(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2019 brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by Amit Walia, President - Product and Marketing here at Informatica. Thank you for coming back on theCUBE. So we're here at Informatica World, there's a lot of buzz, a lot of energy, obviously CLAIRE is a big story, your company got great press yesterday from The Wall Street Journal teaming up with Google to tame the data. One of the themes we keep hearing is that data needs AI, but AI needs data. Elaborate on that a little bit. >> That's a great point, in fact I would extend that and say I believe, and I will talk about that today in the closing keynote, is the language that AI needs or speaks is data. Because to be honest, without data, there's no great AI. And I think something that we've known all this while, but now that AI is really becoming pervasive and has skill, you really, really need to give it relevant, good, contextual data for a Siri or a Cortana or Alexa to make some contextual decisions, right? And we see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise now. Finally enterprises are arriving at the point where they want to use AI for P-to-P use cases, not just consumer use cases that you and me are used to. And then, to your other question, AI is a part of everything that we do in data. Because, to be honest, it really helps improve productivity, automate mundane tasks. And I think we were talking before this, there is a massive skills gap. And I think you look around, the economy's kind of fully saturated with jobs, and there's still so much more work to be done with more data, different data, so AI's helping making some of those mundane activities become a lot more easier or autonomous, if I may. >> What's the use cases for CLAIRE in AI around as it grows? Because, you know, the data world, you guys have been doing it for 25 years at Informatica, private for 4 so, innovating on the products side, but it used to be, here's the data department, they handle it. The data warehousing in the fenced out area in the company, now it's strategically part of everything, right? So you guys have the MDM, you've got the Catalog, you've got all kinds of solutions. How is that role changing within your customer base? And what are some of those use cases? Because now they have to think end-to-end, you've got Cloud and On-premise, these are challenges and opportunities. But the role of data and the data teams is expanding rapidly. >> In a significant way. A significant way. I think I kind of was joking with our practitioners yesterday that they were all becoming, they were going from heroes to superheroes, if you are enjoying the Avengers movies, and that analogy. But genuinely, because if you think about it, right, I think what we are seeing in this world, we call it the data three data where the data is becoming a platform of a sort. It is getting decoupled from the data bases, from the applications, from the infrastructure, because to truly be able to leverage AI, and build applications on top, you cannot let it be siloed and be hostage to its individual infrastructure components. So we're seeing that fundamental change happening where data as a platform is coming along, and in that context the catalog becomes a very, very pivotal start, because you want to get a full view of everything. And look, you're not going to be able to move all your data in one place, it's impossible. But understanding that through metadata is where enterprises are going, and then from there, John, as Rebecca's talked about, you can have a customer experience journey with MDM. You can have a analytics journey in the Cloud with an AWS or (inaudible) or a JCP. Or you can have a complete governance and security and privacy journey understanding anomalous activity. >> So before I go any further I just want to ask you about this one point because you guys made a big bet with the Catalog >> Okay, and it's looking good. A lot of good bets. You know, AI, Catalog, Cloud, early on the Cloud, but one of the things I hear a lot is that data's at the blood stream, you want the blood flowing around the system, the body. People looking at data like an operating system kind of architecture where you got to have the data free flowing. So the Catalog seems to be a big bet there. How is that helping the AI peeps because if you can have the data flowing -- >> Yep. No I think -- >> You're going to have feeding the machine learning >> Absolutely. >> The machine learning feeds the application of AI, you got to have the data, the data's not flowing, you can't just inject it at certain times. >> The way we think about it is, you're exactly right. I would just, in fact it's so ah, interesting, the analogy I use is that data is everywhere. It's like the blood flowing through your body, right? You're not going to get all the data in one place to do any kind of analytics, right? You're going to let it be there. So we say metadata is the new OS. Bring the metadata, which is data about the data in one place. And from there let AI run on it. And what we think about AI is that, think about this. LinkedIn is a beautiful place where they leveraged the machine learning algorithm to create and social graph about you and me. So if I'm connected with John, I know now that I can be connected with you. The same thing can happen to the data layer. So when I'm doing analytics, and I'm basically searching for some report, I don't know, through that same machine learning algorithm at the catalog level, now we can tell you, you know what? This is another table. This is another report. This is another user. And so on. And we can give you back ratings within that environment for you to do what I call analytics on your fingertips at enterprise scale. So that's an extremely powerful use case of taking analytics which is the most commonly done activity in an enterprise and make it accurate at an enterprise scale. >> Well the LinkedIn example, you know, of course I have a different opinion on that. They're a siloed platform. They don't have any API's, it's only within LinkedIn. But