(bright music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" with Dave Vellante, with the opening keynote conversation with Vittorio Viarengo. He's the Vice President of Cross-Cloud at VMware, Cube Alumni. Vittorio, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Ah, my pleasure. >> So you're kicking off the Supercloud event. Again, a pilot. Again, we were texting just a few months ago around some of the momentum. You identified this right away. You saw it, you saw the momentum. What's the reality around supercloud? What's your perspective? >> Well, I think that we have to go back to the history of IT, over the last ever. I feel like in IT, we're always running after the developers. The developers, they're smart. They go for the path of least resistance, and they create innovations, and then the entire stacks moves around, and if you look at developers over the last, you know, 15 years, they've been going to the cloud, right? And the reason they're going for the cloud is, you now, they say software is eating the world. Is really who builds software? Developers, so I think it's developers are eating the world, and so initially, there was one game in town, so they went with AWS, but eventually, we got the multiple clouds, and now, the reality is that the applications there, it's how we make money, how we save money. They're running on multiple cloud, the 75% of the companies running on multiple clouds today, and so, I think that creates the new computing platform for the next, you know, 10 years, 15 years, and I think that that multi-cloud world brings tremendous advantages, as we just talked, but also some challenges, and it's prime to a simplification, and that's where we're trying. >> One of the things we observe is this abstraction layer across clouds to create a consistent experience for customers, and very importantly, as you point out, developers. So when you think about the history of abstractions, we see another one sort of forming in the 2020s, which is really different, as you pointed out, that we had in the 2010s, where there was really, you know, one main cloud. Now, you have all these clouds. What are your thoughts on the history of abstractions? >> Well, if you look at IT, we always needed abstraction to unleash the next level of growth, right? I grew up as a... I started my career as a C++ developer. So initially, you know, on Windows, if you wanted to open a window on the screen, you had to write 200 lines of code. Then the MFC library came in, and now, you still have to be a C++ developer, but now, with a one line of code, you can initiate, open the yellow world and start to build your applications, but it's only when Visual Basic comes along, then now, we get five millions developers building applications that are 20 years later, we're still using, okay? And then the list goes on and on, and in the application integration, we used to look at the bytes on the bus and say, "Okay, this is the customers, and we're going to map it to SAP," and then we went one level higher with SOA and web services and the rest of history, and then unleashed tremendous, you know, growth and look at, you know, how we now, you know, we be able to throw APIs, integrate anything, and so then the ultimate example of abstraction is virtualization. We made all these different servers and networking and storage look like one, and now, you know, and the business never cares if you're running SAP back on-prem on HP or some other piece of hard drive. They care that it runs, right? And so I think that now, we need to bring a level of abstraction in the cloud that not only abstracts the low level APIs at the highest level, but also uniforms and unify the APIs and the way do management and security across multiple cloud. >> Let's unpack that because I think the virtualization angle is interesting 'cause with virtualization enabled AWS. If you look at AWS' success, virtualization, the Hypervisor, got them going, and that established that value. Now, the new structural change is happening. How do you define that specifically? What is supercloud in your mind? >> So in our mind, supercloud is a set of cloud native services that, first of all... Let's unpack that and go back to the virtualization. Virtualization was a great way to do it on-prem and is no wonder that AWS and Azure, they did it on their cloud, right? But the lingo franca of the cloud is not the virtualization layer. That's taken, it's hidden. It's down there, it just does its thing. The lingo franca of cloud is microservices, API, Kubernetes as the orchestration layer, and one would think, "Okay, now, we have Kubernetes, life is good. I just, you know, deploy on- Well, there are six, seven, eight Kubernetes distribution, and so to us, the supercloud is the ability to take, to factor out the common things that you can do across cloud and give you a single pane or glass to manage your application and single pipeline so you can build your application once and deploy it consistently across multiple clouds, and then, basically, factor out the other two important things with the security and observability of the application. >> One of the trade-offs of abstraction, you go back to the mainframe. They had to squeeze out the performance overheads. VMware had to do the same and done a tremendous job of it. So are we going to see that across clouds with multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. Are you going to see a trade-off? What trade-off do you see that the industry, technically, has to attack? >> Abstractions are always about trade-offs, right? You're trading off the speed. You know, I'm writing C++ code goes really fast for scale. You know, now, I have five million developers writing applications, but I think, eventually, what happens is that or you're trading off specialized skills for, you know, more valuable skills, and if I had a dollar every time I heard, "Oh, we cannot run Oracle Databases on virtualization," well, or the JVM is too slow, but guess what? How many Java developers, how many Java application are running out on the JVM? So I think, eventually, there will be trade-offs, but the technology catches up and it's a matter of like how much value are you getting in terms of scales and saving cost versus maybe the performance trade-off you were making on the lower level. >> On the evolution of hybrid cloud, 'cause right now, hybrid cloud is a steady state. People see that clearly, you know, on-premise and Edge, right around the corner. Public native cloud, there's benefits to be in the native cloud. How does multi-cloud fit? 'Cause by default, people have multiple clouds. If they run on Azure, they probably have some sort of productivity software with Microsoft or other Microsoft products, but it's best to breed. It's not yet connected. So multi-cloud has kind of become a default kind of thing. It's not yet a strategy in some people's minds, yet some people are thinking about it. So we think, and I think you might agree, that multi-cloud will happen, multiple clouds in the sense of workloads running seamlessly. Is that a pipe dream or is that near in our future? (men laugh) >> So there is a lot of unpack there. First of all, our definition of multi-cloud is that because most customers are operating their on-prem as the cloud, so the moment you have your on-prem cloud and AWS, your multi-cloud, so 75%, 85% going to 85%- >> You mean Private Cloud on-premise cloud operations? >> Yeah, and then you have another cloud, you're already multi-cloud. >> I'm assuming the experiences is identical, right? That's the assumption you- >> Well, initially, it's not identical, right? That's why you need a supercloud, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And most customers though are in denial, meaning that I see them being in five stages of acceptance or adoption of the multi-cloud. One is denial. We are on-prem and maybe we have one cloud. We're standardized. The second one is euphoria. Oh, look, you know, look how fast we go. All these developers are happy to do whatever they want, and then the third one is like, holy crap. They got the first bill. They realize that the security share responsibility model to deal with. They realize that somebody is to deploy this application and manage the application. Nobody does it for them, and then they go into like, (indistinct). Okay, now, we need to do something about this, right? It's a new normal, and then you end up with the enlightment, right? Now, we're really being productive and strategic about how we use multi-cloud. Very, very few customers are in that stage. Most customers are still within the denial and the new normal, and within the spectrum, you see multi-cloud as, "Okay, I have an application here, an application there. Okay, great, big deal." The next level is, "Okay, I have an application here that uses a pieces of a service of an application over there. Okay, now, I'm coordinating application. I'm using microservices," and then the third stage is like, "Okay, I am designing my application to use multiple services or multiple cloud because each uses differentiated features of that particular cloud." >> Is it part of the problem too, Vittorio, that the industry, the technology industry, you guys have not caught up. The cloud vendors aren't solving that problem. What's VMware doing to solve that problem? >> So we have seen this coming four or five years ago, right? That's why we acquired Pivotal, and then we made a number of acquisition around it because we saw that... Well, let's go back. What is VMware DNA? If you look, I've been running engineering, product management in the company then I moved to the dark side, more on the marketing side, but I've seen, and I sweat with those engineers, and when I look at those engineers, these people know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together work together and deliver value, and so if we go back to, you know, on-prem, we did it with virtualization. In the cloud, we did a new level of abstraction, which is, you know, at the APIs at the... And so over the last five years, we built what we believe is very comprehensive portfolio that unified how you build, you run, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. No Hypervisor required. >> So that's the game changer right there. So let me ask you a question. How does the choice factor come in because can VMware do all this or do they need to rely on partners? Because most customers have HashiCorp and other companies in there doing services for them as well. So how do you see the multi-partner strategy approach? Can you do it alone or are you going to need help from the ecosystem? >> First of all, if you look at the success of your event today, look how many vendors from multiple backgrounds and multiple level of the stack that are coming together to talk about the supercloud. So that to me is success already, and, of course, there are tremendous companies that are going to deliver fantastic value for, you know, management like HashiCorp or security and the development experience. Our approach is to bring them together as an integrated platform, and I think VMware has both the DNA and the muscles, the investment to be able to pull that off. >> Okay, you saw Keith Townsend. He had that very cool blackboard, and he called, this was maybe eight or nine months ago, he called the supercloud and VMware's multi-cloud vision aspirational. When is this going to be real? >> I think it's absolutely real today in some of the pieces. Right, there's always an aspiration. You have to look at a company like VMware as a company that looks out five, 10 years, right? You know, we have Raghu as our CEO, you know, which is a technical visionary, and so he saw five years ago, the advent of multi-cloud, and we invested in first part of the stack. What is it? How to build applications natively in the cloud using Tanzu. So with Tanzu, you can build application, manage Kubernetes cluster, secure, creating this service match, and so that's the reality today. Then on the next step is security. We recently announced our security approach. We have a very peculiar position in the stack to be able to see security, not just on the endpoint, not just, you know, in the application, but in between, right? By looking at all the Hypervisor, if you're using Hypervisor. You looking at East-West traffic with NSX and cross cloud networks, and so these are the three main places that are in place today, right? And then I cannot spoil our user conference coming in a couple of weeks where we're going to make more announcement around the supercloud, which we called cross-cloud services. >> Vittorio, I remember in 2016, I interviewed Andy Jassy and Raghu when they announced the deal with VMware. VMware and AWS had the relationship, and you're running on the cloud on AWS VMware, and you look at what's happened since, and this is where the supercloud conversation starts to kick in where Amazon's really good at moving bits around and optimizing the power and the silicon of the infrastructure, which means that the higher level services are going to be much more open for people to innovate around. So Dave calls it, the super pass. This area platform is a service to change the SaaS game. So I have to ask you, how do you see the SaaS game changing with supercloud? Because if you have a Private Cloud or Edge, you're now multiple clouds, technically, as you pointed out. How has that changed the SaaS configuration? Because SaaS and IaaS and PaaS had great relationships in native clouds to solve problems. Now, you have the multi-cloud. How do you see this platform as a service area changing or maybe enabling? >> So I think that that's where the innovation, the ability to aggregate common... Because look, there is a reason why people use multiple cloud, right? They choose it because they have differentiated features. So we don't want to ever hide those features, like if you're using Google, because you need AI capabilities, absolutely. We don't want to prevent that, right? But at the PaaS level, you know, when you are orchestrated these microservices, you don't want to do it in five different ways, right? So those are the areas where I think are prime for aggregation and simplification. How you, you know, look at all this Kubernetes environment and being able to monitor your application and force security policies, both from a resource consumption, this group of developers can only use this many resources, but also a run time that you don't run out of like, you know, you get that bill shock, and so those are the areas where I think there's this more ability for us to innovate and deliver value, not at the lower level which is taken by the- >> So you try to have your cake and eat it too, which is if you can pull that off it's game over, right? You have a specific set of cross-cloud services that are unique and value added that are differentiable in the industry, but at the same time, you're trying to give access to developers, if in fact, they want access to those primitives, right? >> Yeah. >> That's a bold aspiration. >> Well, we want to have the cake, eat it, and lose weight. (men laugh) But seriously, I think, going back to your point about the ecosystem, of course, we're not going to do it alone, right? If we were doing it alone, there is not a market, right? And so I think that the market is so big and the area of challenges for IT is so large that there's room for many companies to add value, and I think that, as I said, our approach is to, you know, we're a platform company, right? So you're going to find tremendous companies that will solve one problem for multiple clouds. You're going to find the hyperscaler that have a platform approach for one cloud. We like to think that we can position ourself in that two by two as the company that has a platform approach across multiple clouds. >> You know, it's great. That's where we've known each other for a long time. It's 12 years of "CUBE" coverage. Watching things like the CNCF emerge and do great work, watching cloud native kind of go that next level's been fun to watch, and the developers have had a great run. I mean, open sources booming, developer goodness is out there. People are shifting left, a lot of great stuff going with containers and Kubernetes. So looking good on the developer experience front right now, and I think it's only going to get better, but developers don't think about locking. They just want to get the job done. Move on to the next line of code. It's the ops teams that we're hearing from that are saying, "Hey, we love this, too, but we got to align with the developer." Level up, so to speak. So ops and security teams are saying, "Hey, I got to run this with automation with the higher level services." So there seems to be a focus around the supercloud conversation around ops teams. This is your wheelhouse, VMware. You guys do a lot of IT operations and things of that nature. How do you see that and what's the message cross-cloud brings to and supercloud brings to the development teams and the ops teams who are really going to be doing DevOps together and/or faster? >> I think if you go back to what where we started, right? Developers run the show, and I think there's been a little bit of inertia in IT organization on the op side and the security side in catching up to see how to catch up to where developers are, right? And with the DevOps revolution, if operators don't really understand what the developers need and get ahead of that, they're going to be left behind. So I'll give you an example, like SMB Global, one of our customers, their band runs their operation. Basically, told me I had to sit down and figure out what these developers were doing because I was being left behind and then or Cerner, one of our partners and customers, same thing they say, okay, we sat down. We realized that we needed to get ahead of the developers and set those guard rails, right? These are the Kubernetes environment you want to use? Okay, this is how we're going to set them up. This is want to make sure that we shift left security, that we have a single pipeline that feeds that, and Cerner, using our technology was able to... They made a business decision to move from one hyperscaler, was going to go unnamed to another hyperscaler, It was going to go unnamed, and they managed to change all the deployments in four hours. So that's the power of the supercloud, being able to say, "Hey, developers, do whatever you want, but these are the guard rails, and we're going to be able to like stay ahead of you and give you the flexibility, but also, make sure that operation and security, as a saying." >> Shift left shield right, basically. >> Awesome, awesome stuff. We've got 15 seconds. What is supercloud? What's the bumper sticker? >> The supercloud is a level of abstraction across any of the public clouds that allows developers to go fast, operators to make sense of what's happening, security to enforce security, and end users to access any application with a great user experience and security. >> And it's inclusive of on-prem. I'll just throw that in. (John laughs) >> All right, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. We're going to have a industry panel to talk about and debate Supercloud 22. We'll be right back after this break.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with theCUBE here live covering the AWS Summit NYC 2022. There's about 15 different summits going on this year, John, globally. We're here with about 10,000 attendees. Just finished the keynote and two guests from SoftwareONE. Please welcome David Torres, the director of cloud services and Asim Khan, a North American AWS services delivery lead at SoftwareONE. Welcome, guys. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Talk to us, David, kick us off. Give the audience an overview of SoftwareONE. What do you guys do? And then tell us a little bit about the AWS partnership. >> Sure, so SoftwareONE, we are one of Microsoft and VMware's largest resellers. We help customers with our IT asset management services, managing their on-premises license real estate, but we're definitely a company that's undergoing a transformation. And when I say that, essentially we're focused on three key pillars with our go to market, supporting the hyperscalers. So we do support AWS, Azure, GCP at modernization because we do see this with a lot of our customers, you know, they're moving from on premises to AWS. They have a lot of technical debt and they're looking at options to modernize that, and mission critical workloads like SAP, Windows, Oracle, and we offer, you know, a suite of professional services, managed services, migrations, quite quite a bit of services. >> Asim, can you kind of double click on the services that SoftwareONE delivers to customers? Maybe some key use cases? >> Yeah, sure. I think in the Amazon space, I would say we're currently focusing in the area of funding programs that Amazon currently has, for example, the Migration Acceleration Program, which is a map with supporting customers basically with the entire cloud journey that they might have, or helping them define that cloud journey. And then we can help the customer in any phase of that journey as well to basically take them a step step above. So that's what our area of focus is right now to basically help enable customers. >> So on the Microsoft, AWS, you mentioned Microsoft, I mean, they've had the enterprise business for years and, you know, developers was their, you know, ecosystem. Back in the day, "Developers, developers, developers" as Steve Ballmer once said, and that was their crown jewel. But then, you know, .NET now has Linux. They got a lot more open source. So those enterprises, their customers are changing. A lot of them are on AWS. So talk about that dynamic of the shift to AWS. And now that Azure's out there, what's the relationship of those hyperscale? How do you guys navigate those waters? >> Sure, I mean, it's always the concept of work backwards from the customer, right? What are the business outcomes they're trying to drive and, you know, define a strategy from that. And it's still a function of change management for a lot of customers, people, process and tools. So, you know, in a lot of cases, our customers are evaluating what's a skillset of our people, do we need to upskill them, the tools that we're using, how do we use those on the multiple clouds, right? And then the processes. So for us, you know, we have some customers that prefer one cloud over another. We have customers that run cross multiple clouds. They deploy different workloads. And then we have some customers that transformation and modernization are really big top of stack for them. So in some cases, those customers are going to AWS and, you know, we're helping them kind of with that journey. It's interesting, Amazon literally won the developer cloud market early on, going back 15 years. >> Absolutely. >> But not all developers, enterprise developers who, you know, in the enterprises, they're stuck in their ways, but are changing. This is a digital transformation moment 'cause cloud native applications, the modernization piece, is developer centric. >> Absolutely. >> That's key, the developers. So I'm interested in your perspective and reaction to what's going on in that developer market right now with DevOps exploding in a great way, the goodness of the cloud coming more and more to the table. >> Sure, no, absolutely, great question. So I think with enterprise developers, you know, we see just the businesses driving a lot of the outcomes, right? So the modernization aspect of needing to get to market faster, needing to deploy applications faster, having a more efficient operating model, more automation. And for your point on the .NET modernization, you know, we work with customers too as well. We made an acquisition a couple years ago, a company, InterGrupo. They actually specialize in this in .NET modernization. So we know we're seeing some customers that are moving to Linux, right? And they want to go .NET Core and, you know, they're kind of standardizing on Linux. So we kind of see a, you know, wide spectrum, but yeah, maybe. >> Where are your customer conversations as things have changed so much in accelerated dramatically in the last couple of years? >> Sure. >> Obviously we've talked about the developers, but talk to me about, you know, business imperatives for businesses in every industry to digitally transform, number one, to survive the last couple of years, but, two, to be at a competitive advantage. >> Sure, no, so I think with businesses, you know, obviously, 2017, innovation, 2022, it's a little bit different, right? There's obviously macro conditions, you have COVID. So, you know, we're seeing where customers are essentially really doing their due diligence, right, when they make their choices more than ever before. And they're trying to maximize, right, their spend and their ROI when they move to cloud and that involves, you know, the licensing advisory, what they can move, what they can modernize, migrations, and just the roadmap and what strategy. But what I see is, it's the business outcomes, what they're trying to drive, and, you know, we're seeing some trends too with maybe a more conservative segments like healthcare, public sector, right, utilities that they are really investing and moving towards the cloud. >> Asim, I got a question from Twitter, a DM, I want to ask. You guys are on the front line. So you see the customers, which is really great 'cause it's primary data. You guys are right there. And you're not biased. You work with whatever hyperscaler. So it's really good. So the question that came up was, "Can you ask them the following, 'What's going on in the data warehouse front, cloud warehouse front, you got Redshift competing with Synapse, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, and then you got Snowflake and Databricks out there?'" So you got this new data provider, but it's not a data warehouse. And you got data refactoring on AWS, for instance as well. So, you know, this whole new level of data analytics with how you're doing cloud data. And you call it a data warehouse, I guess for categorically, but it's really not a warehouse. It's a data lake and you got lake front foundation. What are you guys seeing on the front lines with customers as they try to squint through how to deal with the data and which cloud to work with? >> That is a good question. I mean, I've been in the industry a long time. I've worked for some major financial institutions as well and data or big data was big for that industry. (John chuckles) So I've seen how the trends have changed, but from our perspective, because we are an agnostic services company, as you mentioned, we basically can work with any hyperscaler, we initially see what the business needs are for the customer. If the customer is already, for example, using Amazon, we initially want to have the customer use native tooling available within that hyperscaler space. If the customer is open for us to give them any recommendations, of course, we look at the business needs. We look at what type of data is going to be stored. What the industry is. Based on all of those inputs is when we basically give the right recommendation, it could be a third party data warehousing solution. It could be an area one. It all depends on what the business needs of the customer are. >> So for example, and most companies do this they build on say AWS, who is one of the first big clouds. And then they go, "Hey, we got customers over there at Azure, that's Microsoft they got thousands and thousands of customers. Snowflake's done, and they have marketplaces as well." So you guys are kind of agnostic it sounds like. Whatever the architecture is on the stack that they choose. >> Correct, so that's what makes us special. I think we are one of those services companies which is quite unique in the industry. And I don't say that just because I work for SoftwareONE, (John chuckle) that is a fact that gives us a very unique perspective of giving the customer the right piece of advice because we've seen it all and we've done it all. So that's, I think what puts us unique and regarding technology, all the different hyperscalers, they might have a very similar backend technology stack, but what the front end services each hyperscaler is building are very unique. Amazon being the leader in this space, they've been ahead of the curb by a few years, they will always have certain solutions which are above the rest. So I mean, I've always been an Amazon person, so I'm slightly biased, but, hey, I mean, I'm not complaining about that. >> The good news is the customer has choices. >> Right, absolutely. And we do see customers that want to be agnostic, right, >> Yeah. >> With their technology choices. Actually, that's a good segue about our partnership with AWS. We recently signed a strategic collaboration agreement between both parties. So there's going to continue to be big investment from us, scaling out our professional services, our practice areas, and then also key focus area for a fin ops. >> Is that your number one area? >> It's one of the areas, yeah. >> Okay, what your top three practice areas? >> Top three, mission critical workloads. So enterprise workloads like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, two, app modernization, and, three, definitely fin ops and the hyperscalers, right? Because we see a lot of customers that have already heavily adopted cloud, they're struggling with that cloud financial management aspect. >> So if they're struggling, what are some of the key business outcomes that they come to you, to SoftwareONE, and say, "Help us figure this out. We have to achieve A, B, C." >> Sure, so depending on the maturity of the customer and where they are in the journey, if they're already very heavily adopting cloud, you know, AWS or Azure, we see in a lot of cases that the customers are unsure if they're getting the most out of their cloud spend, and they're looking at their operations, and their governance, and, you know, they're coming to us and basically asking us, "Hey, we feel like our cloud spend is a little bit out of control. Can you help us?" And that's where we can come in, you know, provide the advice, the guidance, the advisory but also give them the tooling, right, to have visibility into their cloud spend and make those conditions. And we also offer a managed fin op service that will end to end do this for the customers to help to manage their resale, their invoicing, their marketplace buy, as well as their cloud spend. >> So obviously the engagement varies customer to customer. What's a typical timeframe? Like how long does it take you to really get in there with a customer, understand the direction they need to go, and create the right plan? >> Sure, again, comes back to the cloud journey. You know, if the customer is still, you know, very much on prem and maybe more, you know, conservative, it may start with licensing assessments just to give them an idea of what it would cost to move those workloads, right? Then it turns into migration modernization, you know, it can be an anywhere from one to six months, you know, of just consulting, right, to get the customer ready. And then we help 'em, you know, obviously with their migration plan. But if they're already heavily adopting cloud, you know, we do remediation work, we do optimization. Obviously, SAP, that's a longer cycle, so. (chuckles) >> So I got to ask you guys, what is the PyraCloud? SoftwareONE as a platform PyraCloud. What is that? >> I might want to answer that. >> Sure. (chuckles) >> It's pronounced PyraCloud. >> How do you pronounce it? >> PyraCloud. >> PyraCloud, okay. I like PyraCloud better. (chuckles) >> With the Y in there. It's basically our spend insight platform. It gives customers an a truly agnostic single pane of glass view into their entire cloud enterprise spend. What I mean by that is with a single login, the customer has access to looking at their enterprise spend on AWS, on Azure, as well as GCP. And in the future, of course, we're going to add other hyperscalers in there as well. Because of the single pin of glass view, the customer has a true or the customer leadership, or, for example, the CTO has a single pane of glass view into the entire spend. We allow the customer to basically have an enterprise level tagging strategy, which is across all the hyperscalers as well as then allowing a certain amount of automated cost management as well, which is again agnostic and enterprisewide. >> Can you share an example of a customer for whom you've given them this single pane of glass through PyraCloud, and by how much they've been able to reduce costs or optimize costs? >> Yes, mostly the customers who would be a very good fit for PyraCloud would be a slightly more mature customer who already has a large amount of spend, or who is already very mature in their different hyperscalers. And usually what we've seen once a customer is mature in the cloud over a certain period of time, controlling costs does become difficult, even though you might have automation in place, but to get to that automation, you have to go through a certain amount of time of basically things breaking and you fixing them. So this is where per cloud becomes very helpful to help control that. And building a strategy, which once in place is repetitive and helps you manage costs and spend in the cloud year after year then. >> One of the things I want to get your guys reaction before we wrap up is this show here has got 10,000 people which is a big number, post COVID, events are coming back but in the past five years, or six years, or seven years, since like 2015, a lot's changed. What's changed the most? Shared to the audience what you think is the biggest step function change that's happening right now? Is it that data's now prime time? Everyone's got a lot of data, hasn't figured out the consequences with it. Is it scale? Is it super cloud? Is it the ecosystem because this is not stopping ,the growth in the enterprise on the digital transformation is expanding, even though GDPs down, and gas prices are high, and inflation, this isn't stopping. Now, some of the unicorns might be impacted by the headwinds, the big overfunded valuations but not the ecosystem. What's changed? What's the big change? >> Well, I think what I see is this cloud is becoming the defacto operating model and customers are working backwards from that as their primary goal, right, to operate in the cloud. And as I mentioned before, they really are doing due diligence, right, to really understand the best approach for seeing kind of maybe some of the challenges other customers have had when they first moved to AWS, so. And I'm, you know, seeing industries that maybe five years ago, you know, were not about moving to cloud, like healthcare. I can tell you a lot of our healthcare customers, they're trying to get to cloud as fast as possible. >> It's a wake up call. >> It's a wake up call. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Asim, what's your reaction? >> In my point of view with what's happened these last few years with a lot of companies having their employees work from home and being remotely, I think end user compute was one of the big booms which happened about two years ago. We support a lot of customer in that space as well. And then overall, I think we actually saw that there was much more business focus with employees working for home for some reason. And we saw that internally in our own organization as well. And with that focus, the whole area of being more lean and agile in the cloud space, I think became much more prevalent for all the enterprises. Everybody wanted to be spend conscious, availing the different tools available in the cloud arena, like autoscaling like using, for example, containerization, using such solutions to basically be more resilient and more lean to basic control costs. >> So necessity is the mother of all inventions >> It is. >> That got forced. So you got wake up call and then a forcing function to like, okay, but exposes the consequences of a modern application, modern environment because they didn't, they're out of business. So then it's like, okay, this is actually working, (chuckles) why don't we like kill that project that we've doubled down on, move it over here." So I see that same pattern. What do you guys see? >> Yeah, no, I mean, we see that pattern as well. Just modernization, efficiency. You could just move faster, more elasticity, you know, and, again, the wake up call, you know, for organizations that people couldn't go to data centers, right? (chuckles) >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> We actually have a customer, that was literally the reason they made the move, right, to AWS. >> And I would add one more thing to that particular point. With the time available, I think customers were able to actually now re-architect their applications slightly better to be able to avail, for example, no server type of solutions or using certain design principles which were much more cost lean in the cloud. That's what we saw. I think customers spent that time available over the past couple of years to be much more cloud centric, I would say. >> Yeah, the forced March was really an accelerant and a catalyst in a lot of ways for good, and there's definitely some silver linings there. Guys, we're out of time. But thank you so much for joining John >> Oh, awesome. >> And me talking about SoftwareONE, what you guys are doing, helping customers, what you're doing with AWS and the hyperscalers. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you. >> Awesome. Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Really appreciate it. >> All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from New York City at AWS Summit at NYC. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage here live on the floor at AWS re:MARS 2022. I'm John Furrier, host for theCUBE. Great event, machine learning, automation, robotics, space, that's MARS. It's part of the re-series of events, re:Invent's the big event at the end of the year, re:Inforce, security, re:MARS, really intersection of the future of space, industrial, automation, which is very heavily DevOps machine learning, of course, machine learning, which is AI. We have Luis Ceze here, who's the CEO co-founder of OctoML. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me in the show, John. >> So we've been following you guys. You guys are a growing startup funded by Madrona Venture Capital, one of your backers. You guys are here at the show. This is a, I would say small show relative what it's going to be, but a lot of robotics, a lot of space, a lot of industrial kind of edge, but machine learning is the centerpiece of this trend. You guys are in the middle of it. Tell us your story. >> Absolutely, yeah. So our mission is to make machine learning sustainable and accessible to everyone. So I say sustainable because it means we're going to make it faster and more efficient. You know, use less human effort, and accessible to everyone, accessible to as many developers as possible, and also accessible in any device. So, we started from an open source project that began at University of Washington, where I'm a professor there. And several of the co-founders were PhD students there. We started with this open source project called Apache TVM that had actually contributions and collaborations from Amazon and a bunch of other big tech companies. And that allows you to get a machine learning model and run on any hardware, like run on CPUs, GPUs, various GPUs, accelerators, and so on. It was the kernel of our company and the project's been around for about six years or so. Company is about three years old. And we grew from Apache TVM into a whole platform that essentially supports any model on any hardware cloud and edge. >> So is the thesis that, when it first started, that you want to be agnostic on platform? >> Agnostic on hardware, that's right. >> Hardware, hardware. >> Yeah. >> What was it like back then? What kind of hardware were you talking about back then? Cause a lot's changed, certainly on the silicon side. >> Luis: Absolutely, yeah. >> So take me through the journey, 'cause I could see the progression. I'm connecting the dots here. >> So once upon a time, yeah, no... (both chuckling) >> I walked in the snow with my bare feet. >> You have to be careful because if you wake up the professor in me, then you're going to be here for two hours, you know. >> Fast forward. >> The average version here is that, clearly machine learning has shown to actually solve real interesting, high value problems. And where machine learning runs in the end, it becomes code that runs on different hardware, right? And when we started Apache TVM, which stands for tensor virtual machine, at that time it was just beginning to start using GPUs for machine learning, we already saw that, with a bunch of machine learning models popping up and CPUs and GPU's starting to be used for machine learning, it was clear that it come opportunity to run on everywhere. >> And GPU's were coming fast. >> GPUs were coming and huge diversity of CPUs, of GPU's and accelerators now, and the ecosystem and the system software that maps models to hardware is still very fragmented today. So hardware vendors have their own specific stacks. So Nvidia has its own software stack, and so does Intel, AMD. And honestly, I mean, I hope I'm not being, you know, too controversial here to say that it kind of of looks like the mainframe era. We had tight coupling between hardware and software. You know, if you bought IBM hardware, you had to buy IBM OS and IBM database, IBM applications, it all tightly coupled. And if you want to use IBM software, you had to buy IBM hardware. So that's kind of like what machine learning systems look like today. If you buy a certain big name GPU, you've got to use their software. Even if you use their software, which is pretty good, you have to buy their GPUs, right? So, but you know, we wanted to help peel away the model and the software infrastructure from the hardware to give people choice, ability to run the models where it best suit them. Right? So that includes picking the best instance in the cloud, that's going to give you the right, you know, cost properties, performance properties, or might want to run it on the edge. You might run it on an accelerator. >> What year was that roughly, when you were going this? >> We started that project in 2015, 2016 >> Yeah. So that was pre-conventional wisdom. I think TensorFlow wasn't even around yet. >> Luis: No, it wasn't. >> It was, I'm