(upbeat music) >> Welcome to today's session of theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, The Next Big Thing in AI, Security, & Life Sciences, and in this segment, we feature Sonrai security, of course for the security track I'm your host, Dave Vellante, and today we're joined by Sandy Bird, who's the co-founder and chief technology officer of Sonrai, and Avi Boru, who's the director of cloud engineering at World Fuel Services, and in this discussion, we're going to talk about 22 to two data centers, how World Fuel Services and Sonrai Security actually made it happen securely. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, come on in. >> Thank you. >> So we hear consistent themes from chief information security officers, that many if not most enterprises they struggle today with cloud security, there's confusion with various tools and depressing lack of available talent to attack this problem. So Sandy, I want to start with you, we always love to ask co-founders, why did you start your company? Take us back to that decision. >> Yeah, I think looking at Sonrai Security was interesting in that, it was a time to start over, it was a time to build a native in the cloud, as opposed to having a data center, and be able to use, you know, a vendor of infrastructure, be able to use the latest and greatest technology and really change the way people secure their workloads, what was interesting, you know, when we started the company, I believe that the world was in a more mature space probably in cloud than they were at the time when we were starting it, in that we were really focused around, if we could understand all of the rights and entitlements to data, we could understand data movement, we'd had hope in protecting the data and arriving in cloud, we realized that the maturity of the companies building in cloud, we're not quite there yet, they were really struggling with, you know, the identities models in the cloud, how to actually secure, you know, workloads, server less functions that are ephemeral these types of things, and even just sometimes basic governance problems, and the technology we had built was great at understanding all of the ways that data could be accessed, and we were able to expand that into all the resources of the cloud and it's an exciting space to be in, and it's also, I truly believe we'll be able to actually make cloud environments more secure than what we were doing in enterprise, because again for the first time ever you have full inventory, you have the ability to make controls that apply to the entire infrastructure, it's really an exciting time. >> I mean, I've said many times I feel like security is a do over and the fact that you're coming at it as a data problem and bringing in the cloud that intersection, I think is actually quite exciting. So Avi let's bring you into the conversation, you know, obviously we've seen cloud exploding it's continuing to be a staple of digital business transformations and acceleration especially around identity, so what's your point of view on cloud security, what's different and how does your company approach it? >> Sure, thank you for having me Dave, and just to give you a bit of World Fuel Services, World Fuel Services is a public company, and it's based out of Miami, and we are ranked 91 in the fortune 500 list, so we are spread all across the globe, and as part of our transformation to distress our business, we took over a big challenge to migrate all our global infrastructure from 22 data centers to AWS, that was a massive challenge for us, and we are downright now to 20 data centers, we only have two more to go, and we did this in the last two years, and that was really good for us, but as we've been doing this migration, there was also a strong need for us to build a strong security foundation, because going into the cloud as much as capabilities it gives us to innovate, it also gives us a lot of challenges to deal with from security standpoint, and as part of building the security foundation, we had to tackle some key challenges, one was how do we build our cloud security operating model and how do we up skill our people, the talent that you've been binding it out, and how do we make security a way of working in this new world, and more than choosing a solution we needed a really strong security partner who can help us guide in this journey, help us build the foundations and take us further and mature us in this, and that's where it was really interesting for us to partner with Sonrai, who helped us along the way, develop a foundation and now helping us mature our security platform. >> Avi, what were the technology underpinnings, that enticed you to work with Sonrai? >> Sonrai has lot of unique capabilities but I'll take it out on two key points, right? One, Sonrai has a cloud security posture management which is different from other platforms that are out there because they give you capability for a lot of out of the box frameworks and controls, but in addition to that, every organization has need to build unique specific frameworks, specific controls, they give you that capability, which is massive for enterprises, and the second key thing is, if you look at AWS, it has more than 200 services and every service has its unique capability but one key component they use across all the services, is Identity and Access Management, IAM and Sonrai has a unique perspective of using IAM to track risks and identify the interactions between user and machine identities which was really exciting and new for us, and we felt that was a really good foundation and stepping point to use Sonrai. >> All right, Sandy, we definitely saw the need for a better identity explode, in conjunction with the cloud migrations during the pandemic, it was sort of building and building and then it was accelerated, maybe talk a little bit about how you approach this, and specifically talk about your identity analytics and the graph solution that you guys talk about. >> Yeah, I've been a fan of graph solutions for many years, one of the great benefits in this particular space with identity is that, the cloud models for identity are fairly complex and quite different between AWS, Azure and GCP, however, the way that entitlements work, some identity is granted in entitlement, and that entitlement gives them access to do something, sometimes that's something is to assume another identity, and then do something on that identities behalf, and when you're actually trying to secure these clouds this jumping of identities, which happens a lot in the AWS model, or inheritance which happens a lot in the Azure model where you're given access at one level of the tree and you automatically gain access to things below that if you have that entitlement, those models inside of graph allow us to understand exactly how any given identity when we talk about identity we always think of people, but it's not, of course as you said, sometimes it's a machine, sometimes it's a cloud service, it could be many different things, how does every single one of those identities get access to that given resource? And it's not always as clear as, okay, well, here are the direct identities that can access this resource, it may only be able to be accessed with a single key, but who has access to the key, and what has access to the key, and what's the policy on that key, and if that's set too widely can other maybe nefarious actors get access to that key, and by using the graph, we can tie that whole model together to understand the entire list, of what gets access, I think that's actually what surprises a lot of the identity governance and data governance teams that are not in cloud, you know, when enterprise was very intentional, you configured the database to use the identity provider and the rules that you wanted it to use, and that's all that ever got access to that database. In cloud, there are a lot of configuration knobs and things and depending on how you turn them, you could open up a lot of identities to get access to whatever that resource is, often it's data, but it could be a network, it could be many things. So, the graph allows us to tie all that together, the second part of it is, it really allows us to see, we call them effective permissions, what the effective permission of that identity is, the clouds have done this phenomenal thing in using identities as a control mechanism just like in firewall, like an identity firewall, where they can take permissions away from things based on sets of conditions, so one of the great ways, let's say you didn't want to have any data stored deployed without encryption, you could write a policy at the top of your cloud, that says, anytime a data stores is deployed, if encryption is not there, deny that function. And so what happens is, is you can create this very protective environment using identity controls, but the problem is when you actually go to evaluate your cloud for risk, you may find a scenario where an identity has access as an example, to do something like create an internet gateway, or create a public endpoint, but there's this policy somewhere else, that's taking that away, and you don't want thousands of alerts because of that, you want to actually understand the model and say, look if we understand that this policy is mitigating your risk, then don't show the alert in the first place. And it really helps by putting it in a graph, because we can actually see all of these interconnections, we can see how they're interrelated, and determine the exact effective permissions of any identity and what risks that may have. >> So Avi, I mean, Sandy is really getting to the heart of sort of operationalizing you security in the cloud, and we looked at the compelling aspect of the cloud, and one of them anyway is scale, but people