it begs the question, since you're both that kind of consumer, look at a company like Slack, going public, very successful, their numbers are off the charts in terms of adoption, usage, a simple utility in IRC message chat room that has a great UI on it. But their success came when they integrated. >> Sure. >> Integration was a big part of their success. They wanted to have API's and let customers use the software, SAS software, with a lot of data. So they were really open. >> Yes. >> How were you guys from a business standpoint taking that concept of SAS openness connecting with other apps because I might have, bring my own app to the table as data, and integrate that piece into Informatica. How does that work? >> Very similarly. So the way we've done it is that our whole platform is fully API based. So we have opened up the API's, any application can hook on to that. So we believe that we are the Switzerland of data. So you may have any underlying infrastructure stack. On-prem, in the Cloud, multi-Cloud, whatever it is. Different applications, different Cloud applications, right? So our goal is that at the layer which is the metadata layer on which CLAIRE runs, we've opened up the API's, we've hooked to everything, and so we can consume the metadata, and there we truly provide a true data platform to our organization. So if you are running a Server Snap, a Salesforce.com, Adobe, Google, AWS, you can still bring all that stuff together and make contextual business decisions. >> One of the things you had talked about on the main stage is how the Millennials that you're hiring have higher expectations in their personal lives from the technology that they're using, and that's really pushing you to deliver different kinds of products and services that have the same level of innovation and high touch. Can you talk a little bit about that and how, and how this new generation of the workforce, and there's obviously Gen Y coming right behind it, is really pushing innovation in your company. >> Well you know, I have a fourteen-year-old, so I get a taste of that every day at home. (laughing) So you know, what they want to experience, so I, you know, I use this word, experiences are changing. And by the way they are pushing the boundary for us too. We grew up in the infrastructure software world which you know, twenty-five years ago was all, you can go down to the command line interface. Not any more. You really really have to make it simple. I think users today don't want to waste their time what I call doing mundane activities. They want to get to value fast. That's pushing the boundary for us. In fact that's where we're leveraging AI in our products to make sure we can remove the mundane clutter activities for them, for them to do value added activities. For example, I want to discover data to do some analysis. I don't want to go around discovering. Discover it for me. So that's where CLAIRE comes in and the catalog, right? Discover it for me. You know what? I don't want to figure out whether this data is accurate or not accurate. Tell me. So we are taking that philosophy, really really pushing the boundary for us, but in a good way. Because definitely those users want what I call very simplified and value added experiences. >> And that's really what SAS and consumer applications have shown us, and that's proven to be hard in the enterprise. So I got to ask you as you take this data concept to the infrastructure, a lot of enterprises are re-architecting, you hear words like multi-Cloud, hybrid Cloud, public Cloud, and you start to see a holistic new kind of persona, a Cloud architect. >> Yes. >> They're re-architecting their infrastructure to be SAS-like, to take advantage of data. >> Correct. >> That's kind of known out there, it's been reported on, we've been reporting on it. So the question is, that isn't alignment, that's not just the data people, it's data meets infrastructure. >> Absolutely. >> What's your advice to the companies out there that are doing this, because you guys have Cloud, Google, Amazon, Azure, Cloud, On-premise. You can work anywhere. What's you're advice? >> Yeah, no, I think it's a very good, it's a very topical question. Because I do think that the infra, the old days of separating different layers of the stack are are gone. Especially the old infrastructure all the way to platform as a server stack has to be very well though out together. To your point, customers running a hybrid multi-cloud world, right? So think about it, if you're in the world of improving customer experiences, I may have my marketing cloud running somewhere, I may have my sales cloud running somewhere, and a service cloud running somewhere. But to give a great experience I have to bring it all together. So you have to think about the infrastructure and the data together for enterprises to give a better experience to their customers. And I see innovative customers of companies truly think through that one and succeed. And the ones that are still lagging behind are still looking at that in silos. And then be able to have the data layer for hyper scale. Well these are all hyper scale platforms. You cannot run a little experiment over here. So we've invested in that whole concept of hyperscale, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and make sure it touches everything through API's. >> So we've been covering you guys for four years here at Informatica World. It's great to see the journey, nothing's really changed on the messaging and the strategy, you say you're going to do something and you keep doing it, and some little course corrections here, and acquisitions here and there to kind of accelerate it. But when we talk to your customers we hear a couple of different things. We hear platform, Informatica, when describing Informatica. You guys win the whole data thing, you're there, it's the business you're in. In the data business. But I'm hearing new words, platform. Scale. These are kind of new signals we're hearing from your customer base and some of the people here at the show. Talk about that impact, how you guys