New Orleans Louisiana it that you covering dot next conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix welcome back to the cubes coverage here of Nutanix next 2018 here in New Orleans Louisiana the brass bands are going talking to lots of customers been a great event so far and for Keith Townsend and I'm Stu minimun we always love to be able to talk to customers each one of them has a different story different analysis different challenges they're facing happened to welcome Alex Walker who's the senior vice president of IT at IBC Bank out of Texas thanks so much for joining us thank you alright so you've actually been going to all the shows just like I have at this Keys first one who's been getting getting the inaugural visit here but first of all tell us about yourself a little bit of background what you run at the bank and just give us quick sketch of the bank oh let's start with the bank you know we're in our 51st year we are based in Laredo Texas and it's a community bank mostly and commercial right you know where we are 19th according to Forbes magazine best banks in the country so we went up from 46 to 19 this year Congrats and so great accomplishments for the bank itself it's a great operation we're in 88 cities in the in Texas and Oklahoma and about 13 billion in assets great and what's under your purview as the SPID okay so you an all IT for the bank I'm not this not the development side of it you know without the operations infrastructure yes okay 51 year old company finance going through a lot of changes before we get in to the tech just give us one or two some of those the stresses and strains that you're feeling is business well regulation is one right over the last several years the increasing regulation has caused a tremendous growth in our auditing Keith Kountz rates at Department and a lot of cost to the bank I started about three and a half years ago and the bank was looking at how do we prepare for a change right potentially hoping for some change in them in the regulatory climate and so forth but we needed to prepare for that and prepare for growth so we we need to take a look at our infrastructure of everything across the board yeah maybe could organizationally where does that pension for change come from what kind of air cover do you get from from News exercise what's of the staff underneath you know how do they take change well initially there was a lot of reluctance right people were in the status quo they're comfortable with what they had not necessarily happy with it but taking on change is it's difficult right so we looked at operational costs some of the basic things we had two data centers at the time literally a hundred and fifty yards apart from each other so we said we can do we can do more right the bank's motto is we do more and so we said how do we do more for the bank for their customers improve the quality of the services the uptime and so and and reduce its cost so it's your bank so change in a bank a lot of times means going from one store to reef vendor to another storage or a vendor and that's a big deal big set of conversations you know your your your you know it we are sitting at the 19th best bank and then the fourteenth you don't get there by turning over the table part called the table you your get you get there by being steady what made you guys actually consider something as revolutionary as HCI when it came to change well when we looked at the infrastructure that we had and you know it goes back to simon Sinek start with quiet right why are we doing this I asked I asked the my department when I first started who are our competitors and they gave us the names of all the local banks and so forth and the usual suspects the large banks and I said no they're not that's the bank's customers our competitors are AWS Rackspace Microsoft is your Google Cloud it's the these are the hosting companies we host applications for our customers we're shared services for our bank once we understand who we are then we have to take a different approach because now if we're competing with them it's no wonder that the bank is starting to branch out and do their own thing right some unit I'm getting contracts with the cloud providers or with other service providers because we're too far behind we're not cost-effective we're not competitive so it doesn't mean that we want to build massive data centers everywhere but we need to have the same level of services that they provide so from a validation perspective it you start to look at the cost of hyper-converged in general I'm sorry how long you guys have been a new tennis customer three years okay so from a cost perspective as you start to look at hyper-converged how did you even begin to compare it to your existing environment well I looked I looked at the the studies that are out there particular there was an IDC study done member on 2015 that said that customers of like size all different types of customers we're getting these these benefits I said wow if I could get those that'd be really cool right so I went to the board I went to my boss the CIO and I said I think we could get this this would be a really good but then again people said we never heard of mechanics what is this our applications aren't certified with Nutanix you know so let's talk about procurements and I said well let's just do a PLC and that's bringing this in and and we'll run VMware on it which is what we were certified at the time our applications and I said let's let's look at this infrastructure this we brought in the PLC but what we did is we took Nutanix and had them talk directly to my accounting the bank's accounting department right we all know we all work for accountants eventually and so we said if we can get them to agree that if we can get these then they're gonna be behind us from the are white and TCO models right so we went through and said what are we paying for this what are we paying for that what's the hyung going rates for this let's get some samples of if we ordered this and replace it we had eleven storage frames from seven different vendors or we couldn't move data around from one storage frame to another because we had over time acquired a lot of different frames and like most places never retired them right and so all that layer of complexity what we did is we said this on this PLC let's test this out okay cut to the chase we we got the we got the numbers we were then three or two 5% of everything that came out in that study and so we bought that that that equipment immediately placed our first order which was 12 notes still want to keep it constrained so one of food in the water but I said this is a technology I'm betting on five years we'll write it off in five years we can get rid of it and move on to the next thing what happened was we were getting so such good wins we actually completed in our five-year model we completed that in roughly around two years because the acceleration based upon the benefits that we got some of the requirements that we had for change within the organization replace all equipment and so forth we were able to to accelerate that not only that we just finished upgrading our D our site which was not part of that five-year plan and just completed that and so within three years we've now are our 97% on Nutanix and we just took delivery of 24 of the Robo nodes which we're going to put out in our branch operations that'll leave us with five servers that are not Nutanix other than our for AIX system yeah Alex can you tell us what what were the key metrics that you were looking at to measure success and you did some TCO studies you actually presented here at the conference what do you recommend to your peers as to how they should be able to evaluate rolling out something like this well for one and a big one was licensing right it's far more efficient what we got for example we got we were able to take our Fibre Channel switches running about quarter of a million plus each and and get rid of those would we when we look at it the bandwidth that that's taken on the servers it's writing data to storage going through this storage controller going into this the sand and coming back that delay was substantial so much so that when we moved all of our databases into Nutanix and eliminated that infrastructure we're running 66% faster than we did on current technology on a conventional architecture did what was the business response on this did it change anything in the business what did the users say well when they'd users Jobs ran far faster than they did before when we went back and said I don't need as many Microsoft sequel licenses as they did before for consolidation fewer cores the tremendous benefits our sequel developed our sequel management team for example it takes far less time to stand up servers do migrations things like that so what's the Delta between the prediction debrief their predicted ROI and the realized our ROI you guys realize your savings much quicker wolves worldwide little surprises well the surprises were we were conservative we didn't include any soft costs those are difficult to we missed it me Steve Kaplan are all are all I got a TCO guy for Nutanix go back and forth on the soft cost don't show weak soft cost show me where I can give the money back to my accountants who we all have to report to correct right yeah so what we found is the fact that we were conservative we were getting much better benefits so again when we look at the servers we bought too many cores right so now I this good problem now I can migrate more systems I did anticipate based upon that spin so the time the technology to the financial benefits the reduction and latency allows you to stop spending money on more cores that you didn't need less latency equals better performance better performance tools more dense newness Lourdes units means less money spent so we we actually shut down one of the data centers and migrated into a single data center and it's we're running somewhere around up third a little bit more than a third of that data center so the electrical expend is down in aggregate roughly around 40% so that's real money okay you mentioned that you're also using Nutanix for disaster recovery tell us what led to that that's a newer solution from Nutanix how that experience go we're using the note annex replication for that and when we our legacy was that some of them were taped and some of it was you know migrating data you know a typical older dr type of situation we're in our testing now and that's a little bit complex because we have to protect that dr site from production but we're mirroring the the systems exactly as they are in production so when you spin it up its life right so we have to build a barrier between those systems so if we take that even then taking that into account we can get it up in hours rather than and when we say hours like a couple of hours rather than the 22 12 to 24 hours that we were before and it's 10 systems not 4 systems so roughly about a hundred servers or so minimally all right Alex look forward a little bit tell us what's on your roadmap what kind of things you're doing and if there's intersections with titanic's there we're looking at VDI for example something that we now that we've reengineering our network as well that we're looking at doing that for branch operations and security right but looking forward into AI and and blockchain and which is going to be very disruptive for financial institutions okay you mentioned blockchain so definitely need to get get your take as to what can you share either personally or from the Bakke standpoint cryptocurrency of course will I and I do pay taxes on it but realistically I'm mining with you know for video carts it's it's not it's really understand from as a chief technologist I'm I really need to understand these things you don't make appendix fluster off on the side I did ask her I could have the old data center and the when we're doing I'm doing that really effectively to better understand that but I think what we're looking at it blockchain is tremendous opportunities for many improvements in security and loss prevention and other types of things within the financial side I'm seeing a lot of big financial institutions that are getting filing for