>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo. Live Europe, Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Everybody watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Valentin here with my co host Student events. Do Myself and John for Be here all week. Eric Hurt, Saugus Here Long time Cuba Long friend. Great to see you again. He's the CMO of IBM IBM Storage division. He's joined by James Amy's, who's the head of networks at advance. The service provider Guys, Welcome to the Cube. Good to see again. >> Great. Thanks for having us loved being on the cute. >> So we love having you So, James, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about advanced to want to dig into some of the networking trends. We're hearing a lot about it here. It's just go live. >> Yeah, I think so. Advanced are a manage service provider software software company based in the UK, one of the largest software companies in the UK, providing interim solutions for lots of different Marchal market verticals, including healthcare, local government, regional government, national infrastructure projects we've got involved with as well as charity sector legal sector. A lot of education work we do is real diverse portfolio of products we offer on with the manage services piece. We also offer complete 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 in. >> So so Eric advanced are both a customer and a partner, right? Right, right. And so you love you. Love versus Stack. These guys are presumed versus stack customers. Well >> stacked customer in the Versace tack, as you know, Integrate. Cisco, UCS, Cisco Networking Infrastructure, IBM Storage of all types entry products up into the fastest all flash raise with our software spectrum virtualized spectrum, Accelerate Family and James's company is using versus tax is part of their infrastructure, which they then offer, as you know, to a service toe and uses. James just described. >> So let's talk about some of the big trends that you guys are seeing and how you're both responding to customers and you're responding to your customer. So we're seeing two hearing today. Lot about multi cloud. We've been hearing that for a while the network is flattening your network expert love to get your your thoughts on that. Security, obviously, is a huge topic. End end management, another big topic, something that IBM is focused on. So so James, what 1 of the big mega trends that you're seeing that a driving your business decisions and your customer's activity? One >> of the big changes we're seeing is a change from large scare enterprise scale deployments off a particular type of technology on customers are now choosing because they're informed the best fit for a particular application or particular service on that may be coming to a service provider like ourselves to offer our services products to them. Uh, or they're looking for us to run in infrastructure service for them or integrate with a public cloud offering. So the competition of the public cloud for service providers is key on DH. I think people were looking around a few years ago thinking, How do we compete to this well, with partnerships that we have in our Francisco? It gives us a very compelling competitive offering. But 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 could give you guaranteed availability. We give you guaranteed price point on, and this is all backed with key vendor certified designs. So we're not talking about going out on developing a solution that takes maybe eighteen months to take to market. This is understanding a requirement for a quick, you know, Q and A with a customer a line that, too a reference architecture that we can literally just pick up off the shelf, deploy into our data centers using the standard building rocks 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 our key Intel computer platform that we used on DH. The store wise IBM product has been a real true success story for us. So we started off being a a mixed then the house where we would align storage requirement paste with what we could find in the market. That was, that was a good fit. But the store was products is basically just allowed us to standardize on the speed of deployment is one of the key things. So we started out with a very lengthy lead time tio service ready, which is when we start charging for revenue on if we want a ninety day build. Well, we've got a lot of special service time, A lot of engineering time getting that ready Teo, Teo and take to the customer and then we turn it on. We can start seeing revenue from that platform with versus Stack. This enabled us to accelerate how quickly we can turn that on. And we've seen that drop, too. They're literally days through standardisation elements of automation as well. Many of our environments are bespoke because we have such a wide arrange off different types of customers with different needs, but it allows us to take those standing building blocks, align them to their needs and deliver that service. >> James James, we found the peas are often in the middle of those discussions that customers are having on multi clouds. You talked a lot about the services you build. Are they also coming to you? If if you tie into the public Cloud services or yes, maybe you can help explain a little bit on how that worked Five years ago, it was the public loud there are going to kill them and 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 two partners like you to be able to figure this out. >> Yeah, that's a fantastic question. 