are investing in the platform, what it means for customers, and what does scale mean for your business and customers? >> No, we've heard that from our customers too. Customers said look, they all recognize that they have to invest in data as a platform. But you know, it's not like an original platform so they want it because we serve the broader state of management needs, so they want us to be like a platform. So we've invested that, couple of years ago we went completely ground-up, re-built everything, micro-services based. All API driven. Containerized. Modular. So the idea is that nobody is buying a monolithic platform. Nobody buying a platform, it just builds by itself. And they can compartmentize it, I want this now, I want that later, so like a Lego block it builds. And, you know what, through an API it also hooks into any of the existing infrastructure they have, or anything new that they want to bring in. So that really pushed the boundary for us. We invested in that. By the way, that platform today, in the Cloud, which you call IICS, runs eight trillion transactions a month. Eight trillion transactions a month. And by the way, last Informatica World, it was running two-and-a-half trillion transactions. So in one year it's gone from two-and-a-half to eight. So we are seeing that really hyper scale. >> And you, and I'm going to ask you if you believe, just, and you can answer yes or no or maybe, or answer on your own, do you believe that data is critical for SAS success? >> Oh absolutely. No doubt about it. I have not met a single customer who ever said anything different. In fact, the thing that I see is like, it's becoming more and more and more a sea-level conversation. That hey, what are we going to do with our data? How do we bring that data together to make decisions? How do we leverage AI and data together? It's truly in our sea-level discussion, whereas it was never a sea-level discussion years ago, it was more about what application am I going to use? What infrastructure am I going to use? Now they're all about, how do I manage this data? >> I wanted to talk about ethics (laughs) and this is, because recently had published a paper about Tech for Good, and it's about this idea of using AI and machine learning to help society achieve better outcomes, and then also to help us measure it's impact on our welfare beyond GDP. Because think about the value that technology brings to our lives. What's your take on this? I mean how much value do you think AI brings to the enterprise in terms of this Tech for Good idea? >> No, so, by the way one of Informatica's values is "Do good". And we are firm believers in that look, there is an economic value to everything in life. But then we all have something to give back to the society. There is something to create value out there which is outside the realm of just pure economics which is the point you were asking. And we are firm believers in that. I do think that by the way, there is a very high bar for all of us in the industry to make sure that not only, it's not just about ethics of AI also at the same time, because we cannot abuse the data. We're collecting a lot of information. You and me as consumers are giving a lot of information and I talked about that yesterday as well, that we believe that the ethics of AI are going to play a fundamental and differentiating role going forward. I think the Millennials we're talking about, they are very aware of that one. They are very purposeful. So they'll look back and say, who actually has a values system to take this technology innovation and do something better with it, not just creating money out of it. And I think I totally agree, and by the way in the very early stages, industry has to still learn that, and internalize that, then do something about it. >> Well Amit, yeah I think you're right on, early days, and I can give you an anecdotal example is that this year, University of California, Berkeley, graduated its first inaugural class of data science analytics. First! First ever class for them. They're a pioneer, they're usually having protests and doing things with revolutionary things. That shows it's so early. So the question I got to ask you is, you've got your fourteen-year-old, you know I have kids, we follow each other on Facebook. I'm always asked the question and I want to get this exposed. People are really discovering new ways to learn. Not just in school, you got YouTube videos, you've got CUBE videos, you got all kinds of great things out there. But really people are trying to figure out where to double down on, what dials to turn, what classes to take, what disciplines are going to help me. It used to be oh, go into computer science, you'll get a great job. And certainly that's still true. But there's now new opportunities for people, data's now grown from you know, programming deeply to ethics. And you don't need to have a CS degree to get in and be successful to fill the job openings or contribute to society. So what are those areas that you see that people who are watching might say hey you know what? I'm good at that, I'm good at art, I'm good at society or philosophy or I'm really good at math or, what skills do you, should people think about if they want to be successful in data? >> You know, I think it's a very foundational question. I think you're right, I think programming has become a lot easier. So I think if I'd stepped back to the days we graduated, right? It's become a lot easier so I don't think that necessarily learning programming is a differentiating, I do think that back where you were going, people who'd generally think about what to do with that. I think there is analytical skills that we all need, but I think the soft skills I believe in the society, we are kind of leaving behind, right? A little bit of the psychology of how users want to use something. Design thinking. By the way I still think that design thinking is not yet completely out there. Um, the ability to marry what I call the left brain to the right brain, I mean, I think that's key. And I do think that we cannot run away