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

>> From Sunnyvale, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Accelerate Your Journey to AI. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris with Wikibon and theCUBE and we're broadcasting from theCUBE here from NetApp's data visionary center today. We've got a number of great conversations with some NetApp executives, specifically about the role that NetApp and AI are going to play together as the market evolves. And we're joined first by Jean English, who's a Senior Vice President and CMO of NetApp. Jean, welcome to theCUBE. >> Great, thanks Peter, nice to see you again. >> Lot of great stuff to talk about, Jean, so let's start with this interesting relationship, NetApp, AI, the centerpiece of it is data. >> Yes. >> What does that mean? >> Absolutely. Well I think just to start, technology is changing everyday lives. Digital transformation really tops the strategic agenda of most CEOs today. When you think about what does that mean in terms of data, data is the lifeblood of an organization. And it has to really be able to seamlessly flow through that organization to really add value. So we think of data as the heart, and when we think about data and AI, we want to accelerate the journey to AI. But to do that, you have to be able to holistically manage your data. >> So as we think about the need to manage data, that says that there's a number of challenges that customers face. You have to be able to bring great technology, but in ways that allow customers to do things specifically with it. So talk a little bit about the relationship that NetApp is developing with its customers to try to ensure that that journey to AI can be accelerated. >> Absolutely. Well the first is really around when we think about digital transformation, and especially as AI is the heart of it, how are they going to get more connected to their customers? A better customer experience. An experience that allows them to feel connected not only to the experience they have with the company, but to their peers, and to their customers, as well as suppliers. We also know that we want to be able to think about what do customers need to do to create new value? And new business opportunities, new services, new companies? Companies are also looking at how do they optimize their operations? How do they even take out the cost of back office, and take out that capital to be able to fuel innovation, especially when it comes to customer engagement. AI is becoming more and more a part of how companies are doing each of those. They're using those analytics and insight to be able to power through that digital transformation, which is now really being seen as a data-driven digital transformation. >> Well, we certainly agree at Wikibon, SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE. We believe that the relationship between business and digital business is, in fact, that digital business uses data as an asset. >> Mhmm. >> There's a special class of customer, though, as we move forward, and that is some of the hyperscalers, the big cloud suppliers, who are participating in this process of driving so much innovation in the industry. Serving them is a particular challenge. Talk to us a little bit about how that works. >> Sure. Well, we are definitely seeing that there is a certain class of customers that are starting to think about what do they do to thrive on data? And not only can they thrive, but they have to be able to put data as an asset. It has to be at the top of the strategic agenda of the company. It has to be able to seamlessly flow through that company. We're seeing that they're called data thrivers. Those thrivers are set apart. They're driving bottom line revenue, they're driving increased customer acquisition, they're seeing definitely higher profit margins. But in all those results we notice that there's a few things they're really doing right, and they're getting it right. One of those is that they're using the cloud. They're using public clouds. They're using private clouds. They're acquiring more dev-op skills. They're hiring data scientists. They're really being able to think about how do they hire digital officers, data officers, and a lot of that is around how they want to leverage AI. We know that over 50% of companies will start to adopt AI next year. We know that they're going to start to leverage AI to gain better insight. These new roles of people are definitely the ones who are being able to think about how did they manipulate that data, how did they use that data to have a competitive advantage, and how did they leverage the cloud to get more services like AI from these big cloud providers. >> Well, it's pretty clear as you try to service that broad a range of potential customers that you have to have a couple of touchstones to keep coming back to. Increasingly, design has to be one of them. Thinking in terms of design great products, but also designing engagement, designing how you work with customers, designing how you work with partners. Now, you have, along with your team, has bought some of that data first, data-driven notions into how you've designed this data visionary center. Talk to us a little bit about how you have been using design to ensure that great experience across the board from NetApp. >> Absolutely. Well first, as NetApp thinks about how to holistically manage data, that was really the inception of data fabric. And data fabric was a vision, it was a strategy years ago. And we've been really working to see how do we bring that strategy alive? And being that data visionary for our customers thinks about from the edge, to the core, to the cloud. And what do we do to help bring that data fabric across so you can seamlessly manage data, integration points across all those environments, you can migrate data to the cloud, you can make sure you're consuming data services, like analytics and AI, and you're really being able to bring that value back. AI is at the center of that. We wanted to design an experience that brought data fabric to life for our customers. One, how did they modernize their current architectures? Especially with cloud-connected flash and what we're doing with AI. We wanted to make sure that we were thinking about "How did they build these private clouds? What do they need to do to really bring out applications at speed?" Third is we wanted to inspire innovation with the cloud. And the work we're doing with the cloud providers. We've had new services like cloud volumes that have been launching with AWS, with Azure as well as Google. And with all of the biggest clouds, we've been thinking about how do we bring that customer