patents on block chains and they're they're bringing it up in their ten cases potentially very disruptive and very expensive and some of them are saying specifically cryptocurrency and blockchain and some of them are saying new you know new competition in the market right so we take that to kind of mean that they're they're thinking about the same things we are so keep a eye on to the future especially when it comes to something like blockchain this relatively inefficient at processing transactions how does that impact your data center strategy you guys just went down from you know huge space reduced electrical power by 40% any considerations around kind of the blood blockchain at a commercial level of use within the bank and how it might impact your strategy we're a conservative bank so would we we're having discussions about what what does that mean right what it were do we think that's might come in and it's very early for us right we've been busy you know the datacenter moves and other types of things too so we're starting to look at that and have some a few conversations about what do we think it it is we're talking to some of our our business partners and say how might we cooperate with you guys to do excuse me to use some of this blockchain technology it's a it's a different way of doing it you know when in the past we might use relational databases like sequel server or something to do something some of this work where distributed ledger might be a far easier better way to do that so it's another tool I like to say that you know video didn't kill the radiostar right yeah there's more type of radio out there than there ever was so this is another tool that we have to look and say well how does this how do we utilize this what with the right technology for the right job and we're being very cautious about that all right well Alex Walker really appreciate you sharing all the updates on IBC Bank pleasure to catch up with you and look forward to seeing you more than ten echoes in the future for Keith Townsend Thomas do minimun more coverage here at Nutanix duck necks New Orleans thanks for watching the queue [Music]

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world, digital experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE coverage of Dell Technologies world digital experience. Happy to welcome to the program. First we have a first time guest Akanksha Mehrotra, she's the Vice President of Marketing with Dell Technologies. Joining us one of our CUBE alumni, Caitlin Gordon, she's the Vice President of Product Marketing, also with Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back, Akanksha welcome to the program. >> Thank you Stu, happy to be here. >> Alright, so one of the big models we've been talking about for the last few years is a change in how customers acquire things, big thing we've talked about, for many years, this shift from CAPEX to OPEX. How cloud is impacting everything Jeff Clarke in the keynote was talking about, it's the Dell Technologies on demand, DTOD, I guess is the, four letter acronym we use Akansha help us understand a little bit from your standpoint, what is it? Why is it important to your customers? >> Yeah, so Stu, as soon as you as you heard, as part of the keynote, from from Jeff and others earlier today, we've been working really hard to bring the benefits of on demand IT to our customers, in private cloud, public cloud and edge. And certainly this year, especially, we've seen a lot of interest in this, COVID have catalyzed customer interest in flexible consumption in as a service. As we talk with our customers and partners, we hear this almost daily, it's required a level of agility that candidly traditional CAPEX based models simply haven't been able to provide, I mean, imagine taking your workforce remote over the weekend, and the stress that puts on your infrastructure. And so I think that's kind of forced IT to consider some of these alternatives. Another factor has also been, companies have been wanting to preserve capital, right, and avoid large cash outlays and having this type of flexibility and being able to pay for infrastructure, as you're using it, it gives them a way to do that. So I mean, those are some of the customer drivers that we've seen. Last year at Dell Tech Summit, around the this time last year, actually, in November timeframe, we introduced Dell Technologies on demand as our umbrella program for a flexible consumption and as a service solutions. And really what it what it seeks to do is make it easier for customers to get the simplicity and flexibility of cloud, along with the performance and security of on-premises infrastructure. So it's giving them a range of consumption models that include both payment option as well as services that they can apply on any one of the products in our portfolio from end user devices to core data center infrastructure to hybrid cloud solutions. And we've announced that last year, one of the things that you heard about today, and that we're announcing over this event is that we're continually looking to make it easier and simpler for our customers with various turnkey offerings and simpler offerings for them, given the interest that we've seen. >> Yeah, I want to key off of, you mentioned the impact of COVID-19. And for your customers, it's something we've definitely seen that the promise of cloud always has been to be highly flexible, we can scale up, we can scale down. We know that some services out there aren't always as flexible as we might hope. There's certain SaaS solutions, where you're signing up for a multi year offering and even for the cloud, I might lock in some savings by buying something in bulk. So help us understand, what are the benefits that your customer sees, the savings that they get and is this truly cloud flexible, which means I can burst up and scale as I need. And I can it reached the point, oh, hey, I need half the capacity for the next six months. Can I do that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Stu we actually commissioned IBC to talk to a few of our customers. So let me maybe share some of the benefits that they saw in broad terms, and then I can maybe share a specific example of what a particular customer saw. So we had IDC talk to several of the customers using Dell Technologies on demand models, various GIOS, and various sort of sizes. And what they found was that on average, they saw about a 23%, lower cost of storage operations per year, which is great, right? Lower cost of operations is always great. IT is always looking for those efficiencies, especially, in the current environment, but that's not all. I think that's just sort of part of the story. What they also shared with us is that, these types of models were able to help them become much more agile in how they work and change how they work. And what they found was that they saw 54% fewer incidents of downtime and they were 92% faster in their ability to deploy storage capacity, because they had that capacity in their data center available ready for that spike when their business saw it. ` So those are just some of the broad examples of what our customers have seen. Another specific example that I would would share with you is a large multinational institution, financial services company, we've been working with them for years to service their, enterprise scale, private cloud. And then more recently, they had us also, manage their storage as a service managed utility. And they've seen phenomenal results, they've been able to get 50% more compute power at 8%, lower cost, and 90% faster or reduce time and provisioning data. It's all about the yes, it's about the cost savings but really, it's about the agility that the business gets, right. And as you started out, right, with COVID, they really needed that agility and that flexibility and having these models available, ready to spike, ready to go down, right, have been able to provide that. >> Yeah, I think another thing we've seen is, people rush to cloud because it promised that agility, and we've had those conversations before is, there's a reality of what that means, which it might not be the resiliency you're looking for, it also might not actually be as simple as he thought it might be. And we're seeing some of that come back on-prem, whether you need resiliency or performance or security, or you don't want to be really locked into a specific public cloud but you still want to have that agility in the benefits of really running your data center in a service oriented model. And that trend has been picking up over the past couple years. And as we've already said a couple times today, we've seen that accelerate, but also, we starting to see more customers ask for it. It's not just the big and more strategic and the aggressive customers that are looking for this more and more customers are kind of seeing that this is the end game and that's kind of leads into where we're going, which is, how do we make this more accessible to others? >> Well, Caitlin, you're using one of one of my punch lines that I've used for a number of years now if remember, when we thought that cloud was inexpensive and easy to use, it's not. And if we look at what customers are doing, it's a hybrid model. They're deploying in multiple environments, we're seeing the public cloud look more like the enterprise, the enterprise look more like, the public cloud. So these offerings have, OPEX flexibility and the like, make a whole lot of sense. So you've said that, you've seen a lot of growth, especially this year, any metrics you can give us on, adoption, love the one customer example, in the financial space, anything else to kind of paint the picture as to, how prevalent this is becoming. >> Yeah, maybe I'll get started. So, we've seen nearly 50%, year over year growth in the customer base or our most recent quarter, and it's growing, we've seen over 500% increase, year on year in signed contracts, customer demand in these types of models has caused us to expand our offerings to into countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India, and China. I mean, we already offered about 50 plus countries and along with our partner, network and even more, so, I mean, those are just some of the data points around business traction. In the models that we have another proof point that I could point you to is that, in April, we include, we announced a payment flexibility program, which gave our customers a number of promotions and options to extend this flexibility into, across our portfolio and into other parts of our businesses. And just recently, about a month ago, we extended that, and we've seen really good traction in that as well. So I think overall, like you said there's aspects about public cloud that customers really like, and they tell us, hey, I want to be able to pay as I go, I want to be able to extend and contract the infrastructure as I'm using it. I want a simple management experience. But then as Caitlin said, they realize that Oh, but I don't want to, pay for the refactoring and then the egress and the ingress charges and some of my workloads are better off on premises for performance, locality, security, compliance reasons, right. And therein lies the promise of as a service for on-prem infrastructure, 'cause really, I keep looking for the best of both worlds. And this gives you that right you can use the consumption models to grow and shrink as you needed, you can us the payment models to only pay for what you're using and along with our partner network, you can have in the location that you want so you can sort of have your cake and eat it too. >> Yeah, and I would just add on to that is that more and more of the conversation is both about how can I consume that more as a service and pay for just what I'm using? But also, how can I spend less time maybe zero time and energy actually managing that infrastructure? And how can I then allocate the time energy resources into running my business and investing in more strategic things? So becomes both an important financial conversation but even more so a conversation about how IT can empower the business, which really just changes what we're able to do for customers. So it's an exciting kind of transition to see this really