completely to the right brain, as much as I am an analytical person myself. I think marrying the left and the right, I do believe, like I, as I said I have a fourteen-year-old. My advice to all those who say, he wants to do Computer Science, is to take enough psychology or design classes to kind of have that balance. So my encouragement would be have the balance. We cannot all just be hyper-analytical. We have to kind of have the balance to see ... >> I think just be smart, balance, I mean again, I have not found one, well I guess the answers are stats and math, have the check, that's easy to say, but ... >> The emotional skills. But you need more of those, I think a little bit more of those left-brain skills also to complement them. >> Well and also for the experience, study art, music, what delights people. What inspires the passion? >> I agree with that. >> Yeah. Absolutely. Amit, always a pleasure to see you. Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. Always a pleasure to be here. >> Great conversation. Good insight. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, stay tuned at theCUBE's live coverage at Informatica World. (Upbeat music)

>> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier. Host of theCUBE here in theCUBE studios. I'm joined with Ronen Schwartz. Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Integration and Cloud Integration at Informatica, CUBE alumni, been on multiple times, here to do a preview round. Informatica World coming up as well as just catch up. Ronen, great to see you. >> Really happy to see you, you guys have a beautiful place here in Palo Alto. >> I know you live right around the corner so I'm expecting to see you come on multiple times and come in and share your commentary, but I want to get your thoughts, it's been a couple of months since we last chatted, interesting turn of events. If you go back just, you know, September of last year, and then you had Amazon Reinvent. They announced Outpost, multi-cloud starts hitting the scene, first it was hybrid. First it was all public cloud. But now the realization from customers is that this is now a fully blown up cloud world. It's cloud operations, it's just public cloud for unlimited cloud natives activity, on premise for existing workloads, and a complete re-architecture of the enterprise. >> Yes, and I think from Reinvent to Google Next just a week before, I agree with you. It's a world of hybrid and a world of multi-cloud. I think a lot of exciting announcements and a lot of changes, I think from my perspective what I see is that the Informatica customers are truly adopting cloud and hybrid and as data is growing, as data is changing the cloud is the place that they actually address this opportunity in the best way. >> So I know we've talked in the past. Your title is Data Integration, Cloud Integration. Obviously integration is the key point. You're starting to see APIs going to a whole other level, with Google they had acquired Apogee, which is an API marketplace, but with microservices and service meshes and Kubernetes momentum you're starting to see the advent of more programmability. This is a big trend, how is that impacting your world? Because at the end of the day you need the data. >> Yes, it actually means that you can do more things with the data in an easier way and also it means that you can actually share it with more users within the enterprise. I think that especially the whole ability to use containers, and Kubernetes is a great example of how you can do it, it's actually giving you unparalleled scale, as well as simplicity from the obstruction perspective. And it allows more and more developers to build more value from the data that they have. So data is actually in the core. Data is the foundation, and really a lot of this new technology allows you to build up from the data more valuable capabilities. I'm really happy that you're mentioning Apogee because one of the things that Google and Informatica notice together is the need for API to actually leverage data in a better way, and we strike a very strategic partnership that has gone into the market in the last few months allowing every user of Informatica Ipaas to basically publish APIs in a native experience from the Informatica Ipass directly to Apogee and vice versa, everything that you build in Informatica Cloud is basically automatically an API inside Apogee, so users get more value from data faster. >> So can you give an example, 'cause I think this is one of the things we saw at Google as a tell sign or the canary in the cole mine whatever trend parameter is that end to end CICD pipe lining, seamless execution in any environment seems to be the trend. What you're kind of getting at is this kind of cross integration, can you give an example of that Informatica Cloud to Apogee example of benefit to the customer or use case and why that's important. >> Yes, definitely, so if I'm a retailer or a manufacturer, I'm actually looking into automate processes. There is nothing better than deleting the Ipaas from Informatica to actually automate process anything from order to cash or inventory validation or even next best recommendation coming from some AI in the backend. Once you have created this process exposing this process as an API is actually allowing multiple other services. Multiple other capabilities to very easily leverage that, right, so this is basically what we're doing, so what an individual in the retailer is doing is they're actually defining this process of order to cash, and then they're publishing it as an API in one click, at that stage anybody anywhere can very very easily consume that API and basically use this process again and again. >> And that means what? Faster execution of application development? >> It means faster execution of application development. It also means consistency and basically scale so now you don't need to redevelop that. It's available as an API, you can reuse it again and again, so you do it in a consistent way, when you need to update you need to change, you need to modernize this process you