>>In late 2009 when the industry was just beginning to offer so-called converged infrastructure, CI Nutanix was skating to the puck, so to speak, meaning unlike conversion infrastructure, which essentially bolted together compute and networking and storage into a single skew that was very hardware centric. Nutanix was focused on creating HCI hyperconverged infrastructure, which was a software led architecture that unified the key elements of data center infrastructure. Now, while both approaches saved time and money, HCI took the concept to new heights of cost savings and simplicity. Hyperconverged infrastructure became a staple of private clouds creating a cloudlike experience. OnPrem. As the public cloud evolved and grew, more and more customers are now taking a cloud first approach to it. So the challenge becomes how do you remodel your IT house so that you can connect your on-prem workloads to the cloud, to both simplify cloud migration, while at the same time creating an identical experience across your estate? >>Hello, and welcome to this special program, Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft Made Possible by By Nutanix and produced by the Cube. I'm Dave Ante, one of your hosts today. Now, in this session, we'll hear how Nutanix is evolving its initial vision of simplifying infrastructure, deployment and management to support modern applications by partnering with Microsoft to enable that consistent experience that we talked about earlier, to extend hybrid cloud to Microsoft Azure and take advantage of cloud native tooling. Now, what's really important to stress here, and you'll hear this in our second segment, substantive engineering work has gone into this partnership. A lot of partnerships are sealed with a press release. We sometimes call it a Barney deal. You know, I love you, you love me. Like Barney, the once popular children's dinosaur character. We dig into the critical engineering aspects that enable that seamless connection between on-prem infrastructure and the public cloud. >>Now, in our first segment, Lisa Martin talks to Alro Salise, who is the vice president of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chica, who is the vice president of business development for the cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Now, after that, Lisa will kick it back to me in our Boston studios to speak with Eric Lockard, who is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure specialized, along with Thomas Cornell, who is the senior vice president of products at Nutanix. And Indu Carey, who's the senior vice president of of engineering for NCI and NNC two at Nutanix. And we'll dig deeper into the announcement and it's salient features. Thanks for being with us. We hope you enjoy the program. Over to Lisa. >>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chika, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. The the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at their own pace, and more important to be sure that every one of them, as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much, they have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help? How can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and our Microsoft ISV partner ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. I, the Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security, and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite, >>Exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure, absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this solution quite a while, but really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill sets and leverage the most out of that. So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things consistent, cost on premises and the cloud are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course, going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing their apps. >>And of course, as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an on on footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technical reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on or even, and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're to offer customers. >>Let's dig into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation. You guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is, is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds or even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tones of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable ordinate services and cluster and data services on premise to a Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it. It's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers in beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our abital lines. It did. It means, but yeah, so like, like we, like you mentioned Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of, of cu not only customers, but also partners battle testing the solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have GN offered to everyone else, but one of our customers, Camper J was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Ncq and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, my, my migration and a risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications, maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Alva, the power of the ISV ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an V you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our partner ecosystem because at the same time, making our partners more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us. >>Abar, can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There is marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on enjoying opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna go into too much detail, but I will like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what Albar said, you know, it's not just about the product integration or it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually been worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customers. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a long alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focusing on the biggest problems that customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah, >>Let, go ahead. >>No, I would say, well say Michael, the, the one element that we complement, the, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and inspire, as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers in every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the ga that's J in Americas, but kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned, it's working from kind of the s backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for ega. We're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across, they're running their workload cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft, it's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've both done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in these complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspiring. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game, being sure that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge TA task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never as small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you AAR for joining >>Me. Thank you Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic. I looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Thanks to the audience. Exactly. And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave and product execs from both Microsoft. You won't wanna.

>>Okay, we're back with the hybrid Cloud power panel. I'm Dave Ante, and with me our Eric Lockard, who's the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure Specialized Thomas Corn's, the senior vice president of products at Nutanix. And Indu Carey, who's the Senior Vice President of engineering, NCI and nnc two at Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>It's to be >>Here. Have us, >>Eric, let's, let's start with you. We hear so much about cloud first. What's driving the need for hybrid cloud for organizations today? I mean, I not just ev put everything in the public cloud. >>Yeah, well, I mean the public cloud has a bunch of inherent advantages, right? I mean it's, it has effectively infinite capacity, the ability to, you know, innovate without a lot of upfront costs, you know, regions all over the world. So there is a, a trend towards public cloud, but you know, not everything can go to the cloud, especially right away. There's lots of reasons. Customers want to have assets on premise, you know, data gravity, sovereignty and so on. And so really hybrid is the way to achieve the best of both worlds, really to kind of leverage the assets and investments that customers have on premise, but also take advantage of, of the cloud for bursting or regionality or expansion, especially coming outta the pandemic. We saw a lot of this from work from home and, and video conferencing and so on, driving a lot of cloud adoption. So hybrid is really the way that we see customers achieving the best of both worlds. >>Yeah, it makes sense. I wanna, Thomas, if you could talk a little bit, I don't wanna inundate people with the acronyms, but, but the Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure, what is that? What problems does it solve? Give us some color there please. >>Yeah, there, so, you know, cloud clusters on Azure, which we actually call NC two to make it simple and SONC two on Azure is really our solutions for hybrid cloud, right? And you about hybrid cloud, highly desirable customers want it. They, they know this is the right way to do it for them, given that they wanna have workloads on premises at the edge, any public clouds, but it's complicated. It's hard to do, right? And the first thing that you did with just silos, right? You have different infrastructure that you have to go and deal with. You have different teams, different technologies, different areas of expertise and dealing with different portals, networkings get complicated, security gets complicated. And so you heard me say this already, you know, hybrid can be complex. And so what we've done, we then c to Azure is we make that simple, right? We allow teams to go and basically have a solution that allows you to go and take any application running on premises and move it as is to any Azure region where Ncq is available. Once it's running there, you keep the same operating model, right? And that's, so that's actually super valuable to actually go and do this in a simple fashion, do it faster, and basically do hybrid in a more cost effective fashion, know for all your applications. And that's really what's really special about NC two Azure today. >>So Thomas, just a quick follow up on that. So you're, you're, if I understand you correctly, it's an identical experience. Did I get that right? >>This is, this is the key for us, right? Is when you think you're sending on premises, you are used to way of doing things of how you run your applications, how you operate, how you protect them. And what we do here is we extend the Nutanix operating model two workloads running in Azure using the same core stack that you're running on premises, right? So once you have a cluster deploying C to an Azure, it's gonna look like the same cluster that you might be running at the edge or in your own data center using the same tools you, using the same admin constructs to go protect the workloads, make them highly available, do disaster recovery or secure them. All of that becomes the same. But now you are in Azure, and this is what we've spent a lot of time working with Americanist teams on, is you actually have access now to all of those suites of Azure services in from those workloads. So now you get the best of both world, you know, and we bridge them together and you get seamless access of those services between what you get from Nutanix, what you get from Azure. >>Yeah. And as you alluded to, this is traditionally been non-trivial and people have been looking forward to this for, for quite some time. So Indu, I want to understand from an engineering perspective, your team had to work with the Microsoft team, and I'm sure there was this, this is not just a press releases or a PowerPoint, you had to do some some engineering work. So what specific engineering work did you guys do and what's unique about this relative to other solutions in the marketplace? >>So let me start with what's unique about this, and I think Thomas and Eric both did a really good job of describing that the best way to think about what we are delivering jointly with Microsoft is that it speeds of the journey to the public cloud. You know, one way to think about this is moving to the public cloud is sort of like remodeling your house. And when you start remodeling your house, you know, you find that you start with something and before you know it, you're trying to remodel the entire house. And that's a little bit like what journey to the public cloud sort of starts to look like when you start to refactor applications. Because it wasn't, most of the applications out there today weren't designed for the public cloud to begin with. NC two allows you to flip that on its head and say that take your application as is and then lift and shift it to the public cloud, at which point you start the refactor journey. >>And one of the things that you have done really well with the NC two on Azure is that NC two is not something that sits by Azure side. It's fully integrated into the Azure fabric, especially the software defined network and SDN piece. What that means is that, you know, you don't have to worry about connecting your NC two cluster to Azure to some sort of an net worth pipe. You have direct access to the Azure services from the same application that's now running on an NC two cluster. And that makes your refactoring journey so much easier. Your management plan looks the same, your high performance notes let the NVMe notes, they look the same. And really, I mean, other than the facts that you're doing something in the public cloud, all the nutanix's goodness that you're used to continue to receive that, there is a lot of secret sauce that we have had to develop as part of this journey. >>But if we had to pick one that really stands out, it is how do we take the complexity, the network complexity of a public cloud, in this case Azure, and make it as familiar to Nutanix's customers as the VPC construc, the virtual private cloud construc that allows them to really think of that on-prem networking and the public cloud networking in very similar terms. There's a lot more that's gone on behind the scenes. And by the way, I'll tell you a funny sort of anecdote. My dad used to say when I drew up that, you know, if you really want to grow up, you have to do two things. You have to like build a house and you have to marry your kid off to someone. And I would say our dad a third do a flow development with the public cloud provider of the partner. This has been just an absolute amazing journey with Eric and the Microsoft team, and you're very grateful for their >>Support. I, I need NC two for my house. I live in a house that was built in, it's 1687 and we connect all to new and it's, it is a bolt on, but, but, but, and so, but the secret sauce, I mean there's, there's a lot there, but is it a PAs layer? You didn't just wrap it in a container and shove it into the public cloud, You've done more than that. I'm inferring, >>You know, the, it's actually an infrastructure layer offering on top of fid. You can obviously run various types of platform services. So for example, down the road, if you have a containerized application, you'll actually be able to TA it from OnPrem and run it on C two. But the NC two offer itself, the NCAA offer itself is an infrastructure level offering. And the trick is that the storage that you're used to the high performance storage that you know, define tenants to begin with, the hypervisor that you're used to, the network constructs that you're used to light MI segmentation for security purposes, all of them are available to you on NC two in Azure, the same way that we're used to do on-prem. And furthermore, managing all of that through Prism, which is our management interface and management console also remains the same. That makes your security model easier, that makes your management challenge easier, that makes it much easier for an application person or the IT office to be able to report back to the board that they have started to execute on the cloud mandate and they've done that much faster than they'll be able to otherwise. >>Great. Thank you for helping us understand the plumbing. So now Thomas, maybe we can get to like the customers. What, what are you seeing, what are the use cases that are, that are gonna emerge for the solution? >>Yeah, I mean we've, you know, we've had a solution for a while, you know, this is now new on Azure's gonna extend the reach of the solution and get us closer to the type of use cases that are unique to Azure in terms of those solutions for analytics and so forth. But the kind of key use cases for us, the first one you know, talks about it is a migration. You know, we see customers on that cloud journey. They're looking to go and move applications wholesale from on premises to public cloud. You know, we make this very easy because in the end they take the same concept that are around the application and make them, we make them available Now in the Azure region, you can do this for any applications. There's no change to the application, no networking change. The same IP will work the same whether you're running on premises or in Azure. >>The app stays exactly the same, manage the same way, protected the same way. So that's a big one. And you know, the type of drivers point politically or maybe I wanna go do something different or I wanna go and shut down location on premises, I need to do that with a given timeline. I can now move first and then take care of optimizing the application to take advantage of all that Azure has to offer. So migration and doing that in a simple fashion, in a very fast manner is, is a key use case. Another one, and this is classic for leveraging public cloud force, which are doing on premises, is disaster recovery. And something that we refer to as elastic disaster recovery, being able to go and actually configure a secondary site to protect your on premises workloads. But I think that site sitting in Azure as a small site, just enough to hold the data that you're replicating and then use the fact that you cannot get access to resources on demand in Azure to scale out the environment, feed over workloads, run them with performance, potentially fill them back to on premises and then shrink back the environment in Azure to again, optimize cost and take advantage of elasticity that you get from public cloud models. >>And then the last one, building on top of that is just the fact that you cannot get bursting use cases and maybe running a large environment, typically desktop, you know, VDI environments that we see running on premises and I have, you know, a seasonal requirement to go and actually enable more workers to go get access the same solution. You could do this by sizing for the large burst capacity on premises wasting resources during the rest of the year. What we see customers do is optimize what they're running on premises and get access to resources on demand in Azure and basically move the workload and now basically get combined desktop running on premises desktops running on NC two on Azure, same desktop images, same management, same services, and do that as a burst use case during, say you're a retailer that has to go and take care of your holiday season. You know, great use case that we see over and over again for our customers, right? And pretty much complimenting the notion of, look, I wanna go to desktop as a service, but right now, now I don't want to refactor the entire application stack. I just won't be able to get access to resources on demand in the right place at the right time. >>Makes sense. I mean this is really all about supporting customers', digital transformations. We all talk about how that was accelerated during the pandemic and, but the cloud is a fundamental component of the digital transformations. And Eric, you, you guys have obviously made a commitment between Microsoft and and Nutanix to simplify hybrid cloud and that journey to the cloud. How should customers, you know, measure that? What does success look like? What's the ultimate vision here? >>Well, the ultimate vision is really twofold. I think the one is to, you know, first is really to ease a customer's journey to the cloud to allow them to take advantage of all the benefits to the cloud, but to do so without having to rewrite their applications or retrain their, their administrators and or, or to obviate their investment that they already have in platforms like, like Nutanix. And so the, the work that companies have done together here, you know, first and foremost is really to allow folks to come to the cloud in the way that they want to come to the cloud and take really the best of both worlds, right? Leverage, leverage their investment in the capabilities of the Nutanix platform, but do so in conjunction with the advantages and and capabilities of of Azure, you know. Second, it is really to extend some of the cloud capabilities down onto the on-premise infrastructure. And so with investments that we've done together with Azure arc for example, we're really extending the Azure control plane down onto on-premise Nutanix clusters and bringing the capabilities that that provides to the Nutanix customer as well as various Azure services like our data services and Azure SQL server. So it's really kind of coming at the problem from, from two directions. One is from kind of traditional on-prem up into the cloud, and then the second is kind of from the cloud leveraging the investment customers have in in on-premise hci. >>Got it. Thank you. Okay, last question. Maybe each of you could just give us one key takeaway for our audience today. Maybe we start with with with with Thomas and then Indu and then Eric you can bring us home. >>Sure. So the key takeaway is, you know, you takes cloud clusters on Azure is ngi, you know, this is something that we've had tremendous demand from our customers, both from the Microsoft side and the Nutanix side going, going back years literally, right? People have been wanting to go and see this, this is now live GA open for business and you know, we're ready to go and engage and ready to scale, right? This is our first step in a long journey in a very key partnership for us at Nutanix. >>Great Indu >>In our Dave. In a prior life about seven or eight, eight years ago, I was a part of a team that took a popular patch preparation software and moved it to the public cloud. And that was a journey that took us four years and probably several hundred million dollars. And if we had had NC two then it would've saved us half the money, but more importantly would've gotten there in one third the time. And that's really the value of this. >>Okay. Eric, bring us home please. >>Yeah, I'll just point out like this is not something that's just both on or something. We, we, we started yesterday. This is something the teams, both companies have been working on together for, for years really. And it's, it's a way of, of deeply integrating Nutanix into the Azure Cloud and with the ultimate goal of, of again, providing cloud capabilities to the Nutanix customer in a way that they can, you know, take advantage of the cloud and then compliment those applications over time with additional Azure services like storage, for example. So it really is a great on-ramp to the cloud for, for customers who have significant investments in, in Nutanix clusters on premise, >>Love the co-engineering and the ability to take advantage of those cloud native tools and capabilities, real customer value. Thanks gentlemen. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank >>You. Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay, keep it right there. You're watching. Accelerate hybrid cloud, that journey with Nutanix and Microsoft technology on the cube. You're leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage >>Organizations are increasingly moving towards a hybrid cloud model that contains a mix of on premises public and private clouds. A recent study confirms 83% of businesses agree that hybrid multi-cloud is the ideal operating model. Despite its many benefits, deploying a hybrid cloud can be challenging, complex, slow and expensive require different skills and tool sets and separate siloed management interfaces. In fact, 87% of surveyed enterprises believe that multi-cloud success will require simplified management of mixed infrastructures >>With Nutanix and Microsoft. Your hybrid cloud gets the best of both worlds. The predictable costs, performance control and data sovereignty of a private cloud and the scalability, cloud services, ease of use and fractional economics of the public cloud. Whatever your use case, Nutanix cloud clusters simplifies IT. Operations is faster and lowers risk for migration projects, lowers cloud TCO and provides investment optimization and offers effortless, limitless scale and flexibility. Choose NC two to accelerate your business in the cloud and achieve true hybrid cloud success. Take a free self-guided 30 minute test drive of the solutions provisioning steps and use cases at nutanix.com/azure td. >>Okay, so we're just wrapping up accelerate hybrid cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft made possible by Nutanix where we just heard how Nutanix is partnering with cloud and software leader Microsoft to enable customers to execute on a true hybrid cloud vision with actionable solutions. We pushed and got the answer that with NC two on Azure, you get the same stack, the same performance, the same networking, the same automation, the same workflows across on-prem and Azure Estates. Realizing the goal of simplifying and extending on-prem workloads to any Azure region to move apps without complicated refactoring and to be able to tap the full complement of native services that are available on Azure. Remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news related to this announcement and all things enterprise tech. Please go to nutanix.com as of course information about this announcement and the partnership, but there's also a ton of resources to better understand the Nutanix product portfolio. There are white papers, videos, and other valuable content, so check that out. This is Dave Ante for Lisa Martin with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Thanks for watching the program and we'll see you next time.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISV Commercial Solutions at Microsoft. And Michael Luka, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so a, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Well, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. So the, the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at the own pace, and more important to ensure that every one of them as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living in. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much. They have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help, how can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and or Microsoft ISV power ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. The Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite >>Then exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Sure. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this quite a while. But really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as I mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about growing their top line, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill and leverage the most that, So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things cost on premises and are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing in their apps. >>And of course as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technic for reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on pre the cloud or even the edge and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're able to offer our joint customers. >>Let's into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation, you guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds of even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tons of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable services and cluster and data services on premise to the Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it, it's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>And can you comment a little bit further, maybe both of you, of our, starting with you and then Michael, what are some of those business outcomes that customers are coming to Microsoft and Nutanix saying, help us, we've gotta be more competitive, we've gotta get, we've gotta be able to get solutions to market faster, et cetera. What are those key outcomes that these two powerhouse companies are helping customers to unlock? >>Yeah, I will say, look, the range of imperative of customers varies greatly depending on the industry, depending on the positioning. I think that the fundamental question is given your imperative, do we have the ability to empower you to achieve the outcome that you want? And these days, of course, the tons of companies, given the the business context that are being very conscious on cost and efficiency, how do you do more with less? How do I keep innovating? Because innovation will be at the heart of the solutions, but I do that on my own pace with my own priorities. That higher level answer is the one that we're enabling through partnership, like the one we're we're sharing today to the market with Nutanix. >>Yeah, I think >>From you, >>Go ahead. I was just gonna comment ON'S pump as well is that absolutely really depends on the customer and what they're trying to achieve, right? As they think about the next set of innovation that they're trying to develop. But for example, we take a, a web, a use case that we've seen with some of the customers is like migration to the cloud, right? And you know, a lot of companies, they embark on that migration. We see there's a lot of data that says basically, you know, it's much harder than it looks, right? And a lot of these projects become years behind schedule and millions and millions of dollars over budget, right? So reducing that risk and saying, Hey, how do I, can I land in Azure? And then bit by bit start thinking, how do I continue to innovate to get, since now I have easy and secure access while I'm in Azure with, and seek with Nutanix Nutanix clusters on Azure to continue my innovation by taking advantage of Azure native services, right? But again, like Aaro said, it's, it really depends on what the customer goals are. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers and beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our rebuttal lines. It does means, but yeah, so like, like, like you mentioned, Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of CU not only s but also partners battle solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have offered to everyone else, but one of our customers Camp Day was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Nstitute and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, migration and risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Ava, the power of the ISB ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an isv, you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our power ecosystem. Because at the same time, making our powers more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us >>Of, Can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There's marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on joy opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna talk, go into too much detail, but I would like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what all Borrow said, you know, it's not just about the product integration area, it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually even worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customer. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a lot alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focus on the biggest problems the customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar drug organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah. >>Let me, Go ahead. >>No, I will say, well say Michael, I think that the, the one element that we complement, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and far as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I i, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>Yeah. And, and you know, with every hard problem there's challenges along the way, right? And so I'm actually really proud of both of the teams that stepped up and, you know, figure it out. How do we go solve some of these technical problems? How do we go solve, making sure we continue to provide world class support for sports organizations? And, you know, these weren't easy things to solve and, and you know, everyone really stepped up the challenge >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers and every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the GA that's J in Americas kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months. Look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned is working from kind of the customers backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for the ga, we're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across as they're running their workloads cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for them. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft. It's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've do both, done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Of our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know, you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in this complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspired. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game so that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never a small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement, Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you Avara for joining me. >>Thank you, Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic and looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Exactly. Thanks to the audience. >>Exactly. >>And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave Valante and product execs from both and Microsoft. You won't wanna miss it.