experience to life? That design comes forward through the data visionary center, where we are today. This center is where we want to actually have customers come in and be inspired by what they can do in their own digital transformation journey. We want to build trust with those customers and partners. We want them to know that we understand their industry, we understand their needs, we understand what's happening in the market. IOT, AI, what's happening with securing data. How did they think about leveraging the cloud to really maximize business impact? We want to be able to have frank conversations. Inform each other of our strategies. How did they then able to interpret those and internalize that information? The whole data visionary center's been based on "How do we help them to be able to grow? How do they partner with us so they can leverage our services to help them to maximize the value of data?" So we provide those opportunities. Hands-on kiosks, demos, learning, even being able to do what we've done with NVIDIA with an advanced solution around even our events at solution where they can start to play with AI in real time. Then we want to be able to enjoy the conversation here at the data visionary center, and talk about next steps in the journey ahead. So we're excited about the data visionary center. We just opened it a few months ago, and we're thrilled to be able to invite customers and partners to be here. >> So let's extrapolate, extend beyond the data visionary center and make the observation that marketing broadly has become altered, changed, transformed as a consequence of using data. Marketing at NetApp in particular is interesting because you're fundamentally marketing data-driven as a concept. So how is marketing's evolved experience with data informing how NetApp broadly engages customers and builds products? >> CMOs are becoming one of the top functions to really drive digital transformations. When you think about how do you connect and engage with customers more? How do you engage with them on a personalized level? How do you ensure that you're having that constant communication, online, offline? And continuously being able to build that relationship. Marketing's at the center of that. We're excited that we're a data-driven organization, and as a data-driven organization, we're having real business impact to the business and real customer engagement. We're excited that we're at the heart of what we're doing to transform the business. Not only from our branding and how we think about reinventing NetApp, we are data-driven company. We are data-driven as we think about that aspiration for our customers. Our data visionary concept is about how do we inspire people to want to bring all that data together and really simplify and integrate, and then unleash that potential for their own companies. Marketing is at the center of how we're engaging people, especially in the cloud. And as we have a no-touch experience and customers are engaging with us to be able to download trials, being able to see demos, being able to watch other customers and where they are on their own journey. But being able to surface that, again, digitally as well as offline and personal engagement. Analytics, big part of what we're doing to understand customer needs better. Understanding those needs from the solutions they expect from us, understand their needs from what they're enduring in the market, and then being able to help the company think about that in terms of road maps, think about that in terms of key messages, think about that in terms of real solutions and real engagement. >> Jean English, Senior Vice President and CMO of NetApp, thanks again for being on theCUBE >> Thanks, Peter. >> And talking about data-driven and marketing. >> Thank you. Nice to see you. >> Good to see you again.

>> Announcer: Live from Berlin, Germany. It's theCube, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by, NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are joined by Jean English. She is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of NetApp, thanks so much for comin' on the show. >> Thank you for having me, we're glad you're here with us to join us at Insight Berlin. >> We're always excited to do anything with NetApp. So, talk a little bit about NetApp's digital transformation. You're now at a year's long transformation from storage, your legacy, to data. Talk a little bit about your positioning in the market. >> Sure, so I think people have previously thought of NetApp as storage, and what we're so focused on now is data. And why data? Because that's what we hear from our customers, our partners, the analysts, is what is really topping their needs right now. If we think about how companies are transforming, they're having to think about digital transformation is topping the list. It's topping the most strategic agendas of most CEOs. But what happens is they have to think about the data. It has become a life blood of their business, and as it seamlessly flows through that business, and what does it mean to either optimize their operations, if they've gotta increase their customer touch points, do they have to create new product services, and even businesses. So we feel like right now that is where our focus is on data, and it's so much a part of our heritage that we look to the future as well. >> One of the things that you're working on now is helping customers use data in new, exciting, innovative, creative ways, can you talk broadly about your approach to that, and how you're drawing inspiration on customers and then empowering them? >> Absolutely, so we really try to think about, what is our purpose? And our purpose could be true to our heritage from 25 years ago, we just celebrated our 25 year anniversary this past spring, and it is to empower our customers to change the world with data. Just a few of those, we've seen now, especially in hybrid cloud environments, customers have to think about how are they gonna simplify to integrate data across on-prem, cloud environments, to accelerate digital transformation. One example of that is EidosMedia. We love their story, because their talking about how to get news stories, real time, through a cloud platform, into the hands of journalists that can publish real time live insights. Real time journalism, and so when you think about the speed that has to happen with creating stories, getting 'em published, getting 'em out to news networks, that's data. And it's a good data story. >> When you think about the data story though, a lot of people talk about how data is a fuel, or data is. And we tend to think, at least at SiliconANGLE Wikibon, that that's probably not the best analogy, because data's different from other resources. Most resources share the economics of scarcity, you can do this, or you can do that, but data's different because data could be copied, data can be shared. But data also can be appropriated inappropriately. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship or the direction that NetApp's taking to on the one hand, facilitate the sharing of data strategically while at the same time, ensuring that proper security and IP controls are placed on it. >> So I think people are looking to make sure that they can share freely data, and seamlessly integrate data across multiple sources. Right now what we find is that whether it's because you've had data that's been on-prem, and maybe that's more structured. Now we're startin' to see more unstructured data. So data's becoming a lot more diverse. People are constantly looking for the latest source of truth of data, so dynamic, and because it's so distributed across environments, people are trying to figure out, how do you integrate data, how do you share data, but it's all about simplicity, 'cause they need it to be efficient. They need to make sure that it's protected, so security is top of minds, so data protection is the upmost of importance. They're looking for ways to embrace future technologies. And whether that's thinking about different cloud environments, SAS applications, and then how do they create the most open opportunities. A lot of people aren't just putting their data in one cloud, what we're finding is, is it's a multi-cloud world, and they're looking for a holistic solution to more easily and seamlessly manage their data through those environments. >> But the infrastructure has to move from as you said, a storage orientation towards something that's going to facilitate the appropriate sharing and integration of data. Like a fabric. >> Yes. >> Can you talk a little bit about that. >> So we started the conversation around data fabric, it was one of the first people to really talk about data fabric in the market back in 2013. And this vision was about how do you seamlessly be able to share and integrate data across cloud and on-prem environments. That has become so true in how we've been building out that data fabric today. We just launched a few weeks ago that we are the first industry leading storage data service in the Microsoft Azure console, so that people can easily be able to, can do complete storage capabilities in cloud storage, in Microsoft, we've also been developing solutions to make sure that, maybe if you're not wanting to do everything in Office365 and Azure, you wanna back it up to AWS, so how do you have better backup capabilities? Sharing of data across clouds. We're also seeing that you may wanna sync data, so maybe once you put data into the cloud, and you run analytics or even machine learning, how do you then get data back? Because you wanna make sure that you're constantly being able to look holistically at your customers. This notion of one cloud, to back to on-prem, multi-cloud environments, has been critical as we think about customers and where they're going. >> One of the things we're also hearing about at this conference is, this is the day of the data visionary, and this is where people who are thinking about how to store data, use data, extract data, find value in the data. The demands on them, the pressures on them, are so intense. How is NetApp helping those people, sort of understanding where they are, not only in their businesses, but also in their trajectories of their careers, and then helping them move forward. >> We've been really thinking about who is really using data to disrupt, and are this disruptive use of data to really drive business results. It's not just about having the data, it's about how are you gonna have an impact on the business. So we start to think about this notion of who is a data thriver? Who's thriving with data versus who's just surviving and in fact, some are even resisting. So we actually partner with IDC to launch a study on data thrivers to look at who is truly looking at driving new revenue streams, attracting new customers, how are they able to use data as correlistic part of their business. Not some one off or side project to help do the digital transformation, but what was gonna drive really good business results. Data as an asset. Data across business and IT. And we see new roles are emerging from this. We're seeing that, Chief Data Officers, there's Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Scientists, Chief Transformation Officers. All new roles that have been emerging in the last couple of years, but these data thrivers are seeing tremendous business impact. >> So, what is it that separates those people, I mean I think that, those really, those companies and those business models, and what are sort of the worst case scenarios for those companies that are just surviving and not necessarily thriving, in this new environment. >> Yeah, I think it's interesting, we're seeing that companies that actually put data at the center of what they do. So we think of it as a data-centric organization, are seeing 6x in what they're seeing in terms of being able to drive real customer acquisition. When we think about what it means to drive operational efficiency, when we think about 2x times in terms of profitability, real bottom line results, compared to people that are simply just surviving with data. What's interesting is that when we start to think about what are the attributes of these people, so business and IT working together in unison. These roles in fact that are emerging are starting to become those catalysts and change agents that are bringing IT and the business more together. We're also seeing that when you think of data as an asset, even to the bottom line, how does data become more critical in terms of what they see in terms of being a differentiated advantage for the company. Also, thinking through quality, quality, quality. You've gotta make sure that the data is of highest quality and it's constantly being cleansed. Then in terms of how do we think of it being used across the business, it's not just about holding data and locking it away behind a firewall. Data more today is so dynamic, distributed and diverse, that you have to let it be utilized and activated across the business. And then to think through, it's starts not just in terms of what customers are using and seeing from data, what they can actually see in terms of customer touch points and having a better customer experience, but then how do you make sure it even comes back to the development to create new products, create new services, maybe even eliminate waste. Stop doing product lines based on what they're seeing from actual usage. So it's a pretty fascinating space right now, but the data thriver is the new thought we're thinking in terms of getting that out in the market and really sharing more so with our clients, so that they can benchmark themselves as well. >> So, you're a CMO. >> Yes. >> You're telling a story, but you also have operational responsibilities. How would you tell your peers to use data differently? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. I mean, for me data's the life blood of how we think about how we actually create a better customer experience. We're using data constantly to better understand what are our customer's needs, and those customers are evolving. Before, in the loyalist that we love was storage architects and admins, we're starting to see that people are thinking about how to use more hybrid cloud data services with CIOs. How are they gonna look at a cloud strategy? With DevOps, how are they gonna create, deploy, and, applications at speed? How are they gonna be able to help to really think through, what are they gonna do to drive more analytics and better workload usage, and efficiencies? Our clients are evolving, and when we think about how do you reach those clients differently, we have to know who they are. We have to use data to understand them. We have to be more personalized. We just relaunched our entire digital experience, so that when we try to look at how do you bring people into something that's more customized, more personalized, what does it mean to be a cloud architect that's thinking about a data backup and protection plan. What does it mean for someone in DevOps who's thinking about how do I actually create and deploy an application at speed? How do you think about someone that's gonna look at the needs from a CIO, so much differently than before. But, using data, using customization, thinking about an engaging experience, bringing 'em through that experience so that we solve their business challenges. We use data and analytics every day. I think of us as being the new data scientists. People say, is it art or is it science and marketing? I'm like, it's a little bit of the storytelling, absolutely, we have to lead with stories, but the data and the analytics is where we really understand our customers best. So using analytic models, using predictive models, using more ways in which we can actually reach customers in new ways we never have before through social. But bring them into a new conversation. Analytics, analytics, storytelling, and understanding, getting closer to new clients like we never have before, and then thinking through how do we use that full-circle loop of learning to get better and better in how we engage our customers in ways they want to engage with us. >> I wanna switch gears just a second, and I know that you've just been nominated as an International Board Member. You were a Board Member before, of Athena of the Triangle, which is about supporting and inspiring women in the technology industry. As we know that this is the dearth of women, technologists, is a big problem in the US and globally. Can you tell us a little more about the organization and what you're doing? >> So, Athena International is really about, how do you promote women's leadership? It's across the world, in fact we just launched some very exciting initiatives in China where I lived for a year, and the President of Athena International is a friend of mine, and she was really looking at how do you foster growth, especially in emerging markets and countries where women's leadership can be so profound in terms of how do you impact the business, government, and market, and really overall global success. Athena is focused on, is technology, but it's also with women in many industries. But really, how do you gain the powerful mentorships, how do you gain powerful access to programs, to having more access to expertise that can help them to think through business models, business cases. How do they grow their business, it might be from financial to career counseling, to mentoring on marketing, but it's really thinking through women's leadership as a whole. >> And is NetApp also working on behalf of those, of that cause too? >> We're really focused on, today in fact we're gonna be hosting the, the annual Women in Technology Summit. So we're so focused on how do we think about developing women in technology, how to think about that across not only our employees, but our partners and our customers, and it's not just about women, this is men and women working together to determine how do we stop the fact that we've got to get more access to women in mentorships and sponsorships, and really really driving how we have leadership as we grow, really grow into our careers, and can drive more business impact. >> Great. Well Jean, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, >> Thank you. >> It was really fun talking to you. >> Absolutely, thank you both. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight, here in Berlin, Germany in just a little bit.

>> Announcer: Live from Berlin, Germany. It's The Cube, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Peter Burris. We are joined by Jean English. She is the senior vice president and chief marketing officer of NetApp. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having me. >> We're glad you're here with us to join us at Insight Berlin. We're always excited to do anything with NetApp. So talk a little bit about NetApp's digital transformation. You're now at a years long transformation from storage, your legacy, to data. Talk a little bit about your positioning in the market. >> Sure. I think people have previously thought of NetApp as storage. And what we are so focused on now is data. And why data? Because that's what we hear from our customers, our partners' analysts, is what is really topping their needs right now. And when we think about how companies are transforming, they're having to think about digital transformation is topping the list, is topping the most strategic agendas of most CEOs. But what happens is they have to think about the data and how does it become a lifeblood of their business? How does it seamlessly flow through that business? And what does it mean to either optimize their operations, if they've got to increase their customer in touch points, if they have to create new products, services, and even businesses. So we feel like right now that is why our focus is on data. And it's so much a part of our heritage that we look to the future as well. >> So, one of the thing's that you're working on now