[Narrator] Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live teach coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Stu, myself, and John Fur will be here all week. Eric Herzog is here, long time Cube alumn friend, great to see you again. He's the CMO of IBM storage division. he's joined by James Amies who's the head of networks at Advanced, the service provider guys. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Great thanks for having us. Love being on theCUBE. >> So we love having you. So James let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about Advanced, do you want to dig into some of the networking trends? We're hearing a lot about it here at Cisco Live. >> Yeah thanks, Advanced are a manage service provider, software company based in the UK, one of the largest software companies in the UK, providing entrance solutions for lots of different market verticals, including healthcare, local government, regional government, national infrastructure projects we get involved with, as well charity sector, legal sector, a lot of education work that we do. And it's just real diverse portfolio products that we offer. And with the manage services piece, we also offer complete IT outsourcing. So this is desktop support, telephony support, printer support, all the way back into integration with public cloud platforms and private cloud platforms. The majority of which is our own. >> So Eric, Advanced are both a customer and a partner. >> Right >> Right and so you love Versastack, These guys are I presume are Versastack customers as well? >> Yes Versastack customer in the Versastack as you know integrates Cisco UCS Cisco networking infrastructure, IBM storage of all types, entry products up into the fastest off flash rays with our software spectrum virtualizer, spectrum accelerate family, and James' company is using Versastacks as part of their infrastructure. Which they then offer as a service to end users as James just described. >> So let's talk about some of the big trends that guys are seeing and how you're both responding to customers, and you're responding to your customers. So we're seeing here today, a lot about multi-cloud. We've been hearing that for a while. The network is flattening, you're a network expert, love to get your thoughts on that. Security obviously is a huge topic. End to end management, another big topic, something that IBM is focused on. So James what are the big mega trends that you're seeing that are driving your business decisions and your customers' activities. >> So I think one of the big changes we're seeing is a change from large enterprise scale deployments of a particular type of technology and customers are now choosing because they're informed, the best fit for a particular application or a particular service, and that may be coming to a service provider like ourselves, or for our service product to them, or they're looking for us to run an infrastructure service for them, or integrate with a public cloud offering. So the competition of the public cloud for service providers is key. And I think people were looking around a few years ago, thinking how do we compete to this. Well with the partnerships that we have with IBM and Cisco, it gives us a very compelling, competitive offering where we can turn around and say, well we can give you a like for like, but we can give you a slightly better service, because we can give you guaranteed availability. We can give you guaranteed price points, and we this is all backed with key vendor certified designs, so we're not talking about going out and developing a solution that takes as maybe 18 months, to take to market, this is understanding a requirement for a quick Q and A with a customer, align that to a reference architecture, that we can literally just pick up off the shelf, deploy into our data centers using the standard building blocks that we use across the business. So Nexus, nine K seven K's, or our standard` bread and butter inside the data center environment, as Eric pointed out, Cisco UCS is our key intel compute platform that we use. And the storewise IBM product has been a real true success story for us. So we started off being a mixed vendor house, where we would align storage requirement based with what we could find in the market that was a good fit. But the storewise products just basically just allowed us to standardize, and the speed of deployment is one of the key things. So we started out with a very lengthy lead time to serve as ready. Which is when we start charging for revenue. And if we want a 90 day build, well we've got a lot of professional service time, a lot of engineering time getting that ready to go and take to the customer, and then we turn it on, and then we can start seeing revenue from that platform. With Versastack, it's enabled us to accelerate how quickly we can turn that on. And we've seen that drop to literally days through standardization, elements of automation as well. Many of our environments are bespoke because we have such a wide range of different types of customers with different needs. But it allows us to take those standard building blocks, algin them to their needs, and deliver that service. >> James we found the MSP's are often in the middle of those discussions that customers are having on multi-cloud, so you talked a lot about the services you build. Are they also coming to you? Do you tie into the public cloud services? >> Yes. >> Maybe you can help expand a little bit on how that works. Five years ago it was, the public clouds were all going to kill the manage service providers, and what we see is customers can't sort out half of what's going on. They've got to be able to turn to partners like you to be able to figure this out. >> Yeah that's a fantastic question. Because I think three years ago, we'd be talking to our customers, and they were "I am going to this public cloud" or " I am going to build this infrastructure." Whereas now they're making more informed select decisions based on (mumbles) The drive to the hosted office and voice platforms, often