(gentle music) >> Okay, we're back with the hybrid cloud power panel. I'm Dave Vellante, and with me Eric Lockard who is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure Specialized. Thomas Cornely is the Senior Vice President of Products at Nutanix and Indu Keri, who's the Senior Vice President of Engineering, NCI and NC2 at Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> It's good to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Eric, let's, let's start with you. We hear so much about cloud first. What's driving the need for hybrid cloud for organizations today? I mean, I want to just put everything in the public cloud. >> Yeah, well, I mean the public cloud has a bunch of inherent advantages, right? I mean it's, it has effectively infinite capacity the ability to, you know, innovate without a lot of upfront costs, you know, regions all over the world. So there is a trend towards public cloud, but you know not everything can go to the cloud, especially right away. There's lots of reasons. Customers want to have assets on premise you know, data gravity, sovereignty and so on. And so really hybrid is the way to achieve the best of both worlds, really to kind of leverage the assets and investments that customers have on premise but also take advantage of the cloud for bursting, originality or expansion especially coming out of the pandemic. We saw a lot of this from work from home and and video conferencing and so on driving a lot of cloud adoption. So hybrid is really the way that we see customers achieving the best of both worlds. >> Yeah, makes sense. I want to, Thomas, if you could talk a little bit I don't want to inundate people with the acronyms, but the Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure, what is that? What problems does it solve? Give us some color there, please. >> Yeah, so, you know, cloud clusters on Azure which we actually call NC2 to make it simple. And so NC2 on Azure is really our solutions for hybrid cloud, right? And you think about hybrid cloud highly desirable, customers want it. They, they know this is the right way to do it for them given that they want to have workloads on premises at the edge, any public clouds, but it's complicated. It's hard to do, right? And the first thing that you deal with is just silos, right? You have different infrastructure that you have to go and deal with. You have different teams, different technologies, different areas of expertise. And dealing with different portals, networking get complicated, security gets complicated. And so you heard me say this already, you know hybrid can be complex. And so what we've done we then NC2 Azure is we make that simple, right? We allow teams to go and basically have a solution that allows you to go and take any application running on premises and move it as-is to any Azure region where NC2 is available. Once it's running there you keep the same operating model, right? And that's, so that actually super valuable to actually go and do this in a simple fashion. Do it faster, and basically do hybrid in a more (indistinct) fashion know for all your applications. And that's what's really special about NC2 today. >> So Thomas, just a quick follow up on that. So you're, you're, if I understand you correctly it's an identical experience. Did I get that right? >> This is the key for us, right? When you think you're sitting on premises you are used to way of doing things of how you run your applications, how you operate, how you protect them. And what we do here is we extend the Nutanix operating model to workloads running in Azure using the same core stack that you're running on premises, right? So once you have a cluster, deploy in NC2 Azure, it's going to look like the same cluster that you might be running at the edge or in your own data center, using the same tools, using the same admin constructs to go protect the workloads make them highly available do disaster recovery or secure them. All of that becomes the same. But now you are in Azure, and this is what we've spent a lot of time working with Eric and his teams on is you actually have access now to all of those suites of Azure services (indistinct) from those workloads. So now you get the best of both world, you know and we bridge them together and you to get seamless access of those services between what you get from Nutanix, what you get from Azure. >> Yeah. And as you alluded to this is traditionally been non-trivial and people have been looking forward to this for quite some time. So Indu, I want to understand from an engineering perspective, your team had to work with the Microsoft team, and I'm sure there was this is not just a press release, this is, or a PowerPoint you had to do some some engineering work. So what specific engineering work did you guys do and what's unique about this relative to other solutions in the marketplace? >> So let me start with what's unique about this. And I think Thomas and Eric both did a really good job of describing that. The best way to think about what we are delivering jointly with Microsoft is that it speeds up the journey to the public cloud. You know, one way to think about this is moving to the public cloud is sort of like remodeling your house. And when you start remodeling your house, you know, you find that you start with something and before you know it, you're trying to remodel the entire house. And that's a little bit like what journey to the public cloud sort of starts to look like when you start to refactor applications. Because it wasn't, most of the applications out there today weren't designed for the public cloud to begin with. NC2 allows you to flip that on its head and say that take your application as-is and then lift and shift it to the public cloud at which point you start the refactor journey. And one of the things that you have done really well with the NC2 on Azure is that NC2 is not something that sits by Azure side. It's fully integrated into the Azure fabric especially the software-defined networking, SDN piece. What that means is that, you know you don't have to worry about connecting your NC2 cluster to Azure to some sort of a network pipe. You have direct access to the Azure services from the same application that's now running on an NC2 cluster. And that makes your refactor journey so much easier. Your management claim looks the same, your high performance notes let the NVMe notes they look the same. And really, I mean, other than the fact that you're doing something in the public cloud all the Nutanix goodness that you're used to continue to receive that. There is a lot of secret sauce that we have had to develop as part of this journey. But if we had to pick one that really stands out it is how do we take the complexity, the network complexity offer public cloud, in this case Azure and make it as familiar to Nutanix's customers as the VPC, the virtual private cloud (indistinct) that allows them to really think of their on-prem networking and the public cloud networking in very similar terms. There's a lot more that's done on behind the scenes. And by the way, I'll tell you a funny sort of anecdote. My dad used to say when I grew up that, you know if you really want to grow up, you have to do two things. You have to like build a house and you have to marry your kid off to someone. And I would say our dad a third, do a cloud development with the public cloud provider of the partner. This has been just an absolute amazing journey with Eric and the Microsoft team and we're very grateful for their support. >> I need NC2 for my house. I live in a house that was built and it's 1687 and we connect all the new and it is a bolt on, but the secret sauce, I mean there's, there's a lot there but is it a (indistinct) layer. You didn't just wrap it in a container and shove it into the public cloud. You've done more than that, I'm inferring. >> You know, the, it's actually an infrastructure layer offering on top of (indistinct). You can obviously run various types of platform services. So for example, down the road if you have a containerized application you'll actually be able to take it from on prem and run it on NC2. But the NC2 offer itself, the NC2 offering itself is an infrastructure level offering. And the trick is that the storage that you're used to the high performance storage that you know define Nutanix to begin with the hypervisor that you're used to the network constructs that you're used to light micro segmentation for security purposes, all of them are available to you on NC2 in Azure the same way that we're used to do on-prem. And furthermore, managing all of that through Prism, which is our management interface and management console also remains the same. That makes your security model easier that makes your management challenge easier that makes it much easier for an application person or the IT office to be able to report back to the board that they have started to execute on the cloud mandate and they've done that much faster than they would be able to otherwise. >> Great. Thank you for helping us understand the plumbing. So now Thomas, maybe we can get to like the customers. What, what are you seeing, what are the use cases that are that are going to emerge for this solution? >> Yeah, I mean we've, you know we've had a solution for a while and you know this is now new on Azure is going to extend the reach of the solution and get us closer to the type of use cases that are unique to Azure in terms of those solutions for analytics and so forth. But the kind of key use cases for us the first one you know, talks about it is a migration. You know, we see customers on that cloud journey. They're looking to go and move applications wholesale from on premises to public cloud. You know, we make this very easy because in the end they take the same culture that were around the application and we make them available now in the Azure region. You can do this for any applications. There's no change to the application, no networking change the same IP constraint will work the same whether you're running on premises or in Azure. The app stays exactly the same manage the same way, protected the same way. So that's a big one. And you know, the type of drivers for (indistinct) maybe I want to go do something different or I want to go and shut down the location on premises I need to do that with a given timeline. I can now move first and then take care of optimizing the application to take advantage of all that Azure has to offer. So migration and doing that in a simple fashion in a very fast manner is, is a key use case. Another one, and this is classic for leveraging public cloud force, which we're doing on premises IT disaster recovery and something that we refer to as Elastic disaster recovery, being able to go and actually configure a secondary site to protect your on premises workloads. But I think that site sitting in Azure as a small site just enough to hold the data that you're replicating and then use the fact that you cannot get access to resources on demand in Azure to scale out the environment feed over workloads, run them with performance potentially fill them back to on premises, and then shrink back the environment in Azure to again optimize cost and take advantage of the elasticity that you get from public cloud models. Then the last one, building on top of that is just the fact that you cannot get bursting use cases and maybe running a large environment, typically desktop, you know, VDI environments that we see running on premises and I have, you know, a seasonal requirement to go and actually enable more workers to go get access the same solution. You could do this by sizing for the large burst capacity on premises wasting resources during the rest of the year. What we see customers do is optimize what they're running on premises and get access to resources on demand in Azure and basically move the workloads and now basically get combined desktops running on premises desktops running on NC2 on Azure same desktop images, same management, same services and do that as a burst use case during say you're a retailer that has to go and take care of your holiday season. You know, great use case that we see over and over again for our customers, right? And pretty much complimenting the notion of, look I want to go to desktop as a service, but right now I don't want to refactor the entire application stack. I just want to be able to get access to resources on demand in the right place at the right time. >> Makes sense. I mean this is really all about supporting customer's, digital transformations. We all talk about how that was accelerated during the pandemic and but the cloud is a fundamental component of the digital transformations generic. You, you guys have obviously made a commitment between Microsoft and Nutanix to simplify hybrid cloud and that journey to the cloud. How should customers, you know, measure that? What does success look like? What's the ultimate vision here? >> Well, the ultimate vision is really twofold, I think. The one is to, you know first is really to ease a customer's journey to the cloud to allow them to take advantage of all the benefits to the cloud, but to do so without having to rewrite their applications or retrain their administrators and or to obviate their investment that they already have and platforms like Nutanix. And so the work that companies have done together here, you know, first and foremost is really to allow folks to come to the cloud in the way that they want to come to the cloud and take really the best of both worlds, right? Leverage their investment in the capabilities of the Nutanix platform, but do so in conjunction with the advantages and capabilities of Azure. You know, second is really to extend some of the cloud capabilities down onto the on-premise infrastructure. And so with investments that we've done together with Azure arc for example, we're really extending the Azure control plane down onto on-premise Nutanix clusters and bringing the capabilities that provides to the Nutanix customer as well as various Azure services like our data services and Azure SQL server. So it's really kind of coming at the problem from two directions. One is from kind of traditional on-premise up into the cloud, and then the second is kind of from the cloud leveraging the investment customers have in on-premise HCI. >> Got it. Thank you. Okay, last question. Maybe each of you could just give us one key takeaway for our audience today. Maybe we start with Thomas and then Indu and then Eric you can bring us home. >> Sure. So the key takeaway is, you know, cloud customers on Azure is now GA you know, this is something that we've had tremendous demand from our customers both from the Microsoft side and the Nutanix side going back years literally, right? People have been wanting to go and see this this is now live GA open for business and you know we're ready to go and engage and ready to scale, right? This is our first step in a long journey in a very key partnership for us at Nutanix. >> Great, Indu. >> In our day, in a prior life about seven or eight years ago, I was a part of a team that took a popular text preparation software and moved it to the public cloud. And that was a journey that took us four years and probably several hundred million dollars. And if we had NC2 then it would've saved us half the money, but more importantly would've gotten there in one third the time. And that's really the value of this. >> Okay. Eric, bring us home please. >> Yeah, I'll just point out that, this is not something that's just bought on or something we started yesterday. This is something the teams both companies have been working on together for years really. And it's a way of deeply integrating Nutanix into the Azure Cloud. And with the ultimate goal of again providing cloud capabilities to the Nutanix customer in a way that they can, you know take advantage of the cloud and then compliment those applications over time with additional Azure services like storage, for example. So it really is a great on-ramp to the cloud for customers who have significant investments in Nutanix clusters on premise. >> Love the co-engineering and the ability to take advantage of those cloud native tools and capabilities, real customer value. Thanks gentlemen. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there. You're watching accelerate hybrid cloud, that journey with Nutanix and Microsoft technology on The Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (gentle music)

>>The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid two thousands permanently changed the way we think about it at the heart of it. The cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs more than half of it, budgets were spent on people. And much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning management, recovery optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut costs, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to simplifying hybrid cloud made possible by Cisco today, we're going to explore hybrid cloud as an operating model for organizations or the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. >>No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure. And it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where it managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing the growth and diversity of applications continues. And now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIO is by enterprise technology. Research ETR indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. >>So the challenge for it managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of it. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next we're going to hear from Maneesh Agra wall and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex, which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment we'll drill into unified compute more than a decade ago. Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS unified compute system. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade, and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. >>Okay. Let's start things off. Gus is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. DD. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, >>Our pleasure here. Uh, look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but um, every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing, um, while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications. Um, and then most modern applications are, um, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, uh, uh, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering a change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across, um, all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, uh, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the bus storage team. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right. Um, back to the origins of UCS, I mean, we widen the networking company, builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So we do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the software for our, um, for our and you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. Um, but the software is called intersite and, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. Um, but then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does go into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, uh, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, uh, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, we brought a platform, I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. Uh, and so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So w tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, um, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, uh, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we took on this ball goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same is the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or on software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how they work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. Um, but it was a pretty big boat patient because, you know, um, the big change with SAS is, is you're, uh, as you're familiar today is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, um, working with, uh, our own companies, security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. Um, so again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but, uh, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compete, I of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business, and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like doing stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right. Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that your intro introducing I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, um, search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants, I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies, and then figure out how to stitch it all together. Cause it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's, that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, um, you know, infrastructure partners like, uh, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, you know, others who want their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are other SAS offerings and software vendors, um, who have now become partners. Like we do not, we did not write to Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, uh, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem, we partnered with a company called ergonomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, uh, you know, w how we have gone about this. >>And, uh, it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the inner side platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, uh, soon coming on, uh, on GC, on, uh, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site is since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage the end in, in a, in an easy to instance. So, >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. Um, so my last question is how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing has become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center. It doesn't matter if they're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades, or they're looking for a consistent operating model. What my crystal ball doesn't mean. There's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So allegations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is most as the data moving data is the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be located with the data that's on the edge. We on the air colo public cloud doesn't matter, but, um, basically you're gonna see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific, I think sovereign is going to play a huge role. Uh, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it goes to making, you know, a good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, whether it's, gonna play control, um, and then distributed cloud also on edge, um, is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way, every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workload data, um, you know, upgrading your liability concerns. That's really what, what we are trying to enable for our customers. >>Uh, you know, I think I agree with doing that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world, uh, a solid open, flexible platform, and it's flexible in terms of the technology flexible in how they want to consume it at some customers are fine with a SAS software. What if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team now that does not work so how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, our perspective sovereignty, we talked about it. So, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. Um, but the last thing I would mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage into some of those, um, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex. Um, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right, thanks DDL. It was a pleasure to have you in the queue. Great to see you. You're welcome in a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where HyperFlex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers. And as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question and, you know, customer-centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer, and I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data-centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move, and process large datasets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think that give our customers kind of some, you know, pose some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today, or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I rightsize it without over provisioning for example? But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or Blade approach which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data-centric applications have, and that creates a lot of, you know, opportunity for siloing infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU-focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together, that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align, for a lot of our customers they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase, without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really rightsized for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009 we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took a management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time, however, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Dave: All right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right, you know, Jim I said in my open that you guys, Cisco had sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things. These data-intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed so how is it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake, we're seeing, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned which is one infrastructure that can run any application into it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco but also within the industry. And I think right now as a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground-up work that we did is really paying off, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June, when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So, Vikas I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way, and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way, and hybrid cloud so, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures, and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that and I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X-Series right? I mean, so how so? Can you explain that? >> Sure, and that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs, and hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory-dense system, GPU-dense system, core-dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is brought, the adapter is brought, the power and cooling implications, the rack, you know, space challenges. And above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across the firmware, and software, and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade references of their own. As a result we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really, seeing a slowness in their agility, and high burdened in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities, they become more agile, and drive lower these issues. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the rightful footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify with, by delivering a cloud operating model. Where they can create the policy once across compute, network, storage, and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade, and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where, the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their issues. >> Oh, that's key. Less friction is always a good thing. Now of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone, you have hard news as well, what innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely, so we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year Dave, and we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node. And thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the 5th generation of our very popular Unified Fabric Technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the HCI workload, the SDS workload, all these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular farm factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 Gig end-to-end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of this performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, may it be ethernet adapter, may it be with fiber channel adapters, or may it be the other storage adapters, they've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in the smart release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So Jim you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to and think about some of the things that we mentioned before in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move, again, to the, kind of to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI, that's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market every, every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow, we have the, you know, the premier cloud-based management you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that you, that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well, and, you know, I think finally the fifth generation of Fabric Interconnect, and Virtual Interface Card, and Intelligent Fabric Module go hand in hand in creating this 100 Gig end-to-end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to, that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? It solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPUs that solve of these life cycle mismanagement issues, they solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for, like it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly, the fabric that stitches them together is critical and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. X, and the X Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So we, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas, talk, give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to. >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about and James also hinted, this is a future-ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And there we are looking into enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCA in less than four to five to six, without rip and replace, as they embrace CXL without rip and replace, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI or NVMe-based dense drives and so forth. We are also looking forward to X Fabric next generation which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO, by keeping them not only covered for today but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay, thank you guys, we'll leave it there, in a moment I'll have some closing thoughts. (bright upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something it figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations, and is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality and it supports much more diverse and data-intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watchword enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation, remember all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net, and if you want to learn more please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

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

>> From the theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Well, it looks like hybrid cloud is finally here. We've seen a decade of posturing, marchitecture, slideware and narrow examples of hybrid cloud, but there's little question that the definition of cloud is expanding to include on-premises workloads in hybrid models. Now depending on which numbers you choose to represent IT spending, public cloud only accounts for actually less than 5% of the total pie. So the big question is, how will this now evolve? Customers want control, they want governance, they want security, flexibility and a feature-rich set of services to build their digital businesses. It's unlikely that they can buy all that, so they're going to have to build it with partners, specifically vendors, SI's, consultancies and their own developers. The tug of war to win the new cloud day has finally started in earnest between the hyperscalers and the largest enterprise tech companies in the world. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll walk you through how we see the battle for hybrid cloud, how we got here, where we are and where it's headed. First, I want to go back to 2009, in a blog post by a man named Chuck Hollis. Chuck Hollis, at the time, was a CTO and marketing guru inside of EMC who, remember, owned VMware. Chuck was kind of this hybrid, multi-tool player, pun intended. EMC at the time had a big stake, a lot at stake, as the ascendancy of AWS was threatening the historical models, which had defined enterprise IT. Now around that time, NIST published its first draft of a cloud computing definition which, as I recall, included language, something to the effect of accessing remote services over the public network, i.e., public IP networks. Now, NIST has essentially or since evolved that definition, but the original draft was very favorable to the public cloud. And the vendor community, the traditional vendor community, said hang on, we're in this game too. So that was 2009 when Chuck Hollis published this slide. He termed it Private Cloud, a term which he saw buried inside of a Gartner research post or research note that was not really fleshed out and defined. The idea was pretty compelling. The definition of cloud centered on control, where you, as the customer, had on-prem workloads that could span public and on-prem clouds, if you will, with federated security and a data plan that spanned the states. Essentially, you had an internal and an external cloud with a single point of control. This is basically what the hybrid cloud vision has become. An abstraction layer that spans on-prem and public clouds and we can extend that across clouds and out to the edge, where a customer has a single point of control and federated governance and security. Now we know this is still aspirational, but we're now seeing vendor offerings that put forth this promise and a roadmap to get there from different points of view, that we're going to talk about today. The NIST definition now reads cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, e.g., network server storage, applications and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. So there you have it, that is inclusive of on-prem, but it took the industry a decade plus to actually get where we are today. And they did so by essentially going to school with the public cloud offerings. Now in 2018, AWS announced Outposts and that was another wake up call to the on-prem community. Externally, they pointed to the validation that hybrid cloud was real. Hey, AWS is doing it so clearly they've capitulated, but most on-prem vendors at the time didn't have a coherent offering for hybrid, but the point is the on-prem vendors responded as they saw AWS moving past the demilitarized zone into enemy lines. And here's what the competitive landscape of hybrid offerings looks like today. All three US-based hyperscalers have an offering or multiple offerings in various forms, Outposts from Amazon and other services that they offer, Google Anthos and Azure Arc, they're all so prominent, but the real action today is coming from the on-prem vendors. Every major company has an offering. Now most of these stemmed from services-led and finance-led initiatives, but they're evolving to true Azure Service models. HPE GreenLake is prominent and the company's CEO, Antonio Neri, is putting the whole company behind Azure Service. HPE claims to be the first, it uses that in its marketing, with such an Azure Service offering, but actually Oracle was their first with Cloud@Customer. You know, possibly Microsoft could make a claim to being early as well, but it really doesn't matter. Let's see, Dell has responded with Apex and is going hard after this opportunity. Cisco has Cisco Plus and Lenovo has TruScale. IBM also has a long services and finance-led history and has announced pockets of Azure Service in areas like storage. And Pure Storage is an example that we chose of a segment player, of course within storage, that has a strong Azure Service offering, and there are others like that. So the landscape is getting very busy. And so, let's break this down a bit. AWS is bringing its programmable infrastructure model and its own hardware to what it calls the edge. And it looks at on-prem data centers as just another edge node. So that's how they're de-positioning the on-prem crowd, but the fact is, when you really look at what Outposts can do today, it's limited, but AWS will move quickly so expect a continued rapid evolution of their model and the services that are supported on Outposts. Azure gets its hardware from partners and has relationships with virtually everyone that matters. Anthos is, as well, a software layer and Google created Kubernetes as the great equalizer in cloud. And it was a nice open source gift to the industry and has obviously taken off. So the cloud guys have the advantage of owning a cloud. The pure on-prem players, they don't, but the on-prem crowd has rich stacks, much richer and more mature in a lot of areas, as it relates to supporting on-premises workloads and much more so than the cloud players, but they don't have mature cloud stacks. They're kind of just getting started with things like subscription billing and API-based microservices offerings. They got to figure out Salesforce compensation and just the overall Azure service mentality versus the historical product box mentality, and that takes time. And they're each coming at this from their respective different points of view and points of strength. HPE is doing a very good job of marketing and go-to market. It probably has the cleanest model, enabled by the company's split from HP, but it has some gaps that it's needed to fill and it's doing so through acquisitions. Ezmeral, for example, is it's new data play. It just bought Zerto to facilitate backup as a service. And it's expanded partnerships to fill gaps in the portfolio. Some partnerships, which they couldn't do before because it created conflicts inside of HPE or HP. Dell is all about the portfolio, the breadth of the portfolio, the go-to-market prowess and its supply chain advantage. It's very serious about Azure Service with Apex and it's driving hard to win that day. Cisco comes at this from a huge portfolio and of course, a point of strength and networking, which maybe is a bit tougher to offer as a service, but Cisco has a large and fast growing subscription business in collaborations, security and other areas, so it's cloud-like in that regard. And Oracle, of course, has the huge advantage of an extremely rich functional stack and it owns a cloud, which has dramatically improved in the past few years, but Oracle is narrow to the red stack, at least today. Oracle, if it wanted to, we think, could dominate the database cloud, it could be the database cloud, especially if it decided to open its cloud to competitive database offerings and run them in the Oracle cloud. Hmm. Wonder if Oracle will ever move in that direction. Now a big part of this shift is the appeal of OPEX versus CAPEX. Let's take a look at some ETR data that digs a bit deeper into this topic. This data is from an August ETR drill down, asking CIOs and IT buyers how their budgets are split between OPEX and CAPEX. The mid point of the yellow line shows where we are today, 57% OPEX, expecting to grow to 63% one year from now. That's not a huge difference, there's not a huge difference when you drill into global 2000, which kind of surprised me. I thought global 2000 would be heavier CAPEX, but they seem to be accelerating the shift to OPEX slightly faster than the overall base, but not really in a meaningful way. So I didn't really discern big differences there. Now, when you dig further into industries and look at subscription versus consumption models for OPEX, you see about 60/40 favoring subscription models, with most industry slowly moving toward consumption or usage based models over time. There are a couple of outliers, but generally speaking, that's the trend. What's perhaps more interesting is when you drill into subscription versus usage based models by product area, and that's what this chart shows. It shows by tech segment, the percent subscription, that's the blue, versus consumption or usage based, that's the gray bars, yellow being indifferent or maybe it's I don't know. What stands out are two areas that are more usage heavy, consumption heavy. That's database, data warehousing, and IS. So database is surely weighted by companies like Snowflake and offerings like Redshift and other cloud databases from Azure and Google and other managed services, but the IS piece, while not surprising, is, we think, relevant because most of the legacy vendor Azure Service offerings are borrowing from a SaaS-oriented subscription model with a hardware twist. In other words, as a customer, you're committing to a term and a minimum spend over the life of that term. You're locked in for a year or three years, whatever it is, to account for the hardware and headroom the vendor has to install because they want to allow you to increase your usage. So that's the usage based model. See, you're then paying by the drink for that consumption above that minimum threshold. So it's a hybrid subscription consumption model, which is actually quite interesting. And we've been saying, what would really be cool is if one of the on-prem penguins on the iceberg would actually jump in and offer a true consumption model right out of the box, as a disruptive move to the industry and to the cloud players, and take that risk. And I think that might happen once they feel comfortable with the financial model and they have nailed the product market fit, but right now, the model is what it is. And even AWS without post requires a threshold and a minimum commitment. So we'd love to see someone take that chance and offer true cloud consumption pricing to facilitate more experimentation and lower risk for the customer entry points. Now let's take a look at some of these players and see what kind of spending momentum they have. This is our popular XY chart-view that plots net score or spending velocity on the x-axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data set on the... Oh, sorry, net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and pervasiveness or market share on the x-axis. Now this is cut by cloud computing vendors, as defined by the customers responding. There were nearly 1500 respondents in the ETR survey, so a couple of points here. Note the red line is the elevated line. In other words, anything above that is considered really robust momentum. And no surprise, Azure, AWS and Google are above that line. Azure and AWS always battle it out for top share of voice in the x-axis in this survey. Now this, remember, is the July survey, but ETR, they gave me a sneak peek at the October results that they're going to be releasing in the coming week and Dell cloud and VMware cloud, which is VCF and maybe some other components, not VMware cloud and AWS, that's a separate beast, but those two are moving up in the y-axis. So they're demonstrating spending momentum. IBM is moving down and Oracle is at a respectable 20% on the y-axis. Now, interestingly, HPE and Lenovo don't show up in the cloud taxonomy, in that cloud cut, and neither does Cisco. I believe I'm correct in that this is an open-ended question, i.e., who are your cloud suppliers? So the customers are not resonating with that messaging yet, but I'm going to double check on that. Now to widen the aperture a bit, we said let's do a cut of the on-prem and cloud players within cloud accounts, so we can include HPE and Cisco and see how they're doing inside of cloud accounts. So that's what this chart does. It's a filter on 975 customers who identify themselves as cloud accounts. So here we were able to add in Cisco and HPE. Now, Lenovo still doesn't show up on the data. It shows up in laptops and desktops, but not as prominent in the enterprise, not prominent at all, but HPE Ezmeral did show up and it's moving forward in the October survey, again, part of the sneak peek. Ezmeral is HPE's data platform that they've introduced, combining the assets of MapR, BlueData and some other organic development. Now, as you can see, HPE and Cisco, they show up on the chart, as I said, and you can see the rope in the tug of war is starting to get a little bit more taut. The cloud guys have momentum and big account presence, but the on-prem folks also have big footprints, rich stacks and many have strong services arms, and a lot of customer affinity. So let's wrap with some comments about how this will shake out and what's some of the markers we can watch. Now, the first thing I'll say is we're starting to hear the right language come out of the vendor community. The idea that they're investing in a layer to abstract the underlying complexity of the clouds and on-prem infrastructure and turning the world into, essentially, a programmable interface to resources. The question is, what about giving access through that layer to underlying primitives in the public cloud? VMware has been very clear on this. They will facilitate that access. I believe Red Hat as well. So watch to the degree in which the large on-prem players are enabling that access for developers. We believe this is the right direction overall, but it's also very hard and it's going to require lots of resources and R & D. I would say at this point that each company has its respective strengths and weaknesses. I see HPE mostly focused today on making its on-prem offerings work like a cloud, whereas some of the others, VMware, Dell and Cisco, are stressing to a greater degree, in my view, enabling multi-cloud and edge connections, cross connections. Not that HPE isn't open to that when you ask them about it, but its marketing is more on-prem leaning, in my opinion. Now all of the traditional vendors, in my view, are still defensive about the cloud, although I would say much less so each day. Increasingly, they look at the public cloud as an