evolve into really not talking about products anymore, and helping our customers have all their business. >> Well, Caitlin, that's a really interesting point, I want you to talk to us a little bit about the Dell Tech storage as a service, how does that fit, we were just talking about don't want to talk about products, we want to talk about really moving to that full OPEX model so help connect the dots for us. >> Yeah, so we're really excited about this, this will be coming in the first half of next year, as you probably heard earlier today. And what we're doing here is we've really taken what we already have had in market. And we've really upped that to the next level, we've accelerated the simplicity of what we offer here. And think of the experience is all starting in a single console, where you just pick up four things, what's the type of storage you want, what's the performance you want, how much and for how long, that's it. And then now we're counting the time from then to when it's in your data center in days, not months, not weeks, but in days and we're able to get you up and going. And it's your data center of your choice, whether that's on-prem in your own data center, or at a colo facility, we bring that equipment in, we get that deployed, we manage it for you, you operate it, and you simply pay for what you use. So you're really in a quick time to value you're in a very simple model and you're not really responsible for managing infrastructure that's really on us. And that moves you into being in a true OPEX model and it also enables you to accelerate what you're able to leverage that whether it's Blob Storage, file storage, you can get up and running quickly and let us worry about how to manage the infrastructure and we give you the ability to operate what you need to. >> Caitlin, maybe if you could give us a little bit of color as to what happens behind the scenes to make that work. As it sounds wonderful, you've had the program around for a year, these aren't trivial things that you're talking about all the logistics, the management the the gear, and making sure that the physical and the power and everything is all set. So help us understand the engineering, the development, and what this means from kind of a services and go to market that make a solution like this work. >> Yeah, and a lot of ways we're having to change our entire business to help our customers change there's, it goes from top to bottom, and you'll get to hear a lot more about it when we're actually available next year. But when you think about it, we have a lot of the DNA, we have a lot of the experience, we have the technology, but we almost have to completely flip the script on ourselves of how we deliver it, who our customer is, what our then end user customer needs from us, and what the role of things like our global services organization is what the role of our global sales organization is and how do we accelerate providing outcomes to our customers and get the rest out of their way. And the fact that I haven't mentioned a product name, but by the way, we actually have industry leading products and pretty much every category. So of course, on the back end, all of this is going to be powered by our industry leading storage solutions, like power store will be in your data center but at the same time, we will actually have worked to really masked that you don't even need to know that nor do you need to really operate much beyond what you need to really run your business. And that's really it's been an interesting work for us to just flip how we think about everything and you'll hear a whole lot more about it next year as we really bring this out into market but it's been really fun and a big learning for everyone. >> Excellent well yeah, something something power is underneath there well Caitlin. All right why don't you both give us the final takeaway for the Dell Tech on demand account. Start with you in just give us the final takeaway. >> Yeah, so I think look, I back to kind of what we were talking about, we've actually been offering these types of solutions to our customers for a really long time. Through Dell financial services, we've been offering payment flexibility for over 23 years, over 15 years and manage utility. So the customer example that I gave you is a customer who's running storage as a service and has been for many years, I think, building on that experience, listening to our customers feedback over that time period and over, of course, this past year, we're looking to apply all of that, to make it even more simpler for them to consume our infrastructure in the near future. And so, storage as a service is going to be a really exciting proof point of that, the momentum stats and some of the other things that I shared with you today and that you're going to hear about over the next couple of days or another proof point of it. But we're excited about this, and looking forward to continuing the dialogue with our customers with our partners and (mumbles) >> Then I would I'll kind of play off of one of your words there which is is all about simplicity for us is how do we take what we've been able to do for a lot of our customers accelerate that and simplify it to a point where we can offer that for all of our customers. And we're really looking to accelerate this first with storage and then get all of our offerings really into this model, because it's really about getting our customers out of managing infrastructure and give them the time, energy, resources to manage their business and simplicity is paramount to making sure that happens. >> Caitlin and Akanksha, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations to all the progress and definitely looking forward to hearing more beginning of next year. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thank you Stu >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman this is Dell Technology world digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you as always for watching theCUBE (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. Happy to welcome back to the program, just had him on at VeeamON at theCUBE's coverage there. David Harvey, he is the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. David, welcome to our coverage of HPE Discover. >> Thank you. I appreciate the invitation and great to see you again. >> All right, so when I talked to you at VeeamON, of course, you talk about lots of partners and you love all of them, but now we get to hear the truth. HPE, which one of your partners do you love the best? Talk to us a little bit about that HPE relationship. >> Sure, yeah, absolutely and really great to be part of Discover this year. And I think it's a fantastic set up in the way that HPE is running this event. As we've talked about with you guys before as well, HPE's always been a really special relationship for us. It was really the first relationship that we sort of established over eight years ago. And so from our point of view, it's got a long, rich heritage, that level of trust and desire for growth has been fantastic. And in the recent years as well as both of us have really continued to lean in, it's just continued to grow at a fantastic rate. I mean you would've seen some of the recent results there. Veeam's grown over 20% in the second half of 2019 with IBC. I'm really happy to say that the HPE alliance is growing well in excess of that. And so we're really pleased on how things have continued to evolve. >> Well congratulations on that growth. Yeah, boy, eight years so much has changed. So of course, I think about HPE and VMware and one of the earliest partners for server virtualization. But HPE's got a broad portfolio. Bring us through where Veeam sits. You know you got solutions like GreenLake out there, of course, traditional virtualization. So give us a little bit of kind of the breadth and depth of engineering work and partnership that you have. >> Yeah, great question Stu. And I think the interesting part of this is when you look at sort of the ecosystem that's out there now and the evolution HPE's gone through in embracing partners, the focus on the portfolio development and engagement between the two companies has reflected that. There are so many different areas that we could work with HPE on, but when we sat down together and we said where can we really provide the best value to our customers, we focused on a few key parts of the portfolio. Storage, obviously, is key. 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, StorONE, Apollo, areas where we've done really strong work over the years and continue to provide great solutions to the customers. Really pleased with how we've increased into SimpliVity. That's a really big push area for us over the last 12 months. And we're starting to see some great success together with that providing really unique solutions to extend the value of SimpliVity into new use cases, complimenting what they already have. And then obviously at Discover a couple of years ago we did a big push with GreenLake. And we're really pleased with how that's moving forwards as well because that's not really as much as a technology type of play, but that's a philosophy play about how we're satisfying the economic and service needs of the customers. So we're really pleased how that's been moving forwards, and that's another really big push for us this year. >> Well excellent. Maybe it would help to illustrate this. Do you have some customer examples? I understand sometimes, if you can share who the the logo is >> Harvey: Sure. >> that's great, otherwise if it needs to be a little more anonymized, that's fine too. >> No I think that's a great question, and the reason why we like talking about these types of things is we do thousands of orders a year with HPE. It's a really rich partnership on a global basis. If I remember correctly, last time we had over 100 countries where we've done deals together, so it's really nice to see it be appeared as on a global basis. A couple of easy ones that come to mind, certainly is White River Health Services. Big medical system solution serving over half a million customers that are out there. And those guys had a massive growth rate of data, 30% growth year over year, and really needed to make sure that that availability of data was there so that they provided solid solutions to their customers. We partnered up with a solution with StorONE and provided them with a fantastic amount of savings per year on their overall solution but also gave them that business continuity that they were looking at. So I think that's a great example. If we move over to Europe though there's another good market for us where we're seeing really success, great success together. The Metropolitan Thames Valley is a very large housing authorities are a very different virtual but shows the wide applicability of the solution, where they were having trouble looking at the ability to put a full disaster recovery plan into place, And obviously contingencies is a key topic right now. So we worked with HPE and then we've really put in great solution that not only reduced the ability to recover from seven days to less than 30 minutes, but we also managed to be more efficient with the amount rack utilization that was in place for them as well. So economic support, very critical business continuity support, and obviously a unified solution to allow them to be in a scenario where they knew that the IT partners they were working with were fully in unison so there was never any service question if they needed any support. So a couple of really good examples from around the world. >> You know, I wonder if we can touch a little bit on the competitive dynamics here. So eight years ago, HP had its own data protectant. When HP split that piece went over to micro focus so it kind of (murmurs) the swim lanes a little bit. But HP has also been increasing their partnership, so Veeam, you're a good partner but there are other partners out. So how do you help differentiate and how do you make you got clean engagements through HPE's channel and with their field? >> Yeah, that's a really good question, and there's a number of different answers to that, but I think that one of the things that will support what I'm about to