tell us to really take advantage of the cloud, they have to evolve that operating model maybe completely change the operating model, to really take advantage of scale, so my question is how do you operationalize your security practices, what should people think about, in terms of the time it takes to build in automations and bots for things like continuous compliance what can you share in terms of best practice? >> So traditional ways of operating if you look at it is, you identify a security risk, and a ticket is created and teams starts mitigating them. But with so many cloud services and with many solutions, the team start building in the cloud, it becomes too much of an overhead for teams to mitigate all these security risks that keep coming into the backlog, so as we partner with Sonrai in building a foundation, the way we tried to approach it is differently, we said why don't we build this using automatic recommendations, if we know what are the security risks, that we should not be creating in our environment and be noncompliant, how can we mitigate them? And with Sonrai and AWS API capabilities, it's not that hard for us to be a lot of intimidation buds because I didn't find risks, 'cause they have been taken care by Sonrai, the only aspect we need to take care is, how do we mitigate that? So that's the part we chose in building, cloud security operating model, is modeling more than an automated imitations, but as part building that there is always, where everything cannot be remediated automatically, and for these kinds of scenarios, we built a workflow where it still gets funneled to teams, so they can prioritize in their backlog, but other key thing that we did as part of operationalizing is, teams need to use Sonrai as their way of working, teams need to know what and why they should be using Sonrai. So we conduct a lot of training and onboarding and working sessions for teams, so they understand how we use Sonrai, how to consume the data coming out of Sonrai, so they can proactively start acting on how to stay compliant, but yeah, it's been an amazing experience building our foundation though. >> Sandy, I wonder if we can come back to, talking about comparisons with the traditional prevailing security models, I mean, we entering this API economy, as I said before, cloud is a staple of digital business, but you know people have been doing on-prem security for decades, you know, data loss prevention is an entire sub-industry, so what's different about doing it in the cloud, how should we think about that, in terms of whether you know, what responsibilities we have, the technology, what's your perspective on that? >> There's at least five questions in there Dave, so we'll. >> Pick your favorite. >> Yeah, you know, to feed off of what Avi was talking about, you know, he said many times, you know, teams need to solve these issues, teams need to see the issues they're creating, and it's interesting as we move to cloud, we decentralize some of these security functions, and that's actually an important part of the Sonrai solution and how you build a cloud security operating model, there's a set of findings, we'll call them, maybe there are security findings, maybe they're informational findings, that are a fairly low risk, and should be dealt with by the individual teams themselves, but that same team, you know, maybe isn't the person that can sign off on the risk if it's high enough, and if it's not then it needs to be escalated to the next level up to have that risk signed off on. A lot of times in large enterprise for workloads, that was done using unfortunately, you know tickets and systems and, you know, humans actually, you know, filling out some form of a checklist, saying, yes I met this, no I didn't, and we can automate huge numbers of those tests, including distributing them to the teams for the teams to solve themselves, and if they do their job right, there's not even the need for the central security body necessarily to know about the issues because they got solved, but when they don't get solved, that's when rather, you know, escalation to Boston automation or escalating to a centralized team starts to make sense, you kind of said a lot about DLP there as you were doing in cloud and just data security in general, and I do think, you know, cloud has given us this interesting opportunity, that's really upset data security in the old way on its head, you know, we used to do data security by putting agents on systems, or sometimes it was a proxy in front of it but either way that doesn't work well in cloud, when you're consuming platform as a service, you know, Amazon is not going to let you put an agent on their database that they're provisioning for you, and, you know, if you put in your own proxy in front of it you probably just messed up the elastic scalability that was built into the whole thing to begin with. So we needed a different way to look at this, however, we also took away a couple of things, in cloud the application teams themselves generally use fit for purpose data stores, they use the data store that's the best for the workload they're doing, our own workload has many data stores under the covers, it's not one data store, and so because of that, this kind of, you know, the old world of there being a data security team or you know, database optimization team, that you know optimize the database workloads, actually gets distributed as well all back to those teams, and so, we've gained kind of this, you know, fit for purpose smaller sets of data stores that are being used all over, and on top of that, the cloud vendors in many cases have done great things to enable monitoring, you know, part of the reason we were putting agents on database servers, is because the Oracle admin said I can't turn logging on, I don't have a big enough system to do it, it's going to crash the system, well in cloud parts of that go away, you can scale the systems up, you can enable loggings, now you can get that rich data that you wanted when you were an enterprise, and so, you know Sonrai is really kind of taken that model and said, look we can give you the visibility around data movement, we can give you the visibility around all of the entitlements to that data, we can understand, is your data at risk? And then we can profile all that for anomalies, and say, you know, it's kind of odd that the workload that normally connects into this through this automated fashion is now using its access key from a different location, that doesn't make any sense, why is that happening? And so you get kind of strong anomaly detection as well as the governance. So, you know, data security and cloud, if we kind of fast forward a few years, will look very different than it does today, I still believe some of the teams are not quite there yet in cloud, you know, they're still struggling with some of these identity problems we talked about, they still struggle some of them with CSBM problems, and so we have to solve those first obviously before we get to the true data security. But it's interesting that cloud has enabled us with such rich tooling and APIs to actually do it better than what we've done on enterprise. >> A lot of really powerful concepts in there, thank you Sandy. I mean, this notion of decentralizing security functions reminds me when Vogels describes this hyper decentralized distributed system that Amazon is building, and it is clearly a theme, you know, maybe it's bromide, but people talk about shifting left, designing security in, and it's important, not just bolting it on as an afterthought, and so, maybe this next question sort of really relates to the theme of this event, which is all about scale, here's the question Sandy, thinking about your contribution to the future of cloud, obviously you start a company, you want to grow that company, you want to serve customers and grow your revenues et cetera. But what's your defining contribution to the future of cloud scale? >> Look, we want to enable companies to scale faster, we want them to be able to put more workloads in cloud using, you know, the right set of security controls to keep those workloads safe, I know we can actually do this in a way where, you know, we talk about defense in depth for years, right? And usually in enterprise that meant many levels of networks before you got access, now we need to do defense in depth in terms of, you know, actually variety of controls, we can't throw the network control away, it still has to be there, we need an identity control, and it will be the primary control for what we do in cloud, we need a data lock, you know, rather that's through an encryption key policy or whatever it is, so we have multiple different layers of defense in depth, we can use in cloud today, and so it will be a much more secure environment than it was in the future, but we have to, again, so my contribution is hopefully I can help everybody get to that level, because right now we still see way too many breaches with very simple configuration problems that ended up exposing data unintentionally, and that's worrisome. >> You know, it's funny, a lot of people maybe can't relate to that defense in depth, I mean, obviously security people can, but we as individuals who now rely so much on our mobile phones, and things like SMS, and then you start to build in, non SMS, you know, base two factor authentication and you start to build your own personal layers, it's sort of a microcosm of the complexity that you have to think about in the enterprise, but in having tools to automate is critical, and expertise obviously, so let's wrap. Avi give us your final thoughts and key takeaways on building a world-class cloud security. >> I guess the key take of this would be, you know, to choose the right partner, it's not just the solution, another key