thinking like 2017 or so. >> Luis: Right. So that was the beginning of, okay, this is opportunity. AWS, I don't think they had released some of the nitro stuff that the Hamilton was working on. So, they were already kind of going that way. It's kind of like converging. >> Luis: Yeah. >> The space was happening, exploding. >> Right. And the way that was dealt with, and to this day, you know, to a large extent as well is by backing machine learning models with a bunch of hardware specific libraries. And we were some of the first ones to say, like, know what, let's take a compilation approach, take a model and compile it to very efficient code for that specific hardware. And what underpins all of that is using machine learning for machine learning code optimization. Right? But it was way back when. We can talk about where we are today. >> No, let's fast forward. >> That's the beginning of the open source project. >> But that was a fundamental belief, worldview there. I mean, you have a world real view that was logical when you compare to the mainframe, but not obvious to the machine learning community. Okay, good call, check. Now let's fast forward, okay. Evolution, we'll go through the speed of the years. More chips are coming, you got GPUs, and seeing what's going on in AWS. Wow! Now it's booming. Now I got unlimited processors, I got silicon on chips, I got, everywhere >> Yeah. And what's interesting is that the ecosystem got even more complex, in fact. Because now you have, there's a cross product between machine learning models, frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, and like that and so on, and then hardware targets. So how do you navigate that? What we want here, our vision is to say, folks should focus, people should focus on making the machine learning models do what they want to do that solves a value, like solves a problem of high value to them. Right? So another deployment should be completely automatic. Today, it's very, very manual to a large extent. So once you're serious about deploying machine learning model, you got a good understanding where you're going to deploy it, how you're going to deploy it, and then, you know, pick out the right libraries and compilers, and we automated the whole thing in our platform. This is why you see the tagline, the booth is right there, like bringing DevOps agility for machine learning, because our mission is to make that fully transparent. >> Well, I think that, first of all, I use that line here, cause I'm looking at it here on live on camera. People can't see, but it's like, I use it on a couple couple of my interviews because the word agility is very interesting because that's kind of the test on any kind of approach these days. Agility could be, and I talked to the robotics guys, just having their product be more agile. I talked to Pepsi here just before you came on, they had this large scale data environment because they built an architecture, but that fostered agility. So again, this is an architectural concept, it's a systems' view of agility being the output, and removing dependencies, which I think what you guys were trying to do. >> Only part of what we do. Right? So agility means a bunch of things. First, you know-- >> Yeah explain. >> Today it takes a couple months to get a model from, when the model's ready, to production, why not turn that in two hours. Agile, literally, physically agile, in terms of walk off time. Right? And then the other thing is give you flexibility to choose where your model should run. So, in our deployment, between the demo and the platform expansion that we announced yesterday, you know, we give the ability of getting your model and, you know, get it compiled, get it optimized for any instance in the cloud and automatically move it around. Today, that's not the case. You have to pick one instance and that's what you do. And then you might auto scale with that one instance. So we give the agility of actually running and scaling the model the way you want, and the way it gives you the right SLAs. >> Yeah, I think Swami was mentioning that, not specifically that use case for you, but that use case generally, that scale being moving things around, making them faster, not having to do that integration work. >> Scale, and run the models where they need to run. Like some day you want to have a large scale deployment in the cloud. You're going to have models in the edge for various reasons because speed of light is limited. We cannot make lights faster. So, you know, got to have some, that's a physics there you cannot change. There's privacy reasons. You want to keep data locally, not send it around to run the model locally. So anyways, and giving the flexibility. >> Let me jump in real quick. I want to ask this specific question because you made me think of something. So we're just having a data mesh conversation. And one of the comments that's come out of a few of these data as code conversations is data's the product now. So if you can move data to the edge, which everyone's talking about, you know, why move data if you don't have to, but I can move a machine learning algorithm to the edge. Cause it's costly to move data. I can move computer, everyone knows that. But now I can move machine learning to anywhere else and not worry about integrating on the fly. So the model is the code. >> It is the product. >> Yeah. And since you said, the model is the code, okay, now we're talking even more here. So machine learning models today are not treated as code, by the way. So do not have any of the typical properties of code that you can, whenever you write a piece of code, you run a code, you don't know, you don't even think what is a CPU, we don't think where it runs, what kind of CPU it runs, what kind of instance it runs. But with machine learning model, you do. So what we are doing and created this fully transparent automated way of allowing you to treat your machine learning models if you were a regular function that you call and then a function could run anywhere. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> That's why-- >> That's better. >> Bringing DevOps agility-- >> That's better. >> Yeah. And you can use existing-- >> That's better, because I can run it on the Artemis too, in space. >> You could, yeah. >> If they have the hardware. (both laugh) >> And that allows you to run your existing, continue to use your existing DevOps infrastructure and your existing people. >> So I have to ask you, cause since you're a professor, this is like a masterclass on theCube. Thank you for coming on. Professor. (Luis laughing) I'm a hardware guy. I'm building hardware for Boston Dynamics, Spot, the dog, that's the diversity in hardware, it's tends to be purpose driven. I got a spaceship, I'm going to have hardware on there. >> Luis: Right. >> It's generally viewed in the community here, that everyone I talk to and other communities, open source is going to drive all software. That's a check. But the scale and integration is super important. And they're also recognizing that hardware is really about the software. And they even said on stage, here. Hardware is not about the hardware, it's about the software. So if you believe that to be true, then your model checks all the boxes. Are people getting this? >> I think they're starting to. Here is why, right. A lot of companies that were hardware first, that thought about software too late, aren't making it. Right? There's a large number of hardware companies, AI chip companies that aren't making it. Probably some of them that won't make it, unfortunately just because they started thinking about software too late. I'm so glad to see a lot of the early, I hope I'm not just doing our own horn here, but Apache TVM, the infrastructure that we built to map models to different hardware, it's very flexible. So we see a lot of emerging chip companies like SiMa.ai's been doing fantastic work, and they use Apache TVM to map algorithms to their hardware. And there's a bunch of others that are also using Apache TVM. That's because you have, you know, an opening infrastructure that keeps it up to date with all the machine learning frameworks and models and allows you to extend to the chips that you want. So these companies pay attention that early, gives them a much higher fighting chance, I'd say. >> Well, first of all, not only are you backable by the VCs cause you have pedigree, you're a professor, you're smart, and you get good recruiting-- >> Luis: I don't know about the smart part. >> And you get good recruiting for PhDs out of University of Washington, which is not too shabby computer science department. But they want to make money. The VCs want to make money. >> Right. >> So you have to make money. So what's the pitch? What's the business model? >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Share us what you're thinking there. >> Yeah. The value of using our solution is shorter time to value for your model from months to hours. Second, you shrink operator, op-packs, because you don't need a specialized expensive team. Talk about expensive, expensive engineers who can understand machine learning hardware and software engineering to deploy models. You don't need those teams if you use this automated solution, right? Then you reduce that. And also, in the process of actually getting a model and getting specialized to the hardware, making hardware aware, we're talking about a very significant performance improvement that leads to lower cost of deployment in the cloud. We're talking about very significant reduction in costs in cloud deployment. And also enabling new applications on the edge that weren't possible before. It creates, you know, latent value opportunities. Right? So, that's the high level value pitch. But how do we make money? Well, we charge for access to the platform. Right? >> Usage. Consumption. >> Yeah, and value based. Yeah, so it's consumption and value based. So depends on the scale of the deployment. If you're going to deploy machine learning model at a larger scale, chances are that it produces a lot of value. So then we'll capture some of that value in our pricing scale. >> So, you have direct sales force then to work those deals. >> Exactly. >> Got it. How many customers do you have? Just curious. >> So we started, the SaaS platform just launched now. So we started onboarding customers. We've been building this for a while. We have a bunch of, you know, partners that we can talk about openly, like, you know, revenue generating partners, that's fair to say. We work closely with Qualcomm to enable Snapdragon on TVM and hence our platform. We're close with AMD as well, enabling AMD hardware on the platform. We've been working closely with two hyperscaler cloud providers that-- >> I wonder who they are. >> I don't know who they are, right. >> Both start with the letter A. >> And they're both here, right. What is that? >> They both start with the letter A. >> Oh, that's right. >> I won't give it away. (laughing) >> Don't give it away. >> One has three, one has four. (both laugh) >> I'm guessing, by the way. >> Then we have customers in the, actually, early customers have been using the platform from the beginning in the consumer electronics space, in Japan, you know, self driving car technology, as well. As well as some AI first companies that actually, whose core value, the core business come from AI models. >> So, serious, serious customers. They got deep tech chops. They're integrating, they see this as a strategic part of their architecture. >> That's what I call AI native, exactly. But now there's, we have several enterprise customers in line now, we've been talking to. Of course, because now we launched the platform, now we started onboarding and exploring how we're going to serve it to these customers. But it's pretty clear that our technology can solve a lot of other pain points right now. And we're going to work with them as early customers to go and refine them. >> So, do you sell to the little guys, like us? Will we be customers if we wanted to be? >> You could, absolutely, yeah. >> What we have to do, have machine learning folks on staff? >> So, here's what you're going to have to do. Since you can see the booth, others can't. No, but they can certainly, you can try our demo. >> OctoML. >> And you should look at the transparent AI app that's compiled and optimized with our flow, and deployed and built with our flow. That allows you to get your image and do style transfer. You know, you can get you and a pineapple and see how you look like with a pineapple texture. >> We got a lot of transcript and video data. >> Right. Yeah. Right, exactly. So, you can use that. Then there's a very clear-- >> But I could use it. You're not blocking me from using it. Everyone's, it's pretty much democratized. >> You can try the demo, and then you can request access to the platform. >> But you get a lot of more serious deeper customers. But you can serve anybody, what you're saying. >> Luis: We can serve anybody, yeah. >> All right, so what's the vision going forward? Let me ask this. When did people start getting the epiphany of removing the machine learning from the hardware? Was it recently, a couple years ago? >> Well, on the research side, we helped start that trend a while ago. I don't need to repeat that. But I think the vision that's important here, I want the audience here to take away is that, there's a lot of progress being made in creating machine learning models. So, there's fantastic tools to deal with training data, and creating the models, and so on. And now there's a bunch of models that can solve real problems there. The question is, how do you very easily integrate that into your intelligent applications? Madrona Venture Group has been very vocal and investing heavily in intelligent applications both and user applications as well as enablers. So we say an enable of that because it's so easy to use our flow to get a model integrated into your application. Now, any regular software developer can integrate that. And that's just the beginning, right? Because, you know, now we have CI/CD integration to keep your models up to date, to continue to integrate, and then there's more downstream support for other features that you normally have in regular software development. >> I've been thinking about this for a long, long, time. And I think this whole code, no one thinks about code. Like, I write code, I'm deploying it. I think this idea of machine learning as code independent of other dependencies is really amazing. It's so obvious now that you say it. What's the choices now? Let's just say that, I buy it, I love it, I'm using it. Now what do I got to do if I want to deploy it? Do I have to pick processors? Are there verified platforms that you support? Is there a short list? Is there every piece of hardware? >> We actually can help you. I hope we're not saying we can do everything in the world here, but we can help you with that. So, here's how. When you have them all in the platform you can actually see how this model runs on any instance of any cloud, by the way. So we support all the three major cloud providers. And then you can make decisions. For example, if you care about latency, your model has to run on, at most 50 milliseconds, because you're going to have interactivity. And then, after that, you don't care if it's faster. All you care is that, is it going to run cheap enough. So we can help you navigate. And also going to make it automatic. >> It's like tire kicking in the dealer showroom. >> Right. >> You can test everything out, you can see the simulation. Are they simulations, or are they real tests? >> Oh, no, we run all in real hardware. So, we have, as I said, we support any instances of any of the major clouds. We actually run on the cloud. But we also support a select number of edge devices today, like ARMs and Nvidia Jetsons. And we have the OctoML cloud, which is a bunch of racks with a bunch Raspberry Pis and Nvidia Jetsons, and very soon, a bunch of mobile phones there too that can actually run the real hardware, and validate it, and test it out, so you can see that your model runs performant and economically enough in the cloud. And it can run on the edge devices-- >> You're a machine learning as a service. Would that be an accurate? >> That's part of it, because we're not doing the machine learning model itself. You come with a model and we make it deployable and make it ready to deploy. So, here's why it's important. Let me try. There's a large number of really interesting companies that do API models, as in API as a service. You have an NLP model, you have computer vision models, where you call an API and then point in the cloud. You send an image and you got a description, for example. But it is using a third party. Now, if you want to have your model on your infrastructure but having the same convenience as an API you can use our service. So, today, chances are that, if you have a model that you know that you want to do, there might not be an API for it, we actually automatically create the API for you. >> Okay, so that's why I get the DevOps agility for machine learning is a better description. Cause it's not, you're not providing the service. You're providing the service of deploying it like DevOps infrastructure as code. You're now ML as code. >> It's your model, your API, your infrastructure, but all of the convenience of having it ready to go, fully automatic, hands off. >> Cause I think what's interesting about this is that it brings the craftsmanship back to machine learning. Cause it's a craft. I mean, let's face it. >> Yeah. I want human brains, which are very precious resources, to focus on building those models, that is going to solve business problems. I don't want these very smart human brains figuring out how to scrub this into actually getting run the right way. This should be automatic. That's why we use machine learning, for machine learning to solve that. >> Here's an idea for you. We should write a book called, The Lean Machine Learning. Cause the lean startup was all about DevOps. >> Luis: We call machine leaning. No, that's not it going to work. (laughs) >> Remember when iteration was the big mantra. Oh, yeah, iterate. You know, that was from DevOps. >> Yeah, that's right. >> This code allowed for standing up stuff fast, double down, we all know the history, what it turned out. That was a good value for developers. >> I could really agree. If you don't mind me building on that point. You know, something we see as OctoML, but we also see at Madrona as well. Seeing that there's a trend towards best in breed for each one of the stages of getting a model deployed. From the data aspect of creating the data, and then to the model creation aspect, to the model deployment, and even model monitoring. Right? We develop integrations with all the major pieces of the ecosystem, such that you can integrate, say with model monitoring to go and monitor how a model is doing. Just like you monitor how code is doing in deployment in the cloud. >> It's evolution. I think it's a great step. And again, I love the analogy to the mainstream. I lived during those days. I remember the monolithic propriety, and then, you know, OSI model kind of blew it. But that OSI stack never went full stack, and it only stopped at TCP/IP. So, I think the same thing's going on here. You see some scalability around it to try to uncouple it, free it. >> Absolutely. And sustainability and accessibility to make it run faster and make it run on any deice that you want by any developer. So, that's the tagline. >> Luis Ceze, thanks for coming on. Professor. >> Thank you. >> I didn't know you were a professor. That's great to have you on. It was a masterclass in DevOps agility for machine learning. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> Congratulations, again. All right. OctoML here on theCube. Really important. Uncoupling the machine learning from the hardware specifically. That's only going to make space faster and safer, and more reliable. And that's where the whole theme of re:MARS is. Let's see how they fit in. I'm John for theCube. Thanks for watching. More coverage after this short break. >> Luis: Thank you. (gentle music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for in-person AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE two sets, live wall to wall coverage, all scopes of the hybrid events. Well, great stuff online. That was too much information to consume, but ultimately as usual, great show of new innovation for startups and for large enterprises. We've got a great guest, Paul Duffy head of startups Solutions Architecture for North America for Amazon Web Services. Paul, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Hi John, good to be here. >> So we saw you last night, we were chatting kind of about the show in general, but also about start ups. Everyone knows I'm a big startup fan and big founder myself, and we talk, I'm pro startups, everyone loves startups. Amazon, the first real customers were developers doing startups. And we know the big unicorns out there now all started on AWS. So Amazon was like a dream for the startup because before Amazon, you had to provision the server, you put in the Colo, you need a system administrator, welcome to EC2. Goodness is there, the rest is history. >> Yeah. >> The legacy and the startups is pretty deep. >> Yeah, you made the right point. I've done it myself. I co-founded a startup in about 2007, 2008. And before we even knew whether we had any kind of product market fit, we were racking the servers and doing all that kind of stuff. So yeah, completely changed it. >> And it's hard too with the new technology now finding someone to actually, I remember when we stood with our first Hadoop and we ran a solar search engine. I couldn't even find anyone to manage it. Because if you knew Hadoop back then, you were working at Facebook or Hyperscaler. So you guys have all this technology coming out, so provisioning and doing the heavy lifting for start is a huge win. That's kind of known, everyone knows that. So that's cool. What are you guys doing now because now you've got large enterprises trying to beat like startups. You got startups coming in with huge white spaces out there in the market. Jerry Chen from Greylock, and it was only yesterday we talked extensively about the net new opportunities in the Cloud that are out there. And now you see companies like Goldman Sachs have super cloud. So there's tons of growth. >> Paul: Yeah. >> Take us through the white space. How do you guys see startups taking advantage of AWS to a whole another level. >> And I think it's very interesting when you look at how things have changed in those kind of 15 years. The old world's horrible, you had to do all this provisioning. And then with AWS, Adam Szalecki was talking in his keynote on the first day of the event where people used to think it was just good for startups. Now for startups, it was this kind of obvious thing because they didn't have any legacy, they didn't have any data centers, they didn't have necessarily a large team and be able to do this thing with no commitment. Spin up a server with an API call was really the revolutionary thing. In that time, 15 years later, startups still have the same kind of urgency. They're constrained by time, they're constrained by money, they're constrained by the engineering talent they have. When you hear some of the announcements this week, or you look what is kind of the building blocks available to those startups. That I think is where it's become revolutionary. So you take a startup in 2011, 2012, and they were trying to build something maybe they were trying to do image recognition on forms for example, and they could build that. But they had to build the whole thing in the cloud. We had infrastructure, we had database stuff, but they would have to do all of the kind of the stuff on top of that. Now you look at some of the kind of the AIML services we have things like Textract, and they could just take that service off the shelf. We've got one startup in Canada called Chisel AI. They're trying to disrupt the insurance industry, and they could just use these services like text extracts to just accelerate them getting into that product market fit instead of having to do this undifferentiated (indistinct). >> Paul, we talk about, I remember back in the day when Web Services and service oriented architecture, building blocks, decoupling APIs, all that's now so real and so excellent, but you brought up a great point, Glue layers had to be built. Now you have with the scale of Amazon Web Services, things we're learning from other companies. It reminds me of the open source vibe where you stand on the shoulders of others to get success. And there's a lot of new things coming out that startups don't have to do because startup before then did. This is like a new, cool thing. It's a whole nother level. >> Yeah, and I think it's a real standing on the shoulders of giants kind of thing. And if you just unpick, like in Verna's announcement this morning, his key to this one, he was talking about the Amplify Studio kind of stuff. And if you think about the before and after for that, front-end developers have had to do this stuff for a long period of time. And in the before version, they would have to do all that kind of integration work, which isn't really what they want to spend that time doing. And now they've kind of got that headstart. Andy Jassy famously would say, when he talked about building AWS, that there is no compression algorithm for experience. I like to kind of misuse that phrase for what we try to do for startups is provide these compression algorithms. So instead of having say, hire a larger engineering team to just do this kind of crafty stuff, they can just take the thing and kind of get from naught to 60 (indistinct). >> Gives some examples today of where this is playing out in real time. What kinds of new compression algorithms can startups leverage that they couldn't get before what's new that's available? >> I think you see it across all parts of the stack. I mean, you could just take it out of a database thing, like in the old days, if you wanted to start, and you had the dream that every startup has, of getting to kind of hyper scale where things bursting that seems is the problem. If you wanted to do that in the database layer back in the day, you would probably have to provision most of that database stuff yourself. And then when you get to some kind of limiting factor, you've got to do that work where all you're really wanting to do is try and add more features to your application. Or whether you've got services like Aurora where that will do all of that kind of scaling from a storage point of view. And it gives that startup the way to stand on the shoulders of giants, all the same kind of thing. You want to do some kind of identity, say you're doing a kind of a dog walking marketplace or something like that. So one of the things that you need to do for the kind of the payments thing is some kind of identity verification. In the old days, you would have to have gone pulled all those premises together to do the stuff that would look at people's ID and so on. Now, people can take things like Textracts for example, to look at those forms and do that kind of stuff. And you can kind of pick that story in all of these different stream lines whether it's compute stuff, whether it's database, whether it's high-level AIML stuff, whether it's stuff like amplify, which just massively compresses that timeframe for the startup. >> So, first of all, I'm totally loving this 'cause this is just an example of how evolution works. But if I'm a startup, one of the big things I would think about, and you're a founder, you know this, opportunity recognition is one thing, opportunity capture is another. So moving fast is what nimble startups do. Maybe there's a little bit of technical debt. There maybe a little bit of model debt, but they can get beach head quickly. Startups can move fast, that's the benefit. So where do I learn if I'm a startup founder about where all these pieces are? Is there a place that you guys are providing? Is there use cases where founders can just come in and get the best of the best composable cloud? How do I stand up something quickly to get going that I could regain and refactor later, but not take on too much technical debt or just actually have new building blocks. Where are all these tools? >> I'm really glad you asked that one. So, I mean, first startups is the core of what everyone in my team does. And most of the people we hire, well, they all have a passion for startups. Some have been former founders, some have been former CTOs, some have come to the passion from a different kind of thing. And they understand the needs of startups. And when you started to talk about technical debt, one of the balances that startups have always got to get right, is you're not building for 10 years down the line. You're building to get yourself often to the next milestone to get the next set of customers, for example. And so we're not trying to do the sort of the perfect anonymity of good things. >> I (indistinct) conception of startups. You don't need that, you just got to get the marketplace. >> Yeah, and how we try to do that is we've got a program called Activate and Activate gives startup founders either things like AWS credits up to a hundred thousand dollars in credits. It gives them other technical capabilities as well. So we have a part of the console, the management console called the Activate Console people can go there. And again, if you're trying to build a backend API, there is something that is built on AWS capability to be launched recently that basically says here's some templatized stuff for you to go from kind of naught to 60 and that kind of thing. So you don't have to spend time searching the web. And for us, we're taking that because we've been there before with a bunch of other startups, so we're trying to help. >> Okay, so how do you guys, I mean, a zillion startups, I mean, you and I could be in a coffee shop somewhere, hey, let's do a startup. Do I get access, does everyone gets access to this program that you have? Or is it an elite thing? Is there a criteria? Is it just, you guys are just out there fostering and evangelizing brilliant tools. Is there a program? How do you guys- >> It's a program. >> How do you guys vet startup's, is there? >> It's a program. It has different levels in terms of benefits. So at the core of it it's open to anybody. So if you were a bootstrap startup tomorrow, or today, you can go to the Activate website and you can sign up for that self-starting tier. What we also do is we have an extensive set of connections with the community, so T1 accelerators and incubators, venture capital firms, the kind of places where startups are going to build and via the relationships with those folks. If you're in one, if you've kind of got investment from a top tier VC firm for example, you may be eligible for a hundred thousand dollars of credit. So some of it depends on where the stock is up, but the overall program is open to all. And a chunk of the stuff we talked about like the guidance that's there for everybody. >> It's free, that's free and that's cool. That's good learning, so yeah. And then they get the free training. What's the coolest thing that you're doing right now that startups should know about around obviously the passionate start ups. I know for a fact at 80%, I can say that I've heard Andy and Adam both say that it's not just enterprising, well, they still love the startups. That's their bread and butter too. >> Yeah, well, (indistinct) I think it's amazing that someone, we were talking about the keynote you see some of these large customers in Adam's keynote to people like United Airlines, very, very large successful enterprise. And if you just look around this show, there's a lot of startups just on this expert floor that we are now. And when I look at these announcements, to me, the thing that just gets me excited and keeps me staying doing this job is all of these little capabilities make it in the environment right now with a good funding environment and all of these technical building blocks that instead of having to take a few, your basic compute and storage, once you have all of these higher and higher levels things, you know the serverless stuff that was announced in Adam's keynotes early, which is just making it easy. Because if you're a founder, you have an idea, you know the thing that you want to disrupt. And we're letting people do that in different ways. I'll pick one start up that I find really exciting to talk to. It's called Study. It's run by a guy called Zack Kansa. And he started that start up relatively recently. Now, if you started 15 years ago, you were going to use EC2 instances building on the cloud, but you were still using compute instances. Zack is really opinionated and a kind of a technology visionary in this sense that he takes this serverless approach. And when you talk to him about how he's building, it's almost this attitude of, if I've had to spin up a server, I've kind of failed in some way, or it's not the right kind of thing. Why would we do that? Because we can build with these completely different kinds of architectures. What was revolutionary 15 years ago, and it's like, okay, you can launch it and serve with an API, and you're going to pay by the hour. But now when you look at how Zack's building, you're not even launching a server and you're paying by the millions. >> So this is a huge history lesson slash important point. Back 15 years ago, you had your alternative to Amazon was provisioning, which is expensive, time consuming, lagging, and probably causes people to give up, frankly. Now you get that in the cloud either you're on your own custom domain. I remember EC2 before they had custom domains. It was so early. But now it's about infrastructures code. Okay, so again, evolution, great time to market, buy what you need in the cloud. And Adam talked about that. Now it's true infrastructure is code. So the smart savvy architects are saying, Hey, I'm just going to program. If I'm spinning up servers, that means that's a low level primitive that should be automated. >> Right. >> That's the new mindset. >> Yeah, that's why the fun thing about being in this industry is in just in the time that I've worked at AWS, since about 2011, this stuff has changed so much. And what was state of the art then? And if you take, it's funny, when you look at some of the startups that have grown with AWS, like whether it's Airbnb, Stripe, Slack and so on. If you look at how they built in 2011, because sometimes new startups will say, oh, we want to go and talk to this kind of unicorn and see how they built. And if you actually talked to the unicorn, some of them would say, we wouldn't build it this way anymore. We would do the kind of stuff that Zack and the folks studied are doing right now, because it's totally different (indistinct). >> And the one thing that's consistent from then to now is only one thing, it has nothing to do with the tech, it's speed. Remember rails front end with some backend Mongo, you're up on EC2, you've got an app, in a week, hackathon. Weekend- >> I'm not tying that time thing, that just goes, it gets smaller and smaller. Like the amplify thing that Verna was talking about this morning. You could've gone back 15 years, it's like, okay, this is how much work the developer would have to do. You could go back a couple of years and it's like, they still have this much work to do. And now this morning, it's like, they've just accelerated them to that kind of thing. >> We'll end on giving Jerry Chan a plug in our chat yesterday. We put the playbook out there for startups. You got to raise your focus on the beach head and solve the problem you got in front of you, and then sequence two adjacent positions, refactor in the cloud. Take that approach. You don't have to boil the ocean over right away. You get in the market, get in and get automating kind of the new playbook. It's just, make everything work for you. Not use the modern. >> Yeah, and the thing for me, that one line, I can't remember it was Paul Gray, or somehow that I stole it from, but he's just encouraging these startups to be appropriately lazy. Like let us do the hard work. Let us do the undifferentiated heavy lifting so people can come up with these super cool ideas. >> Yeah, just plugging the talent, plugging the developer. You got a modern application. Paul, thank you for coming on theCUBE, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Head of Startup Solution Architecture North America, Amazon Web Services is going to continue to birth more startups that will be unicorns and decacorns now. Don't forget the decacorns. Okay, we're here at theCUBE bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE. You're watching the Leader in Global Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (bright upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Mobile World Congress is alive, theCUBE will be there and we'll certainly let you know if it's alive and well when we get on the ground. Now, as we approach a delayed mobile world congress, it's really appropriate to reflect in the state of the telecoms industry. Let's face it. Telcos have done of really good job of keeping us all connected during the pandemic, supporting work from home and that whole pivot, accommodating the rapid shift to landline traffic, securing the network and keeping it up and running but it doesn't change the underlying fundamental dilemma that Telco has faced. Telco is a slow growth, no growth industry, with revenue expectations in the low single digits. And at the same time network traffic continues to grow at 20% annually. And last year it grew at 40% to 50%. Despite these challenges, Telcos are still investing in the future. For example, the Telco industry collectively is selling out more than a trillion dollars in the first half of this decade on 5G and fiber infrastructure. And it's estimated that there are now more than 200 5G networks worldwide. But a lot of questions remain, not the least of which is, can and should Telcos go beyond connectivity and fiber. Can the Telcos actually monetize 5G or whatever's next beyond 5G? Or is that going to be left to the ecosystem? Now what about the ecosystem? How is that evolving? And very importantly, what role will the Cloud Hyperscalers play in Telco? Are they infrastructure on which the Telcos can build or are they going to suck the value out of the market as they have done in the enterprise? Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, it's my pleasure to welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and colleague, and the founding director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis. Chris, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. >> It is really our pleasure. So, we're going to cover a lot of ground today. And first thing, we're going to talk about Mobile World Congress. I've never been, you're an expert at that and what we can expect. And then we're going to review the current state of telecoms infrastructure, where it should go. We're going to dig into transformation. Is it a mandate? Is it aspirational? Can Telcos enter adjacent markets in ways they haven't been able to in the past? And then how about the ecosystem? We're going to talk about that, and then obviously we're going to talk about Cloud as I said, and we'll riff a little bit on the tech landscape. So Chris, let's get into it, Mobile World Congress, it's back on, what's Mobile World Congress typically like? What's your expectation this year for the vibe compared to previous events? >> Well Dave, the issue of Mobile World Congress is always that we go down there for a week into Barcelona. We stress ourselves building a matrix of meetings in 30 minutes slots and we return at the end of it trying to remember what we'd been told all the way through. The great thing is that with the last time we had a live, with around 110,000 people there, you could see anyone and everyone you needed to within the mobile, and increasingly the adjacent industry and ecosystem. So, he gave you that once a year, big download of everything new, obviously because it's the Mobile World Congress, a lot of it around devices, but increasingly over the last few years, we saw many, many stands with cars on them because the connected car became an issue, a lot more software oriented players there, but always the Telcos, always the people providing the network infrastructure. Increasingly in the last few years people provided the software and IT infrastructure, but all of these people contributing to what the network should be in the future, what needs to be connected. But of course the reach of the network has been growing. You mentioned during lockdown about connecting people in their homes, well, of course we've also been extending that connection to connect things whether it's in the home or the different devices, monitoring of doorbells and lights and all that sort of stuff. And in the industry environment, connecting all of the robots and sensors. So, actually the perimeter, the remit of the industry to connect has been expanding, and so is the sort of remit of Mobile World Congress. So, we set an awful lot of different suppliers coming in, trying to attach to this enormous market of roughly $1.5 trillion globally. >> Chris, what's the buzz in the industry in terms of who's going to show up. I know a lot of people have pulled out, I've got the Mobile World Congress app and I can see who's attending. And it looks like quite a few people are going to go but what's your expectation? >> Well, from an analyst point of view, obviously I'm mainly keeping up with my clients and trying to get new clients. I'm looking at it and going most of my clients are not attending in person. Now, of course, we need the DSMA, we need Mobile World Congress for future for the industry interaction. But of course, like many people having adopted and adapted to be online, then they're putting a lot of the keynotes online, a lot of the activities will be online. But of course many of the vendors have also produced their independent content and content to actually deliver to us as analysts. So, I'm not sure who will be there. I like you, but you'll be on the ground. You'll be able to report back and let us know exactly who turned up. But from my point of view, I've had so many pre-briefs already, the difference between this year and previous years, I used to get loads of pre-briefs and then have to