>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon, theCUBE's insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis, we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that superclouds solve specifically. And we'll further define the critical aspects of a supercloud architecture. We often get asked, isn't this just multi-cloud? Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this Breaking Analysis. Now in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building superclouds? What workloads and services will run on superclouds? And 8-A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on supercloud? Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year, ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called "Castles in the Cloud." Now in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were sub-markets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs that the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers. Weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now it turns out, that we weren't the only ones using the term as both Cornell and MIT have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IaaS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services to solve new problems that the cloud vendors in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level, the supercloud, metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted, love it or hate it. It's memorable and it's what we chose. Now to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rappaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor-based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC Analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rappaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors, and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel, that's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of "The Matrix" that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term Matrix because the conceptual depiction included not only horizontal technology rose like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D, and production, and manufacturing, and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries, jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple, and payments, and content, and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds, rather it's the combination of multiple technologies enabled by CloudScale with new industry participants from those verticals, financial services and healthcare, manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all in any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds? You know, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud so they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc, and Google Anthos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, cost, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And of course, the lesser margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross-cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They had a long way to go a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems superclouds solve? We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner, or whomever the customers on average use more than one cloud. You know, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem because each cloud requires different skills because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data, it's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds, and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems, and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of supercloud? So first and foremost, a supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency, or sharing data, or governing, or securing that data, or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in a most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery, or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course innovate. The services can be infrastructure-related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on-premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, isn't that just multi-cloud? And what we'd say to that is yes, but no. You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want, if you want to use it, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A, you buy a company and they happen to use Google Cloud, and so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called, multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud or increasingly a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, well isn't PaaS already a version of supercloud? And again, we would say no, that supercloud and its corresponding superPaaS layer which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process and manage, and secure, and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that supercloud and will vary by each offering. Your OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a superPaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a superPaaS, it's generic. A superPaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off-the-shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency superPaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is supercloud and its inherent superPaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup and recovery for data protection, and ransomware, or data sharing, or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is who has a supercloud today and who's building a supercloud, and who are the contenders? Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with Net Score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the supercloud mix, and we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now remember, this is a spectrum of maturity it's a maturity model and we've added some of those industry players that we see building superclouds like CapitalOne, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around The Matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company, being a software company and rather than pattern match an outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data, and tools, specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve, and the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. You know, we've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross-cloud services you know, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed project Alpine at Dell Tech World, that's a supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their superPaaS, our term of course, they don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms, but then we talked to HPE's Head of Storage Services, Omer Asad is clearly headed in the direction that we would consider supercloud. Again, those cross-cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of companies, smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst, and Clumio and others that are building versions of superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem specifically, around data as part of their and their customers digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum and new industry players are coming out of hiding, and competing. Building superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's Matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains, and virtual realities, and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past, but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example is Snowflake, it's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift, You can't do this with SQL server and they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data, and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective, trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with ARM-based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at MongoDB, a very developer-friendly platform that with the Atlas is moving toward a supercloud model running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into to play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem, and out to the edge. And I say VMware is hard at work on that. Managing and moving workloads, and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds, industry workloads. We see CapitalOne, it announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets is going to test it out with Snowflake, running, optimizing on AWS and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a supercloud. You know, we've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And we can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I, have decided to host an event in Palo Alto, we're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, supercloud, hypercloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th, out of our Palo Alto studios, we'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants, VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Sky High Security, Gee Rittenhouse's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. It publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data. And the enterprise tech business will be at AWS NYC Summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE, it's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vallante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, Supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this "Breaking Analysis," we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around Supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on Supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out Superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term Supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that Superclouds solve specifically, and we'll further define the critical aspects of a Supercloud architecture. We often get asked, "Isn't this just multi-cloud?" Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this "Breaking Analysis." Now, in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building Superclouds? What workloads and services will run on Superclouds? And eight A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of Supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on Supercloud. Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called castles in the cloud. Now, in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were submarkets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs. That the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers, weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of Supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now, it turns out that we weren't the only ones using the term, as both Cornell and MIT, have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is, something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services, to solve new problems that the cloud vendors, in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level. The Supercloud metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted. Love it or hate it, it's memorable and it's what we chose. Now, to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rapaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rapaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel. That's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of the matrix that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging, built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term matrix, because the conceptual depiction included, not only horizontal technology rows, like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that, whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D and production and manufacturing and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple and payments, and content and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And Supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds. Rather, it's the combination of multiple technologies, enabled by cloud scale with new industry participants from those verticals; financial services, and healthcare, and manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all and any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or Supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about Superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds. Now, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud. So they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc and Google Antos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, costs, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And, of course, the less margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They have a long way to go, a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems Superclouds solve. We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner or whomever, that customers on average use more than one cloud, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem, because each cloud requires different skills, because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data. It's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations, and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out Superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of Supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of Supercloud? So, first and foremost, a Supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem, and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, Supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency or sharing data or governing or securing that data or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A Supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud, and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in the most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that Supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a Supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the Supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course, innovate. The services can be infrastructure related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, "Isn't that just multi-cloud?" And what we'd say to that is yeah, "Yes, but no." You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want. If you want to use, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud, by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning, to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A. You buy a company and they happen to use Google cloud. And so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud. Or increasingly, a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud, with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So, if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it Supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, "Well isn't PaaS already a version of Supercloud?" And again, we would say, "No." That Supercloud and its corresponding super PaaS layer, which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process, and manage and secure and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that Supercloud and will vary by each offering. OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a super PaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a super PaaS, it's generic. A super PaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely, again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off the shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency, super PaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is, Supercloud and its inherent super PaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup in recovery for data protection and ransomware, or data sharing or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the Supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is, "Who has a Supercloud today and who's building a Supercloud and who are the contenders?" Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building Superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with net score or spending momentum on the Y axis, and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the Supercloud mix. And we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now, remember, this is a spectrum of maturity. It's a maturity model. And we've added some of those industry players that we see building Superclouds like Capital One, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around the matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company being a software company. And rather than pattern match and outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data and tools specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve. And the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. We've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of Supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross cloud services, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing Supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed Project Alpine at Dell Tech World. That's a Supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their super PaaS, our term, of course. They don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms. (Dave laughing) But then we talked to HPE's head of storage services, Omer Asad, and he's clearly headed in the direction that we would consider Supercloud. Again, those cross cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst and Clumio and others that are building versions of Superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem, specifically around data as part of their and their customer's digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum, and new industry players are coming out of hiding and competing, building Superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains and virtual realities and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in Superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example of Snowflake. It's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a Supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, and query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift. You can't do this with SQL server. And they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so, it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix, doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with arm based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at Mongo DB. A very developer friendly platform that where the Atlas is moving toward a Supercloud model, running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem and out to the edge. And I say, VMware is hard at work on that, managing and moving workloads and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds. Industry workloads, we see Capital One. It announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake's Supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets. It's going to test it out with Snowflake, optimizing on AWS, and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a Supercloud. We've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And you can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a Supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers, it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I have decided to host an event in Palo Alto. We're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, Supercloud, HyperCloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th out of our Palo Alto studios. We'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants; VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Skyhigh Security, G. Written House's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion, and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for "Breaking Analysis." And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Or DM me @DVallante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please, do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be at AWS NYC summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE. It's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (slow music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Despite all the talk about repatriation, hybrid and multi-Cloud opportunities, and Cloud is an increasingly expensive option for customers, the data continues to show the importance of public Cloud to the digital economy. Moreover, the two leaders, AWS and Azure, are showing signs of accelerated momentum that point to those two giants pulling away from the pack in the years ahead, with each firm's showing broad based momentum across their respective product lines. It's unclear if anything, other than government intervention or self-inflicted wounds will slow these two companies down this decade. Despite their commanding lead, a winning strategy for companies that don't run their own Cloud continues to be innovating on top of their massive CapEx investments. The most notable example here being Snowflake. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we provide our quarterly market share update for the big four hyperscale Cloud providers. And we'll share some new ETR data from their most recent survey. And we'll drill into some of the reasons for the momentum of these two companies and drill further into the database and data warehouse sector to see what, if anything, has changed in that space. First, let's look at some of the noteworthy comments from AWS and Microsoft in their recent earnings updates. We heard from Amazon, the following, "AWS has seen a reacceleration of revenue growth as customers have expanded their commitment to the Cloud and selected AWS as their Cloud partner." Notably, AWS revenues increased 39% in Q3 2021. That's a thousand basis point increase in growth relative to Q3 2020. That's an astounding milestone for a company that we expect to surpass $60 billion in revenue this year. Further, AWS touted the adoption of its custom silicon, and specifically its Graviton2 processors. AWS is fond of emphasizing Graviton's 40% price performance improvements relative to x86 processors, something we've reported on quite extensively. AWS is investing in custom silicon, encouraging ISVs to port their code to the platform so that customers will experience little or no code changes when they migrate. Again, we believe this is a secret weapon for AWS as its cost structure will continue to improve at a rate faster than competitors that don't have the resources or the skills or the stomach to develop such capabilities. Microsoft, for its part, also saw astoundingly good growth of 48% this past quarter for Azure. This is a company that we forecast will approach $40 billion in IaaS and PaaS public Cloud revenue this year. Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, on its earnings call, emphasized the changing nature of Cloud expanding in a distributed fashion to the edge. He referenced Azure as the world's computer. Building on his statements last year that Microsoft is building out a powerful, ubiquitous, intelligent, sensing and predictive Cloud. Yes, folks, it does feel like we're entering the so-called Metaverse, doesn't it? Okay, to underscore the momentum of these two companies, let's take a look at the ETR breakdown of Net score, which measures spending momentum. This chart will be familiar to our listeners. It shows the breakdown of net score for AWS, with the lime green showing new adoptions. That's 11%. The forest green is spending more than 6% relative to the first half of this year. That's a very robust 53%. The gray is flat spending. That's 30% on a very, very large base. And the pink is spending declines of minus 6% or worse. That's 4%. And the bright red is defections i.e those leaving AWS. That's 1%. That's virtually non-existent. