>>Okay, we're back with the hybrid Cloud power panel. I'm Dave Ante and with me our Eric Lockhart, who's the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, Specialized Thomas Corny, the senior vice president of products at Nutanix, and Indu Care, 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 wanna 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, 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. >>That is, so, you know, cloud clusters on Azure, which we actually call NC two to make it simple. And so NC two on Azure is really our solutions for hybrid cloud, right? And you think about the hybrid cloud, highly desirable customers want it. They, they know this is the right way to do 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 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. 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 something actually super valuable to actually go and do this in a simple fashion, do it faster, and basically do, do hybrid in a more cost effective fashion, know for all your applications. And that's really what's really special about NC 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, using, using the same admin constructs to go protect the workloads, make them highly available with 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 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. 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 a net worth pipe. You have direct access to the Azure services from the same application that's now running on an C2 cluster. And that makes your refactoring 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 facts 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 construc, the virtual private cloud construct 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 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 code 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 need NC two for my house. I live in a house that was built and it's 1687 and we connect old 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 tat it from OnPrem and run it on C two. But the NC two offer itself, the NCAA often 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 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 accusation 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 have 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 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 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 the 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 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 to politically or maybe I wanna go do something different or I wanna go and shut down education 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 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 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 feed 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. >>Then the last one, building on top of that is just the fact that you cannot get boosting 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 desktops 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 I don't want to refactor the entire application stack. I just wanna 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 transformation generic. 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 and 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 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, 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-premise 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 can 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, Nutanix Cloud clusters 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, 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 cat's preparation software and moved it to the public cloud. And that was a journey that took us four years and probably several hundred million. 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. >>Okay. Keep it right there. You're watching Accelerate Hybrid Cloud, that journey with Nutanix and Microsoft technology on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon. theCUBE is live at VMware Explorer. Lisa Martin here in San Francisco with Dave Nicholson. This is our second day of coverage talking all things VMware and it's ecosystem. We're excited to welcome from DXC Technology, James Bion, Hybrid Cloud and Multi Cloud Offering manager to have a conversation next. Welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much. >> Welcome. >> Talk to us a little bit about before we get into the VMware partnership, what's new at DXC? What's going on? >> So DXC is really evolving and revitalizing into more of a cloud orientated company. So we're already driving change in our customers at the moment. We take them on that cloud journey, but we're taking them in the right way, in a structured mannered way. So we are really excited about it, we're kicking off our Cloud First type, Cloud Right sort of story and helping customers on that journey. >> Yesterday in the keynote, VMware was talking about customers are on this Cloud chaos phase, they want to get to Cloud Smart. You're saying they want to get to Cloud Right. Talk to us about what DXC Cloud Right is, what does it mean? What does it enable businesses to achieve? >> That's a very good question. So DXC has come up with this concept of Cloud Right, we looked at it from a services and outcome. So what do customers want to achieve? And how do we get it successfully? This is not a technology conversation, this is about putting the right workloads at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost to get the right value for your business. It's not about just doing it for the sake of doing it, okay. There's a lot of changes it's not technology only you've got to change how people operate. You've got to work through the organizational change. You need to ensure that you have the right security in place to maintain it. And it's about value, really about value proposition. So we don't just focus on cost, we focus on operations of it, we focus on security of it. We focus on ensuring the value proposition of it and putting not just for one Cloud, it's the right place. Big focus on Hybrid and Multi Cloud solutions in particular, we're very excited about what's happening with VMware Cloud on maybe AWS or et cetera because we see there a real dynamic change for our customers where they can transition across to the right Cloud services, at the right time, at the right place, but minimal disruption to the actual operation of their business. Very easy to move a workload into that place using the same skilled resources, the same tools, the same environment that you have had for many years, the same SLAs. Customers don't want a variance in their SLAs, they just want an outcome at a right price and the right time. >> Right, what are some of the things going on with the VMware partnership and anything you know, here we are at this the event called the theme is "The Center of the Multi Cloud Universe", which I keep saying sounds like a Marvel movie, I think there needs to be some superheroes here. But how is DXC working with VMware to help customers that are in Multi Cloud by default, not by design? >> That's a very good one. So DXC works jointly with VMware for more than a thousand clients out there. Wide diversity of different clients. We go to market together, we work collaboratively to put roadmaps in place for our clients, it's a unified team. On top of that, we have an extremely good VMware practice, joint working VMware team working directly with DXC dedicated resources and we deliver real value for clients. For example, we have a customer experience zone, we have a customer innovation zone so we can run proof of concepts on all the different VMware technologies for customers. If they want to try something different, try and push the boundaries a little bit with the VMware products, we can do that for them. But at the end of the day we deliver outcome based services. We are not there to deliver a piece of software, but a technology which show the customer the value of the service that they've been receiving within that. So we bring the VMware fantastic technologies in and then we bring the DXC managed services which we do so well and we look after our customers and do the right thing for our customers. >> So what does the go-to market strategy look like from a DXC perspective? We say that there are a finite number of strategic seats at the customer table. DXC has longstanding deep relationships with customers, so does VMware and probably over a shorter period of time, the Hyper scale Cloud Providers. How are you approaching these relationships with customers? Is it you bringing in your friends from the cloud? Is it the cloud bringing in their friend DXC? What does it look like? >> So we have relationships with all of them, but were agnostic. So we are the people who bring it all together into that unified platform and services that the customers expect. VMware will bring us certainly to the table and we'll bring VMware to the table. Equally, we work very collaboratively with all the cloud providers and we work in deals together. They bring us deals, we bring them deals. So it works extremely well from that perspective, but of course it's a multi-cloud world these days. We don't just deal with one cloud provider, we'll normally have all of the different services to find the right place for our customers. >> Now, one thing that that's been mentioned from DXC is this idea that Cloud First which has been sort of a mantra that scores you points if you're a CIO lately, maybe that's not the best way to wake up in the morning. Why not saying, Cloud First? >> So we have a lot of clients who who've tried that Cloud First journey and they've aggressively taken on migration of workloads. And now that they've settled in a few of those they're discovering maybe the ROI isn't quite what they expected it was going to be. That transformation takes a long time, a very long time. We've seen some of the numbers around averaging a hundred apps can take up to seven years to transition and transform, that's a long time. It makes you almost less agile by doing the transformation quite ironically. So DXC's Cloud Right program really helps you to ensure that you assess those workloads correctly, you target the ones that are going to give you the best business value, possibly the best return on investment using our Cloud and advisory practice to do that. And then obviously off the back of that we've got our migration teams and our run services and our application modernization factories and our application platforms for that. So DXC Cloud Right can certainly help our customers on that journey and get that sort of Hybrid Multi Cloud solution that suits their particular outcomes, not just one Cloud provider. >> So Cloud Right isn't just Cloud migration? >> No. >> People sometimes confuse digital transformation with Cloud migration. >> Correct. >> So to be clear Cloud Right and DXC has the ability to work with customers on not just, oh, here, this is how we box it up and ship it out, but what makes sense to box up and ship out. >> Correct, and it's all about that whole end to end life cycle. Remember, this is not just a technology conversation, this is an end to end business conversation. It's the outcomes are important, not the technology. That's why you have good partners like DXC who will help you on that technology journey. >> Let's talk about in the dynamics of the market the last couple of years, we saw so many customers in every industry race to the Cloud, race to digitally transform. You bring up a good point of people interchangeably talking about digital transformation, Cloud migration, but we saw the massive adoption of SaaS technologies. What are you seeing? Are you seeing customers in that sort of Cloud chaos as VMware calls it? That you're coming in with the Cloud Right approach saying, let's actually figure out, you may have done this because of the pandemic maybe it was accelerated, you needed to facilitate collaboration or whatnot, but actually this is the right approach. Are you seeing a lot of customers in that situation? >> We are certainly seeing some customers going into that chaos world. Some of them are still in the early stages of their journey and are taking a more cautious step towards in particular, the companies that would die on systems to be up available all the time. Others have gone too far, the other are in extreme are in the chaos world. And our Cloud Right program will certainly help them to pull their chaos back in, identify what workloads are potentially running in the wrong place, get the framework in place for ensuring that security and governance is in place. Ensuring that we don't have a cost spend blowout in particular, make sure that security is key to everything that we do and operations is key to everything we do. We have our own intelligent Platform X, it's called, our service management platform which is really the engine that sits behind our delivery mechanism. And that's got a whole lot of AI analytics engines in there to identify things and proactively identify workload placements, workload repairs, scripting, and hyper automation behind that too, to keep available here and there. And that's really some of our Cloud Right story, it's not just sorting out the mess, it's sorting out and then running it for you in the right way. >> So what does a typical, a customer engagement look like for a customer in that situation? >> So we would obviously engage our client right advisory team and they would come in and sit down with your application owners, sit down with the business units, identify what success needs to look like. They do all the discovery, they'll run it through our engines to identify what workloads are in the right place, should go to the right place. Just 'cause you can do something doesn't mean you should do something and that's an important thing. So we will come back with that and say, this is where I think your cloud roadmap journey should be. And obviously that takes an intuitive process, but we then can pick off the key topics early at the right time and that low hanging fruit that's really going to drive that value for the customer. >> And where are your customer conversations these days? I mean from a Cloud perspective, digital transformation, we're seeing everything escalate up the C-suite? Are you engaging the executives in this conversation so that they really want to facilitate, let's do things the right way that's the most efficient that allows us as a business to do what we're best at? >> So where we've seen programs fail is where we don't have executive leadership and brought in from day one. So if you don't have that executive and business driver and business leadership, then you're definitely not going to be successful. So to answer your question, yes, of course we are, but we also working directly with the IT departments as well. >> So you just brought up an insight executive alignment, critically important. Based on what you've experienced in the real world, contrast that with the sort of message to the world that we hear constantly about Cloud and IT, what would be the most shocking thing that you can share with us that people might not be aware of? It's like what shocks you the most about the disconnect between what everybody talks about and the reality on the ground? Don't name any names of anyone, but give us an example of the like, this is what's really going on. >> So, we certainly are seeing that big sort of move into Cloud quickly, okay. And then the big bill shock comes and just moving a workload across doesn't mean you're in Cloud, it's a transition and transformation to the SaaS and power services, it's where you get your true value out of cloud. So the concept that just 'cause it's in Cloud it's cheap is not always the case. Doing it right in Cloud is definitely going to have some cost value, but it's going to bring other additional values to their business. It's going to give them agility, it's going to give them resilience. So if you look at all three of those platforms cost, agility, and resilience and live across all three of those, then you're definitely going to get the best outcomes. And we've certainly seen some of those where they haven't taken all of those into consideration, quite often it's cost is what drives it, not the other two. And if you can't keep operations up working efficiently then you are in a lot of trouble. >> So Cloud wrong comes with sticker shock. >> It certainly does. >> What's on the horizon for DXC? >> We're certainly seeing a big drive towards apps modernization and certainly help our customers on that journey. DXC is definitely a Cloud company, may that be on Hybrid Cloud, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, DXC is certainly leading that edge and pushing it forward. >> Excellent, James, thank you so much for joining us on the program today talking about what Cloud Right is, the right approach, how you're helping customers really get to that right approach with the people, the processes, and the technology. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Our next guest joins us momentarily so don't change the channel. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 here in the Seaport in Boston. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Paul Gillin. Justin Boitano is here. He's the Vice President of Enterprise and Edge Computing at NVIDIA. Maybe you've heard of him. And Tushar Katarki who's the Director of Product Management at Red Hat. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here, thanks >> Justin, you are a keynote this morning. You got interviewed and shared your thoughts on AI. You encourage people to got to think bigger on AI. I know it's kind of self-serving but why? Why should we think bigger? >> When you think of AI, I mean, it's a monumental change. It's going to affect every industry. And so when we think of AI, you step back, you're challenging companies to build intelligence and AI factories, and factories that can produce intelligence. And so it, you know, forces you to rethink how you build data centers, how you build applications. It's a very data centric process where you're bringing in, you know, an exponential amount of data. You have to label that data. You got to train a model. You got to test the model to make sure that it's accurate and delivers business value. Then you push it into production, it's going to generate more data, and you kind of work through that cycle over and over and over. So, you know, just as Red Hat talks about, you know, CI/CD of applications, we're talking about CI/CD of the AI model itself, right? So it becomes a continuous improvement of AI models in production which is a big, big business transformation. >> Yeah, Chris Wright was talking about basically take your typical application development, you know, pipeline, and life cycle, and apply that type of thinking to AI. I was saying those two worlds have to come together. Actually, you know, the application stack and the data stack including AI need to come together. What's the role of Red Hat? What's your sort of posture on AI? Where do you fit with OpenShift? >> Yeah, so we're really excited about AI. I mean, a lot of our customers obviously are looking to take that data and make meaning out of it using AI is definitely a big important tool. And OpenShift, and our approach to Open Hybrid Cloud really forms a successful platform to base all your AI journey on with the partners such as NVIDIA whom we are working very closely with. And so the idea really is as Justin was saying, you know, the end to end, when you think about life of a model, you've got data, you mine that data, you create models, you deploy it into production. That whole thing, what we call CI/CD, as he was saying DevOps, DevSecOps, and the hybrid cloud that Red Hat has been talking about, although with OpenShift as the center forms a good basis for that. >> So somebody said the other day, I'm going to ask you, is INVIDIA a hardware company or a software company? >> We are a company that people know for our hardware but, you know, predominantly now we're a software company. And that's what we were on stage talking about. I mean, ultimately, a lot of these customers know that they've got to embark on this journey to apply AI, to transform their business with it. It's such a big competitive advantage going into, you know, the next decade. And so the faster they get ahead of it, the more they're going to win, right? But some of them, they're just not really sure how to get going. And so a lot of this is we want to lower the barrier to entry. We built this program, we call it Launchpad to basically make it so they get instant access to the servers, the AI servers, with OpenShift, with the MLOps tooling, with example applications. And then we walk them through examples like how do you build a chatbot? How do you build a vision system for quality control? How do you build a price recommendation model? And they can do hands on labs and walk out of, you know, Launchpad with all the software they need, I'll say the blueprint for building their application. They've got a way to have the software and containers supported in production, and they know the blueprint for the infrastructure and operating that a scale with OpenShift. So more and more, you know, to come back to your question is we're focused on the software layers and making that easy to help, you know, either enterprises build their apps or work with our ecosystem and developers to buy, you know, solutions off the shelf. >> On the harbor side though, I mean, clearly NVIDIA has prospered on the backs of GPUs, as the engines of AI development. Is that how it's going to be for the foreseeable future? Will GPUs continue to be core to building and training AI models or do you see something more specific to AI workloads? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. So I think for the next decade, well, plus, I mean not forever, we're going to always monetize hardware. It's a big, you know, market opportunity. I mean, Jensen talks about a $100 billion, you know, market opportunity for NVIDIA just on hardware. It's probably another a $100 billion opportunity on the software. So the reality is we're getting going on the software side, so it's still kind of early days, but that's, you know, a big area of growth for us in the future and we're making big investments in that area. On the hardware side, and in the data center, you know, the reality is since Moore's law has ended, acceleration is really the thing that's going to advance all data centers. So I think in the future, every server will have GPUs, every server will have DPUs, and we can talk a bit about what DPUs are. And so there's really kind of three primary processors that have to be there to form the foundation of the enterprise data center in the future. >> Did you bring up an interesting point about DPUs and MPUs, and sort of the variations of GPUs that are coming about? Do you see those different PU types continuing to proliferate? >> Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've done a bunch of work with Red Hat, and we've got a, I'll say a beta of OpenShift 4.10 that now supports DPUs as the, I'll call it the control plane like software defined networking offload in the data center. So it takes all the software defined networking off of CPUs. When everybody talks about, I'll call it software defined, you know, networking and core data centers, you can think of that as just a CPU tax up to this point. So what's nice is it's all moving over to DPU to, you know, offload and isolate it from the x86 cores. It increases security of data center. It improves the throughput of your data center. And so, yeah, DPUs, we see everybody copying that model. And, you know to give credit where credit is due, I think, you know, companies like AWS, you know, they bought Annapurna, they turned it into Nitro which is the foundation of their data centers. And everybody wants the, I'll call it democratized version of that to run their data centers. And so every financial institution and bank around the world sees the value of this technology, but running in their data centers. >> Hey, everybody needs a Nitro. I've written about it. It's Annapurna acquisition, 350 million. I mean, peanuts in the grand scheme of things. It's interesting, you said Moore's law is dead. You know, we have that conversation all the time. Pat Gelsinger promised that Moore's law is alive and well. But the interesting thing is when you look at the numbers, that's, you know, Moore's law, we all know it, doubling of the transistor densities every 18 to 24 months. Let's say that, that promise that he made is true. What I think the industry maybe doesn't appreciate, I'm sure you do, being in NVIDIA, when you combine what you were just saying, the CPU, the GPU, Paul, the MPU, accelerators, all the XPUs, you're talking about, I mean, look at Apple with the M1, I mean 6X in 15 months versus doubling every 18 to 24. The A15 is probably averaging over the last five years, a 110% performance improvement each year versus the historical Moore's law which is 40%. It's probably down to the low 30s now. So it's a completely different world that we're entering now. And the new applications are going to be developed on these capabilities. It's just not your general purpose market anymore. From an application development standpoint, what does that mean to the world? >> Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is a great point. I mean, from an application, I mean first of all, I mean, just talk about AI. I mean, they are all very compute intensive. They're data intensive. And I mean to move data focus so much in to compute and crunch those numbers. I mean, I'd say you need all the PUs that you mentioned in the world. And also there are other concerns that will augment that, right? Like we want to, you know, security is so important so we want to secure everything. Cryptography is going to take off to new levels, you know, that we are talking about, for example, in the case of DPUs, we are talking about, you know, can that be used to offload your encryption and firewalling, and so on and so forth. So I think there are a lot of opportunities even from an application point of view to take of this capacity. So I'd say we've never run out of the need for PUs if you will. >> So is OpenShift the layer that's going to simplify all that for the developer. >> That's right. You know, so one of the things that we worked with NVIDIA, and in fact was we developed this concept of an operator for GPUs, but you can use that pattern for any of the PUs. And so the idea really is that, how do you, yeah-- (all giggle) >> That's a new term. >> Yeah, it's a new term. (all giggle) >> XPUs. >> XPUs, yeah. And so that pattern becomes very easy for GPUs or any other such accelerators to be easily added as a capacity. And for the Kubernetes scaler to understand that there is that capacity so that an application which says that I want to run on a GPU then it becomes very easy for it to run on that GPU. And so that's the abstraction to your point about how we are making that happen. >> And to add to this. So the operator model, it's