touch on is that we're really proud that we just got awarded the Global Technology Partner award again this year. This is the second year running for HPE. Last year was the first time a software application partner was provided and now two years in a row, we've demonstrated that the partnership is really valuable for HPE. And I think to your point, Stuart, it comes down to a couple different areas. The first is just the overall attitude, approach, and relationship. Partnerships work when you can turn your back on each other. They work on the assumption that you really have the same vested interest for success and you can roll through some tough times as well as the good times. With good dialogue, with focus on the objectives you are trying to achieve, but also more importantly that you are excited and you enjoy working together. And so, it's a pleasure to spend hours and hours together to come up with something that satisfies the customer pains that you are solving. Now combined with that attitude because to me that attitude is a core foundation, technology's hugely important but if you can't have a business relationship, you can't actually execute that technology position. Now we're fortunate enough as well that you combine that attitude of partnershipping together with the investments and technology that we've done, and that's why we feel like we continue to differentiate. I think it's great that HPE has such a rich ecosystem. I think it's helpful to get focus on what is a huge topic for customers and frankly, the technology world is a complex ecosystem nowadays. But I think you stand out from the rest by focusing on being the most successful, being the best, having the right attitude, making the right investments together to move forward and that's where we've demonstrated, historically, our engineering commitment and our future roadmap commitment, which we're working on right now together heavily combining with a big marketing and sales investment, so all of the facets and the organization come together in a nice, seamless manner. So, you know, trust, I think it's great that they have the depth of ecosystem that's out there, we're just really proud that we continue to be the preferred partner in this space and we keep getting recognized for the investment that we have with HPE as well. >> Excellent. Yeah, you brought up it is such a complex ecosystem out there. One of the themes that we heard, your show as well as HP Discover, you know, we're talking about customers going through that digital information. You gave us a couple of customer examples, but maybe some big themes, what're you hearing? You know, how do the (murmurs) markets align between Veeam and HPE? >> Yeah, great question. And I think that is another great example where when you use the topic of data transformation, it's a really broad discussion. You know, what we've tried to do is focus on the areas that we provide the most value to customers right now. And I think that focuses us down and data protection powered by intelligence storage, which is a really key topic for a lot of our joint customers that are out there. We really want to make sure we can extend your data management from on-premise to the cloud. That's a really key area we're working with the Simplivity team on. And then finally, the consumption-based data management working very closely with GreenLake. And the (murmurs) of all of those solutions satisfied the plethora of needs that the customers have on storage of data availability. And I think that from that point of view, that's where keeping that focus on what is solving pains today, is why were having such great success together. So I think from that basis, we found that that helps the sales teams identify and satisfy the needs of the customer, It helps us get clarity on execution, and more importantly, keeps us in the scenario where we got really clear bars for success to make sure that this partnership is not just a, I call it a website partnership, but a real partnership that's driving key revenues, key (murmurs) leadership, and frankly, key solutions for the customers. >> Yeah, if you talk about where your data lives and how Veeam could support across multiple environments. There's the technical pieces which Veeam's done a good job on and I think people understand pretty well. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the financial piece of things. How do you make sure, you know, especially with a deep partner like HPE, that you make it seamless as companies are trying to move more towards the SaaS and Opex models, and that it's not getting understanding, full control of what my billing is, and how these things go together. >> Yeah, it's a really good point, and I think there's sort of a capital facet to that. You know, the first part is, on a global basis across all of the segments that we've worked together on, especially if when you look at the success we have at the higher end price together, and the high end commercial. You have to be in a situation where you can support the financial structure that they have as a business. And that's looking at it whether or not it's a traditional Capex employment related to more of the traditional HP solutions, or looking at the flexibility of the Veeam licensing combined with that so they can have the choice that they desire. As well as moving down that path, that if they decide they want to move through a more consumption-based type of position by having that seamless integration with GreenLake as well, you get through a scenario where you can find the right solution for their needs and then the economic structure is really a choice for them, taking away a lot of that pain imposition. Now what we're seeing overall to that point too, which I think is also interesting is customers are going through evolution. If you go back a number of years, every conversation and topic was related to public cloud and it's still a huge area of focus. But, I've also seen a lot of organization especially at the higher end, really start to look at how they can take a lot of their consumption-based economics and bring it on-premise because they want to make sure that the reaction position they got, they're getting their data back is within their premise as well. And so that's why we're really enjoying a lot of success together because we can synergize the flexibility of the HPE offerings with the commercial offerings of (murmurs) Veeam, and be in a scenario where it's almost a perfect fit for most customers. And we try not to force them down a specific path because I think those days are gone, but customers want to look at the economic or the budget constraints they've got today and find the best fit, but they want that best fit without compromising on their overall support they get, and they want the scenario, like we have with HPE where it's fully on their price box, single supplier, single throat to choke, making sure were in unison, and they've got continued investment moving forward in the portfolio (murmurs). >> Excellent. Well final question I have for you is in the general market place, people often get stuck in their head to how they think about a company. Veeam is such a close partner to HPE. (murmurs) has thousands of customers with them. Give our viewers a little bit of how should people be thinking about HPE in 2020, and then also give us the final take away for Veeam and HPE. >> Yeah, great question. I mean, I've been working with HPE now a multitude of, overall over six years now. And the evolution that we're seeing is fantastic. I think that my view on how you should see HPE is, a trusted advisor related to talking about the transformation you're going through your data, and also a clear, solidified portfolio, especially in the storage realm related to the control of the data. Following the data from the origination point of the application all the way through. And so I think from that point of view, there's clarity with portfolio, there's a comprehensive interlock of the portfolio. And so from that point of view, I think there's calmness in the discussion. What I would say is that (murmurs) further and how to look at the HP (murmurs) relationship is. That continued investment on future proofing and hopefully some exciting announcements as we move through the year, will demonstrate that we are constantly making sure that we're differentiating at the frontier (mic cuts) for the customer. And you can see that in the growth of our enterprise business together. You could see that in the growth of high end commercial business together, and you can also see the fact that our customers are growing every single year together. So when we put these solutions in place, they're loving them and they're growing them year over year, and very quickly as well. So we're seeing a very high percentage of our customers reorder within the first year because they're really enjoying the unification of the solution. And so hopefully, the HP customers should look at that, through confidence, through calmness, and be really pleased that the market leader approach will indict protection by Veeam and they're primary (murmurs) leader when it comes to technology with HPE, together provide a really powerful solution, and we're really pleased on the customer satisfaction results we're getting from this work. >> All right. Well, David Harvey, thank you so much for the updates. Looking forward to some of those innovations that you talked about coming later this year. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much. I really appreciate the time and enjoying Discover, and I hope everybody's having a great event. >> All right, stay tuned for launch of theCUBE's coverage, HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks as always for watching.

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the cube now here's your host David on tape the imperative to protect data has never been more pressing as companies transform themselves from businesses into digital businesses the intrinsic value of their data Rises exponentially the problem for infrastructure pros is that everything in IT is additive it seems like nothing ever dies which means more things to manage now think about that when you're protecting data you have bare metal VMs now containers you've got cloud you got to worry about the edge all this data needs to be protected not only does this increase complexity it expands the attack surface for adversaries wanting to steal or ransom your data at the heart of all this is a build out of a massively global distributed cloud we saw wave 1 of the cloud which was public wave 2 was really hybrid and that's evolving now in parallel you're seeing the emergence of multi cloud and as I said these earlier trends are additive they're not replacements and with me to discuss these important issues and how Dell EMC specifically is pivoting toward cloud data protection is Beth Phelan who is the president of Dell emcs Data Protection Division that's great to see you well good to be here again so we know the world is hybrid it's a fundamental the on-prem stuff is part of the fundamental digital digital transformations of these these companies and now you've got data protection for the cloud so what do you see happening in that world yeah let's start with what we're seeing in the market we recently remade on our global data protection index we've been doing it for many years and we've been really using that to help us understand the landscape and what our customers need and first not surprisingly it shows that continued trend of movement and reliance towards cloud environments for business applications continuing to increase on top of that the customers despite that are continuing to struggle with ensuring they have the right data protection for their cloud environments right so they're they're struggling you see that we see that as well what what's going on there well what is the data tell you yeah first of all more than half of the customers don't have a comprehensive data protection solution for their Salas cloud native and multi cloud environments more than two-thirds of the customers who may be relying on their cloud service providers for data protection say that they do not have a solution that covers all of their