takeaway is automate your way, because with security in the cloud is different than traditionally how do you do it, and the only fastest way to move is automate yourself away out of it and rely on talent, rely on a lot of young talent that's coming in and all the tools like Sonrai AWS are making it easier to operate in the cloud, so bring up the young talent and up skill the talent and leverage on these tools to be more secure on the cloud. >> Yeah, use automation to solve the big problem of, you know, that talent gap, there is not enough of it out there, and the adversaries they're well-equipped and quite capable. Okay Sandy, please give us your last word. >> Look again, I think a cloud is going to get us to a point where we are more secure than we were on enterprise, we have all of the right tools and controls to do it, we can decentralize the security and make it better, again, I think if anything just to encourage people to really look at a cloud security governance model, right? You can't do this ad hoc, trying to whack-a-mole small issues as they come up, you build it in as an operating model, you automate it and you deal with the exceptions. >> Yeah, I mean, you're very optimistic and I think is for good reason, I just remembered listening to Steven Schmidt a couple of years ago at reinforce, basically saying, look, we feel pretty optimistic about solving this problem, whereas, I have to say every year I look back in the enterprise and on-prem and I know it's getting worse, and so, keep up the good work gents, I really appreciate the time on theCUBE today, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching theCUBE presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, The Next Big Thing in AI, Security & Life Sciences. I'm Dave Vellante. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman. This is our one day coverage of UiPath. UiPath Forward Americas. UiPath does these events all over the world. They've reached about 14,000 customers to date and about 1,500 here, Stu. A great show, a lot of energy. We're watching the ascendancy of robotic process automation, the simplification of software robots. Courtney Dominiguez is here, she's the Vice President of World Fuel Services and she's joined by Ashim Gupta who's the UiPath's Chief Customer Success Officer. Welcome folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> So, Courtney, let's start with you. World Fuel Services: what's that all about? >> So we're a logistics company, an energy logistics company. We're actually based here in Miami, Florida so it was a short commute over to the Fountain Blue for the day. >> Lucky you. >> Yes, exactly. So, yeah, we do fuel globally, all over the world. So we do for aviation, marine, and land. We also focus on renewable energy and we're really developing over in Europe as well. >> So, interesting, a lot of interesting drivers and dynamics in your business, fast moving, a lot of change, sometimes hard to predict. >> Yes. >> In terms of your role, talk about your role and what some of the key business drivers are that force you to be on top of your game. >> Yeah, so, I'm in charge of shared services and automation for the company so it's really my role to help us operate more efficiently and do things smarter. You know everybody's being challenged to do more with less and as you grow the business, your transaction accounts grow as well so we're really in charge of transforming and providing solutions. UiPath is a component, a big component, of what we're going to be rolling out and helping to really do transformation. >> So, Ashim, Courtney saying, do more with less, that's got to be music to your ears. Your job is to make, Courtney, her company, successful. So, talk about your role and how you actually make your success. >> Sure, so, one, I was a former customer. So you look at Daniel Dines' strategy and UiPath's strategy and it's bringing people in who really have a passion for the industry and have that experience to go and try and operationalize a lot of our mission. As a former customer, I know a lot of times you get sold software and you don't get a lot of the tools or you got to go buy another set of tools to make the first set of tools work. So customer success is about giving technical talent and really great experts and put them in the hands of our best customers to answer the questions that are out there as they embark on their RPA journey. That can go from anything from infrastructure, technical hurdles that they may face to how to really think about RPA, how to eventualize it within their areas. And by doing that, we get people to up that adoption curve, they start seeing the benefits of RPA and it becomes a no-brainer, both for the company to invest in and employees to understand the value that RPA brings. >> So, Courtney, was RPA kind of a no-brainer for you? Was it a, "What is this technology?" How did you go about sort of bringing RPA into your organization? >> Yeah, I think all of the above. So, it seems very intuitive. You know, you want to do things smarter and do things more efficiently but that makes people nervous too so there's a lot of people that say, "I like what I do" "and if you do it smarter and more efficient," "do you still need me?" And I also think that, from the top, it's easy to say robots, and that sounds really cool but really putting it into the water supply is a different story. So, one of the things that we did, we hosted a RPA awareness day, partnered with UiPath. They came in and worked with us on that. And then after that we hosted a bot-a-thon. So, we went out and we had our whole enterprise download the community version of UiPath and just had them start experimenting and coming up with their own ideas and honestly, it was a great crowd-sourcing engine for us. And we just came up with an instant pipeline of ideas and people really caught on and bought into it at that point. So it was fantastic. >> Courtney, I want you to expand a little bit on that. In my career, I've always said, "I know next quarter," "next year, I'm going to have more to do." When I managed a group in operations it was, "You need to figure out what you can get rid of," "you know, what you can," I mean automated a decade ago was quite different than what you do today but I like what you said about how you engaged everybody and got them to, kind of, get over that fear of the unknown. How long's the process going to take? Did you have senior management involvement in the planning? >> Yeah honestly, this was a great, ground roots kind of a way of getting it out and it didn't take long at all. I mean we've only been on this journey a couple of months quite honestly and it's caught on like wildfire and we're really excited about it. So you know, I think it's great that we were able to partner some of our great, younger talent with some of our more, people who've been doing it for a long time. And we partnered together, we partnered them together and then they came up with their own ideas. It's easy for me to, Monday morning, quarterback, and stand on the other side and say, "Oh, you should do this or do that" but the people that are doing it everyday are the ones who have the best ideas. They know what they don't want to do. They know what they want to spend their time working on. So they're the best ones to figure out how to make that other stuff that's not quite as fun go away. So, yeah, it's been fantastic. >> So, Ashim, if I could ask, how do you help your customers figure out what the right metric is? What is success for them? You've been on the customer side, you've been talking to users, it's often like, "Oh, I think I'm going to be able" "to save money but maybe it's growing revenue." There's a lot of pieces there. >> I mean, a lot of it starts with listening because I don't think there's one right answer. You know, a lot of software companies come in and say, "It is just about cost", or, "It is just about X". We think about it very differently. Some of our customers think about it in terms of cost equality, getting accurate data, getting things done 100% accurate and getting data quality up. Some of them, it is a productivity game, right? It's important to get that cost down. We have customers in Japan who are using it to augment their workforce because they need more workers than the market can supply and RPA gets it. So I would say the first is listening to our customers. The second piece of it is, then, there are some standard things across our customer base that we're all learning together. You know, one of our customers started looking at the time, the run time of a bot. Or how long, how much infrastructure does it consume? So we're able to get best practices across to be able to figure out what are the right metrics that suits our customers' needs. >> Courtney, I'm trying to understand if it was a top-down initiative or a bottoms-up or both? >> It's both, yeah I think it's really both. So I think it's that top level setting the direction and saying, "This is what we want to do." One of the things we have at World Fuel is, a lot of people have the mantra, and Dan said this this morning as well, is, "We don't want to touch the keyboard." Right? We want to be no-touch. We want things to come through seamlessly. So that's getting great data quality at the beginning with customer onboarding and then getting it all the way through and out the door because, at the end of the day, we need to get the invoices out and the money back in, right? And I need accurate data to do that and do things efficiently. So, I think it's from the top saying, "We want to be no-touch", and then it's up to my team to help provide solutions and work with the businesses and figure out how to make that happen. >> So it sounds like you had this ideation initiative and did you just pick one or two or