by microsoft, is a big drive in many of our ITO customers are going in that direction. But it's how we integrate that with their legacy applications. Some of the ERP solutions that some of our customers use have had millions of pounds of investment into them. And that's not something that I can just turn off and walk away from overnight. So it's how we're integrating that, and we're doing that at the network level, so it's how we're pairing with different service providers, bringing that and integrating that, and offering it to them as a solution. And what we try to position ourselves is really, the same experience regardless of where we're placing IT consumption workload. It doesn't matter if it's inside our data centers, whether we're talking on one of the public cloud platforms, or even on premise, we have quite a few customers that still have significant presence on premise. Because that's right for their business, depending on what they're doing. Especially with some of the research scientists. >> So you've got to deliver flexibility in your architecture. I know you talk a lot about software define, you guys made a big move to software define a couple years ago actually. Maybe discuss how that fits into how you're servicing Advanced and other clients. >> Sure so IBM storage has embraced multi-cloud for several years now. So our solutions, well of course they work with IBM cloud, and IBM cloud private work with Amazon. They work with Azure, Google Cloud. And in fact, some of our products for example, the Versastack not only is Advanced using it, but we've got probably 40 or 50 public small medium sized cloud providers, that are public references for the Versastack, and spectrum protect, which is our back-up product, number one in the enterprise back-up space, spectrum protect has got at least 300 cloud providers, medium, small, and big who offer the engine underneath, for their backup as a service, is spectrum protect. So we make sure that whether it be our transparent cloud tiering, our cyber resiliency technology, what we do in back up archive. Object storage works with essentially, all cloud providers, that way someone like James, a CSP, MSP, can leverage our products, and we like I said, we got tons of public references around Versastack for that. But so can an enterprise, and in fact I saw a survey recently, and it was done in Europe, and in North American, that when you look at a roughly, the two billion US size revenue and up, the average company of that sizing up, will use five different public cloud providers at one time, whether that be due to legal reasons, whether that procurement, the web is really the internet. And the cloud is really just, it's been around for 20 some years. So in bigger accounts, guess who is now involved? Procurement, well we love that you did that deal with IBM cloud, but you are going to get a competitive quote now from Amazon and Microsoft right. So that's driven it, legal's driven it, certain countries right the data needs to stay in that country, even if you're cloudafying it, so to speak. So If the cloud provider doesn't have a data center there, guess what, another GI use different, and then you of course still have some large entities that still allow regional buying patterns, so they'll have three or four different cloud providers, that are quote, certified by corporate, and then you can use whichever one you want. So we make sure that we can take advantage of that wave. At IBM we ride the wave. We don't fight the wave. >> So you've got in that situation, you've got these multi clouds, you've got different API's. You've got different frameworks. How do you abstract all that complexity, you got Cisco coming at it from a networking standpoint, IBM now with red hat is good. They'd be a big player in that, that world VM ware. What do you guys do James, in terms of simplifying all that multi cloud complexity for people? >> I think with some of it, is actually demystifying and it's engaging with our partners to understand what the proposition is, and how we can develop that and align that to, not only in your own business, but more importantly to the needs of our customers. We've got some really really talented technicians work within Advanced. We've got a number of different forums that allow them to feedback their ideas. And we've got the alignments between those partners, and some of those communities, so that we can have an open discussion, and drive some of that thinking forward. But ultimately it's engaging with the customers. So the customers' feedback is key on how we shape and deliver, not only the service to them, but also to the service to other customers. We have a number of customers that are very similar, but they may work in different spaces. Some are even competitive, so we have to tread that line very carefully and safely. But it's a good one to one relationship between the client service managers, the technicians we have inside the business, having that complete 360 communication is key. And that's really the bottom too, is communication. >> James I'd like you to dig into security a little bit. I think we surpassed a couple years ago. I'm not going to go to the cloud because it's not secured to, oh I understand, it's time for me to at least re-evaluate my security, and most likely manage service providers, public clouds are probably more secure than what I had in my data center. But if I've got multiple environments, there's a lot of complexity there, so how do you traverse that, make sure that you've got a comprehensive security practice, not sure all these point solutions, all over the place? >> Yeah so that comes down to visibility. So it's visibility, understanding where all the control points are, within a given infrastructure. And how the landscape looks, so we're working quite closely with a number actually of key Cisco and IBM partners, as well as IBM and Cisco themselves directly. To have a comprehensive offering that allows us to position to our customers, you used to once upon a time. You had one gate. So all we needed is good security