is helping customers use data in new, exciting, innovative, creative ways. Can you talk broadly about your approach to that and how you're drawing inspiration from customers and then empowering them? >> Absolutely. We really try to think about what is our purpose. And our purpose could be true to our heritage from 25 years ago, we've just celebrated our 25 year anniversary this past spring. And it is to empower our customers to change the world with data. And just a few of those we see now, especially is hybrid cloud environments, customers have to think about how are they going to simplify and integrate data across on-prem, cloud environments, to accelerate digital transformation. One example of that is EidosMedia. We love their story, because they're talking about how to get new stories, real time, through a cloud platform into the hands of journalists that can publish real-time live insights, real-time journalism. And so, when you think about the speed that has to happen with creating stories, getting them published, getting them out to news networks... That's data, and it's a good data story. >> When you think about the data story, though, a lot of people talk about how data is a fuel or data is... And we tend to think, at least it's looking like a Wikibon, but that's probably not the best analogy. Because data's different from other resources. Most resources share the economics of scarcity. You can do this or you can do that. But data's different, because data could be copied, data could be shared, but data also could be appropriated inappropriately. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship, or the direction that NetApp's taking to, on the one hand, facilitate the sharing of data strategically while at the same time ensuring that proper security and IP controls are placed on it? >> Absolutely. I think people are looking to make sure they can share freely, data, and seamlessly integrate data across multiple sources. Right now what we find, whether it's because you've had data that's been on-prem, and maybe that's more structured. Now we're starting to see more unstructured data. So data's becoming a lot more diverse. People are constantly looking for the latest source of truth of data. It's so dynamic, and because it's so distributive across environments, people are trying to figure out how do you integrate data, how do you share data. But it's all about simplicity because they need it to be efficient. They need to make sure that it's protected. So security is top of minds, data protection is utmost of importance. They're looking different ways to embrace future technologies. And whether that's thinking about different cloud environments, Sass applications, and then how do they create the most open opportunities. A lot of people aren't just putting their data in one cloud. What we're finding is it's a multi-cloud world and they're looking for a wholistic solution to more easily and seamlessly manage their data through those environments. >> The infrastructure has to move from a storage orientation towards something that's going to facilitate the appropriate sharing and integration of data. Like a fabric. You could talk a little bit about that. >> Yes. We started the conversation around data fabric. Was one of the first people to really talk about data fabric in the market back in 2013. And this vision was about how do you seamlessly be able to share and integrate data across cloud and on-prem environments. That has become so true in how we've been building out that data fabric today. We just launched a few weeks ago that we are the first industry leading storage data service in the Microsoft Azure console. So that people can easily be able to do complete storage capabilities in cloud storage in Microsoft. We've also been developing solutions to make sure that maybe if you're not wanting to do everything in Office 365 and Azure, you want to back it up to AWS. So how do you have better backup capabilities? Sharing of data across clouds. We're also seeing that you my want to sync data. So maybe once you put data into the cloud and you run analytics or even machine learning, how do you get data back? Because you want to make sure that you're constantly being able to look wholistically at your customers. So this notion of one cloud to back to on-prem, multi-cloud environments has been critical as we've been thinking about customers and where they're going. >> One of the things we're also hearing about at this conference is that this is the day of the data visionary, and this is where people who are thinking about how to store data, use data, extract data, find value in the data... The demands on them, the pressures on them are so intense. How is NetApp helping those people? Understanding where they are, not only in their businesses, but also in their trajectories of their careers. And then helping them move forward. >> Absolutely. We've been really thinking about who is really using data to disrupt. And are this disruptive use of data to really drive business results. It's not just about having the data. It's about how are you going to have it impact on the business. So we started to think about this notion of who is a data thriver. And who's thriving with data versus who's just surviving. And in fact, some are even resisting. So we actually partner with IDC to launch a study on data thrivers. To look at who is truly looking at driving new revenue streams, attracting new customers. How are they able to use data as a corlistic part of their business? Not some one off or side project to help through the digital transformation, but what was going to drive really good business results, data as an asset, data across business and IT. And we see new roles are emerging from this. So we're seeing chief data officers, chief digital officers, chief data scientists, chief transformation officers. All new roles that have been emerging in the last couple of years. But these data thrivers are seeing tremendous business impact. >> So what is it that separates those people? I think of those companies and those business models. And what are some of the worst case scenarios for those companies that are just surviving and not necessarily thriving in this new environment? >> It's interesting. We're seeing that companies that actually put data at the center of what they do, so we think of it as a data-centered organization, are seeing 6x in what they're seeing in terms of being able to drive real customer acquisition. And we think about what it means to drive operational efficiency. When think about 2x times in terms of profitability, real bottom line results, compared to people that are simply just surviving with