workloads so whether they're working with a cloud service provider or some other vendor they're being really clear that they do not have a comprehensive approach to cloud data protection yeah so I mean you see the cloud adoption is going like crazy but it seems like the data protection component is lagging how is that affecting the traction in your business yeah you know it's a double-edged sword right on one level customers see the advantages of moving to a cloud on the other hand you know they are really looking for vendors that they can partner with to still have the same confidence that the data is protected that they have on Prem and what we're seeing now is that customers are turning to us to help solve that problem we have over a thousand customers using Dell EMC for their Cloud Data Protection and we're narrowing in on three exabyte the data that we're currently protecting in the cloud so it's happening yeah that's pretty good traction so I want to talk about VMware obviously VMware is the linchpin of many customers hybrid strategy and it's a clearly an important component of Dell technologies talk a little bit about the relationship between Dell EMC data protection specifically and VMware I'm interested in you know they've announced project tenzou and there's kubernetes how are you guys working together to really deliver a value for customers so we are super excited about the opportunity to work so closely with VMware because as they're cut in their domain we're working directly with them and that's an advantage that comes with being part of the dell technologies family and so we were the first company to bring data protection for were kubernetes environments out to market it's available now so you'll see us bring that into the tenzou mission-critical has been moved forward partnering closely with with vmware and of course we're already fully certified for vmware cloud it's really an ongoing regular conversation about how we can work together to bring the best to our customers so Beth I gotta ask you so you're part of your role as the leader of the the division is obviously you gotta get a lot of mouths to feed big division you got to make your plan you got to deliver for customers but strategy is another key component of this how do all these cloud trends shape your strategy so core to our strategy is to be the essential provider of data protection for multi cloud environments so no matter where customers are choosing to deploy their applications they can have the same confidence that they always did that that data is protected and the way they can get it back so that's core and if you want three words to remember for our strategy think VMware cloud and cyber cloud is central to it and you're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the weeks and months ahead okay so I gotta ask you break out your binoculars maybe even the telescope what are the future what are the future's look like when you think about the division and the market so we've been talking about cloud for a long time but we are still in the middle of this journey customers are going to rely on the cloud even more for additional use cases and especially in the data protection space right now we're seeing backup to the cloud dr to the cloud but the future will include cyber resiliency that's leveraging cloud deployments you're also going to see more and more of an emphasis on people leveraging SAS for their software consumption and for us that means not only protecting SAS applications but it also means giving customers the option to consume data protection in a SAS model we already do that today with things like cloud snapshot manager with things like the power protect management and orchestration but you're going to see us do even more of that because they're just incredible benefits of people leveraging sass to consume their software data constantly evolving lamps landscape data protection has to evolve with it Beth thanks so much for thank you and thank you keep it right there we'll be right back right after this short break from world famous cloud Studios Dell Technologies presents the world's number one show on data protection solutions for today's organizations it's proven in modern magazine with Jake and Emmy hello everyone and welcome to the premiere of PM magazine where we cover the proven Dell technology solutions that you've come to rely on and the latest modern innovation driving powerful data protection for the future I recently spent some quality time with one of our customers and I learned a thing or two about Dell proven data protection solutions let's watch the clip we've always relied on tell performance efficiency and scale to help us keep pace with our data protection needs but there's so much more for example we've been crushing it with Dell cloud data protection for backup to the cloud in cloud backup cloud tearing cloud dr uh-huh look at the picture it's a huge business advantage how so our costs are down we spend less time on management we're meeting our service levels and we have peace of mind that all of our data is protected right awesome did you talk about how Dells agile development approach is accelerating the speed at which we deliver customer value yes and how cloud capabilities will continue to grow yes and about VMware protection yes and cyber recovery yes I mean we covered all of that as well as the mega trends that require data protection with a modern approach well modern is exactly what our guests today are here to discuss Jake he is Ken fatale a noted data protection expert and joining us from the field on her vacation in the Bahamas is Barbara Penner of the data management Institute thank you both for being here so Ken what should our viewers think about when they hear the phrase modern data protection they should think new requirements for modern applications cloud native workloads Cubana is multi-cloud and data services to name a few Barbara would you add anything to that list I would add business service recovery on premises or in the cloud autonomous protection to auto detect and protect workloads across edge core and cloud infrastructure and lastly all of this must operate at global scale thank you both this is exactly where we're heading with Dell power protect solutions well it's time for a break but when we come back we've got something special in store for you don't we Jake I was hoping you forgot oh no someone learned how to make cream puffs and it did not turn out well for him yeah my apologies in advance to my mother who tried to show me around the kitchen but as you can see we'll be right back [Music] we're back with Rob and Rob Emslie who's the director of product marketing for Delhi MCS data protection division Rob good to see you hi Dave good to be back so we just heard from Beth about some of the momentum that you guys have from your perspective from a product angle what is really driving this yeah well one of the things that we've you know definitely seen is that as we talk to our customers both existing and new customers cloud journeys is is top of mind for all of the CIOs it's being driven by either the desire to drive efficiency take out costs and data protection is one of the the most common use cases and one of the things that we find is that there's four use cases for data protection that we see long term retention of data cloud disaster recovery backup to the cloud and the emerging desire to stand up new applications in the cloud that need to be protected so backup in the cloud really completes the four major use cases well one of the things I think is really important this market is that you deliver optionality to your customers so how are our customers enabling these use cases yeah so the the first two UK's first two use cases of long term retention and cleitus recovery is is really driven by our software on our appliances both of those are really predicated based upon the assumption that customers are going to deploy data protection on premises to protect their on-premises workloads and then it's here to the cloud or which is becoming more common used to cloud as a disaster recovery target you know it's delivered by our data protection software and that's either in a software form factor or that software delivered in an integrated appliance form factor so let's talk about purpose-built backup appliances I think you know our friends at IDC I think you know coined that they tracked that market for a while you guys have been a leader there the acquisition of data domain obviously put you in a really strong position give us the update there is it's still a vibrant market is it growing what's the size it's it look like yeah so as we look at 2020 you know IDC forecasts the market size to be a little under five billion dollars so it's still a very large market the overall market is growing at a little over four percent but the interesting thing is that if you think about how the market is is made up it's made up of two different types of appliances one is a target appliance such as data domain and the new power protect dd and the other is integrated appliances where you integrate the target appliance architecture with data protection software and it's the integrated appliance part of the market that is really growing faster than the other part of the of the people being market it's actually growing at 8% in fact IBC's projection is that by 2022 half of the purpose-built back to appliance market will be made up of integrated appliance solutions so it's growing at twice the overall market rate but you guys have two integrated appliances what why - how should people think about those yeah so a little under three years ago we introduced a new integrated appliance the called the integrated data protection appliance it was really the combination of our backup software with our data domain appliance architecture and the integrated air protection appliance has been our workhorse for the last three years really allowing us to to support that that fastest-growing segment of the market in fact last year the integrated air protection appliance grew by over a hundred percent so triple digit growth was great you know it's something that you know allows us to address all market segments all the way down to SMB all the way to the enterprise but last year one of the things you may remember at Delta Nadi's world is we introduced our power to protect portfolio you know and that constituted power protect data manager our new software to find platform as well as the delivery of packet there in an integrated appliance form-factor with perfectly x400 so that's really our our new scale out data protection appliance we've never had a scale out appliance in the architecture before in the portfolio before and that gives us the ability to offer customers choice scale up or scale out integrated and target and with the X 400 it's available is a hybrid configuration or it's also our first or flash architecture so really we're providing customers with the existing software solutions that we've had in the market for a long time an integrated form factor with the integrator protection appliance as well as the brand-new software platform that will really be our innovation engine that will be where we'll be looking at supporting new workloads and certainly leaning into how we support cloud air protection and the hybrid cloud reality of the next decade okay so one of the other things I want to explore is we've heard a lot about your new agile development organization Beth has talked about that a lot and the benefit obviously is you're more you're able to get products out more quickly respond to market changes but ultimately the proof is in translating that development into product what can you tell us about how that's progressing yep so certainly with Papa Tech Data Manager and the X 400 that really is the the epicenter of our agile product development activities you know we've moved to a three-month cadence for software releases so working to deliver a small batch releases into the market much more rapidly than we've ever done before in fact since we introduced palpitate Denham manager where we we shipped the first release in July we're now at the third iteration of palpitate Data Manager and therefore the third iteration