on your internet fighting firewall. But now you may have a 10, 20, 30 of those, we need to have consistent policies across those. We need to understand how they're performing, but also potentially if there's any attack vector on one of them, how somebody's trying to look into compromise that. So it's centralized intelligence, and that's where we're starting to look at AI operations to gather all our information. Long gone are the days where you have 20 people sitting in a room just reading screens. Those 20 people now need to see reams and reams of information instantly. Something needs to be caught up to them, so they can make their decision quickly, and access upon it. And that's really where we're positioning ourselves in the market to differentiate. I'm working with few partners to be able to do that. >> Eric talk about your announcement cadence. IBM has big show, Think, coming up in a couple weeks, Cube's going to be there of course. What can we expect from you guys? >> So we're actually going to announce on the fifth before Think. We want to drive end users and our business partners to the storage campus, which probably one of the largest campuses at IBM Think. We'll have over 15 pedestals of demo. And actually multiple demos because we have such a broad portfolio from the all flash arrays to our Versastack offering, to a whole set of modern day protection, management and control for storage. Which manage is going to control storage that's not ours right, our competitor's storage as well. And of course our software Defined storage. So we're going to do a big announcement. The focus of that will be around our storage solutions. These are solutions, blueprints, references, architectures, Jame you mentioned that use our software, and our storage systems that allow reseller or end user to configure systems easily. Think of it as the ultimate recipe for the german chocolate cake, but it's the perfect recipe. It's tried it's true it's tested, it's been on the food channel 27 times and everybody loves it. That's what we do with our solutions blueprints. We'll all have some announcements around modern data protection and obviously a big focus of IBM storage is been in the AI space. So both storage as an AI platform for AI applications workloads, but also the incorporation of AI technology into our own storage systems and software. So we'll be having announcements around that on February fifth, going into Think, which will be the week after in San Francisco. >> Great so I'm hearing trusted, data protection plays into that. Ai intelligence, machine intelligence and I'm also hearing heterogeneity, multiple platforms whether it's your storage you said, or competitor's storage. Now does that also include the cloud sphere? Without announcing anything, but you guys have -- >> Yeah. >> I've seen your pictures ads Azure. It's AWS, I mean that continues yes? >> Absolutely so whether it be what we do from back up in archive right. Let's take the easy one, so we support not only the protocol of IBM cloud object storage, which we acquired, and allows you to have object storage either on premise or in a cloud instantiation. But we also support the S3 protocol, so for example our spectrum scale software, giant scale out in fact, the two fastest super computers in the world, use spectrum scale. Over 450 petabytes running on spectrum scale. And they can tier to an object store that supports S3. Or it can tier to IBM cloud and object storage. So we have IBM storage customer that's great. If you're using the S3 protocol, you can tier to that at well. So that's just one example. Same thing we do for cyber resiliency, so for a cyber resiliency perspective, we can do things with any cloud vendor of an air gap right. And so you can do that, A with tape, but you can also do that with the cloud. So if your cloud is your backup archive replication repository, then you can always roll back to a known good copy. You don't have to pay the ransom right. Or when you clean up the malware, you can roll back to a known good copy, and we provide that across all of the platforms in a number of different ways, our protect family, our new product safe guard copy for the main frame that we announced it on October. So all that allows us to be multi-cloud resiliency, as well as how do we connect to multi-cloud, back up archive automated tiering to all kinds of clouds, whether it be IBM cloud, and of course I'm a share holder, so I love that. But at the same time we're realistic. Lots of people us Amazon, Google, Azure, and like I said there's thousands of mid to small cloud providers all over the world. And we support them too. We engage with everyone. >> What about SAS, one of the questions we've been trying to squint through, and understand is, because when you talk about five cloud providers, there's obviously infrastructures of service, and then there's service providers like Advanced, and then there's like a Gazillion SAS companies. >> Right. >> Lot of data in there. >> And a lot of Data in there. How should we think about protecting that data, securing that data? Is that up to the SAS vendor, and thou shalt not touch or should that be part of the scope of a storage company? >> Well so what we do is we engage with the SAS vendor, so we have a number of different SAS companies in fact, one was on theCUBE two years ago with us. They were a start up in the cybersecurity space, and all of it's delivered over SAS. What they do is in that case, they use our flash system product line, they get the performance they need to deliver SAS. They want no bottle necks. Because obviously you have to go over the network when you're doing SAS. And then also what they do is data encryption at rest. So when the data is brought it because we have on our flash arrays, the capability in most of our product line, especially the flash systems, to have no performance suit on encrypt or decrypt because it's hardware embedded, they're able to have the data at rest encrypted for all their customers that gives them a level of security when it's at rest on their site. At