go do the briefs as well. So this year I've got the pre-brief so I can sit back, put my feet up and wait for your report to come back as to what's happening on the ground. >> You got it. Okay, let's get into a little bit and talk about Telco infrastructure and the state, where it is today, where it's going, Chris, how would you describe the current state of Telco infrastructure? Where does it need to go? Like, what is the ideal future state look like for Telcos in your view? >> So there's always a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to Telco. I think going forward, the connectivity piece was seen as being table stakes, and then people thought where can we go beyond connectivity? And we'll come back to that later. But actually to the connectivity under the scenario I just described of people, buildings, things, and society, we've got to do a lot more work to make that connectivity extend, to be more reliable, to be more secure. So, the state of the network is that we have been building out infrastructure, which includes fiber to connect households and businesses. It includes that next move to cellular from 4G to 5G. It obviously includes Wi-Fi, wherever we've got that as well. And actually it's been a pretty good state, as you said in your opening comments they've done a pretty good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, whether we're a fixed centric market like the UK with a lot of mobile on top and like the US, or in many markets in Africa and Asia, where we're very mobile centric. So, the fact is that every country market is different, so we should never make too many assumptions at a very top level, but building out that network, building out the services, focusing on that connectivity and making sure we get that cost of delivery right, because competition is pushing us towards having and not ever increasing prices, because we don't want to pay a lot extra every time. But the big issue for me is how do we bring together the IT and the network parts of this story to make sure that we build that efficiency in, and that brings in many questions that we going to touch upon now around Cloud and Hyperscalers around who plays in the ecosystem. >> Well, as you know, Telco is not my wheelhouse, but hanging around with you, I've learned, you've talked a lot about the infrastructure being fit for purpose. It's easy from an IT perspective. Oh yeah, it's fossilized, it's hardened, and it's not really flexible, but the flip side of that coin is as you're pointing out, it's super reliable. So, the big talk today is, "Okay, we're going to open up the network, open systems, and Open RAN, and open everything and microservices and containers. And so, the question is this, can you mimic that historical reliability in that open platform? >> Well, for me, this is the big trade-off and in my great Telco debate every year, I always try and put people against each other to try and to literally debate the future. And one of the things we looked at was is a more open network against this desire of the Telcos to actually have a smaller supplier roster. And of course, as a major corporation, these are on a national basis, very large companies, not large compared to the Hyperscalers for example, but they're large organizations, and they're trying to slim down their organization, slim down the supplier ecosystem. So actually in some ways, the more open it becomes, the more someone's got to manage and integrate all those pieces together. And that isn't something we want to do necessarily. So, I see a real tension there between giving more and more to the traditional suppliers. The Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, Amdocs and so on, the Ciscos. And then the people coming in breaking new ground like Mavenir and come in, and the sort of approach that Rakuten and Curve taken in bringing in more open and more malleable pieces of smaller software. So yeah, it's a real challenge. And I think as an industry which is notorious for being slow moving, actually we've begun to move relatively quickly, but not necessarily all the way through the organization. We've got plenty of stuff sitting on major or mainframes still in the back of the organization. But of course, as mobile has come in, we've started to deal much more closely, uninteractively in real time, God forbid, with the customers. So actually, at that front end, we've had to do things a lot more quickly. And that's where we're seeing the quickest adaptation to what you might see in your IT environment as being much more, continuous development, continuous improvement, and that sort of on demand delivery. >> Yeah, and we're going to get to that sort of in the Cloud space, but I want to now touch on Telco transformation which is sort of the main theme of this episode. And there's a lot of discussion on this topic, can Telcos move beyond connectivity and managing fiber? Is this a mandate? Is it a pipe dream that's just aspirational? Can they attack adjacencies to grow beyond the 1% a year? I mean, they haven't been successful historically. What are those adjacencies that might be, an opportunity and how will that ecosystem develop? >> Sure. >> So Chris, can and should Telcos try to move beyond core connectivity? Let's start there. >> I like what you did there by saying pipe dreams. Normally, pipe is a is a negative comment in the telecom world. But pipe dream gives it a real positive feel. So can they move beyond connectivity? Well, first of all, connectivity is growing in terms of the number of things being connected. So, in that sense, the market is growing. What we pay for that connectivity is not necessarily growing. So, therefore the mandate is absolutely to transform the inner workings and reduce the cost of delivery. So, that's the internal perspective. The external perspective is that we've tried in many Telcos around the world to break into those adjacent markets, being around media, being enterprise, being around IOT, and actually for the most part they've failed. And we've seen some very significant recent announcements from AT&T, Verizon, BT, beginning to move away from, owning content and not delivering content, but owning content. And the same as they've struggled often in the enterprise market to really get into that, because it's a well-established channel of delivery bringing all those ecosystem players in. So, actually rather than the old Telco view of we going to move into adjacent markets and control those markets, actually moving into them and enabling fellow ecosystem players to deliver the service is what I think we're beginning to see a lot more of now. And that's the big change, it's actually learning to play with the other people in the ecosystem. I always use a phrase that there's no room for egos in the ecosystem. And I think Telcos went in initially with an ego thinking we're really important, we are on connectivity. But actually now they're beginning to approach the ecosystem things saying, "How can we support partners? How can we support everyone in this ecosystem to deliver the services to consumers, businesses and whomever in this evolving ecosystem?" So, there are opportunities out there, plenty of them, but of course, like any opportunity, you've got to approach it in the right way. You've got to get the right investment in place. You've got to approach it with the right open API so everyone can integrate with your approach, and approach it, do I say with a little bit of humility to say, "Hey, we can bring this to the table, how do we work together? >> Well, it's an enormous market. I think you've shared with me, it's like 1.4 trillion. And I want to stay on these adjacencies for a minute, because one of the obvious things that Telcos will talk about is managed services. And I know we have to be careful of that term in an IT context, that it's different in a, you're talking about managing connectivity, but there's professional services. That's a logical sort of extension of their business and probably a safe adjacency, maybe not even adjacency, but they're not going to get into devices. I mean, they'll resell devices, but they're not going to be, I would presume not go back to trying to make devices, but there's certainly the edge and that's so, it'll define in opaque, but it's huge. If there's 5G, there's the IT component and that's probably a partnership opportunity. And as you pointed out, there's the ecosystem, but I wonder, how do you think about 5G as an adjacency or indoor opportunity? Is it a revenue opportunity for Telcos or is that just something that is really aspirational? >> Oh, absolutely it's a revenue opportunity, but I prefer to think of 5G as being a sort of a metaphor for the whole future of telecom. So, we usually talk, and MWC would normally talk about 5G just as a mobile solution. Of course, what you can get with, you can use this fixed wireless access approach, where the roots that sits in your house or your building. So, it's a potential replacement for some fixed lines. And of course, it's also, gives you the ability to build out, let's say in a manufacturing or a campus environment, a private 5G network. So, many of the early opportunities we're seeing with 5G are actually in that more private network environment addressing those very low latency, and high bandwidth requirements. So yeah, there are plenty of opportunities. Of course, the question here is, is connectivity enough, or especially with your comment around the edge, at the edge we need to manage connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, and of course the applications. So, that's a blend of players. It's not going to be in the hands of one player. So yes, plenty of opportunities but understanding what comes the other way from the customer base, where that's, you and I in our homes or outward as an about, or from a business point of view, an office or a campus environment, that's what should be driving, and not the technology itself. And I think this is the trap that the industry has fallen into many times, is we've got a great new wave of technology coming, how can we possibly deliver it to everybody rather than listening to what the customers really require and delivering it in a way consumable by all those different markets. >> Yeah now, of course all of these topics blend together. We try to keep them separately, but we're going to talk about Cloud, we're going to talk about competition, But one of the areas that we don't have a specific agenda item on is, is data and AI. And of course there's all this data flowing through the network, so presumably it's an opportunity for the Telcos. At the same time, they're not considered AI experts. They do when you talk about Edge, they would appear to have the latency advantage because of the last mile and their proximity, to various end points. But the Cloud is sort of building out as well. How do you think about data and AI as an opportunity for Telco? >> I think the whole data and AI piece for me sits on top of the cake or pie, whatever you want to call it. What we're doing with all this connectivity, what we're doing with all these moving parts and gathering information around it, and building automation into the delivery of the service, and using the analytics, whether you call it ML or AI, it doesn't really matter. But actually using that information to deliver a better service, a better outcome. Now, of course, Telcos have had much of this data for years and years, for decades, but they've never used it. So, I think what's happening is, the Cloud players are beginning to educate many of the Telcos around how valuable this stuff is. And that then brings in that question of how do we partner with people using open APIs to leverage that data. Now, do the Telcos keep hold of all that data? Do they let the Cloud players do all of it? No, it's going to be a combination depending on particular environments, and of course the people owning their devices also have a vested interest in this as well. So, you've always got to look at it end to end and where the data flows are, and where we can analyze it. But I agree that analysis on the device at the Edge, and perhaps less and less going back to the core, which is of course the original sort of mandate of the Cloud. >> Well, we certainly think that most of the Edge is going to be about AI inferencing, and then most of the data is going to stay at the edge. Some will come back for sure. And that is big opportunity for whether you're selling compute or conductivity, or maybe storage as well, but certainly insights at the Edge. >> Everything. >> Yeah. >> Everything, yeah. >> Let's get into the Cloud discussion and talk about the Hyperscalers, the big Hyperscaler elephant in the room. We're going to try to dig into what role the Cloud will play in the transformation of telecoms on Telecom TV at the great Telco debate. You likened the Hyperscalers, Chris, to Dementors from Harry Potter hovering over the industry. So, the question is, are the Cloud players going to suck the value out of the Telcos? Or are they more like Dobby the elf? They're powerful, there's sometimes friendly but they're unpredictable. >> Thank you for extending that analogy. Yes, it got a lot of reaction when I use that, but I think it indicates some of the direction of power shift where, we've got to remember here that Telcos are fundamentally national, and they're restricted by regulation, and the Cloud players are global, perhaps not as global as they'd like be, but some regional restrictions, but the global players, the Hyperscalers, they will use that power and they they will extend their reach, and they are extending their reach. If you think they now command some fantastic global networks, in some ways they've replaced some of the Telco international networks, all the submarine investments that tend to be done primarily for the Hyperscalers. So, they're building that out. So, as soon as you get onto their network, then you suddenly become part of that environment. And that is reducing some of the spend on the longer distances we might have got in the past approaches from the Telcos. Now, does that mean they're going to go all the way down and take over the Telcos? I don't believe so, because it's a fundamentally different business digging fiber in people's streets and delivering to the buildings, and putting antennas up. So, they will be a coexistence. And in fact, what we've already seen with Cloud and the Hyperscalers is that they're working much more close together than people might imagine. Now, you mentioned about data in the previous question, Google probably the best known of the of the AI and ML delivers from the Cloud side, working with many of the Telcos, even in some cases to actually have all the data outsourced into the Google Cloud for analytics purposes. They've got the power, the heavy lifting to do that. And so, we begin to see that, and obviously with shifting of workloads as appropriate within the Telco networking environment, we're seeing that with AWS, and of course with Azure as well. And Azure of course acquired a couple of companies in affirmed and Metro switch, which actually do some of the formal 5G core and the likes there within the connectivity environment. So, it's not clean cuts. And to go back to the analogy, those Dementors are swooping around and looking for opportunities, and we know that they will pick up opportunities, and they will extend their reach as far as they can down to that edge. But of course, the edge is where, as you rightly say, the Telcos have the control, they don't necessarily own the customer. I don't believe anyone owns the customer in this digital environment, because digital allows you to move your allegiance and your custom elsewhere anyway. So, but they do own that access piece, and that's what's important from a national point of view, from an economic point of view. And that's why we've seen some of the geopolitical activity banning Huawei from certain markets, encouraging more innovation through open ecosystem plays. And so, there is a tension there between the local Telco, the local market and the Hyperscaler market, but fundamentally they've got an absolute brilliant way of working together using the best of both worlds to deliver the services that we need as an economy. >> Well, and we've talked about this you and I in the past where the Telcos, portions of the Telco network could move into the Cloud. And there of course the Telcos all run the big data centers, and portions of that IT infrastructure could move into the Cloud. But it's very clear, they're not going to give up the entire family jewels to the Cloud players. Why would they? But there are portions of their IT that they could move into. Particularly, in the front end, they want to build like everybody. They want to build an abstraction layer. They're not going to move their core systems and their backend Oracle databases, they're going to put a brick wall around those, but they wanted abstraction layer, and they want to take advantage of microservices and use that data from those transaction systems. But the web front end stuff makes sense to put into Cloud. So, how do you think about that? >> I think you've hit the nail on the head. So you can't move those big backend systems straight away, gradually over time, you will, but you've got to go for those easy wins. And certainly in the research I've been doing with many of my clients, they're suggested that front end piece, making sure that you can onboard customers more easily, you can get the right mix of services. You can provide the omnichannel interaction from that customer experience that everybody talks about, for which the industry is not very well known at all by the way. So, any improvement on that is going to be good from an MPS point of view. So yeah, leveraging what we might, what we call BSS OSS in the telecom world, and actually putting that into the Cloud, leveraging both the Hyperscalers, but also by the way, many of the traditional players who people think haven't moved Cloud wards, but they are moving Cloud wards and they're embracing microservices and Cloud native. So, what you would have seen if we'd been in person down in Barcelona next week, would be a lot of the vendors who perhaps traditionally seems a bit slow moving, actually have done a lot of work to move their portfolio into the Cloud and into Cloud native environments. And yes, as you say, we can use that front end, we can use the API openness that's developed by people at the TM forum, to actually make sure we don't have to do the backend straight away, do it over time. Because of course the thing that we're not touching upon here, is the revenue stream is a consistent revenue stream. So, just because you don't need to change the backend to keep your revenue stream going, this is on a new, it keeps delivering every month, we keep paying our 50, 40, whatever bucks a month into the Telco pot. That's why it's such a big market, and people aren't going to stop doing that. So, I think the dynamics of the industry, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the inner workings of it and the potential of adjacent markets, whereas actually, we keep paying for this stuff, we keep pushing revenue into the pockets of all the Telcos. So, it's not a bad industry to be in, even if they were just pushed back to be in the access market, it's a great business. We need it more and more. The elasticity of demand is very inelastic, we need it. >> Yeah, it's the mother of old golden geese. We don't have a separate topic on security, and I want to touch on security here, is such an important topic. And it's top of mind obviously for everybody, Telcos, Hyperscalers, the Hyperscalers have this shared responsibility model, you know it well. A lot of times it's really confusing for customers. They don't realize it until there has been a problem. The Telcos are going to be very much tuned into this. How will all this openness, and we're going to talk about technology in a moment, but how will this transformation in your view, in the Cloud, with the shared responsibility model, how will that affect the whole security posture? >> Security is a great subject, and I do not specialize in it. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say security for me is a bit like AI and analytics. It's everywhere. It's part of everything. And therefore you cannot think of it as a separate add on issue. So, every aspect, every element, every service you build into your micro services environment has to think about how do you secure that connection, that transaction, how do you secure the customer's data? Obviously, sovereignty plays a role in that as well in terms of where it sits, but at every level of every connection, every hop that we look through, every route to jump, we've got to see that security is built in. And in some ways, it's seen as being a separate part of the industry, but actually, as we collapse parts of the network down, we're talking about bringing optical and rooting together in many environments, security should be talked about in the same breath. So when I talked about Edge, when I talked about connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, I should've said security as well, because I absolutely believe that is fundamental to every chain in the link and let's face it, we've got a lot of links in the chain. >> Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's hit on technologies and competition, we kind of blend those together. What technology should we be paying attention to that are going to accelerate this transformation. We hear a lot about 5G, Open RAN. There's a lot of new tech coming in. What are you watching? Who are the players that we maybe should be paying attention to, some that you really like, that are well positioned? >> We've touched upon it in various of the questions that have proceeded this. So, the sort of Cloudification of the networking environment is obviously really important. The automation of the process we've got to move away from bureaucratic manual processes within these large organizations, because we've got to be more efficient, we've got to be more reliable. So, anything which is related to automation. And then the Open RAN question is really interesting. Once again, you raised this topic of when you go down an Open RAN routes or any open route, it ultimately requires more integration. You've got more moving parts from more suppliers. So, therefore there are potential security issues there, depending on how it's defined, but everybody is entering the Open RAN market. There are some names that you will see regularly next week, being pushed, I'm not going to push them anymore, because some of them just attract the oxygen of attention. But there are plenty out there. The good news is, the key vendors who come from the more traditional side are also absolutely embracing that and accept the openness. But I think the piece which probably excites me more, apart from the whole shift towards Cloud and microservices, is the coming together, the openness between the IT environment and the networking environment. And you see it, for example, in the Open RAN, this thing called the RIC, the RAN Interconnection Controller. We're actually, we're beginning to find people come from the IT side able to control elements within the wireless controller piece. Now that that starts to say to me, we're getting a real handle on it, anybody can manage it. So, more specialization is required, but understanding how the end to end flow works. What we will see of course is announcements about new devices, the big guys like Apple and Samsung do their own thing during the year, and don't interrupt their beat with it with MWC, but you'll see a lot of devices being pushed by many other providers, and you'll see many players trying to break into the different elements of the market. But I think mostly, you'll see the people approaching it from more and more Cloudified angle where things are much more leveraging, that Cloud capability and not relying on the sort of rigid and stodgy infrastructure that we've seen in the past >> Which is kind of interesting because Cloud, a lot of the Clouds are Walled Gardens, at the same time they host a lot of open technologies, and I think as these two worlds collide, IT and the Telco industry, it's going to be interesting to see how the Telco developer ecosystem evolves. And so, that's something that we definitely want to watch. You've got a comment there? >> Yeah, I think the Telco developer they've not traditionally been very big in that area at all, have they? They've had their traditional, if you go back to when you and I were kids, the plain old telephone service was a, they were a one trick pony, and they've moved onto that. In some ways, I'd like them to move on and to have the one trick of plain old broadband that we just get broadband delivered everywhere. So, there are some issues about delivering service to all parts of every country, and obviously the globe, whether we do that through satellite, we might see some interesting satellite stuff coming out during NWC. There's an awful lot of birds flying up there trying to deliver signal back to the ground. Traditionally, that's not been very well received, with the change in generation of satellite might help do that. But we've known traditionally that a lot of developer activity in there, what it does bring to the four though, Dave, is this issue of players like the Ciscos and Junipers, and all these guys of the world who bring a developer community to the table as well. This is where the ecosystem play comes in, because that's where you get the innovation in the application world, working with channels, working with individual applications. And so it's opening up, it's basically building a massive fabric that anybody can tap into, and that's what becomes so exciting. So, the barriers to entry come down, but I think it will see us settling down, a stabilization of relationship between the Telcos and the Hyperscalers, because they need each other as we talked about previously, then the major providers, the Ciscos, Nokias, Ericssons, Huawei's, the way they interact with the Telcos. And then allowing that level of innovation coming in from the smaller players, whether it's on a national or a global basis. So, it's actually a really exciting environment. >> So I want to continue that theme and just talk about Telco in the enterprise. And Chris, on this topic, I want to just touch on some things and bring in some survey data from ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, our partner. And of course the Telcos, they've got lots of data centers. And as we talked about, they're going to be moving certain portions into the Cloud, lots of the front end pieces in particular, but let's look at the momentum of some of the IT players within the ETR dataset, and look at how they compare to some of the Telcos that ETR captures specifically within the Telco industry. So, we filtered this data on the Telco industry. So, this is our X, Y graph that we show you oftentimes on the vertical axis, is net score which measures spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, this data is for shared accounts just in the Telco sector. So we filtered on certain sectors, like within the technology sectors, Cloud, networking, and so it's narrow, it's a narrow slice of the 1500. It respondents, it represents about 133 shared accounts. And a couple of things to jump right out. Within the Telco industry, it's no surprise, but Azure and AWS have massive presence on the horizontal axis, but what's notable as they score very highly in the vertical axis, with elevated spending velocity on their platforms within Telco. Google Cloud doesn't have as much of a presence, but it's elevated as well. Chris was talking about their data posture before, Arista and Verizon, along with VMware are also elevated, as is Aruba, which is HPEs networking division, but they don't have the presence on the horizontal axis. And you got Red Hat OpenStack is actually quite prominent in Telco as we've reported in previous segments. Is no surprise You see Akamai there. Now remember, this survey is weighted toward enterprise IT, so you have to take that into consideration, but look at Cisco, very strong presence, nicely elevated as is Equinox, both higher than many of the others including Dell, but you could see Dell actually has pretty respectable spending in Telco. It's an area that they're starting to focus on more. And then you got that cluster below, your Juniper, AT&T, Oracle, the rest of HPE TELUM and Lumen which is formerly, century link via IBM. Now again, I'm going to caution you. This is an enterprise IT heavy survey, but the big takeaway is the Cloud players have a major presence inside of firms that say they're in the telecommunications industry. And certain IT players like Cisco, VMware and Red Hat appear to be well positioned inside these accounts. So Chris, I'm not sure if any of this commentary resonates with you, but it seems that the Telcos would love to partner up with traditional IT vendors and Cloud players, and maybe find ways to grow their respective businesses. >> I think some of the data points you brought out there are very important. So yes, we've seen a Microsoft Azure and AWS very strong working with Telcos. We've seen Google Cloud platform actually really aggressively pushed into the market certainly the last 12, 24 months. So yeah, they're well positioned, and they all come from a slightly different background. As I said, the Google with this, perhaps more data centric approach in its analytics, tools very useful, AWS with this outpost reaching out, connecting out, and as you'll, with its knowledge of the the Microsoft business market certainly pushing into private networks as well, by the way. So yeah, and Cisco, of course in there does have, and it's a mass scale division, a lot of activity there, some of the people collapsing, some of that rooting an obstacle together, their big push on Silicon. So, what you've got here is a sort of cross representation of many of the different sorts of suppliers who are active in this market. Now Telcos is a big spenders, the telecom market, as we said, a $1.4 trillion market, they spend a lot, they probably have to double bubble spend at the moment to get over the hump of 5G investment, to build out fiber where they need to build out. So, any anything that relates to that is of course a major spending opportunity, a major market opportunity for players. And we know when you need the infrastructure behind it, whether it's in data centers or in their own data centers or in the Cloud to deliver against it. So, what I do like about this as an analyst, a lot of people would focus on one particular piece of the market. So you specialize on handsets, people specialize on home markets and home gateways. So, I tend to sit back and try and look at the big picture, the whole picture. And I think we're beginning to see some very good momentum where people are, where companies are building upon, of course their core business within the telecom industry, extending it out. But the lines of demarcation are blurring between enterprise, Telco, and indeed moving down into small business. And you think about the SD-WAN Market, which came from nowhere to build a much more flexible solution for connecting people over the wide area network, which has been brilliant during the pandemic, because it's allowed us to extend that to home, but be of course, build a campus ready for the future as well. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think the big question in my mind is always about from going into the Telco, as I said, whether they wannna reduce the number of suppliers on the roster. So that puts a question mark against some of the open approaches, and then from the Telco to the end customer, because it goes to the Telcos, 30% of their revenue comes from the enterprise market, 60% from the consumer market. How do they leverage the channel? Which includes all the channels, we talked about security, all of the IT stuff that you've already touched upon and the Cloud. It's going to be a very interesting mix and balancing act between different channels to get the services that the customers want. And I think increasingly, customers are more aware of the opportunities open to them to reach back into this ecosystem and say, "Yeah, I want a piece of humans to Telco, but I want it to come to me through my local integrated channel, because I need a bit of their expertise on security." So, fascinating market, and I think not telecom's no longer considered in isolation, but very much as part of that broader digital ecosystem. >> Chris, it's very hard to compress an analysis of a $1.4 trillion business into 30 or 35 minutes, but you're just the guy to help me do it. So, I got to really thank you for participating today and bringing your knowledge. Awesome. >> Do you know, it's my pleasure. I love looking at this market. Obviously I love analogies like Harry Potter, which makes it bring things to life. But at the end of the day, we as people, we want to be connected, we as business, we want to be connected, in society we want to be connected. So, the fundamental of this industry are unbelievably strong. Let's hope that governments don't mess with it too much. And let's hope that we get the right technology comes through, and help support that world of connectivity going forward. >> All right, Chris, well, I'll be texting you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and many thanks to my colleague, Chris Lewis, he brought some serious knowledge today and thank you. And remember, I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And these episodes are all available as podcasts. You just got to search for Breaking Analysis podcasts. You can always connect with me on twitter @dvellante or email me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com. And you can comment on my LinkedIn post, and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE", with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is "theCUBE's" coverage of VMworld 2020. Of course, such a broad ecosystem in the VMware environment. Been talking a lot, of course, this year, about what's happened in the Cloud Native space. vSphere 7 has Kubernetes coming into the virtualized environment. And one of those key pieces of doing cloud is you need to make sure data protection still works. And, of course, VMware has a long history working with lots of companies. In this segment, we're going to be digging into the VMware, and Dell, also, solution for data protection. So, happy to welcome to the program. First, I have, from VMware, Tom Spoonemore. He is a product line manager for Modern Application Platform with VMware, and welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumnis, Efri Nattel-Shay, who is with Dell technologies, Director of Data Protection and Cloud Native apps. Efri, welcome back, Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much, it's good to be here. >> So, Tom, I kind of teed it up in my intro. VMware, for the longest time, for as long as I can remember, we've really talked about that ecosystem, those joint solutions. I remember, back when we started "theCUBE", in 2010, you'd go there and it would be, oh, there's $15, no, $20, for every dollar that you spend on VMware that the ecosystem kind of pulls along. When VMware started building the VMware Cloud Foundation and the VMware cloud solutions, data protection really went along with it. So, the integrations that they done with vSphere hold them in there as the environment. Tanzu Kubernetes, there's a lot of new pieces. But I think some of those principles have stayed the same. So, why don't you start us off. Tell us a little bit, philosophically, how is VMware treating this space, and how data protection fills into it, and then, Efri, we'll get your take on it, too. >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, from the perspective of VMware and the ecosystem, as you say, we want to be very inclusive. We want to bring the ecosystem and our partners along with what we're doing, regardless of what space it is, and in the Modern Applications Platform and Cloud Native tooling, we're very much thinking along the same lines. And as it relates to data protection in specific, Cloud Native is a place where, mainly it's been thought of as a place for stateless applications. but what we're seeing in people's deployments is more and more stateful applications are beginning to move to Kubernetes and into containers. And so the question then becomes, what do you do for data protection of those applications that are deployed into Kubernetes? And so, with Tanzu, and specifically Tanzu Mission Control, we have included a data protection capability, along with the other capabilities that come with Mission Control, that allows you to provide data protection for your fleet of Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which distribution, regardless of which cloud they're running on, and regardless of how many teams you might have running on a particular cluster or set of clusters. And so, for this reason, we have introduced a data protection capability that is focused around our open source project called Velero and Mission Control operates Velero in your clusters from a central UI API and CLI. That allows you to do data protection, initiating schedules of backups, doing restores, and even migration from cloud to cloud, from a single control point. And part of this vision is not only providing an API that we can handle directly with our own Velero-based implementation, but also opening that up to partners. And this is where we're working with Dell, specifically, to be able to provide that single API, but yet have Dell, for instance, with their PowerProtect solution, be able to plug in and be a data protection provider underneath Tanzu Mission Control. And so, that's the work that we're doing together to help satisfy this vision that we have for data protection in the Cloud Native space. >> Yeah, agree 100% with Tom. Like Tom has said, when we looked at customer environments three years ago, people talk mainly about stateless applications, but over time, when more storage solutions, persistent data solutions came along, there came the need to, not only provision the data, but also protect it, and be able to do backups, and restores, and cyber recovery solutions, and disaster recovery, and the whole set of use cases that allow a full life cycle of data along the Cloud Native set of applications, not just a traditional one. And what we've seen, we're talking, obviously, with a lot of customers, joint customers with VMware, customers that use our storage solutions, as well as others, on-prem and in the cloud. And what they have shown, to say, there, is that you have the IT infrastructure people on one hand, which have certain needs, and there is the new set of users, the DevOps people, who are writing applications in a new way, and they need to communicate and they need a solution that fits both of them. So, with VMware, with the community, with Velero, we are introducing a solution that is capable of doing both management for the DevOps people, as well as for the other team infrastructure. And, a year ago, we have talked about this coming up, and now it's really there, and it's doing great. >> Oh, Efri, I'm so glad you brought up some of those organizational issues, because it's not just, oh, we have some new applications, and, of course, we need to do data protection. Can you bring us inside a little bit? Your customers, are they aware of what they need to do? Is it central IT that's coming over and telling the DevOps team, hey, don't forget, security, data protection, still super important. How does that engagement go, and what change does that have for the Dell field and the channel? >> Yeah, I think that the more successful organizations really have that kind of dialogue. So, the developers are not operating in silos. They're not doing things themselves. They do, some of the use cases, they do need to copy data for their own use, but they understand that there are also organizational needs. Someone needs to sign the audit pass, the SLAs are in compliance, the regulations are met. So, all of these things, someone needs to do them. And there is a mutual recognition that there is a role for these people and for these people, for these use cases and for these use cases. >> Yeah, I would agree with that. One of the things that we're seeing, particularly as you think about Kubernetes as a multitenant kind of platform, what we're seeing is that central IT operations still wants to make sure that backups are happening with stateful applications, but more and more they're relying on and providing self-service capabilities to line of business and DevOps, to be able to back up their applications in the way that's best for those applications. It's a recognition of domain expertise for a particular application. So, what we've done with Mission Control is allowed central IT to define policy. And those policies then give the framework, or guidelines, if you will, that then allow the DevOps teams to make the best choices within their own field of expertise and for their own applications. >> Yeah, and what we've seen is some of the organizations really like full control over central IT, and some customers have told us, don't give anything to the developers, but most of them are asking for some self-service capabilities for the developers. But then, who is setting the policy? Who is saying, okay, I have a gold policy data protection? Does it mean I replicate to another side? Does it mean I do longterm retention for a month, or for a year? That is for someone in central IT to set up. So, saying what the policy means, or what it actually is, is the job of a central IT, whereas, this application needs application consistency, and it is of gold policy, that oftentimes is the best knowledge and domain expertise of the developer. >> So, Tom, you mentioned Tanzu Mission Control, which is the management solution. Tanzu is a portfolio. Can you help walk us through the relevant pieces here that are part of this joint solution? >> Yeah, sure. So, Tanzu is really a portfolio of applications, or a portfolio of solutions, as you've said. It's really along three main pillars. It's what we call, build, run and manage. Tanzu Mission Control fills in, along with our Tanzu Observability and Tanzu Service Mesh, in our manage pillar. The build pillar is more along the lines of supporting developing of modern applications, developing and deploying modern applications. So, many of the technologies that