(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. I've been here all day with Stu Miniman, and we've had a jam-packed agenda of guests. We're now coming to the end of our program. We bring back two CUBE alumni. We've got Bharat Badrinath, welcome back. I feel like it's deja vu. The VP of Product and Solutions Marketing at NetApp. And Ken Ringdahl, also an alumni, VP of Global Alliance Architecture from Veeam. Hey, guys. Thanks for stopping by towards the end of the day. I'm sure you guys have both lots of meetings today. Let's talk a little bit about the NetApp-Veeam partnership. NetApp bought Veeam a few months ago, Ken. The reseller relationship that Veeam has with NetApp was announced. Let's talk about the impetus of that, that momentum coming from joint partners, customers, channel partners? Tell me a little bit about that from Veeam's perspective. >> Yeah, sure. I think earlier this year, we announced that resell relationship, which went live in March. So VeeamON was in May, so we were just at the early stages of that, and we've seen some good momentum. We've expanded that relationship. And now we're able to jointly sell the whole portfolio. And I'd say it's a combination of two things: and really it's customers and partners, right? So, we had a lot of success in the channel. Veeam and NetApp have been partnering together on the channel for, you know, five, seven years. A long time now. And just based on the success of our meeting on the channel and then customer demand and partner demand, you know, we decided to expand our relationship and go deeper and really go deeper not only from a go-to-market perspective, but from a product perspective. We're getting even closer together and driving more business and integration and really highlighting the value of the NetApp platform. >> What's NetApp's reaction to when the channel and customers are saying, "Hey, guys." Tell us about that, Bharat. >> We obviously are here to make sure the customers have a great experience with it. And Veeam brings in something which is unique in the market for the customer, so we've heard it from our customers, our joint customers saying that better integration is going to help them. Being the stewards of the customers' data, we want to make sure the data is protected. And Veeam brings that expertise into the market. We integrate better to make it more seamless for the customer, which is what we're doing as we expand this partnership to the next level. >> Both Veeam and NetApp were pretty early in learning into this hybrid, multi-cloud world. Wondering if you have any good customer examples you might be able to share as to customers that are kind of moving towards this future that we're talking about in the partnership. >> Yeah, sure, I mean at Veeam our goal is to really provide a hybrid environment. We started in the virtual world. We expanded to physical. We've gone to cloud. You know, we see NetApp with a very strong presence on-prem. They obviously have strong relationships with the public cloud vendors and have done a really good job of pivoting the strategy and embracing the cloud, which is what we've done at Veeam as well. We see our customers.. they're really choosing cloud. They're choosing best of breed now, right? So, they don't say, "Hey, I'm a single cloud strategy. I don't do just one cloud here. I'm saying best of breed. Maybe I'm doing my machine-learning and AI and Google, And I'm doing my cloud native apps in AWS, and I'm doing my Microsoft native workloads in Azure." And so really you do need to provide that hybrid solution. That's really what we've looked to focus on is taking the strength of where we came up and providing that best solution in the virtual world, extending that to physical, and now going to the cloud. You know, we see lots and lots of customers that they just want a comprehensive solution. They don't want point solutions, a point solution here, a point solution there. They want a comprehensive solution, and so it comes down to two companies really I think that have a very strong strategy for that hybrid world, for best of breed solutions that we can work together in all those facets. >> Yeah, and I think our strategy and Veeam's strategy are pretty aligned when you look at the hybrid cloud, when you look at our data fabric, (inaudible) in the market, and what we are doing to stitch together on-prem and cloud. Veeam happens to be a great partner to help protect that data as we work with the customer along this journey. And today Veeam just announced an SEI part of it as well. Just making sure that we are helping the customer through every aspect of the journey. >> I'm wondering if you might have.. Since the deal was announced earlier this year, any specific customer examples--even anonymized-- that you could share? >> I'm sure there are lots of customers we have had jointly. I don't have any specific ones at this moment. >> There's a few I can highlight. Probably one of the top ten international banks, AMEA. That's a really, really large deal that we're working to get closed. It's multi-million dollars to both of us. Very, very large deal. I think we're seeing success. Veeam's strength has always been sort of in the commercial world, and we're moving up into the enterprise. That's a big impetus for the partnership quite honestly 'cause NetApp has a lot of strength 'specially with the ONTAP system in enterprise. So, I think we're really sort of dovetailing each other. Veeam is bringing NetApp into more of our commercial deals. NetApp is bringing us into more enterprise deals. But really it's across the board: large banks, even healthcare and other deals as well. I don't know if there's any specific names I can call out, but I can tell you it really stretches the entire sort of stretches vertical, all different types, different sizes, different types of customers. >> We just had Dave Hitts on a little bit ago, Stu and I did today, and he kind of talked about in the last five years, really a big revolution at NetApp that has been around 26 years. Ken, you mention that NetApp and Veeam have been partners for about five to seven years. I'm curious what Veeam's perspective is of NetApp's digital and IT and cultural transformation to now go out boldly and say, "We're the data authority," and really kind of wrap their strategy around cloud. >> Yeah, sure. I would say we are in a data-driven world. Data is the currency in the cloud world. We look at ourselves as being the stewards of data availability. NetApp has the strength in that primary data management. There's really a natural dovetail between the two of us and a natural hand-off, where we can provide the entire end-to-end from primary to DR to secondary and really about sort of managing the placement of that data, the value of that data, and the availability of that data. It's incredibly important. I think together we cover that end-to-end. >> Bharat, one of the messages we've been hearing today is talking about there's a lot of complexity out there. NetApp's goal, like many companies in this space, is to try to help simplify. What is the partnership, the integration, reselling.. How does that help simplify solutions for companies? >> Absolutely. As you heard earlier, it was all about providing a comprehensive stack end-to-end, but what makes it simple is when it is comprehensive and integrated, right? So, when the two companies' engineering teams work together to drive that integration, that results in simplicity, which our customers and our partners.. For our partners, it's assurance that we're both working together, so it makes the solution more reliable, works well, as advertised, if you will. And the customer premise is for customers. It's the simplicity in the form of integration, which comes in where the two companies' engineering teams are driving towards that. >> Last question, Ken, for you. In terms of kind of following on what Bharat was saying, the customers now not only need that simplicity, they expect it. I'm curious where is that in that, in the selling motion, where is that conversation? Is it with some of the folks that are down in the technical weeds, who are looking to drastically improve recovery time and recovery point objectives? Or are you also having conversations at the business level of the business going, maybe it's a legacy not cloud-native that needs to go, "We have so much data, which is an advantage, but how do we use that?" Are you seeing those business leaders, business unit leaders in C-levels involved in this conversation with Veeam and NetApp? >> Yeah, yeah, no question. I think traditionally Veeam has really been compelled by the Backup Administrator, by the IT director. Because the product is so easy to try, you can download it, you can try it for free.. Our whole "It Just Works" has been our tagline because it is just so simple to get started with Veeam. We make it simple to get up and running and to manage your backups and also give some of that power back to your customers. In fact, just a quick sidebar. Had dinner last night with a longtime Veeam customer, longtime NetApp customer, and they said, "Hey, look, NetApp is my storage vendor of choice. Veeam is my backup data protection vendor of choice. And they come together well. And NetApp does such a great job from primary to leveraging the snapshot replication," but he told me about this great story. He said, "We had somebody at midnight needed to recover a file. We have self-restore capabilities that they were able to give that power to their end users to go recover a file to their server instead of calling up and opening a ticket. Instead of what took maybe eight hours to go through a whole process to get a storage admin and then a backup admin took eight minutes." I think it talks to the value of the NetApp platform in providing that availability and the simplicity of the Veeam system to be able to give that power and take what might be complex and make it very simple. So, back to your original question, Lisa, about.. We've traditionally really sort of been very, very valuable to that backup administrator, IT admin. As we move further into the enterprise, of course that goes up into VP of IT, all the way up to the CIO. I think our relationship is really bringing us both ways. We can come bottom-up, NetApp can come top-down. And we're hitting both sides and really that whole stack of influencer to buyer to decision-maker in that whole stack. >> Bharat, last question for you. We've got a few seconds left. I'm curious when a customer says, "Veeam is our backup, and recovery, NetApp is our storage," how does that, in this day as, "Hey, cloud is the heart of our strategy," how do you react to, "NetApp is our storage provider?" >> I don't see those as exclusive things. We manage the data on-prem, and Veeam, given their abilities in the hybrid cloud, if a customer considers us as on-prem storage company, that is great. We're working with them to change that impression, to get with them on their journey to the cloud. So we don't want to force them to get into the cloud, but as they move to the cloud, we want to be there to make sure we can manage the data in the cloud. And Veeam, given their hybrid capabilities and where they've been and what they do with the customer, and their ability to manage monthly cloud maps really well, to what we offer the customers. Of course we'd like our customers to change their perception to not just view NetApp as on-prem storage but as a cloud vendor as well, but it takes time for them to change their perception, and we're working very hard on that. As you saw today in the keynote as well, you're starting to see customers.. It has to be driven by the customer need. Sometimes they realize certain things are done better in the cloud, which drives them to the cloud. We want to be there to provide that service for them as they move. >> Well, Bharat and Ken, thanks so much for stopping by at the end of the day here. We appreciate your time, and we look forward to, in 2019, maybe hearing more from that big AMEA bank and some of the great successes they're achieving with this partnership. >> Thank you for having us. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching. This wraps up theCUBE's full day. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We've had a great day, Stu, talking with NetApp executives, customers, partners, and we want to thank you for watching. Hope you've learned a lot, and of course, watch the replays at theCUBE.net. For Stu, I'm Lisa, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and guess who's here now, Dave Hitz, EVP and founder of NetApp, Dave, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you and glad to be here. >> This is a big event, we were in the keynote this morning when we were walking out, standing room only really strong messages delivered by George Kurian, who stopped by for the first time couple hours ago. Great customer story, the futurist was very interesting perspective, 26 years ago, can you envision? >> You know the futurist? >> Where you are? >> Never mind that, I have a very different perspective than him, I think we are entering the golden decade of artificial intelligence. It's smart enough to be super, super cool and it hasn't figured out how to kill us yet, decade. (laughing) >> Lisa: That's good. >> Enjoy your last 10 years. >> Oh no, that's it? >> I, no, no, you asked, you asked that I envision this 26 years ago, oh my god, no, I mean, you know, we were a little start-up and we had these spread sheets that said we would grow to, you know it basically that, what the VC's told us if we could get to 100 million in revenue we can go public, so, naturally our spread sheets showed 200 million (laughs) in revenue, you know or five, six, some where in there and is like, we're so far beyond anything I imagined when we started, and we were doing technical nerdy products for little engineers and little work groups, you know and the idea that that part of the storage market would merge against the heavy duty, high-end enterprise storage market doing databases, and then that would end up colliding with the cloud market and helping, like no we didn't even imagine this stuff that's happening now, I mean it's so far beyond. >> Enabling DreamWorks to make movies, I mean-- >> I love that, you know they do showings, they do previews for their vendors and so I've gotten to take my 11-year-old daughter, she's 11 now, but to see, you know early viewing of some of these movies it's, it's just fun. >> So, Dave, it's always interesting in the industry a lot of time you say like, okay, this architecture is long in the tooth, there's a new generation do things better and everything like that. ONTAP, been around for a long time now.. >> You know, so let me-- >> Seems like it's been reinvigorated with the cloud and everything like that, you know. >> Let me make a comment about that. >> Yeah. >> Cause people do this, oh, ONTAP is so old, isn't that the old generation? So lets talk about old. Mainframes are old, and AS400s are old, and Unix is old, and then there's Windows which is kind of younger, and ONTAP's younger than that, and then there's Windows NT, which was a rewrite of Windows and Clustered ONTAP is younger than that, so like stop with the old, you know I mean iOS is after that, so okay fine we're older than iOS, but it's not an ancient, and then we've revamped it again to go run in the cloud, I mean we first started doing ONTAP running in Azure, sorry I mean Amazon initially, we started that work in 2013 and shipped it in 2014, so like that was yet another refresh so. >> Well, but you bring a point, you've, it is adjusted and moved, it wasn't something that's static. Can you speak a little bit, that cloud, the you know, the rewrite and focus around the cloud and what, that mean internally, I know you've been reinvigorated. >> Ha! >> With everything that's happened for the last few years. >> You know, the cloud everybody's doing it now and everybody's trying to be cloud relevant, we were really struggling early on I will say you know 2013, 2014 we were really trying to get our heads around what to do and a lot of people were stepping back like, no, no, no, let's see if we can slow it down, and, I mean not just outside of NetApp but NetApp as well, and the guy that was the CEO of the time Tom Georgens, and George Kurian was part of the staff then. We, I'm proud of what we did was we said, you know let's really lean in, its either going to happen or it's not going to happen, probably not, based on what we do, and if it does happen we'll be way better off leaning into it early, learning how to make this stuff work, and that's, you know we shipped ONTAP in the cloud in 2014, and it sucked, I mean, and no one body else had anything like it, it was awesome, right, whenever you look at old tech die, the first iPhone sucked too, but it was both great, but it needed so much more work, like the very first rev I remember a story, Joe CaraDonna as a programmer he's like, we tried to get our own IT organization to use it and they told us the security wasn't good enough, so we had to fix the security, like, I mean we've been through so much stuff that's almost five years ago. We've been working on it, and so you do all of this work and then Cloud Volumes is a complete, have you guys had Anthony on? >> Both: Yes. >> Couple hours ago. >> I love how Anthony thinks, so, he's a cloudy guy right from the foundation, he joins the executive staff, whole new perspective on stuff, so Cloud ONTAP, like ONTAP's my baby and we put it in the cloud. I'm proud of that, like you have our forward leaning cloud and Anthony's like, you know, just so you know, that's not nearly good enough, like, that is a very old school infrastructural thing, probably storage infrastructural people will like that they can have their same old OS running in the cloud, but it's not what cloudy people want, cloudy people don't want to run a storage OS in the cloud, cloudy people just want to say, I'd like a volume, please. Here's your volume, Thank you, and by the way, it should be a RESTful API, like God, ONTAP was none of those things and so if you look at the work we're doing now is like, okay, here's a RESTful API, here's the JSON schema, send it to the Azure Resource Manager Like that's cloudy and so, it was because, you know we did a good job engineering getting it in but we didn't, we didn't have that like the, what does cloud smell like? If you know what I mean, like, the right whiff of cloud. Anyway, so Anthony really brought that and I, and I just feel really good about where we are at now, because, it's like cloud developers, develop this stuff for other cloud developers, it feels like that. >> Well in the last five years it sounds like tremendous amounts of transformation, reinvigoration, NetApp has some bold marketing messaging. We are the data authority, we help customers become data driven, you talk about these three business imperatives, customers have lots of choices that, you know public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, George talked about this morning in his keynote that hybrid and multi-cloud is now de facto. >> You know, someone asked me, I was giving a talk and they asked me, okay so much cloud, how long do you think till NetApp's not shipping hardware? And I was like, no, no, like we don't see that going away anytime soon, if anything we think our success in the cloud, 'cause customers want to do that, will help us gain share on-prem because customers also want to do that, right? George's picture shows, yes there is traditional on-prem IT, enterprise IT, there's private clouds people, HCI, convergence CI, and then there's public cloud. To me the interesting question, is why do people do those different things, the number one driver for public cloud is innovation, like, if you just, like all the catchwords you can think of, if you want to start up a DevOps team to-go program, I would like a new mobile phone app and I want it to take a picture of the person's face, oh look it's a woman, she looks happy, and then you want it to listen to her, to the voice, and like transcribe the voice and then do a sentiment analysis on the words, oh, she looked happy but it's snarky, and then you want to feed that into neural net deep learning engine, and say, what should we try to sell her, like, I guaranteed you, the team working on the public cloud will beat the on-prem team hands down every time. Right, I mean that's, so when you look at people and they go, we want all in on the cloud, or there's got to be 100% cloud. My question is what, what's your, like, don't start with that, what's your problem? If it's derive innovation, for the private cloud, typically that's just all about speed. They're so uniform regular, they're all the same you have extra capacity, you know you got empty rack space, for where the next one goes, someone says, I need some storage, and you say, hey, it's got a self service offer defined API, like, just do it yourself, and then in the enterprise space, the enterprise IT, Unix, Windows, clients, server, like that zone, probably the bulk of your investment, right? That's where you been spending the money historically. Probably still the bulk of most people's investment, but they want to modernize it, they don't want to get rid of it, they don't want to turn it off, it's working, but they'd like it to work better, so flash enable it, just get the performance issues out of the way. By the way, shrinks your footprint in the data center, frees up space, and connected to the cloud. Like not moving it, but just back it up or do DR, or like something cloudy and so to me I look at those three goals are tightly linked to the three styles of infrastructure. Notice, I haven't talked about products yet? The conversations I like to have with customers these days, help me understand what your business challenges are, your trying to move faster, be more innovative, modernize the stuff you have. Okay, like what ratio, now lets talk about how we could do those things together with the Data Fabric and let you build the Data Fabric you need, I mean, our Data Fabric strategy is not to tell customers what to do, it's to help them build the Data Fabric they need for their needs based on, oh, we're all about innovation, all on the cloud, like okay fine. We can do that like, but let's talk about that or is it. Now I'm stuttering. >> You bring up a great point there, Dave. >> I'm excited about this stuff. >> It's really exciting 'cause you know I think back, you know, just a couple of years ago, if you go to the enterprise, oftentimes storage was the boat anchor to prevent me from moving forward. Now we know that data, is absolutely going to be one of the drivers going forward, how do we help those people make that transition? How do you see NetApp driving that transition? So boating, that's an interesting word because I think if you look at cloud compute, it's very easy to move compute into the cloud, right. >> Stu: Yes. >> The thing about compute is it just happens and then its done, like you turn it on, you turn if off. You spin up the VM, you spin down the VM, it's easy. The reason data is a boat anchor is not because its a boat anchor, because data is the hard part, like you fired up the compute to the cloud but usually you're computing some data, well, how did you get the data to the place where the compute is? And then when you're finished a lot of times you created some data, well, how do you keep track of the data you created in the cloud, and is it legal for it to stay in the cloud, and now you want to put the data in a different cloud or put the data in your own data center and like, who's watching all that data? It's not a boat anchor because data sucks, it's a boat anchor actually because its the important thing you want to keep forever, right? I mean, maybe you do or maybe you want to delete it and know for sure it's gone. Like, those, compute doesn't have any of those issues. So, what's my point, whatever is hard, like if this was easy anybody can do it, right? Whatever is hard, you go hire lots and lots of smart people to work on hard problems and then customers are like, whoa, you're solving hard problems, I guess I will pay you after all. Isn't that what business is? >> So the majority of your conversations start with helping customers identify what they've got, where best to spread out their investments, it's not product based its about business outcomes. I'd love to get kind of in the last few minutes here, your perspective on NetApp's own IT and digital, and cultural transformation, how does that help your legacy long time enterprise customers feel an even stronger trust with NetApp? >> I think prior to our cloud work customers for the most part, customers and potential customers, they knew us, you know, it was interesting even as we thought about marketing the new work that we are doing, one of the questions was like, how much should be about the cloud, how much should be about the old stuff, and we've really leaned in almost 100% on telling people our new cloud stories, they're both public and private. And our VP of marketing I think she had a really, Jean English, she had a really good perspective. She basically said look, we've been telling the on-prem storage iron story for 26 years and if there's a customer who's out there waiting to decide who to use I don't think telling them that story again and year 27, is going to be the thing that makes the difference, like, they've decided they're happy with their Hitatchi or they're EM's, whatever it is, but, but they don't know that NetApp can help them in this brave new world. Right, they have no clue that ONTAP is also running on Amazon, I mean, It's like, seriously, I can run ONTAP on Amazon? Yeah like fire it up, it's five bucks an hour, or whatever the number is, it's like that's crazy, you know and so, so and then people go, well, we've had so many conversations where they're trying to get a cloud strategy together, and we talk about all these things and data movement and data management and cloud, and like just all of these tools and they're very excited about where they're trying to go and they said, you know, by the way, I do also have a on-prem storage need. Could you do me a quote for like what I need this week and meanwhile let's do some planning about what I need next year, right, you've got both of them working together, and I think it's that combo that's important. >> Last question, how do you, if only you had more energy and excitement like legitimately about this, but how do you keep some of the NetApp folks that have been here for a long time? How have you helped reinvigorate them to, to really be able to digest the massive impact that you guys are being able to make across industries? >> One of the things I think helps, 'cause there is a... Let me back up a step, you know, Steve Jobs, is such an awesome guy and also in his life he made so many mistakes, and one of the things he