the same time we give them the right performance they need to have softwares and service. So we probably have 300,400 different SAS companies who are the actual software vendor and their deployment model is softwares and service, by the way we do that as well. As I mentioned over 300 cloud providers today have a backup as a service and the engine needs a spectrum protect or spectrum protect plus, but they may call it something else. In fact we just had a public reference out from Silver String, which is out in the UK. And all they do is Cyber resiliency backup and archive, that's their service. They have their own product, but then spectrum protect, and spectrum protect plus is the engine underneath their product. So that's an example, in this case, of back up as a service, which I would argue is not infrastructure. But more of an application. But then true what you call real application providers like cybersecurity vendors. We have a vendor who in fact, does something for all of the universities and colleges in the United States. They have about 8,000 of them, including the junior colleges. And they run all of their bookstores, so when you place an order all their AR and PR, everything they do is from this SAS vendor. They're in the northeast and they've got like I said, about 8,000 colleges and universities in the US and Canada. And they offer this, if you will, bookstore as a SAS service. And the students use it, the university uses it. And of course the bookstores are designed to at least make a little money for the University. And they all use that. So that's another example, and they use our flash systems as well. And then they back up that data internally with spectrum protect because they obviously it's the financial data as well as the inventory of all of these bookstores all over the United States at the colligate level. >> Right. >> Now James we got to wrap, but just to give you the final word, UK specialist right, so Brexit really doesn't affect you. Is that a fair statement or? >> It will do yes. >> How so? >> I think it's too early to tell. And no one really knows. I think that's what all the debates are about, is trying to understand that. And for us, I think we're just watching and observing. >> And staying focused on your customers obviously >> Yeah. >> So no predictions as to what's going to happen. When I was in the UK-- >> Not from me. a few weeks ago I heard both sides. You know oh it's definitely going to happen, oh it might not happen. But okay, again give you the last word. What's your focus over the next 12, 18 months? >> Our focus is really about visibility so Dave touched on that when we were talking about the security. For customers understanding where their data is, where their exposure points are. That's our key focus. And Versastack and the IBM storewise products underpin all of those offerings that we have. And that will continue to be so moving forward. >> Guys great to see you. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. And our pleasure hosting you. >> Great thank you really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome, alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back. Dave Velante with Stu Minamin from Cisco live in Barcelona. (electronic music)

>> Live from San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering DataWorks Summit 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back everyone, you are watching day two of theCUBE's live coverage of DataWorks here in San Jose, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm coming at you with my cohost Jame Kobielus. We're joined by Partha Seetala, he is the Chief Technology Officer at Robin Systems, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. >> You're a first timer, so we promise we don't bite. >> Actually I'm not, I was on theCUBE- >> Oh! >> At DockerCon in 2016. >> Oh well excellent, okay, so now you're a veteran, right. >> Yes, ma'am. >> So Robin Systems, as before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about it, it's about four years old, based here in San Jose, venture backed company. Tell us a little bit more about the company and what you do. >> Absolutely. First of all, thanks for hosting me here. Like you said, Robin is a Silicon Valley based company. Our focus is in allowing applications, such as big data, databases, no sequel and AI ML, to run within the Kubernetes platform. What we have built is a product that converges storage, complex storage, networking, application workflow management, along with Kubernetes to create a one click experience where users can get managed services kind of feel when they're deploying these applications. They can also do one click life cycle management on these apps. Our thesis has initially been to, instead of looking at this problem from an infrastructure up into application, to actually look at it from the applications down and then say, "Let the applications drive the underlying infrastructure to meet the user's requirements." >> Is that your differentiating factor, would you say? >> Yeah, I think it is because most of the folks out there today are looking at is as if it's a competent based play, it's like they want to bring storage to Kubernetes or networking to Kubernetes but the challenges are not really around storage and networking. If you talk to the operations folk they say that, "You know what? Those are underlying problems but my challenge is more along the lines of, okay, my CIO says the initiative is to make my applications mobile. They want go across to different Clouds. That's my challenge." The line of business user says, "I want to get a managed source experience." Yes, storage is the thing that you want to manage underneath, but I want to go and click and create my, let's say, an Oracle database or distributions log. >> In terms of the developer experience here, from the application down, give us a sense for how Robin Systems tooling your product enables that degree of specification of the application logic that will then get containerized within? >> Absolutely, like I said, we want