have come from our acquisitions of Pivotal, as well as Bitnami, make up that pillar, and these are technologies that are coming to fore, and you'll hear more and more about at this VM world and going forward. Our run pillar is really where you'll find Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Now, this is our distribution, but it's more than just a distribution of Kubernetes. It's a distribution of Kubernetes, along with all the tools that you would need to be able to deploy modern applications. So, all of these three pillars come together, along with services provided by Pivotal labs, to really give you a full, multifaceted platform for deploying and operating modern applications. >> Great, and Efri, where are there integrations there? How does the storage fit in has been a discussion we've been having for a few years% when it comes to Kubernetes. >> Yeah, basically, PowerProtect integrates with all of these levels that Tom has mentioned, starting with the lowest levels of integration. With the storage, VMware has Cloud Native storage solutions, which allow things like incremental snapshots to be taken from the environment. And we're using this mechanism in order to copy data efficiently from TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, environment, out of the cluster, into a space-efficient data domain, as a target site. So, that's a storage integration. Then, there is qualification and support for the various run environments that Tom has mentioned, the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated, as well as things that we're working with VMware in order to enable protection for what has been called the Project Pacific, which really allows you very sophisticated capabilities of running multiple Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes cluster API capabilities. So, you can spin up a cluster very, very quickly by VMware. And then, we can take backups of this environment up to data domain target site. And, finally, working with Tom for tons of amount of time and effort to do the integration between Tanzu Mission Control and PowerProtect. So, allowing cloud, multicloud, multilocation environments to be provisioned and monitoring by Tanzu Mission Control, but also protected using PowerProtect. >> Yeah, so, Tom, we talked about supporting the ecosystem, and it's a much faster cadence now than it was in the past. It used to be, it felt like every other year at VMworld, we got together and talked about the major vSphere release. Of course, in the container, in Kubernetes world, we're having a much faster cadence. So, could you just help us understand, what of this is generally available today? We saw vSphere 7 back in the spring. The update, right ahead of VMworld, that really extended Kubernetes beyond just VCF, to be able to be an all vSphere 7 environment. So, we know some of this is here on the roadmap, so help map this out for us, what's here today from VMware and what the timeline is we expect for all of these pieces we've been discussing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Mission Control shipped in March. So we're still relatively new, but as you say, we run Cloud Native ourselves, and so we're releasing new features, new capabilities. literally every week. We have a weekly cadence for release. Our data protection capability was just introduced at the end of June, so it's fairly new, and we are still introducing capabilities, like bring your own storage, doing scheduling of backups, and this kind of thing. You'll see us adding more and more cloud providers. We have been working to open up the platform to make it available to partners. And this is, just generally, with Mission Control, across the board, but specifically, when it comes to Dell, and PowerProtect, the data protection capability, this is something that we are still actively working on, and it is past the architecture stage, but it's probably still a little ways out before we can deliver on it, but we are working on it diligently, and definitely expect to have that in the product, and available, and really providing a basis for integrations with other providers as well. >> Yeah, and in terms of PowerProtect, we have told the audience about a tech preview a year ago, and since then we have released a number of releases. We are having a quarterly cadence. So, it is available for the general consumption for quite some time. Talking about the integration layers that we have mentioned before, we are the first stack to protect VMs and Kubernetes and applications using the same platform, the same UI, the same policies, everything looks the same. And we have recently introduced capabilities such as application consistency for a number of applications. The support for TKG is available for now. And, as Tom has said, we are working on further integrations, such as the integration with Tanzu Mission Control with VMware. >> Wonderful, I want to get a final word from both of you. Efri, we'll start with you. We've got this regular cadence coming up. We know we're only a couple of weeks away from DTWE, the Dell Technology World Experience, where, of course, theCUBE will be there. What should we look for the rest of 2020, or any final comments that you have for customers that might be looking at this environment? >> Sure, I think that, two trends that I'm seeing, and they're just getting stronger over the years. The first thing is multicloud, and multicloud means many things to different people, but, basically, every customer that we are speaking to is talking about, I want to run things on-prem, but I also need to run these workloads in the hyperscaler. And I need to move from one hyperscaler region to another, or between hyperscalers, and they want to run this distribution here, and the other distribution there. And there are many combinations of stacks and Database-as-a-Service and other components of the infrastructure that different developers are using on-prem and in the cloud. So, I expect this to go even further, and solutions like PowerProtect and TKG can help customers to do that job, and, of course, Tanzu Mission Control, to monitor and manage this environment. Secondly, I think that protection is going to follow more the workloads. So, application is no longer the VM. Obviously, it's becoming many different components that are starting to span across locations and across environments. And again, the protection nature of these is going to change according to where and how these workloads are being provisioned. >> Yeah, and I would say the same thing about Mission Control, very much multicloud-focused, Today it's largely an AWS-focused solution. We're changing to add more flexible storage options, more clouds. Azure is something that we'll be doing in the short term, Google Cloud platform and Google Cloud Storage after that, as well as just the ability to use your own on-prem storage for your backup targets. Also, we're going to be focusing on driving more policy-driven backup. So, being able to define policies for groups of clusters, define RTO and RPO for groups of clusters, allowing Mission Control to help determine what the individual backup policy should be for that particular asset. And continuing to work with Dell and other partners to help extend our platform and open it up for other data protection providers. >> Tom and Efri, thanks so much for the updates. Tom, welcome to being a CUBE alumni, and Efri, I'm sure we'll be seeing you in the team, in the near future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Stay with us for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con North America 2018. Brought to you by RedHat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone we're here live in Seattle for KubeCon and Cloud Native Con. I'm John Furrier your host, Stu Miniman from Wikibon here. Next guests Anthony Lye, whose the senior vice president general manager of Cloud Data Services at NetApp, and Jonsi Stergesson, CTO and VP of Cloud Services. Great to have you guys on, great to see you again Anthony. >> As always thank you. >> So first I want to get out there we talked lots in the Kube lounge just to reset. The value parsons of NetApp have significantly been enhanced with the cloud. What is that value proposition? What have you guys seen the explosive headroom for value creation that you guys are enabling with NetApp and the cloud? >> You know what I think NetApp has done over now, probably five years, is really pushed itself to embrace the cloud. To recognize that the cloud is a very important part of everybody's IT infrastructure whether it's an extension of the existing IT infrastructure for things like DR or backup or whether it's the primary platform for legacy workloads or, as we're all here to do, to discuss the refactoring and rebuilding of applications around microservices. I think NetApp chose, unlike all of the traditional storage vendors, to see the cloud as an opportunity and I think it's helped the company and it's helped our customers to operate in what is, I think, is by default now, the end state for many companies is hybrid cloud. >> You guys also made some good moves early on with the cloud. We've documented certainly on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE early on. And then as flash comes in for performance, now you've got compute, storage and networking all being optimized in the cloud, creates app developers an environment where it's programmable infrastructure finally. I mean dev ops is happening, this is where services and notion of compute has gone from standing something up in seconds on the cloud to with functions milliseconds. This is changing the dynamic of applications but you've still got to store the data. Talk about, Jonsi, the impact of the services in piece to the developer, storage, services, provisioning, all that and it covers. >> We are taking, I mean all of our services that are running in all the hyperskills in Google and Azure and AWS and more and even on premise. Our view is our role is always to find the best home for any workload at any given time. Even though it's in public cloud or on premise. However storage has always been sort of left aside, it's always been living in this propietary chunk that is hard to move and the weight of the data is actually quite heavy. So we actually want to use Kubernetes and microservices and resistant volume claims by taking that data and making that very easily migratable replicated between locations, between hyperscalers and sort of adopt a true multi cloud strategy. With data with it not only moving those workloads or applications but the data is key, data is key. >> Sometimes, you know, you want to move the data to a compute and sometimes you want to move compute to the data. >> And that's been validated by Amazon's RDS announcement on VMware, Amazon announced outposting on premises, and the number one thing was latency, work was not yet moving. This is exactly to what you guys have been doing and implementing, today, this is like real product. >> I think the reality of the world is, you know, while there is a ton of innovation that exists in public cloud there are well documented use cases that struggle with a cloud only environment. I think NetApp has chosen to make each one of those three potential persistent stores equal to one another. So whether that's in a traditional on premise and upgrading on premise environments to get better price performance characteristics, embracing the public cloud or combining public and private cloud. >> While it's not trivial NetApp, at it's core, always was software so moving it from a hardware appliance, I mean, back in the day Network Appliance was the original name of the company to a software defined solution to being multi-cloud, you can kind of see that genesis where it can go. A lot of times the tougher part is from the customer standpoint. You know, the traditional person that bought and managed this was a storage administrator and getting them to understand cloud native applications and dev ops and all those things, those are pretty challenging moves so how much of it is education? How much of it is new buying centers inside the company or new clients, help us walk through that. >> Yeah I would make two points in maybe answering to you. So I think NetApp's history, actually 25 years ago, NetApp started off as selling into the developers who were running SUN workstations, who wanted shared everything and NetApp actually you know went around IT and put those appliances into the developers. We built a SaaN business, a very successful SaaN business, with the IT people. Now you're absolutely right, the people around here fall into the, sort of, the modern day dev ops characters. What Google calls the SREs the Site Reliability Engineers. And they're a new breed, they're young, they're doing more and more CICD. Storage is an integral part of what they do but maybe not a primary part. They expect storage to work. We are really lucky you know, a little company called Microsoft and another little company called Google sell our stuff so we get introduced into all of those cloud first, cloud only sort of use cases. Not just of refactoring of primary but building. So we're actually, in many cases now, very relevant to those people but we've been fortunate enough to leverage the big public clouds together. >> So you have a relationship with AWS, Google and Microsoft, Microsoft and Google, which you've just mentioned. You mentioned SRE, Site Reliability Engineer, this is a new persona that's clearly emerging and it has a focus around operations, now IT operations has been around for a long time, dev is changing too but this is, if they sell your stuff, their customers need to operate at scale. This is a big point, can you elaborate on the importance of this and what you guys are doing specifically to help that. >> So the Site Reliability Engineer, he is not doing operations. He is actually in charge of running the workload or the development or the application or the product that comes from development. They have to abide by specific rules that are actually set by the SRE. And to your point, because you were talking about different selling motions and not selling into the storage admin or not selling to traditional IT. This is actually what has actually been really surprising and showcases the power of Kubernetes and how widely adopted it has been, both on premise and in the public cloud because customers are actually coming to us and saying, "Hey we had no idea NetApp was actually "doing all of this in the public cloud. "We had no idea that you had your own Kubernetes services "that actually help solve one of the biggest problems "which is persistent volume claims and application of data." So it's actually coming, and you sort of see how important CNCF is, because they're actually educating the market and educating the enterprise space just as well as the new up and coming development team like I've traditionally come from. So I'm actually seeing that it's easier than I would have sort of thought in the beginning. So they're actually becoming more educated about microservices, more educated about how to run their, actually everybody almost in any company that I go into now, they have the SRE playbook somewhere in their meeting room somewhere and everybody sort of getting educated on how they need to, sort of, elevate themselves from being traditional system administrators into that SRE or dev op role. >> And it's also a cultural thing too, they have to develop, not just the playbook, but have some experience in economies of scale, managing it, and certainly it's a tail wind for you guys, storage because, again, it's also a lot of coating involved they need a pool of resources, storage being one of them. But the other thing that's interesting, those are single clouds, Amazon, Google, multi cloud is really where the action is, right? So multi cloud to me is just, to me, a modern version of multi vendor, which basically is about choice. Choice is critical, but having choice around the app, it becomes the value creator. So if you guys can scale with the app development environments that seems to be a sweet spot. How are you guys talking about that particular point because this becomes an under the covers, a new kind of operations, a new kind of scale, pushing code, not just you know stacking interacting boxes but, like, really making things, patching security things or could have been head of security things so doing things in a really really automated way. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing I'm most proud of at my time at NetApp and what the team does and what the team continues to do is we took a very, very, I think, deliberate perspective that we would deliver storage, but we would do it in a very unique way. That my background was from Saas, I spent my entire career building applications, and when you build an application, you run the application, there is nothing you give the customer and say, "Here, administer it." When you look at a lot of the infrastructure services, they make the customer do a lot of work. So what we did at NetApp was we decided that we ourselves would almost create like an always available protocol that people could just ask for it and it would be there. There was no concept of setting it up or patching it or upgrading it. And that's really I think we have set a bar now on the public clouds that, I think, even the public clouds themselves have not done, and giving those developers that I asked for a storage through an API and all I need to do is ask for capacity and throughput. Nothing else, that's something to a developer they're like, "So now I don't even have to ask "anybody with storage skills. "I can tell my application to ask for it's own storage." >> It's interesting you're living in a new world where you need the scale of a system but the functionality of like an app server. I feel like we're living in that app server days where that middle ground and app development was the key focus, you've got to have both now. You need scalable systems but really application performance. >> And then you add an additional layer because now everybody wants to be able to use the same deployment script, the same configuration management system, Terraform, whatever they're actually using to deploy it on premise or in a public cloud but it needs to be done in a unified manner. This is why it's so important to be upstream compatible and there's a lot of companies out there that are actually destroying that model and not following the true cloud concept. >> Yes give them a slap on the wrist, get in line, fix it! >> If you are going to play in this space with the CNCF and with Kubenetes, you better play by the rules and do the open standards. And so you're actually compatible no matter where your workload resides. >> We've been monitoring how storage is maturing in this whole cloud native Kubenetes ecosystem here. A year ago there were a lot of backroom arguments over what were the right architectures, a few sub projects working through here, it actually blew me away in the keynote this morning to hear that 40% of all applications that are deployed in Kubernetes are stateful. So where are we? What's working? What's good for customers? And what do we still need to work on to kind of solidify the storage data piece of this? >> I think it's interesting, 'cause I think we, sort of, ourselves now consider NetApp to be a data company. Storage is an enabler but what's interesting, everyone talks about their Saas strategy, their PaaS strategy their IaaS strategies. I always ask people, "What's your data strategy?" and that's something I think the CNCF Kubernetes, themselves, recognize that they've done a lot of really great things for compute around the microservices themselves but the storage piece has always been something of a challenge. And we said, about solving that problem, we have an open source project called Trident, that essentially enables people to make persistent volume claims and if the container dies, they can essentially start a new container and pick up the storage exactly where they left off. So we really believe that stateful is an ever increasing percentage of the overall application model. Databases are important things, people need them. >> I would agree with that and that's developing too, it's early on. All right so I want to ask you guys a question, kind of outside the box. Multi cloud certainly is part of a hybrid, what they call a hybrid today, it's really a choice, multi cloud will be a future reality, no matter what anyone says, I believe that. How is multi cloud changing IT investments? Business investments, technical investments or both, what's your guys thoughts on how multi cloud is driving and changing IT investments? >> Well I actually think it offers you the opportunity to have like placement policy algorithms that fit your workload at any given time. For example, if this particular application is latency sensitive, and I created an application that all of a sudden became really popular in Mexico, then I should be able to see which one of the hyperscalers actually has a presence in Mexico City, deploy it there. If I'm under utilizing my private cloud and I have a lot of space on it and there is no specific requirements, it gives you that flexibility to, like I said, always find the best home