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score of 59. Remember, anything over 40, we can still consider to be elevated. Let's look at that same data for Microsoft again. You have some new ads that lime green, that's 7%. The forest green is at 46% of customers spending more, which is an incredible figure for a company with revenues that will in the near term surpass $200 billion. And the red is in the low single digits. Buffered by its enormous PC software profits over the years, Microsoft is powered through its Window's Dogma and transitioned into a Cloud powerhouse. Let's now share some of our latest numbers for the big four hyperscale players, AWS, Azure, Alibaba and Google. Here, we show data for these companies from 2018 and our estimates for 2021. This data includes our final figures for AWS, Azure and GCP for Q3 with Alibaba yet to report. Remember, only AWS and Alibaba report IaaS revenue cleanly with Microsoft and Google, they give us a little breadcrumb nuggets that allow us to triangulate with our survey data and other intelligence. But it's our attempt to do an apples to apples comparison for those four companies using AWS and it's reporting as a baseline. In Q3, AWS reported more than $16 billion in revenue. We estimate Azure at 10 billion, Alibaba, we expect to come in at just under 3 billion, and GCP at 2.5 billion for the quarter. With three quarters of data in, with the exception of Alibaba, we're forecasting AWS to capture 51% of the big four revenue, the hyperscale revenue. And really we believe these are the only four hyperscalers. AWS will surpass 60 billion with Azure just under 40 billion, Alibaba approaching 11 billion, and Google coming in just under 10 billion for the year is our expectation. We forecast these four will account for $120 billion this year. That's a 41% increase over 2020 and the same collective growth rate as 2020 relative to 2019. We expect Azure to be 63% of the size of AWS revenue. So it is gaining share. Both of those companies, however, saw accelerated growth this past quarter with Alibaba and GCP's growth rates decelerating relative to last year. Now, let's take a closer look at those growth rates. This chart shows the quarterly growth rates for each of the four going back to the beginning of 2019. Both GCP and Alibaba are showing dramatic declines in growth rates, whereas, this past quarter Azure saw accelerated growth and AWS has now seen an increased rate of growth for the past two quarters. In fact, AWS' growth is about where it was in 2019 when it was around half of its current revenue size. And in 2019 growth was decelerating through the quarters as you can see where today that trend has reversed. It's quite amazing. All right, let's take a look at the broader Cloud landscape and bring back some ETR data. This chart that we're showing here, it shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or presence in the dataset on the horizontal axis. Note that red dotted line, anything above that we can still consider elevated and impressive. As when we've previously shared this data, AWS and Microsoft Azure are up and to the right. Now remember, this chart is not just counting IaaS and PaaS as we showed you earlier, it's however the customers views whatever they think Cloud is. And so they're likely including Microsoft SaaS in this picture. Which is why Microsoft shows larger than AWS despite what we showed you earlier. Nonetheless, these two are well ahead of the pack and the growth rates indicate that they're pulling away. But we've added some of the other players, most notably VMware Cloud on AWS. It's showing momentum as is VMware Cloud, which is VMware Cloud foundation and other on-prem Cloud offerings, even though it's below the red line for the on-prem piece, it's very respectable. The VMware Cloud on AWS has been consistently up above that red line. Has popped beneath it in some quarters, but it's very, very strong. As is, you know, Red Hat OpenShift, it's a little bit below the line, but it is respectable. We've superimposed this by the way. Red Hat OpenShift in the ETR platform is under the container orchestration taxonomy, but we'd like to put it in next to the Cloud players for context. That's how Red Hat sort of thinks about this as well. They think about OpenShift as Cloud. And then you can see the other players. Alibaba has got a small sample in the ETR dataset. Just does not enough presence in China. But Dell and HPE have started to show up in the Cloud taxonomy. So buyers are associating their private Clouds with Cloud. So Dell's Apex, HPE's GreenLake. So that's a positive. And you can see Oracle, which of course is OCI, Oracle Cloud infrastructure. And then IBM with its public Cloud. So, it's a positive that these on-prem players are showing up in this data, but the reality is the hyperscalers are growing collectively at 40% annually and the on-prem players are growing in the low single digits. So, and if you carve out the IaaS business of AWS and Azure, they're larger than most of the on-premises infrastructure players. And all the on-prem players are moving toward an as a service model, as I just alluded to. So, undoubtedly, hybrid multicloud edge are going to present opportunities for the likes of Dell, HPE, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Red Hat, et cetera. But they also present opportunities for the public Cloud players who have vibrant ecosystems and marketplaces much more diverse and deep than the traditional vendors. You know, we have a clearer picture of Microsoft's sort of hybrid and edge strategy because the company has such an enormous legacy business, it really had to think about that much more deeply. It wasn't a blank sheet of paper like AWS. It's going to be interesting at reinvent this year if new CEO, Adam Selipsky, will talk about this. And it will be good to hear how he's thinking about the next decade, how AWS thinks about hybrid and edge, I guarantee that with their developer affinity and custom Silicon capabilities, they're thinking about it differently than traditional enterprise players. And as we've stressed in this segment, they have across the board momentum. Now to quantify that, let's take a look at AWS as portfolio in the spending momentum within its product segments. This chart shows AWS's net scores or spending momentum in the areas where AWS participates in the ETR taxonomy. Again, note that red line. Anything above 40% is considered an elevated watermark. We're showing data from last October, this past July and the latest October 21 survey. That yellow line or a bar. What's notable is the yellow versus the gray bars up across the board for the most part, other than chime... And by the way, other than chime, everything is above the 40% mark as well. Now, we've highlighted database because we feel it's one of the most strategic sectors in a real battleground. So we want to drill into that a bit. Here's our familiar X Y graph showing Net score on the Y axis, remember, that's, again, spending momentum and market share or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis. This data, by the way, includes on-prem and Cloud database data warehouse. So keep that in mind. Let's start with one of our favorite topics; Snowflake. We've reported again and again and again, that we've never seen anything like this. The company's net score has moderated ever so slightly this quarter, but it's still just below 80%. Very highly elevated. Well, above that 40% mark. It's Snowflake's presence continues to grow as a gain share in the market. Snowflake is growing revenue in the triple digits. It's an insane pace, hence its current $115 billion market cap as of this episode. Now that said, all three US-based Cloud players there are above the 40% line with AWS and Microsoft having significant presence on the horizontal axis. You see Cockroach Labs, Redis, Couchbase, they're all elevated or highly elevated. Couchbase just went public this summer. So that may help with its presence. MongoDB, they're killing it. They have a $37 billion market cap as of this episode. The stock has been on a tear. You see MariaDB was also in the mix. And then of course you have Oracle, the database leader. Look, they continue to invest in making the Oracle database and other software like MySQL, the best solution for mission critical workloads, and they're investing in their Cloud. But you can see overall, they just don't have the momentum from a spending standpoint that the others do because the declines in their legacy business. And they've been around a long time. Those declines are not fully offset by the growth in Cloud database and Cloud migration. But look, Oracle is a financial powerhouse with a $250 billion plus market cap. And the stock has done very well this past year. Up over 60%. Cloudera is going private. So it can hide the pain of the transitions that it's undergoing between the legacy install bases of Cloudera and Hortonworks. It's just a tough situation. When the companies came together, Cloudera essentially had a dead end. Each of those respective platforms and migrate their customers to a more modern stack as part of its Cloud strategy. Ironic that it's name is Cloudera. You know, that's always a difficult thing to do. So as a private company, Cloudera can maybe get off that 90 day shot clock and buy some time to invest without getting hammered by the street. And you know, Teradata consistently has not shown up well in the ETR dataset. It's transitioned to Cloud and cross-Cloud still hasn't shown momentum in the surveys. So, look right now, it's looking like the rich get richer. So just to quantify that a little bit, let's line up some of the database players and look a little bit more closely at net score. This chart shows the spending momentum or lack thereof with the net score or spending velocity granularity that we described before. Remember, green is spending more, red is spending less, bright red is leaving the platform, bright green is adding the platform. You take red, subtract red from the green, and that gives you a net score. Snowflake, as we said, tops the list. You can see the granularity there. You can compare the performance. In a little different view to understand how these scores are derived, look, the ideal profile is a solid lime green, a big forest green, a not too large gray and ideally little or no bright red AKA defections. And you can see the green funnel in the gray increasing prominence as the vendor momentum declines. Interestingly, with the exception of Cloudera and Teradata, defections are all in the single digits or nonexistent. In the case of Snowflake, Redis, red is no red at all, but small sample, Couchbase has no defections and very little defection for the giant Microsoft. Incredibly impressive. This speaks to how hard it is to migrate off of a database no matter how disgruntled you are. The more common scenario is to isolate the database and build new functionality on modern platforms. Okay, so what to watch out for. Well, reinvent this coming up next month. Oh this month. It's the first time someone other than Andy Jassy will be keynoting as CEO. 15 years of Cloud, this is the 10th re-invent, which is always a market for the direction of the industry. I've said many times that the last decade was largely about IT transformation powered by the Cloud. I believe we're entering a new era of business transformation where the Cloud is going to play a significant role. But the Cloud is evolving from a set of remote services out there in the Cloud to an omnipresent platform on top of which many customers and technology companies can innovate. And virtually every industry will be impacted by Cloud. However it evolves in the coming decade. The question will be, how fast can you go? And how will players like AWS and Microsoft and many others that are building on top of these platforms make it easier for you to go fast? That's what I'll be watching for at re-invent and beyond. Okay, that's a wrap for today. Remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me, david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, everybody. Stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. We'll see you at re-invent. (soft upbeat music)

(Upbeat Music) >> Commvault was an idea that incubated as a project inside of Bell Labs, one of the most prestigious research and development organizations in the world, back in the day. It became an official company in 1996, and Commvault just celebrated its 25th anniversary As such, Commvault has had to reinvent itself many times over the past two and a half decades from riding the waves of the very early PC networking era to supporting a rich set of solutions for the evolving enterprise. This includes things like cloud computing, ransomware, disaster recovery, security compliance, and pretty much all things data protection and data management. And with me to talk about the company, its vision for the future with also a voice of the customer are three great guests. Isabelle Guis is the Chief Marketing Officer of Commvault, Manoj Nair is the GM of Metallic, and Tim Carben is a Principal Systems Engineer with Mitchell International. Folks, welcome to the Commvault power panel. Come inside theCUBE. It's awesome to have you. [Isabelle] Great to be here today. >> All right. First of all, I got to congratulate you celebrating 25 years. That's a long time, not a lot of tech companies make it that far and are still successful and relevant. So Isabelle, maybe you could start off. What do you think has been the driving factor for your ability to kind of lead through the subsequent technological waves that I alluded to upfront? >> So well, 25 years is commendable but we are not counting success in number of years. We're really counting success in how many customers we've helped over those years. And I will say what has been the driving matter for us as who that, has been innovating with our customers. You know, we were there every step of the way when they migrate to hybrid cloud. And now as they go to multi-cloud in a post COVID world where they have to win gold you know, distributed workforce, different types of workloads and devices, we all there too. We assess workload as well. So the innovation keep coming in, thanks to us listening to our customer and then, adding needs that change over the last 25 years and probably for the next 25 as well. You know, we want to be here for customer was thinking that data is an asset, not a liability. And also making sure that we offer them a broad range of use cases to quote why things simple because the world is getting too complex for them. So let's take the complexity on us. >> Thank you for that. So Manoj, you've riffed on the cube before about, you know putting on the binoculars and looking at the future. So, let's talk about that. Where do you see the future for this industry? What are some of the key driving factors that matter? >> It's great to be back on theCUBE. You know, we see our industry no different than lots of other industries. The SaaS Model is rapidly being adopted. And the reason is, you know customers are looking for simplicity, simplicity not just in leveraging, you know the great technology that Commvault has built, but in the business model and the experience. So, you know, that's one of the fastest growing trends that started in consumer apps and other applications, other B to B apps. And now we're seeing it in core infrastructure like data management, data protection. They're also trying to leverage their data better. Make sure it's not fragmented. So how do you deliver more intelligent services? You know, securing the data, insights from the data, transforming the data, and that combination, you know, our ability to do that in a multi-cloud world like Isabelle said, now with increasing edge work loads. Sometimes, you know, our customers say their data centers has a new edge too. So you kind of have this, you know, data everywhere workloads everywhere, yet the desire to deliver that with a holistic experience, we call it the 'power of bank'; the ability to manage your data and leverage the data with the simple lesson without compromise. And that's really what we're seeing as part of the future. >> Okay. I don't know if all want to come back to you and double click on that, but I want to introduce Tim to the conversation here. You bring in the voice of the customer, as they say. Tim, my understanding is Mitchell has been a Commvault customer since the mid-2000s. So, tell us why Commvault, what has kept you with the company for more than 15 years? >> Yeah, we are, it was what, 2006 when we started. And really what it all boils down to it, it's just as Isabel said, innovation. At Mitchell, we're always looking to stay ahead of the trend. And, you know, just to like was mentioned earlier, data is the most important part here. Commvault provides us peace of mind to protect and manage our data. And they do data protection for all of our environments right now. We've been a partner to help in navel our digital transformation including SaaS and cloud adoption. When we start talking about the solutions we have, I mean we of course started in 2006. I mean, this was version version 6 if I remember right. This predates me at the company. Upgraded to seven, eight, nine, we brought in ten, brought in eleven, brought in HyperScale, and then moved on to bring in the Metallic. And Commvault provides the reason for this. I guess I should say is, Commvault provides a reliable backup but most importantly, recovery. Rapid recovery. That's what gives me confidence. That's what helps me sleep better at night. So when I started looking at SaaS as a differentiator to protect our 036 environments or 065 environments, Metallic was a natural choice. And the one thing I wanted to add to that is, it came out cheaper than us building it ourselves. When you take into account resources as well as compute and storage. So again, just a natural choice. >> Yeah. As the saying goes back up as one thing, recovery's everything. Isabelle. Yeah, we've seen the SaaSification of the enterprise. Particularly, you know from the app side. You came from Salesforce. So you, the company that is the poster child for SaaS. But my question is what's catalyzing this shift and why do you think data protection is ready to make the move? >> Well, there's so many good things and that's that. As you know, you remember when people started moving to the cloud and transforming their CAPEX into OPEX. Well SaaS bring yet another level of benefits. IT, we know always has to do more with less. And so SaaS allows you to, once you set up, you've got all the software upgrades automatically without you know, I think it's, why it works. You can better manage your cash flow, because you pay as you grow. And also you have a faster time to value. So all of this at help, the fast adoption and I will tell you today I don't think there is a single customer who doesn't have at least one SaaS application because they have things of value of this. Now, when it comes to backup and recovery everybody's at different stages. You still have On-Premises, you have cloud, there's SaaS, there's Workloads devices. And so what we think was the most important was to offer a broad choice of delivery model being able to support them if they want a software subscription, if they want an integrated appliance, or if they want SaaS as a service model, and also some of our partners actually delivering this in a more custom and managed way as well. So offering choice, because everybody is at a different stage on this journey. When it comes to data management and protection, I actually, you know, I think team is the example of taking full advantage of this bold choice. >> Well, you mentioned Tim that you leaned into Metallic. We have seen the SaaS everywhere. We used to have a email server, right? I mean, you know, On-Prem, that just doesn't happen anymore. But how was Mitchell International thinking about SaaS? Maybe you could share your, from your customer perch, what you're seeing. >> Well, what's interesting about this is, Mitchell is been providing SaaS for a long time. We are a technology company and we do provide solutions, SaaS solutions, to our customers. And this makes it so important to be able to embrace it because we know the value behind it. We're providing that to our customers. And when I look at what Commvault is doing I know that Commvault is doing the same thing. They're providing the SaaS Model as a value to their customers. And it's so important to go with this because we keep our environments cutting edge. As GDPR says, You need to have a cutting edge environment. And if you don't, if you cannot check that box you do not move forward. Commvault has that. And this is one less thing that I have to worry about when choosing Metallic to do my backup of O365. >> So thank you for that, Tim. So Manoj, thinking about what you just heard from Isabelle and Tim, you know, kind of fitting into a company's cloud or hybrid cloud, more importantly, strategy, you were talking before about this. "And", in other words, it's not an either or it's not a zero sum game. It's simpatico, if you will. I wonder if you could elaborate. >> Yeah, no The Power of And, Dave, I'm very proud of that. You know, when I think of The Power of And I think of actually folks like Tim, our customers and Commonwealth first, right. And, and really that, that need for choice. So for example, you know, customers on various different paths to the cloud we kind of homogenize it and say, they're on a cloud journey or they're on a digital transformation journey, but each journey looks different. And so part of that, "And", as Isabella was saying, is really the ability to meet them where they are in that journey. So for example, you know, do you, go in there and say, Hey, you know what, I'm going to be some customers 100% multi-cloud or single cloud even. And that includes SaaS applications and my infrastructure running as a service. So there's a natural fit there saying great all your data protection. You're not going to be running software appliances for that. So you've got to data protection, data management as a service that Metallic is the able to offer across the whole S state. And that's, you know, that's probably a small set of customers, but rapidly growing. Then you see a lot more customers were saying I'm going to do away as you're talking about but the emails are where I'm going to move to office 365, leverage the power of teams. And there's a Shared Responsibility Model there which is different than an On-Prem data protection use case. And so they're, they're able to just add on Metallic to the existing Commonwealth environment, whether it's a Commonwealth software or HyperScale, and connect the two. So it's a single integrated experience. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and say, great customers all in on a SaaS delivered data protection, as you know, and you hear a lot from a lot of your guests and we hear from our customers, there's still a lot of data sitting out there, you know, 90 plus percent of workloads and data centers increasing edge data workloads. And if you were to back up one of those data workloads and say that the only copy can be in the cloud, then that would take like a 10 day recovery isolation. You know, we have some competitors who say that then that's what they have. Our flexibility, our ability to kind of bring in the Hyper-Scale deployment and just, you know, dock it into Metallic, and have a local copy, instant recovery, SLA, remote, you know, backup copy in the cloud for ransomware, or your worst case scenario. That's the kind of flexibility. So all those are scenarios we're really seeing with our customers. And that's kind of really the power advantage. A very unique part of our portfolio, but, you know, companies can have portfolio products, but to have a single integrated offering with that flexibility, that kind of, depending on the use case, you can start here and grow into a different point. That's really the unique part of the power event. Yeah, 10 day RTO just doesn't cut it, but Timmy, maybe you could weigh in here. Why, What was the catalyst for you adopting Metallic and maybe you could share what was the business impact there? >> Well, the catalyst and impact, obviously two different things. The catalyst, when we look at it, there was a lot of what are we going to do with this? We have an environment, we need to back it up, and how are we going to approach this? So we looked at it from a few different standpoints, and of course, when it boils down to it, one of the major reasons was the financial. But when we started looking at everything else that we have available to us and the flexibility that Commvault has in rolling out new solutions, this really was a no brainer at this point. We are able to essentially back up new features and new products, as soon as they're available. Within our Metallic environment, we are running the activate. We are running the the self-service for the end users to where they can actually recover their own files. We are adding the teams into it to be able to recover and perform these backups for teams. And I want to step aside really quick and mentioned something about this because I'd been with, you know, Metallic for a long time and I'd been waiting for this. We've been waiting for an ability to do these backups and anyone I know Manoj knows that I've been waiting for it. And you know, Commvault came back to me a while back and they said, we just have to wait for the API. We have to wait for Microsoft releases. Well, I follow the news. I saw Microsoft released the API, and I think it may have been two days later. Good. Commvault reached out to me and said, Hey we got it available. Are you ready to do this? And that sort of turned around that sort of flexibility being on top of new applications with that, with Salesforce, that is, you know, just not necessarily the reason why I adopted Metallic but one of those things that puts a smile on my face because I adopted Metallic. >> Well, that's an interesting story. I mean, you get the SDKs and if you're a leader you get them, you know, you can put the resources on it and you're ready when, when the product, you know, comes to GA. Manoj, I wonder if we could talk about just the notion of backing up SaaS, part of the announcements today included within Metallic included backup and offerings for Dynamics 365. But my question is why support Dynamics specifically in SaaS apps generally? I mean, customers might say, doesn't my SaaS provider protect my data? Why do I need a third party? And, and the second part of that question is why Commvault? >> Dave a great question as always. I'll start with the second part of the question. It's really three words the Shared Responsibility Model. And, you know, a lot of times our customers as they go into the cloud model they really start understanding that there is something that you're getting a lot of advantages the certain things you don't have to do, but the Shared Responsibility Model is what every cloud and SaaS provider will indoctrinate in its S&As. And certainly the application data is owned by the customer. And the meaning of that is not something that, you know, some SaaS provider can understand. And so that requires specialized skills. And that's a partnership. We've done this now very successfully with Microsoft and LG 65, we've added support for Salesforce, and we see a rapid customer adoption because of that Shared Responsibility Model. If you have, some kind of, an admin issue as we have seen in the news somebody changed their team setting and then lost all their chat. And then that data is discoverable. And you, the customer is responsible for making sure that data is discoverable or ransomware attacks. Again, recovering that SaaS data is your responsibility because the attack could be coming in from your instance not from the SaaS provider. So those are the reasons. Dynamics is, you know, one of the fastest growing SaaS applications from a business applications perspective out there. And as we looked at our roadmap, and you look at at the right compliment, what is the right adjacency, we're seeing this part of Microsoft's Business Application Suite growing, you know, as millions of users out there and it's rapidly growing. And it's also integrated with the rest of the Microsoft family. So we're now, you know, proud to say that we support all three Microsoft clouds, Microsoft Azure, or 365, Dynamics. Those applications are increasingly integrated so we're seeing commonality in customer base and that's a business critical data. And so customers are looking to manage the data, have solutions that they can be sure they can leverage. It's not just protecting data from worst-case scenarios. In the case of some of the apps like Dynamics, we offer a support, like setting up the staging environment. So it's improving productivity of the application admins, and that's really kind of that the value we're bringing able to bring to the table. >> Yeah. You know, that Shared Responsibility Model. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's oftentimes misunderstood but when you talk to CSOS, they understand it well. They'll tell you the shared responsibility is my responsibility. You know, maybe the cloud provider will secure the object storage bucket for the physical space, but it's on me. So that's really important. So thank you for that. Isabelle, last question, the roadmap, you know, how do you see Commvault's, Metallic SaaS portfolio evolving? What can you tell us? >> Oh, well, it's, it has a big strategic, you know, impact on Commvault for sure on the first portfolio first because of all of our existing customers as you mentioned earlier, 25 years, it's a lot of customers are somehow some workload as SaaS. And so the ability without, you know, adding more complexity without adding another vendor just to be able to protect them in one take, and as teams they bring a smile to his face is really important for us. The second is also a lot of customers come to Commvault for Metallic. This is the first time enter the Commvault community and Commvault family. And as they start protecting their assessed application they realize that they could leverage the same application to protect their own premised data as well. So back to The Power of And, and without writing off their past investments, you know, going to the cloud at the pace they want. So from that perspective, there is a big impact on our customer community the thing is that Metallic it brings I don't know Manoj is way too humble, but, you know, he don't go to this customer every quarter. And, you know, we have added 24 countries to the portfolio, to the product. So we see a rapid adoption. And so obviously back to your question, we see the impacts of Metallic growing and growing fast because of the market demand, because of the rapid innovation we can take the Commvault technology and put it in the SaaS model and our customers really like it. So I'm very excited. I think it's going to be, you know, a great innovation, a great positive impact for customers, and our new customers we're welcoming, which by the way I think half, Manoj correct me, but I think half of the Metallic customer at Commvault and the other half are new to our family. So, they're very bullish about this. And it's just the beginning, as you know, we are 25 years old, or sorry, 25 years young, and looking forward to the next 25. >> Well, I can confirm, you know, we have a data partner survey, partner ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, and I was looking at the Commvault data and it shows within the cloud segment, when you cut the data by cloud, you're actually accelerating, the spending momentum is accelerating. And I think it's a function of, you know, some of the acquisitions you've made, some of the moves you made in integration. So congratulations on 25 years and you know, you're riding the correct wave, Isabelle, Manoj, Tim, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Dave. >> I really appreciate it. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat Music)

>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> There are four A players, in the IS slash pass hyperscale cloud services space, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, and alphabet, pretty clever, huh? In our view, these four have the resources, the momentum, and stamina to outperform all others virtually indefinitely. Now combined, we believe these companies will generate more than $115 billion in 2021 IaaS and PaaS revenue. That is a substantial chunk of market opportunity that is growing as a whole in the mid 30% range in 2021. Welcome to this week's Wiki bond cube insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we are initiating coverage of Alibaba for our IaaS and PaaS market segments. And we'll update you on the latest hyperscale cloud market data, and survey data from ETR. Big week in hyperscale cloud land, Amazon and alphabet reported earnings and AWS CEO Andy Jassy was promoted to lead Amazon overall. I interviewed John Furrier on the cube this week. John has a close relationship with Jassy and a unique perspective on these developments. And we simulcast the interview on clubhouse, and then hosted a two hour clubhouse room that brought together all kinds of great perspectives on the topic. And then, we took the conversation to Twitter. Now in that discussion, we were just riffing on our updated cloud estimates and our numbers. And here's this tweet that inspired the addition of Alibaba. Now this gentleman is a tech journalist out of New Delhi and he pointed out that we were kind of overlooking Alibaba and I responded that no, we do not just discounting them but we just need to do more homework in the company's cloud business. He also said we're ignoring IBM, but really they're not in this conversation as a hyperscale IaaS competitor to the big four in our view. And we'll just leave it at that for now on IBM, but, back to Alibaba and the big four, we actually did some homework. So thank you for that suggestion. And this chart shows our updated IaaS figures and includes the full year 2020 which was pretty close to our Q4 projections. You know, the big change is we've added Alibaba in the mix. Now these four companies last year, accounted for $86 billion in revenue, and they grew it 41% rate combined relative to 2019. Now, notably as your revenue for the first time is more than half of that of AWS's revenue which of course hit over $45 billion. AWS's revenue, over top 45 billion last year, which is just astounding. Alibaba you'll note, is larger than Google cloud. The Google cloud platform, I should say GCP, at just over eight billion for Alibaba. Now, the reason Baba is such a formidable competitor, is because the vast majority of its revenue comes from China inside that country. And the company do have plans to continue their international expansion, so we see Alibaba as a real force here. Their cloud business showed positive EBITDA for the first time in the history of the company last quarter. So that has people excited. Now, Google, as we've often reported, is far behind AWS and Azure, despite its higher growth rates Google's overall cloud business lost 5.6 billion in 2020 which has some people concerned. We on the other hand are thrilled, because as we've reported in our view, Google needs to get its head out of its ads cloud is it's future. And we're very excited about the company pouring investments into its cloud business. Look with $120 billion essentially in the balance sheet, we can think of a better use of its cash. Now, I want to stress that these figures are our best efforts to create an apples to apples comparison across all four clouds. Many people have asked about, how much of these figures represent, for example, Microsoft office 365 or Google G suite, which by the way now is called workspaces. And the answer is our intention is $0. These are our estimates of worldwide IaaS in PaaS revenue. You know, some of said, we're too low. Some of said, we're too high. Hey, if you have better numbers, Please share them, happy to have a look. Now you maybe asking, what are the drivers of these figures and the growth that we're showing here? Well, all four of these companies, of course, they're benefiting from an accelerated shift to digital as a result to COVID, but each one has other tailwinds. You know, for example, AWS, it's Capitalizing on its a large headstart. It's created tremendous brand value. And as well, despite the fact that, while we estimate that more than 75% of AWS revenue comes from compute and storage, AWS is feature and functional differentiation combined with this large ecosystem is a very much a driving force of it's growth. In the case of Azure, in addition to its captive software application estate, the company on its earnings calls cited strong growth in its consumption based business across all of its industries and customer segments. As we've said, many times, Microsoft makes it really easy for customers to tap into Azure and a true consumption pricing model, with no minimums and cancel any time. Those kinds of terms make it extremely attractive to experiment and get hooked. We certainly saw this with AWS over the years. Now for Google it's growth is being powered by its outstanding technology, and in particular its prowess in AI and analytics. As well we suspect that much of the losses in Google cloud are coming from large go to market investments for Google cloud platform, and they're paying growth dividends. Now, as Tim Crawford said on Twitter, 6 billion, you know that's not too shabby. Also Google cited wins at Wayfair in Etsy, that Google is putting forth in our view to signal that many retailers they might be are you reluctant to do business with Amazon, was of course a big retailer competitor. These are two high profile names, we'd like to see more in future quarters and likely will. Now let's give you another view of this data and paint a picture of, how the pie is being carved out in the market. Actually we'll use bars because my, millennials sounding boards they hate pie charts. And I like to pay attention, to these emerging voices. At any rate amongst these four, AWS has more than half of the market. AWS and Azure are well ahead of the rest. And we think we'll continue to hold serve for quite some time. Now while we're impressed with Alibaba, they're currently constrained to doing business mostly in China. And we think it'll take many years for Baba and GCP to close that gap on the two leaders if they'll ever even get there. Now let's take a look at, what the customers are saying within the ETR survey data. The chart that we're showing here, this is X, Y chart that we show all the time. It's got net score or spending moments on the vertical axis, and market share or the pervasiveness in the datasets in the survey on the horizontal axis. Now on the upper right, you can see the net scores and the number of mentions for each company and the detailed behind this data. And what we've done here is cut the January survey data of 1,262 respondents, you can see that in filtered in there on the left, and we've filtered the data by cloud meaning the respondents are answering about the companies, cloud computing offerings only. So we're filtering out anything of the non-cloud spend. That's a nice little capability of the ETR platform. Azure is really quite amazing to us. It's got a net score of 72.6%, and that's across 572 responses out of the 1262. AWS is the next most pervasive in the data set with 492 shared accounts and a net score of 57.1%. Now, you may be wondering, well, why is Azure bigger in the dataset than AWS? And when we just told you that the opposite is the case in the market in the previous slide. And the answer is, like this is a survey and it's a lot of Microsoft out there, they're everywhere. And I have no doubt that the respondants notion of cloud doesn't directly map into IaaS and PaaS views of the world, but the trends are clear and consistent. Amazon and Azure, they dominate in this market space. Now for context, we've included functions in the form of AWS Lambda as your functions and Google cloud functions. Because, as you can see, there's a lot of spending momentum in these capabilities in these services. You'll also note, that we've added Alibaba to this chart, and it's got a respectable 63.6% net Score, but there are only 11 shared responses in the data. So they'll go into the bank on these numbers, but look, 11 data points, we'll take it. It's better than zero data points. We've also added VMware cloud on AWS in this chart, and you can see that, that capability that service, that has the momentum and you can see those ones that we've highlighted above the 40% red dotted line, that's where the real action in the market is. So all of those offerings have very strong or strong spending velocity in the ETR data set. Now, for context, we've put Oracle and IBM in the chart. And you can see, they both have, you know they've got a decent presence in the data set. They have 132 mentions and 81 responses respectively. So Oracle, they've got a positive net score of 16.7%, and IBM is in a negative 6.2%. Now, remember this is for their cloud offerings, as the respondents in the data set see them. So what does this mean? It says that among the 132 survey respondents answering that they use Oracle cloud, 16.7% more customers are spending more on Oracle's cloud than are spending less. In the case of IBM, it says more customers are spending less than spending more. Both companies are in the red zone, and show far less momentum than the leaders. Look, I've said many times that the good news is, that Oracle and IBM at least have clouds. But they're not direct competitors of the big four in our view, there just not. They have a large software business, and they can migrate their customers, to their respective clouds and market hybrid cloud services. Their definition of cloud is most certainly different than that of AWS, which is fine, but both companies use what I call a kitchen sink method of reporting their cloud business. Oracle includes, cloud and license support, often with revenue recognition at the time of contract, With a term that's renewable and, it also includes on-prem fees, for things like database and middleware, and if, you want to call that cloud, fine. IBM is just as bad, maybe they're worse and includes so much legacy stuff and its cloud number to hide the ball. It's just not even worth trying to unpack for this episode, I have previously and frankly, it's just not a good use of time. Now, as I've said before, both companies they're in the game that can make good money provisioning infrastructure to support their respective software businesses. I just don't consider them hyperscale class clouds which are defined by the big four, and really only those four. And I'm sure I'll get hate mail about that statement, and I'm happy to defend that position, so please reach out. Okay, but one other important thing that we want to discuss is something that came up this week in our Twitter conversation. Here's a tweet from Matt Baker who had strategic planning for Dell. He was responding to someone who commented on our cloud data, basically saying that, with all that cloud revenue who took the hit, which pockets did it come out of, and Matt was saying, look, it's coming out of customer pockets, but can we please end this zero sum game narrative. In other words, it's not a dollar for cloud that doesn't translate into a lost dollar from on-prem for the legacy companies. So let's take a look at that. For first I would agree, with Matt Baker, it's not a one for one swap of spend but there's definitely been an impact. And here's some data from ETR that can, maybe give us some insight here. What this chart shows is a cut of 915 hyperscale cloud accounts. So within those big four, and within those accounts we show the spending velocity or net score cut within further sectors representative of these on-prem players. So servers, storage and networking, so we cut the data on those three segments. And we're looking here at, VMware, Cisco, Dell, HPE, and IBM, for 2020 and into 2021. It's kind of an interesting picture, it shows the net scores for the January of 20 April, July and October 20 surveys and the January 21 surveys. Now all the on-prem players, they were of course impacted by COVID, IBM seems to be that counter trend line. Not that they weren't impacted, but they have this notable mainframe cycle thing going on. And you know, they're in a down cycle now. So it's kind of opposite of the other guys in terms of the survey momentum. And you can see pretty much, all the others are showing upticks headed into 2021, Cisco, you know kind of flattish, but stable and held up a bit. So to Matt Baker's point, despite the 35% or so growth expected for the big four and 2021 the on-prem leaders are showing some signs of positive spending momentum. So let's dig into this a little bit further, 'cause we're not saying cloud hasn't hurt on prem spending. You know, of course it has. Here's that same picture, over a 10 year view. So you're seeing this long, slow, decline occur, and it's no surprise. If you think about the prevailing model for servers, storage, and networking, on prem in particular. Servers have been perpetually under utilized, even with virtualization. You know, with the exception of like backup jobs, there aren't many workloads that can max out server utilization. So we kept buying more servers to give us performance headroom and ran at 20, 30% utilization, you know in a good day. Yes I know some folks can get up over 50%, but generally speaking servers are well under utilized in storage my gosh, it's kind of the same story, maybe even worse. Because for years it was powered by a mechanical system. So more spindles are required to gain performance, lots of copying going on, lots of, you know, pre-flash waste. And in networking it was a story of got to buy more ports. You've got to buy more ports. In the case of these segments, customers will just defense essentially, forced in this endless cycle of planning, procuring, you know, first planning. They got to get the secure the CapEx, and then they procure, and then they over-provision, and then they manage, you know, ongoing. So then along comes AWS, and says, try this on for size and you can see from that chart, the impact of cloud on those bellwether on-prem infrastructure players. Now, just to give you a little bit more insight on this topic, here's a picture of the wheel charts from the ETR data set. For AWS Microsoft, Google, and we brought in VMware to compare them. A wheel chart shows the percent of customers saying they'll either add a platform new that's the lime green. Increased spending by more than 5%, that's the forest green spend flat relative to last year. That's the gray spend less by more than 5% down, that's the pinkish or leave the platform, that's the Bright red. You subtract the red from the green and you get a percentage that represents net score, AWS with a net score of 60% is off the charts good. Microsoft remember, this includes the entire Microsoft business portfolio, not just Azure, so it's still really strong. Google, frankly, we'd like to see higher net scores and VMware's, you know, so there's a gold standard for on-prem. So we include them, so you can see for reference the strong, but notice they got a much, much bigger flat spending, which is what you would expect from some of these more mature players. Now let's compare these scores to the other, on-prem Kings. So this is not surprising to see, but the greens, they go down, the flats that gray area goes up compared to the cloud guys and the red which is virtually non-existent within AWS, goes into the high teens with the exception of Cisco which despite its exposure to virtually all industries including those hard hit by COVID shows pretty low read scores. So that's, that's good. And I got to share one other, look at this wheel chart for pure storage. We're not really not sure what's happening here, but this is impressive. We're seeing a huge rebound, and you can see we've superimposed as candlestick over comparing previous quarters surveys and, look at the huge up check in the January survey for pure that blue line. That's highlighted in that red dot at ellipse, jumps to a 63% net score from below 20% last quarter. You know, we'll see, I've never seen that kind of uptick before for an established company. And, you know, maybe it's pent up demand or some other anomaly in the data. We'll find out when pure reports in 2021, because remember these are forward looking surveys. But the point is, you still see action going on in hybrid and on-prem, and despite the freight train that is cloud, coming at the legacy players. You know, not that pure is legacy, but it's, you know, it's no longer a lanky teenager. And I think the bottom line, coming back to Matt Baker's point, is there are opportunities that the on-prem players can pursue in hybrid and multi-cloud, and we've talked about this a lot where you're building abstraction layer, on top of the hyperscale clouds and letting them build out their data center presence worldwide, spend on capex, they're going to outspend everybody. And these guys, these on-prem, and hybrid and multi-cloud folks they're going to have to add value on top of that. Now if they move fast, you no doubt there'll be acquiring startups to make that happen. They're going to have to put forth the value proposition and execute on that, in a way that adds clear value above and beyond what the hyperscalers are going to do. Now, the challenge, is picking those right spots, moving fast enough and balancing wall street promises with innovation. There's that same old dilemma. Let's face It. Amazon for years could lose tons of money and not get killed in the street. Google, they got so much cash, they can't spend it fast enough and Microsoft after years of going sideways is finally figured out and the some. Alibaba they're new to our analysis, but it's looking like you know, it's the Amazon of China, Plus ANT despite its regulatory challenges with the Chinese government. So all four of these players, are in the driver's seat in our view. And they're leading in not only cloud, but AI. And of course the data keeps flowing into their cloud. So they're really are in a strong position. Bottom line is we're still early into the cloud platform era and it's morphing. It's from a collection of remote cloud services, into this ubiquitous, sensing, thinking, anticipatory system, that's increasingly automated and working towards full automation. It's intelligent and it's hyper decentralizing toward the edge. One thing's for sure, the next 10 years, they're not going to be the same as the past 10. Okay, that's it for now. Remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconANGLE.com, these episodes they're all available as podcasts just search for breaking analysis podcast. You can always connect on Twitter. I'm @dvellante or email me at david.Vellante@siliconANGLE.com. I love the comments on LinkedIn and of course in clubhouse the new social app. So please follow me, so that you can get notified when we start a room and riff on these topics. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(royalty free music) >> Woman's voice: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is a special cube conversation. I have a special announcement from our friends at Commvault. So welcome back to the program. We have two of our cube alumni. First, we have Manoj Nair, he's actually the general manager of Metallic, which is a Commvault venture. First time Manoj on the program in your role with, with Commvault, welcome back. And also welcoming back Ranga Rajagopalan who's the vice president of products at Commvault. Ranga, caught up with you recently at the FutureReady event that we had over the summer. Thanks so much for joining us again. >> Sure. >> Alright. So Manoj, let's start. Metallic obviously was, you know, the standout you know, thing that everybody talked about last year at Commvault GO. Really helping to, you know, put Commvault clearly into the SaaS marketplace out there. Talking about how, you know, all the wonderful features for managing my data in a cloud environment. So there is an expansion to the portfolio that we're announcing today. Why don't you share the news? >> Yeah, absolutely Stu, you know, it's great to be back here with all of you and Metallic has come a long way from the launch. Just less than a year ago, we announced the creation of Metallic multiple different offerings whether it's protecting SaaS workloads like O365, remote endpoints and a hybrid cloud workloads. You know, the context that we're getting from our customers, especially in the last six months, increased cloud adoption and, you know, remote working collaboration suites being adopted. All of that has been a great accelerator for adoption of SaaS data protection, which is really what the Metallic is offering. We have gone to global countries and expanded to our Commvault customer base who was, you know, using both Commvault software and Metallic now. One of the key things that we're not, you know, today's announcement is focused on a Metallic cloud storage service that as a new service available for Commvault customers are looking to get a, you know, fully managed secure cloud-based SaaS target for protecting all of the data as an air gap copy and this is, you know, is more relevant than ever. >> So Manoj, using the cloud for data protection, for backup isn't new? Ranga, help us understand. I heard in there air gap, I heard, you know, leveraging the cloud. Absolutely, we've seen a huge tailwind for cloud adoption but there's that gap for making sure customers, you know, protect their data, secure their data. Do they have the skillset to be able to leverage that, so help help us drill in and understand what's different about this new service >> You're right Stu. Cloud is absolutely not new but what is really unique about today's announcement with metallic cloud storage service is that we are bringing cloud even closer to our Commvault customers. So thinking from a data management perspective, our customers want to more easily and securely get the benefits of cloud storage. What we are doing today is integrating Metallic cloud storage service as a cloud storage target into our Commvault software as well as our HyperScale X plans. And that lets our customers to seamlessly use cloud storage for their data protection, backup and archival use cases without needing to understand a lot about the cloud, without needing to get through any of the complexities. Think of it as the easy button that is now introduced into the Commvault software and HyperScale X. >> All right, so, if I heard you right, this is a managed service that Commvault is offering. Did I get that right? >> That's fast. >> Yeah >> So, you know, it's a managed service. It's public cloud storage. It's, as Ranga said, the easy button to be able to create your air gap copies in the cloud. And, you know, with everything that we keep hearing about ransomware, and we believe this is one of the, the, the most important steps in ransomware readiness, a lot of our customers are already doing it by bringing their own cloud storage on all the clouds we protect, but it's still not easy. And this is a skills gap, you know, the procurement process and all of that, you know, the management of the credentials, the setting up of the networking, all of that is encapsulated. So now, it's just, you know, it's like a built-in feature, just, you know plug it in and now you've got an on-ramp to the cloud. Make sure you have your air gap copy. >> Yeah, maybe it would help if you'd, if you'd talk about the easy button, give us a little compare contrast 'cause, right, I could go, I could spin up instance of the cloud, but, you know, who has access? What are the security settings? There's a whole litany of things that I need to make sure I've got the right identity management. It's kind of easy, but not necessarily simple to, to be able to do that. So from what you're describing I don't even need to really think, you know, yes, it's in the cloud, I'm leveraging all the wonderful things of the cloud, but I don't have to have that, that ramp up of skillset if I don't already have that in house as... Ranga, sounds like I'm understanding that. >> Yeah >> You know. >> Yeah, you're perfectly understanding and that's all there is to it. And let me expand on the PC part there, right? For us, simplicity is into end-customer experience. So I'm going to break this down from a customer life cycle perspective. Think of a Commvault customer who's backing up pretty much all the workloads in the data center. The first question they have is, you know, "For security reasons "for easy, or because I'm in a transformation project "I need to make, I need to start using cloud storage." So the first complexity they would face is understanding which cloud provider to use, what kind of cloud profile to use? or who their cloud or chasing model, which is very different from how they normally procure their hardware and software. So that's really the first dimension of simplicity that this Metallic cloud storage offer. Our customers can procure their cloud storage along with any other Commvault software and hardware just like they would do any other Commvault software. So that's the first level of simplicity. The second one is "How do I bring "that into my data management life cycle." And again, as I mentioned before, MCSS is fully integrated into Commvault software. So through the simplicity of command center, which is the one UI that brings all our products together, customers can just click to the cloud storage target and start backing up, moving copies, archiving, doing all the data management use cases, the second dimension of simplicity. And the third one really is the predictability. You know, cloud is beautiful, It brings a lot of flexibility, but it also brings in a lot of new terms. What are the egress charges? What does ingress mean? What does egress mean? What happens when I have the V store? What happens when I have the Ricola? So all of that complexity is taken away. We handle all of that in the backend. From the customer's perspective, just like they use CAP, just like they use the Desk, now, they can use cloud. We handled all the egress and all those kind of stuff in the backend. From the customer's perspective, they get a simple, predictable price point. So from the time of choosing, procuring it, using it and continuously getting the best benefits out of it, the easy button extends across that entire dimension. And the beauty in all of this is customers getting all the benefits of cloud without having to really understand much about cloud. So that's really the benefit we bring to the table with MCSS. >> Yeah. Manoj, Commvault has a long history of being able to live on, you know, various infrastructures that customers have. Are you able to share who the, I'm assuming there's a cloud partner for part of this, so who is the, the underlying IS? >> Yeah, so still, you know, end of June doing, we announced the next phase of our strategic partnership with Microsoft. So this is a, you know, one of the first big, new things that is coming out of the giant partnership between Commvault and Microsoft around Metallic and Microsoft Azure. There's a lot of things that, you know, we're jointly doing that are unique that make all of the simplicity Ranga, you know, just mentioned, come to life and, you know, that's, you know, power of the end as I call it. It's Commvault and Metallic and Microsoft, you know, coming together to make this really easy for our customers to start getting the value out of leveraging cloud for the data protection. Yeah. >> Well, Manoj, it seems natural extension of what you've already talked about for what Metallic can protect. Of course, you've got the, you know, the business suite from Microsoft, can you help frame it for us, you know, where this new, the MCSS fits in the Metallic portfolio today? >> Yeah absolutely. So if you look at, you know, what... I'll give you a customer journey and what's been happening. If you are not a Commvault customer today and you're looking at "What's my best 0365 data protection option," if you go to microsoft.com, you'll actually find Metallic in there as the recommended offer. And they, they might start the journey there or you're an existing Commvault customer and you start rapidly adopting teams and O365, you know, post COVID. The, the, you know, Metallic is the default option. So it doesn't matter how you enter in, you're now getting a full, you know, SaaS actual backup as a service, no storage costs, no egress costs. And so our Commvault customers have been asking, "We love that part of it, why not make that available "for all of the other data that is being protected "by Commvault, either appliance or software on-prem?" and, you know, in a very simple way, it's, you know, the best things are driven by customers. And in this case, our customers came to us and said, "We love the simple button "not just what's included in the Metallic service, "we would like that that to be available, even for, "you know, the existing software you're protecting on-prem "for the air gap copy use case is kind of the biggest one." And you know, all of the things that Ranga said in terms of simplicity now comes to bear. And it's something that we were including inside the Metallic SaaS offerings. Now, it's available for software and appliance customers. >> Yeah. I definitely, I've heard of the industry now. Microsoft seems a little bit more amenable to, you know, not charging for egress, with some of their partners, when they put together these solutions. Ranga, Manoj has mentioned air gap a couple of times, can you help us frame, you know, what that means today? You know, I even think back, you know, ape that most people are familiar with. Even, I think about, you know, Google, you know, use ape for many years even in the public cloud to give that air gap. Of course, we've talked to your customers lots about how to protect against ransomware. So how does, how does this fit in the new solution? >> You know, unfortunately, Stu today. It's, it's important reality for us to discuss the ransomware readiness. Number of attacks are going up depending on, you know, which your source you are listening to. So security is a very important concern in top of our customers' minds. Now, MCSS is cloud storage, so it is off site storage. So it comes with all the natural layered security that it's built into cloud storage. Additionally, Commvault brings a complete ransomware protection, protection and recovery framework, which becomes inherently available with the MCSS. And let me explain that in a few very simple quotes. Now, the entire journey from on-prem to the cloud storage is completely encrypted. So that's, you know, a very important part of the order on security mechanism, but here is where it really becomes cool Commvault software is managing the cloud credentials, the cloud keys. So the entire access to MCSS as a cloud storage target is managed to Commvault. So there isn't an independent cloud admin accessing that storage, which opens it up for any kind of an intentional or unintentional access. Anything can happen when you allow that access. So Commvault completely manages that access the keys are owned by the customer, but managed by a Commvault. So it's a really air gap security, layered security mechanism that you get in combination with the entire framework of air gap isolation, anomaly protection, the authentication, everything that is built into the Commvault framework. So when you, when you bring in the simplicity that we talked about earlier, you can apply that to the security angle as well here. Instead of making the customer manage yet another piece in the jigsaw, we are managing it for them. So from their perspective, it is a seamless extension to their data management strategy while it also adds an extra layer of security and a readiness to recover from ransomware attacks. >> While it's being launched today, we already have customers that have, you know, we have accelerated into adoption of MCSS and it's coming exactly for the scenarios Ranga just said. You know, they, they have a requirement for a cloud copy. If you have seen that on the Metallic SaaS side that some of the customers might be in pilot mode. And because they were in pilot mode, they were quickly able to recover from attacks that happened. Unfortunately, those, those things are reality. And we have had customers who after the attack go and say "I want to make sure it's much easier to recover from that." And so we already have our first customers who are starting to adopt the service even as we launch it today. >> Well. I'm so glad you brought up the customer examples. Manoj, give us a little bit just the high level view, you talked about the growth and adoption of Metallic overall, and you just talked about kind of the, the single management. You got any SaaS for us, you know, how much data do you have in the cloud now and, you know, what's the growth looking like? And talk a little bit about, you know, what we can expect going forward from this portfolio. >> Yeah, I, you know, I don't know how many people disclose this or not, but we have disclosed it in the past, we have over an exabyte of data today in the cloud that, you know, our customers are, you know, either using a Metallic or bringing their own cloud with Commvault and writing to the cloud. So, you know, that's probably, you know, best in class out there. What we are also seeing is the acceleration of that, you know, so we look at it's, you know, it's exponential growth over a hundred percent, you know, we're, we're seeing that, that rise in leverage yet it's something that when you look at the overall industry percentages, it depends on whose stats you use, it's probably only 5%, maybe 10% that are leveraging the cloud for anything, whether it's, you know, in this case, it's data, cloud data as a secondary target. So there's a lot of untapped potential. And the things that Ranga said I think really are the ones our customers are telling us as we tested this out. And those are the biggest reasons. Right cost, you know, I'm concerned about it. I've heard that it's unpredictable. It goes up, people start spinning up other things that they shouldn't be. And so I want predictable costs, you know, security and the whole model around it, the, the governance of the keys, and finally skills, everyone's busy, no one's trying to not be, you know, upping their cloud skills yet it's not something that is very, you know, very easy for most people to, you know, become an expert. And if you're not an expert while you're protecting your data, that's not, you know, that's not something you want to do, so you kind of hold back. And I think this is really the biggest thing that customers are looking at, like our cloud expertise packaged in an offering solving all those things? >> And Stu, we discussed this at FutureReady of how the Commvault portfolio continues to come closer and closer together in order to deliver that increased value to our customers. In July, when we were having a similar conversation, we saw how Hedvig came in as the scale load storage in our HyperScale X integrated data protection plans. And we can see that we have Metallic Cloud Storage Service coming in as a cloud extension to our software, as well as HyperScale X. So it's kind of bringing the best of both worlds, customers who want to continue to stay on for them, protect their on-prem workloads with on-prem footprint. You have HyperScale X as a very nice scale, which integrated our plans. And as the capacity needs increase, as the security needs increase, you have MCSS now as a managed storage extension, bringing together those pieces of the portfolio. Now, the thing that is now available already as of September 15 is our ability to manage Metallic as part of command center. So while you want that SaaS flexibility and you're using Metallic to protect the SaaS workloads let's also realize that there are a bunch of other workloads that you might be protecting using Commvault software all through HyperScale. We can now bring all of them together into the simplicity of command center. So it, again, takes away another point of complexity for the customer. Just one UI, go ahead, do protect the workloads the way you want. With the form factor you want. SaaS software, or our plans, and we bring it all together into a single management framework for you. So you're going to continue seeing the portfolio coming closer together because our prime concern is to provide flexibility of choice to customers. Flexibility of choice in so many different ways, you know, you can use software, our plans or SaaS. You can bring your own on-prem storage, cloud storage, or if you want to hit the simple button, use Metallic clouds for it. So, so you're going to see that happen as we move forward. >> Well. Manoj, Ranga, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the launch. Love little tagline leading it. We're we're making the cloud just a little bit closer to us. >> It is, >> It is a lot closer. >> Thank you. Thank you Stu for your time. >> Thank you. >> I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (royalty free music)

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

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman and Lisa Martin is also in the house. This is day three of our coverage, Danny Allan is here. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam and one of the key thought leaders at the company, one of the main figures at VeeamON, which we were just doing three weeks ago. Danny, great to see you again. >> Wonderful to be here with you. >> That was a really fun show VeeamON, it always is. You guys got a cool vibe. >> You chose the Fontainebleau Hotel this year in Miami, in Miami Beach which is just a great location. Many thousands of customers and you guys hit some milestones recently. You talked about a billion dollars in revenue, it's been something you're going after for a while, you've seen that happen. Of course things change, right? All the subscription stuff started to happen. That slowed you down a little bit but that's awesome that you guys finally hit that, so congratulations. Raised a big pile of dough and you just keep moving that ball forward. Give us the update on Veeam. >> So as you said, Veeam has a great culture, right? There's a passionate green army out there that loves us and we're thankful for that. We hit one billion in bookings for the trailing 12 months, we have 350,000 customers and the business is going well. One of the interesting things about Veeam is because we're private, we actually have the opportunity to decide when and how we do things like switch from perpetual to subscription type bookings. But business is doing great, we love it, we're glad to be here. >> One of the things that you talked about at VeeamON was kind of getting back to the basics. You talked a lot about look, it starts with backup. There's a lot of noise in the market today. You hear a lot about, you know, data management. We talk a lot about date assurance but at the end of the day, it starts with backup. That's something that you gave a lot of thought to. I mentioned that you were one of the thought leaders at Veeam. Double click on that, add some color. What were you thinking in terms of that being the starting point and that really driving a lot of your messaging at VeeamON? >> Yeah, I always say it's three things, right? This is a journey that we're on and I get excited about the end stages of that journey. But how many people actually have a budget for machine learning or blockchain or artificial intelligence? No one has a budget for that. What they have a budget for is backup and so we believe A, it's a journey, B, it does start with backup. There's a budget for that and the key thing is choose a partner for this journey and we believe Veeam is the right partner obviously to choose for that but we really wanted to go back to who is spending money to buy the products and for that, it's the technical decision maker who has the budget for backup today. >> Yeah, all right. So Danny, we talk about the Cisco relationship and budgets like you were talking about there. Cisco UCS was from day one a heavily virtualized environment and therefore had strong affinity with Veeam there. But you've got some great visibility into where UCS is going, what CI and HCI solutions are really starting to gain traction. So talk a little bit about that partnership and which ones of those Cisco solutions are really starting to, you know, kick in the market. >> We have a great partnership with Cisco, first of all and really in two areas, if you're talking infrastructure. So on the HyperFlex, the Converged Infrastructure but also on just the S3260 for example, a storage dense system and we have a target this year, this is public information, we have a target, a joint target of $100 million. We're actually at 80% of that right now. Business has been doing really well. In fact, we've been on the Global Price List now for 18 months and in 18 months, we've actually closed over 350 transactions. Like it's been going really, really well and here's what's exciting about that. Those customers that are spending money on Cisco gear with Veeam software, they might start in the drag, these are quantifiable numbers, it's about five to one. So every dollar they spend on Veeam, it's about $5 on Cisco. But over 35% of those customers within twelve months come back and buy more Cisco gear and actually if you look at the actual drag, quantifiable drag that we're bring for Cisco, it's 11 to one. So for every dollar they spend with Veeam, they're spending $11 in Cisco HyperFlex or S3260. So it's been a great partnership both for us obviously because we're on their resell list but also for them. >> And you said you're 80% of the way there. We're talking a calendar year or is that a fiscal year? >> That is their fiscal year, so that's ending in August or July. I should know the date but I know we're 80%. We're on track to hit that $100 million. >> What do you think is driving that? I mean obviously this is a partnership, which takes time. >> Yes. >> This is not just a press release partnership. What else have you done to really facilitate this? >> Well I would say two things. One is their infrastructure is great. In fact we have one of our Veeam cloud service providers that is protecting over a million VMs right now. So these are massive scale, are using S3260s in the backend as a repository, so their hardware actually works. But I would say the other thing that really resonates is, so they have this Hyper FEX Solution and on top of that they have Intersite and that concept of a cloud management plain that can roll out the hardware, can update it not only at the infrastructure but also the Veeam software is really critical and that resonates with customers. It's again, good for them but it's also good for us. >> Let's see. The last couple years you guys have had a big emphasis on the enterprise and then again we're hearing this theme of kind of back to basics. I mean you heard at VeeamON, it starts with backup. You talk to people at VeeamON, the customers. It's the, you know, a lot of medium sized customers, a lot of smaller customers. Do you feel like you over-rotated to the enterprise or do you feel like hey, we could get there just by slow and steady and still putting the accelerator on our core business? Can you just add some color to that and explain? >> Yeah, so if you back three years, our focus was very much on the small and medium enterprise where we said we wanted to capture the major enterprise and that by the way has worked. If you look, since January of 2017 we've done over a billion just in enterprise, enterprise being 1,000 employees or above. So focusing on the enterprise for a few years was the right thing to do. However, that was all on the messaging side and we had this core constituent that has been with us for