applications to drive the infrastructure. What it means is that we, Robin is a software platform. We later ourselves on top of the machines that we sit on whether it is bare metal machines on premises, our VMs, or even an Azure, Google Cloud as well as AWs. Then we make the underlying compute, storage, network resources almost invisible. We treat it as a pool of resources. Now once you have this pool of resources, they can be attached to the applications that are being deployed as can inside containers. I mean, it's a software place, install on machines. Once it's installed, the experience now moves away from infrastructure into applications. You log in, you can see a portal, you have a lot of applications in that portal. We ship support for about 25 applications of some such. >> So these are templates? >> Yes. >> That the developer can then customize to their specific requirements? Or no? >> Absolutely, we ship reference templates for pretty much a wide variety of the most popular big data, no sequel, database, AI ML applications today. But again, as I said, it's a reference implementation. Typically customers take the reference recommendation and they enhance it or they use that to onboard their custom apps, for example, or the apps that we don't ship out of the box. So it's a very open, extensible platform but the goal being that whatever the application might be, in fact we keep saying that, if it runs somewhere else, it's runs on Robin, right? So the idea here is that you can bring anything, and we just, the flip of switch, you can make it a one click deploy, one click manage, one click mobile across Clouds. >> You keep mentioning this one click and this idea of it being so easy, so convenient, so seamless, is that what you say is the biggest concern of your customers? Is this ease and speed? Or what are some other things that are on their minds that you want to deliver? >> Right, so one click of course is a user experience part but what is the real challenge? The real challenges, there are a wide variety of tools being used by enterprises today. Even the data analytic pipeline, there's a lot across the data store, processor pipeline. Users don't want to deal with setting it up and keeping it up and running. They don't want that, they want to get the job done, right? Now when you only get the job done, you really want to hide the underlying details of those platforms and the best way to convey that, the best way to give that experience is to make it a single click experience from the UI. So I keep calling it all one click because that is the experience that you get to hide the underlying complexity for these apps. >> Does your environment actually compile executable code based on that one click experience? Or where does the compilation and containerization actually happen in your distributed architecture? >> Alright, so, I think the simplest- >> You're a prem based offering, right? You're not in the Cloud yourself? >> No, we are. We work on all the three big public clouds. >> Oh, okay. >> Whether it is Azure, AWS or Google. >> So your entire application is containerized itself for deployment into these Clouds? >> Yes, it is. >> Okay. >> So the idea here is let's simplify it significantly, right? You have Kubernetes today, it can run anywhere, on premises, in the public Cloud and so on. Kubernetes is a great platform for orchestrating containers but it is largely inaccessible to a certain class of data centric applications. >> Yeah. >> We make that possible. But our take is, just onboarding those applications on Kubernetes does not solve your CXO or you line of business user's problems. You ought to make the management, from an application point of view, not from a container management point of view, from an application point of view, a lot easier and that is where we kind of create this experience that I'm talking about, one click experience. >> Give us a sense for how, we're here at DataWorks and it's the Hortonworks show. Discuss with us your partnership with Hortonworks and you know, we've heard the announcement of HDP 3.0 and containerization support, just give us a rough sense for how you align or partner with Hortonworks in this area. >> Absolutely. It's kind of interesting because Hortonworks is a data management platform, if you think about it from that point of view and when we engaged with them first- So some of our customers have been using the product, Hortonworks, on top of Robin, so orchestrating Hortonworks, making it a lot easier to use. >> Right. >> One of the requirements was, "Are you certified with Hortonworks?" And the challenge that Hortonworks also had is they had never certified a container based deployment of Hortonworks before. They actually were very skeptical, you know, "You guys are saying all these things. Can you actually containerize and run Hortonworks?" So we worked with Hortonworks and we are, I mean if you go to the Hortonworks website, you'll see that we are the first in the entire industry who have been certified as a container based play that can actually deploy and manage Hortonworks. They have certified us by running a wide variety of tests, which they call the Q80 Test Suite, and when we got certified the only other players in the market that got that stamp of approval was Microsoft in Azure and EMC with Isilon. >> So you're in good company? >> I think we are in great company. >> You're certified to work with HTP 3.0 or the prior version or both? >> When we got certified we were still in the 2.X version of Hortonworks, HTP 3.0 is a more relatively newer version. But our plan is that we want to continue working with Hortonworks to get certified as they release the program and also help them because HTP 3.0 also has some container based orchestration and deployment so you want to help them provide the underlying infrastructure so that it becomes easier for beyond to spin up more containers. >> The higher level security and governance and all these things you're describing, they have to be over the Kubernetes layer. Hortonworks supports it in their data plane