opportunity to build value on top of that abstraction layer, if you will. As I said earlier, these on-prem guys, they all have ways to go. They're in the early stages of figuring out what a cloud operating model looks like, how it works, what services to offer, how to pay sellers and partners, but the public cloud vendors, they're miles ahead in that regard, but at the same time, they're navigating into on-prem territory. And they're very immature, in most cases. So how do they service all this stuff? How do they establish partnerships and so forth? And how do they build stacks on prem that are as rich as they are in the cloud? And what's their motivation to do that? Are they getting pulled, digging their heels in? Or are they really serious about it? Now, in some respects, Oracle is in the best position here in terms of hybrid maturity, but again, it's narrowly focused on the Red Stack. I would say the same for Pure Storage, more mature as a service, but narrowly focused, of course, on storage. Let's talk marketplace and ecosystems. One of the hallmarks of public clouds is optionality of tooling. Just all you do is go to the AWS Marketplace and you'll see what I mean. It's got this endless bevy of choices. It's got one of everything in there and you can buy directly from your AWS Console. So watch how the hybrid cloud plays out in terms of partner inclusion and ease of doing business, that's another sign of maturity. Let's talk developers and edge. This is by far the most important and biggest hole in the hybrid portfolios, outside the public cloud players. If you're going to build infrastructure as code, who do you expect to code it? How are the on-prem players cultivating developer communities? IBM paid 34 billion to buy its way in. Actually, in today's valuation terms, you might say that's looking like a good play, but still, that cash outlay is equal to one third of IBM's revenue. So big, big bet on OpenShift, but IBM's infrastructure strategy is fragmented and its cloud business, as IBM reports in its financial statements, is a services-heavy, kitchen sink set of offerings. It's very confusing. So they got to still do some clean up there, but they're serious about the architectural battle for hybrid cloud, as Arvind Krishna calls it. Now VMware, by cobbling together the misfit developer toys of the remnants from the EMC Federation, including Pivotal, is trying to get there. You know, but when you talk to customers, they're still not all in on VMware's developer affinity. Now Cisco has DevNet, but that's basically CCIE's and other trained networking engineers learning to code in languages like Python. It's not necessarily true devs, although they're upskilling. It's a start and they're investing, Cisco, that is, investing in the community, leveraging their champions, and I would say Dell could do the same with, for example, the numerous EMC storage admins that are out there. Now Oracle bought Sun to get Java, and that's a large community of developers, but even so, when you compare AWS and Microsoft ecosystems to the others, it's not even close in terms of developer affinity. So lots of work to be done there. One other point is Pure's acquisition of Portworx, again, while narrowly focused, is a good move and instructive of the changes going on in infrastructure. Now how does this all relate to the edge? Well, I'm not going to talk much about that today, but suffice to say, developers, in our view, will win the edge. And right now, they're coding in the cloud. Now they're often coding in the cloud and moving work on prem, wrapping them in containers, but watch how sticky that model is for the respective players. The other thing to watch is cadence of offerings. Another hallmark of cloud is a rapid expansion of features. The public cloud players don't appear to be slowing down and the on-prem folks seem to be accelerating. I've been watching HPE and GreenLake and their cadence of offerings, and watch how quickly the newbies of Azure Service can add functionality, I have no doubt Dell is going to be right there as well, as is Cisco and others. Also pay attention to financial metrics, watch how Azure Service impacts the income statements and how the companies deal with that because as you shift to deferred revenue models, it's going to hurt profitability. And I'm not worried about that at all because it won't hurt cashflow, or at least it shouldn't. As long as the companies communicate to Wall Street and they're transparent, i.e., they don't shift reporting definitions every year and a half or two years, but watch for metrics around retention and churn, RPO or Remaining Performance Obligations, billing versus bookings, increased average contract values, cohort selling, the impact on both gross margin and operating margin. These are the things you watch with SaaS companies and essentially, these big hardware players are becoming Azure Service slash SaaS companies. These are going to be the key indicators of success and the proof in the pudding of the transition to Azure Service. It should be positive for these companies, assuming they get the product market fit right, and can create a flywheel effect with their respective ecosystems and partner channels. Now I'm sure you can think of other important factors to watch, but I'm going to leave it here for now. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and please subscribe, check out ETR's website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me, email david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante. You can comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, everybody, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Every CEO is figuring out the right balance for new hybrid business models. Now, regardless of the chosen approach, which is going to vary, technology executives, they understand they have to accelerate their digital and build resilience as well as optionality into their platforms. Now, this is driving a dramatic shift in IT investments. And at the macro level, we expect total spending to increase at as much as 8% or even more in 2021, compared to last year's contraction. Investments in cybersecurity, cloud collaboration that are enabling hybrid work as well as data, including analytics, AI, and automation are at the top of the spending priorities for CXOs. Hello everyone. And welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're pleased to welcome back Erik Bradley, who is the chief engagement strategist at our partner, ETR. Now in this segment, we're going to share some of the latest findings from ETR's surveys and provide our commentary on what it means for the markets, for sellers, and for buyers. Erik, great to see you, my friend. Welcome back to Breaking Analysis. >> Thank you for having me, always enjoy it. We've got some fresh data to talk about on this beautiful summer Friday, so I'm ready to go. >> All right. I'm excited too. Okay, last year we saw a contraction in IT spending by at least 5%. And now we're seeing a snapback to, as I said, at least 8% growth relative to last year. You got to go back to 2007 just before the financial crisis to see this type of top line growth. The shift to hybrid work, it's exposed us to new insidious security threats. And we're going to discuss that in a lot more detail. Cloud migration of course picked up dramatically last year, and based on the recent earnings results of the big cloud players, for now we got two quarters of data, that trend continues as organizations are accelerating their digital platform build-outs, and this is bringing a lot of complexity and a greater need for so-called observability solutions, which Erik is going to talk about extensively later on in this segment. Data, we think is entering a new era of de-centralization. We see organizations not only focused on analytics and insights, but actually creating data products. Leading technology organizations like JP Morgan, they're heavily leaning into this trend toward packaging and monetizing data products. And finally, as part of the digital transformation trend, we see no slow down in spending momentum for AI and automation, generally in RPA specifically. Erik, anything you want to add to that top level narrative? >> Yeah, there's a lot to take on the macro takeaways. The first thing I want to state is that that 8, 8.5% number that started off at just 3 to 4% beginning of the year. So as the year has continued, we are just seeing this trend in budgets continue to accelerate, and we don't have any reason to believe that's going to stop. So I think we're going to just keep moving on heading into 2021. And we're going to see a banner year of spend this year and probably next as well. >> All right, now we're going to bring up a chart that shows kind of that progression here of spending momentum. So Erik, I'm going to let you comment on this chart that tracks those projections over time. >> Erik: Yeah. Great. So thank you very much for pulling this up. As you can see in the beginning part of the year, when we asked people, "What do you plan to spend throughout 2021?" They were saying it would be about a 4% increase. Which we were happy with because as you said last year, it was all negative. That continues to accelerate and is only hyper accelerating now as we head into the back half of the year. In addition, after we do this data, I always host a panel of IT end users to kind of get their feedback on what we collected, to a man, every one of them expects continued increase throughout next year. There are some concerns and uncertainty about what we're seeing right now with COVID, but even with that, they're planning their budgets now for 2022 and they're planning for even further increases going forward. >> Dave: Great, thank you. So we circled that 8%. That's really kind of where we thought it was going to land. And so we're happy with that number, but let's take a look at where the action is by technology sector. This chart that we're showing you here, it tracks spending priorities back to last September. When I believe that was the point, Erik, that cyber became the top priority in the survey, ahead of cloud collaboration, analytics, and data, and the other sectors that you see there. Now, Erik, we should explain. These areas, they're the top seven, and they outrank all the other sectors. ETR tracks many, many other sectors, but please weigh in here and share your thoughts on this data. >> Erik: Yeah. Security, security, security. It hasn't changed. It had really hasn't. The hybrid work. The fact that you're behind the firewall one day and then you're outside working from home the next, switching in and out of networks. This is just a field day for bad actors. And we have no choice right now, but to continue to spend, because as you're going to talk about in a minute, hybrid's here to stay. So we have to figure out a way to secure behind the firewall on-prem. We also have to secure our employees and our assets that are not in the office. So it is a main priority. One of the things that point out on this chart, I had a couple of ITN users talk to me about customer experience and automation really need to move from the right part of that chart to the left. So they're seeing more in what you were talking about in RPA and automation, starting to creep up heading into next year. As cloud migration matures, as you know, cybersecurity spending has been ramping up. People are going to see a little bit more on the analytics and a little bit more on the automation side going forward. >> Dave: Great. Now, this next data view- well, first of all, one of the great things about the ETR dataset is that you can ask key questions and get a time series. And I will tell you again, I go back to last March, ETR hit it. They were the first on the work from home trend. And so if you were on that trend, you were able to anticipate it. And a lot of investors I think took advantage of that. Now, but we've shown this before, but there's new data points that we want to introduce. So the data tracks how CIOs and IT buyers have responded to the pandemic since last March. Still 70% of the organizations have employees working remotely, but 39% now have employees fully returning to the office and Erik, the rest of the metrics all point toward positives for IT spending, although accelerating IT deployments there at the right peaked last year, as people realized they had to invest in the future. Your thoughts? >> Erik: Yeah, this is the slide for optimism, without a doubt. Of the entire macro survey we did, this is the most optimistic slide. It's great for overall business. It's great for business travel. This is well beyond just IT. Hiring is up. I've had some people tell me that they possibly can't hire enough people right now. They had to furlough employees, they had to stop projects, and they want to re accelerate those now. But talent is very hard to find. Another point to you about your automation and RPA, another underlying trend for there. The one thing I did want to talk about here is the hybrid workplace, but I believe there's another slide on it. So just to recap on this extremely optimistic, we're seeing a lot of hiring. We're seeing increased spending, and I do believe that that's going to continue. >> Yeah I'm glad you brought that up because a session that you and I did a while ago, we pointed out, it was earlier this year, that the skill shortage is one potential risk to our positive scenario. We'll keep an eye on that, but so I want to show another set of data that we've showed previously, but ETR again, has added some new questions in here. So note here that 60% of employees still work remotely with 33% in a hybrid model currently, and the CIO's expect that to land on about 42% hybrid workforce with around 30% working remotely, which is around, it's been consistent by the way on your surveys, but that's about double the historic norm, Eric. >> Erik: Yeah, and even further to your point Dave, recently I did a panel asking people to give me some feedback on this. And three of those four experts basically said to me, if we had greed run this survey right now, that even more people would be saying remote. That they believe that that number, that's saying they're expecting that number of people to be back in office, is actually too optimistic. They're actually saying that maybe if we had- cause as a survey launched about six, seven weeks ago before this little blip on the radar, before the little COVID hiccup we're seeing now, and they're telling me that they believe if we reran this now that it would be even more remote work, even more hybrid and less returned to the office. So that's just an update I wanted to offer on this slide. >> Dave: Yeah. Thank you for that. I mean, we're still in this kind of day to day, week to week, month to month mode, but I want to do a little double click on this. We're not going to share this data, but there was so much ETR data. We got to be selective. But if you double click on the hybrid models, you'll see that 50% of organizations plan to have time roughly equally split between onsite and remote with again around 30 or 31% mostly remote, with onsite space available if they need it. And Erik, very few don't plan to have some type of hybrid model, at least. >> Yeah, I think it was less than 10% that said it was going to be exclusively onsite. And again, that was a more optimistic scenario six, seven weeks ago than we're seeing right now throughout the country. So I agree with you, hybrid is here to stay. There really is no doubt about it. from everyone I speak to when, you know, I basically make a living talking to IT end users. Hybrid is here to stay. They're planning for it. And that's really the drive behind the spending because you have to support both. You have to give people the option. You have to, from an IT perspective, you also have to support both, right? So if somebody is in office, I need the support staff to be in office. Plus I need them to be able to remote in and fix something from home. So they're spending on both fronts right now. >> Okay. Let's get into some of the vendor performance data. And I want to start with the cloud hyperscalers. It's something that we followed pretty closely. I got some Wiki bond data, that we just had earnings released. So here's data that shows the Q2 revenue shares on the left-hand side in the pie and the growth rates for the big four cloud players on the right hand side. It goes back to Q1 2019. Now the first thing I want to say is these players generated just under $39 billion in the quarter with AWS capturing 50% of that number. I said 39, it was 29 billion, sorry, with AWS capturing 50% of that in the quarter. As you're still tracking around a third in Alibaba and GCP in the, you know, eight or 9% range. But what's most interesting to me, Erik, is that AWS, which generated almost 15 billion in the quarter, was the only player to grow its revenue, both sequentially and year over year. And Erik, I think the street is missing the real story here on Amazon. Amazon announced earnings on Thursday night. The company had a 2% miss on the top line revenues and a meaningful 22% beat on earnings per share. So the retail side of the business missed its revenue targets, so that's why everybody's freaked out. But AWS, the cloud side, saw a 4% revenue beat. So the stock was off more than 70% after hours and into Friday. Now to me, a mix shift toward AWS, that's great news for investors. Now, tepid guidance is a negative, but the shift to a more profitable cloud business is a huge positive. >> Yeah, there's a lot that goes into stock price, right? I remember I was a director of research back in the day. One of my analysts said to me, "Am I crazy for putting a $1,000 target on Amazon?" And I laughed and I said, "No, you're crazy if you don't make it $2,000." (both chuckling) So, you know, at that time it was basically the mix shift towards AWS. You're a thousand percent right. I think the tough year over year comps had something to do with that reaction. That, you know, it's just getting really hard. What's that? The law of large numbers, right? It's really hard to grow at that percentage rate when you're getting this big. But from our data perspective, we're seeing no slowdown in AWS, in cloud, none whatsoever. The only slowdown we're seeing in cloud is GCP. But to, you know, to focus on AWS, extremely strong across the board and not only just in cloud, but in all their data products as well, data and analytics. >> Yeah and I think that the AWS, don't forget folks, that funds Amazon's TAM expansion into so many different places. Okay. As we said at the top, the world of digital and hybrid work, and multi-cloud, it's more complicated than it used to be. And that means if you need to resolve issues, which everybody does, like poor application performance, et cetera, what's happening at the user level, you have to have a better way to sort of see what's going on. And that's what the emergence of the observability space is all about. So Erik, let me set this up and you have a lot of comments here because you've recently had some, and you always have had a lot of round table discussions with CXOs on this topic. So this chart plots net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis, and market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. And we inserted a table that shows the data points in detail. Now that red dotted line is just sort of Dave Vellante's subjective mark in the sand for elevated spending levels. And there are three other points here. One is Splunk as well off is two-year peak, as highlighted in the red, but Signal FX, which Splunk acquired, has made a big move northward this last quarter. As has Datadog. So Erik, what can you share with us on this hot, but increasingly crowded space? >> Yeah. I could talk about the space for a long time. As you know, I've gotten some flack over the last year and a half about, you know, kind of pointing out this trend, this negative trend in Splunk. So I do want to be the first one to say that this data set is rebounding. Splunk has been horrific in our data for going back almost two years now, straight downward trend. This is the first time we're seeing any increase, any positivity there. So I do want to be fair and state that because I've been accused of being a little too negative on Splunk in the past. But I would basically say for observability right now, it's a rising tide lifts all boats, if I can use a New England phrase. The data across the board in analytics for these observability players is up, is accelerating. None more so than Datadog. And it's exactly your point, David. The complexity, the increased cloud migration is a perfect setup for Datadog, which is a cloud native. It focuses on microservices. It focuses on cloud observability. Old Splunk was just application monitoring. Don't get me wrong, they're changing, but they were on-prem application monitoring, first and foremost. Datadog came out as cloud native. They, you know, do microservices. This is just a perfect setup for them. And not only is Datadog leading the observability, it's leading the entire analytics sector, all of it. Not just the observability niche. So without a doubt, that is the strongest that we're seeing. It's leading Dynatrace new Relic. The only one that really isn't rebounding is Cisco App Dynamics. That's getting the dreaded legacy word really attached to it. But this space is really on fire, elastic as well, really doing well in this space. New Relic has shown a little bit of improvement as well. And what I heard when I asked my panelists about this, is that because of the maturity of cloud migration, that this observability has to grow. Spending on this has to happen. So they all say the chart looks right. And it's really just about the digital transformation maturity. So that's largely what they think is happening here. And they don't really see it getting, you know, changing anytime soon. >> Yeah, and I would add, and you see that it's getting crowded. You saw a service now acquired LightStep, and they want to get into the game. You mentioned, you know, last deck of the elk stack is, you know, the open source alternative, but then we see a company who's raised a fair amount of money, startup, chaos search, coming in, going after kind of the complexity of the elk stack. You've got honeycomb, which has got a really innovative approach, Jeremy Burton's company observes. So you have venture capital coming in. So we'll see if those guys could be disruptive enough or are they, you know, candidates to get acquired? We'll see how that all- you know that well. The M and A space. You think this space is ripe for M and A? >> I think it's ripe for consolidation, M and A. Something has to shake out. There's no doubt. I do believe that all of these can be standalone. So we shall see what's happened to, you mentioned the Splunk acquisition of Signal FX, just a house cleaning point. That was really nice acceleration by Signal FX, but it was only 20 citations. We'd looked into this a little bit deeper. Our data scientists did. It appears as if the majority of people are just signaling spunk and not FX separately. So moving forward for our data set, we're going to combine those two, so we don't have those anomalies going forward. But that type of acquisition does show what we should expect to see more of in this group going forward. >> Well that's I want to mention. That's one of the challenges that any data company has, and