did when, when Apple was almost entirely floated on their Apple III business and, was that Apple III, Apple II? And he was doing the Mac, and basically his message to everybody else was, if you're not working on the Mac, you suck, except, by the way, that's the product that's floating the entire business and generating all the products, and I really was conscious of, like that's the wrong way to do it. And when I look in particular of what we're doing we've got new operating systems like E-Series and like SolidFire, the HCI is a whole new thing, and yet ONTAP is still shot through our entire product line. I mean, the Cloud Volumes' the cool, hottest new thing. It's ONTAP under the covers, right, and you look at the HCI it's got the SolidFire block storage built in there as a very scalable model, oh but if you'd like files guess what? We run ONTAP in a VM, it's HCI it runs VM, and so actually if you look at what's going on in there the work that we've done going way back, and yes it's evolved, it's changed, but that same work is actually shot through as technology, no longer the front piece but it's shot through all of it as technology, so it is kind of a unifying characteristic. If you talk about that, I think it helps people get more comfortable both internally but, we have the same, you know, you asked how do you get employees comfortable, a lot of customers have the same problem, you know-- >> Lisa: Right. >> They've spent a lot of investment and learning ONTAP's foibles over the year and Cloud Volume's hides all of that. So, gee, maybe I don't like this, you know what if you need all those features Cloud ONTAP, you can run ONTAP, like some people do want to do that, so, I just feel like the fact that the pieces all fit together, work together, actually gets people comfortable with it. >> Excellent, well Dave thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you for sharing your energy, and your excitement, your passion and all this wisdom and looking at where you guys are 26 years later, we look forward to year 27. >> Great, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we're at NetApp Insight 2018 in Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight, 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. From the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, I am Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. And we're welcoming back one of our alumni, Brendon Howe SVP of the Cloud Volume Services at NetApp. Hey, Brendon. >> Hey. >> Thanks for taking some time to come chat with Stu and me. >> Brendon: And thank you for having me. Great to be here. >> Big event about 5,000 plus people, the keynote this morning we had a chance to go to that, and it was when we were leaving standing room only. Biggest, Jean English was saying, this is the biggest collection of customers and partners under one roof. >> That's great. >> Yeah, fantastic. You're a long time NetApp-iac. >> 12 and a half years. >> 12 and a half years young. So you've seen a lot of NetApp's transformation. >> I have. >> In the messaging and the positioning, NetApp is the data authority. We're helping customers to be hashtag data driven. Cloud is really now seeming to be at the heart of NetApp's strategy. >> Brendon: Yeah. >> Talk to us about that evolution. >> Absolutely, you always want to be positioning yourself ahead of where you are, where you want to go. Alright, you want to be perceived as the future of where you're aiming. And I think it's been clear to us for a while now that the whole dynamic and movement to cloud, is probably the most disruptive and most impactful thing that's hit traditional IT. We've lived through a lot of changes. I've been here for a lot of them, where you went to a virtualization and the way applications were deployed and the way infrastructure was deployed waves. And up and down of the economy. Those were minor speed bumps, I think, in the journey of how we get to where we want to go. The disruption of cloud, which really could be characterized as the availability of an unprecedented set of services from the biggest public clouds in the world, who happen to be the biggest companies in the world, has changed the dynamics completely. I don't know that people fully appreciate why it's been so impactful. When you talk to customers, what you hear is they go to the cloud for agility and speed. It's not really a cost discussion of where are compute instances or bits or storage cheaper, one or the other. It's an agility argument. And what cloud brings to them is unprecedented pace of change, of adoption, of speed of line of business. That they can't reproduce otherwise. So, I think it's really important, that we aim ahead of where we want to be, which is really a cloud-first, data-oriented company. And that's why you see so much of that messaging from us. >> Brendan, it's really interesting, I think back. If I turn back the clock a dozen years ago, we didn't talk about software defines. >> Brendon: No. >> Yet, there were certain companies out there that storage, it was like, okay, we're going to create software for storage. Well, no, that was some software that ran on their box and only on their box. >> Brendon: That's right. >> You know, NetApp was the hipster software defines storage company, right? They were software before anybody else was. When you talk about NetApp in this cloud world, I think it's taken a while to come into focus. I remember back at the early solutions it was like, oh, let's stick a filer in a data center direct-connect it, we can offer some services. But the nirvana we've been trying to reach is storage services, available lots of different places. Can you walk us through some of that? Philosophically where NetApp's going? >> Yup, I think that's a good observation. I would say, think back four or five years ago, which I still think most of the industry's in at the moment, the notion of working with cloud was largely a connect-to-cloud theory. As you describe, where you have systems that would interconnect into the cloud. Or even leap into that world of taking an operating system and having it run in a VM in the cloud. I think of that as a cloud-connected strategy. And customers were intrigued, but what we often heard from them is it really can't be consumed as a cloud service. And it really can't be part of my traditional build with Azure, Google, or AWS. So, it's interesting, but it's an adjacency. And what we're really looking for are native cloud services. So, we took that to heart and really retrenched our effort to figure out how to build Cloud Data Services that behaved every bit like a native cloud service from the big cloud companies. All the way through to metered billing, provisioned and managed through the native portals of those cloud companies. Other than a brand label here and there, a customer may not even know it's NetApp. That's how cloud-oriented these services are. I think that's what it's going to take to be successful in this space. And you do that across multiple clouds with a quest towards going after market share. At the end of the day, you want to be relevant in as many cloud instances as exist, so you aim at the big cloud companies and you aim at global scale. I think that was what the learnings that we had through that journey is, it's not enough to reference architectures or software ports to the cloud, you really have to think about native services. There clearly, you have to find unique value, you have to do something that's not available otherwise, which is par for the course, but you also have to look at levels of integration that make it very, very easy to consume. And in the cloud, that's an unprecedented level of simplicity. >> One of the big challenges of the multi-cloud world is, it would be really nice if it was just a utility. People always say, oh well, I'm going to choose a cloud, and I can change things. Well, as you said, there's differentiation in the cloud. If you go talk to Amazon, Google and Microsoft, they're not all saying. no longer is it the race to the bottom. >> Absolutely. >> When you talk about partnering with the clouds, how do you provide, you need to provide unique differentiation, you need to integrate with all of the different players, yet, customers would love to be able to, oh, it's just a Kubernetes service and I use this deal and I move things around. How do you balance and deal with that complicated nuanceness of what multi-cloud really is? >> I think that the starting point is being good at a cloud in something. Right, and then you build on that competency. The Big Bang theory of going in and helping a customer with a hybrid cloud scenario that extends to multi-cloud is sort of the longest term vision of where they might end up over time. So, to some extent, it's the hardest problem to take on first. So if you core that back a little bit saying, let's focus on a use case that runs on the cloud to get started, and we'll build on that. The true fashion of, start small, iterate, grow, earn monthly recurring revenue, build under success and go is really the nature of the beast of what we're trying to do. Each of the cloud environments, tend to have real core competents that leads customers there in the first place. I don't know that you can ever listen to discussions from AWS without hearing about the breadth of their platform as a service. And how attractive it's been to the development in the DevOps community. Or you swing over and talk to Google, it's all about machine learning and analytics and tensor data flow, and all of that big query type stuff. And you swing over to Azure, and you hear about linking to the enterprise with traditional applications now enabled to run natively in the cloud. You follow those paths toward use case success and figure out how to build those solution stack with real value for the customer. So, we're trying to bring Cloud Volume Services into the fold, not as infrastructure as a service that's an option as well that might be faster, but tether that to real use cases where, look people are trying to move SAP HANA environments into the cloud; can we help? People are trying to figure out how to run database in the cloud; can we help? People are trying to figure out how to run analytics on file data that may even be collected on-prem; how can we help? You get into those types of discussions and start building validation, and it gets a lot easier to begin the journey of getting involved. I do think a multi-cloud world is the reality where people end up. As I do a hybrid-cloud. But customers have to work their way through that implementation in order to achieve that outcome. I think that's a long journey for a lot of customers. And I think there's a lot of technology that still has to be built to realize that full vision, the point is we're focused on that. I think we're on the right path, and if you saw the keynote this morning Anthony gave a nice preview of some of the data fabric vision that really showed snippets of how that plays out. A lot of which is available today. Which is pretty cool. >> Last question, and about a minute left, Brendon, NetApp is very customer focused, very customer-centric >> Brendon: Always has been. >> Exactly. Massive install base, as George was addressing this morning. A lot of enterprise customers not born in the cloud, those who are digital, those who are now. And last question, how have your customers helped influence the evolution of Cloud Volume Services? >> In a variety of ways. At times the traditional NetApp customer, that runs with things on-prem, is the most complex customer for services in the cloud because they're expectations are take everything the way they run on premise, and reproduce that in the cloud. And that's just simply not practical. Because you're in a new environment with new circumstances with new economics that make that achievement for a customer near impossible to do. To some extent, you have to sort of reprogram the traditional NetApp customer to understand, the cloud is different. The compare is not against us on-premise, the compare is the services in the cloud today that we look to improve upon. So that's one aspect of it. But clearly, a lot of our customers here at the show have decades of experience in leveraging the features we have into application environments that exist in the cloud today as well. And as it turns out, efficient handling of data, still is a problem. Having a reliable and dependable way to do backup and recovery is still a problem for customers. The ability to deal with bulk data from a backup and archive perspective, it's still a problem. So, I think a lot of the themes are the same and that the technology applies, but it has to be built differently because of the ecosystems that we're going in. I think the customers here are beginning to realize that, and then you bring in the wildcards of what's happening with Kubernetes and the drive towards application provisioning and how all of that can be linked to our solution set. We bring a lot of new opportunity that is different than the way traditional on-premises worked. >> Is that just one of the biggest barriers initially, was helping these large incumbent enterprises realize that it isn't possible to just go from on-prem to cloud, poof? >> Yes, I think so. The whole notion of taking the exact configuration, by the way, they custom tuned, and said I want to do that exact same thing in the cloud. It turns out that the configuration options in global cloud services just simply aren't available to do that. So you have to rework your customer's minds set, into the proper compare, and set expectations the right way. >> Lisa: It's all an evolution. Well, Brendon thanks so much for stopping by >> Thank you. >> and having a chat with Stu and me. We appreciate it. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are at NetApp Insight 2018 from Vegas, we'll be back with our next guest shortly. 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>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of the third annual NetApp Insight, with customers, partners about 5,000 plus people here Lisa Martin with Stu Minamin and very excited to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time George Kurian the CEO of NetApp. George, thank you so much for stopping by. >> Of course, thank you for having me. >> Really enjoyed your key note this morning, first of all it was standing room only there was about 5,000 plus people here Jean English, your CMO mentioned to us a few hours ago, that this is the biggest collaboration of your partners and customers under one roof, the momentum is palpable the messages are palpable, and I really enjoyed some of the messages that you delivered in your keynote. One, I'd love to get your perspective on the data authority and how NetApp itself has transformed in recent years to become that data authority, what does that mean from your C-level perspective? >> You know, we've always been in the business of helping our customers, help make their businesses better with data. We used to do it strictly in the form of storage systems, but over the last few years we have built a much more robust portfolio of capabilities. Both technological as well as partnerships to enable customers to use our technology wherever their data sits, whether it's in the edge of the enterprise or in heart of the biggest cloud providers in the world, and we believe that the world will be a hybrid, multi-cloud world, because of the need for speed and efficiency in how IT delivers support to digital businesses. And our idea is to help our customers by using our tools to integrate all of their data for business advantage. So, we see ourselves as someone who is really knowledgeable about being, managing customers' data in a hybrid cloud world. That's what we call data authority for the hybrid cloud. >> And you talked about, this morning too, kind of early in your keynote it sounded like you were addressing, NetApp has a massive install base, to helping those customers understand those that weren't born in the digital age they have to be there now to be relevant, to compete, to identify new service models, so I thought that was a very, poignant message. But something, that Stu and I were talking about is the four, kind of, pillars of digital transformation, walk us through, for those that didn't have a chance to see your keynote, walk us through those four pillars, how NetApp is enabling customers to utilize them. >> Absolutely, we talk to our customers about if you're not a born digital business you need to transform yourself especially using your data, to compete with these born digital companies. And, there are four ideas that we shared with customers that are the cornerstones of such a transformation. The first is that, digital transformation requires IT transformation, businesses usual in IT wouldn't cut it for the digital era. The second is an idea that was created by the Boston Consulting Group, which is that, speed is the new scale. It's the hallmark of competitive differentiation and advantage in the digital world. You know, I was talking about the fact that, Fortnite, a game that was created just a year ago has now got 125 million customers or players. That wouldn't happen in the physical world. And the third is, that because of the need for speed you need to be able to take advantage of innovation sources anywhere, which creates the necessity to operate in a hybrid multi-cloud world where IT is enabling the business to access innovation everywhere. And finally, that while you're doing it you need to think about your data. The critical asset that you have, that the born digital companies don't and how to use that and you need to build a data strategy which requires you to move from thinking about data centers to data fabrics, and so those were four key principles that we're sharing with our customers. >> Yeah, George I think that's a great way to measure what's happening with digital transformation. I wonder if you can help us take a lens at NetApp itself, so, when you talk about speed, NetApp has 26 years of experience, you've got over 10,000 employees a company of this size and this heritage you have some strengths but you're competing against some of those cloud native players. You know cloud is the bar which we are all measured someone said in the keynote this morning, I believe it was you, can you speak especially to the speed aspect how you look internally, what has to change culturally, I know Jean talked to us this morning, operationally there were changes made, that's your background. >> Absolutely, you know I think that we are an example of a company that is using data to accelerate our business right, in multiple ways. The first was in product development, we have used a lot of information about how customers use our systems. How, the support organization reacts to customer situations, and have accelerated cycle times for software development, it was 20 months when I joined, it's now six months on our hardware platforms and on the cloud we're releasing new capabilities every two weeks. So, we've really become a cloud native development organization and it required a lot of changes, I will just tell you that, getting the engineers through to the other side of it, has been extraordinary, they love the new world. They would never want to go back to the old world. Another place is around our custom interface where we've invested a lot more in digital marketing capabilities our CMO Jean English, is an expert in that world and so we have had new discussions with cloud only customers entirely electronically, and on the back end in terms of support we have amassed a lot of information about our customers systems, and now we're using artificial intelligence through a capability called active-IQ to tell them proactively what they can do to bench mark themselves against the best. So we say, listen Stu, we think your system which is operating in exactly similar environment to Lisa's system, is not working as well because you've done these five things. And so there's a lot of ways where we are trying to progress our own transformation. I would tell you that the secret, there are two important lessons learned. One was we started with business led initiatives rather than an end to end transformation of the business. And the second is we structured a transformation program led by the chief transformation officer so that it would become the day to day reality of our business, not the after thought of the normal course of business. And so, those are two key practical tips that we would share with our customers about transformation. >> George, NetApp has a strong history with partnerships, when I think about channel lead, NetApp has always been there, from a technology stand point, NetApp has negotiated some challenging waters I think specifically, VMware was a big wave of course acquired by EMC, but NetApp did better in VMware environments than it did in the market as a whole. Today VMware is still a very important piece of the marketplace, but Amazon's another one that is a challenging company to partner with, everybody's always worried, okay how long do you partner with them before they take over. How do you look at that, what are the most important partnerships from a NetApp standpoint, and how do you face those today? >> We've always kept the customer at the center of a partnership. I think that the secret to our success has always been that we keep the customer interests paramount, and it allows us to partner with companies who may be part of some of our competitors. I think today, if I look at it, clearly, in terms of the customer lens we have a lot of work going on with the big cloud providers, both in North America as well as overseas. To help customers architect a truly hybrid multi-cloud, we showed some really exciting work that we've done over the last year to make that a lot more tangible and real, and it's the result of deep engineer to engineer collaboration with them. I think the second area that we're making investments in are really to build the foundation for using data alongside artificial intelligence and machine learning, specifically with training and inference models and there we've been fortunate to be able to collaborate with the leader, NVIDIA, in that market. And it's about focusing on what we bring and keeping the customer at the center of the conversation. In terms of the go to market side of things. We've also done work, for example, with Lenovo, where we are bringing complimentary skill sets into the market, they are bringing computing skills, we're bringing storage and data management skills. They have strength in certain geographies and so we feel like it's a really complimentary relationship and we respect all of our partners, what they bring to the market and we're excited to, and honored to work with them to be honest. >> So, one of the things that I've read recently and it was apparent in a lot of the messaging today is the evolution of the data fabric. It's moved, it's transformed from a vision to a legitimate architecture. Talk to us about some of the evolution in the last twelve months and how your customers have helped be able to really make that real? >> We've learnt a lot, about, real use cases of the data fabric. Today, we have hundreds of customers deployed and in production with it, and we've been fortunate to be able to iterate at cloud speed on the new capabilities, it is real today, we allow you to have data management services integrated across all of your environments, in your data center with the world's best flash we've connected and we're very excited to connect our enterprise Grade 8CI solution to it, and of course a catalog of consistent data services that cross enterprise cloud with our 8CI and the biggest public clouds, we have taken advantage of new container technology and capabilities that Kubernetes and Istio bring to the market to build a really good control plane for all of this, we've innovated around data insights using foundational technology from on command insight that gives you now visibility into where all your data sits. And you'll see us continue to bring out really exciting innovations in the data fabric. The reason that the data fabric is resonating with customers is because it helps you build a consistent set of data services in a hybrid multi-cloud world, and use your data for business advantage. That's why it's resonating. >> George, NetApp has gone through some ups and downs over the 26 years. In many ways, it's been close, or people have said it's on the brink of being gone, and it's remade itself. How has NetApp continued to do this, and why should people believe that NetApp is in the position to execute best for the future? >> I think we've always been resilient at looking at things that could have been threats, and making them opportunities. Throughout the generations there was the transition from the internet computing, the dotcom bust that affected everybody, virtualization was supposed to kill storage, the cloud was supposed to kill storage, and through every one of those transitions we have looked carefully at how could we take what could be a threat and make it an opportunity, and make it an opportunity by serving our customers best through those technology moves, and I think that's the core to our success, I would say that what we have done over the last few years, is massively upped the game on execution. We laid out the data fabric strategy four years ago, as a vision and four years later we've got customers, we've got the biggest cloud providers, we've integrated it with the world's best flash and the world's best HCI and we are delivering road maps. So, I think that's really the promise of the new NetApp, we are really, really, focused on execution. >> Another, thing, sorry Stu, that we've heard along those lines in terms of NetApp's evolution, and continuing to stay relevant, is that the NetApp on NetApp story is one that NetAppians are proud of and should be, but it's also seeming like, is that a differentiator, when you're talking with customers who have so much choice that NetApp on NetApp story, that authentic, this is how we pivoted over the last 26 years to stay relevant, to compete. Tell us little bit about how you're, as the CEO, when you're meeting with customers, how does that story resonate with them? >> Our transformation story is a topic of conversation with all C-level executives. Everything we talked about with our customers today, we are an example of. So, for example, we did not take on an end to end IT re-architecture, we prioritize the digital business initiatives in the company and said, what are the barriers in our own IT that preclude that and so we prioritized IT initiatives to support the digital business transformation of the company. We have created two data hubs in the company as we have progressed those initiatives, one a product data hub through our auto support mechanism, which is now integrated into every technology that we sell to customers, both in the data centers of our customers and the cloud and on the customer facing side we've evolved to a customer hub that so, I think that there are examples that we share both in terms of leadership, people change management, transformation of IT that are extraordinarily relevant and I think that one of the things that we are open about sharing is the mistakes we've made. I think that brings an honesty and a transparency to our relationships with our customers and they trust us because of that. >> Alright, George, it's been really interesting, people have said for years storage is going to be killed off by everything else. If you look at all of the big waves right now data's at the center of all of it. >> George: That's correct. >> What I want you to help us understand is connect the dots for us, because NetApp, most of the customers I talk to here, the first thing they'll think about is, oh, well, NetApp's my storage company. Storage versus the data and how I get value out of that, help us connect the dots as to how I go from being a storage supplier to helping customers become data visionaries, as you say. >> I think one of the really important discussions we have with customers is data is the foundation of a digital business it's sort of the oil of the digital business, and software is the engine. It operates on the data to make the business go better, the challenge that most business leaders have as they think about digitizing their businesses is that they have fragmented their data across systems and silos that were the prevailing norm in IT, not only did it fragment the data, but it made operating IT much more complicated and so two long held paradigms that we have shared are finally coming to reality, NetApp has always been a simplify your data center unlike our competitors and that's coming through for the needs of simplification. And the second is, while you're doing it build a platform that can integrate all of your data, so that you can accelerate your transformation, and I think we're well positioned for that. I think there are customers here who have never met us in the storage systems world, that have joined us on the cloud like WuXi NextCODE, the genomics company that never buys a piece of equipment from NetApp, so we're really excited about an enormous number of those new faces that we're seeing. And then there are customers that started with us, as a storage system supplier, that we are bringing to the cloud. And, so we're going to keep pushing forward. >> Just quick follow up on that, it really opened my eyes, I was at the Cisco show earlier this year and when you talk about the future, Cisco, the networking company, they said, ten years from now you won't think of us as a networking company, you'll think of us just as a software company. What's NetApp of the future? >> We will offer our intellectual property in a broad range of ways, I think we'll still be offering systems but I think the brains of those systems will really be super smart software. Software that's, digitally enhanced and software that's enhanced with machine learning capabilities. I think we'll offer them also as cloud services, and we're really going to be focused on helping our customers with their data problems we think that's an extraordinarily rich landscape and we think that it has the opportunity to propel our business to achieve everything we've wanted to achieve. So, we're excited about the momentum. We are, honored to have so many customers, partners, and technologists here, and I think this is the best insight in the three years that I've been CEO, and I'm looking forward to having an even better one next year. >> Excellent, keep moving up bar, George. Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE, you're now an alumni so I'm going to give you a sticker so you-- >> Thank you >> Can brand yourself. Stu and I really appreciate you sharing your insights and your time with us. >> Thank you so much, it's been an honor to be here. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, we are live from NetApp Insights 2018 in Las Vegas, I am Lisa Martin for Stu Minium, stick around we'll be back with our next guest shortly. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. From the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're welcoming back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Jennifer Meyer, Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing at NetApp. And welcoming to theCUBE Alok Arora, Senior Director of Cloud Data Services and the Product Owner for NetApp Cloud Advisor, which we'll talk about today. So guys, the keynote this morning, one of the things that George Kurian, your CEO, whose going to be on the program I think next with Stu and me, talked about the four pillars of digital transformation, and one of them was hybrid and multi-cloud is now the de facto architecture. Jennifer, from a cloud marketing, product marketing stand point, how is NetApp engaging with your customers, both your install base enterprise customers and engaging with new customer to help them evolve a successful multi-cloud strategy? >> Well what's funny about that is it's not really even up to us, it's up to the customer and where they're at today, meeting them there and then taking them kind of to that destination that's interesting or important for them. And what we know today is that not only are customers in the cloud because they want to be close to innovation, that's one of our big themes, inspiring innovation with the cloud, but they've got their hands in multiple clouds. And studies show that at least 80-81% of customers are doing multi-cloud with two or more public clouds, and I think that's really interesting, you know I think that in some cases it's because their end uses, or their customers, have chosen a cloud that they want to go with and so they're trying to service those needs where they exist, but also maybe they realize that they want to subscribe or consume services in one cloud versus what's available in another cloud, and so it's not our job really to tell them where to go, it's to make sure we've got a consistent seamless amount of services to give these customers to consume, wherever they may be, in whichever public cloud. >> Yeah, well I like what you said, meeting them where they are, cause I think in some ways we're giving customers a little bit of credit that this was actually planned for as to how they got to where they are, you know I'm sure if we took that 81% that say they know they're multi-cloud, if we go with the other 19%, most of them are probably multi-cloud and just don't realize it. >> Jennifer: Absolutely. >> Because just like we had an IT in the old day, I have an application, a business unit, or somebody drives something, and oh my gosh, that's how we ended up with silos, we ended up breaking those things apart. >> Or shadow IT, right? You've got a lot of developers that know exactly what tools they want. >> We had a good discussion with Anthony Lye and Ted Brockway talking about Azure and some unique functionality that NetApp's looking to drive into that partnership with Microsoft. I wonder if we could step back, if you could help us understand kind of the cloud portfolio of NetApp, people that just know NetApp as "Oh it's, that's that filer company that I've probably "got a lot of products from." The multi-cloud has been evolving, for quite a few years now, so I want to help understand the breadth and depth of the offering. >> That's right and I think you know we always think about it almost like a four layer stack, in terms of our strategy and what we're doing to bring more of these innovative data services to our install base to your point, but also our net new buyers, folks that are coming to us through Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, or AWS, and so it really does start with our legacy and our foundation of, in this case, cloud storage, and the data services, or the advanced data management that's built upon those storage protocols. So of course it's NFS, NSMB, but when you think about being able to offer that, and compliment what's available in the public clouds today, because that's why they've chosen to partner with NetApp. On top of that we are delivering advanced services in those public clouds that have never been available before, things like automatic snapshots, or rapid cloning, and backup, and tiering, and I think it's really important because what it does is it extends our customers' experience from On-prem into the public cloud, without having to sacrifice a thing. >> Alok, it's a tough thing that customers are trying to figure out. When I look at it and talk to customers, they've got an application portfolio. What are they modernizing? What are they starting from fresh? And then they've got all the other stuff that they have, how is NetApp helping with what they do? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think that's a great point. So you talked about the offerings that we have with multi-cloud and that creates all the options for future state architecture, I can build there, however, in order to understand how do I get there I need to understand where I am today, right? So we start looking at your current state footprint, we look at our customer's current state footprint. Understand how it is architected. How it is designed, how it is serving up the applications. Because it can be really a tedious job to get started, to get to the cloud and building the roadmap. So what Cloud Advisor does is it leverages active IQ data to get that inside for us and be leveraging data science, machine learning, to give them a guidance as to how they can get there. What should be their migration approach. How should they build a transition strategy. Because a lot of times they would call the consultants to help with the transition strategy, at the end they get a PowerPoint, which is not very actionable. We started this grounds up, we understand their detail you know, how the stuff, the bits and bites, are organized so we start giving them an actionable strategy they can execute upon. So that's really Cloud Advisor geared for accelerating that journey to the cloud that our customers should be taking to. >> How are you guys helping customers to start embracing emerging technologies, IoT devices, we had Ducati on this morning, a MotoGP bike is basically an IoT device, but in terms of, Jennifer you talked about this, and Alok you reinforced it, you are basically co-developing in partnership with your customers, it's about where they, helping them understand where they are, what they can do today. How are some of the services helping them to be able to harness the power of AI, say for example, to work with data authority to use that data for actionable business insight, and outcomes? >> Yeah it's interesting you talk about the IoT, I think NetApp saw that 20 years ago. I mean ASAP is our original IoT, that is what we get billions of data points from our customers. Controllers, millions of controllers worldwide, and we build on that mirror data, and we apply the artificial intelligence in there. We actually start looking at classifying their applications so that, if they have a strategy driven by the application, as you were saying, hey there is a director from a BU, from majority point of view, we want to take these applications in the cloud. How do you figure out what application are? Where does the data live? How does it governed? We figure that out by that IoT data, by that artificial intelligence and also making sure that these applications, no work loads are left behind because applications can be complicated they talk to each other. So when you start thinking about taking one part of the application, you also want to make sure the other parts that make that application whole also go to the cloud. And that is where we're leveraging Artificial Intelligence to cluster these applications and recommending the customer that: "Hey don't make, don't leave these workloads behind "because otherwise you're going to have a failed strategy." So we warn them upfront to make sure they're successful when they start making the executions. >> I think another piece to that too is just the fact that for many years we've had workloads just trapped On-prem. They haven't had a place to go into the public cloud without a ton of refactoring or rearchitecting, right. You'd have to rewrite them for objectory. You'd have to do a lot of manual labor and things just to make it happen. In most cases it hasn't been worth it. And so when you looked at the fact that about 80% of On-prem files where in NFS V3 protocol, there wasn't really a place in the public cloud to match that and so by even just delivering Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and AWS or Azure NetApp Files which is the version for Azure, we're able to give customers an, a way to free up that trapped set of workloads, put those into the public hub, so that it then can be available to all of those advanced services that live on those public clouds to do things like Big Data Analytics or to do developing, you know, applications and services of their own and for their own benefit. >> You Know. >> Yeah I think that's a great point because >> He's so excited.| >> Sorry. >> Because when you start looking at building your strategy you want to have confidence in your strategy. >> Jennifer: right. >> So, with your protocols and all that discovery. We also not only give you the option that NetApp offers but show you what are the other options you have within Hyperscalers and how would your workload perform with NetApp technology. So you can move with confidence, right. So that's the good part of about Cloud Advisor to make sure you're moving with confidence not just, you know, with a blind spot with you. >> You know one of the transitions we've been watching is really the ascendancy with the developer in DevOps. And I've talked to the SolidFire team for many years, I see them at some of the shows that we've been covering. In the Keynote this morning George Kurian said that Kubernetes and Istio are the multi-Cloud control plane. Jennifer I'm wondering if you can help explain the StackPointCloud acquisition. >> Jennifer: (agrees) >> Some people that might not have the context of about what NetApp and SolidFire, even before the acquisition were doing. You know, we're being like: "Wait I don't understand, you know." >> Sure. >> Kubernetes is something That you know Google and you know, Red Hat and others are doing. >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> And we even learned what the abbreviation for is was. >> Stu: K8s. >> It's like we're all hip. Absolutely. >> Absolutely, just because. >> It's all about concatenate long words together. So it, it's really interesting because when I talked about that four layer strategy, right the third layer. So it's you know cloud storage at the bottom. Then it's the advanced capabilities and data management above that. But the one that's next is orchestration and integration. And there's really a few things that live in there. You know, the, our cloud orchestration sort of technology is really what we got from our Qstack acquisition. Our teams in Iceland and what they've been able to do largely to underpin a lot of what we've seen with cloud volume service today. But certainly right in there is NetApp Kubernetes service, which as you now know, is from our StackPoint intellectual property. And so back on September 18th, when we announced this acquisition it was really to kind of give our developers and our DevOps folks a way to finally start solving for some of that data gravity that I think we've been periled by over the last few years. And what we now know is Kubernetes is the operating system of the clouds, right. It is the clear winner of container orchestration among things so it made a lot of sense to pair that kind of multi-cloud orchestration again given our strategy to be where our customers want to be with some of our cloud orchestration technology from our Qstack acquisition and make sure that with Trident and some of the ways that we're able to deliver finally persistent storage to those containers. I mean this is like a match made in heaven. Right, we're going to give people the way to make sure that they know that containers are a femoral and data is not. So let's help them do kind of all the things that they want to do in the clouds if they want to do them. >> I think I read on line that, was the StackPointCloud acquisition based on after actually NetApp used it internally. >> Jennifer: Yes. >> Tell us a little bit more about that. Because I think the NetApp on that up story is probably something that could be leverage, you're a marketer, as a differentiator when customers have so much choice. >> Well and I feel like it's a story that every vendor should be forced to tell. If you're not willing to use your own IP and technology what is that saying to your customers. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> So it is true and a lot of our developer teams, if you've hear of Jonsi Stefansson and Anthony Lye's team, that is how this sort of came about as we were looking for a way to sort of do it ourselves. And we thought man through all this investigation there's something here. There's something that we shouldn't hold to ourselves and we should share with the rest of the world. And so at one point we need to get those guys on with you as well so they can tell a little bit more about their story. >> So proof is always in the pudding. Can you give uan example of one of your favorite customer stories. We'll start with you Alok. Who have really embraced the clouds, first of all helped you develop the optimal cloud services are now really achieving big business benefits with the cloud services NetApp is developing. >> Yeah so, several of the customers as we talked to you and specially for Cloud Advisor, as we were looking at their journey as they were starting to think about how much money they were spending upfront to figure out a strategy, they had a strategy driven by a data center that was, were the lease was coming up, and so they had to plan to evacuate that data center into the cloud from there they need to figure out what applications they're running there obviously the virtualization also was there, so that had to be configured in the cloud. So we started thinking about in that use case that we need to provide these triggers and strategy points to our customers. At the same time the other shift that we saw was that these guys were not just talking amongst the infrastructure teams, they had to talk to the application owners and they had to have conversations with CFO's to talk about the economics of the clouds. So we made sure that when we build this that give them the tools that enable them to talk to various stakeholders. Give them the application footprint that is running there. Give them the economics. What it is going to cost to run these applications and workloads that they have identify too when they're in the cloud. So give them the data point that they can go and talk to their CFO. So with that really it starts shaping a product that will meet their needs and meet the needs of all of our customers. >> Lisa: Jennifer, favorite customer example. >> Oh, it's easy this week because it's all about WuXi NextCODE and I don't know if you picked up on any of their story cause we've plastered it around our conference this week because we're so proud of, not only what they're doing as a mission which is very impressive in terms of genomics sequencing and the scale at which they're doing it but the fact that they've based their foundation now on NetApp Cloud Volume services is huge. And really what they came to us and said is: "Look, we are trying to sequence all of these genomes "in parallel and our benchmark is really to look at about "a hundred thousand individuals at once." When they were trying to do that on their own, using there own self-managed storage in the cloud, they could never complete it. It would either fail or they would have some sort of a problem where they just couldn't get it to work. And with NetApp Cloud Volume Service they were able to complete in about 45 minutes. And so what their finding is again with this extreme performance, with the ability to scale and most importantly the tie it back to our discussion, it's multi-cloud, they themselves are multi-cloud because of their big pharma and hospitals that they serve. They have customers in every one of those public clouds and so we are able to help them where ever they need us to be. And that's very exciting. >> It's also one of those great examples that everybody understands. Genomic sequencing related to healthcare, you know disease predictions and things like that. So it's a story that resonates well. >> Jennifer: Sure. >> But something that you just said sort of reminded me of one of the four principles that George Kurian talked about this morning. And speed is the new scale. And this sounds like a customer who's achieving that in spades. >> Well it's so fun because I think for a long time we've been really fast On-prem and I think people have just sort of come to expect a certain level of it's good enough in the public cloud and what we're showing them in droves again on AWS GCP or with Azure is that you should expect more. Particularly for high-performance computing workloads or things that you really just, if you're moving your SAP workloads to the cloud and speed is, there is no option it has to be fast. We are showing people now possibilities that they didn't ever dream of before because of this extreme performance through things like Cloud Volumes Service. >> It's really too bad you guys aren't excited about this. (laughs) >> I know how much longer do you have? >> (laughs) Jennifer, Alok, thank you so much for stopping by and having a chat with Stu and me. And talking about how customers are really helping NetApp become a data authority that they need to be to help customers become data driven. We appreciate your time. >> It's our pleasure. >> Have a great time at the rest of the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you both. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from NetApp Insight 2018, from Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we're live at NetApp Insight 2018 from the Mandalay Bay, in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the day is Stu Miniman. We're welcoming back two distinguished alumni to theCUBE, we've got Anthony Lye SVP and GM of the Cloud BU at NetApp. Hey, Anthony, welcome back. >> Hello, thank you very much. >> Fresh from the keynote stage. And we've also got a Tad Brockway, the head of product Azure Storage, Media and Edge at Microsoft, Tad, welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So guys, this is day one, keynote this morning, it was standing room only, 5,000 plus people here, Jean English was on your CMO of NetApp and said, most ever customers and partners under one roof at NetApp. So that's exciting. Let's talk about partnerships. NetApp has been around 26 years and the slide of partners and sponsors this morning was like a NASCAR slide. Tell us Anthony, about what you guys are doing, and how you're evolving your relationship with Microsoft? >> Oh, I mean, I think of all the relationships, Microsoft is unique. Tad and I have worked together now for over a year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And it's an engineering relationship. There is absolutely no doubt about it. We are doing things in Azure that nobody else has ever done. I think we sort of bring 26 years of NetApp experience to the infinite possibilities that Azure brings to its customers. It's transformation based on, very reliable infrastructure. So you get all the forward looking values of Azure, complemented by the 26 years of NetApp. >> Yeah, it's a great way to-- >> So a year ago, at this very event, NetApp Insight 2017, you announced some exciting things. One of them being Azure NetApp files. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Tell us about, a year later, where you are with that? I know McKesson, big brand in healthcare, they're going to be on stage tomorrow, give us a little bit of perspective about what that announcement has transformed into, one year in? >> Well, let me give you my perspective and then Tad, you should obviously give the view of Microsoft. For NetApp, it's given our customers confidence and confidence in their choice of public Cloud, that they now feel that Azure has distinct advantage in that it can land workloads that today currently run on NetApp. And they have the confidence that Microsoft has selected NetApp, that Microsoft will sell the service, Microsoft will support the service, Microsoft will build the service. I think we've also done something quite unique in the way the service is delivered. We could have just thrown up storage and said to customers, "You manage it." But I think together, we wanted to try and provide almost like dial tone, we just wanted storage to be there, and we wanted to give people performance guarantee. So they felt very comfortable picking a particular performance level with a particular workload. And that's not been done before. So, we're seeing fantastic results from customers, we have a backlog that's growing by the day, and customers who have been onboarded onto the system, have rave things to say about it. You'll hear from one of those customers tomorrow on stage with Tad and I. But Tad, how would you characterize the year? >> Yeah, sure. So, a lot of engineering effort, and that's the thing that makes this, customers don't care about how something is implemented, they care about the value that they get out of it. But it's because we've put so much effort into this across our companies, from an engineering standpoint, that there's nothing like this in the industry today. As we roll this out into Azure regions around the world, it is going to be a highly differentiated offering. And that's because fundamentally, what we're doing is, we're bringing Azure NetApp into Microsoft data centers, and we're wiring NetApp ONTAP directly into Azure. So we've worked together on the design for some advanced networking capability, all the way down to the switch level, where we have very low latency, very high throughput from the Azure Public Cloud, all of the infrastructure, all of the customers VMs, directly into ONTAP, very low latency, very high bandwidth. So all of the performance characteristics of ONTAP on-prem, and then bringing that into the Public Cloud. So you get really a no compromise transformation for your existing apps and you get the ability to provision that app volumes in a way that is fundamentally unique, it fits with the whole Cloud paradigm of being able to pay for your resources as you go, the democratization of IT so that individual business units can go provision volumes. So it really is Cloud paradigm plus all of the performance capabilities of ONTAP. >> I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit. When I think about Microsoft and NetApp, you both have really, it's called today Hybrid Multi Cloud. But Microsoft it's been given a lot of credit that it's got a strong Hybrid strategy. When I think back, I mean, Microsoft's always had storage as part of the Stack. If today, and Azure Stack, you've got Storage Spaces Direct, you've got a Cloud first strategy. So I want to be able to do the same thing in public Azure as when I'm building solutions, put it in the environment, can you help connect, where does that this ONTAP solution fit in there? Because, some people would say, "Well, come on Microsoft, "wouldn't you just build this with your own solutions?" Why do you turn to NetApp? >> So, it's true, I guess, the spirit, I think the spirit of what you're asking is, it's an observation that what brings our companies together is an appreciation for enterprise customers being able to do things on their terms. That involves customers taking existing IT workloads and then transforming them over to the cloud, as opposed to zeroing everything out and starting over, that's just not realistic. So, it's the strategy for Microsoft and the strategy for NetApp, and then our partnership together to meet customers where they are, help them evolve. So scenarios like Hybrid, they fit very nicely within that and Microsoft's portfolio with Azure Stack and some of the other things that we're doing there with Data Box, and so on. These are edge investments that are intended to extend the reach of Cloud into customer environments. And then to make it really easy for customers to take their existing assets, and then take advantage of the Cloud. That fits with the whole model of what we're doing with ONTAP as well. >> Anthony, we would love to hear your piece because there's NetApp pieces that are going into the Cloud but we see Microsoft, the Cloud is the starting point, we start in the public Cloud, and then that pushes out to the edge. >> Yeah, I think, I would make two points, I think, just to reinforce what Tad said, that there's just a technology that sits behind the file system that you cannot underestimate the importance of what Dave Hitz really started. I mean, ONTAP does things that no other file system can do. It manages the data in a very particular way, it allows us to run NFS and SMB protocols on the same volume for certain use cases. It has almost linear performance throughput characteristics. And we've been able to take that file system and then build intellectual property for certain workloads. So, NetApp is really the most commonly deployed platform for SAP. We are probably still the biggest platform for Oracle Database deployment, for MySQL deployment. So I think there's a technology, I think there is a sort of a history and legacy in Linux and open source based workloads, that we have an understanding of that adds to Microsoft. Now, the second point I would say is, I personally agree very much with Tad, but I think what you're going to see is IT will be redefined by Cloud. What I mean by that is, the Cloud will essentially establish the baseline and then push itself and it's sort of it's own access control lists, security models, those will end up getting pushed back to IT. So I think you're going to see a Cloud defined IT business as opposed to an IT defined Cloud. >> Yeah, I buy that. >> And I think there's just so much elegance and simplicity and scalability in Azure. Now, they had 25 years of watching everybody else make a mess of legacy IT, and now Azure is such a pure environment that it can extend, I think, and provide tons of value outside of Azure. >> So you guys mentioned, I think, Anthony, you mentioned when we kicked off, that this is really kind of an engineering partnership, when if we look at the history that both NetApp and Microsoft, have massive install basis of customers, customers that didn't start out in the digital era, obviously, customers that are born in that too. I'm curious, you mentioned about IT, from a joint selling standpoint, where are these conversations initiating? Are you talking with the IT folks? Are you going to the business folks who are having a more business outcomes led conversation? So Anthony, I will start with you? >> Well, so I would say, my favorite line about Cloud was, actually a line Marc Benioff quoted which was, what Clouds do is they democratize innovation. And if you think about that for a second, the environments that we grew up in, the big companies had a material advantage in their use of technology. The small companies couldn't afford to do it. You look at Azure now, and any single person on the planet can consume Azure. They don't need permission, in many cases, and ideas that would never get through the business case, can now be started on Azure. And there are so many great ideas and concepts that needed that sort of easy onboarding and services that, machine learning and artificial intelligence, there's a handful of companies that could buy that stuff themselves. Azure gives you access to all of that. So I think what's happening is that democratization has sort of infused more buyers. So what used to be a fairly linear process through the CIO has now been fractured. A lot of application developers are buying by themselves. Line of business people are funding project work sometimes without IT's knowledge. So for us, we wanted to make sure that we could allow traditional customers to extend to Azure, traditional customers to migrate to Azure, but we wanted to build a service that would appeal to the new Cloud buyer. To the application developer, to the data scientist. And I think we've done a very good job doing that. >> Yeah, no, I agree. I think, it's the combination of empowering folks to go do things to increase productivity at the individual business unit level, but then do that with technology that has taken decades of thousands of engineers to develop. This combination, there really is nothing like it in the industry, it's really unique. >> At lunch, I was talking to a couple of users here, and they were a little bit nervous, a little bit excited, going to go through some sort of Cloud certification. Cloud is an opportunity for a lot of people to scale up on new skill sets. I'm sure there's new certification. Can you talk a little bit about how you're helping customers move towards the future? >> Yeah, I think we've sort of, in many ways made, ONTAP, very much a relevant service in Azure and what we hope that means is for all of the people that have been very loyal to NetApp and to ONTAP that their skill set now translates into the Cloud compensations. One of the things we'll say, on stage tomorrow is, Microsoft and NetApp have worked together to create a certification that blends the best of what ONTAP can do for workloads, strategy and design with the wealth of services that Azure has. It's awesome to be onstage with Tad, we provide a critical service, but Microsoft has how many services now, in Azure? >> Tad: Oh, Gosh, hundreds. >> Hundreds and hundreds of services. And as a developer, I feel, you're like a kid in a candy store when you're in Azure, you can switch on almost anything and find services that will do incredible things that you could never get from IT. You could just never get those services. What Microsoft has is a scale so vast, I mean, how many data centers will you be at, by the end of the year? >> Well, we're in 54 regions today, and then each region has multiple data centers. >> Anthony: Hundreds. >> So anyway, we're all over the planet. >> So guys, we're out of time, but just really quickly, so we've seen this evolution, you guys have lived this evolution in the last year. The public preview is out for-- >> Azure NetApp files. >> Azure NetApp files, any Sneak Peek you can give us into what some of your customers are going to be saying tomorrow about the business outcomes like, reducing costs, or speed of transactions, that are going to be here tomorrow? >> You should get Brad up here from McKesson because he's awesome. Brad's been on point for it and I think, you'll hear from a customer tomorrow that they plan to bring the biggest enterprise workloads to Azure. I mean, I think when he names the applications, they are non-trivial applications that couldn't move, but now with Azure Netapp files can. I think he's also going to say that as well as benchmarking very well at the big workloads, we actually benchmark very well on the cost curve. That we can migrate workloads and give very good cost, I think characteristics as well as performance. So we've tried to give people that two dimensional flexibility. >> Well, that's going to be something not to miss. So if you're here at NetApp Insight, check it out, if you're not, watch it on their live stream. Tad, Anthony, thanks so much for joining-- >> Thank you, very much. >> Stu and me and sharing with us the momentum and the vision that you're now seeing manifest. We appreciate your time. >> Perfect, thank you. >> From Stu Miniman and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live from Las Vegas, NetApp Insight 2018, stick around we'll be back after a short break.

(electronic upbeat theme music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at NetApp Insight 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we're please to welcome for the first time to theCUBE, Cindy Warner, SVP of Worldwide Service and Support at NetApp. Cindy, it's great to have you here. >> Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. >> So this morning's keynote, talked a lot about transformation. Transformation of NetApp. Transformation that your customers need to execute to be competitive, to be successful. Tell us about customer transformation that you're seeing as the leader of service and support. >> Sure, our customers want outcome plain and simple. They are buying solutions that lead to outcome. So in the service and support area, the conversations we're having with our customers now is all about outcome. What can we do to ensure their outcome. To ensure their transformation. To ensure they can provide the services to their customers that they're looking to provide, or new revenue streams, or what have you. But it's really all about outcome and that's awesome because they don't care what's behind the curtain. They don't care if it's this box or that box. They care about outcomes. So that's a really big transformation for us. >> Yeah Cindy, one of the big challenges that used to be, okay, I got a box. I know exactly where it is. I know exactly, you know, who set it up and all the configuration. Now it's like wait. It's a multi-hybrid cloud world. >> Cindy: Right. >> And I got software spanning all of these environments and my data is all over the place. That has to have a huge ripple effect on the services and support. Walk us through a little bit about what that looks like. >> Yeah, I would tell you the number one thing in our world, if you really think about it, is data sovereignty. Because where's my data, you know. If I were a CTO or CIO, I'd wake up in the morning and go, where's my data. Right because, and we're managing that data for a lot of clients. And so it's really all about where's my data, and making sure that the sovereignty of the data is suppose to be in a certain place. It's suppose to be protected in a certain way. We work with a lot of regulated environments. So think healthcare, right. Think, you know, even automotive to some extend. All that IOT data, who's touching that data? That's personal data. So as, you know, the futurist talked about this morning, the ethical side of data for services and support is really intriguing to us actually. >> What's the conversation like, Cindy, with your enterprise legacy customers who weren't born in the cloud? How are you helping them kind of embrace the change that they have to go through? >> Yeah, I think the number one thing is to not be persuade into thinking it's all cloud, right. It's not everything is not made for the cloud. Especially if it wasn't born on the cloud. The pathway to the cloud could be very difficult, and maybe not even prudent. So we're doing a lot of assessments for our clients to decide what workloads belong in the cloud, and helping them to understand, it isn't all cloud. It's some cloud and it's hybrid cloud, and so it's this wonderful Lego cube that we build for them. >> NetApp has done quite a few acquisitions, you know, in the last couple of years. How does that impact what you're doing? Think about everything from the Gubernatis pieces and what's happening in AI. Talk about some of those challenges and opportunities. >> Sure, I mean, I would tell you something like Green Cloud that we did last year. When we look at managing those workloads, and helping to build up that Rubik's cube, right. Of piece parts and what that overall orchestration and architectural looks like in the future. Something like a Green Cloud helps us to orchestrate that. It helps us to manage that and really, that management plane for our clients is really where the heartburn is. It's taking look and seeing that entire data landscape and managing and orchestrating that. And the movement of all that data. That's the biggie. >> You know, follow up question. When I think about NetApp, NetApp was heavily involved in helping to really fix storage in a virtualized environment. >> Cindy: Sure. >> Lots of us have, you know, the wounds, the memories of, you know, over a decade of kind of fighting through that. What is FCS's role in kind of the cloud native this next wave? >> Yeah I, you know, I think it's the overall integration. Our team now is really fixated on where do we go with the overall integration of legacy and the cloud native stuff that clients are building. And grand it, the cloud native stuff gives competitive differentiation. Gives speed, gives scale. Really great stuff. But you can't leave the other stuff behind, right So for us, integration and how that integration is going to work through APIs or otherwise, is really a huge fixation in services and support. >> So NetApp has grown a lot. Done a lot of transformation. Talk about some of the changes to your customers' segmentation and how you're using that information and that segmentation to really deliver differentiated services. 'Cause let's face it, customers have a lot of choice. >> Right, and that's a key word for us actually. We say that the tag line, and for services and support we're looking for value based differentiated services that deliver outcomes. Big mouth. All I know, and I have no marketing chops, as you can tell, but the truth be told, when we look at our Global 1000 customer, they want high touch. And in some cases, no touch. And they want to get the information, solve problems really quickly without having to go, L1, L2 all through the tiers. And so we're piloting programs that are proactive predictive. And that are very high touch to ensure that they can solve their problems quite quickly. Either on their own or through the right person instead of going through some of that typical pathways to support. >> Alright, Cindy, I love you. You're going to help us decode some of this marketing discussion. So, hashtag data driven is something we're seeing at the show. >> Cindy: Right. >> Help connect for us, you know, how are customers being data driven as they look at their future in the cloud and beyond. >> Well, when I think of data driven, I think of new services. That to me means new services. And looking at the correlation, if you may say. Give you, you know, a start here. So the gentleman that had the DNA and Gene-Up data, right, in the keynote. If we can take that data and correlated to somebody's overall health history and see the transition, right. See as your blood pressure is going up. Or see as, you know, certain changes and doubts are happening in your health profile. Overall holistically, you can I think see the train before it hits you. Right, you can see a stroke coming. And that would be the most beautiful thing. Is to see stuff before it hits you. Same with the car manufacturer. If they see a pattern of brakes that are going out, Marry Barra probably never wants to sit in front of the Senate again, right. So we can see those patterns before a massive recall has to happen. So that's data driven to me. It's either new goods and services or seeing a train before it hits you. >> Cindy, I know this is a short segment, but we want to thank you so much for stopping by. I'm going to give you a CUBE sticker because you are now officially an alumni. >> I'll feel CUBED forever more. >> Excellent. CUBED forever more. That's a new hashtag. We want to thank you for sharing your perspective from a services and support standpoint because those are critical services >> Thank you. >> For customers needs. >> And we want to thank you for watching this segment. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE live from NetApp Insight 2018. (electronic upbeat theme music)

(upbeat techno) [Announcer] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018 There's over 5000 customers, partners, Netappians, analysts, press here. TheCUBE is here as well, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman back for our second year of covering. We're joined by two guests, one an alumni and one a new guest to theCUBE, Henri Richard EVP a worldwide field and customer operations from NetApp, welcome. >> Good morning. >> Morning. And Kamran Amini, the VP and GM of data center infrastructure from Lenovo, welcome back! >> Glad to be here. >> So guys, Lenovo, NetApp, just about a month ago announced some exciting news, Henri let's start with you, kind of give our viewers who may not be that familiar with the news announcement what this new technology partnership is all about. >> Well, it's a multi-faceted partnership. I think it's important to understand that for us there is a component that has to do with a worldwide engagement of Lenovo around storage solutions that will be infused with NetApp technology. There's a second element, which is the opportunity for us to pull or go to market organization in certain countries, and get to critical mass to cover the needs of customers. And then the last part, the one that's probably the most talked about, is a joint venture in China where we will combine our forces to serve the needs of the very fast-growing Chinese market. >> Alright, yeah. Henri, I was at the Lenovo event where this was announced, want you to give us a little bit about the field engagement, because it really does seem a place where NetApp and Lenovo, there's good synergies there, but there's not a ton of overlap. Maybe explain a little bit from the field engagement. >> That is really one of the reasons we were excited, I think, on both sides to do this agreement. You know, we feel that Lenovo is a fantastic server company, that's demonstrated incredible momentum in the last 12 months. We have ourselves, you know, modestly a pretty nice momentum in the storage business, and in coming together I think we can be stronger in serving the needs of customers that have both compute and storage needs. When we did the analysis of our market coverage, it so happens that there's a lot of places where we're strong and Lenovo can benefit from that, and other places where they're strong, and we can benefit from it, so you're correct in stating that there was not that much overlap. And then lastly, we've put in place a process where our go-to-market organizations are going to combine their strength and help each other in some of accounts where both a strong compute story and a strong storage - needs to be integrated to serve the needs of the customer. >> Let's talk a little bit more, guys, about the impetus from the customers. The keynote this morning, as I was mentioning was jam packed, and we heard a lot, Stu, about the customer experience, and how NetApp is an enabler of customers to harness their data to become data-driven. Kamran, from your perspective, what was some of the customer input that really sort of brought this partnership - and this multi-faceted partnership - together? >> I think as we see customers looking their applications, not only current applications, but emerging applications, data's becoming very critical. And be able to accelerate data and the availability of data is going to be key for them, alright? As you heard earlier this morning, data's gold, right? It's the next oil, as we think about it. So we looked at our customers and at their transforming moving toward machine learning and AI, big data analytics, and it's driving massive amount of data that you have to be able to accelerate and be able to give results back. The partnership was the best of breed here. Looking at a leader partner around all flash and growing massively with their data-management solutions, and us leveraging our server technology and the capability we bring as a data center group, bring the both of best breeds to deliver an end solution for customers is really what we're focused on. And it's all being driven, really, by data, really where we see the acceleration happening in the workload aspect of it. >> You know, I was listening to the keynote this morning it talked about how customers today, it's a hybrid, multi-cloud world, is what NetApp positioned, and what I actually like is both NetApp and Lenovo are really aware and work with, really, the hyper scalers out there. There's a bunch of years that we kind of - there was this fighting from certain vendors out there, it was like, "Don't go that, that's not the future," you know, "We know what we're telling." Maybe talk a little bit about how that plays into philosophy, how you deal with customers, and how that leads to co engineered solutions that you'll work with together. >> Well, I think that both companies have a history of being good partners in the industry. Let's start there. Secondly, you're right, that some vendors in what we call traditional IT, are still fighting the reality of the hybrid multi-cloud, and I think that that's the path to death. Lenovo doesn't have that position, we certainly don't have that position, and we believe that combining our strength, when we're serving the customer to help them go to the public cloud, to help them leverage both great compute capabilities on prem and the extraordinary innovation that happens in the cloud is the right way to serve the customers. >> No, absolutely. I think that customers are looking to be more agile, all right? As their business evolves, and they're seeing competitive nature in their line of business, agility is becoming more and more important. Everybody also has to fit within a budget, so the hybrid-cloud story is really the path. And today, again, Lenovo is serving six of the top 10 hyper-scalers today from a technology, and we believe the hybrid-cloud story for on prem is the path of the future, where the customer adopt and deploy, to be more agile and reactive to their markets. >> George Kurian talked about, in his keynote this morning, that we seemed to kind of initially address, stand up has a massive install base, a lot of enterprises that were not born in the digital age, so he kind of talked about something that reminded me of what you said, Henri, is, "If customers don't adapt, transform rapidly at scale, they're out of business." So NetApp itself has undergone a very significant transformation, I'd love to understand from both of your perspectives, Henri, we'll start with you. How does the NetApp Lenovo multi-faceted partnership deliver differentiators? Presumably Lenovo has a lot of choices to do a partnership with a cloud storage data management company. What are some of those unique things from NetApp's field? >> So, one of the salient points that George made this morning is that for legacy companies, you know, they have to understand that the fact that they already have data is a huge asset that they need to leverage, right? That's using that data is how they're not going to become disrupted by a new company. Startups have agility, but they don't have the data. So jumping on that opportunity was certainly something we did at NetApp, and we have an application called Active IQ that actually takes a massive data lake of information we get from our systems, and is helping our customers make better usage of our technology. So just an example of our digital transformation. To the point of the relationship with Lenovo, the nice thing about our data fabric strategy is that it is not related to NetApp hardware, it's really all encompassing, it's there to serve the needs of the customer to be able to leverage the value of their data. And so it makes it very easy to partner with us, because really we're not parochial about, how we go about leveraging the technology. >> Yeah, I think what we see is, you know this digital transformation is driving many new use cases. IOT's becoming a big thing, putting edge to the cloud. So, data and our understanding data, and what you can do with data, is going to become more relevant across all lines of business. And that's where we're really focused on, and our transformation as Lenovo it's all around, "How do we address that shift that's happening in the market, where customers are moving away from data being just there to actually leveraging data and being able to create an outcome out of that data so it's going to be effective?" >> Alright, so this was announced about a month ago. Give us a little insight, how's the rollout been going? What's the reaction been from customers, channel partners, and the like? >> So I think channel partners, analysts, and press have been very positive, right? I think as we talked about being frictionless, it's been there, right? I think people see that what we said is actually out there. We're seeing good success in parts of geography worldwide already for the parts that have been shipping as of 09/14. We have our DE series shipping shortly, in early November, and we're going to continue acceleration in our channel partners and our customers. So we're very excited, I think as we saw prior to announcement we were growing triple digits in all flash as Lenovo. I think that with the expanded TAM going from 15% to averaging above 90% on market with the storage portfolio, we're excited here. We're anxious to keep going. >> Yeah, I'll go a little further, I would tell you that I think many channel partners felt hostage to some of the other choices in the industry. And the overwhelming feedback to the announcement of this relationship is, "Thank God, I now have an alternative that is powerful, with great focus on the compute side, great momentum on the storage side, bringing together best of great portfolio, and now I've got choice that I didn't have before." So I think there's a very high level of expectation, excitement, and I expect the momentum with channel partners and distributors to be very high. >> Let's unpack