of the x100 appliance so there's three things that you know I'd like to highlight within the x100 appliance specifically first is really the the exciting news that we've introduced support for kubernetes so we're really the first you know large enterprise data protection vendor to to lean into providing kubernetes data protection so that becomes the vitally important especially with the developments over our partner in VMware with vSphere 7 with the introduction of tan zoo and the reality is that customers will have both these fear virtual machines and kubernetes containers working side-by-side and both of those environments need to be protected soap a patek denim algae and the x400 appliance has that support available now for customers to take advantage of second we talked about long-term retention of of data in the cloud the x100 appliance has just received the capabilities to also take part in long term retention to AWS so those are two very important cloud capabilities that are brand-new with the excellent appliance and then finally we introduced yet 400 appliance with a maximum configuration of four capacity cubes rough-and-tough that was 400 terabytes of usable capacity we've just introduced support of 12 capacity cubes so that gives the customers the ability to scale out the x100 appliance from 64 terabytes all the way to over a petabyte storage so now if you look at our two integrated appliances we now cover the landscape from small numbers of terabytes all the way through to a petabyte of capacity whether or not you pick a scale up architecture or a scale length architecture yeah so that really comes back to the point I was making about optionality and kubernetes is key it's gonna be a linchpin obviously a portability for multi cloud sets that up as we've said it's it's not the be-all end-all but it's a really necessary condition to enable multi cloud which is fundamental to your strategy absolutely alright Rob thanks very much for coming on the cube it's great to have you thanks Dave and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for the cube we'll see you next time [Music]

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody, the Windy City, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here day two at Veeamon 2018, theCUBE's second year doing Veeamon, and I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Patrick Osborne is here, the newly minted VP and GM of big data and secondary storage. >> And CUBE alumni. >> HPE and many time CUBE alumni, did you get a sticker? >> Yeah, it's already on my laptop. >> Oh, awesome, great to see you again. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks so much for coming on, always fun at Veeamon. >> Yep. >> They have a big presence. Your show, HPE Discover, they painted the Chi-Town green. >> Patrick: Yep. >> What's going on at the show for you guys? >> So a huge partner for us, in our ecosystem, as you guys know, HPE and the world of virtualized workloads, like, you know, we definitely own the space in terms of the number of Veeams sitting on our infrastructure and they are a great partner. You know, we've got thousands of customers, and I think what we're seeing, too, is that as Veeam grows up into the midsize and enterprise space, that is, you know, that's where our wheelhouse is. And so we're getting a lot of customer interactions in that space, and then, with some of our offerings around Nimble and SimpliVity, where they play very well in the commercial segments, that's a great way for us to go grab new logos, be present in the channel. So it's a really good partnership for us on both ends. >> I definitely want to understand what's going on in big data, but before we get there, let's talk a little bit about secondary storage and your point of view there. We know that data protection is moving way up on the list of CXO priorities, we also know there's a dissonance in the customer base, between the expectations of how much automation is actually there from the line of business, versus what IT can deliver. >> Patrick: Yeah, yeah. >> And so there's this gap and now you have multi-cloud coming on in a big way, digital transformation, and so it feels like backup and recovery and data protection is transforming. Throw in security and it even complicates it further. What's your point of view on what's going on in this mix? >> Well, certainly the sands are shifting in the secondary storage market. I think because of a heightened customer expectation in this area, whether it's, you know, I want to do more with my data, running things that we do at Veeam, like test data, automation, Sandboxing, security, you know, ransomware. All those are higher level data services than just what people were doing in the past around backup and recovery. So for us, we're really focused a lot on automation right in this space. The death of backup and recovery in that traditional space is essentially caused by comPlexxity, right? So automate or die in this space, nobody wants to deal with backup, right? What you want is outcomes, and what we're doing is, for our product line, we've got sort of this three-tiered mantra, of predictive, cloud-ready and timeless. So we want to be able to, through platforms like InfoSite, be able to heavily, heavily automate all those activities. Cloud-ready, because, you know, as we talked before, it's a hybrid world. People, especially in secondary storage, want to have some data on-prem, and certainly a lot of it for archival and retention off-prem. And then, timeless is sort of this scenario around, even though I'm operating a data center, I want the purchasing experience to be elastic, and like, again, the cloud, right? So consumption-based as a service. So that's what we're trying to bring to the market for secondary storage and storage in general. >> Dave: Awesome. >> Patrick, as I look at this space, you talk about that hybrid, multi-cloud world that we talked about. The two big, main things are data and my applications. So you talked a bit about the data, connect for us, kind of the applications and things, cloud native and 12 factor microservices, versus traditional applications. And you've got that whole spectrum, what are you seeing from your customers and how are you helping them? >> Yeah, so, we're definitely seeing a lot of the tech leading customers in the enterprise from HPE, you know, the big logos, right? They're out there disrupting themselves, disrupting industry, are massively betting on analytics, right? So, they've moved certainly from databases to batch now, it's all, you know, I think people call it fast data, streaming analytics, Kafka, Spark. So we're seeing, that part of our business that HPE's growing, like, non-sequentially, right? So it's really good business for us. But what's going on right now, is that the customers who are doing this, these are all net new apps. Kubernetes, you know, new styles of application, it's not a rip and replace, it's more of an augmentation scenario, where you're providing new services on top of existing apps. So that is very new and I think one of the things we'll see over the next couple of years is, how do I protect those workloads? How do I provide multi-cloud for them? So it's an interesting space, it's very nascent, a lot of tech-heavy investment going on for the, you know, the big players in the market. But that's going to have a long tail into the mid range. >> How will the data protection architecture sort of change for those new emerging applications? You know, maybe IoT is another piece of that. And maybe, where does your partnership with Veeam fit into that? >> Yeah, so we are having a number of strategy discussions on that this morning, you know. And I think that space is, you know, there's a lot of identification that has to go on. Do I want to back it up, do I care? Right, are those persistent streams? Or that IoT data that's coming in, do I really have to back it up at the end of the day or can I back up the results? So, a lot of it is not just an availability issue, it's certainly a data management issue. But a lot of the tools that we would need to do that, today, they're focused on bare-metal, VM wear, virtualization, a lot of stuff that hasn't been written yet, right? So I think there's a lot of actual tech development that has to go on in this space and I think we're kind of poised together as partners to deliver in that area the next couple years. >> You guys have this tagline, "We Make Hybrid IT Simple." >> Patrick: Yes. >> IT, you know-- >> Patrick: Very quantifiable. >> It ain't simple. (laughter) So, where does storage fit into that equation? >> Yeah, the stats that blow my mind was, I think IBC came out with this, was that there's essentially around 500 million apps in the data center today. And then, in any sort of spectrum of bare-metal, being virtualized, maybe being containerized, in the next four years there's going to be 500 million net new apps, right? So that's like, it's mind blowing, in terms of, most people have a flat budget, maybe a little increase. So you think that you're doubling the amount of apps you have and all the services around it. So for us, the automation piece is absolutely key, right? So anything we can do with InfoSite as a platform, we're going to be extending that to other products, you see we've done it for 3PAR, we'll be bringing that experience. But anything we can do around automation, analytics, that's going to take a lot of the mystery and comPlexxity out of managing these apps and services, I think is a win for the customers, and that's why they're going to buy into the platforms. >> Yeah, it's like, imagine if you're a young family, you've got two kids and you have twins. >> Patrick: Yeah. (laughter) >> Uh-oh. (laughs) >> Or you decide to have two more, like I did. (laughter) >> Patrick, we've been talking about intelligence in the storage world for decades. >> Yes. >> Why is it real, you know, more real and different now, than it was in some of the previous generations? >> Yeah, I think, you know, some of the techniques... So, we've had systems that have called home and brought telemetry home forever, right? But I think what's going on is that, as you take the tools that we've developed, and a lot of them are new, right, that are allowing you to do this, it's the practition of the data science, which is like the key, at the end of the day. InfoSite is an amazing piece of technology, a lot of the magic is in the way that you set up your teams, and to be able to take that on, right? So, it's no longer a product manager, an engineering guy, support person in a different organization, right? What we have is what's called a peak team, right? Which just takes all the functions, brings them together with a data scientist, to be able to take a look at, how can I do machine learning, AI, a more predictive model, to actually take use of this data, right? And I think the techniques and the organizational design is the big change that's happened over the last couple of years. Data's always been there, right? But now we know what to do with that. >> Yeah, and like you said before, the curve is reshaping, it's not this linear Moore's Law curve anymore. >> Patrick: Yeah. >> It's this exponential curve. >> Patrick: Exactly. >> I can't even draw it anymore you know, it used to be easy, just put the dotted line straight out, now it's twisting. So, that increases the need obviously, for automation. Now talk about how HPE's automation play is differentiable in the marketplace. >> So I think a couple of things from a differentiated perspective. Obviously we talked a lot about InfoSite as a platform, as a portfolio company, we're definitely trying to take out the friction, in terms of the deployment and automation of some of these big data environments. So our mission is to be able to, like you would stand up some analytic workloads in the public cloud, to provide that same experience, on-prem, right? And essentially be the broker for that user experience. So that's an area that we're going to differentiate, and then, you know, in general, there's not that many mega portfolio companies, right, anymore. And I feel like, that we're exploiting that for our customers, bringing together compute networking and storage. And certainly on the