you guys do a great job of it. You're constantly having to reevaluate. There's so much M and A going on in the industry. You've got to pick the right spots in terms of when to consolidate. There's some big, you know, Dell and EMC, for example. You know, you've beautifully worked through that transition. You're seeing, you know, open shift and red hat with IBM. You just got to be flexible. And that's where it's valuable to be able to have a pipeline to guys like Erik, to sort of squint through that. So thank you for that clarification. >> Thank you too, because having a resource like you with industry knowledge really helps us navigate some of those as well for everyone out there. So that's a lot to do with you do Dave, >> Thank you. It's going to be interesting to watch Splunk. Doug Merritt's made some, you know, management changes, not the least of which is bringing in Teresa Carlson to run go to market. So if you know, I'd be interested if they are hitting, bouncing off the bottom and rising up again. They have a great customer base. Okay. Let's look at some of the same dimensions. Go ahead. You got a comment? >> A few of ETR's clients looked at our data and then put a billion dollar investment into it too. So obviously I agree. (Dave laughing) Splunk is looking like it's set for a rebound, and it's definitely something to watch, I agree. >> Not to rat hole in this, but I got to say. When I look back, cause theCUBE gives us kind of early visibility. So companies with momentum and you talk to the customers that all these shows that we go to. I will tell you that three companies stood out last decade. It was Splunk. It was Service Now and Tableau. And you could tell just from just discussions with their customers, the enthusiasm in that customer base. And so that's a real asset, and that helps them build them a moat. So we'll see. All right, let's take a look at the same dimensions now for cyber. This is cybersecurity net score in the vertical, and market share in the horizontal. And I filtered by in greater than a hundred shared in because just gets so crowded. Erik, the only things I would point out here is CrowdStrike and Zscaler continue to shine, CyberArk also showing momentum over that 40% line. Very impressively, Palo Alto networks, which has a big presence in the market. They've bounced back. We predicted that a while back. Your round table suggested people like working with Palo Alto. They're a gold standard. You know, we had reported earlier on that divergence with four to net in terms of valuation and some of the challenges they had in cloud, clearly, you know, back with the momentum. And of course, Microsoft in the upper, right. It's just, they're literally off the charts and obviously a major player here, but your thoughts on cyber? >> Erik: Yeah. Going back to the backdrop. Security, security, security. It has been the number one priority going back to last September. No one sees it changing. It has to happen. The threat vectors are actually expanding and we have no choice but to spend here. So it is not surprising to see. You did name our three favorite names. So as you know, we look at the dataset, we see which ones have the most positive inflections, and we put outlooks on those. And you did mention Zscaler, Okta and CrowdStrike, by far the three standouts that we're seeing. I just recently did a huge panel on Okta talking about their acquisition of Auth Zero. They're pushed into Sale Point space, trying to move just from single sign on and MFA to going to really privileged account management. There is some hurdles there. Really Okta's ability to do this on-prem is something that a little bit of the IT end users are concerned about. But what we're seeing right now, both Okta and Auth Zero are two of the main adopted names in security. They look incredibly well set up. Zscaler as well. With the ZTNA push more towards zero trust, Zscaler came out so hot in their IPO. And everyone was wondering if it was going to trail off just like Snowflake. It's not trailing off. This thing just keeps going up into the right, up into the right. The data supports a lot of tremendous growth for the three names that you just mentioned. >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up Auth Zero. We had reported on that earlier. I just feel like that was a great acquisition. You had Okta doing the belly to belly enterprise, you know, selling. And the one thing that they really lacked was that developer momentum. And that's what Auth Zero brings. Just a smart move by Todd McKinnon and company. And I mean, so this, you know, I want to, I want to pull up another chart show a quick snapshot of some of the players in the survey who show momentum and have you comment on this. We haven't mentioned Snowflake so far, but they remain again with like this gold standard of net score, they've consistently had those high marks with regard to spending velocity. But here's some other data. Erik, how should we interpret this? >> Erik: Yeah, just to harp on Snowflake for a second. Right, I mean the rich get richer. They came out- IPO was so hyped, so it was hard for us as a research company to say, "Oh, you know, well, you know, we agree." But we did. The data is incredible. You can't beat the management team. You can't beat what they're doing. They've got so much cash. I can't wait to see what they do with it. And meanwhile, you would expect something that debuted with that high of a net score, that high of spending velocity to trail off. It would be natural. It's not Dave, it's still accelerating. It's gone even higher. It's at all time highs. And we just don't see it stopping anytime soon. It's a really interesting space right now. Maybe another name to look at on here that I think is pretty interesting, kind of a play on return to business is Kupa. It's a great project expense management tool that got hit really hard. Listen, traveling stopped, business expense stopped, and I did a panel on it. And a lot of our guys basically said, "Yeah, it was the first thing I cut." But we're seeing a huge rebound in spending there in that space. So that's a name that I think might be worth being called out on a positive side. Negative, If you look down to the bottom right of that chart, unfortunately we're seeing some issues in RingCentral and Zoom. Anything that's sort of playing in this next, you know, video conferencing, IP telephony space, they seem to be having really decelerating spending. Also now with Zoom's acquisition of five nine. I'm not really sure how RingCentral's going to compete on that. But yeah, that's one where we debuted for the first time with a negative outlook on that name. And looking and asking to some of the people in our community, a lot of them say externally, you still need IP telepany, but internally you don't. Because the You Cast communication systems are getting so sophisticated, that if I have Teams, if I have Slack, I don't need phones anymore. (chuckling) That you and I can just do a Slack call. We can do a Teams call. And many of them are saying I'm truly ripping out my IP Telepany internally as soon as possible because we just don't need it. So this whole collaboration, productivity space is here to stay. And it's got wide ranging implications to some of these more legacy type of tools. >> You know, one of the other things I'd call out on this chart is Accenture. You and I had a session earlier this year, and we had predicted that that skill shortage was going to lead to an uptick in traditional services. We've certainly seen that. I mean, IBM beat its quarter on the strength of services largely. And seeing Accenture on that is I think confirmation. >> Yeah that was our New Year prediction show, right Dave? When we made top 10 predictions? >> That's right. That was part of our predictions show. Exactly, good memory. >> The data is really showing that continue. People want the projects, they need to do the projects, but hiring is very difficult. So obviously the number one beneficiary there are going to be the Accentures of the world. >> All right. So let's do a quick wrap. I'm going to make a few comments and then have you bring us home, Erik. So we laid out our scenario for the tech spending rebound. We definitely believe last year tracked downward, along with GDP contraction. It was interesting. Gardner doesn't believe, at least factions of Gardner don't believe there's a correlation between GDP and tech spending. But, you know, I personally think there generally is some kind of relatively proportional pattern there. And I think we saw contraction last year. People are concerned about inflation. Of course, that adds some uncertainty. And as well, as you mentioned around the Delta variant. But I feel as though that the boards of directors and CEOs, they've mandated that tech execs have to build out digital platforms for the future. They're data centric. They're highly automated, to your earlier points. They're intelligent with AI infused, and that's going to take investment. I feel like the tech community has said, "Look, we know what to do here. We're dealing with hybrid work. We can't just stop doing what we're doing. Let's move forward." You know, and as you say, we're flying again and so forth. You know, getting hybrid right is a major priority that directly impacts strategies. Technology strategies, particularly around security, cloud, the productivity of remote workers with collaboration. And as we've said many times, we are entering a new era of data that's going to focus on decentralized data, building data products, and Erik let's keep an eye on this observability space. Lot of interest there, and buyers have a number of choices. You know, do they go with a specialist, as we saw recently, we've seen in the past, or did they go with the generalist like Service Now with the acquisition of LightStep? You know, it's going to be interesting. A lot of people are going to get into this space, start bundling into larger platforms. And so as you said, there's probably not enough room for all the players. We're going to see some consolidation there. But anyway, let me give you the final word here. >> Yeah, no, I completely agree with all of it. And I think your earlier points are spot on, that analytics and automation are certainly going to be moving more and more to that left of that chart we had of priorities. I think as we continue that survey heading into 2022, we'll have some fresh data for you again in a few months, that's going to start looking at 2022 priorities and overall spend. And the one other area that I keep hearing about over and over and over again is customer experience. There's a transition from good old CRM to CXM. Right now, everything is digital. It is not going away. So you need an omni-channel support to not only track your customer experience, but improve it. Make sure there's a two way communication. And it's a really interesting space. Salesforce is going to migrate into it. We've got Qualtrics out there. You've got Medallia. You've got FreshWorks, you've got Sprinkler. You got some names out there. And everyone I keep talking to on the IT end user side keeps bringing up customer experience. So let's keep an eye on that as well. >> That's a great point. And again, it brings me back to Service Now. We wrote a piece last week that's sort of, Service Now and Salesforce are on a collision course. We've said that for many, many years. And you've got this platform of platforms. They're just kind of sucking in different functions saying, "Hey, we're friends with everybody." But as you know Erik, software companies, they want to own it all. (both chuckling) All right. Hey Erik, thank you so much. I want to thank you for coming back on. It's always a pleasure to have you on Breaking Analysis. Great to see you. >> Love the partnership. Love the collaboration. Let's go enjoy this summer Friday. >> All right. Let's do. Okay, remember everybody, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcast, click subscribe to the series. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus. They've just launched a new website. They've got a whole new pricing model. It's great to see that innovation going on. Now remember we also publish a full report every week on WikiBond.com and SiliconAngle.com. You can always email me, appreciate the back channel comments, the metadata insights. David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. DM me on Twitter @DVellante or comment on the LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley and theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, a good rest of summer, be well. And we'll see you next time. (inspiring music)

Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and this is Wikibon's Action Item. We're joined here in the studio by David Floyer. Hi David. >> Hi there. >> And remote, we've got Jim Kobielus. Hi, Jim. >> Hi everybody. >> Now, Jim, you probably can't see this, but for those who are watching, when we do see the broad set, notice that David Floyer's got his Game of Thrones coffee cup with us. Now that has nothing to do with the topic. David, and Jim, we're going to be talking about this challenge that businesses have, that enterprises have, as they think about making practical use of AI. The presumption for many years was that we were going to move all the data up into the Cloud in a central location, and all workloads were going to be run there. As we've gained experience, it's very clear that we're actually going to see a greater distribution function, partly in response to a greater distribution of data. But what does that tell about the relationship between AI, AI workloads, storage, and hybrid Cloud? David, why don't you give us a little clue as to where we're going to go from here. >> Well I think the first thing we have to do is separate out the two types of workload. There's the development of the AI solution, the inference code, et cetera, the dealing with all of the data required for that. And then there is the execution of that code, which is the inference code itself. And the two are very different in characteristics. For the development, you've got a lot of data. It's very likely to be data-bound. And storage is a very important component of that, as well as computer and the GPUs. For the inference, that's much more compute-bound. Again, compute neural networks, GPUs, are very, very relevant to that portion. Storage is much more ephemeral in the sense that the data will come in and you will need to execute on it. But that data will be part of the, the compute will be part of that sensor, and you will want the storage to be actually in the DIMM itself, or non-volatile DIMM, right up as part of the processing. And you'll want to share that data only locally in real time, through some sort of mesh computing. So, very different compute requirements, storage requirements, and architectural requirements. >> Yeah, let's go back to that notion of the different storage types in a second, but Jim, David described how the workloads are going to play out. Give a sense of what the pipelines are going to look like, because that's what people are building right now, is the pipelines for actually executing these workloads. How will they differ? How do they differ in the different locations? >> Yeah, so the entire DataOps pipeline for data science, data analytics, AI in other words. And so what you're looking at here is all the processes from discovering and adjusting the data to transforming and preparing and correcting it, cleansing it, to modeling and training the AI models, to serving them out for inferencing along the lines of what David's describing. So, there's different types of AI models and one builds from different data to do different types of inferencing. And each of these different pipelines might be highly, often is, highly specific to a particular use case. You know, AI for robotics, that's a very different use case from AI for natural language processing, embedded for example in an e-commerce portal environment. So, what you're looking at here is different pipelines that all share a common sort of flow of activities and phases. And you need a data scientist to build and test, train and evaluate and serve out the various models to the consuming end devices or application. >> So, David we've got 50 or so years of computing. Where the primary role of storage was to assist a transaction and the data associated with that transaction that has occurred. And that's you know, disk and then you have all the way out to tape if we're talking about archive. Flash changes that equation. >> Absolutely changes it. >> AI absolutely demands a different way of thinking. Here we're not talking about persisting our data we're talking about delivering data, really fast. As you said, sometimes very ephemeral. And so, it requires a different set of technologies. What are some of the limitations that historically storage has been putting on some of these workloads? And how are we breaching those limitations, to make them possible? >> Well if we take only 10 years ago, the start of the big data was Hadoop. And that was spreading the data over very cheap disks and hard disks. With the compute there, and you spread that data and you did it all in parallel on very cheap nodes. So, that was the initial but that is a very expensive way of doing it now because you're tying the data to that set of nodes. They're all connected together so, a more modern way of doing it is to use Flash, to use multiple copies of that data but logical copies or snapshots of that Flash. And to be able to apply as many processes, nodes as is appropriate for that particular workload. And that is a far more efficient and faster way of processing that or getting through that sort of workload. And it really does make a difference of tenfold in terms of elapsed time and ability to get through that. And the overall cost is very similar. >> So that's true in the inferencing or, I'm sorry, in the modeling. What about in the inferencing side of things? >> Well, the inferencing side is again, very different. Because you are dealing with the data coming in from the sensors or coming in from other sensors or smart sensors. So, what you want to do there is process that data with the inference code as quickly as you can, in real time. Most of the time in real time. So, when you're doing that, you're holding the current data actually in memory. Or maybe in what's called non-volatile DIMM and VDIMM. Which gives you a larger amount. But, you almost certainly don't have the time to go and store that data and you certainly don't want to store it if you can avoid it because it is a large amount of data and if I open my... >> Has limited derivative use. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> So you want to get all or quickly get all the value out of that data. Compact it right down using whatever techniques you can, and then take just the results of that inference up to other ones. Now at the beginning of the cycle, you may need more but at the end of the cycle, you'll need very little. >> So Jim, the AI world has built algorithms over many, many, many years. Many which still persist today but they were building these algorithms with the idea that they were going to use kind of slower technologies. How is the AI world rethinking algorithms, architectures, pipelines, use cases? As a consequence of these new storage capabilities that David's describing? >> Well yeah, well, AI has become widely distributed in terms of its architecture increasingly and often. Increasingly it's running over containerized, Kubernetes orchestrated fabrics. And a lot of this is going on in the area of training, of models and distributing pieces of those models out to various nodes within an edge architecture. It may not be edge in the internet of things sense but, widely distributed, highly parallel environments. As a way of speeding up the training and speeding up the modeling and really speeding up the evaluation of many models running in parallel in an approach called ensemble modeling. To be able to converge on a predictive solution, more rapidly. So, that's very much what David's describing is that that's leveraging the fact that memory is far faster than any storage technology we have out there. And so, being able to distribute pieces of the overall modeling and training and even data prep of workloads. It's able to speed up the deployment of highly optimized and highly sophisticated AI models for the cutting edge, you know, challenges we face like the Event Horizon telescope for example. That we're all aware of when they were able to essentially make a visualization of a black hole. That relied on a form of highly distributed AI called Grid Computing. For example, I mean the challenges like that demand a highly distributed memory-centric orchestrated approach to tackling. >> So, you're essentially moving the code to the data as opposed to moving all of the data all the way out to the one central point. >> Well so if we think about that notion of moving code to the data. And I started off by suggesting that. In many respects, the Cloud is an architectural approach to how you distribute your workloads as opposed to an approach to centralizing everything in some public Cloud. I think increasingly, application architects and IT organizations and service providers are all seeing things in that way. This is a way of more broadly distributing workloads. Now as we think about, we talked briefly about the relationship between storage and AI workloads but we don't want to leave anyone with the impression that we're at a device level. We're really talking about a network of data that has to be associated with a network of storage. >> Yes. >> Now that suggests a different way of thinking about how - about data and data administration storage. We're not thinking about devices, we're really trying to move that conversation up into data services. What kind of data services are especially crucial to supporting some of these distributed AI workloads? >> Yes. So there are the standard ones that you need for all data which is the backup and safety and encryption security, control. >> Primary storage allocation. >> All of that, you need that in place. But on top of that, you need other things as well. Because you need to understand the mesh, the distributed hybrid Cloud that you have, and you need to know what the capabilities are of each of those nodes, you need to know the latencies between each of those nodes - >> Let me stop you here for a second. When you say "you need to know," do you mean "I as an individual need to know" or "the system needs to know"? >> It needs to be known, and it's too complex, far too complex for an individual ever to solve problems like this so it needs, in fact, its own little AI environment to be able to optimize and check the SLAs so that particular inference coding can be achieved in the way that it's set up. >> So it sounds like - >> It's a mesh type of computer. >> Yeah, so it sounds like one of the first use cases for AI, practical, commercial use cases, will be AI within the data plane itself because the AI workloads are going to drive such a complex model and utilization of data that if you don't have that the whole thing will probably just fold in on itself. Jim, how would you characterize this relationship between AI inside the system, and how should people think about that and is that really going to be a practical, near-term commercial application that folks