this, you know, open source model that does the orchestration. So Kubernetes will say, oh, there's a GPU in that node, let me run the operator, and it installs our entire run time. And our run time now, you know, it's got a MIG configuration utility. It's got the driver. It's got, you know, telemetry and metering of the actual GPU and the workload, you know, along with a bunch of other components, right? They get installed in that Kubernetes cluster. So instead of somebody trying to chase down all the little pieces and parts, it just happens automatically in seconds. We've extended the operator model to DPUs and networking cards as well, and we have all of those in the operator hub. So for somebody that's running OpenShift in their data centers, it's really simple to, you know, turn on Node Feature Discovery, you point to the operators. And when you see new accelerated nodes, the entire run time is automatically installed for you. So it really makes, you know, GPUs and our networking, our advanced networking capabilities really first class citizens in the data center. >> So you can kind of connect the dots and see how NVIDIA and the Red Hat partnership are sort of aiming at the enterprise. I mean, NVIDIA, obviously, they got the AI piece. I always thought maybe 25% of the compute cycles in the data center were wasted doing storage offloads or networking offload, security. I think Jensen says it's 30%, probably a better number than I have. But so now you're seeing a lot of new innovation in new hardware devices that are attacking that with alternative processors. And then my question is, what about the edge? Is that a blue field out at the edge? What does that look like to NVIDIA and where does OpenShift play? >> Yeah, so when we talk about the edge, we always going to start talking about like which edge are we talking about 'cause it's everything outside the core data center. I mean, some of the trends that we see with regard to the edges is, you know, when you get to the far edge, it's single nodes. You don't have the guards, gates, and guns protection of the data center. So you start having to worry about physical security of the hardware. So you can imagine there's really stringent requirements on protecting the intellectual property of the AI model itself. You spend millions of dollars to build it. If I push that out to an edge data center, how do I make sure that that's fully protected? And that's the area that we just announced a new processor that we call Hopper H100. It supports confidential computing so that you can basically ensure that model is always encrypted in system memory across the bus, of the PCI bus to the GPU, and it's run in a confidential way on the GPU. So you're protecting your data which is your model plus the data flowing through it, you know, in transit, wallet stored, and then in use. So that really adds to that edge security model. >> I wanted to ask you about the cloud, correct me if I'm wrong. But it seems to me that that AI workloads have been slower than most to make their way to the cloud. There are a lot of concerns about data transfer capacity and even cost. Do you see that? First of all, do you agree with that? And secondly, is that going to change in the short-term? >> Yeah, so I think there's different classes of problems. So we'll take, there's some companies where their data's generated in the cloud and we see a ton of, I'll say, adoption of AI by cloud service providers, right? Recommendation engines, translation engines, conversational AI services, that all the clouds are building. That's all, you know, our processors. There's also problems that enterprises have where now I'm trying to take some of these automation capabilities but I'm trying to create an intelligent factory where I want to, you know, merge kind of AI with the physical world. And that really has to run at the edge 'cause there's too much data being generated by cameras to bring that all the way back into the cloud. So, you know, I think we're seeing mass adoption in the cloud today. I think at the edge a lot of businesses are trying to understand how do I deploy that reliably and securely and scale it. So I do think, you know, there's different problems that are going to run in different places, and ultimately we want to help anybody apply AI where the business is generating the data. >> So obviously very memory intensive applications as well. We've seen you, NVIDIA, architecturally kind of move away from the traditional, you know, x86 approach, take better advantage of memories where obviously you have relationships with Arm. So you've got a very diverse set of capabilities. And then all these other components that come into use, to just be a kind of x86 centric world. And now it's all these other supporting components to support these new applications and it's... How should we think about the future? >> Yeah, I mean, it's very exciting for sure, right? Like, you know, the future, the data is out there at the edge, the data can be in the data center. And so we are trying to weave a hybrid cloud footprint that spans that. I mean, you heard Paul come here, talk about it. But, you know, we've talked about it for some time now. And so the paradigm really that is, that be it an application, and when I say application, it could be even an AI model as a service. It can think about that as an application. How does an application span that entire paradigm from the core to the edge and beyond is where the future is. And, of course, there's a lot of technical challenges, you know, for us to get there. And I think partnerships like this are going to help us and our customers to get there. So the world is very exciting. You know, I'm very bullish on how this will play out, right? >> Justin, we'll give you the last word, closing thoughts. >> Well, you know, I think a lot of this is like I said, it's how do we reduce the complexity for enterprises to get started which is why Launchpad is so fundamental. It gives, you know, access to the entire stack instantly with like hands on curated labs for both IT and data scientists. So they can, again, walk out with the blueprints they need to set this up and, you know, start on a successful AI journey. >> Just a position, is Launchpad more of a Sandbox, more of a school, or more of an actual development environment. >> Yeah, think of it as it's, again, it's really for trial, like hands on labs to help people learn all the foundational skills they need to like build an AI practice and get it into production. And again, it's like, you don't need to go champion to your executive team that you need access to expensive infrastructure and, you know, and bring in Red Hat to set up OpenShift. Everything's there for you so you can instantly get started. Do kind of a pilot project and then use that to explain to your executive team everything that you need to then go do to get this into production and drive business value for the company. >> All right, great stuff, guys. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin. We'll be back right after this short break at the Red Hat Summit 2022. (upbeat music)

(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)

(bright music) >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. It's a hybrid world, we're still doing remote in news. Of course, events are coming back in person, but more importantly conversations continue. We've got two great guests here, John Siegal, SVP ISG Marketing at Dell Technologies, and Dave McGraw, office of the CTO at VMware. Gentlemen, great to see you moving forward. Dell Technologies and VMware great partnership. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back. >> Yeah, hi, John, thanks for having us. >> You know, the world's coming back to kind of real life, Omnicon virus is out there, but people say it's not going to be as bad as we think, but it looks like events are happening. But more importantly, the cloud native, cloud operations is definitely forcing lots of great new things happening, new innovations on-premises and at the Edge. A lot of new things happening in Dell and VMware, both have been working together for a long time now. VMware a separate company, we'll get to that in a second, but let's get to the partnership. What's new, what's changed with the relationship? >> Yeah, so I mean, just to kick that off and certainly Dave can chime in, but I think in a word, you know, John, nothing changes in terms of my customer's perspective. I mean, in many ways our joint relationship has never been stronger. We've put a ton of investment in both joint engineering innovation, Joint Go To Market over the last several years. And we're really been making what was our vision a couple of years ago a reality, and we only expect that to continue. And I think much of the reason we expect that to continue is because we have a shared vision of this distributed multi-cloud, you know, cloud native, modern app environment that customers want to drive. >> Yeah, and John, I would add that we've been building platforms together for the last five years, a great example is VxRail. You know, it's a market-leading technology that we've co-engineered together. And now it's a platform that we're actually building out use cases on top of whether it's multi-cloud solutions, whether it's private and hybrid cloud or including Tansu for developer environments. You know, we're using the investments we made and then we're layering in and building more value into those investments together. And we put agreements in place by the way that, you know, multi-year agreements around commercial arrangements and partnering together as well as our technology collaboration together. So we feel really confident about the future and that's what we're communicating to our customer base. >> Yeah, indeed just go ahead sorry, John. >> No, good. >> I was going to say just to build on that, as he said, I really, when I say not much changes, I mean, VMware has always been an open ecosystem partner, right? With its OEM vendors out there. And I think the difference here is Dell has made a strategic choice and a decision to make a significant investment in joint innovation, joint engineering, joint testing for VMware environments. And so I think a lot of this comes down to the commitment and focus that we've already made. You mentioned VxRail, which is a fantastic example where we at Dell, we've invested our own IP. You know, HCI systems software, that's sort of the secret ingredient that the secret sauce that delivers that single click, you know, automated lifecycle management experience. And we're investing lots of dollars in test labs just to ensure that customers always have that, you know, that seamless experience. >> You know, one of the benefits of doing theCUBE for 11 years now, it's just been that long, both EMC World and Dell World back in the day was our first events we went to. We've watched you guys together over the years. One of the things that strikes to be consistently the same is this focus of end to end, but also modularity, but also interoperability and kind of componentizing kind of the solution, not to oversimplify it, but this is kind of the big discussion right now as cloud scale, horizontal scale is with cloud resources are being put into the development stream where modern applications now are clear using only cloud native operations. That doesn't mean it's just cloud. I mean, it's cloud everywhere, but it's distributed computing. So this is kind of the original vision if you go back even five years or more. You guys have been working on this. This is kind of an important inflection point because now it's well known that the modern application is going to have to be programmable under the hood. Meaning everything's going to be scaling and rise of superclouds or new Edge technologies, which is coming fast. This is the new normal. This is not something that we were talking about mainstream five years ago, but you guys have been working on this kind of simplicity solutions-based approach. What's your reaction? >> That's right, John, I'll tell you, you might remember at VMworld a couple of years ago we announced Project Monterey. And now this was really a redefining architecture for not only data center, core data centers, but also for cloud and Edge environments. And so it's leveraging technology, you know, data processing units also known as smart NICs. You know, we're essentially redefining what that infrastructure looks like, making it more efficient, more performance, depending on the use case. So we've been partnering very closely with Dell to develop that technology and it's going to really transform what you see at the Edge and what you also see in core data centers going forward. >> Yeah, and there's so many of those. I mean, I think it seems Monterey is a great example of one that we continue to invest in. I think there's also NBME over TCP is another, if you will key ingredient to how customer is going to essentially get the performance they need out of the infrastructure going forward. And so we were proud to be a partner there, at most recent VMware where we announced, you know, the ability to essentially automate the integration of MBME over TCP with Dell EMC system integrated with vSphere. And that's a great example as well, right? I think there's countless. >> John: Yeah. >> And I'll tell you, we are so excited to see what Dell has done in the storage business with PowerStore X, where they've integrated vSphere ESXi into a storage array. And, you know, that creates all kinds of opportunities going forward for better integration and really for plug and play of, you know, the storage technology into cloud infrastructure. >> What's interesting about what you guys talking about is remember the old DevOps moving infrastructure as code. Okay, that became DevSecOps. That's big part of Tansu and security. Now it's all about devs, right? So now devs have all that built in and now the operations are the big conversation because one of the things we pointed out in the theCUBE recently is that, you know, VMware has owned the IT operations world, in our opinion for a long, long time. Dell has owned the enterprise for a very long time in terms of infrastructure in front solutions. The operational efficiency of cloud hybrid is really kind of what's the gateway to multi-cloud. This has been a big part of IT transformation. Can you guys share how you guys were working together to make that flexibility to transform from the old IT to the new IT? And what are some of the things that you're seeing with your customers that can give them a map of how to do this? >> Yeah, so I would say, you know, one area in particular that we're really coming together is around APEX, right? From an as a service perspective. I think what APEX is really doing is really unifying much of what you just described. It's taking as a service, it's taking multi-cloud, it's taking cloud native development if you will, and modern app development. And we together partner to ensure that's a consistent experience for customers. And we have a number of new APEX cloud services that keep that in mind and that are built on joint innovations, like frankly, VxRail at the bottom of that as they've said earlier. So for customers are looking to get, you know, item managing infrastructure altogether, which we, you know, we're seeing more and more now, we recently announced the APEX Cloud Services With VMware Cloud you know, which is again, a joint solution that'll be available soon. And it's one that is managed by Dell, but, you know, it gives customers that simplicity and scale of the public cloud, but certainly that control and security and performance, if you will, that they prefer to have in the private club. >> Yeah, and I think because, you know, the APEX Cloud Service is designed with the VMware Cloud, you have a capability that drives consistency and portability of workloads for customers. So they don't have to re-skill and retrain to be able to manage the environment. They also are not locked in to any particular solution. They have this ability to move workloads depending on what their needs are; economically, performance, you know, logistics requirements, and they can react accordingly as they digitize their business going forward. >> It's interesting, you guys are talking about this demand in a way, addressing this demand for as a service, which is, you know, it can be one cloud or multiple clouds, but it's really more of an abstraction layer of what you deploy to essentially create that connective tissue between what's existing, what's new and how to make it all work together to again, satisfy the developer 'cause the new apps are coming, right? They want more data is coming into them. So this has been, is this the as a service focus, is that what's happening? >> Yes, absolutely, yeah. The, as a service focus is, you know, at the end of the day is how are we going to really simplify this. We've been on this journey now for at least a year and much more to go. And VMware has been a key partner here, you know, on that journey. So a number of cloud services. We've had APEX Hybrid Cloud, APEX Private Cloud, you know, out there for some time. In fact, that's where we're getting a lot of the traction right now, and this new offering that's going to come out soon that we just mentioned with VMware cloud is just going to build on that. >> And VMware is a super cloud, isn't it Dave? Because you guys would be considered by our new definition of Supercloud because you can sit on Amazon. You also have other clouds too, so your customers can operate on any cloud. >> Our view is that, you know, from a multi-cloud future for customers to be able to be on-premises with a, you know, APEX service, to be able to be operating in a Colo, to be able to operate in one of many different hyperscalers, you know, providing that consistency and flexibility is going to be key. And I think also you mentioned Tansu earlier, John. You know, being able to have the customer have choice around whether they're operating with VMs and containers is really key as well. So, you know, what Dell has done with APEX is they set up again, another platform that we can just provide our SASE offerings to very simply and easily and deliver that value to customers in a consistent fashion going forward here. >> You know, I just love the term Supercloud. Actually, I called it subclass, but Dave Vellante called them Superclouds. But the idea is that you can have all the super power in the cloud capabilities, but it's also distributed clouds, right? Where you have Edge, you've got the Core and the notion of a cloud isn't like one place in which there's distributed computing. This is what the world now realizes. Again, we've talked about in theCUBE many times. So let's discuss this whole Core to Edge dynamic because if everything's cloudified, if you will, or cloud operations, you've got devs and ops kind of working together with security, all that good stuff. Now you have almost a seamless environment where code can run anywhere, data should traverse anywhere, but the idea of an Edge changes dramatically and certainly with 5G. So can you guys tie that Edge computing story together how Dell and VMware are addressing this massive growth at the Edge? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, first and foremost, we are seeing a major shift. As you mentioned today, the data being generated at the Edge it's, I think Michael Dell has actually gone on record talking about the next frontier, right? So it's especially happening because we're seeing all these smart monitoring capabilities, IOT, right? At almost any end point now from retail, traffic lights, manufacturing floors, you name it. I think anywhere where data is being acted upon to generate critical insights, right? That's considered an Edge now and we're expecting to see, as ITC has already gone out there on record as saying 50% of the new infrastructure out there will be deployed at the Edge in the next couple of years, so. And it's a different world, right? I mean, I think in terms of what's needed and what the challenges are, there's certainly a lack of specialized technical resources, typically at the Edge, there's typically a scaling issue. How do you manage all those distributed endpoints and do so successfully? And how do you ensure you lay any concerns around security as well? So, you know, once again, we've had a very collaborative approach when it comes to working on challenges like Edge, and, you know, we, again, common theme here, but the VxRail, which is a leading, you know, joint ACI off in the market is the foundation of many of our Edge offerings out there in the market today. The new satellite nodes that we just announced just a few months ago, extends VxRail's, you know, value proposition to the Edge, using a single node deployment. And it's really perfect for customers that don't have that local technical resource expertise or specialized resources. And it still has cyber resilience built right in. >> And John, just to follow up on that real quick, before Dave chimes in. On the Edge, compute has been a huge issue. And I've talked with you guys about this too. You guys have the compute, you have the integrated systems now, any update there on what VxRail is doing different or other Edge power (John laughs) PowerEdge sounds familiar? We need some more power at the Edge. So what's new there? >> Well, you know, first of all, we had new PowerEdge platforms of course, come out in this past year, and, you know, there's, we're building on that. I mean, the latest VxRail is of course, leveraged that power of PowerEdge. Yeah, lots of a good naming arrogance, right? PowerEdge. >> John: I love that. And, but, you know, it's, you know, it's at the heart of much of what we're doing. We're taking a lot of our capabilities that have been IP, like streaming data platform, which enables streaming, video and real-time analytics and running that on a VxRail or PowerEdge platform. You know, we're doing the same thing, you know, with, in the manufacturing side. We're working with partners that have IOT Edge platforms, you know, and running those on VxRail and PowerEdge. So we are taking very much the idea here that, yes, you're right with our rich resources of infrastructure, both with PowerEdge and VxRail, you know, building on that. But working with partners like VMware and others to collapse an integrated solution for the Edge. And so we're seeing really good uptake so far. >> Dave, what's your take on the Dell Edge with VMware, because automation is big theme, not moving data across an internet that's obviously huge. And you got to have that operational stability there. >> Absolutely, and, you know, to your point, being able to do the processing at the Edge and move results around versus moving massive amounts of data around is really key to the future going forward. And, you know, we've taken an approach with Dell where we're working with customers, we're having detailed conversations, really using a "Tiger Team Approach" around the use cases; manufacturing and retail being two of the real key focuses, healthcare another one where we're understanding customer requirements, it's both today and where they want to go. And, you know, so it's about distributed computing, certainly at the Edge. Dell is coming out with some great new platforms that we're integrating our software with. At the same time, we have technology in STWIN and SASE that become part of that solution as well, with VeloCloud. And we're developing a global network of points of presence that really will help support distributed application environments and Edge-native Application environments working with Dell going forward. >> That's great stuff. The next ending question is what's next. I want to just tee that up by bringing up what you kind of made me think of there, Dave, and this is key supply chain on both hardware and software talking about security. So when you say those things you're talking about in terms of functionality, the question is security, right? Both hardware and software supply chain with open source, with automation. I mean, this is a big discussion. What do you guys react to that about what's next.. >> Yeah, I can tell you from a central engineering perspective, you know, we're looking at security compliance and privacy every day, we're working closely with Dell. In fact, we're in the middle of meetings today in this area. And, you know, I look at a few key areas of investment that we're making collectively together. One is in the area of end to end encryption of data. For virtualized environments or containerized environments, being able to have end-to-end encryption and manage a very efficient way, the keys and maintain the data compression and deduplication capabilities for customers, you know, efficiency and cost purposes while being very secure. The second area we're working closely on is in Zero Trust. You know, being able to develop Zero Trust infrastructure across Edge, to Core, to Colo, to Cloud and making sure that, you know, we have reference designs available to customers with procedures, policies, best practices, to be able to drive Zero Trust environments. >> John what you're (indistinct) is huge and you guys have, literally could be the keys to the kingdom pun intended. You guys are doing a lot of great security at the Edge too, whether the traffic stays with the Edge or goes across the network. >> That's all right, I'm as curious, like you said, it's been a joint focus and initiative across much of our portfolio for quite a while now. And I think, you know, you asked what's next and I think, you know, sky's the limit right now. I mean, we've got the shared vision, right? I think at the end of the day, you know, we've shared a number of joint initiatives that are ongoing right now with Project Monterrey. Obviously our integration with Tansu and a number of solutions we have there, work around APEX, et cetera. I think we have complimentary capabilities. You mentioned, you know, areas like supply chain, areas like security, you know, and I think these are all things that we both do well together. And the thing I will say that I think is probably the most key to us sustaining this great execution together is our collaborative cultures. I think, you know, there's something to be said for what we built, you know, all these last several years, you know, around these collaborative cultures, working together on joint roadmaps and focusing on really end of the day solving our customer's biggest challenges, whatever those may be, you know? And so at the end of the day behind us, we have the greatest supply chains, you know, services, support, and innovation engines. But I think, you know, I think that the passion, our groups working together I think is going to be key to us going forward. >> Well, great stuff moving forward together with Dell Technologies and VMware. David, thanks for coming on. John, great to see you. Thanks for sharing insight. Great CUBE conversation talking encryption, we've spoken about Edge and supply chain as well. Great stuff, great conversation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you >> Thank you so much, John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, with theCUBE. You're watching CUBE coverage. Thank you so much for watching. (bright music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of HPE's Green Lake announcement. We've been following the caves of Green Lake's announcement for several quarters now, and even years. And we're going to look at cloud adoption and frameworks to help facilitate cloud adoptions. You know, in 2020, the world was on a forced march to digital and there was a lot that they didn't know. Big part of that was how to automate, how to reduce your reliance on physically, manually and plugging things in. And so, customers need an adoption framework to better understand and how to de-risk that journey to the cloud. And with me to talk about that are Alexia Clements, who's the Vice President at Worldwide go to market for GreenLake cloud services at HPE and Alexei Gerasimov who's the vice president of Hybrid Cloud Delivery advisory and professional services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Folks, welcome to theCube. >> Alexia: Thanks so much for having us. >> You're very welcome. So, Alexei, what is a cloud adoption framework? How does that all work? >> Gerasimov: Yeah, thanks Dave. So the framework is a structured approach to elevate the conversation, to help our customers get outcomes. So we've been helping customers adopt the benefits in the most of IT for a decade. And we've noticed that they basically focus on eight key areas as they transform to cloud-like capabilities. It's a strategy and governance, it's innovation, people, a dev ops applications, operations security, and data. So we've structured our framework around those core components to help our customers get value. Because end of the day, it's all about changing the way they operate. To get the advantage of all of it. >> Yes. So you can't just pave the cow path and kind of plug your existing process. There's a lot that's unknown, as I said up front. So, so Alexia, maybe you could talk a little bit more about some of the real problems that you're solving with customers that you see in the field. >> Alexey: Yeah, absolutely. So most customers are going through some form of digital transformation and these transformations are difficult and they need a structured approach to help them through that journey. I kind of like to think of it as a recipe to make a meal. So you need to know what ingredients to buy and what are the steps to perform to make that meal. >> Okay. So when you talk to customers, what do you, what do you tell them? That's in it for them after the, after you've actually successfully helped them deploy? What are they telling you? >> Yeah, well, they're telling they now have reached their business outcomes and they're, you know, they're a more agile organization. >> What's the experience look like when you, when you go through one of these journeys and you, you apply the adoption framework, can you sort of paint a picture for us? >> Yeah, absolutely. So every customer is in some sort of transformation, like Alexia said, that transformation implies you've got to know where you start and again, know where you're going. So the experience traditionally is customers need to understand what are my current hybrid cloud capabilities? What do I have, what am I missing? What's lacking and then determine where do you want to go? And in order to get from point A to point B, they have to get a prescriptive approach. So the framework sort of breaks down their path from where they are to their desired maturity. And it takes them in the very prescriptive path to get there. >> So you start with an assessment, you do a gap analysis based on their skill sets. I presume you identify what's possible, help them understand, you know, best practice, which they may not achieve, but this is kind of their north star. Right? And then do you help? How do you help them fill those gaps? Because are skills gaps. Everybody talks about that today. You guys presumably can provide additional services to do that, but so can you add a little bit color to that scope? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so to your point, the first is a maturity level. So once you figure out the maturity level, you understand what needs to be done. So if you look at our domain, the eight domains that I mentioned and the framework, people is a big one, right? Most of the folks are struggling with people's skills and organizational capabilities. And it's so because it's an operating model change, right? And people are the key component to this operating model change. So we help our customers figure out how do we achieve that optimal operating level and operating a model maturity. And that could be on-prem that could be on public cloud. That could be hybrid. That could be at the edge. And yeah, we, if we can HP, the framework, by the way is pretty, pretty open and pretty objective. If we can help our customers address and achieve their sales gaps great. If we can not directly, then we can have a partner that can help them, you know, plug in something that we don't have. >> Are you finding that, that in terms of the maturity that most people have some kind of experience with, with cloud, but they're struggling to bring that cloud experience to their on-premise state. They don't want to just shove everything into the cloud. Right. So, what does that kind of typical journey look like for folks? I know there's--it's a wide spectrum, or you've got people that are maybe more mature. Maybe some of the folks in financial services got more resources, but can you sort of give us a sense as to what the typical, the average. >> Oh yeah yeah yeah, absolutely. By the way. So that give you a customer example, perfect example of a large North American integrated energy company. They decided to go cloud fresh, like a lot of companies. that wants to do cloud first. And why? The reason was agility. So they started going to the cloud and they realized in order to get agility, you can't just go to you, pick your public CSP, you got to change the way to operate. So they brought us in and they asked, could you help me figure out how we can change the organization? So we actually operate on the proper level of maturity. So we brought our team in. We help them figure out what do we need to look at? We need to look at operations. We need to look at people. We need to look at applications, and we need to figure out what gives you the best value. So when all said and done, they realized that their initial desire of, you know, public first or cloud first, wasn't really public cloud first. It's a way to operate. So now the customer is in three different public CSPs. They're on-prem, there are at edge and everywhere. So that's the focus. Yeah. >> Is the scope predominantly the technical organization. How deep does it go into the, to the business? Is it obviously the application development team is involved, but how deep into the business does this go? The framework. >> Right, and it's absolutely not a technology focused, the whole concept areas, it's outcomes based, and it's a results based. So if you look at the framework, there's really not a single element of the framework that says tech, like storage or compute. No, it's its people, its data, it's business value, strategy and governance, because the goal for us is being objective is we're just trying to help them address the outcomes. Not necessarily to give them more tech. >> So Alexia, I like that answer because it's a wider scope as, I mean, if we just focused on the tech and that's the swim lane, it'd be a lot easier. But as we all know, it's the people in the process that are really the hard part. So that, that makes the challenge for customers greater. You're hurting more cats. So what are the, some of the obstacles that potentially you help customers before they dive in understand. >> Yeah. So we're giving them a roadmap on where they need to go. So we're like I mentioned that recipe, so we're really trying to identify what is their strategy and where do they, what are the outcomes that they're trying to drive and help them on a street, you know, with that path to meet those outcomes. So some of those, I mean, every customer's a little bit different. I mean, we had one customer, which was a, one of the largest hospitals in north America and they, they would needed to, they wanted to go to the cloud, but they realized they couldn't put all of their patient data on the cloud. So what we did was we helped them in changing their operating model and really look to see how does that, how do they need to what's that end game for them, and actually help redo their operating model to have some in the cloud and some on-prem and, and really identify, you know, where they needed to go for their roadmap. So that was an obstacle that they had, hey, we can't put all this stuff out there. How does that now need to work in this new world? >> I would think the data model is a big deal here. I mean, you just gave an example where there's a, there's a, there's a governance and compliance aspect to it. So thinking about that example, did they have to change the way in which they provided federated governance was that presumably identify whose whose responsibility that was to adjudicate, but also had to get the, the implementers to follow that's the, how does that all work? Is it just the deep conversations? And then you figure out how to codify it or. >> No. So what so we have, so through those eight domains that Alexia mentioned, we go through, step-by-step how they need to think about it. And within mind, what are their business outcomes and goals that they're trying to achieve? So really identifying how they need to change that operating model to meet those business outcomes. >> So what's the output, it's a plan, right. That's tailored to the customer. Is that, is that correct? And, and then sort of assistance in implementing downstream or what do they get? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just to piggyback to what Alexia said, the alignment, the early alignment, the strategy and governance, as you mentioned, this is probably the most important thing, because everybody says we want to be cloud first, but what does that mean? Cloud first means different things to everyone. So we said, give him a plan. The first we'll help with figure out is what does that mean for you? Because at the end of the day, you're not going to the cloud for the sake of cloud, or anywhere you go into the cloud to get some sort of value. So what's that alignment. So the plan is supposed to help you on your road to that value, right? So we'll help them figure out what I want to do, why, for what purpose, what's going to actually address my business value. So yes, they will get a plan as part of it. But more importantly, they get, they get a set of activities, communication plans, which by the way, another block that you got to address. >> Dave: Huge. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, a lot of executives tell me, look, if you don't change your operating model and go to the cloud, yeah. You're talking, you know, nickels and dimes. If you want to get telephone numbers, you know, big companies, you want to get into bees with billions, you have to change the operating model. And the problem that they tell me is a lot of times the corner offices, okay, we're doing this, but everybody in the fat middle says, what are we doing? >> Right. And now more than ever, I mean, customers need to look at that model like a more modern operating model to realize the benefits of cloud capabilities, whether that be at the edge, their data centers, their colos cloud. So they really need to look at that. And what we've seen is with our framework, we're really helping customers accelerate their business outcomes. De-risk their transformation, and really optimize that cloud operating model. >> It's that alignment you reducing friction within the organization, confusing confusion. When people don't know which direction they're going, they'll just going to go wherever they're pointed. Right. Right. >> And you back to the alignment. So you've got alignment and you mentioned communication. You have to communicate up and down and left and right across the organization because that's one of the most probably ignored elements of any transformation lots of people don't know. So you got to communicate. And then you have to actually measure and report on how they, you know, how the transformation is happening. So we can help in all three of those. >> Especially when everybody's remote. Yeah. Right. And then I said, hey, these digital transformations, there's so much, that's unknown. >> Alexia: Right. It's difficult. >> It's a lot of new. And so you also have to, I presume part of the plan is, Hey, you're not, it's not going to be a hundred percent perfect. So you have to have. >> Alexia: Right. And you're constantly iterating on that plan. >> What does this have to do with GreenLake? >> Alexia: Yeah. So, I mean, GreenLake is HPE's you know, cloud everywhere. And what we're really doing is this framework is helping customers with that path to get that cloud-like experience and as a service model. And so the framework is really helping clients understand where do they need to go and what GreenLake solutions can help them get there. >> So the fundamental assumption of not every cloud player necessarily bad, I would say most hyperscalers is, hey, ultimately, all the data and the workloads are going to go to the cloud, that's their operating premise. So they all have an operating framework to facilitate that. >> Alexia: Right. >> It's, it's tongue in cheek, but it's true. So, but everybody has one of these. How was yours different? >> Yeah. So like, like you said, there's lots of different, you know, frameworks out there, but what we're really focused on is meeting those business goals and outcomes for clients. So we didn't focus on the technology. Like we mentioned what we were really focusing around. I mean, we kind of learned early on that every customer has technical capabilities, applications, data in multiple clouds, on-prem in colos and at the edge. So we didn't focus on like just the technology. So it's really driving business outcomes and their goals and, and the tech, all those frameworks that we just mentioned, they're really specifically driving a particular technology tool or vendor implementing a particular technology or vendor. >> So we've talked about outcomes a lot, but I wonder if we could peel the onion on that. So, you know, the highest level outcome is I want to increase revenue, cut costs, drop to the bottom line, increase shareholder value, improve employee experiences and retention, make customers happier, grow my business. I mean, those are, I mean, I, I don't know a lot of businesses that don't... >> Alexia: Right. >> want to do that, So. Okay. That's cool. But then I'm imagining you really start to peel the layers and say, okay, this is how we're going to get there. And you get down to specific objectives as to the, how is that sort of how this works? >> Right, and that's due to echo at Alexia. So that's exactly why ours is different. We're not focusing on how to adopt Microsoft or AWS or Alibaba with focusing on how we can deliver the customer experience or a better revenue, you know, or, you know, increase the value for the consumer for whatever the company will help him. So the framework we'll look at that and figure out how do we actually address it, whether it's on public cloud, whether it's on prem, whether it's at the edge. >> You mentioned Alexia, that something, hey, if we don't have the skills, we can get a partner who does, a big company. You got a huge partner network. So for example, if you might not have necessarily a deep industry expertise, that's where you might lean on a partner or is that, is that a good example or is there a better one? >> Yes and we know. We're not going to just like you mentioned AWS or Microsoft, Alibaba thing that everything will go to public cloud. I don't believe so, but at the same time we know not everything will stay on-prem. So the combination of on-prem, the edge, you know, private cloud and public cloud is what the customers are after. So our partners could be either third party, system integrator that can help us implement something or even the public CSPs, because we know our customers have capabilities everywhere. So the question becomes, how can we holistically address their needs, whether it's on-prem, whether it's in public cloud. >> Great. Guys, thanks so much. >> Alexia: Thank you. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. >> My pleasure and thank you for watching everybody's as theCube's continuous coverage of HPE's GreenLake announcement, keep it right there for more great content. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests with me here from Infosys. Alumni Uma Lakshmipathy is back, Senior Vice President and Regional Head of EMEA at Infosys. Uma, it's great to see you welcome back to the program. >> Yeah. Hi Lisa. It's great to be back for Discover 2021. It's been a great opportunity to meet with a lot of stakeholders in HPE. >> Excellent. We're going to dig into that. And Saju Sankarankutty is here as well. The CTO, Cloud Advisory, VP-Hybrid Cloud Engineering, Platforms and Automation at Infosys. Saju, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be in the program. It is my first time, but I really enjoyed it as well. >> Well, welcome, welcome. So the next 15 minutes or so, we're going to unpack a survey that was just done. As we know, cloud has catalyzed a lot in the last year. One of those being cloud adoption. Talk to us about some of the things that you've seen as more and more enterprises are moving workloads to cloud. How is the hybrid cloud enabling businesses to grow, enabling them to actually have a competitive edge? >> Lisa, if you look at the pre-COVID scenario, there are many, many clients which actually made a significant move into cloud, but there were many few of the companies who didn't really take a mature cloud adoption. But those companies which actually did the adoption, we see that have taken a big step with the help of the, when the COVID hit them because they were able to be very resilient, but at the same time, they were able to, the cloud adoption really helped them to improve their business profits. When we did this cloud radar survey across all the geographies, we did it across the US, the Latin, the Asia Pacific, the EMEA markets, and when we looked at what our clients and enterprises were able to recover and get all of this whole cloud adoption, we got a number of 414 billions of profits that the enterprises can make by using this cloud adoption. And that's what we saw in this survey that we did with our clients. >> Yeah, that's huge enterprises. The survey found can add up to, you said 414 billion and net new profits annually through effective cloud adoption. Uma, sticking with you for a second, what does Infosys describe as effective cloud adoption? >> When we look at cloud adoption, we have enterprises who started shifting workloads, which are very comfortable for them. And then they started to take the more mature understanding of moving workloads, which are very critical to the business. So when we look at effective, it is a combination of both. The ones that were very easy to go to the cloud. The ones that made businesses able to bring in new applications, the new go-to markets to their segments, to their clients. But then, it is also about taking some of those legacy workloads and making a choice, the right choice to take it by transforming those applications and environments into the cloud adoption. And that's what we call as effective. It's just not the easy ones, but also those are complex and legacy riddled ones that effectively goes on to transform itself into a new way for their clients and for the experience of the users. >> So big changes coming big opportunities. Saju, we see we've talked about this for many times, more and more companies moving to multicloud arrangements for a variety of reasons. What have been some of the things that Infosys has experienced and what are some of your viewpoints on a multicloud? >> Thank you, Lisa. So if you look around, hybrid cloud has been the new normal and if you look at it, private cloud is becoming an essential component for hosting applications. When you look at it, it's more about applications which have low latency requirements, it has regulatory requirements, or it has a static demand of infrastructure. Now, what Infosys has done in this spaces is that we have developed a framework which we call it as a right cloud solution framework. And this is focused on implementing a hybrid multicloud leveraging and in-house developed tools and frameworks as well as platforms along with those strategic partner ecosystem. That is our biggest contribution onto the hybrid multicloud world. Now, the foundation of our framework is Infosys polycloud platform. It's a unified multicloud management platform. It can provision, it can orchestrate, it can also manage the cloud deployment across multiple of the environments. It can be a private, it can be a public, or it can be on the edge. Now, apart from all of these things, it also offers features and functionalities very similar to the hyperscalers. And either it can be in terms of the user experience or it can be in a commercial model or a technology stack or it can be reports or it can be persona based user experience and integration with multiple systems, it brings all of these functionalities seamlessly across the multiple hybrid ecosystem. That's the biggest contribution from Infosys in this space. >> Got it. Okay. Uma, as we see the, just clear growth of multicloud in every industry, talk to us about what the cloud radar survey uncovered with prospective? You've mentioned that big number, the correlation between cloud transformation and profitable growth for enterprises across any industry. >> So I did mention about that Lisa in the previous question as well. When we look at enterprises trying to take the cloud adoption, the big benefits for the enterprises do happen when they cross that layer of moving a significant part of their existing legacy in a very transformed new world. And that brings in the new way of working for the customers, for their end users and internally as well for the various stakeholders. And that I think is creating a cost structure for them, which is very, very optimal from where they were. But at the same time, it is enabling their ecosystem of users and customers to come and operate in a very seamless fashion. And that is the biggest advantage of boosting profits for them at the same time cutting costs within the internal stakeholders. So at one stage, you're optimizing your cost. At the other stage, you're bringing in an easiness for your clients to operate on, which is actually creating that enlarged profit boost. >> Uma, sticking with you for a second. If we unpack that growth, that business profit growth opportunity that the survey uncovered, are we talking about things like faster time to market, increasing scale? What are some of the things underneath that hood? >> So if you look at traditionally, cloud was considered the enabler for quick faster time to market, but now a cloud has become the central theme for resilience. If you look at the COVID pandemic, those enterprises which were already cloud enabled were able to resiliently and sustain their business and grow their businesses. So as the economy started opening up, if I can talk about an automotive client who is today enriching businesses out of China because they have the first economy that has opened up after the pandemic. So you see a lot of enablement for those enterprises which have already taken the cloud journey. And if you look at today, enterprises are in somewhere around 17 to 18% of cloud adoption. And if they can take that to the 40%, that's when they will see that kind of boosted profits and we can clearly see about 400 plus billion dollars of profits that enterprises can make. >> All right. Saju, let's talk to you for a second. If we look at some of the survey results, the acceleration that is expected to be seen by in the next year of enterprises moving so many more workloads to cloud. You talked about hybrid cloud, talk to me about how the experience of working with HPE and creating joint solution suites is going to help the customers facilitate and drive that transformation. >> Thank you, Lisa. So if you look at HPE, HPE comes with a fine set of technology and commercial constructs that complements our right cloud framework and they offer the solution, the whole sort of lot of solutions offer private cloud as a service, which is a major component of our right cloud framework. Either it is a container as a service with HPE's ezmeral data platform on HP hardware or VDA as a service based on a composable and conversed infrastructure or HPC cloud build on great systems and all of them commercially supported with an HPE GreenLake offering makes it very attractive for our customers. Now, these integrations have helped us in providing a very seamless metering and billing along with the chargeback solutions very much in line with what is being provided by hyperscalers. Apart from this, we also work very closely with HPE to create a very compelling sourcing strategy for driving hybrid cloud driven digital transformation while taking costs out and protecting the existing investments through various financial models for our customers helping them in terms of transforming their digital estate in the new cloud world. >> And Uma, I want to get your perspective as well, the HPE Infosys partnership. Talk to me about that being a win-win for your clients in every industry. >> So actually Lisa, it's a great question. And this probably is my third CUBE interview. And I've told this previously as well in my previous interviews as well. The relationship between Infosys and HPE is very, very strategic And it's very, very top down driven. And today, we've seen very high transformative opportunities that two organizations have come together and we won't call it win-win, but we call it win-win-win, which is essentially a win for HPE, win for Infosys, but even for the clients as well. So if you look at some of the engagements that we've jointly done, everything has been transformative. I can talk about energy client where we've done a huge virtual VDI engagement with them where we have been able to dig them very seamlessly when the COVID pandemic hit them. So then they're a significant part of their IT users, but being able to operate from their residences. I can talk about a great story about how we had enabled GreenLake for a wind energy company and how that GreenLake capability helped the customer to migrate the application seamlessly to a hybrid cloud. And there are so many examples of similar scale and size when we look at clients in the manufacturing space and the automobile sector where we really done a work very closely with HPE across all regions and all geographies to make this what I would call a win-win-win partnership. >> I like that, win-win-win. Who wouldn't want that? One more question, Uma for you. Talk to me about the next, as we talked about some of those survey results and I think folks can find that survey, the cloud radar survey on the infosys.com website. I found it on the homepage there. But looking at how much transformation is expected in the next 12 months or so, what are some of the things that we can expect from Infosys and HPE to help drive and catalyze that growth that you expect to see in the next 12 months? >> Yeah. And I was talking to you before this interview and you said that yes, we are to look at this. And I was feeling very happy that you had the opportunity to look at the site. And you said that, look, there's an opportunity to also make, to continuously provide feedback and we're very happy for clients to come in and look at it and do provide us the feedback. This is a constant learning for us. We are a big learning company. And when it comes to the next 12 months of agenda, I think the pipeline is very robust for both us and the HPE in terms of the way we want to take proactive transformational opportunities to our clients. Create a value differentiation on the hybrid cloud for them and clearly, this survey clearly came back to reflect back to us that our strategy that we've done together as partners is the right strategy because there is a significant headroom for growth in the cloud space for both Infosys and HPE. >> Excellent. Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking to me about what Infosys and HPE are doing together, unpacking some of the significant insights that the cloud radar survey has uncovered. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. Thank you for giving us this opportunity. >> Absolutely. For Uma and Saju >> Thank you, Lisa. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBEs coverage of HPE Discover 2021. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. I've got a great guest here Robin Hernandez, vice president Hybrid Cloud Management and Watson AIOps. Robin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much for having me, John. >> You know, Hybrid Cloud, the CEO of IBM Arvind loves Cloud. We know that we've talked to him all the time about it. And Cloud is now part of the entire DNA of the company. Hybrid Cloud is validated multi clouds around the corner. This is the underlying pinnings of the new operating system of business. And with that, that's massive change that we've seen IT move to large scale. You're seeing transformation, driving innovation, driving scale, and AI is the center of it. So AIOps is a huge topic. I want to jump right into it. Can you just tell me about your day to day IT operations teams what you guys are doing? How are you guys organized? How you guys bring in value to the customers? What are your teams responsible for? >> Yeah, so for a few years we've been working with our IT customers, our enterprise customers in this transformation that they're going through. As they move more workloads to cloud, and they still have some of their workloads on premise, or they have a strategy of using multiple public clouds, each of those cloud vendors have different tools. And so they're forced with, how do I keep up with the changing rate and pace of this technology? How do I build skills on a particular public cloud vendor when, you know, maybe six months from now we'll have another cloud vendor that will be introduced or another technology that will be introduced. And it's almost impossible for an it team to keep up with the rate and pace of the change. So we've really been working with IT operations in transforming their processes and their skills within their teams and that looking at what tools do they use to move to this cloud operations model. And then as part of that, how do they leverage the benefits of AI and make that practical and purposeful in this new mode of cloud operations >> And the trend that's been booming is this idea of a site reliability engineer. It's really an IT operations role. It's become kind of a new mix between engineering and IT and development. I mean, classic DevOps, we've seen, you know dev and ops, right? You got to operate the developers and the software modern apps are coming in that's infrastructure as course has been around for a while. But now as the materialization of things like Kubernetes and microservices, people are programming the infrastructure. And so the scale is there, and that's been around for a while. Now it's going to go to a whole enterprise level with containers and other things. How is the site reliability engineering persona if you will, or ITOps changed specifically because that's where the action is. And that's where you hear things like observability and I need more data, break down the silos. What's this all about? What's your view? >> Yeah, so site reliability engineering or SRE practices as we call it has really not changed the processes per se that IT has to do, but it's more accelerated at an enormous rate and pace. Those processes and the tools as you mentioned, the cloud native tools like Kubernetes have accelerated how those processes are executed. Everything from releasing new code and how they work with development to actually code the infrastructure and the policies in that development process to maintaining and observing over the life cycle of an application, the performance, the availability, the response time, and the customer experience. All of those processes that used to happen in silos with separate teams and sort of a waterfall approach, with SRE practices now, they're happening instantaneously. They're being scaled out. They're being... Failback is happening much more quickly so that applications didn't do not have outages. And the rate and pace of this has just accelerated so quickly. This is the transformation of what we call cloud operations. And we believe that as IT teams work more closely with developers and they moved towards this SRE model, that they cannot just do this with their personnel and changing skills and changing tools. They have to do this with modernized tools like AI. And this is where we are recommending applying AI to those processes so that you can then get automation out of the back end that you would not think about in a traditional IT operations, or even in an SRE practice. You have to leverage capabilities and new technologies like AI to even accelerate further. >> Let's unpack the AI operations piece because I think that's where I think I'm in hearing. I'd love you to clarify this because it becomes I think the key important point but also kind of confusing to some folks because IT operations people see that changing. You just pointed out why, honestly, the tools and the culture is changing, but AI becomes a scale point because of the automation piece you mentioned. How does that thread together? How does AIOps specifically change the customer's approach in terms of how they work with their teams and how that automation is being applied? 'Cause I think that's the key thread, right? 'Cause everyone kind of gets the cultural shifts and the tools, if they're not living it and putting it in place, but now they want to scale it. That's where automation comes in. Is that right? Is that the right way to think about it? What's your view on this? This is important. >> It's absolutely right. And I always like to talk about AI in other industries before we apply it to IT to help IT understand. Because a lot of times, IT looks at AI as a buzzword and they say, "Oh, you know, yes, sure. "This is going to help me." But if you think about... We've been doing AI for a long time at many different companies not just at IBM, but if you think about the other industries where we've applied it, healthcare in particular is so tangible for most people, right? It didn't replace a doctor but it helps a doctor see the things that would take them weeks and months of studying and analyzing different patients to say, "Hey, John, I think this may be a symptom "that we overlooked or didn't think about "or a diagnosis that we didn't think about," without manually looking at all this research. AI can accelerate that so rapidly for a doctor, the same notion for IT. If we apply AI properly to IT, we can accelerate things like remediating incidents or finding a performance problem that may take your eye months or weeks or even hours to find, AI applied properly find those issues and diagnose just like they could in healthcare it diagnoses issues correctly much more rapidly. >> Now again, I want to get your thoughts on something while you're here 'cause you've been in the business for many, many decades 20 years experience, you know, cloud cold, you know the new modern area you're managing it now. Clients are having a scenario where they, "Okay, I'm changing over the culture." I'm "Okay, I got some cloud, I got some public "and I got some hybrid and man, "we did some agile things. "We're provisioned, it's all done. "It's out there." And all of a sudden someone adds something new and it crashes (chuckles) And now I've got to get in, "Where's the risks? where's the security holes?" They're seeing this kind of day two operations as some people call, another buzz word but it's becoming more of, "Okay, we got it up and running "but we still now going to still push some code "and things are starting to break. "and that's net new thing." So it's kind of like they're out of their comfort zone. This is where I kind of see the AIOps evolving quickly because there's kind of a DevSecOps piece. There's also data involved, observability. How do you talk to that scenario? Where, okay, you sold me on cloud, I've been doing it. I did some projects. We're not been running. We got a production system and we added something new. Something maybe trivial and it breaks stuff? >> Yes. Yeah, so with the new cloud operations and SRE, the IT teams are much more responsible for business outcomes. And not just as you say, the application being deployed and the application being available, but the life cycle of that application and the results that it's bringing to the end users and the business. And what this means is that it needs to partner much more closely with development. And it is hard for them to keep up with the tools that are being used and the new code and the architectures of microservices that developers are using. So we like to apply AI on what we call the change risk management process. And so everyone's familiar with change management that means a new piece of code is being released. You have to maintain where that code is being released to was part of the application architecture and make sure that it's scaled out and rolled out properly within your enterprise policies. When we apply AI, we then apply what we call a risk factor to that change because we know so often, application outages occur not something new within the environment. So by applying AI, we can then give you a risk rating that says, "There's an 80% probability "that this change that you're about to roll out, "a code change is going to cause a problem "in this application." So it allows you to then go back and work with the development team and say, "Hey, how do we reduce this risk?" Or decide to take that calculated risk and put into the visibility of where those risks may occur. So this is a great example, change risk management of how applying AI can make you more intelligent in your decisions much more tied to the business and tied to the application release team. >> That's awesome. Well, I got you here on this point of change management. The term "Shift Left" has come up a lot in the industry. I'd love to get your quick definition of what that is in your mind. What does Shift Left mean for Ops teams with AIOps? >> Yeah, so in the early days of IT there was a hard line definitely between your development and IT team. It was kind of we always said throwing it over the fence, right? The developers would throw the code over the fence and say, good luck IT, you know, figure out how to deploy it where it needs to be deployed and cross your fingers that nothing bad happens. Well, Shift Left is really about a breaking down that fence. And if you think of your developers on your left-hand side you'd being the IT team, it's really shifting more towards that development team and getting involved in that code release process, getting involved in their CI/CD pipeline to make sure that all of your enterprise policies and what that code needs to run effectively in your enterprise application and architecture, those pieces are coded ahead of time with the developer. So it's really about partnering between it and development, shifting left to have a more collaboration versus throwing things over the fence and playing the blame game, which is what happens a lot in the early days IT. >> Yeah, and you get a smarter team out of it, great point. That's great insight. Thanks for sharing that. I think it's super relevant. That's the hot trend right now making dealers more productive, building security from the beginning. While they're doing it code it right in, make it a security proof if you will. I got to ask you one of the organizational questions as IBM leader. What are some of the roadblocks that you see in organizations that when they embrace AIOps, are trying to embrace AI ops are trying to scale it and how they can overcome those blockers. What are some of the things you're seeing that you could share with other folks that are maybe watching and trying to solve this problem? >> Yeah, so you know, AI in any industry or discipline is only as good as the data you feed it. AI is about learning from past trends and creating a normal baseline for what is normal in your environment. What is most optimal in your environment this being your enterprise application running in steady state. And so if you think back to the healthcare example, if we only have five or six pieces of patient data that we feed the AI, then the AI recommendation to the doctor is going to be pretty limited. We need a broad set of use cases across a wide demographic of people in the healthcare example, it's the same with IT, applying AI to IT. You need a broad set of data. So one of the roadblocks that we hear from many customers is, well I using an analytics tool already and I'm not really getting a lot of good recommendations or automation out of that analytics tool. And we often find it's because they're pulling data from one source, likely they're pulling data from performance metrics, performance of what's happening with the infrastructure, CPU utilization or memory utilization, storage utilization. And those are all good metrics, but without the context of everything else in your environment, without pulling in data from what's happening in your logs, pulling in data from unstructured data, from things like collaboration tools, what are your team saying? What are the customers saying about the experience with your application? You have to pull in many different data sets across IT and the business in order to make that AI recommendation the most useful. And so we recommend a more holistic true AI platform versus a very segregated data approach to applying and eating the analytics or AI engine. >> That's awesome, it's like a masterclass right there. Robin, great stuff. Great insight. We'll quickly wrap. I would love to you to take a quick minute to explain and share what are some of the use cases to get started and really get into AIOps system successes for people that want to explore more, dig in, and get into this fast, what are some use case, what's some low hanging fruit? What would you share? >> Yeah, we know that IT teams like to see results and they hate black boxes. They like to see into everything that's happening and understand deeply. And so this is one of our major focus areas as we do. We say, we're making AI purposeful for IT teams but some of the low hanging fruits, we have visions. And lots of our enterprise customers have visions of applying AI to everything from a customer experience of the application, costs management of the application and infrastructure in many different aspects. But some of the low hanging fruit is really expanding the availability and the service level agreements of your applications. So many people will say, you know I have a 93% uptime availability or an agreement with my business that this application will be up 93% of the time. Applying AI, we can increase those numbers to 99.9% of the time because it learns from past problems and it creates that baseline of what's normal in your environment. And then we'll tell you before an application outage occurs. So avoiding application outages, and then improving performance, recommendations and scalability. What's the number of users coming in versus your normal scale rate and automating that scalability. So, performance improvements and scalability is another low-hanging fruit area where many IT teams are starting. >> Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you want to have the AIOps? They're totally cool, very relevant. You know, you're seeing hybrid cloud, standardized all across business. You've got to have that data and you got to have that incident management work there. Robin, great insight. Thank you for sharing. Robin Hernandez, vice president of Hybrid Cloud Management in Watson AIOps. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me John. >> Okay, this theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. We're not yet in real life. We're doing another remote interviews with two great guests Cube Alumni. Of course, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've got Jason McGee, IBM fellow VP and CTO of IBM's cloud platform and Octavian the Nazis senior vice president Hybrid Cloud engineering at NetApp. Both Cube alumni, is great to see you both. Thanks for coming on theCUBE >> Yeah, great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we were just talking before we came on camera that, it feels like we've had this conversation, a long time ago we have, Hybrid Cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys in many times on theCUBE. So now it's mainstream, it's here in the real world. Everyone gets it. There's no real debate. Now multicloud that's people are debating that which means that's right around the corner. So Hybrid Cloud is here and now Jason this is really the focus. And this is also brings together the NetApp in your partnership and talk about the relationship first with Hybrid Cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, you know look we've talked a number of times together. I think in the industry, maybe a few years ago people were debating whether Hybrid Cloud was a real thing. We don't have that conversation anymore. I think, you know, enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of COVID and kind of how we work differently now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on-prem and off-prem systems probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers. And what they're looking for now is how do I do that? And how do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in? And then how do I get more and more of my workload into those environments? And it's been interesting. I think the first waves of cloud were infrastructure centric and externally application focused they were easier things. And now we're moving into more mission critical more stateful, more data oriented workloads. And that brings with a new challenges on where applications run and how we leverage the club. >> Octavian, you guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years, data centric company NetApp has always been great engineering team. You're on the cloud, Hybrid Cloud engineering. What's the current status of the relationship. Give us an update on how it's vectoring into the Hybrid Cloud since you're a senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud engineering. >> Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM. I think NetApp and IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers. And we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong joint Hybrid Cloud value proposition for customers on NetApps storage and data services compliment what IBM does in terms of products and solutions both for on-premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions, solutions that span data mobility, data governance for the new workrooms that Jason has talked about. >> And how has some of the customer challenges that you're seeing obviously software defined networking software defined storage, DevOps is now turned into DevSecOps. So you have now that programmability requirement with for dynamic applications, applications driven, infrastructure, all these buzz words point to one thing, the infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. >> Yeah, I would say infrastructure will continue to be top of mind for everybody, whether they're building a private cloud or whether they we're trying to leverage, something like IBM cloud. I think, you know, people want to consume, infrastructure is an API. I think they want to simplicity, security. I think they want to manage their costs very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM cloud to build such capabilities. >> Jason how are you guys helping some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and refactoring previous stuff during transforming, but also innovating at the same time. There's a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the Hybrid challenges? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of dimensions to that problem but the one that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how kind of the consumption model of public cloud, API driven, self service, capabilities operated for you how that consumption model is starting to spread because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these, more mission critical data centric kind of workloads was well, I can't always move that application to the public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network, closer to my end users. So, you know, out where data is being generated, maybe in an IOT context and when you had those requirements you had to kind of switch operating models. You, you had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model. And we have a common platform and things like open shift that can run everywhere but the missing piece was how do I consume everything as a service everywhere? And so recently we launched this thing called IBM been satellite, which we've been working with Octavian and his team on, on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center, out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both location flexibility with public cloud consumption. And when you do that, you of course running a much more diverse infrastructure environment. You have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with like multi-tiered applications you know, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this complex environment. >> Here we've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade as the evolution goes. Octavian, I got to ask you this is critical path for companies. They want the storage ready infrastructure. You guys have been doing that for many decades pardon me with IBM, for sure. But now they're all getting Hybrid Cloud big time and it's not, it's attributed computing. It's what it is. It's the operating model. When someone asks you guys what your capabilities are how do you answer that in today's world? Because you have storage as well known. You got a great product people know that. But what is NetApp's capabilities? When I say I'm going all in and Hybrid Cloud complete changeover. >> So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. The software-defined has been definitely one of the key design points. The second is the Hybrid Cloud in the containerization of our operating systems. So they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do it's enabled the speed of scale. And that has been by building, you know intrinsically in the product, both support or in also using Kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility, that scale. >> So how about this data fabric vision? Because to me, this is comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners the number one problem at their, and problem that they're to solve in the conversation tends to I hear what was that control plane Kubernetes, horizontally scalable this all points to data being available., So how do you create that availability? What is data fabric mean? What does all this mean in a hybrid context? >> Well if you think about it, data fabric it's a Hybrid Cloud concept, right? This is about enabling data governance, data, mobility data security in an environment where some of the applications were run on premises or at the edge or the smart edge and many of the, perhaps data links and analytics, and services, rich services will be in a central locations or many or perhaps some large know data centers. So you need to have, the type of capabilities data services to enable that mobility that governance, that security across this continuum that spans the edge, the core and the cloud. >> Jason, you mentioned satellite before Cloud Satellite. Could you go into more detail on that? I know it's kind of a new product, what is that about and tell me what's the benefits and why is it exist and what problems does it solve? >> Yeah, so in the most simple terms, Cloud Satellite is the capability to extend IBM's, public cloud into on-prem infrastructure at the edge or in a multicloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to to build your application, OpenShift as a service database, as DevTools, AI capabilities instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's re you know, cloud regions you can now add your private data center or add your Metro provider, or add your AWS or Azure accounts and now consume those services consistently across all those environments. And that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public cloud with kind of location independence you see in hybrid and lets us solve new problems. Like, you know, it's really interesting. We're seeing like AI and data being a primary driver. You know I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like, in a Metro because all of my, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to halfway across the country to some cloud region. And so it lets you extend out in that way. And when you do that, of course, you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with NetApp on how do we then expose NetApp storage into this environment when I'm running in the data center or I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data replicate the data, secure it. Well, how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think John, at the beginning you kind of alluded to this idea of, things are becoming more application centric, right? And we're trying to run a IT architecture that's more centered around the application. Well, by combining clouds knowledge of kind of where everything's running with that common platform like OpenShift with Kubernetes aware of data fabric and storage layer, you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management that spans those environments. >> Yeah, I'm want to come back to that whole impact on IT because this has come up as a major theme here. Think at the it transformation is going to be more about cloud scale, but I want to get to Octavian on the satellite on NetApp's role and how you compliment that. How do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with Cloud Satellite. Obviously this looks like an operating model. How does NetApp fit in. >> Simply put we extend and enable the capabilities that IBM satellite platform provides. I think Jason referred to the storage aspects and you know what we are doing it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around new theory based on temperature, or replicated snapshots or capabilities around, you know, caching, high availability, encryption and so forth. So we believe that our technology integrate very well with red hat openShift and the Kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility in that translation of really distributed computing at scale, from the traditional data center to the edge and to the massive Ops that IBM is building. >> You know, I got to say, but watching you guys work together for many decades now and covering you with theCUBE for the past 10 years or 11 years now been a great partnership. I got to say one thing, that's obvious to me and our team and mainly the world is now you've got a new CEO over at IBM you have a Cloud Focus that's on unwavering. Arvind loves the cloud we all know that. Ecosystems are changing without, you already had a big ecosystem and partnerships. Now it seems to be moving to a level where you got to have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud. So I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes. If you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM NetApp relationship in the new context of this new partnership new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together. >> Yeah, I mean, I could start, I mean I think you're right, that cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment people operate in and the ecosystem is really critical. And I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean, IBM and NetApp, as we said I've been working together for a long time. We rely on them all in our public cloud, for example, in our storage tiers. But with the kind of idea of distributed cloud in the boundaries of public cloud spreading to all of these new environments, those were just new places where we can build really interesting valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with data, deal with these more complex apps, in all the places that they exist. So I think it's been actually really exciting to kind of leverage that opportunity to find, new ways to work together and deliver solutions for our clients. >> Octavian. >> I will say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there's more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center be it in the cloud or at the edge. So our mission is to enable that, Hybrid Cloud or data mobility and enabled persistence rich data, storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform, comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM's services at the edge and or a remote office and I think that's very exciting. >> You guys are both experts and solely season executives to DevOps, DevSecOps, DataOps, whatever you want to call data's here, ecosystems. Guys thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate the insight. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, IBM Think CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) (tranquil music)