over decade now and we didn't want to pivot away from them. So in the last six months, nine months, what you've seen is pivoting back towards the center. So we do a third of our business with SMB, a third with commercial and a third with enterprise. So we believe we're right there on the fairway now and it's a perfect alignment of that messaging. >> Well I mean history would show that the disruptors oftentimes come from, you know, down below and move up. I mean you certainly saw that with Microsoft in the 80s and there are many other examples. Is that part of the philosophy, that you guys just can keep adding value that will appeal to the enterprise customers? It sounds like with a 30 year business, you're actually already there in terms of functionality. Is there a functionality gap though still that you need to close in your opinion? >> I don't think so. We announced as you know probably v10 a few years ago and what we've done is we've introduced that over the years and so the final check box if you will for v10 is coming in our next release later this year. But that really covers off the gambit of everything that needs to be done and that's been resonating really strongly. We believe we have a portfolio that addresses everything from the smallest customer to the largest customer. >> Yeah and you don't live and die, we heard this from Radmere, you don't live and die by your long term product development roadmap. You tend to be very tactical and listen to customers and-- >> We're very agile, so we keep a backlog of all the things that we want to do but we will pivot on a dime if we believe hey, this is really strategic for our customer base. We'll change something that, you know, we had planned for year out and do something else in the interim. >> Dave: Pretty judicious about how you decide there. >> Yeah so Danny, bring us inside some of the customer conversations you're having here to show, you know, when I watch the keynotes, many of the messages about multi-cloud sound like the same kind of things that I've been hearing at VeeamON for the last couple of years. What are you hearing from the customers at this? >> Well, definitely cloud date management is top of mind. I ate dinner last night with an enterprise customer. They're rolling this out across about 100 different locations around the world and they very much wanted a local repository of data but they also wanted to tier that data into the HyperScale public cloud, so that is clearly an enterprise-centric message. But that same capability goes down to the SMB. But if you asked me what is the conversation on everyone's, on the tip of their tongue, it is cloud. How are you addressing cloud? And we've done that a number of ways. One is we take the backup data, we'll tier it into cloud. We'll recover workloads in cloud. It's not so much a lift and shift. You know what's interesting is the cloud is not a charity. If you just take what you had on premises and move it into the cloud, there's merge-in layered in there, right? But for some use cases, disaster recovery, business continuity, you want to be able to turn it on in cloud and then after it's in cloud of course, then you need to protect it. And so we've been addressing all of those capabilities within the Veeam portfolio. >> Do you think there's going to be a backlash? I mean you don't see it in the numbers. You see, you know, AWS's growth and I'm not talking about repatriation but the cloud as a target is just another piece of infrastructure, even though it's kind of virtual, that I have to manage. I mean it does add complexity in that sense. So do you think there'll be, there's maybe somewhat over-enthusiasm now or do you see this as an unstoppable trend? >> I believe that cloud is a tool in the toolbox and it's both the smallest, most precise tool and also the largest tool and everything in between. What I mean by that is this isn't just a lift and shift and move it over to the cloud. It's how do I leverage the cloud to extend my data center? I actually, a lot of people talk about multi-cloud, I actually think that the era is really hybrid cloud. It's how do I extend what I have on premises into the cloud? And we're only now really being pragmatic about how to leverage it. The people that jumped in, all in and said, "I'm going all to cloud," those are the ones that you're seeing a bit of buyers remorse but those that are a lot more pragmatic, they're now saying, "How do I deliver business outcomes?" Because it's not about cloud, it's actually about business outcomes, right? Focus on the services. How do I deliver business outcomes that are improved by leveraging aspects of the cloud? >> Yes. So Danny, I know you've talked to our team. You know, we look at the environment and customers today, they have multi-cloud. But the strategy has been well, I've got some stuff here and I use that service here and wait, I need to spin that stuff over here. We've almost remade multi-vendor into multi-cloud. >> Yes. >> So the goal we've been looking for is the solution should be more than just the sum of the parts. Veeam sits in an interesting layer to help customers leverage that and get value out of their data across all of those environments. So you know, do we see that as a viable future that is not just the state that we're in but be able to get more value out of those pieces in the near future? >> Yeah, so I'm obviously biased 'cause I work for Veeam but I think we sit at the intersection of all of this because what we do is we take services, we take workloads and we make them portable. I can take something from on premises, I can put it in cloud A, I can put it in cloud B, I can take it back on premises, I can move it to a private cloud provider. So we have the ability to be completely flexible and agnostic as to where it lands and the reason why that's important, people don't go out and say "I'm going to put 50% "of my workload in this cloud or this cloud." They say, "I need a data center in this geography" or "I need a data center that has this kind of service." So the reason they end up in multi-cloud is not because of a multi-cloud strategy but because they have a business need that is met by that infrastructure and we allow the portability, the flexibility to move the workloads as the business needs. >> So we have some data here. I want to dig into it a little bit. Can you share with us some of the fun facts? Like when, maybe the timeline of your relationship with Cisco, some of the things you've done. Walk us through that, Danny. >> So, we partnered with, we've had a longstanding relationship with Cisco. Officially we went on their Global Price List like I said, 18 months ago. Since then, 300 and, earlier this week, 359 transactions. But almost a transact, two transactions every three days and we have a great go-to-market program with them right now, so we do a lot of joint activities, both in the channel as well as between. We fund heads with them and vice versa. >> Who's your favorite partner? No, you don't have to answer that. >> We have, we have a lot of partners. They're all of my favorite children. >> So we're hearing kind of this land and expand strategy. We've heard that from many other companies. But it's actually happening inside of or within the Veeam ecosystem and what I heard here was you're selling with Cisco and then people are coming back and buying more Cisco. So that's part of land and expand but another dimension of land and expand is you sell it to an organization. Not only do they buy more but other parts of the organization, you sort of fan out horizontally. How much of that is happening? >> It's happening quite a bit. I would say the most significant expansion right now is actually at a line of business level and so you'll have multiple lines of business and then they will begin to coalesce together and say "Okay, let's supply a central policy to that." So that's what we're seeing. What we do know is that 35% of Cisco customers that are joint Veeam and Cisco customers, they'll come back within the next 12 months and they'll buy more Veeam and more Cisco gear. >> Okay last question, why Veeam? You got a lot of competitors obviously in this market. You and I have talked about that a lot. You got, Cisco has made an investment in one of them. Why Veeam? >> So, simple, reliable, flexible and the flexible is probably the key to all of this because we don't lock people in. We don't lock them into our hardware, we don't lock them into a specific cloud, we don't lock them into any one of our children if you will, we love them all equally and that flexibility, future proofing the organization is a huge deciding point for the organizations. Because they don't know what the landscape's going to look like two, three years from now. Is this still going to be your partner or is it not? So having an organization that will partner with you, that will be flexible in, and this isn't just flexibility at a technology level, it's also at a business level. Licensing, for example. Flexibility to move licenses from physical systems to virtual systems to cloud systems to back again. They want to partner with someone that has that flexibility. >> Danny, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Yes, likewise. >> Okay, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin from Cisco Live in San Diego 2019. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back. (upbeat electronic tones)

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO, 2018. Brought to you by, Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee, this is Commvault Go and you're watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host, Keith Townsend And we're going to get a little cloudy. Happy to welcome to the program, Sabina Joseph, who's the Global Segment Director with Amazon Web Services, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you very much for having us here, >> Miniman: And also welcome to the program, first time, Jeanna James, who's the Worldwide Cloud Alliances Leader with Commvault, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Alright, so, we're looking at the ecosystem that Commvaults have, Sabina, why don't you give us a little bit on the history, and what's going on, between Amazon, and Commvault. >> I think I'm going to have Jeanna kind of kick that off, and then we will >> sure! Yeah! >> Add some comments! >> I'll take that, so we started our relationship over five years ago, and it's been a strong and growing relationship since that time. We started off with S3 integration, and we write natively to Amazon S3, and now our integration points have just become deeper and wider, so, S3, S3IA, Glacier, Snowball, we have full support across the Amazon services, and, about three years ago, Amazon started the storage Competency Program, and Commvault is a storage Competency Partner, and so with that launch, we started to do more on the go to market side, so we started off with that integration, and the technology side, and now today are expanding more on the go to market, and Sabina you want to talk a a little bit about that? >> Absolutely, thank you, Jeanna. Thank you for that question. So our collaboration indeed started five years ago, and Commvault has always embraced our best practices around technology and go to market. They've always focused on getting the technical integrations with our services right, prior to engaging on go to market and sales initiatives. They have launched a joint practices website on their webpages, which talks about our collaboration, our solutions, and also jointly validated reference architectures. We engaged early on in the channel. In addition, when AWS is about to launch services and new features, we engage Commvault's technical team early on, and wherever possible, Commvault has always participated in our beta launches. This is actually one of the reasons why Commvault has a wide integration across Amazon S3, S3IA, Glacier, Glacier Vault Lock, and different versions of Snowball. >> Yeah, so, Sabina, those of us that watch the industry, watching this storage segment, and how AWS relates to it has been one of the most fascinating stories there. At this conference, we're really enjoying getting to talk to some of the customers, we know that Amazon's always listening very much to the customers, what can you tell us about what you're hearing from the customers, and how is that impacting the focus of what you're doing together? >> Well, as you know, AWS is very focused on the customer, and Commvault has always embraced this vision, making sure to launch solutions that mutually delight our customers. Every year, our technical and our executive teams meet, to set the initiatives for the year, both on the business and the technical front. This is on of the reasons why solutions such as data disaster recovery, healthcare data protection solutions, and AIML solutions, really speak to Commvault's commitment to the Cloud, and we are also very open with each other on recommendations. They have given us recommendations on our services, and we have done the same with Commvault, and we very much welcome these suggestions. All of this has laid a very strong foundation for our collaboration, and we look forward, and we will expect to see continued strong growth in the coming years. >> So, data, we've heard it said time and time again, the new currency, super important, Amazon obviously a leader in Cloud storage, talk to us about what's happening around data protection, data management, at AWS Cloud. >> Well, when we talk to our customers, one of the very first workloads, there in fact moving into the Cloud is backup of data, and with this cloud-first initiative in mind, they are embracing cloud-based solutions around data protection and data management. As you might be aware, the amount of data that customers are needing to protect is growing two-fold every two years, and challenges around ransomware means that traditional industries, and heavily regulated industries, like financial services, healthcare, are moving data into the Cloud because of our collaboration for over five years, Commvault has a wide array of solutions to address these customer needs available on AWS globally. >> Yes, and just to add to that, with AWS over the last two years, we've seen 100% growth year over year, and we continue to expect additional growth >> absolutely >> with AWS and our customer base, and typically, what we see, is customers will start with backup and recovery and sending backup data into the could, and then once they get that data into the Cloud they start to use it. Let's test disaster recovery incident, and see if it works? Wow, it worked, great! Once it works, then they start moving more clothes into the Cloud, and protecting the data across regions, and all over the world, and so that's one of the great benefits that we have with Amazon and Commvault together. >> Congrats on the progress that you've been making, sounds like you've got some good proof points. As this is maturing, what feedback are you getting from customers, what are they asking you to do, to expand this partnership even further? >> Thank you for that question, as Jeanna knows, customers are always looking for a wide integration of Commvault solutions across our services. They want to use the rich features that Commvault has on premises, in the hybrid architecture model, and also for workloads that are running completely on AWS, and once this data moves into the Cloud they want to do more with this data. This is actually one of the reasons why we are working together, to have Commvault integrate across our machine learning services, like transcribe, translate, which means that customers can extract more value from this data, improve their time to market, and potentially even create net new solutions using this data. >> So from a Commvault perspective, we see, just like Sabina said, more and customers going through digital transformations, and when they go through those digital transformations, they've been sold on things like, we want to lower cost, and we want to have more agility with our business, and one of our big customers that's here today, Dow Jones, talks about that story, where they've gotten rid of a lot of their data centers, moved a lot of their infrastructure into the Cloud and so they've been able to become more agile as a business because of moving to the Cloud with Commvault and AWS, so, we hope that you'll take some time and hear some of the customers' stories out there, while you're here. >> Yeah, we'll listen to customers, and as customers are making that digital business transformation, what have you been hearing, or what are some of the trends you're seeing, and what are customers thinking about, and specifically in this collaboration, what are you guys thinking about when it comes to digital transformation and the impact on data protection? >> You want to start with that? So, again, lowering cost, scalability, global infrastructure, those are the big things for the digital transformation that we see customers wanting to embrace, and with Commvault, one of the big differentiators, I think, for the enterprise customers out there who are global, is they typically do have both an on-prem environment as well as an in Cloud environment, and even if they have an all in strategy, there is time between that, moving all into the Cloud where they need to be able to cover both the on-prem and in the Cloud workloads, and so Commvault really brings that together, we also work together with our HyperScale Appliance for those customers who want to have on-prem and in the Cloud so overall, it's simplicity, the ability to manage the data, wherever it needs to be, that's where Commvault and AWS really do well and shine. >> Alright, so, for people that are at this show, what flavor are they getting of AWS, or their sessions, or their labs, what's that kind of Cloud experience at this show? >> Well, we have a number of sessions that we are jointly presenting together at, focus around AIML, future SAAS solutions, and also healthcare data protection solutions. And in fact, at this show, we are launching over 2100 EC2 instances, every day at this show, through the hundreds of labs that Commvault has running. For customers and partners, you can come and try out the Commvault solutions on AWS for free at these labs, and for those of you listening out there, we are giving away two Alexas at each of our sessions. >> Wow. So, I think, still we're about eight weeks out, right, from the big show? >> Oh, my team's deep in planning already, I mean, this is a great show, but Amazon is one of the biggest shows that we do every year. What should we expect to see, this year? >> Well as you said, our team is preparing very hard, to make sure that we are providing value to the customers, and partners, attending re:INVENT, and there will be a number of announcements, we're looking forward to having our advanced technology partner and our storage competency partner, Commvault, at re:INVENT again this year. >> And we're excited to be there, so I hope that everybody who's here with us today, will join us at re:INVENT in November, and it's sure to be a great show. >> Alright, yeah, be sure to join theCUBE and over 50,000 of your closest friends >> (laughs) >> in the Cloud in Las Vegas the week right after Thanksgiving, if you haven't already, register quickly, because it will sell out, >> Townsend: That's right >> get your hotel, because they will sell out, what I'm saying is, it's a big show, so, we're excited to be there, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be be back here with more coverage, from Commvault GO in Nashville, Tennessee, thanks for watching theCUBE. >> Jeanna: Alright. (electronic music)

>> Live from New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Lenovo Transform 2.0 brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Lenovo Transform here in New York City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Melissa Massa. She is the Executive Director of Hyperscale Sales. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. It's quite exciting. >> It is, it is very exciting. You're a cube newbie. >> I'm a cube newbie, yes. >> So this is very exciting. I'm sure it's the first of many visits. So Melissa we're at this real inflection point in technology and in AI as AI is ushering in this new wave with increasing use of big data and analytics and machine learning. All this means hyperscale is increasingly important. Can you just set the stage for our viewers a little bit about where we are in this-- >> Absolutely, yeah the transformation is really taking place in this industry that we know and love. And it's really amazing at how fast rapid the change is coming so if you look at in the past traditional one U two U type compute were the standard requirements right and today it's much more complex. It's becoming a much faster paced and you look at some of the big guys out there right from the top ten space. They're really helping to evolve AI and machine learning much faster as it's part of the cloud now and it's centric from the cloud space. So it's making things whether it's for personal use, for play, for business or for good humanity type areas. It's really helping involve and change the space altogether. >> One of the themes we've talked about in our kickoff there is Lenovo has a global presence, but it's also through a lot of partnerships. So Intel, Nvidia of course has to be very important in the AI space, you know, people like Microsoft and VMware. That's very much you know, some of those last ones especially look like Microsoft and VMware very much on the enterprise side. The cloud, the hyperscale, you mentioned the top 10 providers. What are the pieces, what are they looking for? What's the expertise that Lenovo brings that helps you fight in this very competitive real tight margin and very demanding ever-changing marketplace? >> You know this marketplace well? You sum it up very well, but in this in this marketplace, when you look at what the big guys are doing right and then you talk about partnerships, in our space, we don't come in and we don't have predisposition in terms of what we're going to. It's really through understanding what they're trying to do with technology and the direction they're going and it's interesting because at Lenovo we have several hundred engineers now dedicated just in our hyperscale organization, but we have 2000 engineers across the globe. So this really allows us to tap into this expertise in our organization, everything from even HPC aspects to multi socket boxes to different types of platforms, you look at ARM, you can look at AMD, look at Intel. So we don't really try to be one provider. We try to be the provider for our customers, and what their needs and where their requirements are going. >> So where have you seen the most success and we're looking forward do you see the growth coming from? >> Yeah we've started out a little bit different in this space. I think a lot of companies take a while getting their name out and getting traction, trying to grow up in what I'll call more that tier two that tier three space. Lenovo really has come into the tier one space. We're very fortunate in that aspect that we kind of are doing more of a top-down trajectory, so we've been very successful. I think you've heard Kirk talk about and you'll hear us continue to talk about the partnerships we have today with ten of the largest, truth be known, I've got pilots going on with the others. I think in a very short period of time we'll be talking about what we're doing across all of the top ten that is really unique to Lenovo, but again I think one of the reasons there's been success there is there's an availability of an engineer to engineer relationship we bring to the table that is really unique and allows our customers as they're going through this evolution with this change in the cloud space, they're realizing that there's not always the expertise they need in house. They've got to go outside and external and look for help in certain areas. One of the areas is we have an eight socket box and it's a great box with an incredibly high memory footprint and there's not a reference architecture on that box in the marketplace. Lenovo really helped develop it. So that's been a great platform for us to be able to have conversations with clients around for SAP hosting, HANA hosting and whatnot. >> Can you talk a little bit about this kind of the scale and investment Lenovo needs to have to be successful in this space? For those of us that track the hyperscales it's like you know there's tens of billions of dollars a year that they're investing in people, plant, and infrastructure. Kirk mentioned in the keynote, what was it? 42 soccer field size manufacturing facility. Is that only for hyperscale? Is it used for some of the other businesses? Help us unpack that a little yeah. >> So that's great, great question. To be in this business, you have to be incredibly committed