modernize it once and use it again and again. >> Sorry to drill down on kind of the unique use case here, but this points to the integration challenges out there and the opportunities. Mentioned Google Next, Google Cloud. You've got a relationship with Amazon. This is part of your strategy for ecosystem. This is critical, integration is becoming Amit Walia was saying that you can compose. Have that foundation for the data and you compose your applications, but if you got to have a lot of composition, you need to have integration points, that's going to be either APIs or some sort of glue layer. This is huge, this is like the entire thesis of cloud architecture. >> Right, and the reality that our customers are facing is basically irrelative from multi-cloud, they will use a best of breed cloud for CRM, a best of breed cloud for ERP as well as a best of breed cloud for their data warehouse, their databases as well as their analytics, AI, et cetera. In that world, the only thing that is kind of common across this cloud is the data. And if you're actually able to allow the data to reside in the best place but you keep the metadata managed centrally by software like the one at Informatica is giving you are getting the best of breed of all of these offerings without actually paying a fine for that. >> So you guys are in a lot of magic quadrants out there in terms of categories of leadership and focus on data from day one. As you talk about your ecosystem, can you explain what that means because you're also an ecosystem partner of cloud players but you also have your own ecosystem. Talk about the ecosystem, how is it laid out? What's the update, what are some of the momentum points, can you share just an overview of how that's all happening? >> Yes, definitely, so when we're looking into our partnership with Microsoft Azure, with AWS, with JCP, we're not talking about just Informatica supporting the technologies that they build, we're talking about Informatica supporting the technologies that they're building as well as their ecosystem of partners. We're talking about an end-to-end solution that supports the entire ecosystem. What that actually translates to is Informatica building services that are giving best of breed experience for users within this cloud environment and really giving you the full power of data management integration, data quality. Master data management, data security. Data catalog across all of this cloud. In a way you're right, we can look at it in the same way as like we have an ecosystem and in that ecosystem we're seeing a lot of strategic partners that are very very large, definitely all of these cloud scales are key partners for us and for our customers, but we're also seeing a huge amount of smaller, innovative vendors that are joining this ecosystem, and Informatica World in May 20th is a great place to come and actually see these vendors. We're actually showing for the first time our AI and cloud ecosystem in one place and these vendors are coming and they're showing how are they leveraging Informatica technology to basically bring new value in AI, in machine learning, in analytics to their customers. If you ask me, like, what is Informatica doing to help them, we're basically making the data available in the best way for their offering, and that kind of allowed them to focus on their innovation rather than how do they work in the different places. >> Rowen, you got ahead of me on the Informatica World question, but you just brought it out, you're doing an innovation. Let's talk about Informatica World. Because again, this data, there's a lot of sessions, so you do the normal thing. We've covered multiple years there. Integration's the key point, what are, why should someone come to Informatica World if they're a customer or a prospect? Now, you mentioned the AI zone. What's the core theme that you're going to be seeing there from your group and from the company? >> Informatica World this year is an amazing place for people to come and see the latest that happens within the cloud and hybrid journey, a great place to actually see next generation analytics and all the innovation there, it is a great place to see customer 360 and master data management and how can that change your organization as well as an amazing place to see data security and data privacy and a lot of other innovations around data. But I would actually say that it's great to see everything that Informatica can share with you. It is a better place to see what our customers and our partners are sharing. And especially from a partnership perspective Informatica World 2019, you're actually going to see leaders from Google, you're going to see leaders from Microsoft, you're going to see leaders from AWS, the people that are leading the best data warehouses in the world the best analytics in the world as well as innovators like DataRobot and Databricks that are changing the world and are actually advancing technology very very fast. >> And the AI zone, there's a cloud and AI zone. I've seen them, I know it's here from the prep. What does that mean, what's someone, AI's going to be hot, I think that's a big theme. Getting clarity around, as Amit kind of shared with us on a previous interview. AI's hot because automation kind of left the blocking and tackling. But the value of creation is going to come from using the data, where's the, and it's not integrated, you can't get the data in. If it's not integrated, you can't leverage machine learning, so having access to data makes machine learning get great. The machine learning gets great, AI is great. So tell us what's going on with it. Give a little sneak preview. >> It's actually amazing what we can do leveraging the iron machine learning today, right? I wake up in the morning and I say Alexa, good morning, and I actually get back what's the weather and what's happening. I'm getting into my car, Google is telling me how fast will I get to the office or the first meeting. I left to come here and I knew exactly what's the best route to take. A lot of that is actually leveraging AI and machine