>> Voice Over: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back everyone. To theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the power of hybrid cloud and AI. And I'm excited to have Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM's cloud and Data platform, CUBE alumni. Been on going back years and years talking about data. Rob, great to see you, a leader at IBM. Thanks for joining. >> John. Great to see you hope everybody is safe and well and great to be with you again. >> Yeah, love the progress, love the Hybrid Cloud distributed computing, meets operating systems, meets modern applications at the center of it is the new cloud equation. And of course data continues to be the value proposition as the platform. And as you quoted many times and I love your favorite quote. There's no AI without IA. So you got to have the architecture. So that still rings true today and it's just so evergreen and so relevant and cooler than ever with machine learning and AI operations. So let's just jump in. IBM's announced, host a new products and updates at Think. Tell us what you're most excited about and what should people pay attention to. >> Maybe I'll connect two thoughts here. There is no AI without IA, still true today. Meaning, customers that want to do AI need an information architecture. There was an IDC report just last year that said, "Despite all the progress on data, still 90% of data in organizations is either unused or underutilized." So what's amazing is after all the time we've been talking John, we're still really just getting started. Then that kind of connects to another thought, which is I still believe that AI is not going to replace managers, but managers that use AI will replace the managers that do not. And I'd say that's the backdrop for all the announcements that we're doing this week. It's things like auto SQL. How do you actually automate the creation of SQL queries in a large distributed data warehouse? It's never been done before, now we're doing it. It's things like Watson Orchestrate which is super powers in the hands of any business user, just to ask for something to get done. Just ask for a task to get completed. Watson Orchestrator will do that for you. It's maximo mobile. So anybody working in the field now has access to an AI system on their device for how they're managing their assets. So this is all about empowering people and users that use these products are going to have an advantage over the users that are not, that's what I'm really excited about. >> So one of the things that's coming out as Cloud Pak for Data, AI powered automation these are kind of two that you kind of touched upon the SQL thing their. Cloud Pak is there, you got it for Data and this automation trend. What is that about? Why is it important? Can you share with us the relevance of those two things? >> Let's talk broadly about automation. There's two huge markets here. There's the market for RPA business process, $30 billion market. There's the market for AIOps, which is growing 22%, that's on its way to $40 billion. These are enormous markets. Probably the biggest bet IBM has made in the last year is in automation. Explicitly in Watson AIOps. Last June in Think we announced Watson AIOps, then we did the acquisition of Instana, then we announced our intent to acquire Turbonomic. At this point, we're the only company that has all the pieces for automating how you run your IT systems. That's what I mean when I say AIOps. So really pleased with the progress that we've made there. But again, we're just getting started. >> Yeah. Congratulations on the Turbonomic. I was just commenting on that when that announced. IBM buying into the Cloud and the Hybrid cloud is interesting because the shift has happened. It's Public Cloud, it's on premises as Edge. Those two things as a system, it's more important ever than the modernization of the apps that you guys are talking about and having the under the cover capabilities. So as Cloud and Data merge, this kind of control plane concept, this architecture, as you'd said IA. You can't have AI without IA. What is that architecture look like? Can you break down the elements of what's involved? I know there's predictive analytics, there's automation and security. What are the pillars of this architecture? What are the four concepts? If you can explain that. >> Yeah, let's start with the basics. So Hybrid Cloud is about you build your software runs once and you run it anywhere you want, any public cloud,any private cloud. That assumes containers are important to the future of software. We are a hundred percent convinced that is true. OpenShift is the platform that we build on and that many software companies in the world are now building on because it gives you portability for your applications. So then you start to think about if you have that common fabric for Hybrid Cloud, how do you deliver value to customers in addition to the platform? To me, that's four big things. It's automation, we talked about that. It's security, it's predictions. How do you actually make predictions on your data? And then it's modernization. Meaning, how do you actually help customers modernize their applications and get to the Cloud? So those are the things we always talk about, automate, secure, modernize, predict. I think those are the four most important things for every company that's thinking about Cloud and AI. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I love the security side is one of the big conversations in AIOps and day two operations or whatever it's called is shifting left, getting security into the Cloud native kind of development pipeline. But speaking of secure, you have a customer that was talking about this Dow Chemical. About IB empowering Dow zero trust architecture. Could you explain that deal and how that's working? Because that's again, huge enterprise customer, very big scale at scale, zero trust is big, part of it. What is this? >> Let's start with the basics. So what is zero trust mean? It means to have a secure business, you have to start with the assumption that nothing can be trusted. That means you have to think about all aspects of your security practice. How do you align on a security strategy? How do you protect your data assets? How do you manage security threats? So we always talk about a line, protect, manage back to modernize, which is how do you bring all your systems forward to do this? That's exactly what we're doing with the Dow as you heard in that session, which is they've kind of done that whole journey from how they built a security strategy that was designed with zero trust in mind, they're protecting data assets, they're managing cyber threats in real time with a relatively low number of false positives which are the issue that most companies have. They're a tremendous example of a company that jumped on this and has had a really big impact. And they've done it without interfering with their business operations, meaning anybody can lock everything down but then you can't really run your business if you're doing that. They've done it, I think in a really intelligent way. >> That's awesome. We always talk about the big waves. You always give great color commentary on the trends. Right now though, the tsunami seems to be a confluence of many things coming together. What are some of the big trends in waves you're seeing now specifically on the tech side, on the technology side, as well as the business side right now? 'Cause coming out of post COVID, it's pretty clear cloud-native is powering a new growth strategy for customers. Dow was one of them, you just commented on it but there's a bigger wave happening here, both on the tech theater and in the business theater. Can you share your views on and your opinions and envision on these trends? >> I think there's three profound trends that are actually pretty simple to understand. One is, technology is going to decentralize again. We've always gone from centralized architectures to decentralized. Mainframe was centralized, internet mobile decentralized. The first version of public cloud was centralized, meaning bringing everything to one place. Technology is decentralized and again, with Hybrid Cloud, with Edge, pretty straight forward I think that's a trend that we can ride and lead for the next decade. Next is around automation that we talked about. There was a McKinsey report that said, "120 billion hours a year are going to be automated with things like Watson Orchestrator, Watson AIOps." What we're doing around Cloud Pak for automation, we think that time is now. We think you can start to automate in your business today and you may have seen the--example where we're doing customer care and they're now automating 70% of their inbound customer inquiries. It's really amazing. And then the third is around data. The classical problem, I mentioned 90% is still unused or underutilized. This trend on data is not about to slow down because the data being collected is still multiplying 10 X every year and companies have to find a way to organize that data as they collected. So that's going to be a trend that continues. >> You know, I just kind of pinched myself sometimes and hearing you talk with some of our earlier conversations in theCUBE, people who have been on this data mindset have really been successful because it's evolving and growing and it's changing and it's adding more input into the system and the technology is getting better. There's more cloud scales. You mentioned automation and scale are huge. And I think this really kind of wakes everyone up. And certainly the pandemic has woken everyone up to the fact that this is driving new experiences for users and businesses, right? So this is, and then those experiences become expectations. This is the classic UX paradigm that grows from new things. So I got to ask you, with the pandemic what is the been the most compelling ways you seen people operate, create new expectations? Because new things are coming, new big things, and new incremental things are happening. So evolution and revolutionary capabilities. Can you share some examples and your thoughts? >> We've collected a decent bit of data on this. And what's interesting is how much AI has accelerated since the pandemic started. And it's really in five areas, it's customer care that we talked about, virtual agents, customer service, how you do that. It's employee experience. So somewhere to customer care but how do you take care of your employees using AI? Third is around AIOps, we talked about that. Fourth is around regulatory compliance and fifth is around financial planning and budgeting. These are the five major use cases of AI that are getting into production in companies over the last year that's going to continue to accelerate. So I think it's actually fairly clarifying now that we really understand these are the five big things. I encourage anybody watching, pick one of these, get started, then pick the second, then pick the third. If you are not doing all five of these, 12, 18, 24 months from now, you are going to be behind. >> So give us an example of some things that have surprised you in the pandemic and things that blew you away. Like, wow, I didn't see that coming. Can you share on things that you've seen evolve? Cause you're a year ahead of the business units of Cloud and Data, big part of IBM and you see customer examples. Just quickly share some notable use cases or just anecdotal examples of just things that jumped out at you that said, "Wow, that's going to be a double-down moment or that's not going to be anymore." Exposes, the pandemic exposes the good, bad and the ugly. I mean, people got caught off guard, some got a tailwind, some had a headwind, some are retooling. What's your thoughts on what you can you share any examples? >> Like everybody, many things have surprised me in the last year. I am encouraged at how fast many companies were able to adjust and adapt for this world. So that's a credit to all the resiliency that they built into their processes, their systems and their people over time. Related to that, the thing that really sticks out to me again, is this idea of using AI to serve your customers and to serve your employees. We had a hundred customers that went live with one of those two use cases in the first 35 days of the pandemic. Just think about that acceleration. I think without the pandemic, for those hundred it might've taken three years and it happened in 35 days. It's proof that the technology today is so powerful. Sometimes it just takes the initiative to get started and to do something. And all those companies have really benefited from this. So it's great to see. >> Great. Rob, great to have you on. Great to have your commentary on theCUBE. Could you just quickly share in 30 seconds, what is the most important thing people should pay attention to and Think this year from your perspective? What's the big aha moment that you think they could walk away with? >> We have intentionally made this a very technology centric event. Just go look at the demos, play with the technology. I think you will be impressed and start to see, let's say a bit of a new IBM in terms of how we're making technology accessible and easy for anybody to use. >> All right. Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM cloud and Data platform. Great to have you on and looking forward to seeing more of you this year and hopefully in person. Thanks for coming on theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Keep coverage of IBM Think 2021. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

(soft music) >> Voice Over: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back everyone. To theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the power of hybrid cloud and AI. And I'm excited to have Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM's cloud and Data platform, CUBE alumni. Been on going back years and years talking about data. Rob, great to see you, a leader at IBM. Thanks for joining. >> John. Great to see you hope everybody is safe and well and great to be with you again. >> Yeah, love the progress, love the Hybrid Cloud distributed computing, meets operating systems, meets modern applications at the center of it is the new cloud equation. And of course data continues to be the value proposition as the platform. And as you quoted many times and I love your favorite quote. There's no AI without IA. So you got to have the architecture. So that still rings true today and it's just so evergreen and so relevant and cooler than ever with machine learning and AI operations. So let's just jump in. IBM's announced, host a new products and updates at Think. Tell us what you're most excited about and what should people pay attention to. >> Maybe I'll connect two thoughts here. There is no AI without IA, still true today. Meaning, customers that want to do AI need an information architecture. There was an IDC report just last year that said, "Despite all the progress on data, still 90% of data in organizations is either unused or underutilized." So what's amazing is after all the time we've been talking John, we're still really just getting started. Then that kind of connects to another thought, which is I still believe that AI is not going to replace managers, but managers that use AI will replace the managers that do not. And I'd say that's the backdrop for all the announcements that we're doing this week. It's things like auto SQL. How do you actually automate the creation of SQL queries in a large distributed data warehouse? It's never been done before, now we're doing it. It's things like Watson Orchestrate which is super powers in the hands of any business user, just to ask for something to get done. Just ask for a task to get completed. Watson Orchestrator will do that for you. It's Maximo Mbo. So anybody working in the field now has access to an AI system on their device for how they're managing their assets. So this is all about empowering people and users that use these products are going to have an advantage over the users that are not, that's what I'm really excited about. >> So one of the things that's coming out as Cloud Pak for Data, AI powered automation these are kind of two that you kind of touched upon the SQL thing their. Cloud Pak is there, you got it for Data and this automation trend. What is that about? Why is it important? Can you share with us the relevance of those two things? >> Let's talk broadly about automation. There's two huge markets here. There's the market for RPA business process, $30 billion market. There's the market for AIOps, which is growing 22%, that's on its way to $40 billion. These are enormous markets. Probably the biggest bet IBM has made in the last year is in automation. Explicitly in Watson AIOps. Last June in Think we announced Watson AIOps, then we did the acquisition of Instana, then we announced our intent to acquire Turbonomic. At this point, we're the only company that has all the pieces for automating how you run your IT systems. That's what I mean when I say AIOps. So really pleased with the progress that we've made there. But again, we're just getting started. >> Yeah. Congratulations on the Turbonomic. I was just commenting on that when that announced. IBM buying into the Cloud and the Hybrid cloud is interesting because the shift has happened. It's Public Cloud, it's on premises as Edge. Those two things as a system, it's more important ever than the modernization of the apps that you guys are talking about and having the under the cover capabilities. So as Cloud and Data merge, this kind of control plane concept, this architecture, as you'd said IA. You can't have AI without IA. What is that architecture look like? Can you break down the elements of what's involved? I know there's predictive analytics, there's automation and security. What are the pillars of this architecture? What are the four concepts? If you can explain that. >> Yeah, let's start with the basics. So Hybrid Cloud is about you build your software runs once and you run it anywhere you want, any public cloud,any private cloud. That assumes containers are important to the future of software. We are a hundred percent convinced that is true. OpenShift is the platform that we build on and that many software companies in the world are now building on because it gives you portability for your applications. So then you start to think about if you have that common fabric for Hybrid Cloud, how do you deliver value to customers in addition to the platform? To me, that's four big things. It's automation, we talked about that. It's security, it's predictions. How do you actually make predictions on your data? And then it's modernization. Meaning, how do you actually help customers modernize their applications and get to the Cloud? So those are the things we always talk about, automate, secure, modernize, predict. I think those are the four most important things for every company that's thinking about Cloud and AI. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I love the security side is one of the big conversations in AIOps and day two operations or whatever it's called is shifting left, getting security into the Cloud native kind of development pipeline. But speaking of secure, you have a customer that was talking about this Dow Chemical. About IB empowering Dow zero trust architecture. Could you explain that deal and how that's working? Because that's again, huge enterprise customer, very big scale at scale, zero trust is big, part of it. What is this? >> Let's start with the basics. So what is zero trust mean? It means to have a secure business, you have to start with the assumption that nothing can be trusted. That means you have to think about all aspects of your security practice. How do you align on a security strategy? How do you protect your data assets? How do you manage security threats? So we always talk about a line, protect, manage back to modernize, which is how do you bring all your systems forward to do this? That's exactly what we're doing with the Dow as you heard in that session, which is they've kind of done that whole journey from how they built a security strategy that was designed with zero trust in mind, they're protecting data assets, they're managing cyber threats in real time with a relatively low number of false positives which are the issue that most companies have. They're a tremendous example of a company that jumped on this and has had a really big impact. And they've done it without interfering with their business operations, meaning anybody can lock everything down but then you can't really run your business if you're doing that. They've done it, I think in a really intelligent way. >> That's awesome. We always talk about the big waves. You always give great color commentary on the trends. Right now though, the tsunami seems to be a confluence of many things coming together. What are some of the big trends in waves you're seeing now specifically on the tech side, on the technology side, as well as the business side right now? 'Cause coming out of post COVID, it's pretty clear cloud-native is powering a new growth strategy for customers. Dow was one of them, you just commented on it but there's a bigger wave happening here, both on the tech theater and in the business theater. Can you share your views on and your opinions and envision on these trends? >> I think there's three profound trends that are actually pretty simple to understand. One is, technology is going to decentralize again. We've always gone from centralized architectures to decentralized. Mainframe was centralized, internet mobile decentralized. The first version of public cloud was centralized, meaning bringing everything to one place. Technology is decentralized and again, with Hybrid Cloud, with Edge, pretty straight forward I think that's a trend that we can ride and lead for the next decade. Next is around automation that we talked about. There was a McKinsey report that said, "120 billion hours a year are going to be automated with things like Watson Orchestrator, Watson AIOps." What we're doing around Cloud Pak for automation, we think that time is now. We think you can start to automate in your business today and you may have seen the C QVS example where we're doing customer care and they're now automating 70% of their inbound customer inquiries. It's really amazing. And then the third is around data. The classical problem, I mentioned 90% is still unused or underutilized. This trend on data is not about the slow down because the data being collected is still multiplying 10 X every year and companies have to find a way to organize that data as they collected. So that's going to be a trend that continues. >> You know, I just kind of pinched myself sometimes and hearing you talk with some of our earlier conversations in theCUBE, people who have been on this data mindset have really been successful because it's evolving and growing and it's changing and it's adding more input into the system and the technology is getting better. There's more cloud scales. You mentioned automation and scale are huge. And I think this really kind of wakes everyone up. And certainly the pandemic has woken everyone up to the fact that this is driving new experiences for users and businesses, right? So this is, and then those experiences become expectations. This is the classic UX paradigm that grows from new things. So I got to ask you, with the pandemic what is the been the most compelling ways you seen people operate, create new expectations? Because new things are coming, new big things, and new incremental things are happening. So evolution and revolutionary capabilities. Can you share some examples and your thoughts? >> We've collected a decent bit of data on this. And what's interesting is how much AI has accelerated since the pandemic started. And it's really in five areas, it's customer care that we talked about, virtual agents, customer service, how you do that. It's employee experience. So somewhere to customer care but how do you take care of your employees using AI? Third is around AIOps, we talked about that. Fourth is around regulatory compliance and fifth is around financial planning and budgeting. These are the five major use cases of AI that are getting into production in companies over the last year that's going to continue to accelerate. So I think it's actually fairly clarifying now that we really understand these are the five big things. I encourage anybody watching, pick one of these, get started, then pick the second, then pick the third. If you are not doing all five of these, 12, 18, 24 months from now, you are going to be behind. >> So give us an example of some things that have surprised you in the pandemic and things that blew you away. Like, wow, I didn't see that coming. Can you share on things that you've seen evolve? Cause you're a year ahead of the business units of Cloud and Data, big part of IBM and you see customer examples. Just quickly share some notable use cases or just anecdotal examples of just things that jumped out at you that said, "Wow, that's going to be a double-down moment or that's not going to be anymore." Exposes, the pandemic exposes the good, bad and the ugly. I mean, people got caught off guard, some got a tailwind, some had a headwind, some are retooling. What's your thoughts on what you can you share any examples? >> Like everybody, many things have surprised me in the last year. I am encouraged at how fast many companies were able to adjust and adapt for this world. So that's a credit to all the resiliency that they built into their processes, their systems and their people over time. Related to that, the thing that really sticks out to me again, is this idea of using AI to serve your customers and to serve your employees. We had a hundred customers that went live with one of those two use cases in the first 35 days of the pandemic. Just think about that acceleration. I think without the pandemic, for those hundred it might've taken three years and it happened in 35 days. It's proof that the technology today is so powerful. Sometimes it just takes the initiative to get started and to do something. And all those companies have really benefited from this. So it's great to see. >> Great. Rob, great to have you on. Great to have your commentary on theCUBE. Could you just quickly share in 30 seconds, what is the most important thing people should pay attention to and Think this year from your perspective? What's the big aha moment that you think they could walk away with? >> We have intentionally made this a very technology centric event. Just go look at the demos, play with the technology. I think you will be impressed and start to see, let's say a bit of a new IBM in terms of how we're making technology accessible and easy for anybody to use. >> All right. Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM cloud and Data platform. Great to have you on and looking forward to seeing more of you this year and hopefully in person. Thanks for coming on theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Keep coverage of IBM Think 2021. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

(Upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE got two great guests from Deloitte Consulting Dave Knight who manages the Red Hat Relationship, Lee he's the lead there, and Mike Bourgeois who's the Public Sector Managing Director both from Deloitte Consulting LLP official name. Guys, great to come on, and we were just talking before camera about all the stories. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Like I said we were just talking about all the stories from the transition from pre-COVID, COVID. Now we've got a view into post-COVID. I want to dig into that 'cause there's a lot of things happening. You guys have been in the trenches, front lines bringing solutions, but before we get into that, can you guys just introduce yourself share your roles at Deloitte and give us a quick overview of what you work on. >> Yeah, so again, thanks for having us John Dave Knight I'm a solution architect and Global Red Hat Alliance Manager for Deloitte. I've got responsibility for making sure that play nicely in the sandbox together or we've got a joint customer and solutions to deliver to those customers. >> Hi everyone, thanks for having us John, I'm a Managing Director Mike Bushwa out of Boston Texas. I am coming up on year 20 and Public Sector Consulting. My area of expertise is large state government systems that serve the needs of millions of citizens and thousands of state workers, good to be here. >> Yeah. Great to have you. And I wanted to chime in with you right away because Mike you are living in probably one of the hottest markets Public Sector. I've been following that for many, many years, generations actually from the early computer industry GSA contracts, all these contracts you've got all the Public Sector, they move very slowly but now the pandemic, there was no place to hide. Everything got pulled back, disruption, you can't just shut down critical infrastructure and critical services. People had to move fast. What was your experience and how is it now give us a taste of some of the challenges and the landscape. >> You bet John, so we talked a little bit before we started this, but my 20 year consulting career, I can't think of anything really in close to this, other than maybe Y2K and as Dave mentioned the Affordable Care Act Legislation in 2009, though that was a much smaller scale as it turned out to be. So I would be remiss not to share examples of extraordinary challenges our clients have had related to the pandemic. Department of Labor and Health and Human Service Agencies for example, responded to the pandemic in rapid timeframe that were rarely seen in government. Citizens that were used to coming in appealed offices, We're now required to do most things virtually. Deloitte has been privileged to assist clients with digital solutions across the country in response to this unprecedented event. And so I'd like to share just a couple of examples. The first is for Department of Labor, the pandemic contributed to millions of layoffs throughout the country Department of Labor workers found called volumes increasing by a 1000% in some cases, the amount of increased volume required agencies across the country hire temporary workers to help out. Millions of new unemployment claims needed to be filed in benefits rapidly provided to citizens of name. So the big challenge was the agency had to figure out how to rapidly file claims into the unemployment system, rather than requiring new citizens to use an external web application they were really unfamiliar, the agency needed more efficient approach. The approach we used was to create an internal web application that enabled workers to file unemployment insurance claims on behalf of citizens. Workers collected the necessary data from citizens and claims were filed into the system. The application enabled workers to focus on filing claims rather than sort of a technical support role showing how to people use an external web application. More citizen were served in much less time, claims are filed efficiently by train workers which resulted in benefits being received in a much more timely fashion. And so a second example is, with Department of Human Services. So one stay as mentioned Citizens were used to going into field offices but suddenly they were told you can't come into the field office. So once they provided a 100% virtual application and the important part here is certification solution for the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or DSNAP for short. this application was stood up in two weeks, families who needed food assistance can now apply and be certified for benefits remotely. Today over 50,000 cases have certified and citizens receiving food nutrition assistance. Back to you John. >> So, I mean obviously there's some great use cases you got, basically I got to work at home, new architecture there you got to have a new workflows. I mean, this poses some real challenges. How did you guys put it together? I mean, Dave take us through where this all fits in with the Red Hat, because obviously now it's new deployment new capabilities have to be deployed for the pandemic. How does this bring together the partnership with Red Hat? >> Yeah, so great question and it really plays to the strength of both Deloitte and Red Hat, right? The success stories that Mike has illustrated show how we can quickly pivot as a firm to delivering these types of solutions and help our customers think through innovative ways to solve the problems. So, I mean the prime example that Mike just gave, everything used to be done in offices. Now it's all done remotely cause you can't go to the office even if you want to. And that is very much aligned with the innovation we get with our partnership with Red Hat, right? They've led the way in open source and some of the technologies that we've leveraged that our solutions include, answerable for automation, some of the middleware products, and I would say one of the cornerstones is the OpenShift Platform. Now that allows us to greatly accelerate the development and delivery of those solutions to our customers. Sort of again, aligning our innovative thinking with Red Hats Innovative Technologies. >> What would you say if someone said, "what's the partnership strengths and what needs specifically are you addressing with customers and customer needs?" >> So I, again, I think our lean towards innovation is a common thread across both firms and where we have our greatest strength. We like to take our customers on a journey but it's not our journey, it's their journey, right? So we help them figure out where they want to go and how they want to get there in a way that aligns with their business goals, their budgets all the sort of factors that drive those things and Red Hat is very open to that approach. They sort of invented the crowdsourcing of open source they made it into a business model. They've developed that from literally nothing. And that aligns very nicely with us. That's one of the key strengths. We also are firm believers in open source again to the degree that our customers like the leverage that to drive their journeys. And we're seeing that, especially in the Public Sector Space as being a key driver of the technologies they employ. >> Mike, I want to come back to you on this open ma component open question, open source, open to technology open innovation out in the open as Red Hat calls it. How does Red Hat open source software, address the needs for your customers for security and on-premise considerations. >> I'll talk a little bit about open source principles in general still the open source principles of transparency meritocracy community problem solving and collaboration. These are on its of both software innovation as well as organizational transformation. One of the highest demand transformation needs that I'm seeing in the market is the desire to adopt innovative technology, and most importantly, moving workloads to the cloud. It's no longer a thought, it is an imperative moving workloads to the cloud, on new deals hosted in the cloud, on an existing, is it large systems let Deloitte help us get to the cloud. So I believe the key to success embracing the cloud is recognizing first the need for change in people, processes and technology. The vehicle for this transformation is DevSecOps and innovative open source platforms, such as the OpenShift platform that Dave mentioned. OpenShift focuses on people, processes and technology and the security conversation becomes even easier. I mean, I see Linux was around for years, and we've always used Linux on our Java based workloads now we can have the conversation about saying, Hey, well that se Linux operating system we've been using for years now, there's this really cool Container Management Platform that we can solve real problems like auto scaling, in my Health and Human Services career, I can remember every year when open enrollment comes around systems engineers are teed up, and ready to manually add those to a BMR cluster or something like that. Well, now we don't have to do these things. We can rely on Kubernetes so auto scale, and then and get rid of those instances when workload demands seven resolved. So it's a really cool technology kind of behind the scenes. It's not the dog and pony show sometimes but in the end it helps the clients and Deloitte remain consistent with those service level agreements. >> That's a great example about the open enrollment illustrates the fact that, you got to provision more stuff to take that load on it. It's always hard in Public Sector you might not have the speed. So I got to follow up and ask you, you guys have had wins in the Public Sector lately with Red Hat, you guys Deloitte and Red Hat working together and get some wins under your belt, on around cloud and cloud and technology obviously with the pandemic has needs there. Are you guys seeing any particular sector challenges specifically around Public Sector as it goes this next level a lot of modernization happening we're seeing that, but any challenges that you're seeing, can you give some examples of how these challenges are being addressed? First talk about the challenges and then give some examples of how they're overcoming them. >> So I can jump in here with this one then, and Mike I think you probably have some maybe Public Sector specific examples, but one of the things that I think is common across all industries is resource constraints, right? And particularly as we look for human resources and not in the HR sense, but developers, CIS admins those types of resources as Mike said, the cloud is here to stay, right? And it's not something that people are thinking about it's de facto part of the conversation. And that's great, but it leads to silos of skills which puts further sort of strain on a limited pool of resources within most sites IT organization. So something like an OpenShift, something like an Ansible solves problems related to resource constraints, because they're skills that are portable across cloud environments, right? If you can manage OpenShift you can manage OpenShift on-prem, you can manage it recently released AWS version of that ROSA on the Azure version of that. So it's no matter where you're running it you've got a common set of skills and access sort of a force multiplier, same thing with Ansible automation, right? If you can write scripts, with an Ansible you can do those repeatable tasks in a much more efficient fashion. And again sort of multiplying the capacity of your existing workforce. >> So you've got an operating leverage there. I mean, this is what you're getting at is that, Public Sector and other commercial areas they kind of got to get used to this fact that, you get some leverage here, you get some operating leverage. >> More or less has always been a thing in IT. And it's not relenting that's for sure. >> It's been more at the more, with less has always been kind of a tagline for budget cuts, right? You can squeeze more out of the investment. Here it's kind of like do more with less than the sense of there's more net new things happening with leverage. So, I mean, do you agree with that? What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's more with less from a resource perspective, right? Typically it was budget, but no money is just another resource. Now we're getting into the personnel side of it. The other thing I would say is, something like an OpenShift Platform allows the Mike's point around DevOps, it allows the developers to develop, right? I have an article in wired.com about this, where developers are saddled with meetings and they have to become concerned with infrastructure and they have traditionally and security. And I am I doing all these things that aren't related to development. If you have a good DevOps Platform in place the security folks can build guard rails into the platform and the developers can just go develop which is what they want to do in the first place. Yeah exactly, that's another riff on the more, with less, again in a resource, the human resource way versus the budget way. >> Yeah, and that really is where OpenShift ties in. Mike what's your take on this? Because with this kind of program ability infrastructure as code DevSecOps kind of modern developers, Public Sector loves that, because they just want to build the new apps. They got to modernize. So change the infrastructure once. And then a lot of ma many benefits on top of it. It's almost like, it sounds like an operating system to me. >> Yeah, lots of thoughts going around my head right now but I'll say the more with less to me when I'm having client conversations is imagine a world of higher innovation, more technology at lower costs, right? I mean, so CIO is light up when I explained to them the orders of magnitude cost savings on top of the innovation introduced to their environment. So when moving workloads to the cloud is not as easy as just packaging up a binary and dropping in on a name, your cloud provider, right? There's an entire, a blueprinting strategy. There's a Cloud Native Architecture, modernization discussion, so we do those sorts of things, at Deloitte and we work with clients very closely to do that. I want to say teaming with Red Hat allows us to be proactive with our design and reference architecture validation. The Collaborative Partnership in Relationship allows us to connect senior engineers from Deloitte and Red Hat. So we have low level strategic discussions, we validate our assumptions and optimize to use a Red Hat technology. What we're doing in Public Sector is separating the monolithic application into layers. And whenever it comes to technologies like Ansible, like OpenShift, like Jenkins, all of these things that any application needs and Public Sector, we're saying out to the account teams across the country, look this is a slower layer DevOps Platform. And by the way, you can run any .Net or Java based workload on it. So we're trying to make opinionated reference architecture so that regardless of the solution, we can just go to market with that platform that tried and true production application. So I'll give a quick example John, if now's a convenient time regarding, well, one of the things that we've done for particular state client. >> Definitely yeah, give the use cases we love those. >> Yes so one of the impactful modernization that struck my mind was the State of Washington. They've mentioned the affordable care act earlier, there are two major things that came out of that. One was the eligibility and enrollment systems had to be modified across all 50 states. But the second thing and the primary driver behind the affordable care act was health insurance exchange. A way for millions of citizens to have access to healthcare using Subsidized Health Insurance Plans. So in Washington and health benefits exchange is that health insurance exchange, State of Washington has been a client of Deloitte since 2012. The solution was originally designed using closed source proprietary products. There are three drivers for change. The first is the API gateway was end of life and needed to be replaced. Number two was the client wanted it to move health benefit exchange to the cloud from an on-premise hosting arrangement. And third is reducing cost of those solution with innovative products. So the agency was looking for a platform that provided flexibility, auto-scaling and performance and lower cost of ownership. So we worked with the agency and we evaluated a variety of API Management and Integration Platforms after reviewing the outcomes for each proof of concept the agency decided to move forward with Red Hats, three skill API Management Platform, Red Hat Fuse for Integration and OpenShift Container Platform that offered the auto-scaling continuous integration tools and out of the box monitoring and reporting capabilities proactively monitor the health of the solution. I often describe a little bit of OpenShift as a data center or DevSecOps in the box. It just is all there. You don't need to add layers on top of OpenShift install and configure it, tune it and just you're off and running in a short amount of time. So three outcomes I'll mention, go ahead, John. >> NO continue, I thought you were finished. So on the outcomes side, the first outcome the agency substantially lower the cost of ownership using commercially supported open source while increasing access to innovative emerging technology. So the agency wanted a solution not only to meet their current needs, but extend the solution going forward. The beautiful thing about OpenShift is you can drop a container images into the platform without installing an operating system. It's all just there and it's spreading to be extended. The number two outcome cloud migration. Deloitte work collaboratively with the agencies and infrastructure and managed services team to successfully migrate the health benefit exchange to the cloud. And the last thing a bit obvious, but that's successful release, working collaboratively with our client. We were able to migrate the solution within 100 days from making the products decision. The cut over to the new solution was seamless with minimal downtime and zero production issues or exceptionally proud of that. >> Great stuff, great use case. And again, those are great business examples. Dave, I want to get this last question to you and Mike can chime in too. As Red Hat Summit evolves, and we're hearing the theme here at the event about transformation is the innovation, Innovation is about scale. When you hear the words like in a box or Hybrid Cloud you hear about an operating environment. So it's an opportunity to set the table for the next generation, this is what I see. What do you guys see as people talk about Hybrid Cloud and soon to be Multiple Cloud? Because you guys you said have tough relationships. You deal with IBM and Red Hat and you probably deal with other people. Clients want, from what we hear they want back to the Multi Vendor Open Connection Distributed Environment. That's what they want. So how does your relationship evolve, given all this is happening? How do you see the future, please chime in. >> Thanks, that's a fantastic question. I actually think the market is coming catching up to where I've been thinking for quite a while. And that is the Hybrid is kind of where it's at. A lot of customers have been in some sort of Hybrid mode as part of the step or a journey to the cloud, getting all the way to the cloud. But I think we're seeing some transition. I know customers are starting to ask me more and more about Hybrid solutions for a variety of reasons, right? The easy workloads for the most part have either been moved or be are being moved, or at least there's a strategy and a plan to get them moved. And now we're starting to be asked about some of the more difficult architecture type questions, right? The workloads that are a little bit more sticky to the on-premise model. And so Hybrid becoming more of the endpoint as opposed to a step along the journey. The other big thing is some repatriation, right? Workloads coming off of cloud. Maybe they seem like good candidates but for whatever reason, the cost drivers or other things weren't realized, let's get them back on premise. Maybe it's a regulatory thing and new regulations are making folks uncomfortable. So I see Hybrid as a pretty interesting next wave of cloud, Deloitte as a far or we're skilling up or tooling up in order to address the needs of our customers, again are starting to ask us these really challenging questions about Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures. >> Yeah and just the key point there is that you think about it like with the way you're discussing it, it's a platform, not a tool, right? So if you think about it like a platform then you can move things around and look at architectures and changes of how resources and workloads are deployed and then what data you're getting from it. Whether you bring it to a factory, for instance you say, Hey, okay, we're going to put it on prem because it's a factory or whatever, and you need more data. What was the changeover? This is like a day to operations kind of mindset. What's your comment on that? >> Well I mean I have actually going back three years now, one of the marketing lines that we developed internally, was moved to a platform, not a provider. But because you get that flexibility, now, the reality is what works stay where they're put for a variety of reasons. But I think one of those reasons could be, because they're put in places where they tend to not want to move, right? So if we could put them into a platform where, there is some portability built into the platform, I think we might have a different sort of outcomes for customers. And I think architecture is absolutely the key, right? That to me is the secret sauce here. >> Mike set up for you to close us out here, platform, Public Sector, Hybrid, that's what they want. It's an ideal scenario for anyone in Public Sector and in general, and why wouldn't you want to have a great platform that's it can be programmed, and rearchitected at will for the benefit of the business powered by software. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, all good points and I will agree with Dave that Hybrid is certainly evolving. Eight years ago, Hybrid was consuming and address validation API in the cloud and not custom coding that, but today I do agree that Hybrid Cloud is all about a vehicle a way of moving workloads across data centers. It's an architecture that is encapsulated by something like an OpenShift so that you can federate your workloads across data centers. You can put them in one or easily moved them to the other. Maybe that's for a variety of reasons. It could be compute and storage is being reduced by one provider versus the other. So the solutions were we're designing today, they are data center agnostic, we're not being tied to data centers anymore. The best design solutions, you can just let them move in their easy manner. So that that's my take on Hybrid Cloud. And I would say the and Red Hat are making investments to help us advance that thinking help us advance those solutions. We had Deloitte have created a Red Hat OpenShift lab environment, and we've done this purposely to validate reference architectures to show account teams the way we have delivered the very very large accounts to show them what DevSecOps to means from a product perspective and to give them opinionated processes to be successful in delivering these large type solutions. >> Dave, Mike, thanks for coming on, and I appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE and sharing the perspective on the Red Hat Relationship with Deloitte Consulting. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> This is CUBE Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021, am John for your host, thanks for watching.