did you say, "Okay, guys, go?" Where did you start, what did you have to do to really prove out the value? >> We did, we definitely picked one or two. It went with quick wins but when you go with quick wins and you say, "This is what we did in a really short" "amount of time with minimal effort," "think of the art of the possible, think of what we can do?" And now our focus is not on quick wins. Our focus is on, "How do we transform our business? "How do we take this tool and really apply it" "and transform the way we work?" So I think it's important to have those quick wins initially and just kind of set the stage because that gets everybody thinking, "Wow, this can be really big." >> What kind of person was required to build the robots? Somebody who's fairly technical or was it a business person, was it a team, two people team? >> I have the best team ever and I really think we got a lot of them internally. Really, citizen, kind of data, scientist people. Not anybody that was necessarily trained in it. Now we're getting more and more data scientists added to the team. So we're getting more developer-type skills. We also have BAs, so we've got some people who are great at looking at process and how can we make things more efficient? It's a combination but I do really think that some of our best resources have just been people that are really eager to learn. I mean, UiPath does an amazing job of putting the certification and the academy, and so many online tools it's free. I mean, it's so easy to work with them and really pick it up. You know you don't need a lot of training and that's one of the reasons we selected UiPath you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out. And they really make it all so readily available. >> A lot of the customers we talked to today on theCUBE have gone through a business case, some rigorous, some sort of back-of-napkin, What kind of business case and justification did you go through? >> So we started small with the bots. So we said, "Lets prove it out with a small number of bots" "and if we can do that, then we can scale". And we were just chatting earlier that now we really want to look at it and say, "Over the next three", "six, 12 months, how can we really scale this" "and what do we think that looks like?" Again, start small and then, now okay now we know what's out there and we know what we can get so let's go big and we're ready to do that now. >> So did you go through a rigorous, sort of, quantification of the business value or was it more like, "Hey, it's low risk. Let's try it, see what we get." >> Yeah, yeah, it's low risk, let's just do it. >> I mean what was the result, what was the business event? >> Honestly, it's been fantastic. I mean the results back that we've had have been savings of 100,000s of dollars with minimal, again, minimal effort and minimal, really unsure of what we were going to get out of it. So, it's phenomenal. >> And the denominator, and I say denominator I'm talking about benefit divided by cost-- >> Yeah. >> Sounds like the denominator was pretty low. >> Pretty low, yeah. >> One of the best ways to get our eyes, lower the denominator. I always talk to my kids about this when it comes to college cost so you know what I mean, (laughing) And really, with the community version, getting that out there and free and just having people start playing around with it? I mean, that right there keeps your cost pretty low because they're funneling and putting ideas in the pipeline and then when it comes time to develop it and make it production ready, that's where our effort is involved but to just get that into the pipeline with a little bit of effort and a little bit of cost is a no-brainer. >> So it's clear, your strategy as a company is to lower the barriers to entry for your clients, train them, free training, get them hooked, and then let the rest of it soar. >> Yeah, I mean, one is we share that, our CEO talked about that today, we share that joy that automation brings to a lot of people's work. That's what drives them. So for us, it's not about nickel and diming people every step of the way, it is arming them with what they need to fulfill the mission for what we sold them automation or RPA for. And that's a huge part of it so it goes beyond just the academy, just the training, you know, it's the intimacy that we want to keep with our customers. So we're growing very fast in our number of employees. So, even though, I think we're getting close to 2,000 customers, our goal is to get to 2,000 employees here very quickly. And our CEO really stresses customer first in that equation so we learn and we do little pivot points along the way. An example could be internal marketing, helping people drive awareness. You know, the bot-a-thon that Courtney had for her team, we want to be able to sponsor those things. You know, be partners in getting that name of RPA out there. So it's everything they need to try to get up that curve. >> Courtney, your enthusiasm is palpable, as much of the feedback that we've had from customers, but if you had to do it over again, would you change anything, would you go faster? Would you have done anything differently if you'd had a mulligan? >> One of the concerns is that I feel like we've got a lot of momentum and I want to keep it going. So I want to, like Ashim, we need to scale our team as well so that we're able to handle that pipeline of work coming in and that we don't stall out because I really see a lot of enthusiasm for what we're developing and we want to be able to keep up with that. I love moving fast, I wish we could move faster, I push my team to say, "How much faster can we go?", because there's commitments as well at the board level saying, you know, "What are you guys doing and how are you transforming?" But I wouldn't do anything over so far. So far it's been fantastic. >> You know It strikes me that when you put in a robot, and automate a process, you're saving for an individual, and arm or a leg, you know, Lots of arms and legs. How have you thought about virtualizing those arms and legs into a team that can really drive this to your last point, through the organization, to keep that momentum going? >> Yeah, that's what we're looking in now, right? We want to look at that digital roadmap and say, not arms and legs, but we actually want to look at real resources and that doesn't necessarily mean a resource reduction, it just means being able to scale and do things more efficiently and hopefully, redeploy those resources to do stuff that requires a brain, right? >> Ashim, I'm curious. Do you have some tools to help customers as to how they scale and grow and keep the momentum going? It reminds me of a rocket going on, you've got those booster levels, and you want to reach escape velocity but then probably, keep accelerating. >> Yeah, so you'll start seeing our platform expanding this. At this conference, and Daniel must have talked about it, we launched UiPath Go. Getting openness and collaboration within organizations and across organizations, that's really what our Go platform will enable people to do. Sharing automations, learning best practices, being able to connect with different companies, different partners at a fast pace, that's so important because there's not a cookie cutter approach to this, we need collective knowledge to ramp up the speed and then, slowly by slowly, the features that we're starting to do: sharable libraries within the platform, you're going to see other process discovery type automations come out or tools that we're starting to roll out to our customers. And then we have events. Yesterday, Courtney was a part of our customer advisory counsel. It is incredible, when you put customers like Courtney in a room, who are so passionate and are incredible, sharing what's working and what's not and everybody leaves saying, "Okay, these are the two things that I'm either" "going to look out for or that I'm going" "to do differently to make sure the journey happens ahead." Those are just a few. >> Courtney, Daniel was on earlier today and we were asking him to give some advice to these young people, you know, he's kind of inspirational. He talked about this morning in his keynote about people laughed him out of their office and so forth. And one of the things he said is, "I didn't think big enough," "I started to think bigger, you got to think bigger." So as you put on your think-big hat, where do you think this could go? >> So I really see UiPath and RPA collaborating, right? I mean, we were investing in a lot of smart tools and I want to see how all of those tools can work together. I don't want it to be just UiPath or just another tool, or workflow tool. I want to see how they can all, because to me, that's where the value really comes in. I mean if you're leveraging best-of-breed options and best-of-breed tools and then we can say, "How do all of these work together?" That's transformational. So, really, at the end of next year, what I want my team and what I want my leaders to say is, "Wow. They have really transformed the way that we work" "and the way that we do business." To me, that's a win. If Ashim can make me successful in that, I'll be a happy camper. >> Awesome, guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. We're seeing some of these trends that we talked about: the productivity gap, we have more jobs than we have employees to fill those jobs. The productivity line's not moving. RPA and the ascendancy of RPAs promises to change that and we'll be covering that ongoing. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward Americas. Stu Miniman And Dave Vellante. We will be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, California, it's theCUBE covering innovating to fuel the next decade of big data. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick, here with theCUBE. We are at the Western Digital Headquarters in San Jose, California. It's the Al-Mady Campus. A historic campus. It's had a lot of great innovation, especially in hard drives for years and years and years. This event's called Innovating to Fuel the Next Data Big Data. And we're excited to have a big brain on. We like to get smart people who's been watching this story for a while and will give us a little bit of historical perspective. It's John Rydning. He is the Research Vice President for Hard Drives for IEC. John, Welcome. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> Absolutely. So, what is your take on today's announcement? >> I think it's our very meaningful announcement, especially when you consider that the previous BIGIT Technology announcement for the industry was Helium, about four or five years ago. But, really, the last big technology announcement prior to that was back in 2005, 2006, when the industry announced making this transition to what they called at that time, "Perpendicular Magnetic Recording." And when that was announced it was kind of a similar problem at that time in the industry that we have today, where the industry was just having a difficult time putting more data on each disc inside that drive. And, so they kind of hit this technology wall. And they announced Perpendicular Magnetic Recording and it really put them on a new S curve in terms of their ability to pack more data on each disc and just kind of put it in some perspective. So, after they announce Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, the capacity per disc increased about 30% a year for about five years. And then over, really, a ten year period, increased about an average of about 20% a year. And, so today's announcement is I see a lot of parallels to that. You know, back when Perpendicular Magnetic Recording was announced, really they build. They increased the capacity per platter was growing very slowly. That's where we are today. And with this announcement of MAMR Technology the direction that Western Digital's choosing really could put the industry on a new S curve and putting in terms of putting more capacity, storage capacity on each one of those discs. >> It's interesting. Always reminds me kind of back to the OS in Microsoft in Intel battles. Right? Intel would come out with a new chip and then Microsoft would make a bigger OS and they go back and back and forth and back and forth. >> John: Yeah, that's very >> And we're seeing that here, right? Cuz the demands for the data are growing exponentially. I think one of the numbers that was thrown out earlier today that the data thrown off by people and the data thrown off by machines is so exponentially larger than the data thrown off by business, which has been kind of the big driver of IT spin. And it's really changing. >> It's a huge fundamental shift. It really is >> They had to do something. Right? >> Yeah, the demand for a storage capacity by these large data centers is just phenomenal and yet at the same time, they don't want to just keep building new data center buildings. And putting more and more racks. They want to put more storage density in that footprint inside that building. So, that's what's really pushing the demand for these higher capacity storage devices. They want to really increase the storage capacity per cubic meter. >> Right, right. >> Inside these data centers. >> It's also just fascinating that our expectation is that they're going to somehow pull it off, right? Our expectation that Moore's laws continue, things are going to get better, faster, cheaper, and bigger. But, back in the back room, somebody's actually got to figure out how to do it. And as you said, we hit these kind of seminal moments where >> Yeah, that's right. >> You do get on a new S curve, and without that it does flatten out over time. >> You know, what's interesting though, Jeff, is really about the time that Perpendicular Magnetic Recording was announced way back in 2005, 2006, the industry was really, already at that time, talking about these thermal assist technologies like MAMR that Western Digital announced today. And it's always been a little bit of a question for those folks that are either in the industry or watching the industry, like IDC. And maybe even even more importantly for some of the HDD industry customers. They're kind of wondering, so what's really going to be the next technology race horse that takes us to that next capacity point? And it's always been a bit of a horse race between HAMR and MAMR. And there's been this lack of clarity or kind of a huge question mark hanging over the industry about which one is it going to be. And Western Digital certainly put a stake in the ground today that they see MAMR as that next technology for the future. >> (mumbles words) Just read a quote today (rushes through name) key alumni just took a new job. And he's got a pin tweet at the top of his thing. And he says, "The smart man looks for ways "To solve the problem. "Or looks at new solutions. "The wise man really spends his time studying the problem." >> I like that. >> And it's really interesting here cuz it seems kind of obvious there. Heat's never necessarily a good thing with electronics and data centers as you mentioned trying to get efficiency up. There's pressure as these things have become huge, energy consumption machines. That said, they're relatively efficient, based on other means that we've been doing they compute and the demand for this compute continues to increase, increase, increase, increase. >> Absolutely >> So, as you kind of look forward, is there anything kind of? Any gems in the numbers that maybe those of us at a layman level are kind of a first read are missing that we should really be paying attention that give us a little bit of a clue of what the feature looks like? >> Well, there's a couple of major trends going on. One is that, at least for the hard drive industry, if you kind of look back the last ten years or so, a pretty significant percentage of the revenue that they've generated a pretty good percentage of the petabytes that they ship have really gone into the PC market. And that's fundamentally shifting. And, so now it's really the data centers, so that by the time you get to 2020, 2021, about 60 plus percent of the petabytes that the industry's shipping is going into data centers, where if you look back a few years ago, 60% was going into PCs. That's a big, big change for the industry. And it's really that kind of change that's pushing the need for these higher capacity hard drives. >> Jeff: Right. >> So, that's, I think, one of the biggest shifts has taking place. >> Well, the other thing that's interesting in that comment because we know scale drives innovation better than anything and clearly Intel microprocessors rode the PC boom to get out scale to drive the innovation. And, so if you're saying, now, that the biggest scale is happening in the data center Then, that's a tremendous force for innovation in there versus Flash, which is really piggy-backing on the growth of these jobs, because that's where it's getting it's scale. So, when you look at kind of the Flash hard drive comparison, right? Obviously, Flash is the shiny new toy getting a lot of buzz over the last couple years. Western Digital has a play across the portfolio, but the announcement earlier today said, you're still going to have like this TenX cost differentiation. >> Yeah, that's right. >> Even through, I think it was 20, 25. I don't want to say what the numbers were. Over a long period of time. You see that kind of continuing DC&E kind of conflict between those two? Or is there a pretty clear stratification between what's going to go into Flash systems, or what's going to hard drives? >> That's a great question, now. So, even in the very large HyperScale data centers and we definitely see where Flash and hard disk drives are very complimentary. They're really addressing different challenges, different problems, and so I think one of the charts that we saw today at the briefing really is something that we agree with strongly at IDC. Today, maybe, about 7% or 8% of all of the combined HDD SSD petabyte shipped for enterprise are SSD petabytes. And then, that grows to maybe ten. >> What was it? Like 7% you said? >> 6% to 7%. >> 6% to 7% okay. Yeah, so we still have 92, 93%, 94% of all petabytes that again are HDD SSD petabytes for enterprise. Those are still HDD petabytes. And even when you get out to 2020, 2021, again, still bought 90%. We agree with what Western Digital talked about today. About 90% of the combined HDD SSD petabytes that are shipping for enterprise continue to be HDD. So, we do see the two technologies very complementary. Talked about SSD is kind of getting their scale on PCs and that's true. They really are going to quickly continue to become a bigger slice of the storage devices attached to new PCs. But, in the data center you really need that bulk storage capacity, low cost capacity. And that's where we see that the two SSDs and HDDs are going to live together for a long time. >> Yeah, and as we said the conflict barrier, complimentary nature of the two different applications are very different. You need the big data to build the models, to run the algorithms, to do stuff. But, at the same time, you need the fast data that's coming in. You need the real time analytics to make modifications to the algorithms and learn from the algorithms >> That's right, yeah. It's the two of those things together that are one plus one makes three type of solution. Exactly, and especially to address latency. Everybody wants their data fast. When you type something into Google, you want your response right away. And that's where SSDs really come into play, but when you do deep searches, you're looking