data. What's interesting is that when we started to think about what are the attributes of these people. So, business and IT working together in unison. These roles, in fact, that are emerging are starting to become those catalyst and change agents that are bringing IT and the business more together. We're also seeing that, when you think of data as an asset, even to the bottom line, how does data become more critical in terms of what they see, in terms of being a difference and an advantage for the company. Also, thinking through quality, quality, quality. So you've got to make sure that the data is of highest quality and it's constantly being cleansed. Then, in terms of how do we think of it being used across the business. It's not just about holding data and locking it away behind a firewall. Data, more today, is so dynamic, distributed, and diverse that you have to let it be utilized and activated across the business. And then to think through, it starts not just in terms of what customers are using and seeing from data, but they can actually see, in terms of customer touch points and having a better customer experience. But then how do you make sure it even comes back to development to create new products, great new services, maybe even eliminate waste? Stop doing product lines based on what they're seeing from actual usage. So it's a pretty fascinating space right now. But the data thriver is the new thought we're thinking in terms of getting that out in the market and really sharing that more so with our clients. So that they can benchmark themselves as well. >> Peter Burris: So, you're a CMO? Yes. You're telling a story, but you also have operational responsibilities. How would you tell your peers to use data differently? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. For me, data is the lifeblood of how we think about how we actually create a better customer experience. We're using data constantly to better understand what are our customers' needs? And those customers are evolving. Before, and the royalists that we love with storage architects and admins. We're starting to see that people are thinking about how to use more hybrid cloud data services. With CIOs, how are they going to look at a cloud strategy? With DevOps, how are they going to create deploying and applications at speed? How are they going to be able to help to really think through? What are they going to do to drive more analytics and better workload usage and efficiencies? So our clients are evolving. And when we think about how do you reach those clients differently? We have to know who they are. We have to use data to understand them. We have to be more personalized. We just relaunched our entire digital experience so that when we try to look at how do you bring people into something that's more customized, more personalized? What does it mean to be a cloud architect that's thinking about a data backup and protection plan? What does it mean to someone at DevOps that's thinking about how do I actually create and deploy an application at speed? How do you think about someone that's going to look at the needs from a CIO so much differently than before? But using data, using customization, thinking about an engaging experience, bringing them through that experience so that we solve their business challenges. We use data in analytics everyday. I think of us as being the new data scientists. People say, is it art or is it science and marketing? And I'm like, well it's a little bit of story telling. Absolutely we have to leave the stories. But the data, the analytics is where we really understand our customers best. And so using analytic models, using predictive models. Using more ways in which we can actually reach customers in new ways we never have before through social. But bring them into a new conversation. So, analytics, analytics, story telling and understanding, getting closer to new clients like we never have before, and then thinking through how do we use that full circle loop of learning to get better and better at how we engage our customers in ways they want to engage with us. >> I want to switch gears just a second. And I know that you've just been nominated as an international board member. You were a board member before of Athena of the Triangle, which is about supporting and inspiring women in the technology industry. As we know, the dearth of women technologists is a big problem in the U.S. and globally. Can you tell us a little bit more about the organization and what you're doing? >> Sure. So, Athena International is really about how do you promote women's leadership? And it's across the world. In fact, we just launched some very exciting initiatives in China, where I lived for a year. And the president of Athena International is a friend of mine and she was really looking at how do you foster growth, especially in emerging markets in countries where women's leadership can be so profound in terms of how do impact a business, government, and market and really overall global success. Athena is focused on its technology. But it's also women in many industries. But really, how do you gain the powerful mentorships? How do you gain powerful access to programs? To having more access to expertise that can help them to think through business models, business cases. How do they grow their business? It might be from financial, to career counseling, to mentoring on marketing, but it's really thinking through women's leadership as a whole. >> And is NetApp also working on behalf of that cause too? >> Today, in fact, we're going to be hosting the annual women in technology summit. And so we're so focused on how do we think about developing women in technology. How to think about that across not only our employees, but our partners and our customers. And it's not just about women. This is men and women working together to determine how do we stop the fact that we've got to get more access to women in mentorships and sponsorships. And really really driving how we have leadership as we grow into our careers and can drive more business impact. >> Great. Well Jean, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. It was really fun talking to you. Absolutely. Thank you both. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight here in Berlin, Germany in just a little bit.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApp. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of The Cube, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media with my cohost, Keith Townsend with CTO Advisors. Our next guest is Jean English. She's the Chief Marketing Officer of NetApp. Great to see you, thanks for having us, and thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Oh, thank you, thank you guys for being here. >> So NetApp is no longer a storage company, we learned. But then last year, now this year, you're a data company. >> Jean: (laughs) That's right. >> The brand promise is still the same. Take us through, as the Chief Marketing Officer, you have to, it's a complex world. One of your concepts here we've been seeing is winning while in a tough environment and IT is a tough environment. I got application development going on. I got DevOps. I got data governance. I got security issues, internet of things. It's a challenging time for our customers. How is your brand promise evolving? >> So we really see that NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud, and the amazing thing is is that what we see is our customers aren't talking to us about storage anymore. They're talking to us about data, and what their data challenges are, and most companies are trying to think through if they're going to transform, how are they going to harness the wealth of the data. What are they going to do to maximize the value of the data? >> And the cloud too is center stage, 'cause the cloud is a forcing function that's changing the relationship of your partners, VARs who has a lot of folks on talking about the dynamics with customers around multiple clouds. We saw on stage the announcement with Microsoft. Congratulations. >> Jean: Thank you. >> So you've been in Amazon for a while. We've been covering that, but the on-premise work still is growing, where you have the data from Wikibon Research came out shows that the on-premise true private cloud, which is defined as cloud operation business model is actually growing. However, the decline in automation of non-differentiated labor is declining by 1.5 billion over the next five years, which means the SAS market is going to continue to explode and grow, so the on-premise is actually growing, as is the cloud. How does that change the narrative for you guys, or does it, or is that a tailwind for NetApp? >> We think it's a complete tailwind in for NetApp. When we think about data today, we see that it's really becoming more distributed across environments. It's definitely more dynamic, as you're looking for the latest source of truth. And the diversity of data, especially with machine learning. I mean, it is exploding. So, how do you start to be able to build that data together? We really think of it as that our customers want to maximize that value and the only way to do that is to start to think about how do they bring it together, and how do they get more insight from that data, and then how do they have more access and control of that data, and then the most questions we usually get from our customers around, how do I make sure it's secure? But the really big point is is that, as we think about what NetApp is doing, it has been about three things that we see with our customers. They have to make sure that they're modernizing what they have today, and that goes to the on-prem environment, so if it's going to be that they got to accelerate applications, they want to make sure that they have that. But this notions of building clouds, even building private clouds. And we think of that as a next-generation data center, especially with DevOp environments. Then harnessing the power of the cloud and hybrid cloud world. And if they are not able to really leverage the cloud for SAS applications, if they're leveraging the cloud for backup, or even disaster recovery, data protection, that's where we see that these three imperatives, when they come together, that they're truly, truly able to unleash the power. >> So we saw on stage, CEO George Kurian talking about his personal situations in light of what's happened in Las Vegas here. Data is changing the world, and your tagline is "Change the world with data." So I got to ask you, obviously, data, we see a lot of examples in society and also personal examples of data being harnessed for value. The cloud can be great there, it's all on-prem. How do you guys position NetApp as a company? I know there's a lot of positioning exercises in marketing you do, but positioning is really important. That's what you do. The tagline is kind of the emotional aspect of it, okay, changing the world, let's change the world with data. I believe that. But what's the positioning of NetApp? How would you say that the positioning- What's the positioning statement of NetApp? >> The positioning statement of NetApp, I think we've really seen a big break in the positioning in the last couple of years. And why is because the customers are demanding something different. They're really looking for more hybrid cloud data services. And what are those data services that accelerate and integrate data, and that notion of on-prem and in the cloud, that's where we see what's going to happen to accelerate digital transformation. And so, this notion of yes, thought about as storage before, customers are demanding more for their data and they need data services, especially in hybrid environments to really be able to drive their business. >> The old expression, "Position it, they will come." And you guys have done a good job with the data. Okay, now let's get to the customer reality. You have to go out and do the tactical marketing. They're busy, right? There's a lot of noise out there. We just came back from New York and our Big Data NYC event that we ran in conjunction with Strata, which is a separate event, and it's clear they don't want the hype. They want reality. The rubber's hitting the road because they're so busy, and with the the security and the governance challenges- GDPR, for instance, in Europe is a huge pressure point for data. A lot of challenges but they want the magic. (laughter) It should be easy, right? But it's not. How do you guys go out day to day and take that to the field message? What's your strategy? >> Well, you talked about changing the world with data. And it feels like a lofty promise, but we really believe that when we come down to the purpose of why NetApp exists, it is to empower our customers to change the world with data and that's something that NetApp has been focused on not just for today, but the 25 years of history, and then also into the future. So what makes that the reality? Well number one, they want something that's simple. And so this notion of simplicity, and no matter how they think about managing or optimizing their data, it's got to be simple and easy to manage. Optimized to protect, I think data protection is critically important. Things about safeguarding data across its life cycle. and I think that NetApp has always been focused