should be paying attention to? >> Well looking at the Cloud native world, what we need and what we're increasingly seeing out there are solutions, tools, really data planes, that are able to associate a distributed storage infrastructure of a very hybridized nature in terms of disk and flash and so forth with a highly distributed containerized application environment. So for example just last week at Jeredhad I met with the folks from Robin Systems and they're one of the solution providers providing those capabilities to associate, like I said, the storage Cloud with the containerized, essentially application, or Cloud applications that are out there, you know, what we need there, like you've indicated, are the ability to use AI to continue to look for patterns of performance issues, bottlenecks, and so forth and to drive the ongoing placement of data storage nodes and servers which in clusters and so forth as way of making sure that storage resources are always used efficiently that SLAs as David indicated are always observed in an automated fashion as the native placement and workload placement decisions are being made and so ultimately that the AI itself, whatever it's doing like recognizing faces or recognizing human language, is able to do it as efficiently and really as cheaply as possible. >> Right, so let me summarize what we've got so far. We've got that there is a relationship between storage and AI, that the workload suggests that we're going to have centralized modeling, large volumes of data, we're going to have distributed inferencing, smaller on data, more complex computing. Flash is crucial, mesh is crucial, and increasingly because of the distributed nature of these applications, there's going to have to be very specific and specialized AI in the infrastructure, in that mesh itself, to administer a lot of these data resources. >> Absolutely. >> So, but we want to be careful here, right David? We don't want to suggest that we have, just as the notion of everything goes into a centralized Cloud under a central administrative effort, we also don't want to suggest this notion that there's this broad, heterogeneous, common, democratized, every service available everywhere. Let's bring hybrid Cloud into this. >> Right. >> How will hybrid Cloud ultimately evolve to ensure that we get common services where we need them? And know where we don't have common services so that we can factor those constraints? >> So it's useful to think about the hybrid Cloud from the point of view of the development which will be fairly normal types of computing and be in really large centers and the edges themselves, which will be what we call autonomous Clouds. Those are the ones at the edge which need to be self-sufficient. So if you have an autonomous car, you can't guarantee that you will have communication to it. And most - a lot of IOTs in distant places which again, on chips or distant places, where you can't guarantee. So they have to be able to run much more by themselves. So that's one important characteristic so that autonomous one needs to be self-sufficient itself and have within it all the capabilities of running that particular code. And then passing up data when it can. >> Now you gave examples where it's physically required to do that, but it's also OT examples. >> Exactly. >> Operational technologies where you need to have that air gap to ensure that bad guys can't get into your data. >> Yes, absolutely, I mean if you think about a boat, a ship, it has multiple very clear air gaps and a nuclear power station has a total air gap around it. You must have those sort of air gaps. So it's a different architecture for different uses for different areas. But of course data is going to come up from those autonomous, upwards, but it will be a very small amount of the data that's actually being processed. The data, and there'll be requests down to those autonomous Clouds for additional processing of one sort or another. So there still will be a discussion, communication, between them, to ensure that the final outcome, the business outcome, is met. >> All right, so I'm going to ask each of you guys to give me a quick prediction. David, I'm going to ask you about storage and then Jim I'm going to ask you about AI in light of David's prediction about storage. So David, as we think about where these AI workloads seem to be going, how is storage technology going to evolve to make AI applications easier to deal with, easier to run, cheaper to run, more secure? >> Well, the fundamental move is towards larger amounts of Flash. And the new thing is that larger amounts of non-volatile DIMM, the memory in the computer itself, those are going to get much, much bigger, those are going to help with the execution of these real-time applications and there's going to be high-speed communication between short distances between the different nodes and this mesh architecture. So that's on the inference side, there's a big change happening in that space. On the development side the storage will move towards sharing data. So having a copy of the data which is available to everybody, and that data will be distributed. So sharing that data, having that data distributed, will then enable the sorts of ways of using that data which will retain context, which is incredibly important, and avoid the cost and the loss of value because of the time taken of moving that data from A to B. >> All right, so to summarize, we've got a new level in the storage hierarchy that puts between Flash and memory to really accelerate things, and then secondly we've got this notion that increasingly we have to provide a way of handling time and context so that we sustain fidelity especially in more real-time applications. Jim, given that this is where storage is going to go, what does that say about AI? >> What it says about AI is that first of all, we're talking about like David said, meshes of meshes, every edge node is increasingly becoming a mesh in its own right with disparate CPUs and GPUs and whatever, doing different inferencing on each device, but every one of these, like a smart car, will have plenty of embedded storage to process a lot of data locally that may need to be kept locally for lots of very good reasons, like a black box in case of an accident, but also in terms of e-discovery of the data and the models that might have led up to an accident that might have caused fatalities and whatnot. So when we look at where AI is going, AI is going into the mesh of mesh, meshes of meshes, where there's AI running it in each of the nodes within the meshes, and the meshes themselves will operate as autonomous decisioning nodes within a broader environment. Now in terms of the context, the context increasingly that surrounds all of the AI within these distributed architectures will be in the form of graphs and graphs are something distinct from the statistical algorithms that we built AI out of. We're talking about knowledge graphs, we're talking about social graphs, we're talking about behavioral graphs, so graph technology is just getting going. For example, Microsoft recently built, they made a big continued push into threading graph - contextual graph technology - into everything they do. So that's where I see AI going is up from statistical models to graph models as the broader metadata framework for binding everything together. >> Excellent. All right guys, so Jim, I think another topic another time might be the mesh mess. (laughs) But we won't do that now. All right, let's summarize really quickly. We've talked about how the relationship between AI, storage and hybrid Clouds are going to evolve. Number one, AI workloads are at least differentiated by where we handle modeling, large amounts of data still need a lot of compute, but we're really focused on large amounts of data and moving that data around very, very quickly. But therefore proximate to where the workload resides. Great, great application for Clouds, large, public as well as private. On the other side, where the inferencing work is done, that's going to be very compute-bound, smaller data volumes, but very, very fast data. Lot of flash everywhere. The second thing we observed is that these new AI applications are going to be used and applied in a lot of different domains, both within human interaction as well as real-time domains within IOT, et cetera, but that as we evolve, we're going to see a greater relationship between the nature of the workload and the class of the storage, and that is going to be a crucial feature for storage administrators and storage vendors over the next few year is to ensure that that specialization is reflected in what's known. What's needed. Now the last point that we'll make very quickly is that as we look forward, the whole concept of hybrid Cloud where we can have greater predictability into the nature of data-oriented services that are available for different workloads is going to be really, really important. We're not going to have all data services common in all places. But we do want to make sure that we can assure whether it's a container-based application or some other structure, that we can ensure that the data that is required will be there in the context, form and metadata structures that are required. Ultimately, as we look forward, we see new classes of storage evolving that bring data even closer to the compute side, and we see new data models emerging, such as graph models, that are a better overall reflection of how this distributed data is going to evolve within hybrid Cloud environments. David Floyer, Jim Kobielus, Wikibon analysts, I'm Peter Burris, once again, this has been Action Item.

>> Hi, everybody. This is Dave Vellante of theCUBE. We're running a series of events, and one of the episodes that were focused on is hybrid cloud storage. I'm here with Terry Richardson. Terry, what are people going to learn in this event? >> So this one's all about what elements of our portfolio a cloud ready and how partners and customers can take advantage of that on the digital journey as the implement hybrid ITSolutions. >> Hybrid Cloud is a complicated situation for a lot of people: on-prem,  off-prem data sovereignty, data movement, security, etcetera. So watch this space will be flowing White Papers; How To's; video content We'll see you in the CrowdChat.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This, is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman coming from our Boston area studio, and joining me for this special discussion of hybrid cloud monetization innovation white space, I have James Kobielus, who is our lead analyst out of the DC area. And also have David Floyer, who is the author of Wikibon's 'Hybrid Cloud Topologies' coming to us from San Francisco. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Happy to be here. >> You're welcome. Alright, so we've been talking about hybrid cloud quite a bit. And the reason we're doing that is if you look here in 2019, public cloud we think we understand it. It's well defined, we've talked about it, we can talk about the winners and losers, we can talk about innovation and growth. There's a lot of money there. Couple of years ago we spent a lot of time looking at private cloud. We put out research, what we call 'true private cloud', and the reason we called it that is because how do we differentiate it from virtualization? Things like the operating model, how we buy it, how we consume it, how we management. All is different than the traditional data center. When you talk about hybrid cloud, it's interesting. When you think back at the early days, it was well I take public, I take private, I put 'em together and I have hybrid cloud. But, is there much more than just selling those pieces? And earlier this year, David Floyer put out the hybrid cloud taxonomy, really put together some of the planes that we should be examining, as well as the spectrum of the offerings. Today we're going to talk about some of the opportunities to really up-level and where there's opportunities for customers to get a lot of value, and therefore the ecosystem will also be able to get some revenue and monetize that. But, David, to kick things off, if you could just give us, kind of the primary thesis of that hybrid cloud taxonomy for those that haven't seen it before. >> Okay so, we've created the taxonomy, which if you imagine it going from left to right, is multi-cloud, and then loosely coupled hybrid cloud, tightly coupled hybrid cloud, true distributed hybrid cloud, and autonomous standalone clouds. So those are the five labels that we've given to them. And, if you think about those five labels, there are four characteristics, which increase from left to right. State, for example, the autonomous standalone cloud is all about state. It's about the state of a IoT, or a moving car, or whatever it is. Integration, the level of integration, automation, and hybrid applications. So those are the four levels which change, and then covering those, we have the concept of planes. So we're looking at different types of planes, network planes, data planes, control planes, and there are other planes as well. And looking at a functionality that's in those planes, which has to increase the further to the right you go. >> Alright, thank you, David. And there's a lot nuance and complexity in a lot of areas to kind of dig in. But before we go into specifics there, can hybrid cloud be more than just a composite of the various pieces? You know, where's their innovation? Where's their white space? Where is this going to be more than just say the world of the past where we talked about multi-vendor? >> Well, I think the way to answer that is to think about what is the most important characteristic of data centers, characters to computing? And that is, what is different now is data. Data is spread everywhere. You have data at the edge. You have data in your own data centers. You have data in the clouds, you have data in SAS clouds. Data is distributed. If you wanted maximize the value of that data, then you need services, not that just pull everything up to one cloud, that's one model. But the key disadvantage of that is it takes time, takes time and a lot of money to move all of that data up. So, a better model is to move your code and services to that data. And to do that, you need a hybrid cloud mechanisms to achieve that, you've got to be able to send that information across the network in some way. And you've got to be able to coordinate where and how you send the code and the services. >> Yeah. Well, David, we've been talking for a couple of years now. Data is really at the center of all of this discussion. You talk about cloud, we've talked about big data for years. I want to pull in Jim. So, Jim, data is your world, you're talking developers, and data scientists, and of course the giant wave of AI has data at that center. So, you've been look at writing a lot about the role that data and AI play in this hybrid cloud discussion. So, up-level us a bit to some of the apps and the data, as to how this fits to this overall discussion. >> Oh, yes yes. Well, AI of course rides on data. And really AI rides on entire pipeline and workflow of data, from sources through to data lakes, where the models are built and trained, to then the serving of the built-out models into downstream applications, which also have their own local data and so forth. So, we look at hybrid clouds they, and multi-clouds, they quite often bring a lot more complexity by their very nature into the whole AI development and operations pipeline. But there are, there's value to be gained from using distributed data for all manner of AI applications. The applications become more powerful because they can leverage more data, you can build more types of models to do more kinds of inferencing and so forth. So, when you look now at the multi-cloud, we have distributed data, distributed models, distributed workloads that are doing everything from natural language processing to face recognition and beyond. That's the power of AI. Now, in hybrid cloud environment, you need, like David said, these planes to enable all degree of integration. And one of the planes, is the data plane. And the data plane, at its very heart, involves moving the data where it needs to be for training the model, for doing validation of training models to make sure they continue to be fit for purpose and so forth. And much more of the training is happening at the edges now, because that's where the actual AI is living, because that's where the data lives and dies. So what you need to make that happen, that data plane needs to be highly versatile, increasingly needs to be able to work in more of a meshed multi-cloud environment and that's sort of the bleeding edge of Istio and all those other things that we're seeing coming into the mainstream of AI and data management in the multi-cloud. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought edge into the discussion because often it's the, battle of public versus private cloud. And that's not really the discussion, it's about my applications, it's about my data, it's where things naturally going to live. We've done lots of interviews where you talk about just, you know, the natural laws of the cloud. There is, latency and the speed of light are still very important things. You know, David actually spent many years talking with you about these pieces and, the role as to what lives in my data center, what lives in the public cloud, what ends up the edge, where code goes, where data goes is a complex thing. But, David, you know I think we're going to spend most of our time talking about this data plane, help us peel the onion a little bit on this. One of the services that should be extracted from the individual platforms that we've looked at is data protection. Is that part of the data plane? Is it the main piece of the data plane? How does that and other services fit into this discussion of hybrid cloud? >> Uh yes, data protection is obviously a key component. And, I think a good way of thinking about it is that in most cases would be multiple data planes. You will want a data plane, for example, the helps you with high-speed record moving or high-speed small pieces of data moving around, which is maybe of transient use. The type of characteristics and network to support it, the protocols and the distributed management of that is going to be very very different from, for example, data that you need to get ready for an AI. Example where you're training something. So where bandwidth is much more important. So there will be, in my opinion, multiple data planes. There's a big opportunity here for vendors because you need to be able to run your storage services across all the different hybrid versions that you have. You need to be able to run that at the edge, you need to be able to run that in your local private cloud, and you'll also need to be able to run that in whatever other clouds, public clouds as well. So, a key characteristic then is all of this is going to be code. All of this is about moving those services. And if you think about the types of services that you want in that environment. If you want to write a hybrid application where you are having data in one place and compute in one place, and data somewhere else. You need to know the latency, for example, how far away in time is that data? Should I move the data here or should I move the code to the data? You need operational systems, you need... you need orchestration that will manage that for you. So, you need different horses for different courses, we'll need different data solutions for different types of application. Different ones for AI, different ones for transactional processing. For example, complex one like maybe you have a transactional system and you want to, at the same time, to do a large amount of fraud detection. That's a different type of application and different databases associated with that. If you're at the edge you're going to be using far more time series databases, state databases... Whereas you would be using traditional SQL databases for your systems of record. Does that help in explaining? >> It does quite a bit, David, and I would say to people, please check out Wikibon.com, you can see some of David's research, it brings back to mind just the discussion we had on software defined in the infrastructure space pulling the services away from just hardware and being independent, but that is a discussion, David, you've been having for decades. And I've been reading some of your stuff from even before I joined the team. So, it's great to see kind of what's the same and what's different as we build these out. Jim, the piece I heard from David is a lot of, you know, there's the database and there's all of these services that we have. But at the core of it, when I go back to that data, one of the things we've been grappling is companies, is how can I actually monetize that data and get value out of it? >> (Laughs) >> One of the things that we talked about, you know, big data was supposed to be that bit-flip from oh my god how do I deal with all that data to oh boy I've got all this data and I can do something with it. And... it had rather mixed results. So for AI, there's lots of companies out there, that'll help unlock the value of data. It's going to be the rocket-ship to drive things forward, AI's going to drive of this, so, it's a complex environment and there's lots of things that companies would have to spend, so you know, are they going to have to spend more money? Or can they actually make money when it comes to our data? Give us a little bit of an insight as to what you're seeing there. >> Well, monetizing the data, Stu, where AI and machine learning come into the picture, is that essentially these are statistical models that are derived from the data and provide monetizable value if deployed into working applications. So that's what the whole data science pipeline is all about. It's taking the source data, looking for the predictive variables, building models to incorporate those predictive variables to do, you know, face recognition, or natural language processing, etc, into models that are trained and deployed into working applications to do to inferencing. That's all the monetization train, as it were, for AI. And so, what we're seeing, what Wikibon is seeing, is that there has been, in the last several years, a growing niche in the industry of workflow tools, DevOps tools for the data science pipeline that handle all of those processes and enable teams of data scientists, and data engineers, and subject matter experts, and so on, to work together to really industrialize the process of extracting that value, building those models from the data and deploying into all manner of applications, including deploying these models, AI, over kubernetes and within containers and in serverless environments. This is happening. I mean, we're seeing all over the world and every industry enterprises setting up very much industrialized processes for incorporating data science into the very heart of application development. >> Jim, that's awesome. So I'll go back as I've heard Peter Buriss talk about, the thing that differentiates a company before and after they've gone through that digital transformation is how they can actually leverage that data, are you a data driven company? Is that something you can take advantage of inside what you're doing? So, we've only scratched the surface. Jim and David, really appreciate you talking about that. My call to action for people out there is if you go to Wikibon.com you're going to see the regular aim of research coming up for the team on this. We actually have regular conversation with the community and welcome your input. If you go to, excuse me, Crowdchat.net/actionitem you'll find the latest and you'll see, if you look on the right side, some of the previous ones. And, of course, our team is at lots of events. All the big cloud and infrastructure and software shows. Check out thecube.net for all of those. For Jim, David, I'm Stu, thanks so much for watching. Please reach out to us with any question and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (Jazzy music)