learning, I think it's not a secret that the better your data is the better the machine can learn from the data. And if your data is not good, then learning can actually be really really bad. You know, sometimes I can use, like with my kids. If their learning books are bad, there's no way that they can actually get to the right answer. The same as data, data is so critical. What we're seeing is basically data engineers, data operation becoming a super strategic function to make AI and machine learning even possible. Your ability to collect enough data to make sure that the data is ready and clean for AI and machine learning is critical. And then once the AI and machine learning eventually contributed the automation, the decision making, the recommendation, you have to put it back in to the data pipes so that you are actually able to leverage them to do the right thing. >> You know, you, I think you nailed this one. We've talked about this before but I think more important than ever, data cleansing or data cleaning was always an afterthought in the old data warehouse world where well, we're not getting the answers we wanted so you kind of have to fail to figure out that the data sucks so you had to get the data to be better, now it's much more acute in the sense that people realize that you need quality data so there's now new capabilities to make sure there's a process for doing that on the front end, not on the back end. Talk about that dynamic, because this is something that is critical in the architecture, and how you think about data pipe-lining, data management, the things that you guys do, this is an important trend. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yes, I totally agree with you and I think that the rise of the importance of data quality, and it actually is coming also as part of the pattern of data governance and we want to make sure that the processes exist to make sure that the data that we make available for our AI research, for analytics, for our executives and data workers that this data is really the right data is critical. To actually support that, what we are seeing is people defining data governance process. What are the steps that the data needs to go before it is actually available for the next step? And what is nice today is that this is not people that the data needs to go through. These are processes, automation, that can actually drive data quality, it goes from things that are very very basic. Let's remove duplicate data, but also into the fact that you actually identify anomalies in the data and you ask the right questions so that that data doesn't go in. >> Is this the kind of topics that people will hear at Informatica World? >> Definitely, they will hear about how they can actually help the organization get the data right so that machine learning automation, and hyper growth is actually possible. >> You're excited about this market, aren't you? >> Super excited, I mean I think each and every one of us, we're going to see a lot of innovation coming out and I consider myself lucky that data is actually in the center of all of this innovation and that we're actually able to help the customers and our partners be successful with that. >> Yeah, you and I were talking before you came on camera, I wish I was 23 again right now, this is a great time to be in tech, everything's coming together. You got unlimited compute, machine learning's rocking and rolling, everyone's all kinds of diverse areas to play on, it's kind of intoxicating to be in this environment, isn't it? >> I totally agree, and I will add one additional thing to the reasons, agility. Like the fact that it all is available at your fingertip, and you can actually achieve so much with very little patience is really really amazing. >> This compose ability really as the new developer modernization renaissance. It's happening. >> Yes, yes, and as we usually say it all starts from the data. >> Okay, Ronen Schwartz, we're talking Informatica World but getting an update on what's going on because data integration, cloud integration, this is the number one activity people are spending their time on. You get it right, there's huge benefits. Ronen, thanks for coming in and sharing your insights, appreciate it. >> Hey, my pleasure. >> Okay, this is theCUBE, here for CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California at theCUBE headquarters, I'm John Furrier Thanks for watching. (jazz music)

>> Narrator: Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost John Troyer. We're here at the CUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2017, we're the world wide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program Kim Bannerman who does the Developer Relations at Google. Recently to Google. And Ben Kepes who's an analyst with Diversity Limited. Thanks so much both for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Kim, you were up on the main stage yesterday and today MCing the event, really appreciate you joining us. Why are you at this event, why is the event important for developers? >> I got involved with Cloud Foundry before there was a Foundation so this has been my community for almost three years now. I'm not one of the oldie, oldie people but I feel like these are my people. >> Yeah, we had James on before so... >> Yeah, so you know. It's important to developers because it helps them move faster. I started out my career in consulting so one of the big heavy lifting items that we would always have to for our customers would be building a custom platform for an application. When I first heard about Cloud Foundry, shortly after it was launched into open source, I was like that's really interesting to me. >> Ben, do I remember right, is this the first time you've actually been at this event in person? >> Yeah it's funny, so I've been covering Cloud Foundry, writing about Cloud Foundry since before it was called Cloud Foundry. >> Yeah Ben, you were one of those clouderati people talking about ads >> Like platform right? >> and the temperature, for years about that stuff. >> And it's bizarre, I remember