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. Where is now? They're They're making Mohr informed select decisions based on the drive to the hosted office and voice platforms offered by Microsoft. There's a big driving. Many of our customers are going in that direction, but it's how we integrate that with legacy applications. Some of the solutions that some of our customers use have have have had millions of pounds of investment into them, and that's not something I can just turn off the water away from overnight. So it is how we're integrating that. We're doing that at the network level, so it's how we're appearing with different service providers, bringing that in integrating that, I'm offering it to them as a solution. What we try tio, we try to try position ourselves is really it's the same experience, regardless of where we're placing it. Consumption. Workload doesn't know whether it's inside our data centers, whether we're talking one of the public cloud platforms or even on premise. So we have quite a few customers that still have significant presence on premises because that's right for their business, depending on on what they're doing, especially some of the research scientists. >> So you've got to deliver flexibility in your architecture, and you talk a lot about software to find you guys made a big move to software to find, you know, a couple years ago, actually, maybe discuss how that fits in to how you're servicing advanced another client? >> Sure. So you know, IBM Storage has embraced multi Cloud for several years. So our solutions. While, of course, they work with IBM, Cloud and IBM cloud private work with Amazon. They work with azure Google Cloud and in fact, some are products. For example, the versus stack not only is advanced using it, but we've got pry forty or fifty public, small, medium sized cloud providers that our public references for the vs Tag and Spectrum Protect you Know which is our backup product Number one in the Enterprise. Back up space Expect from detectives Got at least three hundred cloud providers. Medium, small and big. Who offered the engine underneath for their backup is a service is spectrum protect, So we make sure that weather PR transparent cloud tearing our cyber resiliency technology. What we doing? Backup 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 have tons of public records around versus Stack for that, but so can an enterprise. And in fact, I saw survey recently that it was done in Europe and in North America that when you look at a roughly two billion US size revenue and up the average company of that sizing up, we use five different public cloud riders at one time. Where that it be due to legal reasons whether that be procurement. You know, the Web is really the Internet. And, yeah, Cloud is really just It's been around for twenty some years. So in bigger accounts, guess what is now involved Procurement Well, we love that you did that deal with IBM club, 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 your cloud if eyeing it, it's so to speak. So if the clap water doesn't have a data center there, guess what? Another geographer used different. And then you, of course, still have some large entities that still allow regional buying pattern so they'll have three or four different cloud providers that air quote certified by corporate. And then you could use whichever one you want, so we make sure that we could take advantage of that. Wade and IBM. We ride the wave, We don't fight the way. >> So you've got in that situation. You these multi cloud you got different AP eyes, You get different frameworks potty, you abstract all that complexity you got, Francisco coming at it from a networking standpoint, I b m. Now with Red Hat is good. Be a big player in that that world. VM where What do you guys do? James, in terms of of simplifying all that multi cloud complexity >> for people. I think some of it is actually the mystifying on its engaging with our partners to understand what the proposition is on, how we can develop that on a line, that to mind your own business, but more importantly, to the needs of our customers. We've got some really, really talented technicians worked within within advance, and we've got a number of different forums that allow them to feed back their ideas. But we've got the alignments between those partners and and some of those communities, so that we can have an open discussion on drive. Some of that thinking forward about ultimately see engaging with customers. So the customers feedback is key on how we shape and deliver no need 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 somewhere even competitive. So we have to tread that line very safe, very carefully and safely. But it is. It's a good one to one relationship between the client service managers, technical technicians. We have inside business having that to complete three sixty communication is key, but that's that's that's really the bottom takes. Its creation >> came like youto dig into security for us a little bit. You know, I think we surpassed a couple of years ago. I'm not going to go to the cloud to it because it's not secure to Oh, I understand it's time for me to least reevaluate meant security and, most likely, you know, manage service fighters. Public clouds are probably more secure than what I had in my data center, but if I've got multiple environment, there's a lot of complexity there. So how do you traverse that? Make sure that you've got a comprehensive security practice, not just all these point solutions for security all over the place. >> Ah, so that's that comes onto visibility. So its visibility understanding where all the control points are within a given infrastructure on how the landscape looks. So we were working quite closely with a number actually of key Cisco and IBM partners, as well as IBM and Cisco themselves directly tohave a comprehensive offering that allows us to position to our customers. You used to once upon a time you had one