into this business right, and I can say from YY on down through our entire leadership organization, there is a passion around this space from a hyperscale compute perspective in ensuring our success. In order to do that it really comes with making those right investments, so we can take care of these customers both near-term and long-term. This is not a short-term thing. This is an incredibly long-term plan for us and I will tell you the growth numbers they've given me over the course of the next years so that we have to make these types of investments right, so not only do we leverage our own manufacturing plants, but fortunately for Lenovo, we own. So it really helps minimize margin stacking but I've got great manufacturing facilities around the world and also now as you heard today, and the 42 football fields, we have started our own motherboard lines in our Hefei China Factory. So we'll be producing over 40,000 boards there a year with the two lines we have and then we're going to continue to grow well beyond that. >> So you are a tech veteran. You've been, at this is not your first rodeo here at Lenovo. How would you describe, I mean talking about YY's vision and the commitment he has made to hyperscale, what do you think it is that differentiates Lenovo in this very crowded and competitive tech world? >> I came from a couple of different places before Lenovo. So I had seen the OEM, I had seen the ODM aspect. And I was nervous when we launched this out of Lenovo as to how well is the market going to receive it. It's a crowded place and then you've started to see some of the other players that have been there, have faded off right. So what's really interesting about Lenovo when people ask us about what is your strategy, it's really we call it our ODM plus model and what does that mean? Well it means I'm taking the best parts of an OEM from a size, the global perspective of the markets I can get into for my clients are incredible and for an export of record, being able to get them into markets that are very challenging for others, I have a global services organization. So if you do need me to happen to come into your data center and help with other things, we have that capability too. And then also, but because I own my own manufacturing and I don't outsource anything, I keep relatively low costs to do business with. I can compete with more of that traditional ODM size and now you take the full vertical integration we have and you bring that to the table with being able to we manufacture all of our own motherboards, all the way up through our systems, it's a pretty powerful story, and I think from what we've seen the clients have really resonated with this story. They like what they're seeing from the benefits. >> Yeah it's so much we can learn, maybe you talk so much about scale, I think first of all the customer base that you talk about, 5000 servers or more is kind of the entry level for that, and just the speed that they're changing. A question we get all the time is how do people keep up with this? Give us a little bit of insight as to what you're hearing from your customers in the hyperscale market? How are they keeping to innovate, keeping to grow and how can everybody deal with kind of the pace of change today? >> It's unbelievable, I mean you look around it's immersive data. It's the network you got all this data now and you've got to get it through a pipe right and so there's all these different aspects coming. I've always told our customers look if there are areas that I can't help you with in, I'm going to tell you. I'm going to be more what's right up the middle for you guys, so we really focus on where are you going, where are you evolving, where do you need help from, how can we help to get you? I don't know if Kirk or anybody at the team has talked about it, but really breaking news for you guys because I was going to announce it in pitch today is that we are actually going to build our own white box networking products, and we're going to leave them open source from an OS perspective for our customers too, because we feel this is going to be a very key area for them. We've got the in-house talent. We've actually moved a number of engineers on our networking team directly into our hyperscale organization to get this started. >> Okay is this announcement which, congratulations by the way, is this, are you hearing that demand from the hyperscalers? Some of the hyperscalers have-- >> Absolutely. >> Kind of dipped their toe in there. I know you've been at the OCP events where we see some of the big players like Microsoft and Google. How do they fit, how does that compete against Cisco, so yeah how much of that is kind of a requirement to the customers? >> It is a requirement. I think if you're going to be all-in with these customers because we happen to have a great investment in the networking space already. Also you see Lenovo I think we're a company that we don't come with 50 years of habits right? We come as a fresh company. I never hear inside the company oh we tried that 10 years ago, and we don't want to do it again. We come with a fresh perspective and approach to building our business. We've got the networking organization inside of our company. Why not proliferate it in the next generation and why does that matter? Open matters right? Everything look at what's coming today. Open BMC, open OS. I have major customers coming into Raleigh and sitting down and talking to us about where we going from a security perspective, and how we're going to bring open security standards into this market? >> The other thing when I think about you know, YY mentioned it. Cloud network and device kind of things like IOT and the global device because everybody, AI and IOT everybody's going there. How does that play in your space? >> It just continues, the data just continues to double in massive size and scale, and there are new technologies out. People are learning to use things like the FPGA is a lot smarter and you look at like what they're able to do today from that technology and deliver one server that can take the compute power of four now. So all of that is helping to evolve this rapid pace and where we're going. >> Finally what we'll be talking about next year? I mean perhaps inked deals with the remaining four players that you are in pilot programs with. What other things are most exciting to you? >> Yeah so I think in what you're going to find is I'm launching a team that's going to go after the tier II and tier III market. And we're going to really start to invest in this space. We're going to really start to proliferate. Paul and I, you saw up on the screen. We have 33 custom boards in design today. We have a factory that we need to fill right, so we're going to continue to really push the envelope on everything we're going to be developing from a custom perspective. I think you're going to see it evolve with quite a number of products, maybe even more so beyond just your traditional server approach. We're there to help clients in other areas where they also need to manufacture maybe a part or what could be a commodity for them. And they need special attention in that particular space. We're going to continue to work with them, but I would say the biggest thing. When I'm sitting here next year is going to be the sheer size of where this hyperscale team is going and the revenue and the growth that's bringing in to Lenovo overall. >> Great well thank you so much for coming into theCUBE Melissa. >> It was nice talking to you. >> I appreciate it. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE live at Lenovo Transform in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

(music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE, here in our studio in Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBEConversation; I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media, and co-host of theCUBE. Our next guest here is Surya Varanasi, who's the co-founder and CTO of Vexata, a hot startup here in Silicon Valley, also exhibiting this week at Oracle Open World in San Francisco. It's our 8th year of coverage at Oracle Open World, we will not be there on the ground with theCUBE; not a lot of room as they're doing a lot of reconstruction up there, among other events happening. Great, great conversations happening around the world of cloud, and certainly Big Data, now called 'data' generally because it's so hot. Sorry, welcome to the CUBEConversation. >> Thank you. >> So, first of all you guys are a hot new startup, really coming out of stealth, but not really stealth I mean stealth technically, not with general availability. You've been in business for a few years, building up great comprehensive storage-slash-data solution, I call it, with this "data fabric" concept. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Well-funded team, super technical. Tell us about the company, tell us about the launch, you guys are out public at Oracle Open World this week. What is Vexata? >> Vexata, we started in 2014, as you mentioned, a few years in development. We've been in trials for over a year and a half, shipping actually for a good eight or nine months. And what we're about is, we really wanted to design against three basic pillars. The first one being, there's digital businesses, they're all under pressure. "How do we survive, and how do we handle the transactions that are coming in?" And we wanted to build the highest performance storage system that we could build that really accelerates your apps, makes them super fast. The second thing we want to do is, the demanding enterprises, these are the ones that have the requirements, we wanted to be super enterprise-resilient. How do we deploy seamlessly? That was the third pillar we stood on, meaning no changes to your application or your, how do we plugin and just simply work? So we simply work, we're enterprise-resilient, and we have the highest-performance system that accelerates your apps with no changes. We built around Flash, and Intel's latest 3D Optane, and that's a big deal. >> Well you guys are well-funded, looking at the management team of the company, it's a start-up that began a couple years now, but you're now out in the wild, now launching. Just a couple of stats here, over 50 million dollars in funding, well-funded, great with a lot of work on the front end with the product, but the venture capitalists are interesting. Lightspeed has been very, very successful in the enterprise, just look at the list of successful day value, even if they have Snapchat too, so they know a little bit about data. Mayfield, Intel Capital, and Redline, and International One. Really really good pedigree there, and they know storage too, they see you telling us, they know what it looks like, they understand converge investors they now get the data play. I have to ask you, in the market everyone's kind of scratching their heads right now because real time data is super important. What problem are you guys solving because certainly the performance >> Yeah >> Is looking good. What's the problem you solve for customers? >> So, the specific problem is when you have digital businesses, what happens is that you don't have a little bit of data that's hot and the rest that's cold, everything is hot, so how do you serve all your data in real time? That's what we're about, and that's what we've built a transformative solution for. >> Well the thing that's coming out, some of the feedback we've been getting and seeing online is, besides the new logo, looks great by the way >> Thank you >> Is you guys are winning on the speeds and feeds. Now the market's going beyond speeds and feeds, which we'll get to in a second, so one: talk about the performance goals, you guys are saying exponential performance, but you're saying you're 10x the performance of anything else. But two, the challenge with data is these silos, right, and you're seeing a confluence of injection of open-source coding, real-time performance data in the application level as app developers start to come on board with open source. At the same time, data traditionally has not been open and free, democratized, if you will, that it's stuck in silos. So it's been a big challenge for architects and CXOs to say, "How do we deploy a solution that gets us to value quickly, not do these science projects." So talk about the performance and then the market model around "How do you free the data?". >> Yeah, so I think for us the simplest of value props is when you plug into your existing infrastructure, we show up to any OS just like a disc. We show up very simply like a disc, so any application that runs with Vexata powering the disc, the virtual disc, if you will, runs enormously fast. That's the very simple value prop, we've done something very basic. >> So on the integration site, like deploying it's easy. >> Not only is it easy, there's no change to the OS. So you talk about democratization, what are you looking for? Can I simply plug and play, will this just work? So that's the biggest thing of all, it just works. The second piece, and the most important thing is, it's not just out here our numbers that really work well, when you plug in Oracle and run OLTP or OLAP, you see this dramatic performance that if you didn't know better, you'd think this was an engineered system from Oracle, you know it's really just amazing performance. We maximize the utilization of your server, so any app that just plugs into an OS and looks at it as a disc will run great. >> Well when you say that, not to trivialize this, because I know it's probably complicated, I'm going to dig into the tech in a second, but when I plug in a thumb drive or an external hard drive into my Mac, it's just "Boom there it is!" >> Yeah. >> Similar, is that the kind of concept you guys are thinking? >> Pretty much, that's what we, really if you build a very complicated product that's complicated to use, nobody'd use it. So we want it really simple to consume. Complicated to build maybe, but really simple to consume. >> Alright so I'm going to play the naysayer, I don't believe you guys, it's smoke and mirrors in there, Cause no one can do that, you're going to give me 10x performance? Okay, that's marketing, I'm skeptical, but I have a problem. I have I/O bottlenecks, at the end of the day I have all these bottlenecks, how do you do it? >> You know, I think a few core principles, the first of them being we use solid state media. How we read and write to that solid state media is actually under patent, it's very specific to keep the performance very high all the time. The second piece of course is our system itself is designed to avoid, to separate control and data paths, so we keep them isolated, and we've invested a lot in our software to keep it and use the space and so on, a lot of jargon for we keep our latencies extremely low on the system, so your applications don't have to worry about anything and change anything. >> So are you lower in the stack in terms of, well a stack isn't perfectly speaking but, I start thinking about free data moving around, which by the way, people want, they want their data available at any given time, at any moment, cause you don't know what's going on in real time. All the data has got to be ready. But then it brings up the governance thing. Are you below the governance or is that a separate challenge on top, how do you deal with that dynamic? >> I'd say we're in the governance of it, so you know for example we provide the full standard based encryption so should anybody say, "Hey are you secure?" Yes, absolutely we are. It's a big deal, it's data, it's your active data, and so we protect it as well. >> One of the things that's coming out of Oracle Open World we're seeing obviously is they're comparing themselves to Amazon. And I was commenting last night on Twitter, I've been covering Oracle since 1994, watching and comparing them against SAP back then, the ERP days, and all the software mini computer days. But now they're comparing themselves not to SAP or IBM anymore, it's Amazon. What does that tell you, because that's also translating into the customer conversations because cloud has become mainstage, Oracle says "We have the cloud, it's Oracle on Oracle." They're not really winning the Cloud Native battles, they kind of own IT, Oracle does, so there's really no debate that IT, information technology CIOs know all about Oracle, but people who are doing Cloud-Native or DevOps might not be interested in Oracle, so how do you balance those two markets that, Oracle's trying to be more Cloud-Native and we're still evaluating their progress there, but you guys, are you impacted by those trends at all? >> You know, as you mentioned, everybody talks about the cloud, a lot of apps do go to the Native Cloud, if you will, the data that's very critical to your business, be it your intensive transaction processing, your OLAP, your machine learning, those seem to remain on premise. That's what our experience has been, and that's where we want to play first. Now, Oracle for Oracle Cloud, Oracle Cloud for Oracle may be a great thing, but-- >> Oracle on Oracle runs well, but I mean they're still playing catch up to Amazon, clearly number one. Okay let's get, you bring up the on-prem thing, this is important, business model. So you guys are out there, share the business model for you guys. What's on premise, is it hardware, software, both? Is there license, how do people engage with you, what's your business? >> So today we sell an appliance, that's the product we have today, and so we sell the appliance all included, software and hardware, and we offer the services to plug it in, and show you the transformative results on your applications. We don't stop at "Hey we plugged it in and you got your hero numbers," we show you. >> So I'm, I just want to buy it, how do I engage? I buy a license? A box? >> You buy the system. >> System, so it's hardware. >> Yeah >> And all the software and the intellectual property that you have >> All in. >> Is inside the box. And how do I, just connect to the network? >> Pretty much. >> Like, all interfaces? >> Pretty much; so today we have fiber channel, and we have NVMe over Fabric, so both ethernet and fabric channel, this is typically where you're on your highest performance of your data. So for us, very simple, it's very seamless to plug it in, and it'll be recognized in your servers, and off you go. >> Okay, so I'm an architect at a large enterprise, take me through the conversation you'd have with those geeks because they're going to want to (Surya laughs) have the conversation be, I want it, I need dashboarding, we're going to be moving high value applications so I need analytics, I want to kill the memory bottlenecks, but I also want the future, I don't want to foreclose anything so, you know, you guys are a startup so you've got my attention, I like what your story is. How do we move forward in the future, how do you talk through the, we've got your back covered, you've got the head room available, how does an IT or tech guy say, "You guys are solid."? >> Yeah. So here's how I start the conversation: I typically start the conversation by telling them, "Hey, you've got the highest performance servers, the latest servers, the Broadwells, the Prolines, what have you. The fastest networks are the 100 GigE, 50 GigE, you know whatever your ethernet network looks like, and then typically you have a SAN and it's really fast- 1630 to a gig. And you run your application, let's pretend it's Oracle RAC, you run that application. And when you run it, what you notice in your servers is eventually you see I/O wait times that slow down your application, and your servers, your really fast servers are under utilized because they're just not moving. >> Because you have bottlenecks. >> That's right. Well we say, it's very simple, if you plug us into your network and run your application on us, we will eliminate your I/O bottlenecks on your server, so your server is maximally utilized. So with no changes for you, you get 10x, and that's how easy we want to make it. That's really our value. >> So you guys are coming in and basically saying 10x performance right out of the gate. >> Yeah. >> Okay so what are some of the challenges on the dynamics, because you got my attention again, now I say, "How do I know I need you? Is there certain things, smoke before the thing blows up?" What are some of the tell signs for the customers to call you guys, cause they just started hearing about you guys as you start marketing. Why should customers work with you, what's the indicators on their side where they go, "I got to call them." >> The classic indicator is, for us, for one is, you're running an Oracle RAC. You're running an Oracle RAC for resiliency and for performance and you need both, right? The moment we see that we say, okay, we have a clean in. The second tell-tale sign, is when you have in-memory databases running. When you're in-memory, what you're trying to do is not write to your storage because that's your bottleneck, so you keep throwing memory at it, it's really expensive. And we know that's a classic sign. >> Okay, talk about Oracle Open World, you're going to be here this week, up in the city. What are you guys showing, what's the pitch, obviously you've got the new logo. >> Oh yeah. >> @VexataCorp is the Twitter handle so people can watch and can check out your updates on Twitter, but what's the value proposition, what are people in the booth talking about, what's the demos, what's the thing? >> You know, it's Oracle Open World, so we're going to do a whole lot of Oracle demos, so we have a RAC demo set up, and we show, with a four node, dual socket server, our system seamlessly plug in, and you get, the last I looked, it was 4,000,000+ OLTP transactions. It's phenomenal for a four socket, dual socket server. We're going to show our optane base array, the first of its kind in the industry, and show the same kind of results we have with optane. So it's all about Oracle and accelerating those apps. >> Alright so for Oracle customers out there, you know who you are, they're always evaluating stuff but it's always hard to kind of get out on the branch and be exposed if you try to go off Oracle, so people might be a little bit nervous. What's your conversation to the Oracle customers that's saying there's no risk in looking at Vexata. They're like, hey why not just buy a lot more Exadata, or the ZDLRA stuff, or other things that they have. >> And all those are entirely possible, I think that's the easiest way to get comfort. It's those trials, even in your research and development, and get used to us, because you'll be shocked at the performance you get. And eventually yeah, you can go to Exadata, but we're just so much more cost-effective than any solution out there. Try us, get comfortable with us, and then deploy when you're ready. >> And what's the price point? What's the price, or is it different by deployment? >> You know, honestly, it does differ by deployment, but really we use standard NVMe flash, and that's driven by the HyperScale guys, so we ride the curve of flash, we don't make our own. >> Yeah, you're not a sales guy, you're a CTO, co-founder, >> Thank you. >> So I don't want to put you on the spot there. Affordability relative to Oracle, let's talk about the customer conversation, so I don't want to put you on the spot on the pricing, we'll hit the CEO and some of your other guys on that. So, I'm a customer, I'll roleplay. Hey, I love this opportunity, but what's wrong with Oracle storage, why not just go with those guys? >> You can use us, not just for Oracle, but all your application workloads that are demanding, like your machine learning, like your SQL server, if you're running SAS analytics, so you have a general purpose platform, you're not silo'd. That's the biggest deal with us. >> So you give them scope outside of Oracle. >> That's right. Any app, really, I mean, just the simplest of all. >> Alright so I got to ask you the secret sauce question. You've got some patents, so your friend says, "Hey, what's going on, you guys are awesome, how did you get the 10x?" What's the bottom line, how did you guys do it? How do you get all that performance? >> I think the really, the investment in the software, to reduce the storage stack latencies, to the absolute minimum, that's what really gives us the biggest bang for the buck. >> So a lot of low-level engineering. >> Pretty much. >> Alright, so benefits to customers? What are the benefits, how do you guys see the benefits unfolding, take us through some of the anecdotal data you've seen in the trials you've done with customers, what are some of the benefits they've told you they've seen? >> You know, the simplest of them all, it's a very simple one, when we do a PoC with a customer, the customer usually says, "Hey this PoC's going to take two months." And afterward we find out it's two months because it takes three weeks to tune the system, and then the