when Heroku and Engine Yard were all it was when it comes to pass. So I've been following the space but I've never actually been to a Cloud Foundry summit so it's awesome to be here and to get a sense and vibe of the community which is always a really important thing. >> What's your take so far, what's your overlay of the market? We're not talking about paths so much anymore, so what are we talking about. >> No it's interesting. Just recently I read a post opining about the death or otherwise of paths. I think what we're seeing now is really what Cloud Foundry is is more than a path. It's really about a fabric, a control fabric for a bunch of different modes of operating. From that perspective, it's been really great to be here. Seeing the new announcements, obviously Microsoft joining us is a big deal. Things like Cubo. It really does position Cloud Foundry in this container, server-less world. >> Kim, we were joking with Chip when we had him on earlier, talked about enterprise grade and that means a salesperson goes in and the front of the company, the C level suite, talking about digital transformation, how do you reconcile that with what you're hearing from developers? How do you have the business and developers, are they coming together more? >> Right, so I'll tell you this. If you see a message and tweets or collateral or a deck or a talk and it kind of hits you wrong, understand that you may not be the intended audience. So I think that serves... That will speak to a CTO level type of person but increasingly nowadays we're seeing enterprises saying, hey, don't call me enterprise, we're actually an internet company like you are Google, we want to be like you. Don't call us this legacy, old school, all these different connotations that are attached to enterprise. Really we're just talking about larger companies of 10,000 employees or above, right. As far as meeting in the middle, The New Kingmakers, I love that book, Red Monk, great people. >> We're going to have Steve O'Grady on later. >> Yup, love them. I was seeing this happening when I started organizing user groups back in Atlanta in 2010 and 2011 where deals were happening but used to happen and say here, I'm signing this but you're going to have to live with it and I'm throwing it over the fence to my team and we're done. More and more those folks are coming into EBCs, tech leads, architects, developers, systems administrators, devOps, whatever. They're absolutely influencing the deal and they really do want to see it and try it and know that they've got a community behind them, supporting them before they agree. >> Kim, you have worked with a lot of different developers and your perspective now at Google and IBM was the last place. So sure, the developers are going to be the new kingmakers but they're having to choose between different platforms. The joke used to be at the front end, the web, HTML people, the great thing about Java Script is there are so many frameworks to choose from and they're tearing their hair out every year cause there's a new set. Now the backend, the folks who are doing the orchestration and the distributed systems and all the stuff we're talking about here, they also have some choices to make, look at different architectures, look at different stacks. What do you see as the developers that you're talking with, how are they approaching this in this multi-cloud world that they're dealing with? >> Ben made a good point on Twitter earlier today about multi-cloud, it happens for multiple reasons. Someone said this is the reason and then Ben, I'll let him speak to that, I won't steal his thunder. But for me, it's different, we can say it from the product level, it's different use cases. But quite frankly, there are multitudes of various different types of developers doing various different types of applications inside any given large customer. That's why you've seen, not to shield, Google has partnered we're doing PCF, Google roadshows, getting in with each other customers because that's definitely a big use case that we keep seeing. Then we also have container engine that's run by Kubernetes. It's just a matter of who your developers are. >> Google is big enough to embrace a lot of sets of developers. >> Absolutely, and it's not just about developers, which is a big pet peeve of mine, you got to think about all my ops people too and everyone else that's keeping the ship running. >> Shout out to ops people. >> Absolutely. >> Well Ben, what was your comment on Twitter? >> It's interesting. I guess there's a couple of different options and we've been told that multi-cloud the value propers that you've got a workload running on JCP, you want to move it to Azure or AWS. It's lists about that it's more about the CIO deciding that she wants to enable her developers to use whatever platform they want to use. It's funny, the developers are the new kingmakers meme. I'm not 100% comfortable with that because I think that absolutely developers build the solutions that allow an organization to be EdgeAll. But really it's still the CIO that gives them, or allows them, gives them the framework to use whatever tools they need. So I actually think that the developers versus IT tension is actually a fake one. What really needs to happen, what we're seeing in these more forward looking large enterprises, is the bringing together of those two worlds and enabling developers to use what they need. I totally agree with what Kim said about speed. At the end of the day, it's not the bigs that eat the small, it's the fast that eat the slow. Large enterprises want to feel more like a startup, more like an EdgeAll organization so I think that enterprise grade way of looking at the world was a way of looking at it from legacy days and we need to change that way I think. >> Ben, it feels like that Cloud Foundry and if I look at Pivotal specifically, are focused at those large enterprises getting a lot of traction. We see big companies that are on stage and here which there's a large opportunity there but different from what I see at certain shows where you're seeing