(orchestral music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another Cube conversation, from our awesome studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. With every Cube conversation, we pick a topic, find someone to talk about. The topic today is hybrid cloud. A lot of conversation. AWS introduced Outposts, we've got Microsoft Azure talking about centralize, as well as distributed cloud offerings. Oracle is doing the same thing. A lot of conversation about hybrid cloud and what it means. To have that conversation, we've got David Floyer with us. David is the CTO of Wikibon. David, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, Peter. >> David, let's start by saying, that there has to be a way of representing different options when we think about hybrid cloud. You've done a lot of research in this domain. How are you representing the continuum, the taxonomy of hybrid cloud for customers? >> On the slide, it shows that there are essentially, five different multiple clouds or hybrid clouds. From left to right, it's multi-cloud, and at the bottom of the slide, it says that this essentially a set of clouds, with an integrated network. And then the next is loosely-coupled hybrid cloud, and that adds in the data plane, where we look after storage, and data protection, data management, et cetera. The middle one is tightly-coupled hybrid cloud, and that's where the control plane, is now tightly integrated along with everything else. The next one is "true" distributed hybrid cloud, and those are the ones that you were talking about. Those are the AWS Outposts, the Azure Stack, the Oracle Cloud at Customer-type environments. Also, you could put IBM, some of IBM's recent announcements into that as well. Last but not least, and certainly one of the most interesting and different, is the autonomous stand-alone clouds, are going to be at the edge. They have to be autonomous, because they can't guarantee network availability to them. >> So, five classes of cloud, each distinguished by the degree, to which they share different types of resources, including state, integration, automation, and the degree to which the application is going to be common across each of these cloud types. >> That's correct. >> Have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Obviously, while this is theoretical. >> Yeah. >> In a sense that we're trying to create some way, so understanding about how to represent these things. It's based on some practical observations, about where we are within the industry. >> Yeah. >> Let's start talking about multicloud. Who do you place into that bucket, of multicloud hybrid cloud styles? >> If we talk first of all about the cloud themselves, there would be clouds from AWS or Azure, or IBM or Google. Those are the clouds that you start with, you might have one on premise, but the connection between them is just on a network basis. The people who are doing that would be clearly, Cisco is one of the leading people in that area, where they already have a lot of enterprise equipment, and experience of dealing with clouds, across the whole of the area. They would be the people, that are going to be a foremost vendor, in connecting those different clouds together, on a network plane. >> Okay, let's move to the right, and talk about the loosely-coupled hybrid clouds. Now here we're having more than network, common network. We're having a common data plane, which really boils down to a common set of data services, that are rendered commonly. >> Right, yeah. >> Across different cloud instances. >> Right. >> Who's there? >> To do that, you've got to be able to have your data services, actually on each of the clouds. You have to have it in software on AWS, or Azure, or IBM, or whatever it is. Two of the people that's probably leading the charge in that area are IBM themselves. They've gone completely software, with all of their spectrum line of software in that area, and Pure. Pure Storage have been very aggressive again, in putting things up, so that they can be reflected in each of the clouds. >> And there's other vendors, that are coming in from a data protection standpoint. >> Sure. >> Data security standpoint, and they may-- Some people like Veeam. >> -not have the full set of services. >> Yes. But they are looking at how they can apply their services. >> Correct. >> Across multiple cloud instances. >> And there's a lot of vendors there. People like Veeam or Rubric, or Cohesity. DellEMC. >> Et cetera, yes. >> Okay, so let's move to the right. Now we've moved from loosely-coupled, to tightly-coupled hybrid clouds, where we're starting to share a common automation framework, more control, sharing control data so that we can start to understand, the state of applications in multiple different locations. >> Yes. >> Who's leading there? >> Some of the leads in this area, are some of the traditional ones, like IBM for example. IBM Sysplex, which came out what, 20 years ago. >> We're not. >> That is where you have state being, time and state being shared, across a whole number of different instances, or notion within that Sysplex. >> Yeah, let's talk about that specifically. So, we're talking about a global shared memory notion. >> Yes. >> More than just a name space, but actually-- >> Correct. >> -a control plane, that has global incite into where resources are, has names for them. >> Yeah. >> They may be multiple name spaces, but it's bringing a common set of controls to that global set of resources. >> Yes, and time is obviously a key aspect to help stay-- >> Well, it's got to be synchronized. >> Yes. >> Exactly. >> That's right. >> If we move to the right to true distributed hybrid cloud, in the tightly-coupled, we have a common control plane, but not necessarily common software. >> Correct. >> Common code. >> Correct. >> At the compile level. We're still utilizing distribution formats, maybe specific, et cetera. But now in a true hybrid, or true distributor hybrid cloud, it's common-common. >> Yes. >> Who's there? >> Yes, it's common code. It can run on any node without having to be recompiled, or retested. You know it's going to work. The people in there, are the people that we were talking about earlier. It's people like AWS with Outposts, Microsoft with Azure Stack, Cloud at Customer from Oracle. Three large vendors, who are using this to use a cloud first-type model, in which they can grow, the central cloud, as quickly as possible, add things to it, and push that down into the Cloud at Customer, or the Outposts, or the Stacks. >> To be clear, we're not talking about a common cloud experience, we're talking about absolute common cloud services. >> Correct. >> All the way down to the executables, so that the same software can run wherever it needs to run. >> Yes. >> Finally, let's move one step further to the right. This is the autonomous stand-alone clouds. >> Yes, this is at the edge. >> Who's there? >> This is the most different of all of these. It has to be autonomous. If you think about mobile vehicles or planes, or even think about a factory or a nuclear power plant. You have to be able to run that, assuming that the network is not going to get through. It's on the edge, so it's the most vulnerable to network. It has to be autonomous, therefore it has to be able to run by itself. That sort of cloud is mainly concerned with the state, the state of that edge. All of the devices in that edge, the windmills in that edge, or the factory robotics in that edge. In military terms, the automated units in that edge, or the drones. Whatever it is, you're concerned about the state of that. >> But specifically, sustaining local control of state. >> Correct. >> Against a common understanding. >> Yes. >> Of how these things interact with each other. >> Right. >> It brings almost a network realtime of flavor to it. >> It is realtime. It has to be realtime so it's a shared state across. For example, across the city, in terms of the traffic lights. You would see multiple of these small clouds, in different parts of a large city, for example. Which need to communicate with each other. So, you have devices, which have an inference code running on them, and they're dealing with the device, on to which it's attached. And then you have connecting all of those devices together, to make this overall system representation of the sate. >> Okay, so we've got five classes of hybrid cloud. How is a CIO going to use this taxonomy, to make better decisions? >> Clearly by making this decision, what we're doing from a taxonomy point of view, is making each one individual, and different from the others. There's no sharing between them. That means that from a description point of view, we can describe the whole of this industry. We can say how much is going on in each one, who are winners and losers in each one. >> We'll use this to size different classifications. >> Right, and give that-- >> Talk about leader, describe competition and all that stuff. >> Yes. >> But if I'm a CIO, do I think, oh, I got a business problem that's associated with applications, on various levels of common data sharing, control sharing, et cetera. Do I use this to help me chose the specific architecture that I use? >> The best way that I think that CIO's are going to use this to say, "Where am I aiming to be? What is most important to me and my business? If it is the edge, then how am I going to go through these? Because I'm not going to get to the edge on day one. How am I going to chose my vendors and my protocols, and my standards, and my data planes, and my control planes, such that I can get to that particular end point?" Within each one, you'd want to look at them individually, because you're going to put together a, first of all, in a multi-cloud environment. But you should be looking into the future, as to how you want to traverse across this, and who your major partners and vendors will be. Or, strategic partners and vendors. >> And we'll use this as you said, we'll use this specifically to size the market, describe the competitive factors, et cetera. >> Correct, yeah. All right. David Floyer, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much, indeed. >> Once again, I'm Peter Burris, and we have been talking about Cube conversations, related to true hybrid cloud taxonomies. Wikibon research. Thanks very much for watching, and until our next Cube conversation. (orchestral music)

>> Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco for IBM Think 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Stu, it's been a great day. We're on our fourth day of four days of wall to wall coverage. A theme of AI, large scale compute with Cloud and data that's great. Great topics. Got two great guests here. Rohit Badlaney, who's the director of IBM Z As a Service, IBM Systems. Real great to see you. And Nataraj Nagaratnam, Distinguished Engineer and CTO and Director of Cloud Security at IBM and Hybrid Cloud, thanks for joining us. >> Glad to be here. >> So, the subtext to all the big messaging around AI and multi-cloud is that you need power to run this. Horsepower, you need big iron, you need the servers, you need the storage, but software is in the heart of all this. So you guys had some big announcements around capabilities. The Hyper Protect was a big one on the securities side but now you've got Z As a Service. We've seen Linux come on Z. So it's just another network now. It's just network computing is now tied in with cloud. Explain the offering. What's the big news? >> Sure, so two major announcements for us this week. One's around our private cloud capabilities on the platform. So we announced our IBM Cloud Private set of products fully supported on our LinuxOne systems, and what we've also announced is the extensions of those around hyper-secure workloads through a capability called the Secure Services Container, as well as giving our traditional z/OS clients cloud consumption through a capability called the z/OS Cloud Broker. So it's really looking at how do we cloudify the platform for our existing base, as well as clients looking to do digital transformation projects on-premise. How do we help them? >> This has been a key part of this. I want to just drill down this cloudification because we've been talking about how you guys are positioned for growth. All the REORG's are done. >> Sure, yeah >> The table's all set. Products have been modernized, upgraded. Now the path is pretty clear. Kind of like what Microsoft's playbook was. Build the core cloudification. Get your core set of products cloudified. Target your base of customers. Grow that and expand into the modern era. This is a key part of the strategy, right? >> Absolutely right. A key part of our private cloud strategy is targeted to our existing base and moving them forward on their cloud journey, whether they're looking to modernize parts of their application. Can we start first with where they are on-premise is really what we're after. >> Alright, also you have the Hyper Protect. >> Correct. >> What is that announcement? Can you explain Hyper Protect? >> Absolutely. Like Rohit talked about, taking our LinuxOne capabilities, now that enterprise trusts the level of assurance, the level of security that they're dependent on, on-premise and now in private cloud. We are taking that further into the public cloud offering as Hyper Protect services. So these are set of services that leverage the underlyings of security hardening that nobody else has the level of control that you can get and offering that as a service so you don't need to know Z or LinuxOne from a consumption perspective. So I'll take two examples. Hyper Protect Crypto Service is about exposing the level of control. That you can manage they keys. What we call "keep your own keys" because encryption is out there but it's all about key management so we provide that with the highest level of security that LinuxOne servers from us offer. Another example is database as a service, which runs in this Hyper Secure environment. Not only encryption and keys, but leveraging down the line pervasive encryption capabilities so nobody can even get into the box, so to say. >> Okay, so I get the encryption piece. That's solid, great. Internet encryption is always good. Containers, there's been discussions at the CNCF about containers not being part of the security boundaries and putting a VMware around it. Different schools of thought there. How do you guys look at the containerization? Does that fit into Secure Protect? Talk about that dynamic because encryption I get, but are you getting containers? >> Great question because it's about the workload, right? When people are modernizing their apps or building cloud-native apps, it's built on Kubernetes and containers. What we have done, the fantastic work across both the IBM Cloud Private on Z, as well as Hyper Protect, underlying it's all about containers, right? So as we deliver these services and for customers also to build data services as containers or VM's, they can deploy on this environment or consume these as a compute. So fundamentally it's kubernetes everywhere. That's a foundational focus for us. When it can go public, private and multicloud, and we are taking that journey into the most austere environment with a performance and scale of Z and LinuxONE. >> Alright, so Rohit, help bring us up to date. We've been talking about this hybrid and multi-cloud stuff for a number of years, and the idea we've heard for many years is, "I want to have the same stack on both ends. I want encryption all the way down to the chip set." I've heard of companies like Oracle, like IBM say, "We have resources in both. We want to do this." We understand kubernetes is not a magic layer, it takes care of a certain piece you know and we've been digging in that quite a bit. Super important, but there's more than that and there still are differences between what I'm doing in the private cloud and public cloud just naturally. Public cloud, I'm really limited to how many data centers, private cloud, everything's different. Help us understand what's the same, what's different. How do we sort that out in 2019? >> Sure, from a brand perspective we're looking at private cloud in our IBM Cloud Private set of products and standardizing on that from a kubernetes perspective, but also in a public cloud, we're standardizing on kubernetes. The key secret source is our Secure Services Container under there. It's the same technology that we use under our Blockchain Platform. Right, it brings the Z differentiation for hyper-security, lockdown, where you can run the most secure workloads, and we're standardizing that on both public and private cloud. Now, of course, there are key differences, right? We're standardizing on a different set of workloads on-premise. We're focusing on containerizing on-premise. That journey to move for the public cloud, we still need to get there. >> And the container piece is super important. Can you explain the piece around, if I've got multi-cloud going on, Z becomes a critical node on the network because if you have an on-premise base, Z's been very popular, LinuxONE has been really popular, but it's been for the big banks, and it seems like the big, you know, it's big ire, it's IBM, right? But it's not just the mainframe. It's not proprietary software anymore, it's essentially large-scale capability. >> Right. >> So now, when that gets factored into the pool of resources and cloud, how should customers look at Z? How should they look at the equation? Because this seems to me like an interesting vector into adding more head room for you guys, at least on the product side, but for a customer, it's not just a use case for the big banks, or doing big backups, it seems to have more legs now. Can you explain where this fits into the big picture? Because why wouldn't someone want to have a high performant? >> Why don't I use a customer example? I had a great session this morning with Brad Chun from Shuttle Fund, who joined us on stage. They know financial industry. They are building a Fintech capability called Digital Asset Custody Services. It's about how you digitize your asset, how do you tokenize them, how you secure it. So when they look at it from that perspective, they've been partnering with us, it's a classic hybrid workload where they've deployed some of the apps on the private cloud and on-premise with Z/LinuxONE and reaching out to the cloud using the Hyper Protect services. So when they bring this together, built on Blockchain under the covers, they're bringing the capability being agile to the market, the ability for them to innovate and deliver with speed, but with the level of capability. So from that perspective, it's a Fintech, but they are not the largest banks that you may know of, but that's the kind of innovation it enables, even if you don't have quote, unquote a mainframe or a Z. >> This gives you guys more power, and literally, sense of pretty more reach in the market because what containers and now these kubernetes, for example, Ginni Rometty said "kubernetes" twice in her keynote. I'm like, "Oh my God. The CEO of IBM said 'kubernetes' twice." We used to joke about it. Only geeks know about kubernetes. Here she is talking about kubernetes. Containers, kubernetes, and now service missions around the corner give you guys reach into the public cloud to extend the Z capability without foreclosing the benefits of Z. So that seems to be a trend. Who's the target for that? Give me an example of who's the customer or use case? What's the situation that would allow me to take advantage of cloud and extend the capability to Z? >> If you just step back, what we're really trying to do is create a higher shorten zone in our cloud called Hyper Protect. It's targeted to our existing Z base, who want to move on this enterprise out journey, but it's also targeted to clients like Shuttle Fund and DAX that Raj talked about that are building these hyper secure apps in the cloud and want the capabilities of the platform, but wanted more cloud-native style. It's the breadth of moving our existing base to the cloud, but also these new security developers who want to do enterprise development in the cloud. >> Security is key. That's the big drive. >> And that's the beauty of Z. That's what it brings to the table. And to a cloud is the hyper lockdown, the scale, the performance, all those characteristics. >> We know that security is always an on-going journey, but one of the ones that has a lot of people concerned is when we start adding IoT into the mix. It increased the surface area by orders of magnitude. How do those type of applications fit into these offerings? >> Great question. As a matter of fact, I didn't give you the question by the way, but this morning, KONE joined me on stage. >> We actually talked about it on Twitter. (laughs) >> KONE joined us on stage. It's about in the residential workflow, how they're enabling here their integration, access, and identity into that. As an example, they're building on our IoT platform and then they integrate with security services. That's the beauty of this. Rohit talked about developers, right? So when developers build it, our mission is to make it simple for a developer to build secure applications. With security skill shortage, you can't expect every developer to be a security geek, right? So we're making it simple, so that you can kind of connect your IoT to your business process and your back-end application seamlessly in a multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud fashion. That's where both from a cloud native perspective comes in, and building some of these sensitive applications on Hyper Protect or Z/LinuxONE and private cloud enables that end to end. >> I want to get you guys take while you're here because one of the things I've observed here at Think, which is clearly the theme is Cloud AI and developers all kind of coming together. I mean, AI, Amazon's event, AI, AI, AI, in cloud scale, you guys don't have that. But developer angle is really interesting. And you guys have a product called IBM Cloud Private, which seems to be a very big centerpiece of the strategy. What is this product? Why is it important? It seems to be part of all the key innovative parts that we see evolving out of the thing. Can you explain what is the IBM Cloud Private and how does it fit into the puzzle? >> Let me take a pass at it Raj. In a way it is, well, we really see IBM Cloud Private as that key linchpin on-premise. It's a Platform as a Service product on-premise, it's built on kubernetes and darker containers, but what it really brings is that standardized cloud consumption for containerized apps on-premise. We've expanded that, of course, to our Z footprint, and let me give you a use case