remainder of the weeks to do the PoC. For us, those first three weeks collapsed to one day. There's no tuning, you just plug it in and you all of a sudden get the performance and your PoC has just shrunken massively. That's really our value. Don't try hard, just right to your data, embrace it and it'll run for you. >> So you guys are a potential bridge to the future with the data. >> Yeah. >> You have this thing called Active Data Fabric, is that it? >> Yes. >> What is that about? >> It's really about how you actually scale your data over a very large amount. Today, yes we have an appliance, and it scales on size, ours scales to 150 terabytes and so on, but as data keeps growing and everything becomes hot, you really need to get into the many hundreds of terabytes, petabytes of active data. So how do we actually design that using external, open hardware, that's really what the principle is about. So this is the first realization and then we continue going with other implementation. >> Surya, great to have you on theCUBE, you guys have done a great job, so I got to ask the bigger question outside of Vexata, you know, data's been a challenge, and as an industry participant and a technologist, what's been the big thing, if you could summarize it down from your perspective, data obviously needs to be free, because applications never know when a piece of data will be needed in context to other things. You see things like metadata, active data's clearly the benefit there, but everyone's got these data lakes out there. We just came back from our Big Data NYC event, and the whole Hadoop thing has been very batch. >> Yeah. >> Store everything in a data lake, but you never know, at any given time, if a piece of data is going to be valuable, until you put it to work. So you really can't put a valuation on data. What has been an inhibitor, the bottlenecks. Has it been the silos, has it been data architecture, has it been the software, or now that the cloud's got compute power, all of the above, what's your thoughts? >> I think you netted out, really data, you look at it as hot data or cold data, and you decide data lake or active data, and I hold it in memory. The biggest problem I see is how do you call something hot or cold, it's hard to tell, and I think the biggest challenge for us is how do you make it all at least warm, so you can get to it when you need to. And that's the hardest challenge for the industry, I think. >> Yeah and I think that people look at self-driving cars to bring up that, because Larry Ellison said onstage, "Autonomous database", which I kind of roll my eyes cause Larry's so good at taking trends and making it look like Oracle has it. Autonomous cars being self-driving, it's the concept. >> Yeah. >> The data's really critical, cause if car's going to have telemetry data, real time is real time, it's not milliseconds, it's nanoseconds. You can't say one week, ten days, and a lot of time people say realtime queries can come back, but the data's a week old, so there's huge issues in what real time means. >> Yeah, and the second issue, you bring up self-driving cars, so the way self-driving cars, the test drives happen today, you plug in a lot of drives into the car, send it out for two weeks, and when it comes back to base you have 200 terabytes in the car that you want to learn with. How long does it take to transfer 200 terabytes? In a regular system? A few days? >> Yeah. >> So until that data's off, this car doesn't move. With us, it takes a few hours, so you can get your car back on the road. So we actually, we not only do great on the transactions, we do great with this, your basic data mobility problems, and we fix it. >> Yeah, you guys are fixing the data mobility problems. Okay, great connotation, one last final point I want to get your thoughts and color on, the internet of things. Cause now you're seeing industrial really being the low hanging fruit right now on IOT, and IOT certainly is hot, it will always be hot, but it also increases the surface area for cyber attacks. So people are kind of taking baby steps there, first one is industrial: plant equipment, could be manufacturing, it could be edge of the network sensor, something along those lines, hacking into the IP network. That's certainly going to create the need for active data. >> Absolutely. >> Your thoughts on that? >> Very much so. You know, IOT is really the classic future growth model, look at the amount of data you're trying to ingest and process. Everything is active, and you have to act on it in real time. >> Does IOT help you guys? >> You know, it does, it quite doesn't show up as IOT, it shows up as machine learning, you get another signature off it, you get all this data, you're trying to learn and figure out anomalies, and you need to process your data and that's us. >> You know I always said that a good business model is reducing steps it takes to do something, making it easy to use, and being high performance. You guys seem to do all three, congratulations. >> We do, thank you. >> Surya Varanasi, CTO and co-founder of Vexata, hot new startup, check them out, @VexataCorp is the Twitter handle, check out their updates, they're at Oracle Open World this week. I'm John Furrier, you're watching CUBEConversation here live in our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for watching. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017 brought to you by Veritas. (mid tempo electronic tones) >> Vegas everybody, this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Veritas Vision 2017 at The Aria Hotel. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Eric Kessels is here, he's the CTO for Fairbanks, a partner of Veritas' out of the Netherlands and Carlos Carrero is Senior Principle Product Manager at Veritas and we're going to talk OpenStack. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you. >> We love this topic, I mean five years ago Stu, it was the hottest thing in the planet, OpenStack came out, many people including John Furrier called it a Hail Mary against Amazon, which it kind of was and now the narrative around OpenStack is well, it's kind of, nobody is really doing it, blah, blah, blah. But there are definitely pockets of interest. The developer community is still, you know, passionate about it and service providers are you know, still glomming on to OpenStack. So Carlos, give us the update from Veritas' perspective. What's your interest in OpenStack and your role at Veritas? >> Yeah, so the good thing is what Veritas has been doing with OpenStack and also what Veritas is doing with containers solves emerging problems for emerging technologies and one of the key things is, with our partners Fairbanks, all the things we have been doing to validate the product and to bring the product into market. So for us, Fairbanks is one of the perfect partners because what the value that we bring with that. So they are OpenStack experts and he will go through all the content, you know, what they do, but they really understand about OpenStack. They really identify the issues that customers have with OpenStack and how they collaborate with Veritas to build HyperScale as a product to bring those gaps into a solution and deliver those enterprise class services to customers that-- >> I mean it's the ultimate in true private cloud visions too but Eric, you guys use to be VMware experts and decided to move beyond VMware to OpenStack. What was that journey like? >> Yeah right, so that was about I think five years ago where we did a lot of VMware implementations but we, at some stage we wanted to be a different chapter in the market, so a lot of people knew VMware was more a commodity in the IT so, we started to design a Blue Ocean Strategy for our company and then we went looking in the OpenSource market, which Open Source initiative was feasible for us to move forward with. We're knowledgeable about infrastructure, so then we went into OpenStack and we did a technical validation and we looked on what the attention was is the market. So from that stage we transferred completely our company from being a VMware house to a complete OpenSource company, but it took us a while of course because it was not like a switch of a couple months. I think it took us about three years to make that complete transition from being a VMware shop to being a complete OpenSource company. >> Eric, can you talk to us about your customers? Did they come saying "I want OpenStack" or are they coming saying "You know, I need to digitally transform." What's the conversation you're having with them that leads to your solution and what are your customers doing these days? >> So when we decided for OpenStack, at that stage we had already made a decision that we would move forward for the private cloud decision, so we were not focusing on public cloud initiative for OpenStack. So we think that OpenStack was initially built for private cloud environments. So one thing that we saw is that the VMware login for VMware or for Microsoft was pretty big and customers didn't like that anymore and the costs were pretty high for the VMware licensing. So then we started talking with those customers and say, "Okay hey, there's a different kind of way of running "your workloads in a different kind of environment. "Would you be interested in it if we can "cut the cost 50 percent?" for example. And of course that's always a good trigger to get in contact with our customers and what we see is that our customers are more like enterprise customers. They're not big service providers but just companies like a customer that is running a customer site so that they can do customer, a call center for that, so that's really an enterprise-like company and I just want to add that for them, that they decided to move to OpenStack because they needed to expand their infrastructure with like, with 20 nodes and if they did it with OpenStack, it was one-third of the price in doing that, so. >> So more than 50 percent. So are these cloud service providers predominantly, or? Describe the customers. >> Yeah, we have of course customers that are service providers because they have a huge price pressure on providing virtual machines, so they need to cut costs on their infrastructure and I think that OpenStack is really suitable for that because it's flexible, it is open, you can incorporate your management systems into OpenStack very fairly easily. So for those companies, OpenStack was a really good choice of doing that. And we have also other kind of customers that are, like we have packaging company, so they print the packaging for McDonald's, for example and they have developer departments in their company that want have really fast VMs for developing their own software and if you go by more the traditional route, it takes too long before that all is in place, so they want to have some self-service functionality and that's also what OpenStack can provide, providing self-service for their departments so to make it more easy. >> Carlos, this morning your CEO Bill Coleman said that the future is software defined, multi-cloud and HyperScale. I'm sure you're sitting there, well my product is HyperScale. So maybe, you've launched the product HyperScale at the OpenStack show in Boston. We got to talk with you on The Cube there. Bring us up to speed as to that product and how it fits into really the portfolio of you from Veritas. Especially I'm kind of curious, the multi-cloud world as opposed to this is very specifically and on premises, you know, type offer. >> So we talked in Boston. In Boston we launched the 1.0 version, last week we launched the 1.1 version. We're going to launch the next one together with Red Hat. It is one of the key things we're doing together working with them and as Bill mentioned, you know it's multi-cloud and it's software-defined. So if you understand the architecture for HyperScale, for OpenStack, HyperScale for containers, it's really pure software. So what that means is that it's the hardware of your choice, we don't have any locking. As Eric mentioned there's no locking into any specific platform, that's one of the key things. But also the architecture we're building is the perfect thing for your private cloud because in a multi-cloud environment you still have to have something in house, so that's the private cloud. With all the data management capabilities that we have with Veritas, we can move the data however we want. So typically and that's the challenge you have with OpenStack, you get the locking, you get a closed environment, how do you move the data? We've got things already with net backup where we can just move the data from the data plane, move workloads somewhere else, do the recover and allow customers to just one click and recover that workloads wherever they want. So that's a perfect thing in all, the 360 Data Management that we got with Veritas. >> So what do you hear from customers around the function? I mean obviously we hear about the V-tax. People don't want to pay the VMware tax. But Eric, you're talking about when you started the conversations with your customers, what if you could save 50 percent? You must've had conversations with customers who said "Well, but I like the functionality of VMware. "I like V-Motion, I like the recovery capabilities and "they're doing a good job of adding capabilities and stuff." So where are we, CTO perspective, in terms of the functionality of OpenStack private clouds versus sort of where VMware is. >> That's a good question because the reason that we get in contact with Veritas for this kind of functionality is because the customer will start running work loads on their OpenStack environment and in the beginning, they don't worry about backups. They don't worry about quality of service and then they get into production and then they get problems with performance. They kept, "Hey, I need to have a backup, how do I do it? And oh, we don't have a backup. So these kind of gaps that were really not good resolved in OpenStack and these were the gaps that HyperScale filled in. So then on functional comparison with VMware, we took away those concerns and have a real good comparison on the functional level between OpenStack and VMware. >> I think that it was interesting. Last week we launched in the OpenStack Benelux Days. I had a keynote presenting HyperScale and I was talking about quality of service and backup data protection really, so focused on that, right? After that we had a panel with three customers and the moderator asks the three customers, "What is your biggest challenge now "you've got OpenStack, what do you need?" And the first answer was backup and the moderator said, "What do you mean, there is no backup?" And the answer for 400 people in the room, he said "No, you got Freezer but that's a project." Well now we can get it from Veritas. So that's the thing is that you need to move those workloads, you need data protection and they saw the demo where with one click, you can recover your workloads and the third customer mentioned that it is quality of service and that's a customer that Eric has been working already, they are already working on installing a HyperScale and they need quality of service because they have a workload and running on the cloud and they have to make sure they get the performance that they need for some critical workloads. And again it's a solved problem that again all the work, what we did together with Fairbanks validate and what needs they have is coming all together now. >> Eric, one of the knocks on OpenStack has been I want simplicity and OpenStack, it's got all these pieces, how do I put it together? Oh it's all software, wait backup, I didn't even think of that. How does Fairbanks help? What does kind of your stack look like and how much is it you can just roll this out and how much is it The customers actually? Some customers like that flexibility. Service providers, oh I've got my management layer and things like that. What's kind of the typical environment? And give us some of the variables. >> So based on of course the journey that we made and of course there were a good projects and bad projects, that's the learning curve that we also needed to do but we managed to build a best practice for OpenStack, so we now can do an implementation of OpenStack in less than two weeks because we know the components, we know what you should do and what you don't have to do and so we have a good starting point about an environment where you have 11 nodes in total as a good starting point for having a production environment for OpenStack and then with HyperScale included, then you need two add to data nodes additionally because then it's necessary for the copy that you need to have. But a 10 or 11 node configuration is from our perspective a very good starting point where you start with different customers with different sizes of course. >> Do you deploy the OpenStack distribution? Does the customer have preference on that? I know Veritas has a couple of options, so. >> So we have a preference for a canonical distribution because it's very open. I think the good thing from canonical is that the function set that they provide as an OpenSource product is exactly the same if you want to add that with the managed service from canonical to it and I think that the real cool thing about canonical is their way of deploying OpenStack because it leverages a really consistent way of deploying OpenStack. So for us it's very important that when we deploy OpenStack, that the result is the same on every customer's side and that's what the tools from Canonical provide us with. >> So I want to ask you about what you just said about you could do an OpenStack deployment in two weeks. I can hear some cloud guy going, "Oh I'll just go to Amazon and speed it up." So I wonder if you could address that and as well, how does that compare for instance to a VMware installation of a deployment of a private cloud? Those two examples. >> I think that when you look at the private cloud from VMware, I think for the installation it takes about the same time I think. But that's all about the knowledgeability of the partner that's doing the installation. Because that's the journey that we had so they can do the implementation fast and that they can rely on that environment because as you know in OpenStack, in the beginning there was a little bit of doubt about if it was production ready or not. And to take that away, it must be a solid implementation and that they can rely on that and then they can make sure that they can put their really important workloads also on top of OpenStack instead of making a decision, yeah, should I run it on that or not? >> So from your standpoint, it's parity in terms of just deployment ease and functionality, we could debate that all day long. What about the public cloud example? How do you respond to somebody who says "Oh, we'll just spin it up in AWS or Azure." >> Yeah, I think the public cloud is still a good thing. It's not a bad thing to have public cloud because I think in most companies you have a hybrid cloud environment, so you will have firmware and maybe you have a public cloud and a private cloud in one company. But it all depends a little bit on the type of workloads that you're going to run inside of that environment. So I think there are workloads that you should, that you can't run on a public cloud. >> Eric, does Fairbanks get involved with how they manage that, you know, kind of hybrid or multi-cloud environment? We know Carlos wants to jump in with the Veritas answer. >> Yeah, we get the question a lot of course because we know the infrastructure, how it works and as you probably know, there are a lot of cloud orchestration products in the market that can do the multi-cloud management. But to be honest, at this moment there is not one real good product that handles all the clouds correctly and managing all the bits and pieces that you need to have for an infrastructure. So, we're still looking on that to find the one that can do that. >> Yeah, what's on your wish list? What are you looking for from the ecosystem? >> I think it's really good to have, that there is no difference anymore about the type of workloads that you can run on different kind of environments. So that you choose based on functionality, what you are going to run on that. Now you see there's a lot about a focus on virtual machines but actually it all goes about the application because that's the, on the end that's something what needs to be run on that environment and having that manageability to manage the application. I think that's more important than managing the infrastructure underneath it. >> How about jumping in with the multi-cloud commentary? >> Well I think it's the customer's choice and what we do as a company is being able to give them the choice is that we don't care and that's in our DNA really. With that in the past as Mike Farmer explained today is that we didn't care about two apparatuses at the beginning, now we don't care if you are using OpenStack containers and what you want to run those. So that is the way we're building products nowadays with Veritas is that user choice. So we don't care about that anymore. >> All right Carlos, Eric, thanks very much for coming to The Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you >> All right, you're welcome. >> Okay, keep it right there. My buddy Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision. Hashtag VtasVision. This is The Cube, be right back. (mid tempo electronic tones)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Veritas Vision 2017, #VtasVision. Jyothi Swaroop is here. He's the vice president of product and solutions marketing at Veritas. Jyothi, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks, Dave. I'm an officially an alum, now? >> A CUBE alum, absolutely! >> Two times! Three more times, we'll give you a little VIP badge, you know, we give you the smoking jacket, all that kind of stuff. >> Five or six times, you'll be doing the interviews. >> I'm going to be following you guys around, then, for the next three events. >> So, good keynote this morning. >> Jyothi: Thank you. >> Meaty. There was a lot going on. Wasn't just high-level concepts, it was a lot of high-level messaging, but then, here's what we've done behind it. >> No, it's actually the opposite. It's a lot of real products that customers are using. The world forgets that Veritas has only been out of Symantec, what, 20 months? Since we got out, we were kind of quiet the first year. That was because we were figuring our strategy out, investing in innovation and engineering, 'cause that's what Carlyle, our board, wants for us to do is invest in innovation and engineering, and build real products. So we took our time, 18 to 20 months to build these products out, and we launched them. And they're catching on like wildfire in the customer base. >> Jyothi, Bill came on and talked about, he made a lot of changes in the company. Focused it on culture, innovation, something he's want. What brought you? You know, a lot of places you could've gone. Why Veritas, why now? >> Well, Bill is one of the reasons, actually. I mean, if you look at his history and what he's done with different companies over the years, and how the journey of IT, as he put it during his keynote, he wants to make that disruption happen again at Veritas. That was one. Two was just the strategy that they had. Veritas has a Switzerland approach to doing business. Look, it's granted that most Fortune 500 or even midmarket customers have some sort of a Cloud project going on. But what intrigued me the most, especially with my background, coming from other larger companies is, Veritas was not looking to tie them down or become a data hoarder, you know what I mean? It's just charge this massive dollar per terabyte and just keep holding them, lock them into a storage or lock them into a cloud technology. But, we were facilitating their journey to whichever cloud they wanted to go. It was refreshing, and I still remember the first interview with Veritas, and they were talking about, "Oh, we want to help move customers' data "into Azure and AWS and Google," and my brain from previous storage vendors is going, "Hang on a minute. "How are you going to make money "if you're just going to move all of this data "to everyone else?" But that's what is right for the customer. >> Okay, so, how are you going to make money? >> Well, it's not just about the destination, right? Cloud's a journey, it's not just a destination. Most customers are asking us, "On average, we adopt three clouds," is what they're telling us. Whether it's public, private, on-prem, on average, they have about three separate clouds. What they say is, "Jyothi, our struggle is to move "an entire virtual business service "from on-prem to the Cloud." And once we've moved it, let's say Cloud A is suddenly expensive or is not working out for them. To get out of that cloud and move it to Cloud B is just so painful. It's going to cost me tons of money, and I lost all of the agility that I was expecting from Cloud A, anyway. If you have products like VRP from Veritas, for example, where we could move an entire cloud business service from Cloud A to Cloud B, and guess what. We can move it back onto on-prem on the fly. That's brilliant for the customers. Complete portability. >> Let's see. The portfolio is large. Help us boil it down. How should we think about it at a high level? We only have 20 minutes, so how do we think about that in 15, 20 minutes? >> I'll focus on three tenets. Our 360 data management wheel, if you saw at the keynote, has six tenets. The three tenets I'll focus on today are visibility, portability, and last, but definitely not the least, storage. You want to store it efficiently and cost-effectively. Visibility, most of our customers that are getting on their cloud journey are already in the Cloud, somewhere. They have zero visibility, almost. Like, "What applications should I move into the Cloud? "If I have moved these applications, "are they giving me the right value? "Because I've invested heavily in the Cloud "to move these applications." They don't know. 52% of our customers have dark data. We've surveyed them. All that dark data has now been moved into some cloud. Look, cloud is awesome. We have partnered up with every cloud vendor out there. But if we're not making it easy for customers to identify what is the right data to move to the Cloud, then they lost half the battle even before they moved to the Cloud. That's one. We're giving complete visibility with the Info Map connectors that we just announced earlier on in the keynote. >> That's matching the workload characteristics with the right sort of platform characteristics, is that right? >> Absolutely. You could be a Vmware user, you're only interested in VM-based data that you want to move, and you want role-based access into that data, and you want to protect only that data and back it up into the Cloud. We give you that granularity. It's one thing to provide visibility. It's quite another to give them the ability to have policy-driven actions on that data. >> Jyothi, just take us inside the customers for that. Who owns this kind of initiative? The problem in IT, it's very heterogeneous, very siloed. You take that multi-cloud environment, most customers we talk to, if they've got a cloud strategy, the ink's still drying. It's usually because, well, that group needed this, and somebody needed this, and it's very tactical. So, how do I focus on the information? Who drives that kind of need for visibility and manages across all of these environments? >> That's a great question, Stu. I mean, we pondered around the same question for about a year, because we were going both top-down and bottoms-up in the customer's organization, and trying to find where's our sweet spot. What we figured is, it's not a one-strategy thing, especially with the portfolio that we have. 80% of the time, we are talking to the CIOs, we are talking to the CXOs, and we're coming down with their digital transformation strategy or their cloud transformation strategy, they may call it whatever they want. We're coming top-down with our products, because when you talk visibility, a backup admin, he may not jump out of his seat the first thing. "Visibility's not what I care about, "the ease of use of this backup job "is what I care about, day one." But if you talk to the CIO, and I tell him, "I'll give you end-to-end visibility "of your entire infrastructure. "I don't care which cloud you're in." He'll be like, "I'm interested in that, "'cause I may not want to move 40% of this data "that I'm moving to Cloud A today. "I want to keep it back, or just delete it." 