game, right? So we need it is from good security on your Internet. Facing viable For now, you might have a ten. Twenty, thirty of those. We need tohave consistent policies across those. We need to understand how they're performing, but also potentially, if there's any attempt attack vector on one of them. How that how someone is trying to looking to compromise that so centralized intelligence on That's where we start to look at my eye operations to gather all that information. The long gone are the days where you have twenty people sharing a room just reading streams. Those twenty people now need thio. See reams and reams of information instantly. Something needs to be called up to them. They could make a decision quickly on Active planet on DH. That's really where we we're positioning ourselves in the market to differentiate. I'm working with key part, Mr >> Never talk about your announcement cadence. Good idea as a big show. Think coming up in a couple weeks cubes gonna be there. Of course. What can we expect from from you guys? >> So we're actually gonna announce on the fifth before things way, want to drive end users and our business partners to storage campus, which is one of the largest campuses at IBM, think we'll have over fifteen pedestals of demo and actually multiple demos because we have such a broad portfolio, from the all flash arrays to our versus stack offering to a whole set of modern data protection management control for storage, which manages in control storage, that's not ours, right? Our competitors storage as well, and, of course, our software to find storage. So we're going to do a big announcement. The focus of that will be around our storage solutions. These air solutions blueprints reference architectures is Jane, 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 wrestling recipe for that 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 twenty seven times and everybody loves it. That's what we do with our our solutions. Blueprints. We'll have some announcements around modern data protection, and obviously a big focus of IBM. Storage is been in the space. So both storage as an Aye aye platform for aye aye, applications are workloads but also the incorporation of technology into our own storage systems and software. So be having announcements around that on February fifth going into think, which will then be the week after in San Francisco. >> Great. So I'm here and trusted data protection plays into that. Aye, aye. Intelligence machine intelligence. And I'm also hearing header of Geneti multiple platforms. Whether it's your storage, you said our competitors now does that also include sort of the clouds? Fear we're not announcing anything. But you guys have you know, you've seen your pictures. That's azure itt's a w a s. I mean, that continues >> so absolutely so. Whether it be what we do from backup in archive, right, let's take the easy one. So we support not only the protocol of IBM clad object storage which we acquired and allows you to have object storage either on premise or in a cloud in stance e ation. But we also support the s three protocol. So, for example, our spectrum scale software giant scale out. In fact, the two fastest supercomputers world you spectrum scale over four hundred fifty petabytes running on spectrum scale, and they continue their to an object store that supports us three. Or it can tear toe IBM clad object stories through that IBM clad object storage customer. That's great for using the S three protocol. You, Khun, Tear to that as well. That's just one example. Same thing we do for cyber resiliency. So from a cyber resents me perspective, we could do things with any cloud vendor oven air cat air gap, right? And so you could do that, eh? With tape. But you could also do that with the clouds. 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 writer. 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 ways. Our protect family, our new products, a safeguard copy for the main friend that we announced October. So all that allows us to be multi cloud resiliency as well as how do we connect a multi cloud backup archive automated tearing all kinds of clouds, whether the IBM cloud and, of course, I'm a shareholder. So I love that, but at the same time were realistic. Lots of people use Amazon Google Azar. And like I said, there's thousands of mid two small cloud providers all over the world, and we support them, too. We engage with everyone. >> What about SAS? You know, that's one of the questions we've been trying to squint through and understand is because when you talk about five cloud providers is obviously infrastructures of service. And then there's their service providers like like Advanced. And then there's like a gazillion SAS Companies >> write a lot of data >> in there and a lot of data in there. How should we think about, you know, protecting that data? Securing that data is that sort of up to the SAS vendor, and thou shalt not touch. Or should that be part of the scope of AH, storage company? Well, so what we do >> is we engage with the SAS vendor, so we have a number of different sass coming is, in fact, one of them was on the Cube two years ago with us. They were startup in the cyber security space and all of its delivered over SAS. So what they do is in that case, the use our flash system product line, they get the performance they need to deliver south. They want no bottlenecks because obviously you have to go over the network when you're doing SAS Andi. Also, what they do is data encryption at rest. So when the data is brought in because we have on our flash arrays capability and most of our product line especially the flash systems to have no performance hit on encrypt their decrypt because its 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've