through a lot of data that has been collected over years and a lot of that's probably sitting on hard disc drives. >> Yeah. The last piece of the puzzle, I just want to you to address before we sign off, That was an interesting point is that not just necessarily the technology story, but the ecosystem story. And I thought that was really kind of, I thought, the most interesting part of the MAMR announcement was that it fits in the same form factor, there's no change to OS, there's no kind of change in the ecosystem components in which you plug this in. >> Yeah, that's right. It's just you take out the smaller drive, the 10, or the 12, or whatever, or 14 I guess is coming up. And plug in. They showed a picture of a 40 terabyte drive. >> Right. >> You know, that's the other part of the story that maybe doesn't get as much play as it should. You're playing in an ecosystem. You can't just come up with this completely, kind of independent, radical, new thing, unless it'S so radical that people are willing to swap out their existing infrastructure. >> I completely agree. It's can be very difficult for the customer to figure out how to adopt some of these new technologies and actually, the hard disk drive industry has thrown a couple of technologies at their customers over the past five, six years, that have been a little challenging for them to adopt. So, one was when the industry went from a native 512 by sectors to 4K sectors. Seems like a pretty small change that you're making inside the drive, but it actually presented some big challenges for some of the enterprise customers. And even the single magnetic recording technologies. So, it has a way to get more data on the disc, and Western Digital certainly talked about that today. But, for the customer trying to plug and play that into a system and SMR technology actually created some real challenges for them to figure out how to adopt that. So, I agree that what was shown today about the MAMR technology is definitely a plug and play. >> Alright, we'll give you the last word as people are driving away today from the headquarters. They got a bumper sticker as to why this is so important. What's it say on the bumper sticker about MAMR? It says that we continue to get more capacity at a lower cost. >> (chuckles) Isn't that just always the goal? >> I agree. >> (chuckles) Alright, well thank you for stopping by and sharing your insight. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Alright. Jeff Frick here at Western Digital. You're watching theCUBE! Thanks for watching. (futuristic beat)

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, California, it's theCUBE, covering Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Western Digital's headquarters in San Jose, California at the Almaden campus. Lot of innovation's been going on here, especially in storage for decades, and we're excited to be at this special press and analyst event that Western Digital put on today to announce some exciting new products. It's called Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Data. I'm super happy to have a long-time industry veteran, he just told me, 35 years, I don't know if I can tell (Mark laughs) that on air or not. He's Mark Grace, he's the Senior Vice President of Devices for Western Digital, Mar, great to have you on. >> Thanks Jeff, glad to be here. >> Absolutely, so you've seen this movie over and over and over, I mean that's one of the cool things about being in the Valley, is this relentless pace of innovation. So how does today's announcement stack up as you kind of look at this versus kind of where we've come from? >> Oh I think this is maybe one of the, as big as it comes, Jeff, to be honest. I think we've plotted a course now that I think was relatively uncertain for the hard drive industry and the data center, and plotted a course that I think we can speak clearly to the market, and clearly to customers about the value proposition for rotating magnetic storage for decades to come. >> Which is pretty interesting, 'cause, you know, rotating drives have been taking a hit over the last couple of years, right, flash has been kind of the sexy new kid on the block, so this is something new, >> Mark: It is. >> And a new S curve I think as John said. >> I agree, we're jumping onto a, we're extending the S curve, let's call it that. I think there's actually plenty of other S curve opportunities for us, but in this case, I think the industry, and I would say our customer base, we have been less than clear with those guys about how we see the future of rotating storage in the cloud and enterprise space, and I think today's announcement clarifies that and gives some confidence about architectural decisions relative to rotating storage going forward for a long time. >> Well I think it's pretty interesting, 'cause compared to the other technology that was highlighted, the other option, the HAMR versus the MAMR, this was a much more elegant, simpler way to add this new S curve into an existing ecosystem. >> You know, elegant's probably a good word for it, and it's always the best solution I would say. HAMR's been a push for many years. I can't remember the first time I heard about HAMR. It's still something we're going to continue to explore and invest in, but it has numerous hurdles compared to the simplicity and elegance, as you say, of MAMR, not the least of which is we're going to operate at normal ambient temperatures versus apply tremendous heat to try and energize the recording and the technologies. So any time you introduce extraordinary heat you face all kinds of ancillary engineering challenges, and this simplifies those challenges down to one critical innovation, which is the oscillator. >> Pretty interesting, 'cause it seems pretty obvious that heat's never a good thing. So it's curious that in the quest for this next S curve that the HAMR path was pursued for as long as it was, it sounds like, because it sounds like that's a pretty tough thing to overcome. >> Yeah, I think it initially presented perhaps the most longevity perhaps in early exploration days. I would say that HAMR has certainly received the most press as far as trying to assert it as the extending recording technology for enterprise HDDs. I would say we've invested for almost as long in MAMR, but we've been extremely quiet about it. This is kind of our nature. When we're ready to talk about something, you can kind of be sure we're ready to go with it, and ready to think about productization. So we're quite confident in what we're doing. >> But I'm curious from your perspective, having been in the business a long time, you know, we who are not directly building these magical machines, just now have come to expect that Moore's Law will contain, has zero to do with semiconductor physics anymore, it's really an attitude and this relentless pace of innovation that now is expected and taken for granted. You're on the other side, and have to face real physics and mechanical limitations of the media and the science and everything else. So is that something that gets you up every day >> Mark: Keeps me awake every night! >> Obviously keeps you awake at night and up every day. You've been doing it for 35 years, so there must be some appeal. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> But you know, it's a unique challenge, 'cause at the same time not only has it got to be better and faster and bigger, it's got to be cheaper, and it has been. So when you look at that, how does that kind of motivate you, the teams here, to deliver on that promise? >> Yeah, I mean in this case, we are a little bit defensive, in the sense of the flash expectations that you mentioned, and I think as we digest our news today, we'll be level setting a little bit more in a more balanced way the expectations for contribution from rotating magnetic storage and solid state storage to what I think is a more accurate picture of its future going forward in the enterprise and hyperscale space. To your point about just relentless innovation, a few of us were talking the other day in advance of this announcement that this MAMR adventure feels like the early days of PMR, perpendicular, the current recording technology. It feels like we understand a certain amount of distance ahead of us, and that's about this four-terabit per inch kind of distance, but it feels like the early days where we could only see so far but the road actually goes much further, and we're going to find more and more ways to extend this technology, and keep that order of magnitude cost advantage going from a hard drive standpoint versus flash. >> I wonder how this period compares to that, just to continue, in terms of on the demand side, 'cause you know, back in the day, the demand and the applications for these magical compute machines weren't near, I would presume, as pervasive as now, or am I missing the boat? 