for your workload at any given time. >> Dynamic policy based stuff? >> Yeah, precisely. And it allows you also, I mean, you can choose to do it whether its based on workload requirements or you can start doing it in a least cost effective route, I mean least cost routing. So it actually impacts both from a technical and a business sense in my opinion. >> I think you know you cannot help but get excited every day with what one cloud delivers over another cloud, and we're seeing something not unlike the arms race, you know, Google does this, then Amazon does this, then Microsoft does this. As developers we're very keen to take advantage of all these capabilities and we want to, in many cases, let the application itself make the decision. >> So yeah Amazons got there, everyone's catching up. Competitions good. All right, final question. Predictions for multi cloud in 2019. What's going to happen? Is there going to be a loud bang? Is there going to be a crash? Is it going to be fruit on the trees? What's the state of the multi cloud predictions for 2019? >> Well I actually believe it's going to become a standard. Nobody should be locked into any region or any one provider, I don't even care if it's on premise or NetOps specific, you should be able to... I mean, I think it's just going to become standard. Everybody has to have a multi cloud strategy and you can see that, like the IDC report that 86% of Fortune 500 companies are adopting multi cloud. And I think I'm actually quite fed up of this hyper cloud stuff because, in my opinion, on premise is just the fourth or the fifth hyperscaler and should be treated as such. So if you actually have that true cloud concept, you should be able to deploy that using the same script, the same APIs to deploy it everywhere. >> As I said in theCube the data center and non print, they're just an edge, a big edge. If it's an operating mall? >> My prediction? Your prediction. >> 2019 is the year of Istio. I think we've become enamored with Kubernetes, I think what Istio brings significantly advances Kubernetes, and we barely scratched the surface, I think, with the service mesh and all of the enhancements and all the contributions that will go into that. I think, you know, that 2019 will probably see as many vendors here next year with Istio credentials and STO capabilities as we see today with Kubernetes. >> Anthony, Jonsi, thanks for coming on, great insights, smart commentary, appreciate it. We should get in the studio and dig into this a little bit deeper. Really a great example of an incumbent, large company, NetApp, really getting a tailwind from the cloud, good smart bets you guys made, programmable infrastructure, dynamic policy routing, all kinds of under the covers goodness from smart cloud deployments. This is where software drives the data. >> Yep data is the new oil, that's what they say right? If you don't have a data set you're not very competitive. >> Thanks for coming on I appreciate it. More Kube coverage here, getting all the breakdown here, the impact of cloud computing at scale, the role of data software, all happening here at the CNCF. This is the KubeCon, I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. More live coverage after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, llinois. It's the CUBE covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. VeeamON 2018, this is Dave Vellante cohost Stu Miniman. It's day two, they're breaking down the exhibit hall but the CUBE keeps going. Benno Kuijper is here, he's a senior strategic product manager at Equinix. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So Equinix is cracking the data center is booming. The data center business is booming. You guys are at the heart of it, you're working with all the cloud providers. Obviously you're working with Veeam. Talk about your role in what your relationship is with Veeam. >> Alright I represent the manage service department in the Netherlands so what we are doing on the beautiful platform we have with Equinix is provide manage services in the hybrid category. What we provide our customers is for example data management platform. So we provide the ease of mind with data management and business continuity on backup and disaster recovery. So the enterprise is our customers. >> So you're both a Veeam customer and partner right? >> Yeah we are platinum partner of Veeam yeah. So we provide the backup service to our customers. >> Okay so you purchase their products, install them. You got a relationship where you guys share the revenue somehow, someway. >> Yeah right, in the Netherlands we service the enterprise market and also big governmental companies and we use Veeam for the disaster recovery services. >> What are the big trends you see in data protection these days? >> Of course GDPR is very close. We see that especially in the Netherlands for a lot of companies the data has to be stored in the Netherlands. But ambition to go to the public cloud and use the HyperScalers as a still in the same trend. So what we try to do is to keep the data safe in the Netherlands but make it possible for our customers to use the HyperScalers for compute. It's important strategy we see. >> Yeah one of the things that's been interesting watching here is Veeam's they call the hybrid, the multi cloud strategy. Give us some examples of what your customers you said compliant is a reason they keep it. You know especially in say the Netherlands and their services. You have any examples you can give of things like that? >> Yeah we service few big customers that are obliged to be in the Netherlands with their data and all the service they provide to their customers for the dutch citizens. We have our own cloud platform for that so they're not using public clouds. But the availability they need is very high and that's what we provide. >> So what's driving that, we talked about digital transformation. >> Yes. >> Is that the driver, what is that? >> I think the digital transformation is just is not just about infrastructure it's how companies are and how they want to be. What we see is that they first want to have the data secured and next to that they want to experiment with HyperScaler and the real cloud native environments and providing both of those worlds in one package is what we see as a big trend. >> When I think about businesses like yours. Simplicity, scalability and cost effectiveness you know come to mind or those kind of the top three and if so you know from what you need from a solution like Veeam. >> Yes, well they currently provide our customers is more the disaster recovery part of the suite. So when there's something wrong we are there to help the customer to get back on track as soon as possible and here in the VeeamON2018 to explore the whole suite because what we see is that like services as office backup. The customers are getting more mature about using cloud and SaaS solutions. But still want to have the secure environment. >> Are you, is your expertise specific to Veeam or is it more general? >> More general. >> Okay so you're using other products as well? >> Yes. >> How do you decide what to use where? >> With Equinix we have a policy to select the leaders in the market and also based on functionality and services we want to provide we package to our customers and that's why Veeam was one of our selected partners. >> Okay so, what do they do better than others? What's their sweet spot? >> We chose Veeam a couple of years ago based on the functionality mainly. There were more technical colleagues that gave the list of arguments to choose for Veeam so. >> Okay maybe when we look at your space as a laser something important to your customers. Has that been changing your environment and how does solution with Veeam help you meet that for customers? >> Think that the way we approached it is more like you first discuss with the customer what kind of availability they need and the performance they need and then you design the architecture and that is also immediately the overlay. Instead of making a nice platform and then start discussion talking about overlays. So we try to have the correct infrastructure with the architecture and solutions within to meet customer's demands and that's another way to approach overlays. >> So flexibility and granularity is part of that. So I mean one of the problems backup we've been talking about all day and yesterday is many data protection approaches are one size fits all. You say okay here's our, we're going to back it up you know once a day incremental and you know once a week. Whatever it is that's it. This is your RPO, this is your RTO take it or leave it. >> Yes. >> Are you able to these days provide more granularity for customers? >> There's always a field of tension between standardized products and customer specific solutions. We try always to use the standard because then we are better in guaranteeing the service. But as the legacy of Equinix manage service in the Netherlands. We tend to do a lot more for our customers. >> Whatever the customer wants. >> That's what our differentiator is at this moment. >> Yeah okay that creates challenges just in terms of managing all these different templates and SLAs. Can't you I mean I'm sure you do this, you have categories and sort of banding if you will. Is that how you're dealing with this problem? You know gold, you know silver, bronze kind of thing or no it's gold one, gold two, gold three, gold four, or five. >> I see that we go from gold to platinum and there's also gold. But yes the service levels are high and that's why we are so successful we can do that. >> Right how about VeeamON2018 what have you seen. Anything that's really particularly exciting? You said you wanted to come here to better understand the portfolio presumably so you could exploit it. What have you learned, what's exciting you? >> Yeah at the time of this conference was perfect because as you know Equinix is at this time in the middle of the internet. So all the public clouds and all the tier one players are connecting on our platform. We call it the Equinix cloud exchange fabric and right on that fabric the best place for data management platform is there. So we are trying to enlarge this street from data to archiving. So storage to archiving on that spot. So we do that in the Netherlands we are building a portfolio around that data platform to provide the customers a safe place for all of the data and it can be redundant within the Netherlands in 12 IBXs and we are also strongly connected to those public cloud providers. So they can put the workload in cloud and the data on Equinix. >> Go ahead. >> No that was it. >> Who's your favorite public cloud provider, you don't have to answer that it's okay. >> The thing is they are both very good but having control on where your data and your applications are is a bit less. So that's the market we are jumping in now. >> Excellent Benno thanks very much for coming on the CUBE it was really a pleasure having you. >> Likewise. >> Keep it right there buddy the CUBE at VeeamON2018 we're winding down day two. Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman we'll be right back.

(techno music) >> Announcer: It's the Cube, covering Sapphire Now 2017, brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform, and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Hey, welcome back to our exclusive SAP coverage here in our studio in Palo Alto, our 4,500 square foot studio. I'm John Furrier. Our three days, we're on third day, of Sapphire Now 2017 coverage. I'm on the phone with RJ Bibby, who's the SAP Global Alliance Manager for SAP. Handles the relationship. RJ, great to have you on the phone and thanks for calling in from Orlando, really appreciate it. >> RJ: You bet, John. Love the Cube. Love SiliconANGLE. We're great partners. It's been a great week and looking forward to talking to you about it. >> Tell us what's going on on the ground. First, give us the updates on day three. So, pretty much everyone's coming-- And always a great activities at night as well. So, SAP, a lot of business done during the day. They work hard. They play hard. But, day three, what's it like? What's settling in as the storylines for Sapphire 2017? >> RJ: Yeah, absolutely. So, you're starting to feel-- You've gone through about-- We're in our third tour. For the partner's community, we're in day four, cause we had the partner day. Last night was the big partner night. We actually NetApped with our partners with Cisco and KPIT did a private event at Universal Studios at the Jimmy Fallon Theme Park that was highly successful. What was great about today, was in the morning, we kicked off will Bill McDermott on stage with Kobe Bryant and Derek Jeter. And it was all about leadership and mentorship and experience in being in the business, whatever industry that you're in for so long and how you just stay creative, hungry, and passionate. And it was packed. One of the comments was they couldn't believe, on the day after the big party night of all the partners that you still have a lot of energy on the floor. Ultimately, it's still about data, which is great for our business that we can get into at NetApp. There's a lot of buzzword bingo going on here, John, all week, whether it's machine to machine, blocked chain, Cloud-- And at the end of it, it's still our customers who we've talked to a lot this week, and wow. What are we going to do with out data? How do we analyze it? And how do we improve that user experience based on all this data that we have? And I think that's one of the things that I see on the floor that's almost overwhelming with the amount of people, 30,000, all the partners. Just a lot of information. And lastly, I'll say, the good news with that is everybody is hungry for content. Whether it's a mini-theater, whether it's at one of the booths, interactions one-on-one, it's people are hungry for what is happening in the industry. And I think that's exciting for all of us. >> Well, we do our part and try and get as much coverage as possible, even if we are going to do it from Palo Alto. Question for you on NetApp. I mean, you guys have been-- The scuttlebutt in Silicon Valley is that NetApp is doing very well with the Hyperscale (mumbles). I know for a fact. I've interviewed the former CEO and others within NetApp. They were really on early with AWS. And obviously, AWS a big part of the announcement at Sapphire. So, you guys are kind of like getting these relationships with these key players. It's changed a little bit of the business model, or culture within NetApp. What's different about NetApp right now? With resect to some of the big players that you've had relationships with. It's not this new relationship with SAP. You guys have a deep relationship. What's changing as the CloudWave hits, as the DataWave hits? Those are the biggest waves hitting the world right now. How are you guys playing in that world? And share some insight there. >> RJ: Absolutely. Great question. 'Cause the world is going through digital transformation and so is NetApp. So, we are actually celebrating our 25th year as a company right now and we've been a traditional, global technology and data management company. And, the digital shift to Hybrid Cloud is where we're moving. So, specifically with partners like AWS, Microsoft and Azure, the Hyperscalers like CenturyLink, it's how we can help our customers really collect, transport, analyze, protect data, in whatever environment they want to hold their data. Whether it's On-Premises, if your in a Cloud, you can choose whatever Hyperscaler you want. You still have to deal with the data. And then, how do we manage it? How do we consume it? Where is dead data that needs to be taken out? So, data's the currency and with our data fabric methodology and tools from software, hardware, we're really able to help manage that complete life cycle, whether it's SAP, or any other type of environment we hold. So, the exciting thing for us, and the stock prices is showing that at an all time high, is what Bill McDermott said on Monday, in the keynote, or excuse me, Tuesday, "Data is the currency. "Our new mission statement is we're trying "to empower our customers to change the world with data." So, back to the buzzWord bingo comment I made earlier, we're still dealing with fact that we have all these great technologies: all these censors, machine-to-machine, On-Print to Cloud. At the heart of everything is the data and what you do with it. And I think that one of the things that NetApp does and the best in the world of, is we continually evolve digital transformations with the tools on how we deal with data. So, that's high level. >> How about the data dynamic? >> Data is the fundamental story, in my opinion. Cloud has been around, the Clouderati. We were part of that from the beginning. Now, Cloud is mainstream. Amazon stock prices looking like a hockey stick now, it's going straight up. But, that took years of development, right? I mean, you saw the Cloud formation coming, really, in the mid-2000s and then, really at 2008, -09, -10 was the foundational years and then the rest is history. Data's now going through the same thing. As people get over themselves and say, "Okay, big data's not a dupe. It's everything." IOT is certainly highlighting a lot of that. SAP has recognized that legacy systems have to move to a MultiCloud and certainly multi-vendor world in a whole new way. But, at the end of the day, you still got to store this stuff. So, that's your business. How are you keeping up with the moving train of data as is architecturally shifts in the marketplace? >> RJ: Great question. I think that we have some of the best minds in Silicon Valley. Again, been there 25 years. I think with the deep relationships we have with companies like SAP. On the front end, I think the one thing that we bring as a value to SAP is the consumption model, life exists. Through owning the data and the user experience, we're able to enable and accelerate the license consumption to the edge. Right from application in to the system. From an architectural standpoint, it still comes down to the thing that we are creating and blabs and launching around, like the data fabric, the tool system, really software. The software that can help from an analytical perspective affect the user experience. Everybody wants it live. And the other part is the data protection and the DR aspect of it. And I think that's another core competency that we're continuing to develop as a service for the customer. So, I hop I've answered your question. >> Yup. >> RJ: But if-- >> (mumbles) a bottom line then, why NetApps? Say I'm a customer. Okay, I get the SAP. Why should I go with you guys over new the Delium see powerhouse over there, or the White-Box Storage? >> RJ: At the end of the day, we are best at capitalizing the value of data in the Hybrid Cloud. Nobody can help collect, analyze, test, and do life-cycle management live like NetApp can. And that's the reason that we are going more upstream, selling like we say at EPC, always selling to the CXO. I think we're changing the landscape from a true storage company on the infrastructure side to a full end-to-end Hybrid Cloud data management portfolio company. And it's been proven by the acquisition of Salazar from bringing Slash in to the portfolio, our cloning, and snapshot capabilities. So, anywhere in the stack at any time during the day when you're looking live at your operations or your data that you can take live snapshots. Just so if there's a glitch from a data protection side, or there's some type of spike from a request on the ticketing side or demand side of your system. So, I think that's some of the things that we're differentiating. And that's the reason that the AWSs and the Azures and the SAPs are so excited about co-innovating together to again, improving the customer experience with their data. >> RJ, final question. What's the net-net? What's the bumper sticker for you this year at Sapphire 2017? What's the walk-away revelation? >> RJ: Well, I think from the SAP side, it's the revelation on the push of Leonardo. I think that SAP-- I'd like to see them continue to hone out the 'what' and the 'if' from partners with Leonardo from blotching in machine-to-machine and IOT. For us, it is the beautiful fact that now at the center of everything that SAP and the ecosystem is trying to do is around the data side of it and it's the actual currency. And the fact that we have kind of the leading-edge tools to enhance the customer experience with our platform for customers' and partners' data is really, really exciting for us. And we're excited. We're all psyched to be partnered with the Cube. And everything we do is in the Cloud. So, I'm here to help. >> Alright. >> RJ, thanks so much for takin' the time callin' in from Orlando. RJ Bibby, SAP Global Alliance Executive with NetApp. He runs the the relationship with NetApp. And again, it's been a long-term relationship. I remember takin' photos on my phone, way back in the day, years ago. So, not a new relationship and continued momentum. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the insight from Orlando. 'Preciate it. >> RJ: You bet. Thanks for the partnership. Have a great day. >> 'Kay, more coverage from the Cube in Palo Alto on SAP, Sapphire 2017 after this short break. Stay with us. (techno music)