smaller companies that are maybe embracing Kubernetes and containers a little bit more and not looking at Cloud Foundry. What are you seeing? >> I think it's pragmatic, it's totally not the sexy thing to say, but at the end of the day, developers will do what they are told to do, cause at the end of the day, they're in a job they have to deliver. So I actually think, I've spent some time talking to James Waters earlier on today to get an update on where Pivotal is with regard to PCF and I think this theme of allowing the CIO to enable their people to do what their people need to do is actually the right one. It's a really pragmatic approach. I think it's less about hey, let's try and keep all of these developers happy and try and be the cool tech vendor for the developer, it's about being the tech vendor that can help the CIO be the hero of their own development teams. >> Kim, there was a good question at the new stack panel this morning, how do people keep up with all of the new things, of course there's many answers but you're involved with lots of meetups, lots of different channels, what are you seeing as some of the best ways for people to try to get involved and try to keep up? >> It's a information overload. I would say tailor your feeds, whatever they are, to be very finite into the things that matter most to you. Like Sarah and some other folks said, there's Telepathy, there's Slack, there's mailing lists, Twitter obviously, User Groups, GitHub, that kind of thing. It's really important. I think a lot of us have gone through and looked at talks and videos after a conference, maybe we weren't able to make it. Those are super valuable to hear what the state of the union is on certain things. I like seeing independent analysts talk about a project. I think my customers enjoy that and they want to hear it from an objective perspective not just the company branding. >> I also think people still share things on blogs, even in 2017, a real-world development experience out there as it goes. In your new, as you're moving on in your role at Google, is there a broader role that you'll be looking at in terms of this whole ecosystem of developers and operators? >> Broader role. So building a program and basically attaching myself, we always laugh and say someone has to do a shot for every time you mention Kelsey Hightower's name, but Kelsey and I are going to be sticking together for a little while and I'm going to see what works for him. I did programs like this at IBM and at Century Link for Jared and those folks. I just want to see what the state of the union is there. >> You said you've been involved with Cloud Foundry for years, can you pull one or two things that you really have enjoyed about this community and how it has grown that people might not know if they aren't a part of it? >> Yeah, I think if you were here two years ago, it very much looked like the Pivotal show. There was a very close, Foundation had just been formed so there was a blurry line between where Foundation picked up and where Pivotal stopped. Those other companies that helped found the Foundation and the projects and were contributing upstream kind of felt like, oh well, okay, we're all in this together. But there was definitely a little how do we do this thing. This year's show, even from last year's show has grown significantly. The big differences are we've got people from all over the globe contributing to the project where I feel like we had a few places here and there early on. I love meeting the people and hearing their stories. >> Ben, with your analyst hat on, what do you going to be looking at the next few days? >> As I said, it's the first time I've actually been here but I have been following it since day one. I think I agree with Kim, I said a couple years before the Foundation was born that it was time for the project to grow up and move out from VMware as it was then. That's happened and it's actually quite neat to be here and to see that it isn't all Pivotal centric, that the fact that Microsoft is now a big part of the Foundation. It does feel like a mature and a vibrant ecosystem. It feels like things are in good form. >> Ben, slightly different question for you, you also wear a hat of working with a number of startups as an advisor. What do you see in the marketplace today? What are some of the big opportunities and big challenges for startups? >> I think helping with the complexity. At the end of the day, the world is going to be increasingly heterogeneous, whether that's multi-cloud or hybrid cloud or whatever name you want to put on that. So helping tools that help people wrap their arms around this increased complexion. There's a real opportunity there, things are getting busier, more and more complex. Removing some of that noise is a good opportunity. >> Well, if you don't like the complexity, you can always just live on Google's platforms and the things that they enable, right Kim? >> I think we are up to 60 something products now and more coming, so it's a lot. >> Alright, Kim want to give you and Ben final word, takeaways from the show. Maybe Kim, some of the community aspects. >> We're on day one really. Yesterday was kind of day one with the different workshops and Hackathons and things like that. I'm really looking forward to more talks and attracts today and tomorrow we have diversity luncheon and we'll see how the keynotes go in the morning but I'm meeting so many great customers and so I'm looking forward to meeting more tomorrow morning. >> Ben, you go to so many shows, what differentiates this one? >> Yeah I do and for me, I'm not an open source fanatic, by any stretch of the imagination, I equally go to propriety vendors and product shows as well as these ones. But what I will say is that I've been impressed with the coming together of the community and the supportive environment among the organizers and the attendees, so that's really refreshing to see. >> Ben, Kim, thank you so much for joining us. For John and myself, thanks for watching, we'll be back with lots more programming, thanks for watching the CUBE.