'Cause now clearly there is no shortage of demand for storage and compute. >> Yeah, depending on where you're coming from, you could take two different views of that. The engine that drove the scale of the hard drive industry to date has, a big piece of it in the long history of the hard drive industry has been the PC space. So you see that industry converting to flash and solid state storage more aggressively, and we embrace that, you know we're invested in flash and we have great products in that space, and we see that happening. The opportunity in the hyperscale and cloud space is we're only at the tip of the iceberg, and therefore I think, as we think about this generation, we think about it differently than those opportunities in terms of breadth of applications, PCs, and all that kind of create the foundation for the hard drive, but what we see here is the virtuous cycle of more storage, more economical storage begets more value proposition, more opportunities to integrate more data, more data collection, more storage. And that virtuous cycle seems to me that we're just getting started. So long live data, that's what we say. (both laugh) >> The other piece that I find interesting is before the PCs were the driver of scale relative to an enterprise data center, but with the hyperscale guys and the proliferation of cloud and actually the growth of PCs is slowing down dramatically, that it's kind of flipped the bit. Now the data centers themselves have the scale to drive >> Absolutely. >> the scale innovation that before was before was really limited to either a PC or a phone or some more consumer device. >> Absolutely the case. When you take that cross-section of hard drive applications, that's a hundred percent the case, and in fact, we look at the utilization as a vertically integrated company we look at our media facilities for the disks, we look at our wafer facilities for heads, and those facilities as we look forward are going to be as busy as busier than they've ever been. I mean the amount of data is relative to the density as well as disks and heads and how many you can employ. So we see this in terms of fundamental technology and component construction, manufacturing, busier than it's ever been. We'll make fewer units. I mean there will be fewer units as they become bigger and denser for this application space, but the fundamental consumption of magnetic recording technology and components is all-time records. >> Right. And you haven't even talked about the software-defined piece that's dragging the utilization of that data across multiple applications. >> And it's just one of these that come in to help everybody there too, yeah. >> Jeff: You got another 35 years more years in you? (both laugh) >> I hope so. >> All right. >> But that would be the edge of it, I think. >> All right, we're going to take Mark Grace here, only 35 more years, Lord knows what he'll be working on. Well Mark, thanks for taking a few minutes and answering your prospective >> No that's fine, thanks a lot. >> Absolutely, Mark Grace, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Western Digital headquarters in San Jose, California. Thanks for watching. >> Mark: All right.

(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: Live from San Jose, California it's theCUBE, covering Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at the Western Digital Headquarters off Almaden down in San Jose, a really important place. Western Digital's been here for a while, their headquarters. A lot of innovation's been going on here forever. So we're excited to be here really for the next generation. The event's called Innovating to Fuel the Next Generation of big data, and we're joined by many time Cuber, Dave Tang. He is the SVP in corporate marketing from Western Digital. Dave, always great to see you. >> Yeah. Always great to be here, Jeff. Thanks. >> Absolutely. So you got to MC the announcement today. >> Yes. >> So for the people that weren't there, let's give them a quick overview on what the announcement was and then we can dive in a little deeper. >> Great, so what we were announcing was a major breakthrough in technology that's going to allow us to drive the increase in capacity in density to support big data for the next decade and beyond, right? So capacities and densities had been starting to level off in terms of hard drive technology capability. So what we announced was microwave-assisted magnetic recording technology that will allow us to keep growing that areal density up and reducing the cost per terabyte. >> You know, it's fascinating cause everyone loves to talk about Moore's Law and have these silly architectural debates, whether Moore's Law is alive or dead, but, as anyone who's lived here knows, Moore's Law is really an attitude much more it is than the specific physics of microprocessor density growth. And it's interesting to see. As we know the growth of data is growing in giant and the types of data, and not only regular big data, but now streaming data are bigger and bigger and bigger. I think you talked about stuff coming off of people and machines compared to business data is way bigger. >> Right. >> But you guys continue to push limits and break through, and even though we expect everything to be cheaper, faster, and better, you guys actually have to execute it-- >> Dave: Right. >> Back at the factory. >> Right, well it's interesting. There's this healthy tension, right, a push and pull in the environment. So you're right, it's not just Moore's Law that's enabling a technology push, but we have this virtuous cycle, right? We've realized what the value is of data and how to extract the possibilities and value of data, so that means that we want to store more of that data and access more of that data, which drives the need for innovation to be able to support all of that in a cost effective way. But then that triggers another wave of new applications, new ways to tap into the possibilities of data. So it just feeds on itself, and fortunately we have great technologists, great means of innovation, and a great attitude and spirit of innovation to help drive that. >> Yeah, so for people that want more, they can go to the press releases and get the data. We won't dive deep into the weeds here on the technology, but I thought you had Janet George speak, and she's chief data scientist. Phenomenal, phenomenal big brain. >> Dave: Yes. >> A smart lady. But she talked about, from her perspective we're still just barely even getting onto this data opportunity in terms of automation, and we see over and over at theCUBE events, innovation's really not that complicated. Give more people access to the data, give them more access to the tools, and let them try things easier and faster and feel quick, there's actually a ton of innovation that companies can unlock within their own four walls. But the data is such an important piece of it, and there's more and more and more of this. >> Dave: Right, right. >> What used to be digital exhaust now is, I think maybe you said, or maybe it was Dave, that there's a whole economy now built on data like we used to do with petroleum. I thought that was really insightful. >> Yeah, right. It's like a gold mine. So not only are the sources of data increasing, which is driving increased volume, but, as Janet was alluding to, we're starting to come up with the tools and the sophistication with machine learning and artificial intelligence to be able to put that data to new use as well as to find the pieces of data to interconnect, to drive these new capabilities and new insights. >> Yeah, but unlike petroleum it doesn't get used up. I mean that's the beauty of data. (laughing) >> Yeah, that's right. >> It's a digital process that can be used over and over and over again. >> And a self-renewing, renewing resource. And you're right, in that sense that it's being used over and over again that the longevity of that data, the use for life is growing exponentially along with the volume. >> Right, and Western Digital's in a unique position cause you have systems and you have big systems that could be used in data centers, but you also have the media that powers a whole bunch of other people's systems. So I thought one of the real important announcements today was, yes it's an interesting new breakthrough technology that uses energy assist to get more density on the drives, but it's done in such a way that the stuff's all backward compatible. It's plug and play. You've got production scheduled in a couple years I think with test out the customers-- >> Dave: That's right. >> Next year. So, you know, that is such an important piece beyond the technology. What's the commercial acceptance? What are the commercial barriers? And this sounds like a pretty interesting way to skin that cow. >> Right, often times the best answers aren't the most complex answers. They're the more elegant and simplistic answers. So it goes from the standpoint of a user being able to plug and play with older systems, older technologies. That's beautiful, and for us, to be able to, the ability to manufacture it in high volume reliably and cost effectively is equally as important. >> And you also talked, which I think was interesting, is kind of the relationship between hard drives and flash, because, obviously, flash is a, I want to say the sexy new toy, but it's not a sexy new toy anymore. >> Right. >> It's been around for a while, but, with that pressure on flash performance, you're still seeing the massive amounts of big data, which is growing faster than that. And there is a rule for the high density hard drives in that environment, and, based on the forecast you shared, which I'm presuming came from IDC or people that do numbers for a living, still a significant portion of a whole lot of data is not going to be on flash. >> Yeah, that's right. I think we have a tendency, especially in technology, to think either or, right? Something is going to take over from something else, but in this case it's definitely an and, right. And a lot of that is driven by this notion that there's fast data and big data, and, while our attention seems to shift over to maybe some fast data applications like autonomous vehicles and realtime applications, surveillance applications, there's still a need for big data because the algorithms that drive those realtime applications have to come from analysis of vast amounts of data. So big data is here to stay. It's not going away or shifting over. >> I think it's a really interesting kind of cross over, which Janet talked about too, where you need the algorithms to continue sharing the system that are feeding, continuing, and reacting to the real data, but then that just adds more vocabulary to their learning set so they can continue