automation side. So you know, for us, I really feel that you're no longer going to be buying on horizontal lines anymore. You know, best of breed servers, best of breed networking, best of breed storage, but bringing together a complete, vetted stack for a set of workloads, from a vendor like HPE. >> Yeah, and it was just announced, the deal's not closed yet, but just to mention to the audience, HPE just made an acquisition of Plexxi, a networking specialist-- >> Patrick: Yeah, a good friend, too, Rich Napolitano. >> Rich Napolitano. Just this week, which is interesting, because that brings cloud scale to some of the hyperconvergence infrastructure. It's essentially hyperconverge networking, so really interested to see how that plays out. HPE has made a number of really effective acquisitions over the last several years, starting really with 3PAR, was the one. Clearly Aruba, you know, the Nimble acquisition, you know, SimpliVity, so, SGI. So some really strong, both tactical and strategic moves for HPE, really interested to see how Plexxi sorts out. Okay, we got to talk sports for a minute. I asked Peter McKay this question, I asked his boss, some sports fans, if you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? >> (sharp inhale) No. >> No way? >> No way, no way. >> Okay, that's consistent with McKay. >> Yeah, no way, that's like trading Montana, that didn't work out. >> That did work out, right? They traded Montana, then they won another Superbowl. >> Yeah, I know, I mean, I think, for me, he's an icon and then he's still operating at maximum efficiency, which is amazing, but I think he got a lot of legs in him. >> What do you think of the... Well hopefully he stays, hopefully he does play 'til 45. What do you think of the Garoppolo trade, though? Are you disappointed that they didn't get more, or do you think it was the right move to hang on, just in case Brady went down again? >> I think it's the right move at the end of the day, right? You're not going to get much from him anyways, and they're certainly not going to pay him out as a backup quarterback. What I don't like, though, is the fact that he's gone to the 49ers, and that's where most of my engineering team is in the Bay Area. So, to have to deal with yahoo 49ers fans, you know, for the next couple years, is going to be painful. But it's good, it's a good renewed rivalry. >> So you're not a-- >> Celtics, Warriors, you know, Patriots, Niners. >> You're not an instant transplanted 49ers fan, because of Garoppolo, right? >> Patrick: No, absolutely not. >> He's a carpet-bagger, right? >> He's out, he's off the team, he's out of the house. >> I love it, okay, Bruins were a big disappointment this year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We thought that, you know, the Celtics were super exciting, let's go there, I mean. You know, you watched the Celtics early in the year, 'cause your like, after Hayward went down, you're like, kind of' we were all walking around like this. And then you-- >> I felt like, it's like where Kennedy was shot, right? I know exactly where I was, right? >> Right, and you had people blaming Danny Ainge for, like, making a move, I'm like, come on, guys. And you see what happened with the young players, and then they sort of tailed off a little bit, they were struggling, you know, Ky was trying to find his way and now they're the exciting team. Up to on Cleveland, I mean, you got to believe that Lebron is going to step up his game with a little home cooking. But let's assume for a second that they get by Cleveland (laughs) which will be a huge task. I mean, I don't think there's anybody in the NBA who can stop Kevin Durant, but I'd love to see Marcus Smart try. >> So two things in that scenario. One is that, who needs Kyrie Irving more right now, Cleveland or Boston, right? (laughter) Which is amazing, can you imagine saying that a couple months ago? It blows my mind. And then, for me, it's a revamping of the NBA, right? If you get the Celtics versus the Warriors in that style of play, I mean, it's definitely, it's changed the whole game, right? Shooting guards, ballers, I think it's fantastic to see, you know, a whole new style of play in the NBA. >> It's so exciting to see the Celtics back in. >> Team basketball, defense, passing, all of it, it's great. >> And ESPN is losing their minds, they don't know what to do. Stephen A Smith doesn't know what to say. >> Patrick: ESPN Live. >> He's actually pissed I think, yeah. (laughter) So, now, Stu, you're a Yankees fan, of course, and you know my line on the Yankees. Stu's kind of a weekend Yankees fan. My line on the Yankees is, that sucks you can't beat us in April. (laughs) Here it is in May. >> Dave, I'm just quiet around you, because I know where my paycheck comes from. >> I appreciate that perspective, Stu, okay. >> Patriots win, we're in agreement. >> Think about all these renewed rivalries, it's great. Celtics, Sixers, Red Sox, Yankees, it's unbelievable. >> And like I said, San Francisco-- >> Patrick: Phillies! >> And the Pats. >> The Pats! >> Well Patrick, always a pleasure seeing you, thanks for making time out of your busy schedule. >> Yeah, absolutely, it was great. >> For coming on theCUBE. Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, right after this brief break. You're watching theCUBE, Live from Veeamon 2018. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive, three days of coverage here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier co-host with Dave Vellante, hosting three days and next is Joel Horowitz, Vice President Strategic Partnerships and Offering, of The Digital Business Group. >> Thanks. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me here. >> Thanks for coming on. >> You've been on theCUBE, probably so many times, talking big data, talking analytics, now, in your new role in The Digital Group, the digital transformation. I really want to just ask you right off the bat about your new role, and how it relates to the changing ecosystem. >> Joel: Yeah. >> All of these markets are changing big time, the role of the ecosystem, the leverage that they have with technology and the value propositions, whether it's decentralized applications in Blockchain to storage and infrastructure, and big data. What is your role, take a minute to explain what you're doing, because you have a unique position, because this demand for partnerships, this demand for collaboration at many levels. What's the latest? >> So I would describe my role as being a champion of our partners, for sure. I look at, you know, I take, a very outside in perspective on IBM. Joining just over three years ago now, I came in, really through analytics, as you know, focused on machine learning, data science, and the growth of A.I. at that time. Last year I was part of the corporate development team over there. So looking, really, at a lot of the industry trends and what's going on, as well, in analytics, data, and A.I. This year, you know, we recognize that we're only going to do so many strategic partnerships a year, right, where there's probably a handful that we're going to work with. For example, last year we did a great partnership with Lightbend to bring their reactive platform to IBM, and we launched the iPhone 10, with Verizon on Lightbend's platform. But, these days, my team, can't be everywhere, obviously, and part of the value of digital, and that route to market is really the idea that partner should be able to self service. So, you know, my job this year, is frankly to put myself out of a job, right. Meaning, if I can get, you know, 70% of the work my team does, right, contracting, legal, setting up, provisioning, all of that on our cloud, and partners can just do that themselves. Then we'll capture a much larger swath of the emerging A.I., data, and cloud market. >> I want to talk about the killer app creating value and then the role the market place is playing. You mentioned self service. I want to kind of go down that. Before we get there, I want to get your thoughts on this because I noticed, in your role you're covering, it's cutting across a lot of different things, and you know we've been talking about cloud, as a horizontally disrupting technology, >> Joel: Yeah. >> Certainly in the data space you saw that. And stacks will be horizontally scalable with the cloud. >> Yeah. >> But you could be vertical specialization in the applications. So I noticed you're covering analytics, Watson, Cloud, hybrid cloud, emerging technologies. >> Yeah. >> Blockchain, and many others. >> Yeah. >> So talk about, it's obvious you guys are now cutting across, horizontally, across the different IBM divisions. Is that by design? >> Yeah. >> What's the impact of the ecosystem and partners for that horizontally cut over? >> Yeah, I know, I mean it's a great question, I think. Look, there are some specific design patterns that we see across every technology, across every, you know, business at IBM. One design pattern is pretty obvious, you saw it with the launch of the IBM cloud private data. Following up on last years IBM Cloud Private. And that design pattern is really about people containerizing applications. And so, at the end of the week, we have the business partner, or PartnerWorld Leadership conference. Excuse me. Where a number of our partners really are looking at how do I bring that work load to the cloud. And it's not so much the cloud is the end point. That's really the starting off point to A; Get much wider distribution and B; Be able to take advantage of a lot of these emerging technologies, like Blockchain, like A.I. Like IOT, and numerous others, Quantum, et cetera, they'll just keep coming. So really cloud to me is just a way for us to open the door to a lot of the technology that's flooding the market. >> Dave: Joel, can you talk about partnership, you mentioned before that you guys are kind of selective, John calls them Barney deals, ya know. I love you, you love me. You guys sound like you don't look for those, not volume, it's quality. >> Yeah. >> What are the criteria that you're looking for? How do you get value out of those? How do you measure that value out of the partnerships? If someone is a prospective partner out there, how should I be interacting with you? >> Yeah, I think, there's probably two steps. I think one is really recognizing that, in my own personal view, is that we really want to partner with folks who embrace open standards. Now I'm not going to like go as far to say open source, 'cause I think there is a lot that goes into that. But I will say open standards, meaning, not these like large monolithic applications, but can you actually integrate with us in some meaningful way? And to do that, that's why we actually started on this new platform that we are launching today. Called IBM Partner Self-service. Is the ability to first integrate with IBM. So, if you can demonstrate that you can build with IBM first, whether that's a startup, an ISV, a business partner. Like that's criteria number one. Criteria number two is are you a trusted partner? So, do you actually have the same level of competency that we would expect from, frankly, our own sellers, and our own people. And so, to do that, we've also launched new competency paths for business partners and partners as well. So, those are the two major criterias. And then the third one, which I think is kind of the holy grail, is selling with IBM. So we also launched a sell with path today where you can actually list in our marketplace. And then we will actually help you reach new markets. And then demonstrate there's clients, there's a client need that really wants our joint solution, right? And so, to me, those are the three things, to re-state. Like, you know, building with us, having a level of competency with us, and then demonstrating client success with us. >> Okay, so, integrate, you really don't need you guys to do that. I can just dive in and do that. Bake it out a little bit, and then approach you. What kind of help do you give? Do you have programs once you get by those gates? >> So, you know, I would categorize into two groups, I think we have a ton of online support. So, you know, we even embrace Slack at IBM. If you're not aware of that, we have Slack everywhere. And, so, for a self