that joint go-to-market GTM strategy a little bit more. Let's talk about it first from the NetApp side. How are you going to market with an image and your partners? The selling motion, how do customers engage? Help us understand that. >> So NetApp is really coming from a very high-touch sales model, you know the beauty of our partnership with Lenovo is they have a velocity model. So for the part of the markets that are really about having velocity, I think it's a perfect marriage. The second thing is, they have a much larger world-wide presence than we do, I mean they've got physical location in many countries where we are not present. So that's expanding the footprint of potential close in service to NetApp customers. And then lastly, you know, the world is evolving very quickly, it's all about the apps, and I am excited about the fact that my go-to-market team rubbing shoulders with the Lenovo team is going to get more intelligent about compute, which is important for us to understand the real needs of the customers. >> Lisa: And Kamran, from your view? >> I mean I think we - And Lenovo serves over 160 countries, as you know, Henri, so we have a very expanded. We serve customers all the way from SMB all the way to very large enterprise like cloud service providers and MSBs. I think the momentum we have based on the park announcement is really provides an alternative solution to the HPE 3PAR and Delhi AMC, right? As Henri stated I think a lot of our channel partners, our disties, our value-added resellers are looking for an alternative route of a solution between the two leading platform solution providers here. And I think we're seeing that momentum, right? I think as of 09/13 when we made the announcement at Transform, we're seeing the excitement and the pull coming from the field and driving it, and of course we of course have a direct sales model, right? Having that high touch with a customer, selling the value prop of this storage solution and entire portfolio we can bring in, and the partnership value that brings in with NetApp here. >> Alright, so what should we expect to see from this partnership in the near future? >> Well, I think, you know, expansion of the product portfolio, particularly in the case of the China JV. One of the mission of that JV will be to design products specifically for the Chinese market, which we all know is very big and growing extremely fast, so that's one aspect that is yet to be seen. And then the second thing is as we collaborate on solving real customer problems, I expect to see a higher level of innovation, as we understand both sides of the equation and how we can bring our technologies together to solve real customer problems. >> The last question for both of you. You both talked about this joint partnership gives both NetApp and Lenovo and your respective install bases choice. What is the one differentiator? Why would a customer choose to go this route versus, as you mentioned, Delhi MC, HPE...? >> So I think you look at where NetApp has had leadership performance in all flash, and Ontap's amazing software, data management software solution. And look at Lenovo, we've been the fastest-growing server provider in the world. We see where we're bleeding in HPC environments, and really driving software to find. So I think customers are looking for, "How do I take the best of breed of things and bring it together? And making sure when you bring it together it is working together." So part of having the relationship of leveraging the NetApp technology is that Lenovo storage portfolio also provides that ability that says, it's a proven technology, the server technologies and the storage are proven. So it doesn't matter if a customer wants to leverage a NetApp technology with a Lenovo server, it is a proven solution for them, and they can depend on the value it's going to deliver. >> From my standpoint, you've got two credible, long term, solid people in the industry, partnering to get best-of-breed solutions with an eye towards being leaning into the cloud, and I think that in two days, IT business with a new wave of IT, if you don't embrace the cloud, the cloud will kill you. And so I think that's our unique differentiation, is that we have two companies that can serve our customers on prem needs, but have a very comprehensive private cloud, public cloud, and on prem strategy. And I think that nobody else can claim that differentiation. >> Henri, Kamran, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting and sharing a little bit more about this exciting partnership. We look forward to hearing news next year! >> It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are live from NetApp Insight 2018, we'll be back after a short break. (upbeat techno)

(techno music) >> At Ducati, we create racing bikes and road bikes, and unique experiences for our bikers. The Ducati teams participate in 19 races, in 15 countries, on five continents, as part of Moto GP Championship around the world. When you own a bike, you are part of a new family, the Ducatisti. (engine revving) We have a DNA racing, that we bring into everyday's bike, you can be a racer, or you can be someone who want to go down downtown Bologna, or San Francisco, or Bangkok. Data is at the heart of the Ducati digital strategy, in racing we know how to analyze data, the experience is directly moved to our road bikes. In race bikes and road bikes we have physical sensors, now thanks to machine learning, artificial intelligence, we can bring to data together to create Bitron sensors, that give us information that were not available before. We are looking for a partner that truly understands the value and the power of data, and this happened to be NetAPP. We want to arrange data in new ways, to transform the sport of Moto GP racing, and the road bike experience. NetAPP has controlled data to make experimentation more quickly, the bike we race on Sunday, is the bike we sell on Monday, and we can test the riders sensation through data. I'm Piergiorgio Grossi, and I'm data driven. (techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering NetAPP Insight 2018, brought to you by NetAPP. >> Welcome back the the Cube our continuing coverage today, from the Mandalay Bay of NetAPP Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we have a couple of guests joining us. If you're a Motorsport fan, turn the volume up. First we have, welcoming back to the Cube, Jean English, the SVP and CMO at NetAPP, great to have you back Jean!. >> Oh thank you very much, excited to be here. >> And we have Konstantin Kostenarov, CTO of Ducati Motor, wow Ducati, there is by the way, I encourage you to go to the NetAPP.com web site after the segment here there's a very cool video about how Ducati is working with NetAPP on the racing side, these bikes are like flying IOT devices, as well as the consumer side. So Jean let's kick of things with you, this is day one, record breaking attendance for NetAPP, 5000 attendees, we were in the Keynote this morning, standing room only, talk to us about NetAPP as a Data authority, what's some of the feedback that you're hearing from your wealth of partners and customers that are here this week? >> Absolutely, well we're thrilled to have so many partners and customers and employees here with us, record breaking attendance, more customers and partners that have ever joined us before here at Insight a Data authority, people are asking us what do I need to do to maximize the value of that data, whether it's integrating the data, simplifying the data, they're trying to figure it out, and most of the time it's in a Hybrid role, it's in a multiclout world, and so we're just excited about where we are with our strategy, we're bringing it to life, more and more customers, like Ducati everyday are helping us to see this vision come true and we just can't wait to get started with everyone else. >> And this is a really interesting example, NetAPP has, in it's 26 year history, a massive install base, probably every industry, but when you look at something like Ducati, which probably every guy knows about, I have some Motorsport experience myself, it's much more of a, oh as a consumer, as a fan of the sport, so Konstantin, tell us about Ducati's decision to work with NetAPP, because you guys aim to not only utilize, all of the data, tons of data coming off the two bikes, every race weekend, to improve performance, but you're also wanting to use that speed, which is the new scale as George Curion said this morning, to even improve the consumer experience, and talk to us about Ducati's partnership with NetAPP. >> So we start to work with NetAPP about two years ago, more over, and in these, nowadays, every people around us talk about job thinking, extreme improvement, extreme increase of customer experience so in this world this will be Ducatis very excited challenge and this challenge requires us to respond with the best technology. The best technology that help us to collect the best information from our motorbikes, from our racing teams that we know how to collect the data, how to transformate this data into usable information, and how to generate the opportunity to have data sensors that we can transform in in information but also in knowledge that we hear before, and put all this information inside our fabric, and inside our shop floor, inside our R and D department, in order to be able to extremely increase the experience of our customers. >> I love that we get to work with one of the most innovative companies in the entire world of Motorsports, and I think really from the inception of Ducati, you guys have been really focused on how do you keep innovating through technology, and we talk about transforming the world of racing with data and how are we doing that together, so together with Ducati and NetAPP, how do we help enable them to have the best motors in the whole world, we're really excited! >> Jean, it's a great discussion, we've loved watching from just talking about the storage industry to where we're talking about data, and transformations so maybe explain to our audience that maybe not understand, you know, what's different about the industry today, and what's enabling this, NetAPP to be able to work with companies like Ducati, to help them through these transformations today, that they might not have been able to do a few years ago. >> Absolutely, I think there's just more and more data that we're finding every day, whether it's Ducati, Motorsports, if it happens to be in health care, and thinking about the millions and billions of genomes types of research that they're doing. We know even from banking how they're trying to connect the dots across an entire customer experience. Sure they're using technology like storage, absolutely, they're thinking about computers, they're thinking more and more though about services, and the cloud, APIs, how are they going to gain all this innovation through AI, analytics, but it's about making the customer experience better. What I love about the partnership we have with Ducati is it's not just about the bikes themselves, it's about the community that they have and that they're building and that community is yes, based on data from the bike, it's about the data coming from the riders, and it's about the data they collect so they all become a stronger community as a whole. >> Yeah, Konstantin maybe explain a little bit more to your audience the role of data as Ducati see's it, and how that drives innovation in your company. >> In the world like motorbike racing team, where every millisecond counts and the difference, in how we can collect in, very quickly mode the data, and to transform the information becomes determinate if you win or not because as you know, in Qatar we win with 29 milliseconds, and this is the work that we've done, days before, analyzing data, and set up the motorcycle, in the best way, because for us, the collaboration with NetAPP is not only storage, and is not only data, but is data management, and extremely short time to respond to our business requests and work to transform the paradigm of time, and money the paradigm of data and information, and we talk about performance with our line of business, not from the technical point of view but from the extremely business oriented, the customer oriented point of view, and we collect the data from the more than 60 sensors, from the racing motorbikes and transform it with artificial intelligence and deep machine learning, in vector sensors that give us information that we cannot reach from the normal road bikes, and this improves extremely our competitiveness, and we are able to give this, experience to our riders that becomes our families, because a good thing, a good product to all our customers, and with attention of environment in the behavior of the riders we would think that the good people in the good universe act in a good way. >> And we're happy to be part of that too. >> Before we get into that, the consumer side, so your riders, Andrea Dovizioso, and Jorge Lorenzo, how has their performance improved because you're able to take data, gigs per quali day, race day, analyze it in real time, how has their performance improved as a result of your NetAPP partnership? >> As you know, the racing motorbike is not able to stop in real time during the race, not like in Formula One so you need to use the best technology to connect the bikes to our minidata center inside the box during the race. Make our strategy to set up the bike as better as we can, and the speed which we can reach the, and collect the data, put it in the telemetry software, calibrate it, make the strategy decision is very very important. And with the HCI technology we can do it. >> How are you taking the transformation that you're making on the racing side and applying it to the consumer side so that, as I think I heard on the video, Ducati wants to deliver the bike that a guy or gal rides on a Sunday by Monday, that speed, speed is the new scale as George Curion mentioned this morning, how is the consumer side of Ducati Motorsport being influenced positively to enable those consumers to have exactly what they want? >> If you see our new creation, the Dopra, the Panigale V4, this is the right example how we transform racing motorbikes to the road bikes, and we give to our customers this kind of experience because all information we manage during the Sunday we are able to put in on Monday and sell the bike that have the same performance, safety, and pleasure of riding for the final customers and we have a racing that we bring to everydays motorbike, so when you buy a bike we give you experience that before you're riding, during the riding, and after your riding when you are at your home, with our uplink connection, we use the NetAPP technology to give the best experience of connected bikes. >> So when you think about customers, especially our partnership with Ducati, in order to be customer centric, or rider centric, we really have to be data driven, and so as we think about what are all the connections and the dots of data that happen, whether it's on the bike, the rider, the community itself, how does that bike that's driven or ridden on a Sunday, how is then really performed and given to customer that next day, it's all about the data. >> I'm curious, cause how have you been able to improve that speed of scale meta HCI as part of your data driven foundation, what's kind of a before and after, are you able to deliver bikes faster? Have you transformed the customer experience like Jean was saying? >> So before NetAPP, our production plan is more difficult to be connected to all other line of business and we are not able to collect the information from our final user, our customer. And give this information to our R and D department or the shop floor, in order to be able to transform in real time our production process, and to give the best experience for everyday bikers. >> So significant business impact? >> Exactly, and with our connected bike, this has become a reality. >> Jean, just want to bring it back to NetAPP for a minute here you've been on board for about two years, George Curion talked about the transformation that NetAPP is going through itself, can you speak a little bit to the culture, you know I think back for years and NetAPP has been known for one of the top places to work, it's talking about that transformation, what can you say about what's happening inside NetAPP? >> Sure, so I think the transformation has gone through a couple of different cycles. I mean one was really around the operational efficiency we needed to be as a company to really be focused on what were the customers caring about? What were the technologies and innovations that we needed to shift to that mattered to the customer? Cloud being one of those, whether it was a private cloud, or a public cloud, we also started to think through, is the right leadership that we needed to have in the company to start making those shifts? A big part of it is the culture though and that culture is ground up, it definitely starts across the leadership team we have today, but it is infused across all of NetAPP. It is one of the reason why I joined the company, when I first started interviewing with George, he wanted me to come help him write the new story, but so much a part of a story of a company is the people themselves, and so if you think about any kind of transformation, it is definitely strategy, it's technology, it's around what you do from processes, but culture and people are the biggest part of that, and we think of the brand inside of NetAPP, the people are the biggest part of it. And who we are and what we stand for, really always leaning in to the latest technology, because it's what customers care about, if I think about the history over the last 10 to 15 years, what could have broken NetAPP, moving from Linux to Windows, moving in to virtualization, now with the cloud, we've always leaned in, because we want to care about what the customer cares about. And that's every single person inside of NetAPP that makes that happen. So I love being at NetAPP and it's an exciting place to be! >> Cultural transformation is hard to do, it's essential for IT transformation, digital transformation, security transformation, I'm curious Jean, NetAPP has such a big install base of a lot of enterprise incumbents that weren't born in digital of course you've got some amazing customers like Ducati, talk to us about how your customers, you mentioned NetAPP is good at leaning in, how do you leverage that voice of the customer to help the sustain the cultural transformation you need to really put cloud at the heart of your strategy? >> Absolutely, even with the example of Dreamworks, we just started working with Dreamworks as one of our partners to start co-engineering with them, to help them on their own transformation. And so that's taking right from the customer, what are their requirements, how are they going to take this cutting edge digital content, and then be able to make it into beautiful, engaging films that we all know and love, How To Train Your Dragon's coming out very soon and we're excited about seeing it, but those kind of partnerships really matter, and how people are leaning in to the cloud, and how they're leaning in to hypercloud, multicloud, we want to hear what our customers need and work with them to be able to really build out that technology and innovation for the future. >> Konstantin, last question for you, what are you, I know you had a session yesterday, what are you excited to hear about from you partner NetAPP at the event this week? >> I'm excited to hear about the people, it's a very put attention of the details, of what the NetAPP mean regarding the data management. And the data driven company, what is the real time feedback to the customers, and improvement of the customer experience, and one of the things that I like is the simplicity to use the NetAPP technology that give us the speed of reaction, and transform the information into knowledge, and how can I say in experience to know how to do the things >> Well Konstantin, Jean, thank you so much for stopping by and giving us a really cool, sexy example of how NetAPP is helping a company like Ducati really revolutionize the racing side and the consumer side of the businesses. And we want to encourage you to go to NetAPP.com search Ducati and you will find a very cool video, on how these two companies are working together. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube live, all day from NetAPP Insight 2018, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay at NetApp Insight 2018, the third annual with customers, partners, endless press, NetAppians. We're excited to welcome two alumni back to theCUBE. We have Nancy Hart, Head of Marketing for Cloud Infrastructure at NetApp, and Dale Degen, Cloud Infrastructure Business Director. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. It's so great to see you guys again. >> Likewise. So we got back from a standing room only keynote, thousands of people here, and one of the interesting things, Nancy, that Stu and I both observed were today no product announcements. It was really about concepts. The first time we heard anything architecture related was really the Data Fabric, but George Kurian, the CEO of NetApp, talked about the four principles of digital transformation. >> Nancy: Right >> I wonder if we can unpack those with you guys. >> Nancy: Yes >> The first one talking about digital transformation requires IT transformation. >> Nancy: Yes >> Talk to us about that speed as the new scale. What does that mean for NetAPP as a company that needs transformed... >> Nancy: Right >> and to your customers? >> So it means for our customers the idea is that speed is the new scale, right. That to create new businesses, to create new opportunities, to create new revenues, there has to be a lot more agile and agilent on their ITs. Right. So, NetApp will really focus on doing is how to break down the barriers between Dev and Ops. The days of silos, months of provisioning all of that is now gone. Because companies need to now help their teams build faster, build better, and that's really what George was talking about, in this idea that the speed is the new scale. And if our customers are not driving IT agile... Agile IT operations on their own data centers, their competitors certainly are. >> How does... NetApp talks a lot about being driven, the data authority and hybrid cloud. George also said hybrid clouds do in multi-cloud or the defacto architecture. >> Yes >> When you talk with customers, how do they digest "NetApp's going to help "me be data driven?" >> Nancy: Right >> What's that conversation like? >> So, looks like a lot these days, we have our customers, they have their own users, their own internal DevOps team who have gotten very used to taking their Corporate AMEX and running up the Amazon, setting up a new compute shape or storage. The thing is we see customers are trying to rebalance where they put their data cap with data, where they put their applications. Do somethings being, belong in public cloud? Absolutely, but there is also this natural rebalance, that not every application should be in the cloud. For reasons of data governance, perhaps cost, whatever it is, when they build that next new application, it may be in the data center. So, to make that work is the idea of a hybrid multi-cloud experience, and the key part of that is the experience. It's not a management experience. It's a consumption experience. It's a very seamless, simple consumption experience if you've got up in the public cloud, but in a private cloud in your data center. >> Stu: Nancy, I like that. We've always, we've been saying on theCUBE for a couple of years now, cloud is not a destination, it's an operating model. >> Yes It's the way we need to think things, but Dale, when I talk to customers, we talk about their cloud strategy, we talk about what they want, every single one of them, totally different. How much they're doing SaaS , versus how many mulvic public lines they're doing, and of course, they're still figuring out what they've got in their traditional data centers. And its that certain companies have been selling them multiple products, they've got their data all spread out, so, are we getting away from silos, how architecturally do we build this? There's so much differentiation out in the marketplace today. It'd be lovely to have a magic wand and say "Oh, everything's, "you know, simple." But that really hasn't been the case in an enterprise IT. >> Dale: I think you nailed it the way you described it right there You have an enterprises that have built up a collection of applications, some of them have been given a cloud mandate. And so, that means something different to everyone. Sometimes they're going out all SaaS, sometimes they're saying, "I want to put everything, "all my storage in the cloud." We're seeing an interesting moment in time where, there's almost a reaction to that, and finding out maybe there's silos within different public cloud service providers, maybe the monthly cost is a little bit larger than what people might have expected on that. At NetApp, we've been working with our customers, I kind of love being here because the last couple years has just been this huge transformation of the company around that, taking a lot of our customers have viewed us as number one in storage the trusted provider on that. I really, expanding out to a more data driven solution on there. And things we've done internally to address side is really focused on different business imperatives there. Because I think each of our customers has their data center that they need their rock solid applications on. They're thinking about this journey to the cloud. They're trying to innovate with acceleration in the cloud with different services with the cloud public... the biggest public clouds and along the way they're also saying "I need some of that agility internally." And so we've, we've really built that, to build out your kind of a hybrid multi cloud experience. And the company strategy is coming together. We're seeing investments, we're seeing growth and announcements and all of those. >> So one of the interesting things that I observed in the keynote this morning was NetApp being 26 year old, 26 years young company, right? Massive install base. You've got a lot of customers who were not born in the digital age and George Kurian your CEO seems to kind of address them almost right out of the gate. >> Nancy: Yes. >> So let's talk about the data fabric a little bit more. Let's unpack that because some of the messaging seems to be reflecting that, that, and I think Anthony liked talked about this a little bit this morning in the keynote as well. It, it's, it's transforming from a vision to an architecture for your customers, your incumbent enterprise customers who were not born in the cloud, what does being data driven