to evolve overtime. >> Yeah, what really helps us out in the market place is that because we have technologies and products across that full spectrum of flash and rotating magnetic recording, and we sell to customers who buy devices as well as platforms and systems, we see a lot of applications, a lot of uses of data, and we're able to then anticipate what those needs are going to be in the near future and in the distant future. >> Right, so we're getting towards the end of 2017, which I find hard to say, but as you look forward kind of to 2018 and this insatiable desire for more storage, cause this insatiable creation of more data, what are some of your priorities for 2018 and what are you kind of looking at as, like I said, I can't believe we're going to actually flip the calendar here-- >> Dave: Right, right. >> In just a few short months. (laughing) >> Well, I think for us, it's the realization that all these applications that are coming at us are more and more diverse, and their needs are very specialized. So it's not just the storage, although we're thought of as a storage company, it's not just about the storage of that data, but you have contrive complete environments to capture and preserve and access and transform that data, which means we have to go well beyond storage and think about how that data is accessed, technical interfaces to our memory products as well as storage products, and then where compute sits. Does it still sit in a centralized place or do you move compute to out closer to where the data sits. So, all this innovation and changing the way that we think about how we can mine that data is top of the mind for us for the next year and beyond. >> It's only job security for you, Dave. (laughing) >> Dave: Funny to think about. >> Alright. He's Dave Tang. Thanks for inviting us and again congratulations on the presentation. >> Always a pleasure. >> Alright, Dave Tang, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Western Digital headquarters in San Jose, California. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Male voiceover: Live from San Jose California, it's the Cube, covering Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Western Digital World Headquarters It's the Almaden Campus in San Jose. If you know anything about the tech world, you know there's a lot of innovation that's been happening on this campus for years and years and years. Big announcement today called Innovating to Fuel the Next Generation of Big Data. Lot of exciting announcements and here to join us to tell us all about it is Brendan Collins. He's the Vice President of Product Marketing Devices for Western Digital. Brendan, great to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Absolutely so, really exciting announcement. You know, I've talked to Kim Stevenson at Intel, we had an interview talking about Moore's law. And one thing she really reinforced is that Moore's law is really more of an attitude than it is specifically physics, and whether you want to argue the physics is one thing, but the attitude for innovation, to continue to deliver a lot more for less, just continues, continues, and continues, and you guys announced a huge step in that direction today. >> Yeah, we have a challenge that storage is growing at a rate of about 40 percent per year. And budgets from the data centers are not growing, right? So the challenge is for us to develop new technologies that allow us to stay on the technology curve, and cut costs and do that efficiently. >> Then this is a big one, so let's jump in. So actually it was years ago I was actually at the event when you guys introduced the Helium drives, and that was a big deal there, and you've continued to kind of move that innovation but then you can see a plateau. And the density of this data, so you guys had to come up with something new. >> Yeah, what we've seen is that our PMR technology that we use currently is slowly running out of steam, right? So in order to come down the cost curve, we needed to boost areal density. And luckily we were able to come up with a new breakthrough in MAMR technology that will allow us to do that for the next decade. >> It's interesting in the talk, you talked about you guys could see this kind of coming and you actually put a lot of bets on the table, you didn't just bet on MAMR, you bet on HAMR, and you continued along a number of multiple tracks, and you've been at this for a while. What was kind of the innovation that finally gave you a breakthrough moment that got us to where we are today? >> Well, there were multiple technologies that we could have invested in, and we decided to continue on the two major ones which were HAMR and MAMR but we made a decision to invest in a process called, a head fabrication process called damascene that allowed us to extend the life of PMR for the last five to six years, and it's been in all the products we've been shipping since 2013. >> And you talked the areal density, so that's basically the amount of information we can put on the square inch of surface area And you've really, you attacked it on two vectors. One is how many tracks, just think of a record, how many tracks can you get on an album, in terms of the number of lines, and then how much density then you can have on each of those tracks. >> That's right, that's right. And you're now seeing major improvements on both of those factors. >> Well if you look at, we've had three enabling technologies in our products for the past three to four years, right. One is helium, one is micro actuation, and the other is the damascene process. Damascene and micro actuation actually push track density which enables higher capacity. But the newer technology that we're talking about, MAMR, addresses both factors. So we push the track density even tighter together, But we also boost the linear density at the same time, and we do that without adding cost. >> Right. The other thing you talked about, and I think it's a really important piece, right it's not only the technology breakthrough, but it's also how does that fit within the existing ecosystem of your customers, and obviously big giant data centers and big giant cloud providers, we actually have a show going on at a big cloud show right now, and this technology was innovative in that you've got a breakthrough on density, but not so crazy that you introduced a whole bunch of new factors into the ecosystem that would then have to be incorporated into all these systems, because you guys not only make your own systems, but you make the media that feeds a whole host of ecosystems, and that was a pretty important piece. >> If you look at some previous technologies we've introduced whether it be even 4K sectors in the industry, or shingled magnetic reporting, both of those require whole side modifications. Any time you have whole side modifications, it generally slows down the adoption, right? With HAMR, one of the challenges that we had was because of the concerns with thermals on the media, we needed a process called wear leveling, and that required whole software changes. In contrast, when we go to MAMR, everything is seamless, everything is transparent, and it's great. >> Right. I thought it was much simpler than that. I thought just heat is bad, HAMR is heat, and MAMR is microwave, and you know, heat and efficiency and data centers and all those, kind of again, system-level concerns; heat's never a good thing in electronics. >> Well, and in the case of MAMR versus HAMR, there's like an order of magnitude difference in the temperature on the disk, which is the key concern. >> And then of course as you mentioned in the key note, this is real, you've got sample units going on, correct me if I'm wrong, as early as next year >> That's right. >> you're hoping you'd be in scale production in 2020. Where some of these other competing technologies, there's really still no forecasted ship date on the horizon. >> Yeah, you can generate samples, you can build lower quantities of these HAMR drives, but you still have that big concern out there in front of you, how do I address the reliability, how do I address the complexity of all these new materials, and then if I got all of that to work, how do I do it commercially because of the cost additives. >> Right; so I just want to get your perspective before we let you go, you're busy, there's a high demand for your time, as you kind of think back and look at these increasing demands for storage, this increasing demand for computers, and I think one of the data points given is, you know, the data required for humans and machines and IOT is growing way way way way faster than business focused data which has been the driver of a lot of this stuff, if you just kind of sit back and take a look, you know, what are some of your thoughts because I'm sure not that long ago you could have never imagined that there would be the demand for the types of capacities that we're talking about now and we both know that when we sit down five years from now, ten years ago, you know, ten years from now, we're going to look back at today and think, you know, that was zero. >> Yeah, way back in the day there were just PCs and servers and there was traditional IT with rate, today with autonomous cars and IOT and AI and machine learning, it's just going to continue, so that exponential growth that you saw, there's no sign of that slowing down, which is good news for us. >> Yeah, good job security for you for sure. >> You bet! >> Alright Brendan, well, again, thanks for taking a few minutes to sit down and congratulations on the great event and the launch of these new products. >> Thank you, thank you. >> He's Brendan Collins, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching the Cube from the Western Digital Headquarters in San Jose California. Thanks for watching.