(melodious music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're a virtual this year. But we'll be in real life soon, right around the corner, as we come out of COVID. We got a great guest, a CUBE alumni, Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow VP, CTO for IBM automation. Jerry, great to see you. Been on since almost since the early days of theCUBE. Good to see you >> Yeah, John. Thrilled to be back again. Thank you. >> What I love about our conversations, one is you're super technical. You've got patents under your belt. You're on the cutting edge. You've been involved in web services and web technologies for a long, long time. You're constantly riding the wave. And also you're a creator of a great podcast called "The Art of Automation", which is the subject of this discussion. As automation becomes central in cloud operations and Hybrid Cloud, which is the main theme of this event this year and the industry. So great to see you. First give us a little background for the folks that may not know you, about your history with IBM and who you are. >> Yeah. So thanks John. So I'm Jerry Cuomo. I've been with IBM for about three decades and I started my career at IBM research in Yorktown at the dawn of the internet. And I've been incredibly fortunate as you mentioned, to be on the forefront of many technology trends over the last three decades, internet software, middleware, including being one of the founding fathers of WebSphere software. I recently helped launch the IBM blockchain initiative and now all about AI powered automation. Which actually brings me back to my roots of studying AI in graduate school. So it's kind of come full circle for me, really enjoying the topic. >> It's funny you mentioned AI in graduate school. I was really kind of into AI when I was an undergraduate and get a master's degree in Computer Science. I kind of went the MBA route. But if you think about what was going on in the eighties during those systems times, a lot of the concepts of systems programming and cloud operations kind of gel well together. So you got this confluence of computer science and engineering AKA now DevOps, DevSecOps, coming together. This is actually a really unique time to bring back the best of the best concepts. Whether it's AI and systems and computer science and engineering into automation. Could you share your view on this? Because you're in a unique position, you've been there done that, now you're on the cutting edge. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely John. And just when you think of automation and time, automation is not new. That literally, if you go into Wikipedia and you look up automation, you see patents and references to like steam engine regulators at the dawn of the industrial era, right? So automation has been around and in its simplest form, automation whether it was back then, whether it was in the eighties or today it's about applying technology that uses technology software to perform tasks that were once exclusively done by us, humans. But now what we're seeing is AI coming into the picture and changing the landscape in an interesting way. But I think at its essence, automation is this two-step dance of both eliminating repetitive mundane tasks that help reduce errors and free up our time. So we get back the gift of time, but also helps. It's not about taking jobs away at that point, it's a sentence of two-step dance. That's step one. But if you stop there, you're not getting the full value. Step two is to augment our skills. And to use automation, to help augment our skills. And we get speed, we get quality, we get lower costs, we get improved user experience. So whether it was back in the steam engine times or today with AI, automation is evolving with technology. >> And it's interesting too, as a student of the history of the computer industry, as you are and now a creator with your podcast, which we'll get to in a second. You're starting to see the intersection of these concerts and not bespoke as much as they used to be. You got transformation, digital transformation and innovation are connected and scale. If you think about those three concepts, they don't stand alone anymore. They can stand alone, but they work better together. Transformation. And it is the innovation, innovation provides cloud scale. So if you think about automation, automation is powering this dynamic of taking all that undifferentiated heavy lifting and moving the creativity and the skillset into higher integrated areas. Can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, no, right on there. When you talk about transformation, jeez, look around us. The pandemic has made, transformation and specifically digital transformation, the default. So everything is digital. Whether it's ordering a pizza, visiting a doctor through telemedicine, or this zoom WebEx based workplace that we live in. But picture a telemedicine environment, talking about transformation and going digital. With 10 X more users, they can't hire 10 X more support staff. And think about it. I forgot my password, does this work on my version of the Apple iPhone or all of that kind of stuff? So their support desks are lit up, right? So as they scale digitally, automation is the relief that that comes into play, which is just in time. So the digital transformation needs automation. And John, I think about it like this, businesses like cars have become computers. So they're programmable. So automation software just like in the cars, it makes the car self-driving. I think about the Tesla model three, which I recently test drove. So with this digital acceleration, digital opens the door for automation. And now we can muse about self-driving business. We can muse about maybe that's step one, right? That's the remove repetitive work, but maybe we can actually augment business to have an autopilot. So it doesn't need us there all the time to drive. And that's the scale that you talked about. That's the scale we need. So automation is really like the peanut butter and chocolate. Digital is the peanut butter automation is the chocolate. They go well together and they produce amazing tastes. >> Yeah. That's a really interesting insight. And I was just put an exclamation point on that because you mentioned self-driving business you're implying, you said the business is a computer. So if you just think about that mind blowing concept for a second. If it's a computer, what's the operating system and what's the suite of applications that are on top of it? So, okay. Let's go in the old days you had a windows machine and you had office, which was a system software, applications software construct. If you map that to the entire company, you're talking about Red Hat and IBM will kind of come working together. Kind of connects the dots a little bit on what Red Hat could, because they're not breaking system company. So if Hybrid Cloud is the system, edge, hybrid, then you got the application suite is all software for the business. >> That's right. That's right. And if you listen to anything these days about what IBM stands for, it's Hybrid Cloud and think Red Hat as kind of the core element of that with OpenShift and AI. And both of those really matter in terms of automation and maybe I'll come back to the Hybrid Cloud or Red Hat thing in a second, but let's just talk about Watson and AI, which is the application. You mentioned scale, which I'm so glad you did. AI could help scale automation. And the trick is, is that automation sometimes gets stuck. It gets stuck when it's working with data that is noisy or unstructured. So there's a lot of structured data in your organization. With that, we can breeze through automation. But if there is more ambiguous data, unstructured, noisy, you need a human in the loop. And when you get a human in the loop, it slows things down. So what AI can start to do, AI and its subordinates, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision. We can start to make sense of both unstructured and structured data together and we can make a big deal going forward. So that's the AI part. You mentioned Red Hat and, and Hybrid Cloud Park. Well, think about it this way, when you shop, how many stores do you... You don't just shop in one store, right? You go to specialty stores to pick up that special catsup, I don't know or mustard. (audio cuts) In one store and maybe do shopping in another store. Customers using clouds John, aren't very different. They have their specialty places to go. Maybe they're going to be running workloads in Google, involving search and AI related to search. And they're going to be using other clouds for more specialty things. From that perspective, that's a view of hybrid. Customers today, take that shopping analogy. They're going to be using Salesforce or Servicenow, IBM cloud, they have a private cloud. So when you think about automating that world, it's the real world. It's how we shop, whether it's for groceries or for cloud. The Hybrid Cloud is a reality. And how do you make sense of that? Because when an average customer has five clouds, how do you deal with five things? How do you make it easy, normalize? And that's what Red hat really does. >> It's interesting. I'll just share with you though. When I interviewed Arvin, who is now the CEO of IBM when he was at Red Hat summit 2019 in San Francisco. Before he made the acquisition, I was peppering him with questions. Like, you need to get this cloud and he loves cloud, you know, he loves cloud. So he was smiling. He just wanted to say it, he wanted to just say it. And I think Red hat brings that operating kind of mindset where the clouds are just subsystems in the OS of the middleware, which is now software which is software defined business. And this kind of is the talk of your views. Now you have a podcast called "Art of Automation". We want to get that in there, for the folks watching. Search for the podcast, "Art of Automation". This is the stories that you tell. Tell us some stories, from this phenomena. What's the impact of automation for the holistic picture? >> Well, it starts with a lot of, I guess it starts with customers. The stories start with the customer. So we're hearing from customers that AI and automation is where they're investing in 2021. For all the reasons we briefly mentioned, and IBM has a lot to offer there. So we've made AI powered automation a priority. But John, in the pursuit of making it a priority, I've started talking with many of our subject matter experts and was floored by their knowledge, their energy, their passion, and their stories. And I said, we can't keep this to ourselves. We can't keep this locked away. We have to share it. We have to let it out. So basically this is what started the podcast around that. And since then, we've had many industry luminaries from IBM and outside. Starting with customers. We had Klaus Jensen who is the CIO of Memorial Clones Kettering Hospital to talk about automation in healthcare. And he shared great stories. You need to listen to them, about automation is not going to take the place of doctors. But automation will help better read x-rays and look at those shades of gray on the x-ray and interpret it much better than we can. And be able to ingest all of the up-to-date medical research to provide pointers and make connections that the human may not be able to do in that moment. So the two working together are better than any individual. Carol Polson recently joined me to talk, and she's the CIO for Cooperators, to talk about automation and insurance. And she had some great stories too. So John, with that, a bunch of IBM, great IBM fellows like Rama Akkiraju, who is one of Forbes top 20 women in AI research. Talking about AI ops. And also Ruchir Puri talking, and Ruchir has been working on Watson since jeopardy to tell stories about ultimately now how we're teaching AI to code and all the modern programming languages. And really automating application modernization and the like. Four keyed episodes in, we have those under our belt. About 6,000 downloads so far. So it's coming along pretty well. Thanks for asking, John. >> The key is you're a content creator now, as well as a fellow. And this is the democratization, as we say direct to audience, share those stories. Also here, I think you released an ebook. Tell us a little quickly about that. We've got one minute left, give a quick plug for the ebook. >> The book echoes the podcast. Chapters relate to the episodes of the book. We're dropping the first five chapters plus forward for free on the IBM website. Other chapters will become available and drop as they become available. The book makes the content searchable on the internet. We go into more detail with advice on how to get started. You get to hear the topics and the voice of those subject matter experts. And I really suggest you go out and check it out. >> All right, Jerry Cuomo. IBM fellow VP, CTO, IBM automation. Also a content creator, podcast "Art of Automation." Jerry, we're going to list it out on our Silicon angle and our cube sites, gets you some extra love on that. Love the podcast, love the focus on sharing from experts in the field. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. Thank you so much for having me again, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Here for IBM Think 2021. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the cube with >>Digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual were not yet in real life. We're doing another remote interviews with two great guests cube alumni of course, I'm john for your host of the cube. We've got Jason McGee, IBM fellow VP and CTO of IBM cloud platform and octavian Tennessee. Senior Vice president Hybrid Cloud Engineering at Netapp. Both cube alumni. It's great to see you both. Thanks for coming on. Thank >>you. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. >>So we were just talking before we came on camera that you know what it feels like. We've had this conversation, you know, a long time ago we have Hybrid cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys many times on the cube. So now it's mainstream, it's here in the real world, everyone gets it. It's not, there's no real debate now. Multi cloud, that's that. People are debating that. Which means that's right around the corner. So Hybrid cloud is here and now, um, Jason this is really the focus and this is also brings together Netapp in your partnership and talk about the relationship first with hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, I mean, you know, look, we've talked to a number of times together I think in the industry, uh, maybe, maybe a few years ago people were debating whether Hybrid cloud was a real thing. We don't have that conversation anymore. I think, um, you know, enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of Covid and kind of how we work differently now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on prem and off premise systems. Probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers, um, and what they're looking for now is how do I do that and how do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in. Um, and then how do I get more and more of my work into those environments? And it's been interesting. I think the first, the first waves of cloud, we're infrastructure centric and externally application focused, they were easier things. And now we're moving into more mission critical, more state fel more data oriented workloads. And that brings with it new challenges on where applications run and and how we leverage the club >>Octavia. You guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years, uh, data centric company that it has always been great engineering team. You're on the cloud. Hybrid cloud engineering. What's the current status of the relationship? Give us an update on how the it's vectoring into the hybrid clouds this year? Senior Vice President. Hybrid cloud engineering. >>Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM I think uh that happened. IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers. And we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong um joint hydrochloric value proposition for customers. Netapp storage and data services complement what IBM does in terms of products and solutions, both for on premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions solutions that span data mobility to the governance for the new workloads that Jason has talked about. >>And how are some of the customer challenges that you're seeing? Obviously software defined networking, software defined storage, uh, deVOps has now turned into Deb's sec ops. So you have now that program ability requirement with four dynamic applications, application driven infrastructure, all these buzzwords point to one thing the infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. >>Yeah, I would say uh infrastructure, you know, will continue to be uh you know, top of mind for everybody whether they're building a private uh you know, cloud or whether there um you know, trying to leverage, you know, something like IBM cloud, I think people want to consume, you know, infrastructure is an A P I I think they want simplicity, you know, security, I I think they want to manage their cost, you know very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM cloud to build such capabilities. >>Jason what's how are you guys help on some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and re factoring previous stuff don't transforming but also innovating at the same time as a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the Hybrid challenges? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of dimensions of that problem, but the one that that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how um kind of the consumption model of public cloud, you know, api driven self service capabilities operated for you, how that consumption model is starting to spread because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these more mission critical data centric kind of workloads was well, I can't always move that applications of public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network closer to my end users out where data is being generated maybe in an IOT context. And when you had those requirements, you had to kind of switch operating models, you had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model. And you know, we have a common platform and things like open shift that can run everywhere. But the missing piece was how do I consume everything as a service everywhere. And so recently we launched this thing called have been brought satellite, which we've been working with the T V. And his team on on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both locational flexibility with public consumption. When you do that, you of course running a much more diverse infrastructure environment. You have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with multi tier applications, you know, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this. No complex environment. >>We've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade. As the evolution goes okay, I gotta ask you this is critical path for companies. They want the storage ready infrastructure. You guys have been doing that for many, many decades party with IBM for sure. But now they're all getting a hybrid cloud big time and it's not it's attributed computing is what it is. It's an operating model. When someone asked you guys what your capabilities are, how do you answer that? In today's world? Because you have storage is well known. You got a great product, people know that, but what is net apps capabilities? When I say I'm going all in and hybrid cloud, complete changeover. >>So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. Um the software defined has been definitely, you know, one of the key design points. The second is the um, the hybrid cloud and the internalization of our operating system so they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do, it's enabled the speed of scale and that has been by building um, you know, intrinsically in the, in the, in the product, both support or, and also using kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility that that scale >>talk about this data fabric vision because to me that comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners. The number one problem that there is a problem that we're solving to solve and the conversation tends to I here was a control playing kubernetes horizontally scalable. This all points to data being available. So how do you create that availability? What does data fabric mean? What does all this mean in hybrid context? >>Well, if you if you think about it data fabric, it's a hybrid cloud, you know, concept, right. This is about enabling data governance, data mobility, data security in an environment where some of the applications will run on premises or at the edge of the smart edge and many of the, you know, perhaps data lakes and analytics, um, you know, and services rich services will be in a central locations or on many or perhaps some large, you know, data centers. So you need to have, you know, the type of, you know, capabilities, data services, you know, to enable that mobility, that governments governance, that that security across this continuum that spans the edge the core and the cloud, >>Jason, you mentioned satellite before. Cloud satellite. Can you go into more detail on it? I know it's kind of a new product, uh what is that about? And tell me what's the benefits and why does it exist and what problems does it solve? >>Yeah. So so in the most simple terms, cloud satellite is the capability to extend iBMS public cloud into on prem infrastructure infrastructure at the edge or in a multi cloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to to build your application of open shift as a service databases. Deb tools, aI capabilities. Instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's cloud regions, you can now add your private data center or add your metro provider or add your AWS or Azure account and now consume those services consistently across all those environments. Um and that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public ill with kind of location independence, you see in hybrid and let's solve new problems like, you know, it's really interesting, we're seeing like a I and data being a primary driver. I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like you know in a metro because all of my, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to halfway across the country to some cloud region and so lets you extend out in that way and when you do that of course you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with Netapp on, how do we then expose um Netapp storage into this environment when I'm running in the data center where I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data replicate the data, secure it. Well how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think john at the beginning you kind of alluded to this idea of you know, things are becoming more application centric, Right? And we're trying to run an I. T. Architecture that's more centered around the application well by combining um clouds, knowledge of kind of where everything is running with a common platform like open shift with a kubernetes aware data fabric in storage layer, you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management that spans those environments. >>Yeah, I want to come back to that whole impact on I. T. Because this has come up as a major theme here. Think that the I. T. Transformation is going to be more about cloud scale but I want to get octavian on the satellite on Netapp role and how you complement that. How do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with clouds satellite, obviously this was like an operating model, How does that fit in? >>Um simply put we extend and enable the capabilities that uh IBM satellite uh you know, platform provides, I think Jason referred to the storage aspects um and you know what we are doing, it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around tearing based on temperature or you know, replicated snapshots or you know, capabilities around, you know cashing, you know, high availability encryption and and so forth. So we believe that our our technology integrates very well with red hat open shift um and uh the kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility and in that translation of really distributed computing at scale, you know from you know from the traditional data center um to the edge and uh you know to the massive hubs that IBM is building, >>you know, I gotta say but watching you guys worked together for many decades now and and covering you with the queue for the past 10 years or 11 years now um been a great partnership. I gotta say one thing that's obviously too obvious to me and our team and mainly mainly the world is now you got a new Ceo over at IBM you have a cloud focus that's on unwavering Arvin loves the cloud. We all know that um ecosystems are changing with that. You have already had a big ecosystem and partnerships now it seems to be moving to a level where you gotta have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud. So I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes if you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM Netapp relationship in the new context of this new partnership, new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together. >>Yeah, I mean I could start, I mean I think you're right that that cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment, people operating in the ecosystem is really critical and I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean I'd be a minute up, as we said, I've been working together for a long time. We rely on them a lot in our public cloud, for example in our storage tiers but with with the kind of idea of distributed cloud and the boundaries of public cubs spreading to all these new environments. Those are just new places where we can build really interesting, valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with day to deal with these more complex apps, you know, in all the places that they exist. So I think it's gonna actually really exciting um to kind of leverage that opportunity to find new ways to work together and and uh and deliver solutions to our clients >>Octavia, >>I would say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there is more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center, beat in the cloud or at the edge. Um so our mission is, you know, to enable that, you know, hybrid cloud or or that uh, you know, data mobility um and enable, you know, persistence rich data, you know, storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform um you know, comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM services at the edge and or or the remote office. And I think that's very exciting. >>You guys are both experts and solely seasoned executives. Devops DEP sec ops, DEV data Ops whatever you wanna call, data's here. Ecosystems guys, thanks for coming on the key. Really appreciate the insight. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. Okay. IBM think cute coverage jOHN for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

(bright upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. I've got a great guest here Robin Hernandez, vice president Hybrid Cloud Management and Watson AIOps. Robin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much for having me, John. >> You know, Hybrid Cloud, the CEO of IBM Arvind loves Cloud. We know that we've talked to him all the time about it. And Cloud is now part of the entire DNA of the company. Hybrid Cloud is validated multi clouds around the corner. This is the underlying pinnings of the new operating system of business. And with that, that's massive change that we've seen IT move to large scale. You're seeing transformation, driving innovation, driving scale, and AI is the center of it. So AIOps is a huge topic. I want to jump right into it. Can you just tell me about your day to day IT operations teams what you guys are doing? How are you guys organized? How you guys bring in value to the customers? What are your teams responsible for? >> Yeah, so for a few years we've been working with our IT customers, our enterprise customers in this transformation that they're going through. As they move more workloads to cloud, and they still have some of their workloads on premise, or they have a strategy of using multiple public clouds, each of those cloud vendors have different tools. And so they're forced with, how do I keep up with the changing rate and pace of this technology? How do I build skills on a particular public cloud vendor when, you know, maybe six months from now we'll have another cloud vendor that will be introduced or another technology that will be introduced. And it's almost impossible for an it team to keep up with the rate and pace of the change. So we've really been working with IT operations in transforming their processes and their skills within their teams and that looking at what tools do they use to move to this cloud operations model. And then as part of that, how do they leverage the benefits of AI and make that practical and purposeful in this new mode of cloud operations >> And the trend that's been booming is this idea of a site reliability engineer. It's really an IT operations role. It's become kind of a new mix between engineering and IT and development. I mean, classic DevOps, we've seen, you know dev and ops, right? You got to operate the developers and the software modern apps are coming in that's infrastructure as course has been around for a while. But now as the materialization of things like Kubernetes and microservices, people are programming the infrastructure. And so the scale is there, and that's been around for a while. Now it's going to go to a whole enterprise level with containers and other things. How is the site reliability engineering persona if you will, or ITOps changed specifically because that's where the action is. And that's where you hear things like observability and I need more data, break down the silos. What's this all about? What's your view? >> Yeah, so site reliability engineering or SRE practices as we call it has really not changed the processes to say that it has to do, but it's more accelerated at an enormous rate and pace. Those processes and the tools as you mentioned, the cloud native tools like Kubernetes have accelerated how those processes are executed. Everything from releasing new code and how they work with development to actually code the infrastructure and the policies in that development process to maintaining and observing over the life cycle of an application, the performance, the availability, the response time, and the customer experience. All of those processes that used to happen in silos with separate teams and sort of a waterfall approach, with SRA practices now, they're happening instantaneously. They're being scaled out. They're being... Failback is happening much more quickly so that applications didn't do not have outages. And the rate and pace of this has just accelerated so quickly. This is the transformation of what we call cloud operations. And we believe that as IT teams work more closely with developers and they moved towards this SRE model, that they cannot just do this with their personnel and changing skills and changing tools. They have to do this with modernized tools like AI. And this is where we are recommending applying AI to those processes so that you can then get automation out of the back end that you would not think about in a traditional IT operations, or even in an SRE practice. You have to leverage capabilities and new technologies like AI to even accelerate further. >> Let's unpack the AI operations piece because I think that's where I think I'm in hearing. I'd love you to clarify this because it becomes I think the key important point but also kind of confusing to some folks because IT operations people see that changing. You just pointed out why, honestly, the tools and the culture is changing, but AI becomes a scale point because of the automation piece you mentioned. How does that thread together? How does AIOps specifically change the customer's approach in terms of how they work with their teams and how that automation is being applied? 'Cause I think that's the key thread, right? 