given the right performance. They need tohave soft reserve, so we engage with all we pry have three hundred, four hundred different SAS companies who are the actual software vendor and their deployment model. This software's interest, by the way, we do that as well as I mentioned, over three hundred cloud providers today have a backup is a service and the engine ease their 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 in archive. That's their service. They have their own product, but then spectrum Protect and Spectrum Check plus is the engine underneath their Prada. So that's an example. In this case, the backup is a service, which, I would argue is not infrastructure, but more of an application. But then true what you call real application providers like cyber security vendors, we have a vendor who in fact, does something for all of the universities and colleges. United States. They have about eight thousand of them, including the junior colleges, and they run all their bookstores. So when you place an order, all their air NPR, everything they do is from this SAS vendor that's based in there in the Northeast. And they've got, like I said, about a thousand colleges and universities in the U. S. And Canada, and they offer this if you will bookstore as a sass service and the students use it. University uses it. And, of course, the bookstores are designed to, you know, make a little money for the university, and they all use that so that's another example. And they use are flash systems as well. And then they back up that data internally with spectrum protectors. They obviously it's the financial data as well as the inventory of all of these book stores all over the United States at the collegiate >> level right now. James Way gotta wrap, but just sort of give you the final word. UK specialist, right? So Brexit really doesn't affect you. Is that a fair statement? >> Uh, we'll do? Yes. >> How so? >> I think it's too early to tell. No one really knows. I think that's all the debates are about. AJ's trying to understand that on DH for us. We're just watching and observing. >> Staying focused on your customers, obviously. So no predictions as to what's going to happen. I was not from a weeks ago. I got hurt both sides. You know, it's definitely gonna happen, All right, Not happen, but okay, again give you the last word. You know? What's your focus? Over the next twelve eighteen months? >> Eso all our focus is really about visibility, So they they they've touched on that. We're talking about security for customers. Understanding whether data is whether exposure point saw. That's our keep. Keep focusing on DH versus stack on dh thie IBM store wise product underpin all of those offerings that we have on. That will continue to be to be so forward. >> Guys. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and our pleasure hosting you. Thanks. Appreciate, Really welcome. Alright, Keep right, everybody. We'll be back. Day Volante was stew Minutemen from Cisco live in Barcelona. >> No.

[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 Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo. Live Europe, Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Everybody watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Valentin here with my co host Stew, Minuteman Stew Myself and John for Be here all week. Eric Hurt, Saugus Here Long time Cuba Long friend. Great to see you again. He's the CMO of IBM IBM storage division. He's joined by James Amy's, who's the head of networks at Advanced the service provider. Guys, Welcome to the Cube. Good to see again. >> Great. Thanks for having us loved being on the cute. >> So we love having you So, James, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about advanced to want to dig into some of the networking trends. We're hearing a lot about it here. It's just go live. >> Thanks. So Advanced are a managed service provider software company based in the UK, one of the largest software companies in the UK, providing interim solutions for lots of different market verticals, including healthcare, local government, regional government, national infrastructure projects we get involved with. As well as charity sector, legal sector. A lot of education work we do, so it's real diverse portfolio of products we offer. I'm with the managed 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 so Eric advanced are both a customer and a partner, right? Right, right. And so you love versus stack, these guys I presume a versus stack customers as well. >> Versus stack and customer in the Versace tack, as you know, integrates Cisco, UCS, Cisco Networking Infrastructure, IBM storage of all types entry products up into the fastest all flash raise with our software spectrum, virtualized spectrum, Accelerate Family and James's company is using versus tax is part of their infrastructure, which they then offer, as you know, to a service toe and uses. James just described. >> So let's talk about some of the big trends that you guys are seeing and how you're both responding to customers and you're responding to your customer. So we're seeing two hearing today. Lot about multi cloud. We've been hearing that for a while the network is flattening your network expert love to get your your thoughts on that. Security, obviously, is a huge topic. End end management, another big topic, something that IBM is focused on. So so James, what 1 of the big mega trends that you're seeing that a driving your business decisions and your customer's activity? One >> of the big changes we're seeing is a change from large scare enterprise scale deployments off a particular type of technology on customers are now choosing because they're informed the best fit for a particular