services portfolio. Does Robin Systems solutions portfolio tap in to any of that, or do you provide your own layer of sort of security and metadata management so forth? >> Yeah, so we don't want- >> In context of what you offer? >> Right, so we don't want to take away the security model that the application itself provides because might have step it up so that they are doing governance, it's not just logging in and auto control and things like this. Some governance is built into. We don't want to change that. We want to keep the same experience and the same workflow hat customers have so we just integrate with whatever security that the application has. We, of course, provide security in terms of isolating these different apps that are running on the Robin platform where the security or the access into the application itself is left to the apps themselves. When I say apps, I'm talking about Hortonworks. >> Yeah, sure. >> Or any other databases. >> Moving forward, as you think about ways you're going to augment and enhance and alter the Robin platform, what are some of the biggest trends that are driving your decision making around that in the sense of, as we know that companies are living with this deluge of data, how are you helping them manage it better? >> Sure. I think there are a few trends that we are closely watching. One is around Cloud mobility. CIOs want their applications along with their data to be available where their end users are. It's almost like follow the sun model, where you might have generated the data in one Cloud and at a different time, different time zone, you'll basically want to keep the app as well as data, moving. So we are following that very closely. How we can enable the mobility of data and apps a lot easier in that world. The other one is around the general AI ML workflow. One of the challenges there, of course, you have great apps like TensorFlow or Theano or Caffe, these are very good AI ML toolkits but one of the challenges that people face, is they are buying this very expensive, let's say NVIDIA DGX Box, this box costs about $150,000 each, how do you keep these boxes busy so that you're getting a good return on investment? It will require you to better manage the resources offered with these boxes. We are also monitoring that space and we're seeing that how can we take the Robin platform and how do you enable the better utilization of GPUs or the sharing of GPUs for running your AI ML kind of workload. >> Great. >> Those are, I think, two key trends that we are closely watching. >> We'll be discussing those at the next DataWorks Summit, I'm sure, at some other time in the future. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Partha. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, my pleasure. Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for James Kobielus, We will have more from DataWorks coming up in just a little bit. (techno beat music)

>> Hey, welcome back here everybody. It's Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit. It's in San Francisco at Pier 27. It's a new facility, we've never been here. It's pretty unique. It's right between the Bay bridge and Pier 39. Beautiful day out on the water and it's all about DevOps here at PagerDuty. And I'm going to tease Jen later if people even know what a pager is at this town. So we are excited to have Nicole Forsgren She's a founder at CEO and chief scientist of DevOps research and assessment. I had to read it, it's a big mouthful but it goes buy DORA for sure. Nicole, welcome to see you. Good to see you. >> Thanks so much. It's good to be here. >> Alright so you are the DevOps expert. You got a really interesting past. Did some research on the LinkedIn profile industry. Academe industry, Academe and now you're out helping people. >> Yes, bounce around a bit. It's all about the pivot right? >> Absolutely. >> Out here doing DevOps. >> Absolutely, absolutely so you do an annual report on the state of DevOps. So where are we? DevOps has been being talked about for a long, long time. How much is reality? How far are we on this journey? What are you seeing? >> Right so it's really interesting you point that out right, because for years everyone's been like DevOps. What is it? Does it matter? And so DORA and by the way, DORA is myself. Jess Humble, Jame Kim. We just brought on Sue Chow. But the core founders, we've partnered up with the team at Puppet, and for the last several years. We've put out the state of DevOps report. To kind of help define at least from a research standpoint and from our standpoint. What it is? What are the key contributors to really drive value and does it drive value? It's for years and I'll talk about this later this afternoon on my closing keynote. For years and when I say years, I mean decades of academic rigorous, pure review research. Technology didn't matter. Like it didn't matter at all. It just never delivered value to organizations. But then we started seeing patterns and really interesting patterns and companies saying no. We're seeing results, we're delivering value. We're delivering outcomes. Core essential outcomes for end users and customers in the business. And so we got together and say okay, let's really take a look at this in a really important way. >> Right, now how far we've come right. 'Cause now most companies are technology companies. They just happen to warp their technology around a particular product or a particular service. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And now most leading the technology in terms of a vehicle to drive value and to drive transformation. So DevOps is also very wrapped up in this whole concept of digital transformation. That's all anybody wants to talk about. It's in every earnings call, so how closely are the two related and how do you see, 'cause DevOps got a little bit more history in terms of the buzz of transformation. Are people applying DevOps concept beyond strictly development and operations? >> So, there's a lot to unpack there. So like you said, it's really, really involved. Although it has some kind of a buzz word, right? Some people love it, some people embrace it, some people never want to hear it. So it's really all about what's important to the company in delivering value. But it's core is really about taking important methodologies and practices to deliver value and it's about using technology and automation, in conjunction with core values and practices and processes that we've adopted from the lane and agile movements. >> Jeff: Right, right. And having a really good healthy culture that's about more than just DevOps. Right like you said. DevOps, QA, Info Sec. The business marrying all of that, pulling all of it together, working in conjunction in the right kind of ways to deliver value. To deliver key outcomes to help us pivot, move fast, learn, have fast feedback. So that we can do what we need to do for the company, for the business, because like you said, it's so many companies right now, really are technology organizations that happened to be wrapped around in some particular industry. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Capital One is a financial institution. Really they are a technology organization that happens to do finance and deliver finance really, really well for their customers. So many other companies are doing retail but it's driven by technology. Right or they do insurance and it's driven by technology or they're a healthcare organizations that really can't do what they do unless they have technology to really drive it. >> Right, right. The financials institutions are interesting because if you talk to like my kids. If they've ever been inside of an actual bank and then and how often do they go to the atm? So not even atm, so the way that people more and more interact with the company is through digital mediums. >> Right. >> But I'm curious to get you're input on the big question that we always ask people is how do I get started. Right, what is the easy paths to success? How do I get some early success so I can build on that success? What's interesting is you have a very unique approach to solve that question as oppose to what I think or based on what I'm really good at, I think we should start here. >> Yes, we really do-- >> Do you guys have different-- >> And this is really why DORA exist and this is what we do. So myself Jess Humble, Jean Kim. This explains the genesis of DORA. So we have a couple different things so the mission of DORA is to help companies get better through science and proven methods. Ans so we have a couple of different things we do. The first is that state of DevOps report that we put together at Puppet. And those are all open sourced and so if you want some ideas of what really statistically drives improvement, go find those. They're open source, they're totally free. We've tried so many resources because we don't want companies to fail. We've all lived through that awful dot com mess. We've seen companies fail. Go find those resources. Now your question though, where should I start? If I'm a company, what should I do? We've all go into conferences myself, Jean, Jess and we've had companies come up and say well where should I start? And the answer is always, it depends. The answer is always it depends because I can't tell you absent context, absent data, absent information. If I don't know about someone's detail information. I can't tell you and so what we also have is we offer an assessment where I can collect data from the doers. Right there's this fantastic report from Forester. It's called the dangerous disconnect and that's such a great title because if you ask executives. They drastically over estimate technology and DevOps maturity in organizations. So you shouldn't be, I mean I love-- >> Over estimate. >> Of course they do. I mean because we need to be really, really optimistic about where our organizations are going. >> Right, right. >> Those are our roles as executives. And so that's appropriate but in certain conditions that's appropriate. But where it's not appropriate is when you're setting detail strategy for your organizations. And so what we do is we offer an assessment where using these strong scientifically based measure that we have prepared and refined over now, four years of rigorous academic research. We can go with a 15 minute survey, collect data from everyone in organization that like I said are the doers. DevOps, TestOps, QA, InfoSec including vendors, contractors, consultants to people that are in the weeds every single day. I can measure you. I can benchmark you against the industry. I've got over 23,000 data points around the world. All industries, all company sizes. And then, where should they start? I can algorithmically tell you what your bottle neck is, what your constraint is. Where you should start to accelerate your performance. >> Based on my data? >> Based on your data. >> Based on your algorithms and based on your population data from this huge data set >> Yes, and with the companies that we're working with right now, they're seeing amazing results. They're calling it out-sized results. So a really great example we have was with Capital One. They did the assessment across over a dozen lines of business. And by focusing on two core capabilities out of over 20. We focus them on the right two capabilities. They saw a 20X improvement in deploy frequency in only two months with zero increase in internet. >> 20% improvement-- >> 20X >> 20X? >> 20X >> In two months. >> 20 times. >> Wow. >> So it's that ability to measure consistently see visibility throughout that software engineering life cycle. So we also had feedback from customer like Verizon. That that visibility, that consistency of measurement was also a really huge value add. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Measurements hard. >> Well it's interesting, I saw some of your videos and some of your prior key notes and stuff and talking about, everyone says data is in the world. But the data without context, the data without the right algorithms, and you talk about a bunch data dirty things and data problems. Data itself is not the new oil. So I wanted to get to your report 'cause that's kind of your bench mark. That's your big stake in the ground. So how are we've been doing it? What do you do different than other things that are out there? Besides the fact that it's open source which I'll ask you about as a follow up. What makes your research special? >> So why is our report different from any other reports out there? I think there's a couple things. The piece that makes me the proudest is that, the state of DevOps report is so different because it's academically rigorous. It's a true research report and I love that the team has been so loving and so patient with me. Because when I started working with the rest of the group four years ago, I stepped in and I said. This is what I want to do. These are my ideas. I was still a professor at the time, so as you mentioned, I was industry and then academia and I'm now in industry again. But I stepped in and I said, I think there's this really, really fantastic opportunity to take a look of what's going on but we have to measure this in really rigorous ways. And by doing that, it allows us to look at predictive relationships, which is interesting because it let's us say. If we focus on core capabilities, they will predict organization's ability to develop and deliver quality software with speed and stability. Which will in turn drive improvements in organizational performance. Profitability, productivity, market share. Effectiveness, efficiency delivering mission and organizational goals. Notice I'm saying predict and drive. I'm not saying correlate, which is really interesting. And so in these years of research, we've been able to identify core capabilities that drive improvement. So it allows organizations to understand what's important to invest in. It's not just this worked for my team. This worked for that team. Hey, I think this is what I'm going to try because as someone fond of joking. Anecdote is nice but the plural of anecdote isn't anecdata. (laughing) Right, and that was my frustration when I was in tech and before and when I was in consulting. If you want to try a thing and you want to apply it but it's really hard if I only have one or two or three or five maybe even 10 stories. We need so much data to really understand what will likely work for teams and for industries as a whole. And like I said, God bless the team, because I came in and I was really rigorous and I would say that doesn't work, we can't measure that. That doesn't work here and sometimes I'd come back and I'd say that doesn't hold. The stats don't hold and they say, "But it has to." "I know it worked here and I know it worked here." And I'm like, but it's not, we have no evidence to support that. The stats don't hold. This doesn't work. We can't say that and we're like hey, we'll have to try it again next year. Not try it again next year but we have to find a different way to measure it. We have to have a different hypothesis to test. But then we also find really amazing things like I said a couple times, it predicts a team's ability to develop and deliver code with speed and stability. Speed and stability. We found four years ago speed and stability go together. For years, we didn't know that was the case or we thought that in order to get stability, you had to slow down. It doesn't show up anywhere in the data. No where, high performers get both. >> So do the executives, do they realize the leader that having better internal thought for development has an impact on their business relative to saving a few bucks on parts or spending a few more bucks on marketing? As a real driver of value as oppose to it's just always internal apps that we have to build for whatever reason. >> They're starting to get there. And so what we're starting to do is we're really focusing heavily on delivering code with speed and stability. And then, we're saying okay, imagine if you could deliver with speed and stability here. What could you do with delivering features? How does that help you get to market faster? How does that help you beat your competitors? How does it allow you to respond to complaints and regulatory changes? And so that's really what helps us drive and then another way that we are a little different from other reports that are out there. Other industry reports are also very helpful but they are very different. So I don't say things like 27% of the industry is using configuration management. Other report say that and that is interesting. I don't report on percentage of the industry that's doing something. >> Right, right. >> But those other reports can not say what is predictive of improvement. So we are the prediction. Occasionally, I'll report correlations if I don't have the statistics to go as strong as-- >> And what moves it from correlation to prediction is the strength of the algorithms? >> No, it's the strength of the research design. >> The strength of the research design upfront? >> Yep, up front. >> Before you feed it in. >> Upfront and-- >> 'Cause really, you're knocking them at research. >> Yes. >> Rigor. >> Yep. >> That's the underpinning of the whole thing. >> And much more data has been published in academic periodicals, so we are still actively doing research. >> And I would imagine that the annual report is really an ongoing, longitudinal study across a whole lot of the same companies over and over and over, year in, year out. So you get them-- >> So it's open every year. >> As well. >> Yep. >> Awesome, alright Nicole. Well that is fascinating and everyone should go to DORA and get the free research. And then if they want to bring you guys in, and you offer custom services to help the particular company execute and do better. >> Yes, absolutely. So you can go to DevOps-research.com to find all of our research and anything else you want to find out about engaging with us or anything like that. >> Nicole Forsgren. She's DORA the explorer. She'll help you out with your DevOps. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from PagerDuty Summit. Thanks for watching. (uptempo techno music)