service, I want to say, look, what does zero touch mean, right, in this day and age, for a partner. And so, they can go to our site today, and actually get, you know, sign up for Slack, and talk directly to our technical specialist as well as to our developer advocates. And so, on the enablement and integration side, my colleague, Angel Diaz and team, have done a great job of launching hundreds of IBM code patterns. So that you can just pick these artifacts up, these assets up, and leverage them to integrate all sorts of capabilities into your product. >> You know, Dave, I want to get your thoughts on this, because you and I have been talking about the API integration, and I want to get back to Joel's point in a second because I think this is critical for startups and ecosystem partners. API's are the (speaking quickly) for developers right now, so if I don't want to take a big chance on being all in on IBM, say I want to kick the tires, API's are critical. So the question is, are you seeing that traction on your side of the house, in terms of the end now, since the level of API integration, is that the touchpoint? Is it like the beginning phases? And what level of commitment that you're seeing with people. >> Well, John, to me it comes down to innovation, and it's interesting because Joel came out of the data world. To me, the innovation in the next 10 years starts with data. The second component of that innovation, I think, over the next decade or so is going to be, really, A.I., whether you call it cognitive or machine intelligence or artificial intelligence. And then third, I think is cloud economics and that's really where the API economy fits in. You got to have API'S to integrate, as Joel was saying. You've got to have marginal... You've got to have scale, marginal costs go to zero eventually. You've got to have network effects and you've got to be able to track startups, which is another question I have. >> Now Joel, back to you, on the start on the integration, whether it's a startup or a big company. It used to be, the old days, you got to go all in. You've got to get the developer kit, >> Joel: Yeah. >> Download it, line it to a swim lane, get deeper, prove your value. >> Yeah. >> Find the value's faster; what's the first hurdle if someone wants, hey I want to give IBM a shot here? Love the sell, holy grail option, is it API'S, can people integration on their own? Talk about that specific first step because some people might open up the door and go whoa! There's more here than I thought. Or, wow, there's some real tech. Or, I don't want to use IBM tech, I want to use some of mine. There's that first indifference point. >> Yeah, I think there are areas where we've seen dramatic customer experience improvements. So to give one example, as we've partnered with Ubisoft, Redstorm last year around a new title game that they released called Star Trek Bridge Crew, and so, you know, to me, we went on our own merit, and I think that publisher chose IBM because Watson Conversation is absolutely the best on the market. And so what that did is it enabled game players, their end customer, their end user, to speak into a VR headset and just give commands, as you would naturally. And so, I think a lot of, as you think about IBM, it's, yeah, we've made it completely easy to access our API'S. I think, there's a great quote from the founder of Flickr that I read years ago, I'll go dig it up for you guys later, but it was along the lines of business development means, today is exposing your API'S, like, that's it! And, on the other side of it, we give a lot away in terms of cloud credits, right, and so, today, if you go and sign up on our self service platform, we'll give you $10,000 a month in free cloud credits to build and build quickly. Because, at the end of the day, if it's not self service, if it requires more heavy lifting, then, frankly, we're not doing our jobs. And so that's my commitment, is to make sure that is available, is accessible, and there's experts there that can help you on your journey. >> So that attracts startups, obviously, 10K a month is a honey pot for those guys. What about existing IBM clients that want to get to the cloud. Migrate to the cloud. How do you help those guys? >> Yeah, so, in the migration front, we have a great team in place with IBM services, who basically have set up a migration factor, if you will, and there are numerous ways to chart your course to the cloud. Whether it's, you know, full cloud or hybrid cloud, or some offloading, some aspects to the cloud. There's a lot of different paths you can take and so to do that, we're offering $50,000 in migration credits for the first couple months. We're also offering 35% off for professional services. So, we have a great offer going on over the next few months to help people make that first step. >> Incentives are key. >> And, look, we're here with you so it's not like, here, throwing it over the fence, and good luck! You know, tweet at me, instant message me, I'm around. And I will be absolutely committed to partner success. >> Yeah, you know, incentives are critical, that's going to get the market going. But, the end of the day, it's the type of value, and I want to get your thoughts, it's something that's come up that I've heard people talk about in the hallways and other conferences. They kind of chirp about "Hey, you know, "I'd like to get this, from suppliers. "I want to see more tools, more programs "to help me get more customers, to get more value. "I'm building apps, but also got a business to run." What are some of the conversations you've had over the past year with customers and partners? Stack rank the top three or four things that they talk about, either their pain points or things that are on their mind, that's worth noting? >> I mean, I would say first and foremost, I mean, me, myself, being in a startup at H2O. Three, four years ago. We used to walk in there and sell into the data scientists, right, so if you don't know H2O, they're a great company, a machine learning company, but we would get the data scientists really excited about working with our product, and then lo and behold, we'd get to the CIO office saying, "Hey, what is this stuff? "Get it out of here." You know, Hadoop was the same way, by the way, 2010 working at AVG, like, we'd bring in Hadoop. Like what is this data like thing? There's no governance, it's a mess. Where they could really, you know, work with IBM, where they see value from IBM is when we go into the CIO office together and say, look, we've demonstrated that there's value here. We've demonstrated that there's actual customer need. We can create a lot of help in terms of getting the rest of the organization bought in. Put in the right governance around it. Because, look, I mean GDPR is real, it's a big deal. Like, data privacy, is huge. So, you know, Rob Thomas likes to say, "You can't have good A.I. without I.A." I think that's a great information architecture. So, I agree, and so I think that's what the number one benefit is. Really get in there, move quickly, demonstrate value, and then when you're ready to make that next step of how you roll that out to the rest of the enterprise, that's when IBM becomes a huge help. >> You know, you mentioned GDPR. With regulatory issues now are becoming criteria for a lot of application developers that are small that may not have the resources to handle the right to get your name out of a database or other tools, and other regulations, certainly. Decentralize applications with Blockchain, another regulatory challenge-- >> Yep. >> Opportunity as well. Are you guys having those kinds of conversations, like putting specific things in place beyond GDPR, and if so what regulatory and legal things do you see out there that could be blockers for customers, that you guys hope to go after? >> I mean, I don't think there's a one word answer here. I do think that you take it on a case by case basis. I think you're seeing different countries adopt GDPR differently. Germany, obviously, being a very strict kind of country in doing that. So, you know, IBM services, as well as our analytics team, are really focused on that. I think, like I said, what you saw with ICP data coming out this week, I think that's a really important way to look at it. My own personal view, I think, for sure there's a lot of compliance, They have to look at, and understand the workflow, workflows of how people are using that data, as well as application architecture is big. And those are all the considerations, I think, that you are going to see as people move. I read a statistic that 40% of all CSP'S, MSP'S, are moving, are growing, like it's 40% growth from IBC, 50% of all developers are now embedding A.I. So, this market is growing and growing fast. But, you're right. If folks out there aren't really taking GDPR seriously, you can get yourself into some hot water. >> Well, we've observed that scale matters, certainly, whether it's a partner or cloud, that gets, that helps people. >> Yeah. >> Joel, well, thanks for coming onto theCUBE, we really appreciate it. >> Yeah, my pleasure. >> Before we end, I want to get your thoughts, just share with the folks that are watching. What kind of deals do you want to do? What's on your radar? What's the priorities for you? From a strategic business development standpoint. To develop across that horizontally scalable, IBM division space, as well as technology space? >> You know, it's not what deals I want to do, it's really what deals our partners want to do. >> Come on, your in charge, come on. >> It's really what deals our partners want to do, ya know. I mean, look, I get excited about transforming industries, I really do, so I look at, not what's the transactional partnership, like go, we'll do something, and there's some revenue, or something. I look at how do we transform an industry? >> Let me rephrase the question. What's on the priority list for you guys, from a transformational area, that's important for your partners. >> Yeah, I would say for sure, obviously, A.I. is huge. Obviously data is huge, obviously cloud is huge. But, looking really specific, I think you just add tech after each industry. So Addtech, Fintech, Healthtech obviously. Game tech and, I think, probably the last one, to me personally, is the most exciting. We signed an amazing deal with Unity at the end of last year, the start of this year. In fact GDC game developer conference is going on as we speak in San Francisco. So half my team right now is over there, demonstrating Watson as like VR, AR, and it's not just for games, right. It's like with BMW and VW doing some cool stuff there as well. So, I'm really excited about the, AR, VR, industry growing, especially with our partner Unity. >> There's a new creative out there-- >> Can I jump in before you exit? I want to ask you a follow up on that, because if transformation is sort of the target for your partnerships. Healthcare is an area that should be transformed. But, needs to be transformed, but it's hard to transform healthcare. >> Joel: It is, yeah. >> Do you feel like you could start moving the needle from a partnership perspective? Or is that going to take some more time? >> You know, I think there's a lot of great work being done there. I do believe... Look, in general, I think we can move a lot faster with partners, in fact, I like to call it like the Nordstrom model. Right? Like IBM in the past has been Barney's of New York, forever, right? From a branding and from how we partner with folks, like I think we need to move more to a Nordstrom, like, yeah, we'll sell our own offerings off the rack, but then we need to help partners come in and create the right styles for the right need and the right industry. >> Yeah and then there's a Nordstrom Rack you're going to need to put that on. (laughing) Over technology goes the Nordstrom Rack. Joel Horowitz, thanks for coming out. Vice President Strategic Partnerships and Offerings, here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, with three days of IBM Think live streaming, all of the videos will be up on thecube.net sports live now. Youtube.com/siliconangle for all the ondemands when the show's over. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (light techno music)