application or particular service on that may be coming to a service provider like ourselves to offer our services products to them. Uh, or they're looking for us to roam in infrastructure service for them or integrate with a public cloud offering. So the competition of the public cloud for service providers is key. Andi, I think people were looking around a few years ago thinking, How do we compete to this well, with partnerships that we have an IBM and Cisco gives us a very compelling competitive offering, but we can turn around and say, Well, we could give you a like for like, but we can give you slightly better service because we could give you guaranteed little give you guaranteed price point on. And this is all backed with key vendor certified designs. So we're not talking about going out on developing a solution that takes maybe eighteen months to take to market. This is understanding a requirement for a quick, you know, Q and A with a customer. Our line that, too, a reference architecture that we can literally just pick up off the shelf, deploy into our data centers using the standard building brought 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 our key Intel computer platform that we used on DH. The store wise IBM product has been a real true success story for us. So we started off being a a mixed then the house where we would align storage requirement based with what we could find in the market. That was, that was a good fit for the store. Waste products is basically just allowed us to standardize on the speed of deployment is one of the key things. So we started out with a very lengthy lead time tio service ready, which is when we start charging for revenue on If we want a ninety day build, Well, we've got a lot of special service time, A lot of engineering time getting that ready Teo, Teo and take to the customer and then we turn it on. We can start seeing revenue from that platform with versus Stack. This enabled us to accelerate how quickly we can turn that on. And we've seen that drop, too. They're literally days through standardisation elements of automation as well. Many of our environments are bespoke because we have such a wide arrange off different types of customers with different needs, but it allows us to take those standing building blocks, align them to their needs and deliver that service. >> James James, we found the peas are often in the middle of those discussions that customers are having on multi clouds. You talked a lot about the services you build. Are they also coming to you? If if you tie into the public Cloud services or yes, maybe you can help expand a little bit on how that worked. Five years ago, it was the public loves are all going to kill the man and service providers, and what we see is customers can sort out half of what's going on. They've got to be able to turn two partners like you to be able to figure this out. >> Yeah, that's a fantastic question. 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 what's right. The drive to the hosted office and voice platforms offered by Microsoft.  There's a big drive and 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 they can just turn off and walk away  from over night. So it's how we're integrating that. We're doing that at the network level, so it's how we're pairing with different service providers, bringing that in integrating that I'm offering it to them as a solution on what we try to, we try to try and position ourselves is really it's the same experience. Regardless of where we're placing IT consumptional workload, it doesn't matter whether it's inside our data centers, whether we're talking one of the public cloud platforms or even on premise. So 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 some of the research scientists. >> So you've got to deliver flexibility in your architecture, and you talk a lot about software to find you guys made it big. You move to software to find, you know, a couple years ago, actually, maybe discuss how that fits in to how you're servicing advanced another client? >> Sure. So you know, IBM Storage has embraced multi cloud for several years. No, our solutions. While, of course, they work with IBM, Cloud and IBM cloud private work with Amazon. They work with Azure Google Cloud and in fact, some are products. For example, the versus Stack not only is advanced using it, but we've got pry forty or fifty public, small, medium sized cloud providers that our public references for the versus stack and spectrum protect Now, which is our backup product number one in the Enterprise. Back up space expect from detectives Got at least three hundred cloud providers. Medium, small and big. Who offered the engine underneath for their backup is a service is spectrum protect, so we make sure that weather PR transparent cloud tearing our cyber resiliency technology. What we doing? Backup 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 have tons of public records around versus Stack for that, but so can an enterprise. And in fact, I saw survey recently, and it was done in Europe and in North America that when you look at a roughly two billion US size revenue and up the average company of that sizing up, we'll use five different public cloud riders at one time. Where that it be due to legal reasons whether that be procurement. You know, the Web is really the Internet, and go Cloud is really just It's been around for twenty some years. So in bigger accounts, guess what is now involved procurement. Well, we love that you did that deal with IBM club, 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 your cloud if eyeing it, it's so to speak. So the clap water doesn't have a data center there. Guess what another geographer used different. And then you, of course, still