mean to them? How are they embracing this architecture idea of the data fabric and using it to use their data to identify new customer touchpoints, deliver new services, increased revenue? >> Dale: So we're seeing a lot of our customers really transform their business to take advantage of these new services in the cloud. The value that a lot of them are bringing to us is they have a massive amount of institutional data that maybe was in different silos. May be they had different as a service offerings touching it. We're able to bring it together with the data fabric. So now they can consolidate this into a large amount of tangible data. You can have multiple as a service solutions and services coming from public cloud service providers to do analytics on data. For example, we have energy companies that have seismic data from 50 years ago that is sitting on tapes. It's better than anything they could even get today. They bring it all together and now they're doing data analytics on this and they're finding new ways to really take advantage of that. So we're seeing that across the board and we're, Our goal is to try to move them along that journey. >> Nancy: Yes >> Stu: Nancy, could you give us a little insight as to who you're selling to? >> Yes Where is NetApp getting involved in kind of those strategic discussions? As I said, >> Great >> you know everybody's got a cloud strategy, but I said usually the external still drawing and it's something you need to revisit often so you know where is NetApp seat at that table? You've got a lot of partners here >> Nancy: Yes >> and how are things changing? >> Nancy: So, a lot of things are changing a lot of ways for Netapp and the companies that we're selling to and who we're selling to at those companies. We certainly see a lot of new buyers and it's interesting to see now that the decision making, the who's sitting at the decision table when they make that decision of what kind of infrastructure to purchase, is it getting larger and larger group and now we're really seeing the Dev teams, their internal Dev ops teams have a seat at that table who are and they're having significant influence on the infrastructure and operations teams on what kind of investments that companies should be making. Right, so, working with partners, going to market through the largest public hyper scalers and reaching these new buyers and new and existing accounts as well. So even if there is a traditional part of the data center, I guarantee you somewhere in every company there's a new Dev team working on new business models. And so we want to attend (mumbles) >> Lisa: Does the conversation Nancy, start at the business outcomes level? >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> And, and your perspective, how are you seeing some of the more technical folks in an organization participating in a business outcomes driven conversation where it's more about these are the things we need to do to, to compete to increase our revenue. What, how is that persona based conversation changing? So actually I have a story from a customer meeting earlier this week, right? And so we were talking with the customer about data fabric and what we can do and how we can deliver a seamless experience between public and private clouds. And we walked out of their room and the gentleman from the customer who's I walked in that room as a storage admin and I walked out as a data fabric architect. Right. >> Lisa: It's pretty good validation >> It's pretty good validation. It's happening right now like the personas, even personas that we've traditionally known are certainly changing. What do yo say? >> So that point we're seeing some of the attributes that service providers are offering. We're seeing enterprises at the same time trying to build those up scale. And it's really been amazing as we're seeing you, you spoke about speed is the new agility on here and it's really the agility to be kind of build those infrastructures quickly and take advantage of that at a business advantage level. And a lot of the most technical customers of ours are saying now they're kind of at a, they have a seat at the table to kind of inspire some of those business innovations. They, they see how they could make the company more efficient and all of a sudden they're getting a lot more attention at the C level. >> Stu: Alright. So a few years ago there was the wave of big data, you know, it was really what I summed it up. One of the key findings was it was that bit flip of saying, oh my gosh, I have so much data to, Oh yes, yes, I've got so much data and I can take advantage of it. What I want you to help connect us is when you talk about being data driven, NetApp at its core is you know, there's storage, there's infrastructure, there's software. How do I then get the insights and the value out of the data, the data that I've helped my customers get to? >> Nancy: So let me give you an example of what NetApp is doing around this very issue, right? So we have a very large install base like you talked about. We have a new product called the active IQ. And what it does is based on community wisdom pulled from 30,000 or more installed systems across our entire customer base. And what we do is we use AI ML to extract value and intelligent insights and then actionable plans for our customers. So even if a customer doesn't have 30,000 units installed, they can take advantage of all of that knowledge themselves. So we drink our own champagne and we apply the things that we learned, but we can also help customers do the same thing in their own business as an extract value from their own data. >> Lisa: I'm curious too, from a company as as history does NetApp, formerly network appliance, how is NetApp drinking our own champagne example? How does that influence customers perspective on NetApp's transformation and convince a customer to trust NetApp and go, "yes, this is a partner "that I want to work with "to help us be able "to just do point, "not just a mass, "a tonne of data "and the silo, "but extract insights that are "essential to try this, this change." >> Dale: So we actually have some breakout sessions here where NetApp IT is speaking to that a talking about how we have NetApp on NetApp. You know we've got the active IQ data coming in, so an all flash fas tier being teared down through east series to object storage to a giant data lake of active IQ doing analytics on that. And so that's a great reference for us. We're able to have them speak to our customers directly, eye to eye in our executive briefing center, and oftentimes that pushes them over the edge on that one. >> Nancy: Because we're living the dream and we're making our own mistakes along the way and so when we have folks from our NetApp's own IT department come speak with customers, it's very credible about we did this at work, we did this. It didn't work so much. Right? But we're in that same transformation journey as our customers as well. >> Well, the failure I always say is my, It's not a bad word. It's part of that journey. >> Nancy: Yes. Well, finishing up Nancy with you. Talk to us about the media customer example that really articulates the value that NetApp is delivering as an enabler of the data driven company. >> So one of my favorites these days as we work with a company called Children's Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, right? And they brought us new Ciox and he was really interested in transforming the IT experience for his clinicians. Right. These are the people that work with kids in the hospital, sick kids, they're stressed out families. And I love this story because it's very easy for me to imagine if my child was in the hospital, how stressed out I would be to have a clinician walk in fast, easy access, the latest data about my child, a happy clinician. That would be such an impact to me. And so to see what our customers are doing at children's mercy and they'll also multi cloud they've got their own private clouds are accelerating their VDI, they're working with public clouds all through NetApp product in the end to help those kids and to help maybe some moms on wherever you are, just a smidge less. >> Lisa: Are you helping them to use some of the emerging technologies, IoT AI to drive faster, better outcomes and decision making for these in these critical literally life and death situations? >> So the first project we're working on them as about accelerating their VDI. How does he get a virtual desktop to all his clinician? So whatever room that clinician is in, he has access. So she has access to the latest data about that child. Right. And to make the overall just a better experience so that the new ciox is very keen on just delivering a better experience, not better technology, but a better experience for his clinicians and for his patients. >> Nancy, Dale, thanks so much for stopping by on day one of insight. We appreciate your time. Got to give you some cubes stickers because you're doubling the alumni now. Real. Exactly. We want to thank you. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman for watching the cube. Again, we're live all day at NetApp Insight 2018. Stick around. Stu and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage today of NetApp Insight 2018, I am Lisa Martin. Stu Miniman is my co-host for the day, and we're welcoming to theCUBE, for the first time, a couple of guests, one from NetApp, my former colleague, Emily Miller, acting VP of brand content and influencer marketing. And one of this morning's keynote, Gerd Leonhard, futurist, the CEO of The Futures Agency. I loved, Gerd, I loved your keynote this morning, it was very very interesting and informative. >> Thank you. >> And I liked how you said, you don't predict the future, you observe the future. So Emily, thinking about NetApp, its history, NetApp today, and in the future, talk to us a little bit about how this brand has transformed. >> Sure >> Not just digitally, for IT, but transforming, taking the feedback, and the really, kind of direction from your customers. >> Sure, so if I think about, you know, NetApp's been around for 25 years and we've played a great role in the, you know, kind of the storage history. But over the last few years as our customers' needs have changed, you know, really having to have data as your design point, how everything is evolving, changing, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, we had to listen to that and knowing that our customers are going to places like AI and, you know, deep learning, we have to move there. And so, a couple years ago, we looked at who are we as a company and who are we going to be for the next 25 years? And our purpose now is around how we empower our customers to change the world with data because that is what they are doing. So using a lot of these technologies, and the things that Gerd talked about this morning, it is happening, and so, we've got some great customers we're working with, where we're able to kind of see that brand promise come to life with things they're doing, and we're just excited to be able to continue to work with those companies that are pushing the edge because that helps us be better and be more proactive about the future. >> When you talk with customers, #datadriven is all over, right? We've been hearing that for a while. What is being data driven mean to a customer, because as Gerd talked about in his keynote this morning, there's always that conversation, Stu, we hear it all the time on theCUBE, on ethics. >> Right. >> When you talk about enabling customers to be data driven and developing a data strategy, how do they internalize that and actually work with NetApp to execute? >> Right, so we really see it as putting data at the heart of your business, it is that lifeblood, it has to be centered around that. And then, thinking about data fabric, it's really the strategy and the approach, so how do you envision how data from all over, all parts of your organization are able to be leveraged? You get the access and the insights, and you can utilize it. You don't want it to be stagnant, you've got to be able to use it to make better decisions, to have that information, those insights at your fingertips to do the things that have to be done in real time, all the time. >> So Gerd, we want to bring you into discussion here, there's certain fears, for people in technology, "Oh my gosh, my job's going to be "replaced, that can be automated." You know, I've gone to shows, talk about, oh hey, in humans, you're good at getting things to 95, 96%. You know, I can get perfectly accurate if I let the robots just automate things. You write about humans versus technology, what's your take? You know, singularity's coming, you were saying, so are we all out of a job? >> Well, this is of course, what I call a reductionism, right? It's the idea that you would have a machine who would do just what I do, exactly what I do, for very little money, and then you would have thousands of other machines that do thousands of other things, then. And the fact is that, I think McKinsey's study says only 5% of all jobs that can be automated, can be fully automated. So, even a pilot can be automated, but I wouldn't fly an airplane without a pilot, so we still have a pilot. And data scientists can be automated by an AI, yes, but there'll be many things that I need the data scientist for as a person. So, if you take human skills, what I call the andro-rhythms, you know, the human things. So, passion, ingenuity, design, creativity, negotiation. I think computers may learn that in 100 years, but to really be compassionate, it will have to be alive. And I wouldn't want them to be alive. So, I'm saying that yes, true, I think if you only do routine, like bookkeeping, like low level financial advice, like driving a bus. You have to retrain and relearn, yes. But otherwise, I wouldn't be that negative, I think there's also so many new things happening. I mean, 10 years ago, we didn't have social media managers, right, and now we got what, 30 million? So, I'm not that dark on the future there. >> I'm glad, you actually, you gave a great quote from Albert Einstein talking about that, really, imagination is infinite as opposed to, knowledge is kind of contained. NetApp talks a lot about being data driven, you gave the Jeff Bezos example of, you know, I need to listen to it. But there's heart, and there's kind of history, there's another great line from Jeff Bezos, is, "There is no compression algorithm for experience." So, how do we as humans balance that humanity and the data and the numbers? >> Well, the reality is, we don't live in a binary world. When we look at technology, it's always about yes, no, yes, no, zero, one. That's what machines do, we don't do that. (laughs) Humans are called multinary, which is essentially, to us, a lot more things matter than yes or no. Like, it depends, maybe, it may change, and so on. And so if we just look at that and say it's going to be data or humans, we have to pick one of the two, that will be a rather strange suggestion. I think we need to say that it's sometimes data, sometimes human, but we have to keep the humans in the loop, that's my key phrase. >> And I would say, I feel like that's really our opportunity as humans, is to decide where is the value, where is the layer of value that we add on. You know, again, kind of thinking back to NetApp's history, we're moving from storage to data, we are evolving. We have to add value at a higher level for our customers, and what was something that maybe we did as humans, and for advising, that's automated now, like think of the demo we saw this morning, and now what is that additional layer of value that you add on top? >> Yeah absolutely, as you're both saying, it's not a binary thing, Andy McPheener from Jolmston, from MIT, say, tracing with the machines, that humans plus machines will do way better than either humans or robots alone. >> You know, I think if you are arguing that we would be in a perfect world if the machines could run it perfectly, then I would argue that world would be a machine, right? So, it would be perfect, but it wouldn't be human, so what are we getting, right? It's a bad deal, so I think we need to find a good balance between the two, and also carve out things that are not about data. You know, like dating and love, relationships, you know, that can be about data, like matching, right? But in the end, the relationship isn't about data. (laughs) >> Well, you even said this morning, it's, knowledge is not the same thing as understanding. >> Right. >> And that's kind of where we are at these crossroads. Emily, let's kind of wrap up with you, you got some interesting customer examples, of how NetApp is helping customers become and live that data driven life, and embrace these emerging technologies, like AI. >> Right, so we have a customer we're working with in Serbia, and they are basically kind of digitizing a human to be able to interact from an AI standpoint, in terms of having an interactive conversation. And I've seen some of this before, with interviewing your grandparents, and you can store them, and you can interact, and I think what's really exciting, is that gives you the opportunity to do something you never could do before. I think to your points this morning, it's, how do we make sure we don't lose the richness from those more kind of offline experiences, so that they are complimentary? If we, as we expand and do things that we couldn't think about, that we didn't, we couldn't envision or imagine, and I think that's about being a data visionary. Like the people at the companies like 3Lateral, like we've seen today, on Wuji NextCODE on stage, the data visionaries are those who are saying, how can data transform my, not just my company, but my industry, my category, and how do I really think about it completely differently? >> It's an exciting time. Emily, Gerd, thank you so much, I wish we had more time to chat with you guys, but we appreciate you stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights. >> Great, thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Insight, pun intended. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we are with theCUBE, live all day at NetApp Insight 2018, stick around, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we are live at NetApp Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by Stu Miniman. Stu and I are going to be here all day. And this is the third annual Insight, with customers and partners and NetAppians and analysts and press. Stu this is the second time theCUBE has been here. We just came from the keynote and the interesting thing that Stu, that you and I both noticed, was at least the first 75 minutes of the keynote that we got to see today, none of the product news was announced. It was really about strategy, #datadriven, how NetApp wants to enable their customers from DreamWorks to oil and gas companies, health care, etc. To use data, develop a data strategy, to move their businesses into the digital age. >> Yeah, Lisa, first of all, great to be working with you again. >> Always. >> And I'm excited, it's second year that we've been at this show, third of the NetApp Insights that we've done. Cause we've done both the U.S. and the European shows. My first time actually coming to a NetApp event. I remember, gosh I'm showing my age, I remember when NetApp started, network storage was becoming a thing. NetApp really rose its ascendancy with file systems and NAS, and FAS was the one operating system to rule them all, really grew into a very sizable business. Company's about $6 billion worth of revenue and I think somewhere about 10,000 employees. Today, NetApp is really the largest independent storage company after Dell took EMC off as an independent now, so it's interesting to watch. George Kurian got on stage and talked about digital transformation. And one of the things I'm really interested in looking at is how is NetApp doing in that transformation? Because, most people when I was talking to some customers at some of the meals and walking the floor and things like that it's, NetApp is my filer company. I buy boxes, sometimes I mine some software and there's some things there, but I'm the guy that runs NetApp Gear, if you will. And that transformation, what is the NetApp of 2019 and beyond? Are they a storage company? Are they a hybrid, multi-cloud software led something something company in the future? Are they a services company? There's a nice ecosystem here, so that's what I'm excited to dig into. George Kurian he in the keynote this morning, laid out the four things that companies need to do for digital transformation. It's something we'll dig into, but yeah, I had to go search NetApp on the news release and be like, oh Cloud Insights, and ONTAP in the Cloud, and HCI and Partnership News and things like that, so there definitely is some news, they just didn't talk about it in the keynote. >> Yeah, it was an interesting keynote for me, and as theCUBE we go to a lot of keynotes, many times a year, and this was an interesting start to it. It's clear from the NetApp messaging on NetApp.com, NetApp Insight, things that are being put out on media that they're really putting cloud at the heart of their strategy. The discussions and the keynote this morning included futurist Gerd Leonhard, who's going to be on the program with us in just a few minutes. Interesting take on data, humanity, the only thing that NetApp talked about was about 75 minutes minutes into they keynote this morning was when Anthony Lye got on, he's going to be on the show later today, talking about the data fabric. And I think some of the messages that NetApp was wanting to get out is that data fabric is transforming from a vision into an architecture kind of foundationally to enable organizations to employ those four principals of digital transformation that George Kurian talked about. Digital transformation requires IT transformation, speed is the new scale, some interesting thoughts and concepts there, more conceptual. I liked the DreamWorks customer, I think she's a great speaker. Kind of talked also about how DreamWorks, everybody knows DreamWorks, "Shrek", "How to Train your Dragon", are becoming more morphing from a customer to an engineering partner. So that was and interesting kind of, I wouldn't even say undertone, but part of the story today. >> You know, Lisa, absolutely. When you look at traditionally, not only NetApp, but all the storage companies, where they sold to. It was the storage budget, and oh how do I manage with the explosion of data, and that growth and what's the performance, the speeds and feeds, the price per terabyte, all that kind of stuff? I thought we could actually take George Kurian's four characteristics and say, how's NetApp doing? First is digital transformation requires IT transformation. >> (Lisa) Right. >> I heard yesterday in some of the sessions they actually had some of NetApp's IT people talk about how they're leveraging and using new technologies. We talked about speed is the new scale, well how fast is NetApp? We have a number of acquisitions. There was the big SolidFire acquisition which is now fully part of the portfolio. They had a Kubernetes company that they bought recently. They've had management companies that they bought. How fast is NetApp keeping up with the pace of what they're doing? Hybrid multi-cloud, I think NetApp first of all was really what you would call software-defined before that was a thing, and they were very early in jumping on this wave of we need to play in the cloud environment. Most of the storage companies really lined up and was like, oh wait, Amazon's the competition, you can't do that, but NetApp was partnering with Amazon for many years, now I'd like to see more proof points as to what customers are doing, how are they doing it differently. But absolutely we're going to have Microsoft Azure on the program with Anthony Lye, this afternoon. I know we're going to be talking about Amazon, we're going to be talking about Kubernetes and Istio, where does NetApp fit into that environment? I've been going to theCUBE Con shows for a couple years, and storage is actually lagging in that space. When you talk about having persistent data, that's not something we're there with. We spent more than a decade trying to fix storage and networking in the virtualized environments, and NetApp played a strong role in helping on the storage piece there. So it would be great to see how they are going to play into the Kubernetes and issue discussion. And the last piece is they said moving from data center to data fabric. >> Right. >> Which is the closest tie to the products as you said. >> (Lisa) Yes, exactly. >> To what they're doing. >> Well, Stu we have a jam-packed schedule today, all day. We're going to be able to unpack a lot of things from NetApp, execs, to their branding folks, to customers, so Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. Again, theCUBE Live from NetApp Insight 2018. We'll be right back. (music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. We are in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman. And we have a couple of guests joining us now from the A-Team, cue the music rights too. We've got Phoebe Goh, Cloud architect from NetApp, and we've got Paul Stringfellow, one of our CUBE alumni, technical director of Gardner Systems, one of NetApp's partners. Guys thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. >> You're welcome. >> In your matching outfits! >> Thank you for having us. >> So first of all, this morning, before the general session started, I saw both of you on camera talking a little bit about the A-Team. For our audience who might not be familiar with that, I know it's been around for five years. Phoebe, talk to us a little bit about the A-Team, who composes it, obviously we've got a channel partner, it's not just NetAppians, but give our viewers a little bit of an overview of the A-Team. >> NetApp really appreciates our advocates from channel partners and also from our customers. We really love hearing from them, and we also love giving them back information about what we do, and where we're going with our vision and our strategy. So, we have channel partners on the A-Team as well as customers, and technical advisors from NetApp, such as myself, and we get together every now and then at events like Insight, and we also bring them to Sunnyvale where they are given some information about what's coming up with our strategy. >> And this is a small group of about maybe 30 people. Paul how long have you been part of the A-Team, and what has that, what you have learned from some of the other folks that are on that team? >> It's a great question, I've been a part of the team for three years, and it's kind of a symbiotic relationship almost in that it kind of works both ways. I think there's lots of value for NetApp in the partnership, in that they get to hear kind of from