'Cause everyone kind of gets the cultural shifts and the tools, if they're not living it and putting it in place, but now they want to scale it. That's where automation comes in. Is that right? Is that the right way to think about it? What's your view on this? This is important. >> It's absolutely right. And I always like to talk about AI in other industries before we apply it to IT to help IT understand. Because a lot of times, IT looks at AI as a buzzword and they say, "Oh, you know, yes, sure. "This is going to help me." But if you think about... We've been doing AI for a long time at many different companies not just at IBM, but if you think about the other industries where we've applied it, healthcare in particular is so tangible for most people, right? It didn't replace a doctor but it helps a doctor see the things that would take them weeks and months of studying and analyzing different patients to say, "Hey, John, I think this may be a symptom "that we overlooked or didn't think about "or a diagnosis that we didn't think about," without manually looking at all this research. AI can accelerate that so rapidly for a doctor, the same notion for IT. If we apply AI properly to IT, we can accelerate things like remediating incidents or finding a performance problem that may take your eye months or weeks or even hours to find, AI applied properly find those issues and diagnose just like they could in healthcare it diagnoses issues correctly much more rapidly. >> Now again, I want to get your thoughts on something while you're here 'cause you've been in the business for many, many decades 20 years experience, you know, cloud cold, you know the new modern area you're managing it now. Clients are having a scenario where they, "Okay, I'm changing over the culture." I'm "Okay, I got some cloud, I got some public "and I got some hybrid and man, "we did some agile things. "We're provisioned, it's all done. "It's out there." And all of a sudden someone adds something new and it crashes (chuckles) And now I've got to get in, "Where's the risks? where's the security holes?" They're seeing this kind of day two operations as some people call, another buzz word but it's becoming more of, "Okay, we got it up and running "but we still now going to still push some code "and things are starting to break. "and that's net new thing." So it's kind of like they're out of their comfort zone. This is where I kind of see the AIOps evolving quickly because there's kind of a DevSecOps piece. There's also data involved, observability. How do you talk to that scenario? Where, okay, you sold me on cloud, I've been doing it. I did some projects. We're not been running. We got a production system and we added something new. Something maybe trivial and it breaks stuff? >> Yes. Yeah, so with the new cloud operations and SRE, the IT teams are much more responsible for business outcomes. And not just as you say, the application being deployed and the application being available, but the life cycle of that application and the results that it's bringing to the end users and the business. And what this means is that it needs to partner much more closely with development. And it is hard for them to keep up with the tools that are being used and the new code and the architectures of microservices that developers are using. So we like to apply AI on what we call the change risk management process. And so everyone's familiar with change management that means a new piece of code is being released. You have to maintain where that code is being released to was part of the application architecture and make sure that it's scaled out and rolled out properly within your enterprise policies. When we apply AI, we then apply what we call a risk factor to that change because we know so often, application outages occur not something new within the environment. So by applying AI, we can then give you a risk rating that says, "There's an 80% probability "that this change that you're about to roll out, "a code change is going to cause a problem "in this application." So it allows you to then go back and work with the development team and say, "Hey, how do we reduce this risk?" Or decide to take that calculated risk and put into the visibility of where those risks may occur. So this is a great example, change risk management of how applying AI can make you more intelligent in your decisions much more tied to the business and tied to the application release team. >> That's awesome. Well, I got you here on this point of change management. The term "Shift Left" has come up a lot in the industry. I'd love to get your quick definition of what that is in your mind. What does Shift Left mean for Ops teams with AIOps? >> Yeah, so in the early days of IT there was a hard line definitely between your development and IT team. It was kind of we always said throwing it over the fence, right? The developers would throw the code over the fence and say, good luck IT, you know, figure out how to deploy it where it needs to be deployed and cross your fingers that nothing bad happens. Well, Shift Left is really about a breaking down that fence. And if you think of your developers on your left-hand side you'd being the IT team, it's really shifting more towards that development team and getting involved in that code release process, getting involved in their CI/CD pipeline to make sure that all of your enterprise policies and what that code needs to run effectively in your enterprise application and architecture, those pieces are coded ahead of time with the developer. So it's really about partnering between it and development, shifting left to have a more collaboration versus throwing things over the fence and playing the blame game, which is what happens a lot in the early days IT. >> Yeah, and you get a smarter team out of it, great point. That's great insight. Thanks for sharing that. I think it's super relevant. That's the hot trend right now making dealers more productive, building security from the beginning. While they're doing it code it right in, make it a security proof if you will. I got to ask you one of the organizational questions as IBM leader. What are some of the roadblocks that you see in organizations that when they embrace AIOps, are trying to embrace AI ops are trying to scale it and how they can overcome those blockers. What are some of the things you're seeing that you could share with other folks that are maybe watching and trying to solve this problem? >> Yeah, so you know, AI in any industry or discipline is only as good as the data you feed it. AI is about learning from past trends and creating a normal baseline for what is normal in your environment. What is most optimal in your environment this being your enterprise application running in steady state. And so if you think back to the healthcare example, if we only have five or six pieces of patient data that we feed the AI, then the AI recommendation to the doctor is going to be pretty limited. We need a broad set of use cases across a wide demographic of people in the healthcare example, it's the same with IT, applying AI to IT. You need a broad set of data. So one of the roadblocks that we hear from many customers is, well I using an analytics tool already and I'm not really getting a lot of good recommendations or automation out of that analytics tool. And we often find it's because they're pulling data from one source, likely they're pulling data from performance metrics, performance of what's happening with the infrastructure, CPU utilization or memory utilization, storage utilization. And those are all good metrics, but without the context of everything else in your environment, without pulling in data from what's happening in your logs, pulling in data from unstructured data, from things like collaboration tools, what are your team saying? What are the customers saying about the experience with your application? You have to pull in many different data sets across IT and the business in order to make that AI recommendation the most useful. And so we recommend a more holistic true AI platform versus a very segregated data approach to applying and eating the analytics or AI engine. >> That's awesome, it's like a masterclass right there. Robin, great stuff. Great insight. We'll quickly wrap. I would love to you to take a quick minute to explain and share what are some of the use cases to get started and really get into AIOps system successes for people that want to explore more, dig in, and get into this fast, what are some use case, what's some low hanging fruit? What would you share? >> Yeah, we know that IT teams like to see results and they hate black boxes. They like to see into everything that's happening and understand deeply. And so this is one of our major focus areas as we do. We say, we're making AI purposeful for IT teams but some of the low hanging fruits, we have visions. And lots of our enterprise customers have visions of applying AI to everything from a customer experience of the application, costs management of the application and infrastructure in many different aspects. But some of the low hanging fruit is really expanding the availability and the service level agreements of your applications. So many people will say, you know I have a 93% uptime availability or an agreement with my business that this application will be up 93% of the time. Applying AI, we can increase those numbers to 99.9% of the time because it learns from past problems and it creates that baseline of what's normal in your environment. And then we'll tell you before an application outage occurs. So avoiding application outages, and then improving performance, recommendations and scalability. What's the number of users coming in versus your normal scale rate and automating that scalability. So, performance improvements and scalability is another low-hanging fruit area where many IT teams are starting. >> Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you want to have the AIOps? They're totally cool, very relevant. You know, you're seeing hybrid cloud, standardized all across business. You've got to have that data and you got to have that incident management work there. Robin, great insight. Thank you for sharing. Robin Hernandez, vice president of Hybrid Cloud Management in Watson AIOps. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me John. >> Okay, this theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBES coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. We're not yet in real life, we're doing another remote interviews with two great guests CUBI alumni. Of course, I'm John for your host of theCUBE. We got Jason MacGee, IBM fellow VP and CTO of IBM's cloud platform and Octavian Tanase senior vice president Hybrid Cloud Engineering at NetApp both CUBE alumni, it's great to see you both. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we were just talking before we came on camera that we it feels like we've had this conversation a long time ago we have. Hybrid cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys and many times on theCUBE. So now it's mainstream, it's here in the real world, everyone gets it, there's no real debate, now multicloud, people are debating that which means that's right around the corner. So hybrid cloud is here now, Jason this is really the focus and this is also brings together the NetApp in your partnership and talk about the relationship first with hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, look we've talked a number of times together I think in the industry. Maybe a few years ago people were debating whether hybrid cloud was a real thing, we don't have that conversation anymore. I think enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of COVID and kind of how we work differently now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on-prem and off-prem systems probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers. And what they're looking for now is how do I do that? And how do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in? And then how do I get more and more of my workload into those environments? And it's been interesting. I think the first waves of cloud where infrastructure centric and externally application focused, they were easier things, and now we're moving into more mission critical more stateful, more data oriented workloads, and that brings with it new challenges on where applications run and how we leverage the club. >> Octavian, you guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years data centric company, NetApp has always been great engineering team, you're on the hybrid cloud engineering. What's the current status of the relationship, give us an update on how the it's vectoring into the hybrid cloud since you're senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud Engineering. >> Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM. I think NetApp have been IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers, and we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong joint hybrid cloud value proposition for customers on NetApp storage and data services compliment. What IBM does in terms of products and solutions both for on-premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions that span data mobility, data governance for the new workrooms that Jason has talked about. >> And how has some of the customer challenges that you're seeing obviously software defined networking software defined storage, DevOps is now turned into DevSecOps. So you have now that programmability requirement with for dynamic applications, application driven infrastructure, all these buzz words point to one thing. The infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. >> I would say infrastructure will continue to be a top of mind for everybody, whether they're building a private cloud or whether they're trying to leverage something like IBM Cloud. I think people want to consume infrastructure as an API, I think they want a simplicity, security, I think they want to manage their costs very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM Cloud to build such capabilities. >> Jason how are you guys helping some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and refactoring previous stuff during transforming but also innovating at the same time. There's a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the hybrid challenges? >> Yeah, I mean there's a lot of dimensions to that problem but the one that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how kind of the consumption model public cloud, API driven self service, capabilities operated for you. How that consumption model is starting to spread. Because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these more mission critical data centric kind of workloads was well, I can't always move that application to the public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network closer to my end users, so out where data is being generated maybe in an IoT context. And when you had those requirements you had to kind of switch operating models, you had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model, and we have a common platform and things like OpenShift that can run everywhere but the missing piece was how do I consume everything as a service everywhere? And so recently we launched this thing called IBM Cloud Satellite which we've been working with Octavian and his team on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both location flexibility with public cloud consumption. And when you do that, you of course running a much more diverse infrastructure environment, you have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with like multi-tiered applications, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this more complex environment. >> We've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade as the evolution goes. Octavian, I got to ask you this is critical path for companies, they want the storage ready infrastructure, you guys have been doing that for many decades partnering with IBM for sure but now they're all getting hybrid cloud big time and it's attributed computing is what it is, it's the operating model. When someone asks you guys what your capabilities are, how do you answer that in today's world? Because you have storage as well knowing you got a great product people know that, but what is NetApp's capabilities when I say I'm going all in a hybrid cloud complete changeover. >> So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. The software defined has been definitely one of the key design points, the second is the hybrid cloud in the containerization of our operating systems so they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do it's enabled the speed of scale and that has been by building intrinsically in the product both support or in also using Kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility that scale. >> So how about this data fabric vision? Because to me, this is comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners, the number one problem that they're solving to solve in the conversation tends to, I hear words like control plane, Kubernetes, horizontally scalable, this all points to data being available. So how do you create that availability? What does data fabric mean? What does all this mean in a hybrid context? >> Well, if you think about it data fabric it's a hybrid cloud concept, this is about enabling data governance, data mobility, data security in an environment where some of the applications were run on premises or at the edge or the smart edge and many of the perhaps data lakes and analytics, and services, rich services will be in a central locations or on many or perhaps some large data centers. So you need to have the type of capabilities data services to enable that mobility that governance that security across this continuum that spans the edge the core and the cloud. >> Jason, you mentioned satellite before cloud satellite. Could you go into more detail on that? I know it's kind of a new product, what is that about, and tell me what's the benefits and why is it exist and what problems does it solve? >> Yeah, so in the most simple terms, cloud satellite is the capability to extend IBM's public cloud into on-prem infrastructure at the edge or in a multicloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to to build their application, OpenShift as a service database, as DevTools, AI capabilities instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's cloud regions you can now add your private data center or add your Metro provider or add your AWS or Azure accounts and now consume those services consistently across all those environments. And that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public cloud with the kind of location independence you see in hybrid and lets us solve new problems. It's really interesting we're seeing like AI and data being a primary driver. I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like in a Metro because all of my, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to halfway across the country to some cloud region now. And so it lets you extend out in that way. And when you do that, of course, you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with NetApp on how do we then expose NetApp storage into this environment when I'm running in the data center or I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data replicate the data, secure it. Well, how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think John, at the beginning you kind of alluded to this idea of things are becoming more application centric, right? And we're trying to run IT architecture that's more centered around the application. Well, by combining clouds knowledge of kind of where everything's running with that common platform like OpenShift with a Kubernetes aware data fabric and storage layer, you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management that spans those environments. >> Yeah, I want to come back to that whole impact on IT because this has come up as a major theme here. Think that the IT transformation is going to be more about cloud scale, but I want to get to Octavian on the satellite on NetApp's role and how you compliment that, how do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with cloud satellite, obviously this was like an operating model. How does that fit in? >> Simply we extend and enable the capabilities that IBM satellite platform provides. I think Jason referred to the storage aspects and what we are doing it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around peering based on temperature or replicated snapshots or capabilities around caching, high availability, encryption and so forth. So we believe that our technology integrate very well with Red Hat OpenShift and the Kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility and in that translation of really distributed computing at scale from the traditional data center to the edge and to the massive hubs that IBM is building. >> You know, I got to say but watching you guys work together for many decades now and covering you with theCUBE for the past 10 years or 11 years now been a great partnership. I got to say one thing that's obviously too obvious to me and our team and mainly the world is now you've got a new CEO over at IBM, you have a cloud focus that's on unwavering, Octavian loves the cloud we all know that. Ecosystems are changing, IBM already had a big ecosystem and partnerships. Now it seems to be moving to a level where you got to have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud, so I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes if you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM NetApp relationship in the new context of this new partnership a new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together? >> Yeah, I mean I think you're right that cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment people operate in and the ecosystem is really critical. And I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean, IBM and NetApp, as we set up, been working together for a long time we rely on the MoD in our public cloud, for example, in our storage tiers, but with the kind of idea of distributed cloud and the boundaries of public cloud spreading to all these new environments those are just new places where we can build really interesting valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with data, deal with these more complex apps in all the places that they exist. So I think it's been actually really exciting to kind of leverage that opportunity to find new ways to work together and deliver solutions for our clients. >> Octavian. >> I will say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there's more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center be it in the cloud or at the edge. So our mission is to enable that hybrid cloud or that data mobility and enable know persistence rich data storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM's services at the edge and or remote office and I think that's very exciting. >> You guys are both experts and solely seasoned executives to DevOps, DevSecOps, DevDataOps, what are we going to call data's here ecosystems. Guys, thanks for coming on the queue, really appreciate the insight. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, IBM, Think CUBE coverage, I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM think brought to you by IBM hi everybody we're back and this is Dave Valentine you're watching the cubes coverage of the IBM think 20/20 digital event experience lisa cisco is here she's the global head of go to market and IBM cloud at wit-pro Lisa good to see you thanks for coming on how you doing you're welcome how things holding up down in Florida you guys staying safe good working from home like like most of us everyone's doing good so I want to ask you don't go right to it talk about digital transformation and I want to get your take and maybe share some thoughts that we've heard from clients but digital transformation you're kind of in the heart of it you've got cloud you do and work with cognitive and AI and and blockchain and and the like so what are you seeing in terms of how clients are adopting this notion this digital transformation journey and how has kovat affected that great question so the hopefully the digital transformation won't always be about Kovan but there always will be a need for companies to move quickly and adopt new technologies and do things that are unexpected whether that's from an acquisition or an unexpected competitive move or new market that they want to be in so any of those things and affect businesses and what we're seeing right now is businesses who have adopted digital technology and by extension adopted cloud as the backbone to that digital technology have been able to move faster in this environment they're able to do things like work from home they're able to ensure security is in place they're able to give their employees and their customers access to information in a faster and more cost-effective way and so we're really not excited to have coated but we're really it's an interesting time to be looking at digital technologies and first mover advantages here and the digital Tudo era is all about enabling business responsiveness and those are the things that we're doing with the technology plays that we're working on today yeah I mean the customers we've talked to the the CIOs the CISOs they've said in many hard-hit industries hey we basically has shut down spending with some exceptions digital transformation being one of them you've got experience in two areas that are being affected pretty dramatically by kovat want a supply chain on the other is e-commerce you know supply chains are just you know especially for a while we're just in shambles or seeming to come back you know a little bit but what have you seen from the supply chain and what do you think what kind of changes do you expect are gonna be affected by koban going forward so again this was an area that if you had invested in your supply chain and you have automated some of those processes you're having an easier time onboarding your suppliers and knowing where your shipments are and understanding what your forward-looking position is going to be if you haven't done those things um even though your IT budgets might be being slashed they're things that you have to do right now and so doing some of those things using supply chain automation on the cloud it's it's um it's the right way for companies to go right now that find themself in a predicament and maybe aren't as prepared as they'd like to be so some of the technologies that we're helping bring to market we've we're seeing results with with things like five times faster adoption and 40% more cost efficient than if they weren't trying to do these things in an automated way using the cloud and so for companies that that need help doing this iBM has some of the best supply chain solutions in the market and and Wipro certainly has years of experience bringing those turquoise and then e-commerce is the other one I mean obviously there's been an explosion nobody wants to go out if they don't have to we're ordering anything and everything online there's been a kind of similar situation right if you if you had your kind of e-commerce you know we have you been running water through the pipes and you've perfected that over the last you know a couple of years or part of a decade then you're in pretty good shape but what are you seeing there with if you didn't have a loyal customer base now the time to really get used to interacting with your customers in that way so restaurants for example think the local mom-and-pop shops I live in a small town outside of Orlando and I'm seeing little businesses get online and and sew clothing and wine and things that they wouldn't normally see and dabbling in e-commerce so it's it's really comfortable for most people now to buy things online and we're seeing services that you wouldn't normally be be having online things like education k12 all allerjies everything can be pretty much bought on-line these days or consumed in a digital format and so I think again customers that have experience in doing this are ahead of the curve and customers that don't are going to quickly find that they have too I want to turn our attention to in the conversation to cloud and get your perspectives I mean I've reported a number of times that you know the IBM cloud it's not it's not an infrastructure as a service and the race to the bottom obviously IBM offers infrastructure of service but IBM strategy is not to try to take AWS head-on and you know storage cost per bit it's really to bring value through its software estate and portfolio and help its customers really take advantage of that the cloud model how are you and your clients taking advantage of the IBM cloud what kind of solutions do you have that are that are specific that leverage the IBM cloud that's correct we have two solutions that we're working on building out with with IBM and leveraging hybrid clouds so for an environment where 94% of enterprises have multiple clouds now they all have a combination of AWS or Azure or private clouds or IBM cloud and 73% of our clients see the ability to move between those clouds as a high priority and we are addressing that with two main solutions that we've built out at with row one is called our boundary list enterprise solution and you can think of that as the infrastructure and the knowledge we've taken the knowledge from thousands of successful hybrid cloud migrations that we've done and we've built it into this framework to help our customers be able to have a single dashboard and manage their view across hybrid cloud in an automated way and be able to be nimble and move between those clouds as business requirements it demand that they do and so that's the boundary-less Enterprise side the other side that we're working on with IBM is the application and integration modernization and we have a solution that we call moderniser and that is using some of the IBM technologies some third-party technologies and again the with our knowledge from our successful engagement and making it so that we can easily see what the workload is going to be to contain a rise and a single integration methodology that we're going to be bringing to our clients to help them be able to do this in a in an automated in a better way a faster way a more economical way so those are the two things that we're working on now and some of IBM's products are under the covers things like multiple cloud manager some of their DevOps and automation tools and there's some some tools again from third parties in firmware that we've brought in there as well so the boundary let's enterprise them in the idea there is that you've got a layer that allows you to go across clouds and have the same experience whether you're on pram whether you're in an Amazon Cloud and IBM cloud as you're wherever is that correct and it's a single sort of cloud experience single dashboard you know glass that you can look and you can serve you know in an IT environment your constituents the best way possible so that you're not locked into any cloud vendor and you can take advantage of where your workloads need to go and the modernization piece the modernized moderniser you talk about how clients are approaching it where do they start when they modernize their applicants that they do kind of and you help them do an application portfolio assessment they identify the high value workloads in their portfolio maybe the ones that they're going to sunset is a rationalization exercise the first step may be to talk about that every client is different but if the plant was to approach us and recommend the best practice we actually have a free two-week consulting engagement that we use for our clients that take a look at the workloads that they have and potentially will want to move to good we help them organize those workloads and figure out what the low-hanging fruit will be the things that will take a little bit more time on the things that are going to give them the highest bang for the buck and we will make some recommendations to them and that that two-week engagement about how to get started what about the I wanna shift gears talk about the you guys done in India with the Novus lab what is that all about what kind of expertise is there how does how two clients take advantage of that so we in IBM and out of the first soon-to-be announced we've just built it and we're soon to launch the I began with pro nobis loan you know this is the latin word from new or for innovation and that's what we plan to be doing in this lounge together so we have we pro talent and 150 seats where we'll have clients and different experts coming in and in residing in that center as well as access to all of the products i just talked about we'll be working closely with the IBM on GSI labs and bringing in new technologies building out new solutions so everything from taking supply chain to the next step to adding additional industry solutions one of the first things that we're going to do in that IBM Davis line just take advantage of the new IBM finance services cloud which is going to be a covering cloud focused at that industry and we're really excited to get started working on that technology to bring in our clients so ok so that's a that's an example of an industry solution and it's what it's it's optimized or for for banking and financial services or explain that if you would that's correct so iBM has worked with their clients in the financial services industry and they have packaged some of the governance and security and regulations that are needed for the financial services industry and they've put that into a solution that they'll be rolling out shortly I'm sure you'll hear more about it at IBM thing and that solution is going to be based on the industry guidelines by country on rolling out in the US and then shortly to Europe and we're going to be able to use that to jumpstart a lot of the workloads that we want to bring to our financial services clients without having to make them reinvent the wheel or all of the governance and security and regulatory things that they need well I can see you guys doing this across multiple industries kind of an out of the box you know tune something for retail government financial services Manufacturing healthcare where you've got the the requisite of security and compliance edicts depending on where you are in the world if it's a global organization you're able to you know identify what those local laws are maybe there's certain analytics capabilities and dashboards that you'd include is that is that kind of the right way to think about this that's exactly where we're headed and we're already starting to talk about healthcare as the next industry where we tackling after the services yeah well I mean the healthcare is that there are so heads down right now yeah believe you know we could think they'd come out of this and take a take a little breather and then can really you know get back to some of the more strategic things that they want to do in the industry I'll leave you with the last word kind of where you see the IBM Wipro partnership going you know what's your vision for that we really like IBM's approach in terms of avoiding vendor lock-in but we love what's happened with the acquisition of Red Hat and being able to use that technology more easily in our solutions we think that the industry approach is the right approach all of those things will have our focus in the noon double Ange this year and so while things are unusual in this current environment and we have a lot of things that we have to do immediately to help our clients just be able to survive we're very much looking to the future and what we can bring when this is all over that will help our clients make sure that they're ready for whatever the next Rose might be well Lisa thanks very much for coming on the cube you got a deep experience appreciate you sharing that with our with our audience they say you're welcome and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for the cube and our continuing coverage wall-to-wall coverage of IBM think 2020 the digital event experience you watch in the cube we were right back right after this short break [Music] you