have some large entities that still allow regional buying pattern so they'll have three or four different cloud providers that air quote certified by corporate. And then you could use whichever one you want, So we make sure that we could take advantage of that. Wade and IBM We ride the wave. We don't fight the way. >> So you've got in that situation. You these multi cloud you got different AP eyes, you get different frameworks. How d'you abstract all that complexity you got, Francisco coming at it From a networking standpoint, I b m. Now with Red Hat is good. Be a big player in that that world. VM where What do you guys do? James, in terms of of simplifying all that multi cloud complexity >> for people. I think some of it is actually demystifying on DH. It's engaging with our partners to understand what the proposition is on, how we can develop that on a line that to learn their own business but more importantly, to the needs of our customers. We've got some really, really talented technicians worked within within advance, and we've got a number of different forums that allow them to feed back their ideas. We've got thie alignment between those partners on DH, some of those communities, so that we can have an open discussion and drive. Some of that thinking forward about ultimately see engaging with customers so the customers feedback is key on how we shape and deliver only in 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 somewhere even competitive. So we have to tread that line very safe, very carefully and safely. But it is. It's a good one to one relationship between the client service managers technical so that the technicians we have inside business having that complete three sixty. Communication is key. That's that's that's really the bottom takes its creation >> came like youto dig into security for us a little bit. You know, I think we surpassed a couple of years ago. I'm not going to go to the cloud to it because it's not secure to Oh, I understand it's time for me to least reevaluate my security and most likely, no manage service fighters. Public clouds are probably more secure than what I had in my data center, but if I've got multiple environment, there's a lot of complexity there. So how do you traverse that? Make sure that you've got a comprehensive security practice, not just all these point solutions for security all over the place. >> Yeah, so that's that comes onto visibility. So its visibility understanding where all the control points are within a given infrastructure on how the landscape looks. So we were working quite closely with a number actually 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 guy, right? So we need It is from good security on your Internet. Facing viable For now, you may have a ten. Twenty, thirty of those. We need tohave consistent policies across those. We need to understand how they're performing, but also potentially, if there's any attack, attack vector on one of them. How that how someone is trying to looking to compromise that so centralized intelligence on That's where we start to look at my eye operations to gather all that information. The long gone are the days where you have twenty people sharing a room just reading streams. Those twenty people now need thio. See reams and reams of information instantly. Something needs to be called up to them. They could make a decision quickly on Active planet on DH. That's really where we were. We're We're positioning ourselves in the market to differentiate. I'm working with key partners. We have >> to do that. >> Eric, talk about your announcement cadence. That idea has a big show. Think coming up in a couple weeks. Cubes going be here? Of course. What can we expect from from you guys? >> So we're actually gonna announce on the fifth before things we want to drive end users and our business partners to storage Campus, which is one of the largest campuses at IBM, think we'll have over fifteen pedestals of demo and actually multiple demos because we have such a broad portfolio, from the all flash arrays to our versus stack offering to a whole set of modern data protection management control for storage, which manages in control storage, that's not ours, right? Our competitors storage as well. And, of course, our software to find story. So we're going to do a big announcement. The focus of that will be around our storage solutions. These air solutions blueprints reference architectures is Jane, 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 wrestling recipe for that 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 twenty seven times and everybody loves it. That's what we do with our our solutions. Blueprints. We'll have some announcements around modern data protection, and obviously a big focus of IBM. Storage is been in the space. So both storage as an Aye aye platform for Aye, aye. Applications are workloads, but also the incorporation of technology into our own storage systems and software. So be having announcements around that on February fifth going into think, which will then be the week after in San Francisco. >> Great. So I'm here and trusted data protection plays into that. Aye, aye. Intelligence Machine Intelligence. And I'm also hearing header of Geneti multiple platforms. Whether it's your storage, you said our competitors now does that also include sort of the clouds Fear without announcing anything. But you guys have you know, you've seen your pictures. That's azure itt's a W a s. I mean, that continues >> so absolutely so. Whether it be what we do from backup in archive, right, let's take the easy one. So we support not only the protocol of IBM clad object storage which we acquired and allows you to have object storage either on premise or in a cloud in stance E ation. Well, we also support the s three protocol. So, for example, our spectrum scale software giant scale out. In fact, the two fastest supercomputers world use spectrum scale over four hundred fifty petabytes running on spectrum scale, and they continue ear to an object store that supports US three. Or it can tear toe IBM clad object stories through that IBM clad object storage customer. That's great using the S three protocol. You, Khun, Tear to that as well. So that's just one example. Same thing we do for cyber resiliency. So from a cyber resents me perspective, we could do things with any cloud vendor oven air cat air gap, right? And so you could do that, eh? With tape. But you could also do that with the clouds. 