channel partners on the street, about what people actually think of their technology. It also works in that we get to see quite a lot of pre-release information, and it gives us the opportunity to feed back to NetApp directly from the things that we see out in the channel about what customers actually want, and then we can feed that back into NetApp, and we've seen over kind of the five years of the team, we've seen product strategies change, we've seen new products come to market, because of that direct feedback. And then from our side, when we talk to our customers, there's real value in being able to say that we've got that direct relationship with NetApp, we've got that access to their executives, and access to their research team. It works really well both ways for us. >> In the keynote this morning, we heard George Kurian talk about digital transformation, and one of those pieces is that hybrid multi cloud is the defacto IT architecture, Paul I would love to get your feedback as a channel partner, what this kind of hybrid multi cloud means to your customers, means to your business. >> So I think the idea of hybrid I think, it's different for a lot of people, so in lots of cases, hybrid for some organizations may be that their entire data center remains on prem within their own walls, however they might be using a software service, an Office 365, they may be using a Dropbox, and I don't think kind of the definition that George was talking about this morning when he talked about hybrid cloud. My little take on what George talked about as well with hybrid cloud , I think he's understanding that it exists, understand that public cloud is a thing, that the Azures, that the AWSs, the Googles, play a part in a way that some organizations are working. That's not necessarily the way your organization wants to work, so understanding that it's there, designing an architecture that recognizes that, and makes sure that if you ever want to use those kind of services in the future, that you'll be able to do so, but it's equally valid to say, actually, public cloud isn't for us. As long as you make that as a decision, and don't just fall into it because you've not really thought about it, that's a perfectly valid strategy. >> I really agree with what you were saying. So often when we talk about hybrid and multi-cloud, we're talking about infrastructure. >> Paul: Yep. >> And there's more than just infrastructure, a thing that I've been saying for a few years, let's follow the applications, and even more importantly, let's follow the data. I love we get some international viewpoints here because sometimes North America, it's like oh let's talk only about public cloud and seems to be kind of a monolithic thing. Phoebe, I would love to get your viewpoint, what are you hearing from customers when they talk about cloud, what does that mean for them, and how's NetApp and NetApp's channel partners helping them sort through this new future? >> Definitely, our customers and our channel partners are talking a lot about cloud, creating, adding agility to their business, allowing them to move faster, and to be more flexible, and what NetApp is looking to do is really enable that and speed that up for, no matter where you are in the globe, whether you're in Australia, or in America, or in Europe, that you can achieve those business outcomes that you really want, and we know that the cloud is going to help us get there, so we really want to help them use the data the best ways, and use the technology that makes sense for the business to be able to get to public cloud. >> How are you hearing, a lot of the messaging coming out, NetApp is data driven, it's the data authority, lot of transformation that NetApp's undergone in its 26 year history, I'd love to get your both of your perspectives before we wrap here about how are customers embracing that as looking to NetApp and its ecosystem partners to help them embrace this hybrid multi-cloud environment in which they live, and look at NetApp as part of their core cloud strategy, rather than data management storage? >> I'm actually really excited about this because I love collaborating and talking our customers and our partners, and what I find is that they're coming to us and saying, "Wow, we didn't know you guys did that, and "you're not even, you're not selling us something, you're "really helping us get there." We're having a conversation about how we can really get there, get to their business outcomes, rather than trying to push a product, where I find that we get to have really collaborative conversations, Paul? >> Actually, I couldn't agree more, I think that what data fabric, what this kind of hybrid cloud model means to our customers, is it opens up a much wider conversation. We're not having a conversation about storage, we're not talking to a partner saying, would you like to buy some NetApp, as a customer, because that can be, that's a yes no, I use something else, I'm not interested in NetApp or I'd love to buy some NetApp. Actually, if we can have a data conversation that talks about how do you want to use this, what are the business outcomes that you'd like to achieve, what is it you are trying to do as a business, let's help data be part of that transformation. >> Guys, thanks so much for stopping by having a quick convo, especially Phoebe since you've been in Vegas for four days already, and your voice is hanging on by a thread. Paul, Phoebe, thanks so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, pleasure, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, from Las Vegas NetApp Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest after a short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live. We've been here all day at NetApp Insight in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're joined by a couple of guests. One of our alumni, Bharat Badrinath, the V.P. of Product Solutions and Marketing at NetApp. Hey, Bharat, welcome back. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> And we've also got Renee Yao, who is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Deep Learning and AI Systems at Nvidia. Renee, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So guys, this is a pretty big event. NetApp's biggest customer-partner event, the keynote, standing room only this morning five thousand plus people, lot of buzz, lot of momentum. Speaking of momentum, NetApp and Nvidia just launched an interesting partnership a couple months ago. Bharat, talk to us about how NetApp is working with Nvidia to really take advantage of AI and allow your customers to do that as well. >> Sure. So, as we started talking to customers and started looking at what they were investing in, AI bubbled up, right up to the top. And given our rich history in NFS, high performance NFS, it became an obvious choice for NetApp to invest in this space. So we've been working with Nvidia for a really long time, probably close to a year, to start integrating our products with their DGX-1 supercomputer and providing it as a single package to our customers, which makes it a lot easier for them to deploy their AI instead of waiting months for testing infrastructure, which the data scientists don't want to do. We get them a pre-tested, pre-validated system and our All-Flash Fast, which has been winning multiple awards and the recent A800 announcement were perfect choice for us to integrate into this architecture for the system. >> Alright, Renee, in the keynote this morning, the Futurist, he said-- We talked about data as the new oil, he said AI is the new electricity. Maybe you can speak a little bit as to why this is so important. Having gone to a lot of shows this year, it felt like every single show I go to, I see Nvidia, arm in arm with partners, because there's a huge wave coming. >> Yes, absolutely, and I think there was this hype about data, there was this hype about AI, and I think the years of Big Data World, that's creating data, absolutely the foundation for AI, and AI as the new electricity is a very, very good analogy. And let's do some math, shall we? So Swiss Federal Railway, it's a very good customer of ours. For those of you who don't know, they're kind of like the heart or center of all the railway tracks going through, serving about 1.2 million passengers on a day-to-day basis. Securing their security is very, very important. Now, they also have a lot of switches that turn on, then the train can go by and with the tunnels and bridges and switches, so they need to make sure that these trains actually don't collide. So when one train goes by with 11 switches, that gives you 30 ways of possible routing. Two trains, 900 ways. 80 trains, 10 to the eightieth power of ways. That's more than the observed atoms in the universe. And they actually have more than 10 thousand trains. So think about, can human being possibly calculate that much data and possibilities in their brain? As smart as we all want to think we all are, they turn to DGX, and the full day of simulation on DGX-1 was only 17 seconds for them to get back results. And I think that analogy of AI as the new electricity, just talking about the speed of light, is very spot on. >> So this isn't hype anymore, this is actually reality. And you gave a really great example of how a large transportation system is using it to get almost real time information. Bharat, talk to us about NetApp storage, history, 26 years, you guys have really made a lot of pivots in terms of your digital transformation, your cultural transformation. How are you helping with, now, kind of the added power of Nvidia, helping customers to, the hype's gone, actually deploy it, live it, and benefit a business from it? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think, as you rightly pointed out, NetApp has made a lot of pivots. Right, and I think the latest journey in terms of being empowering our customers with data has been a very powerful mission for the company. We entered the Flash market a little bit later than our competitors, but we have made dramatic progress in that space. In fact, recently, based on the latest IDC report, we were number one in All-Flash market worldwide, so that is quite an accomplishment for a company which was late to the market. And having said that, that's because of the innovation engine that is still alive and well within NetApp. We're announcing, as you've seen in the conference, we're announcing a lot of new products and technology which are way ahead of what our competitors are offering, but I think it is all hinged on what our customers need. The customer benefits because, yeah, it has profound benefit of changing how customers operate, their entire operations, it can transform dramatically overnight. And as Renee pointed out, Big Data gave the foundation which collected all the data, but wasn't able to process it. But AI with the power of Nvidia and DGX is able to utilize that to create those outcomes for customers. And from our perspective, we bring two key value adds to the space. One, we're able to serve up the data at incredibly high speeds with our award-winning All-Flash systems. But more importantly, data today lives everywhere. If you think about it, edge is becoming even more important. You can't expect an autonomous car to make an instantaneous decision without the backing of data, which means it can't, everything can't reside in the cloud, it may be at the edge. Some of it may be at your data center. How do you tie all three together, edge, core, and cloud? And that's where the data fabric, the vision of data fabric that you saw today comes in the picture. So one is performance, the ability to stream up the kind of data at the speed of the new processors are demanding, at the speed the customers are demanding to make business decisions and also the edge to core to cloud, our data fabric, which is unique and unparalleled in the industry. >> Now, I'm wondering if you could both bring us inside the customers a little bit. If I think of the traditional storage customer, I need performance, I have more and more data that I need to deal with. But Renee pointed out real outcomes, which is beyond what a traditional storage person would be doing. Who are you working with at the customers-- How do they put together-- It almost sounds like you're building a car. I've got the engine, I've got all the pieces. Who helps put this whole solution together? How does the partnership on the customer's side go together? >> That's a great question. I'll give my take and you can jump on it because she's just returned from being on road shows with joint customers and prospects. So I believe it has to be a joint decision. It's not like IT does it first and the data scientists come in later. Although it may be the case in certain instances where the data scientists start the discussion and then the IT gets brought in. In an ideal case, just like building a car, you want all the teams to be sitting together, make sure they're making the right calls because every compromise you make at one end will impact the other. So you want to make sure you make the optimal decision end to end. And that's where some of our channel partners come in who kind of bridge the data scientist team and the IT team. In some cases, customers show up with data scientists and IT teams together and some, it's one after the other. >> Absolutely. We see the same thing when we're on the road show. Literally two weeks ago, in Canada, by the way, there was a snowstorm, and it was an unforeseen snowstorm, you don't get snowstorm in October-- >> Yes, even for Canada, it was unforeseen. >> Yeah, and we had a packed room of people coming to learn about AI and in the audience, we absolutely see people from the infrastructure side, from the data center side, from the data scientist side, and they realized that they really have to start talking because none of them can afford to be reactive. For example, the data scientists, we want to do the innovation. I can't just go to the infrastructure guys and say that, "Hey, this is my workload, do something about it." And the infrastructure guys don't want to hold on to that problem and then don't know what to do with it. They really need to be ahead of everything and I think the interesting thing is, among those four cities that we're at, we see customers from the government, oil and gas, transportation, health care, and just any industry you can think of, they're all here. One specific example, do you know Mike's company that actually came to us, they have about 15 petabytes of data and that's storing 20 years of historical data and they only have two staff and they were not hiring more staff. They were like, "We just want something that's "going to be able to work and we know everything, "so just give us a solution that's going to be able to "easily scale up and out and enable us to continue to "store more data, manage more data, "and get insights out of data fast." So they came to both of us, it's just a very good, natural decision. That's why we have a partnership together as well. >> So you guys talked about kind of connecting the data scientists with the infrastructure folks. Where's the business involved in this conversation? In terms of, we want to identify new products and services to deliver faster than our competition, new markets. Talk to us about, are the data scientists and the infrastructure guys and girls following business initiatives that have been set or are the business leaders involved in these joint conversations? >> Go ahead, you take it. >> Sure. So, I think we see both. We definitely see that there's top-level executives saying that this is our initiative and we have to do it. And they will make the decision that we have to refresh our infrastructure from the ground up to make sure we're supportive of our data scientists' innovation. We've also seen brilliant minds, researchers, data scientists doing amazing things and then roll it up to the VP level and then roll it up to CEO level to say that this has to be done because this-- For example, that simulation of 17 second results, it's things that people used to cannot do in their lifetime, now they can do it in seconds, that kind of innovation just cannot be ignored. >> Yeah, we see the same thing. In fact, any team that has possession of that data or is accountable for that data is the one usually driving the decisions. Because as you mine the data, as you start deploying new techniques, you realize new opportunities, which means the business gets more interested in it and vice versa. If the business is interested, they're going to look for those answers within the data that they have. >> So last thing, Renee, you were on the Women in Tech panel that ended yesterday, Bharat and I were both in the audience, and one of the things that I thought was really inspiring about your story is that you had given us, the audience, an interesting example of a TV opportunity that you were inspired to do by the CEO of Nvidia. Give our audience who didn't have a chance to see that panel a little bit, and in the last minute, of that story and how you were able to step forward and go, "I'm going to try this." >> Yeah, of course. I think that brings us back to the concept that we have at Nvidia, the speed of light concept, and you really have to learn, act, to move at the speed of light, just like our GPUs, with extreme performance. And obviously, at that speed, none of us know everything. So what Jensen, CEO, shared with us was, in an all-hands meeting internally, he told us that none of us are here qualified to do any of our jobs, maybe besides his legal counsel and CFO. And all of us are here to learn, and we need to learn as fast and as much as we can. And we can't really just let the competition determine where our limit is, but instead is by the limit of what is possible. So that is very much a fundamental mindset change in this AI revolution. >> Well thanks so much, Renee and Bharat, for stopping by and sharing with us the exciting things that you guys are doing with NetApp. We look forward to talking with you again soon. >> Thank you. >> Me too, thanks. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from NetApp Insight 2018 in Las Vegas. Stu and I will be right back with our next guests after a short break. (techno music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Micron Insight 2018. It's just wrapping up behind us. It's a day long of thought-leading content around AI, AI for good, how it's affecting the human condition and healthcare and the future of AI. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Peter Burris and that's the Golden Gate Bridge over there. You used to live right up that hill over there. >> I did. >> Dee Mooney is here. >> Until they kicked me out. >> Dee Mooney is here. She's the Executive Director of the Micron Foundation. Dee, thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule and coming on theCUBE. >> You bet, I'm very pleased to be here with you today. >> So, you guys had some hard news today. We heard about the 100 million dollar fund that you're launching, but you also had some news around the Foundation. >> That's right. >> The grant, you announced two winners of the grant. Tell us about that. >> That's right. So, it was a great opportunity for Micron to showcase its goodness and what a great platform for us to be able to launch the Advancing Curiosity grant. It is all around really focusing on that, on advancing curiosity, in the hopes that we can think about how might AI help for good, whether that's in business and health or life, and it's really a great platform for us to be able to be a part of today. >> So, what are the specifics? It was a million dollar grant? >> So, it was a million dollar fund and today we announced our first recipients. It was to the Berkeley College of Engineering, specifically their BAIR, which is Berkeley A, Artificial Intelligence Research lab, then also Stanford PHIND lab, which is the Precision, Health and Integrated Diagnostics lab. And then also a non-profit called AI For All, and really their focus is to get the next generation excited about AI and really help the underrepresented groups be exposed to the field. >> So with AI For All, so underrepresented groups as in the diversity culture-- >> Females, underrepresented groups that might not actually get the exposure to this type of math and science in schools and so they do summer camps and we are helping to send students there next summer. >> How do you decide, what are the criteria around which you decide who gets the grants, and take us through that process. >> Today, because we are all about goodness and trying to enhance and improve our communities, this was all around how can AI do some good. So, we are taking a look at what problems can be solved utilizing AI. The second thing we're taking a look at is the type of technology. We want students and our researchers to take a good look at how the technology can work. Then also, what groups are being represented. We want a very diverse group that bring different perspectives and we really think that's our true ability to innovate. >> Well, there's some real research that suggests a more diverse organization solves problems differently, gets to more creativity and actually has business outcomes. That may not be the objective here, but certainly it's a message for organizations worldwide. >> We certainly think so. The more people that are being involved in a conversation, we think the richer the ideas that come out of it. One more thing that we are taking a look at in this grant is we'd like the recipients to think about the data collection, the privacy issues, the ethical issues that go along with collecting such massive amounts of data, so that's also something that we want people to consider when they're applying. >> One of the challenges in any ethical framework is that the individuals that get to write the ethical framework or test the ethical framework, the ethics always works for them. One of the big issues that you just raised is that there is research that shows that if you put a certain class of people and make them responsible for training the AI system, that their biases will absolutely dominate the AI system. So these issues of diversity are really important, not just from a how does it work for them, but also from a very starting point of what should go into the definition of the problem, the approach and solution, how you train it. Are you going the full scope or are you looking at just segments of that problem? >> We'll take a look at, we hope to solve the problems eventually, but right now, just to start with, it's the first announcement of the fund. It's a million dollars, like we mentioned. The first three recipients were announced today. The other recipients that come along, we're really excited to see what comes out of that because maybe there will be some very unique approaches to solving problems utilizing AI. >> What other areas might you look at? How do you determine, curiosity and AI, how'd you come up with that and how do you determine the topics in the areas that you go after? >> The Micron Foundation's mission is to enhance our lives through our people and our philanthropy and we focus on stem and also basic human needs. So, when Micron is engaged in large business endeavors like today, talking about AI, it was the perfect opportunity for us to bring our goodness and focus on AI and the problems that can be solved utilizing it. >> Pretty good day today, I thought. >> Oh, yeah. >> I have to say, I've followed Micron for awhile and you guys can get pretty down and dirty on the technical side, but it was an up-level conversation today. The last speaker in particular really made us think a little bit, talking about are we going to get people to refer-- >> Max Tegmark, right? >> Was that Max Tegmark? Yeah. >> I think that's the name. I didn't catch his name, I popped in late. But he was talking about artificial general intelligence >> I know. >> Reaching, I guess a singularity and then, what struck me is he had a panel of AI researchers, all male, by the way, I think >> Yes. >> I noticed that. >> Yes, we did too. >> The last one, which was Elon Musk, who of course we all know, thinks that there's going to be artificial general intelligence or super intelligence, and he asked every single panel member, will we achieve that, and they all unanimously said yes. So, either they're all dead wrong or the world is going to be a scary place in 20, 30, 50 years. >> Right, right. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, it was certainly thought-provoking to think about all the good things that AI can do, but also maybe the other side and I'm actually glad that we concluded with that, because that is an element of our fund. We want the people that apply to it or that we'll work with to think about those other sides. If these certain problems are solved, is there a down side as well, so that is definitely where we want that diverse thinking to come in, so we can approach the problems in a good way that helps us all. >> Limited time left, let's talk a little bit about women in tech. In California, Jerry Brown just signed a law into effect that, I believe it's any public company, has to have a woman >> On the Board? >> on the Board. What do you think about that? >> Well, personally, I think that's fantastic. >> Well, you're biased. (laughs) >> I might be a little biased. I guess it's a little unfortunate we now have to have laws for this because maybe there's not enough, I'm not exactly sure, 6but I think it's a step in the right direction. That really aligns well with what we try to do, bring diversity into the workplace, diversity into the conversation, so I think it's a good step in the right direction. >> You know, let's face it, this industry had a lack, really, of women leaders. We lost Meg Whitman in a huge Fortune 50 company, in terms of a woman leader, replaced by Antonio Neri, great guy, know him well, but that was one, if you're counting, one down. Ginni Rometty, obviously, huge presence in the industry. I want to ask you, what do you think about, I don't want to use the word quotas, I hate to use it, but if you don't have quotas, what's the answer? >> I don't know about quotas either. We do know that we help, our Foundation grants span the pipeline from young students all the way up through college and we see this pipeline. It starts leaking along the way. Fifth grade, we start seeing girls fall out. Eighth grade is another big-- >> In the U.S. >> In the U.S. >> Not so much in other countries, which is pretty fascinating. >> We are a global foundation and when we talk with our other partners, they're also interested in having stem outreach into their schools because they want to bring in the critical thinking and problem-solving skills, so, I used to think it was quite just a U.S. problem, but now being exposed to other cultures and countries, definitely they have a different approach, but I think it's a problem that we all strive to overcome. >> Well, it's pretty good research that shows that governance that includes women is generally more successful. It reaches better decisions, it reaches decisions that lead to, in the case of Boards, greater profitability, more success, so if you can't convince people with data, you have to convince them with law. At the end of the day, it would be nice if people recognized that a diverse approach to governance usually ends up with a better result but if you can't, you got to hit 'em over the head. >> I guess so, I guess so. >> Well, obviously, with the Kavanaugh confirmation, there's been a lot of talk about this lately. There's been some pretty interesting stuff. I've got two daughters, you have a daughter. Some pretty interesting stuff in our family chat that's been floating around. I saw, I think it was yesterday, my wife sent me a little ditty by a young woman who was singing a song about how tough it is for men, sort of tongue-in-cheek and singing things like, I can't open the door in my pajamas, I can't walk down the street on my phone at night, I can't leave my drink unattended, so tough for men, so tough for men, so on the one hand, you have the Me Too movement, you have a lot more, since Satya Nadella put his foot in his mouth at the Grace Opera event, I don't know if you saw that, he said-- >> I didn't. >> He said, a couple years ago >> He's the CEO of Microsoft. >> Said a couple years ago, a woman in the audience, Grace Opera, big conference for women, asked, "If we're underpaid, should we say anything?" and he said, no, that's bad kharma, you should wait and be patient, and then of course, he got a lot of you know what for that. >> That probably didn't work for them. And then, he apologized for it, he did the right thing. He said, you know what, I'm way off base and then he took proactive action. But, since then, you feel like there's been certainly much more attention paid to it, the Google debacle of last summer with the employee that wrote that Jerry Maguire tome. >> Right, right. >> Now the Me Too movement, then you see the reaction of women from the Kavanaugh appointment. Do you feel like we've made a lot of progress, but then you go, well, hmm, maybe we haven't. >> It sometimes feels like that. It sometimes feels like that. In my career, over 20 years, I have had a very positive experience working with men, women alike and have been very supported and I hope that we can continue to have the conversations and raise awareness, that everyone can feel good in their workplace, walking down the street and, like you mentioned, I think that it's very important that we all have a voice and all of us bring a different, unique perspective to the table. >> So do you feel that it's two steps forward, Dee, and maybe one step back every now and then, or are we making constant progress? >> It kind of feels like that right now. I'm not sure exactly why, but it seems like we're talking a lot about it more now and maybe just with a lot more attention on it, that's why it's seeming like we're taking a step back, but I think progress has been made and we have to continue to improve that. >> Yeah, I think if you strip out the politics of the Kavanaugh situation and then focus on the impact on women, I think you take a different perspective. I think that's a discussion that's worth having. On theCUBE last week, I interviewed somebody, she called herself, "I'm a Fixer," and I said, "You know, here's some adjectives I think of in a fixer, is a good listener, somebody who's a leader, somebody who's assertive, somebody who takes action quickly. Were those the adjectives that were described about you throughout your career, and the answer was, not always. Sometimes it was aggressive or right? >> True, true. >> That whole thing, when a woman takes swift action and is a leader, sometimes she's called derogatory names. When a man does it, he's seen as a great leader. So there's still that bias that you see out there, so two steps forward, one step back maybe. Well Dee, last thoughts on today and your mission. >> Well, we really hope to encourage the next generation to pursue math and science degrees, whether they are female or male or however they identify, and we want them to do great and hopefully have a great career in technology. >> I'm glad you mentioned that, 'cause it's not just about women, it's about people of color and however you identify. So, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. >> You bet, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Micron Insight 2018 from San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(lively music) >> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody, we're here covering Micron Insight 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my cohost David Floyer. Sanjay Mehrotra is here, he's the president and CEO of Micron. Sanjay, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be on the show. >> So quite an event here! First of all beautiful venue. >> Lovely venue. >> Got the Golden Gate that way, we got Nob Hill over there. So tell us about this event. It's not just about hardcore tech and memory. You guys are talking about AI for good, healthcare, changing the world. What's behind that? >> Yeah, our focus is on AI technologies and how AI is really changing the world. In terms of life, in terms of business, in terms of health. This is a showcase of how these technologies are in very very early innings, they've just barely begun. And what's happened is that AI algorithms have been around for a long time but now the compute capability and the memory and storage capability have advanced to the levels that you can really mine through a lot of data real-time, derive lot of insights and translate those insights into intelligence. And Micron plays a pivotal role here because our memory, our storage is where all this data resides, where all this data is processed. So we are very excited to bring together many industry figures, industry luminaries, park leaders, researchers, engineers all here today to engage in a dialogue on where technology is going, where AI is going, how it's shaping the world. And for the realization that hardware is absolutely central to this trend. And memory and storage is key. And we are very excited about what it means for the future. >> So a lot of thought leaders here today. Well first of all you guys have some hard news, which is relevant to what we're talking about. Talk about the hundred million dollar fund and how you've deployed it even just today you've made some sub-announcements. >> So, one of the things we announced today is we are launching a hundred million dollar fund to support, to fund start-ups in AI. Because we really think AI is going to transform the world. We want to be in the front row. With not only the large existing players that are driving this change but also the start-ups that will drive innovation. Having the front row seat with those start-ups, through our investment fund, will really help us accelerate intelligence, accelerate time to market of various AI applications. So a hundred million dollar fund is targeted toward supporting start-ups that are developing AI technologies. And what I'm really excited to talk about here is that 20% of that fund will go to start-ups that have leadership that is represented by women or under-represented groups. Under-represented--those groups that are under-represented in tech today. This demonstrates Micron's commitment to diversity and inclusion in the technologies phase. >> Well that's, well first of all congratulations on that we're big supporters >> Absolutely >> Of women and tech and diversity, it's something that we cover on the theCUBE extensively. And now you've announced two grants just today, a half a million dollars each. One with Stanford, one with Berkeley that we heard. We heard Amazon up on stage talking about Alexa AI, Microsoft was onstage we had NVIDIA on theCUBE earlier. So bringing together an ecosystem that involves academia, your partners, your customers, talk about that a little bit. >> So the two grants that you talked about, those are from Micron Foundation that is again supporting advancement of AI and AI research as well as teaching of AI to kids so that we can build the pipeline of strong engineers and technologists of the future. So the two grants that we have announced today are one to Stanford Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center, 200,000 grant to Stanford, pioneers in AI applications to precision management of your health. Very exciting field that will really truly enrich life and prolong life in the future as well as advance detection of diseases. Second $200,000 grant that we are giving is to Berkeley. Artificial Intelligence Research Center, absolutely cutting-edge that will be applicable to many industries and many walks of life. These are intended to support advancement of AI research. In addition to this advanced curiosity grant to these two institutions later today you'll hear there will be announcing a $100,000 grant to AI4ALL. And this is an institution that is encouraging women and under-represented minorities at high school level, 9th grade to 11th grade to pursue STEM careers. So Micron is really promoting study of advanced research and supporting the pipeline. In addition to this of course our focus today is on bringing together industry luminaries just like you mentioned, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, autonomous driving of the future, automotive partners, BMW, Visteon, really to engage in a dialogue of how AI is advancing in these various applications. We just heard great talk from vice president at Amazon, on Alexa devices really really exciting how those devices are truly making your life so easy and so intelligent. We heard from Microsoft Corporate Vice-President of AI research. So you see we really are as leaders in our industry, we are really bringing together industry experts to engage in a thought-provoking and inspiring dialogue on AI so that when we leave here today we leave with insights into what is coming next but even more importantly what do we all need to do to get there faster, and this is all about technology. >> So Sanjay and David too, Micron is one of the few companies that was here when I started in the business and is still around. At the time you were just a component manufacturer doin' memories and wow to watch the diversification of Micron over the years but also recently, I mean it's incredibly well-run company so congratulations on the recent success. At the analyst event in New York City this year, you talked about not only that diversification in your investments and innovation but you talked about the cyclicality of this business the historical cyclicality of this business you've dampened that down a little bit, for a variety of reasons. The capital requirements in this business are enormous, there's been consolidation. So how is that going, talk about sort of the trends in your business both in terms of diversification and your ability to make this business more predictable. >> So Dave you are very right to know that Micron is 40 year old company, we actually just turned 40, very proud of it. Really a company founded on the principles of innovation and tenacity. In fact the company has contributed to the industry to the world over the course of 40 years, 40,000 patents, just imagine that's a thousand patents a year, three patents a day over the course of 40 years. We are really a prolific inventor and we absolutely through our innovations in memory and storage have shaped the world here. As technology advances it really unleashes more applications and this is what has brought about the change in our industry. Today memory is not just in your PC. Of course it is in this PC but it is also in your data center it is going to be in the autonomous records of the future you going to have as much memory as what you had in the server just a few years ago. It's inside your mobile phone Artificial Intelligence, facial recognition is only possible because of the data and memory that you have in there. You have NAND Flash that is in these devices and with technology advancing that's bringing down the price points of NAND Flash really bringing more SSD's into these notebook computers, making these notebook computers lighter, longer battery life, more powerful. And of course Flash drives are also replacing hard test drives in data centers and cloud computing. So many applications, these diverse applications really have brought greater stability in our industry. And of course technology complexity has over time moderated the supply growth. And that's what we mean that the cyclicality of our industry, yes one or two quarters here or there you can have demand and supply mismatches but overall when you look at the demand trends and combine them with the moderating supply trends the long-term trajectory for our industry is very healthy. In fact we just completed a record year. >> Our fiscal year '18 was a record 30 billion dollar year for us with profitability that puts us at the very top of the most companies with 50% operating margin and with 30 billion in revenue we are actually number two largest semiconductor company in the U.S. And a lot of opportunity ahead given the demand drivers in the industry. >> Massive free cash flow, you've said publicly the stock is undervalued which is ya know, I don't know any CEO that says it's overvalued but nonetheless the performance that you've had suggests that you very well might be right. Go ahead David please. >> Yeah I just wanted to ask your opinion on, you are leading in this area now, very very clearly you're growing faster than the industry, you've had a magnificent year and the whole area is grown both the NAND and the DRAM. How are you judging how much to invest in this for the future? What's the balance between giving money back to the stockholders by buying stock back or versus investing in this what seems to me a very very exciting area. >> Do you have an AI algorithm for that? (laughing) >> We are in a great position where we are extremely disciplined about investing in CapEx to reduce cost of production and to deploy new technologies into production. We are very ROI focused in terms of any CapEx investments we make. We of course invest in R and D. I mentioned earlier 40,000 patents over the course of 40 years that only comes in investment in R and D. Investments in R and D are essential because we are today the most comprehensive technology solutions provider in memory and storage in the world. >> Yeah. >> In the world. With our DRAM, our Flash, our 3D crosspoint technologies, as well as future emerging technologies really position us as the only company in the world that have all of these memory and storage technologies under one company roof. So we do invest very thoughtfully and we manage our expenses very carefully but we do invest in R and D and of course we are committed to driving shareholder value as well. And we had announced earlier in the year ten billion dollar share buy back program with at least 50% of a fee cash flow. Every quarter on an annual basis actually, 50% of our fee cash flow on an annual basis going, at least 50% going toward share buy back. So we are managing the business, all aspects of it, excitedly looking forward to the opportunities. At the same time prudently in an otherwise driven fashion, building shareholder value through investments in R and D and manufacturing. >> Well of course the great Warren Buffett, David, says when asked if stock buy backs are a good investment says if your stock's undervalued it's a good investment, so. Obviously you believe that Sanjay, so. >> Absolutely! >> So thanks, thanks very much for coming on the theCUBE it was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> I hope we can have you back again. >> Thank you. >> We could talk to you for a long long time. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy, >> Thank you. >> We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from San Francisco Bay Micron Insight 2018. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music).

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco everybody. You're watching theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante. He's David Floyer, and we're covering Micro Insight'18. It's all about bringing together artificial intelligence and the memory and storage requirements. We're here on the embarcadero. We've got treasure island that way. We've got the financial district over there. We've got Golden Gate bridge behind us. Tom Eby is here as senior vice president and GM of Micron's booming compute and networking business unit. Good to see you Tom. >> Great to be here. >> And Permal Savla is here. He's the director of deep learning at NVIDIA. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So obviously some of these new emerging work loads require collaboration between folks like Micron and folks like NVIDIA. But Tom why don't you kick it off. What are some of the big trends that you're seeing in some of these alternative work loads that's driving this collaboration? >> Well a lot of what we're talking about here today is the drive of AI and machine learning work loads, and the implications for memory. Certainly there's a host of them, natural language processing, photo and image recognition, applications in medical research, applications in optimizing manufacturing like we're doing in our fabs, and there's many many more. And of course what's exciting for us is that to support those in an optimized way really does require the mating of the optimal processing architecture, things like GPUs. With the right high band width with low latency memory and storage solutions. That's what leads to great partner ships between partnerships like Micron and NVIDIA. >> David was explaining at our open the intensity of the work loads that you guys are serving, and how much more resources that requires to actually deliver the type of performance. Maybe you could talk about some of the things that you're seeing in terms of these emerging work loads. >> Yes, so at NVIDIA, we build systems for X rated computing. AI and deep learning is a very quickly expanding field at this point which needs a lot of CP horse power. What we are seeing is that different applications like you said there's image processing, whether it's video, whether it's natural language processing the amount of data that is there, that is required to do deep learning and AI around it, we break it up into two work flows. One is the training where you actually train the software, and make it intelligent enough to then go and do inference later on. So that you can go and get you results out of it at the end of it. We concentrate on this entire workflow. That's where when we are looking at it from a training perspective, the GPU gives it the processing power. But at the same time all the other components around it perform at the peak. That's where the memory comes in. That's where the storage comes in, and we need to process that data very quickly. >> Yeah, so we know from system's design that you got to have a balanced system or else you're just going to push the bottle necks around. We've learned that over the years, but so it's more than just slapping on a bunch of storage and a bunch of memory. You're doing some other deeper integration, is that correct and what is that integration? >> Yeah, I think the two companies have had a great relationship, just to talk about a couple examples. We essentially co-defined a technology called GEDR 5X, which greatly enhanced the speed of graphics technology. We gently introduced that to the marketplace with NVIDIA about 18 months ago. And then worked with them again very closely on a technology called GDDR six, which is the next generation of even faster technology. We were their launch and ran partner for their recently announced G-force RTX line of cards. It's a very deeply engaged early in the process, define the process, define the standards, jointly develop the solution. Very intimate sharing in the supply chain area. It's a great relationship for us. We're excited about how we can continue to expand and extend that relationship by going forward. >> So obviously there's the two parts of it. You said the learning part of it, and the inference part of the computing. What do you think is the difference between the two? I mean obviously at the end of the day, the inference part is critical. That's got to be the fastest response time. You have to have that in real time. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing to really speed that up, to make that micro seconds as opposed to milliseconds? >> So from an NVIDIA perspective we build the entire end to end tools steps for training and inferencing. We have a set of libraries that we have made it openly available for all of our customers, all our partners, and all users. So that they can go download it, and do the training so they can use the different frameworks and libraries to accelerate the work that they're doing. And then transform it onto the inference spot. We have something called denser RT, which is basically denser real time. That gives the capability to get these answers very quickly. So on our D4 of the tuning, Chip said that we just announced. We can get a very high performance for our image. So any kind of image recognition or image processing that we need to do, we can do that on the systems very quickly. And we can meet, rebuild entire architectures. So it's not just about one piece. It's about the whole end to end architecture of the system. >> So we heard earlier today in the analyst briefing, the press briefing that Micron certainly in the last 40 years has changed. We're seeing a lot more diversity. Usually it'd be all about PCs. Now there's just so many alternative work loads emerging. Clearly NVIDIA is playing there as well with alternative processing capabilities. What do you guys see as some of the more exciting, emerging work loads that are going to require continued collaboration and innovation? >> Yeah, well I think to build a little bit on some of the other comments about the need for real time inference, one of the things in the area of diversity that we've found interesting. The relationship between Micron and NVIDIA in high performance memory really started around their graphics business. But we are seeing in other markets closer to the edge, in automotive, in networking and in other areas where there's a need for that real time performance. Yet there's also a need for a degree of cost effectiveness. Perhaps a little more so than in the data center. That we're seeing technologies like GDR six being applied to a much broader range of applications like automotive, like networking, like Edge AI, to provide the performance to get that real time response but in a form factor and at a cost point that's affordable for the application. >> Anything you'd add to that Permal? >> So I would also add you talked about applications, different applications that are changing right? Today we announced a new set of libraries and tools for the analytic space. That's again a big work load in the enterprise data centers, that we are trying to optimize and accelerate with machine learning. So we announced a whole set of tools which take in these large data sets that are coming in, and applying it in the data centers and using it to get answers very quickly. So that's what NVIDIA is also doing is expanding on these capabilities as we go in. And as these components and as these technologies get better it just gets our answers much more quickly. >> As exacts in the space and you guys both, you're component manufacturers, and so you sell to people who sell to end consumers. How do you get your information in that sort of pull through? Obviously you work with your customers very closely. >> Mm-hm. >> How do you get visibility to their customers? Just going to go to shows, you go do joint sales calls, how does that all work? >> Certainly some of that is in discussions with our customers and their marketing groups about what they're seeing from a customer point of view. But certainly there's other paths. One of the reasons behind the hundred million dollar venture fund that we announced today, is one of the best ways to get that advanced insight, is to be working with some of the most innovative start ups that understand what some of those end users needs might be and are developing some unique technologies. So there's a range. Working with our customers through eventually finding others, but it's important that we understand those needs because the lead time to developing the solutions both memory and processing architectures is quite well. >> Of course everybody wants to work with NVIDIA, you guys have an inundated like come on oh no we're the most. We're tied up now. Of course there's not a lot of choices here when you're talking about the levels of components that you're selling. But what's life like at NVIDIA? I mean they've been knocking down your doors to do partnerships. >> I think we've grown from being just the component to now being a complete system and an architecture. We don't only just build just a chip that the GPU was. We also build full SLCs. We also build the libraries, software, and the tools that are required to make this complete end to end solutions. We also do a lot of open source technologies because we want our customers and our end cast partners to build and take what we have and go beyond what it's capable of. That's where we end value at the end of the day. Yes, it's all of us together. We need to work together to make that much more faster as we go. >> The tuning is incredibly important. This is complicated stuff. It doesn't just work out of the box, right? So you need an ecosystem as well. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> That's what you guys have been out building. Tom, well give your final thoughts. >> Yeah well I guess to build a little bit. Certainly NVIDIA is moving up the stack in terms of the ecosystem, the software, the complete solution and I think Micron does as well. Like you commented, traditionally it was a component play. And increasingly, we're going to be building subsystems in memory and storage that occurs today on the storage side. I think we'll increasingly see that in memory, and with some of the future, very promising technologies like 30 Cross Point. >> Yeah it's the dawn of the days where everybody just gets piece parts and put them all together. They need you you guys to do more integration, and more out of the box like you say subsystems. So guys thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright you're welcome, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back in San Francisco, you're watching theCUBE from Micron Insight 2018, accelerate intelligence. We'll be right back after this short break. (music)