of clients and how they use it. We're working with a very big, regulated bank that's looking to modernize a massive monolithic piece of WebSphere application server on-premise and break it down into micro-services. They're doing that on IBM Cloud Private. They've containerized big parts of the application on WebSphere on-premise. Now they've not made that journey to the cloud, to the public cloud, but they are using... How do you modernize your existing footprint into a more containerized micro-services one? >> So this is the trend we're seeing, the decomposition of monolithic apps on-premise is step one. Let's get that down, get the culture, and attract the new, younger people who come in, not the older guys like me, mini-computer days. Really make it ready, composable, then they're ready to go to the cloud. This seems to be the steps. Talk about that dynamic, Raj, from a technical perspective. How hard is it to do that? Is it a heavy lift? Is it pretty straight-forward? >> Great question. IBM, we're all about open, right? So when it comes to our cloud strategy open is the centerpiece offered, that's why we have banked on kubernetes and containers as that standardization layer. This way you can move a workflow from private to public, even ICP can be on other cloud vendors as well, not just IBM Cloud. So it's a private cloud that customers can manage, or in the public cloud or IBM kubernetes that we manage for them. Then it's about the app, the containerized app that can be moved around and that's where our announcements about Multicloud Manager, that we made late last year come into play, which helps you seamlessly move and integrate applications that are deployed on communities across private, public or multicloud. So that abstraction venire enables that to happen and that's why the open... >> So it's an operational construct? Not an IBM product, per say, if you think about it that way. So the question I have for you, I know Stu wants to jump in, he's got some questions. I want to get to this new mindset. The world's flipped upside down. The applications and workloads are dictating architecture and programmability to the DevOps, or infrastructure, in this case, Z or cloud. This is changing the game on how the cloud selection is. So we've been having a debate on theCUBE here, publicly, that in some cases it's the best cloud for the job decision, not a procurement, "I need multi-vendor cloud," versus I have a workload that runs best with this cloud. And it might be as if you're running 365, or G Suite as Google, Amazon's got something so it seems to be the trend. Do you agree with that? And certainly, there'll be many clouds. We think that's true, it's already happened. Your thoughts on this workload driving the requirements for the cloud? Whether it's a sole purpose cloud, meaning for the app. >> That's right. I'll start and Rohit will add in as well. That's where this chapter two comes into play, as we call Chapter Two of Cloud because it is about how do you take enterprise applications, the mission-critical complex workloads, and then look for the enablers. How do you make that modernization seamless? How do you make the cloud native seamless? So in that particular journey, is where IBM cloud and our Multicloud and Hybrid Cloud strategy come into play to make that transition happen and provide the set of capabilities that enterprises are looking for to move their critical workloads across private and public in bit much more assurance and performance and scale, and that's where the work that we are doing with Z, LinuxONE set of as an underpinning to embark on the journey to move those critical workloads to their cloud. So you're absolutely right. When they look at which cloud to go, it's about capabilities, the tools, the management orchestration layers that a cloud provider or a cloud vendor provide and it's not only just about IBM Public Cloud, but it's about enabling the enterprises to provide them the choice and then offer. >> So it's not multicloud for multicloud sake, it's multicloud, that's the reality. Workload drives the functionality. >> Absolutely. We see that as well. >> Validated on theCUBE by the gurus of IBM. The cloud for the job is the best solution. >> So I guess to kind of put a bow on this, the journey we're having is talking about distributed architectures, and you know, we're down on the weeds, we've got micro-services architectures, containerization, and we're working at making those things more secure. Obviously, there's still a little bit more work to do there, but what's next is we look forward, what are the challenges customers have. They live in this, you know, heterogeneous multicloud world. What do we have to do as an industry? Where is IBM making sure that they have a leadership position? >> From my perspective, I think really the next big wave of cloud is going to be looking at those enterprise workloads. It's funny, I was just having a conversation with a very big bank in the Netherlands, and they were, of course, a very big Z client, and asking us about the breadth of our cloud strategy and how they can move forward. Really looking at a private cloud strategy helping them modernize, and then looking at which targeted workloads they could move to public cloud is going to be the next frontier. And those 80 percent of workloads that haven't moved. >> An integration is key, and for you guys competitive strategy-wise, you've got a lot of business applications running on IBM's huge customer base. Focus on those. >> Yes. >> And then give them the path to the cloud. The integration piece is where the linchpin is and OSSI secure. >> Enterprise out guys. >> Love encryption, love to follow up more on the secure container thing, I think that's a great topic. We'll follow-up after this show Raj. Thanks for coming on. theCUBE coverage here. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Live coverage, day four, here live in San Francisco for IBM Think 2019. Stay with us more. Our next guests will be here right after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018 brought to you by Red Hat the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Well, everyone welcome back to theCube's live coverage here in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Three days of coverage around the Cloud Native growth, around the Ecosystem around open source, and the role of micro servers in the cloud. Our next guest is Roland Barcia who's the IBM Distinguished Engineer for IBM's Hybrid Cloud. Welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Thanks for joining us. Being a Distinguished Engineer of IBM is a pretty big honor so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> it means you got technical chops so we can get down and dirty if we want to. >> Sure. >> I want to get your take on this because a lot of companies in IT are transforming and then that's been called digital transformation, it's happening and cloud has developed scale. And the wish list if you had the magic wand that could make things do better is actually happening. Supernetting's actually creating some goodness that if you had the magic wand, if I asked that question three years ago, if you had a magic wand what would an environment look like? Seamless operations around the cloud, so it's kind of happening. How are you guys positioned for this? Talk about the IBM cloud, what you're doing here, and how you see this cloud native market exploding. It's almost 8,000 people here up from 4,000 last year. >> Yeah, that's a great question I think. I work a lot with our enterprise clients. I'm part of what's called the IBM Cloud Garage, so I'm very customer facing. And often times, we're seeing that there is different paces of a journey. And so for example, I worked with a client that started building a cloud native application. They built about 60 micro services. And at the end of that, they were deploying it as one job which means they defeated the whole purpose of micro service architecture. And so what we really need to think about is an end to end journey. I think the developers are probably the more modern role in an enterprise, but we're starting to see modernization of an operations team for example, and adopting culture, and cutting down the walls of IT organizational groups into mixed squads, adopting something like a Spotify model. And I think a lot of the challenges in adopting kubernetes is really in cultural aspects and in enterprise. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. And because network guys are different than the app guys, and now they have policy knobs on kubernetes they can play with. Network guys love policy. >> Yeah, and they're fighting over ownership, right? >> Roland indeed. We look at that modernization, the application modernization really is that long home intent. And what we hear here is you need to be able to meet customers where they are. Sure, there's some stuff they're building shiny and new and have the developers, but enterprises have a lot of application and therefore there's a grand spectrum. What do you hear from customers? What's the easy part and where's the parts they're getting stuck? >> Yeah, so I think the easy part is writing the application. I think where they're getting stuck is really scaling it to the enterprise, doing the operations, doing the DevOps. I always tell people that a modernization journey might be better started by taking a certain class of applications like middleware where we have a WebSphere heritage from IBM, and saying why don't we take a look at containerizing that. We've built tools like Transformation Advisor that'll scan your WebSphere applications and tell you what do you need to change in that middleware application to make it behave well in a containerized platform. Then from there, you build your DevOps engine, your DevOps pipeline and you really start to get your operations teams going in delivering containers, delivering applications as containers. And then getting your policies and your standards in place. Then you can start opening up around innovation and start really driving towards building cloud native new applications in addition to that. >> One of those areas we've been talking about in the industry for decades is automation. The conversation's a little bit different these days. Maybe you can bring us up to speed about what's different than say it was earlier days. >> Yeah, I think IT organizations have always done a bit of automation. I think they write scripts, they automate builds. I think the mantra that I use is automate everything, right? Organizations need to really start to automate in a new way. How I deliver containers, but delivering the app is not enough. I need to automate all levels of testing in a modern way. Test driven development is big. At the IBM Cloud Garage, we have something we call the IBM Cloud Garage Method which really takes a set of practices like test driven development, pair programming, things out of lean startup, extreme programming, and really start to help enterprises adopt those practices. So I say why can't we automate end to end performance testing in the pipeline, and functional testing, and writing them early and in the beginning of projects? That way, as I'm deploying containers which are very dynamic, along with configuration, and along with policy you're testing it continuously. And I think that level of automation is what we need to get to. >> Talk about security as well 'cause security's one of those things where it's got to be baked in upfront. You got to think about it holistically. It's also now being pulled out of IT, it's more of a board function because the risk management is one hack you could get crushed. And so you got to have security. And the container there's a security boundary issue, so it's important. >> Last week we met with an insurance company. We did a workshop. And they walked us through all the compliant steps that they need to go through today. How they do it with traditional middleware and virtual machines and hardware and it was a very, what I'm going to say governance driven process. And so a lot of checks and balances, stop don't move forward, which is really the industry for developing and innovating is going the opposite way: self service and enabling. And there's a lot of risk with that. And so what we're really trying to do with technology is like Multicloud Manager, technology we have around multicluster, management is how do I do things like I want to check which clusters are Hipaa compliant and which ones are out. How do i force that policy? >> That's smart. >> Now that everything is software driven, software developed, there's an opportunity to really automate those checks. >> So your point automate everything. >> Yeah, I want to automate everything. >> Governance is a service. (laughing) >> Yeah, that's right. And actually, that can help get away from error prone human checks where they had all these tons of documents of all different policies they have to go through can now be automated in a seamless way. >> So compliance and governance could be a stumbling block or it can be just part of the software. That's what you're getting at here. >> That's right, that's what I'm getting at. I think the transition is look at it as an opportunity now that everything is software driven, use software disciplines that developers are used to in those security roles and those CSO roles, etc. >> So I want to ask you a question. So one of the things we're seeing obviously with the cloud is it's great for certain things, and then on premises it has latency issues. We saw Amazon essentially endorse this by saying RDS on VMware on premises. They announced Outpost had reinvent oh, latency. Things aren't moving into the cloud as fast. So you're going to see this hybrid environment. So hybrids, we get that, it's been around, check. No real discussion other than it's happening. The real trend is multicloud, right? >> That' right. >> And so multicloud is just a modern version of the word multi vendor about the client server days. So systems were a multi vendor man choice. This is a fundamental thing. It's not so much about multicloud as it is about choice. How do you guys see that? You are in an environment where you have a lot of customers who don't have one cloud, so this is a big upcoming trend in 2019. >> Most of our clients have at least five different clouds that they deal with, whether it be an IaaS, a PaaS, a SaaS base solution. What we're seeing as a trend is we talked about on premise and private and enterprise is I think is 80% of workloads are still in the data center. And so they want to build that private cloud environment as a transitionary point to public, but what we're seeing across the multicloud space is I'm going to say a new integration space. So if you really think 15 years ago, SOA and enterprise service bosses in a very centralized fashion, I think there's a new opportunity for integration across clouds and on-prem in a more decentralized way. So I think integration is kind of the next trend that we're seeing in this multicloud space because the new applications that we're seeing with cognitive data AI are mixing data sources from multiple clouds and on-prem and needing to control that in a hybrid control plane is key. >> It's funny, the industry always talks about these buzzwords, multicloud. If we're talkin' about multicloud, then it's a problem. The idea of infrastructure as code it's not even use the word multicloud. I mean, if you think about it, if you're programming the infrastructure and enabling the stuff under the covers, why even talk about cloud? It should be automated, so that's the future state, but in reality, that's kind of what enterprisers are tryin' to think about. >> They are, and I think it's a tension between innovation and moving fast and control, right? The enterprisers want to move fast, but they want to make sure that they don't break security protocol, that they don't break resiliency that they're maybe have used to with their existing customers and applications. I do think the challenge is how operations teams and management teams start to act like developers to get to that point. And I think that's part of the journey. >> Open source obviously a big part of this show, and that's open source, people contribute upstream It's great stuff. IBM is a big contributor, and it'll be even more when Red Hat gets into the mix. So upstream's great, but as you got 8,000 people here, you're startin' to see people talkin' about business issues, and other things. One of the downstream impacts of this conference being so open source centric is the IT equation and then just the classic developer. So you have multiple personas now kind of interacting. You got the developer, you got the IT architect, cloud architect pro whatever, and then you got the open source community members. Melting pot: good, challenges, thoughts? >> So I think it's so developers love that, right? I think from an enterprise perspective, there are issues. We're seeing a lot of our clients with our private cloud platform ask us to build out what's called air gapped environment which is how do I build up an open source style ecosystem within my enterprise. So things like getting an artifactory registry or a Docker registry or whatever type of registry where I get certified, open source packages in my enterprise that I've gone and done security vulnerability scans with, or that I've made sure that I look at every layer from the Linux kernel all the way up to whatever software is included. So what we're seeing is how do I open the aperture a bit, but do it in a more responsible fashion I think is the key. >> Yeah, and that's for stability, right? So Stu, one of things I've been talkin' about and want to get your thoughts on this role is that you got the cloud as a scalable system then one of the things that's being discussed in Silicon Valley now for the first time, we've been sitting on theCube for years, is the cloud's a system. It's just some architecture, it's network distributing, computing, art paradigm, all that computer science has been around for awhile, right? >> Yes, yes. >> So if you've been a systems person whether hardware or whatever, operating systems, you get cloud. But also you got the horizontal specialism of applications that are using machine learning and data and applications which is unique on top. So you have the collision of those two worlds. This is kind of a modern version of two worlds that we used to call systems and apps, but they're happening in a real dynamic way. What's your thoughts on this? Because you got the benefits of horizontally scalable cloud and you now have the ability to power that so we're seeing things like AI, which has been around for a long, long time, have a renaissance because now you got a lot of compute. >> That's right, and I think data is the real big challenge we're seeing with a lot of our clients. They have a lot of it in their enterprise, they don't want to unlock it all right away. We recently did what's called IBM Cloud Private for Data, in which we brought in a set of technologies around our AI, our Watson core to really start leveraging some of those tools in a private manner. And then what we're seeing is a lot of applications that are moving to the cloud have a data drag. It might start as something as simple as caching data and no SQL databases, but very quickly they want to learn a lot more about that data. So we're seeing that mix happening all the time. >> We've had it, we've had someone say in theCube ML's the new SQL. >> Yeah. >> Because you're starting to see SQL abstraction layers are a beautiful thing if they're connected. So I want to get your thoughts on this because everyone's kind of in discovery mode right now. Learning, there's a lot of education. I mean, we're talkin' about real, big time players. Architects are becoming cloud architects. Sysadmins are becoming operators for large infrastructure scale. You see network guys goin' wait a minute, if I don't get on the new network programmable model I'm going to be irrelevant. So a lot of persona changes in the enterprise. How are you guys handling that with customers? I know you guys have the expert program. Comment on that dynamic. >> I think what we're doing is we use the IBM Cloud Garage to bring in practices like the Spotify method where we start pushing things like >> What's the Spotify method? >> Spotify method is a way of doing kind of development where rather than having your disciplines of architects, development, operations, we're now splitting teams, let's say functionally, where I have mixed disciplines in a squad and maybe saying hey, the person building the account team has an SRE, an ops guy, a dev guy all within their same squad. And then maybe have guilds across disciplines, right? And so what we do at the Garage is we bring 'em in to one of the Garages. We have four team locations worldwide. Maybe do your first project. Then we build enablement and education around that, bring it back to the enterprise and start making that viral. And that's what we're doing in the IBM Cloud Garage. >> So not a monolithic thing, breakin' it down, integrating multiple disciplines, kind of like a playlist. >> Yeah, that's right. And I think the best way to do it is to practice it, right, in action. Let's pick a project rather than talking about it. >> If I had to ask you in 2019, what is the IT investment going to look like with kubernetes impact? How does kubernetes change the IT priorities and investments for an enterprise? >> Yeah, so I think you'll see kubernetes become a vehicle for enterprises to deliver content. So one, the whole area around helm and other package managers as a way to bundle software. I think as people build more clusters, multicluster management is going to be the big trend of how do I deal now with clusters that I have in public cloud and private cloud, all different clouds? And I think that integration layer that I talked about where what does modern integration look like across kubernetes based applications. >> Someone asked me last week at Reinvent hey, can't we just automate kubernetes? And then I was like, well it's kind of automated now. What's your thoughts on that? >> So I think when someone asks a question what does it mean to automate that I think the kubernetes stack really sits on top of IaaS infrastructure. And so for example, our IBM Cloud Private you can run it on zLinux or Power. And we have a lot of IBM folks that run multi architecture clusters. And therefore, they still need a level of automating how I create clusters over IaaS and there's technologies like Terraform and others that help with that, but then there's also automating standing up the DevOps stack, automating deployment of the applications over that stack. And I think they mean automating how I use kubernetes in an environment. >> So 2019, the year of programmability and automation creating goodness around kubernetes. >> Yeah, absolutely, >> Roland, thanks for comin' >> Thank you, it was great. >> on theCube, thanks for that smart insight. TheCube coverage here, day two winding down. We got day three tomorrow. This is theCube covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. We'll be right back with more day two coverage after this short break. (happy electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the saas. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the sass. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)