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 writer. 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 ways. Our Protect family, our new products say safeguard copy for the main friend that we announced October. So all that allows us to be multi cloud resiliency as well as how do we connect a multi cloud backup archive automated tearing all kinds of clouds, whether the IBM cloud and of course, I'm a shareholder, so I love that. But at the same time, we're realistic. Lots of people use Amazon Google Azar. And like I said, there's thousands of mid two small cloud providers all over the world, and we support them, too. We engage with everyone. >> What about SAS? You know, that's one of the questions we've been trying to squint through and understand is because when you talk about five cloud providers is obviously infrastructures of service. And then there's their service providers like like Advanced. And then there's like a Brazilian SAS companies >> write a lot of data in >> there and a lot of data in there. How should we think about, you know, protecting that data? Securing that data is that sort of up to the SAS vendor, and thou shalt not touch. Or should that be part of the scope of AH, storage company? Well, so what we do >> is we engage with the SAS vendor, so we have a number of different sass coming is, in fact, one of them was on the Cube two years ago with us. They were startup in the cyber security space and all of its delivered over SAS So what they do is, in that case, the use our flash system Roddick line. They get the performance they need to deliver South. They want no bottlenecks because obviously you have to go over the network when you're doing SAS on DH, then also, what they do is data encryption at rest. So when the data is brought in because we have on our flash arrays capability and most of our product line especially the flash systems to have no performance hit on encrypt their decrypt because its 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've given the right performance. They need tohave soft reserve, so we engage with all we pry have three hundred, four hundred different SAS companies who are the actual software vendor and their deployment model. This software's interest, by the way, we do that as well as I mentioned, over three hundred cloud providers today have a backup is a service and the engine ease their 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 in archives. That's their service. They have their own product, but then spectrum Protect and Spectrum Check plus is the engine underneath their product. So that's an example. In this case, the backup is a service, which, I would argue is not infrastructure, but more of an application. But then true what you call real application providers like cyber security vendors, we have a vendor who in fact, does something for all of the universities and colleges. United States. They have about eight thousand of them, including the junior colleges, and they run all their bookstores. So when you place an order, all their air NPR, everything they do is from this SAS vendor that's based in there in the Northeast. And they've got, like I said, about a thousand colleges and universities in the U. S. And Canada, and they offer this if you will bookstore as a sass service and the students use it. University uses it. And, of course, the bookstores are designed to, you know, make a little money for the university, and they all use that. So that's another example. And they use are flash systems as well. And then they back up that data internally with spectrum protectors. They obviously it's the financial data as well as the inventory of all of these book stores all over the United States at the collegiate >> level right now. James Way gotta wrap, but just sort of give you the final word. UK specialist, right? So Brexit really doesn't affect you. Is that a fair statement >> will do? Yes. >> How so? >> I think it's too early to tell. No one really knows. I think that's that's what all the debates are about. AJ's trying to understand that on DH for us. We're just watching and observing. >> Staying focused on your customers, obviously. So no predictions as to what's going to happen. I was not from a weeks ago. I got hurt both sides. You know, it's definitely gonna happen. All right, Not happen, but up. Okay, again give you the last word. You know? What's your focus? Over the next twelve eighteen months? >> Eso all our focus is really about visibility, So they they they've touched on that. We're talking about the security for customers understanding whether data is whether exposure point saw that's all Keep keep focusing on DH versus stack on dh thie IBM store wise product underpin all of those offerings that we have on. That will continue to be to be so forward. >> Guys. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and, uh, our pleasure hosting you. Thanks. Appreciate, Really welcome. All right. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. Day Volante was stew Minutemen from Cisco live in Barcelona.