'Cause GDPR in Europe gives the citizens the right to delete their data. Doesn't matter which company the data's present in. The citizen can go to that company and say, "You have to delete my data." How will you delete the data if you just don't know where the data is? >> It's in 20 places in 15 different databases. Okay, so that's one. You had said there were three areas that you wanted to explore. >> The second one is, again, all about workload data and application portability. Over the years, we had storage lock-ins. I'm not going to name names, but historically, there are lots of storage vendors that tend to lock customers into a particular type of storage, or to the company, and they just get caught up in that stacked refresh every three years, and you just keep doing that over and over again. We're seeing more and more of cloud lock-in start to happen. You start migrating all of this into one cloud service provider, and you get familiar with the tools and widgets that they give you around that data, and then all of a sudden you realize this is not the right fit, or I'm moving too much data into this place and it's costing me a lot more. I want to not do this anymore, I want to move it to another local service provider, for example. It's going to cost you twice as much as it did just to move the data into the Cloud in the first place. With VRP, Veritas Resiliency Platform, we give our customers literally a few mouse clicks, if you watched the demo onstage. Literally, with a few mouse clicks, you identify the data that you want to move, including your virtual machines and your applications, and you move them as a business service, not just as random data. You move it as an entire business service from Cloud A to Cloud B. >> Jyothi, there's still physics involved in this. There's many reasons why with lock-in, you mentioned, kind of familiarity. But if I have a lot of data, moving it takes a lot of time as well as the money. How do we handle that? >> It goes back to the original talk track here about visibility. If you give the customer the right amount of visibility, they know exactly what to move. If the customer has 80 petabytes of data in their infrastructure, they don't have to move all 80 petabytes of it, if we are able to tell them, "These are the 10 petabytes that you need to move, "based on what Information Map is telling you." They'll only move those 10 petabytes, so the workload comes down drastically, because they're able to visualize what they need to move. >> Stu: Third piece of storage? >> Third piece of storage. A lot of people don't know this, but Veritas was the first vendor that launched the software to find storage solution. Back in the VOS days, Veritas, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, we had the first file system that would be this paper over rocks, if you will, that was just a software layer. It would work with literally SAN/DAS, anything that's out there in the market, it would just be that file system that would work. And we've kept that DNA in our engineering team. Like, for example, Abhijit, who leads up our engineering, he wrote the first cluster file system. We are extending that beyond just a file system. We're going file, block, and object, just as any other storage vendor would. We are certifying on various commodity hardware, so the customers can choose the hardware of their choice. And not just that. The one thing we're doing very differently, though, is embedding intelligence close to the metadata. The reason we can do that is, unlike some of the classic storage vendors, we wrote the storage ground-up. We wrote the code ground-up. We could extract, if you look at an object, it has object data and metadata. So, metadata standard, it's about this long, right? It's got all these characters in it. It's hard to make sense of it unless you buy another tool to read that object and digest it for the customer. But what if you embed intelligence next to the metadata, so storage is not dumb anymore? It's intelligent, so you avoid the number of layers before you actually get to a BI product. I'll just give you a quick example in healthcare. We're all wearing Apple Watches and FitBits. The data is getting streamed into some object store, whether it's in the Cloud or on-prem. Billions of objects are getting stored even right now, with all the Apple Watches and FitBits out there. What if the storage could predictively, using machine learning and intelligence, tell you predictively you might be experiencing a stroke right on your watch, because your heartbeats are X and your pulse is Y? Combining all of the data and your history, based on the last month or last three months, I can tell you, "Jyothi, you should probably go see the doctor "or do something about it." So that's predictive, and it can happen at the storage layer. It doesn't have to be this other superficial intelligence layer that you paid millions of dollars for. >> So that analytic capability is really a feature of your platform, right? I mean, others, Stu, have tried it, and they tried to make it the product, and it really isn't a product, it's a byproduct. And so, is that something I could buy today? Is that something that's sort of roadmap, or, what's the reaction been from customers? >> The reaction has been great, both customers and analysts have just loved where we're going with this. Obviously, we have two products that are on the truck today, which are InfoScale and Access. InfoScale is a block-based product and Access is a file-based product. We also have HyperScale, which was designed specifically for modern workloads, containers, and OpenStack. That has its own roadmap. You know how OpenStack and containers work. We have to think like a developer for those products. Those are the products that are on the truck today. What you'll see announced tomorrow, I hope I'm not giving away too much, because Mike already announced it, is Veritas Cloud Storage. That's going to be announced tomorrow, and we're going to go deep into that. Veritas Cloud Storage will be this on-prem, object-based storage which will eventually become a platform that will also support file and block. It's just one single, software-defined, highly-intelligent storage system for all use cases. Throw whatever data you want at it. >> And the line on Veritas, the billboards, no hardware agenda. Ironic where that came from. Sometimes you'll announce appliances. What is that all about, and when do you decide to do that? >> Great question. You know, it's all about choice. It's the cliched thing to say, I know, but Veritas, most people don't know this, has a heavy channel revenue element to what we do. We love our partners and channel. Now, if you go to the channel that's catering to midmarket customers, or SMBs, they just want the easy button to storage. Their agility, I don't have five people sitting around trying to piece all of this together with your software and Seagate's hardware and whatever else, and piece this together. I just want a box, a pizza box that I can put in my infrastructure, turn it on, and it just works, and I call Veritas if something goes wrong. I don't call three different people. This is for those people. Those customers that just want the easy button to storage or easy button to back up. >> To follow up on the flip side, when you're only selling software, the knock on software of course is, I want it to be fast, I want it to be simple, I need to be agile. How come Veritas can deliver these kinds of solutions and not be behind all the people that have all the hardware and it's all fully baked-in to start with? >> Well, that's because we've written these from the ground up. When you write software code from the ground up, I mean, I'm an engineer, and I know how hard it is to take a piece of legacy code that's baked in for 10, 20 years. It's almost like adding lipstick, right? It just doesn't work, especially in today's cloud-first world, where people are in the DevOps situation, where apps are being delivered in five, 10, 15 minutes. Every day, my app almost gets updated on the phone every day? That just doesn't work. We wrote these systems from the ground up to be able to easily be placed onto any hardware possible. Now, again, I won't mention the vendor, but in my previous lives, there were a lot of hardware boxes and the software was written specifically for those hardware configurations. When they tried to software-define it forcefully, it became a huge challenge, 'cause it was never designed to do that. Whereas at Veritas, we write the software layer first. We test it on multiple hardware systems, and we keep fine-tuning it. Our ideal situation is to sell the software, and if the customer wants the hardware, we'll ship them the box. >> One of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning was what I'll call your compatibility matrix. Whether it was cloud, somebody's data store, that really is your focus, and that is a differentiator, I think. Knocking those down so you can, basically, it's a TAM expansion strategy. >> Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, TAM expansion strategy, as well as helping the customer choose what's best for them. We're not limiting their choices. We're literally saying, we go from the box and dropboxes of the world all the way to Dell EMC, even, with Info Map, for example. We'll cover end-to-end spectrum because we don't have a dollar-per-terabyte or dollar-per-petabyte agenda to store this data within our own cloud situation. >> All right, Jyothi, we got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. It's good to see you again. >> Jyothi: No, it's great to be here. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (fast electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017, everybody. My name is Dave Velante, and this is our day one wrap. I'm here with Peter Burress and David Foyer who have been inside the analyst meeting all day. Peter, I want to start with you. The premise that we wanted to test coming into this show was the following question that we wanted answered: Is VMware's momentum a function of people realizing, experience the data realities of cloud. In other words, as you've phrased it, the reality that they must bring the cloud model to their data, versus trying to force-fit their business model into the cloud. Is that a reality that customers have now come to see, or is this really just kind of an end user, or an enterprise license agreement, product cycle for VMware? Is that what the momentum is behind? >> I don't think it's the latter but I think there's elements to it. So I think, I don't think customers have fully rocked the idea, fully conceived of the idea that their data is the most important asset, not their hardware. And that the goal is not to get rid of hardware, the goal is to get more value out of your data, and that means bringing cloud and cloud experience to your data. But I think also that VMware is interesting because they do have this enormous install base. You know, 500 thousand plus customers, many of whom are vitally dependent upon VMware as a technology. And for many years it looked as though VMware was just going to sit on that and milk it. But in the last two years, it's become very very evident that they're not. There have not been a lot of really hugely successful industry or company transformations in this industry. You can look back at IBM in the 90's, Microsoft has done it a couple times, but there aren't that many companies that have done a really great, hugely successful transformation. VMware may be one of them. So they're able to build on that notion that what's going to matter is: where is your data? And bringing function and capabilities to that data, number one, but leveraging their installed base, and providing the chops to help their customers move forward from where they are, is, in many respects, the core story of what's happening here. >> So David, let me bring you to the conversation. About a year ago, VMware and AWS announced a partnership. We're just starting to see the initial pieces of that, there's obviously a lot of engineering work having to be done and heavy lifting. But the other piece that might be a tailwind for VMware was their cloud strategy was all over the place for years. For the better part of a decade, it was Vcloud Air and then sort of shifting that strategy, owning their own cloud. >> They had no cloud strategy. >> Well, they tried a lot of different things, and none of them worked, and then basically they said "okay look, we're going to partner with IBM," "we're going to partner with Microsoft," "We're going to partner with AWS." In particular, the AWS partnership, it seems like brought a lot of clarity, do you think that made customers feel more comfortable that entering into long-term relationship with VMware, now that they had a clearer cloud strategy both for the customers and the partners, gave VMware a boost over this past year? >> Absolutely, and in particular, the knock on effect of the agreement with AWS gave confidence, I believe, to VMware customers that they knew, they had a path forward. They had a clear path forward. And the same with AWS, and they've extended that now with rack space and I hear that even Google is in the mix, as well. So, they've announced firm relationships with other clouds, they've announced their foundation, which is again, part of making the cloud respects part of the overall platform. >> Well, they really have to make sure it doesn't just become a marketing or markitecture. >> Sure, absolutely. But I'm impressed with the confidence they have. I think their story of any device, any application, on any cloud, the little piece of intrinsic security may be that needs a lot of work on that area. But the first three things I think is a strong, positive, confident start. >> Well, they've been talking about that for a while, but two years ago they had negative license growth, and now it's significant. I mean, double digit license growth, 13% last quarter, we think we've had three quarters of substantive revenue growth, so do we feel as though this is a semi-permanent on the near to mid-term trend? >> There are three platforms, aren't there? There's AWS, there's Lennox, and there's Azure. And at one stage, they were sort of feeding that everything might go to Lennox, I think there are three firm platforms that will, in my opinion, survive at least til the next decade. >> Certainly in the U.S. The global market has to weigh in, there may be some things that happen elsewhere, but certainly in the U.S. No, David's right. Where we are right now, kind of as I said, VMware is going through transformation. It looks like it's going to succeed, it's going to remain relevant, and it's going to be in a position to bring its customers forward, and show them a direction where they could put their money, where they're going to get value as opposed to putting their money where somebody else is going to get value. If they carry on with the transformation they're in, and the commitments that they're making, this is going to be, this is going to remain, one of the top five or eight technologies in the enterprise for the foreseeable future. >> Yeah, and I think people underestimate the power of the ecosystem. That's really kicked in. And I really do feel like it's some of that clarity with the cloud strategy. Now, the other interesting thing is VMware at one point wanted to own its own data centers and manage its own data centers. They just raised four billion dollars in debt. They're going to spend, maybe, a couple a hundred million on capex this year, that's it. I guarantee Google, and Microsoft, and the Hyperscale guys are going to spend a lot more than that. Very efficient operating model from that standpoint. They raised a bunch of cheap debt. They're buying back stock, many people feel like the stock is underpriced. The cash flow is really strong, operating cash flow at three billion dollars, so things are pretty good right now. The data center is on fire. What did you guys learn today, in terms of, that was of interest in terms of product announcements, innovations, other things that were of interest or exciting to you? >> Well, the first thing I think I learned, and David, you and I were talking about this a bit, is that when you peel back every major commitment that they're making right now, every new effort that they're undertaking, buried inside is NSX. Somewhere in there is NSX. And it looks like they're really going to bet heavily on NSX. And that makes some good sense, it's going to be a multi-cloud world, one of the biggest challenges the customers are going to have are how are they going to weave multiple clouds together so that you have a coherent application or set of work loads that you can manage. So that's probably the first thing, is that the last year, NSX started to come to the fore, this year, any conversation you have, blah blah blah, NSX, blah blah blah NSX. So NSX has replaced v sphere as the primary, that core technology that's going forward. >> Because of that multi-cloud imperative. >> Right. >> I would pick another area as perhaps also being very very important, and that was the success they've had with the vSAN. >> Peter: vSAN? >> vSAN. >> Oh yeah, totally. >> They have essentially reducing the cost, straight-forwardly reducing the cost of running a v-sphere environment by being able to put in vSAN, and they didn't have -- >> EFC's finally out of the way. >> Exactly. >> I'll say it. I mean let's face it, EFC held back VMware for years. When we first started coming to VMworld, and we said "wow, this company's in an amazing position" "to really innovate in storage," and storage is a real mess, but they didn't have the resources to do that, and they were sort of publishing these API's saying you guys all figure it out. Finally, you know, under the Gelsinger era, he was able to, I don't know, fight, beg, borrow, steal, who knows how it all went down internally, but they've really taken the handcuffs off. >> They have and it's good, and they're aggressive. >> But there's another thing, and that is the EMC's, EMC's transformation to Flash, absolutely facilitated the emergence of vSAN as a platform for how you're going to handle storage. So, it was a combination of things. I'm not sure if vSAN would've worked as well if EMC was still driving storage raise with this. >> Exactly. In fact, they gave some interesting numbers. >> So, they did. >> Yeah, 60% of vSAN is flash, and of the VX Rail, 71% is all flash. >> 71% is flash. >> And the reason they give, and I think is right, is that it's so much simpler for the VMware, for the VMware operators to manage. >> And that's Flash inside of what, a Dell server? Or an HPE server? Or? >> No, it doesn't matter. But the key thing is, is that, you know, >> Not an array. >> It might very well, not an array. It might very well be that EMC was holding things back, but I think there's also a very practical, technical reality here that the amazing potential of vSAN has become unlocked by the market's adoption of Flash. Which, you know, David was one of the guys that helped move the market many years ago. So it's coming together for them in ways that perhaps they planned from the beginning, but they're taking advantage of the opportunities as they emerge. And you know, I'll say one other thing, Pat Gelsinger took some serious hits over the last 18 months in the rumor mill, and he's still here, and his company's doing pretty well. >> Well, two years ago it was like, oh, Pat's on his way out, and then he gave a really strong keynote. I thought his keynote today was very crisp, and evidently he was a little under the weather, so he did a good job fighting through that, but last thing, any announcements that were exciting to you or things that you're expect, big announcements coming tomorrow? We're hearing about some super secret stuff that's kind of leaking out. >> Yeah, you got to be a little bit careful about that, but what did you hear today, David, that made you go "hmm?" >> Well, I still want to focus on one thing that I think is one of the biggest issues, and that is security. They were very open today, very very open today about what a mess security was. And they came up with something called, what was it, absence? Which is a good idea. >> Now you're making me go to my notes. >> Defense. >> App defense. Which is an idea, but it's just a start. These are huge amounts of greater investment in security, from Dell, from EMC, and from VMware, all together. They have to step up in a much bigger way. >> He said in his keynote today that the industry, as an industry we have let you down. Several years ago, one of the early years when we interviewed Pat in the CUBE I had asked him, is security a do-over? Unequivocally, he said yes, and that was years ago, we're still doing it over. Alright guys, we got to wrap. Thanks very much for coming on and close, I look forward to more analysis from you guys tomorrow and throughout the week. This is day one, we launch tomorrow, we start at 10:30 local time. >> That's pacific time. >> Yes, which is pacific time. We're in Las Vegas, watch siliconangle.tv. Siliconangle.com for all the news, check out wiki.com for all the research. We're out. This is day one, this is the CUBE, we'll see you tomorrow.