on how to make sure data is secure and protected. And that now is what we're seeing in the cloud too. So, all the relationships and partnerships that we've been creating and solidifying, AWS has been for the last couple years, we've had some latest`announcements of what we're doing to really make sure we have stronger data protection in multi-cloud environments. Obviously, today from what we're doing with Microsoft Azure, in really providing- Not even having to know how to manage storage, you can do it easily in Azure, and- >> No, I'm sorry. I really love this, this message from NetApp. As a traditional technologist, I understand NetApp disrupting the original storage CN Market with Fowlers, you guys were one of the first in the cloud with AWS, so from a trusted partner inside of the infrastructure team, I understand the vision of NetApp. But the transformation also means that you're starting to expand that conversation beyond just that single customer of the storage admin, of the infrastructure group. How is that messaging been going towards that new group of customers within your customers who have said, "NetApp? Isn't that a storage company?" How is that transformation been going? >> (laughs) You know, when we talk about reinventing, NetApp is reinventing itself. And that's what we're going through right now. And what we see is, is that the customers that we know and love, the storage admins and the storage architects, those are definitely tried-and-true and we love our relationships with them. But we see that the demands around data are growing and those demands are starting to reach more into DevOps, application developers, definitely into cloud enterprise architects as we think about cloud environments. The CIO is now under more pressure to think through how- They have a mandate to move to the cloud. Now what? But who do they want to move with? Someone that they've trusted before, and by the way, because we've been first, and because we're so open with all our relationships with the cloud providers, why not move with us? Because we can help them think through it. >> So you're keeping the core. You're not pivoting off the core, you're building on top of the core, extending that. Is that what you're saying? >> We're building off of a really great foundation of who we've had as customers all along. We're establishing new relationships, though, as well, with cloud enterprise architects, and today, we actually just had here at Insight our first executive summit, where we brought together CIOs and CTOs and really talked about what's happening with data and organizations, what's happening with data that's being disruptive, what's happening if you want to thrive, based on data as well. >> There used to be an old expression back in the day when Polaroid was around, "What's the new Polaroid picture of something?" Now it's Instagram, so I have to ask this question. What is the new Instagram picture of NetApp with the customers that you have and for customers now in the data space, there's a lot of data conversations happening. What is that picture of NetApp? What should they know about NetApp? >> NetApp is in the cloud. >> Yeah, I love that messaging that NetApp is in the cloud. And how important is that moving forward? Especially as we look at technology such as ONTAP. They have been there from the beginning. I love the NFS on Azure story, but that's powered by ONTAP, which I kind of- It took me a few minutes to kind of get it, because I'm thinking, "ONTAP in Azure, that's bringing the old to the new." But that's not exactly what it is. What messaging do you want customers to get out of something like an NFS in Azure? >> We want them to understand that they don't have to know anything about storage to be able to protect and manage their data. No matter what environment that they're in. >> And by the way, we've been looking at and commenting critically on The Cube many events now that multi-cloud is a pipe dream. Now I say that only as folks know me. It's real. Customers want multi-cloud, but multi-cloud has been defined as, "Oh, I run 365 on Azure, and I got some analytics on Redshift on Amazon, I do some stuff on-prem. That's considered multi-cloud because there happen to be stuff on multiple clouds. You guys are doing something with cloud orchestrate that's quite interesting. It truly is multiple clouds in the sense that you can move data, if I get this right, across clouds. >> Jean: That's right. >> So it's in a complete transparent way, seamless way, so I don't have to code anything. Is that true? If that's true, then you might be one of the first multi-cloud use cases. >> We are one of the first multi-cloud use cases. We have created the data fabric, which is really looking at how do you seamlessly integrate across multiple clouds or on-prem environments? The data fabric, we've been talking about this vision for a couple of years. What we're seeing now is customers are seeing it come to reality. And now that we have more and more relationships expanding, as we mentioned we've been building SAS offerings with AWS for a couple years, we just had the big announcement today with Microsoft Azure. We're working with IBM Cloud. We're also working with Google Cloud, Alibaba, so as we think about a seamless data fabric, they want frictionless movement in and out of the cloud. >> Jean, I got to change gears for a second, because one of the things we've been observing over the past couple of months, certainly we were at the Open Source Summit, Linux Foundation. Open source is growing exponentially now. You've seen the new onboarding of developers in general and enterprise is going to take the bulk of that. Companies are supplying personnel to contribute on open source projects. That's continuing to happen. Nothing new there. But it's starting to change the game. You see Blockchain out there, getting some traction, ICOs and all that hype, but it points to one thing. Communities are really valuable. So as a marketer, I know you were at IBM, very community-oriented, very open source oriented, the role of communities is going to be super important as customers discover- So marketing is changing from batch marketing, you know, surge email marketing to real-time organic with communities. It's not just have a social handle. Really, have you guys looked at the B2B marketing transformation as customers start to make selections and take opinions in the new organic communities, because you have people in these projects, in open source, who are making decisions based on content. What's your view on communities and the importance of communities? >> Well, we believe highly in communities. Our A-Team is a community with us that is so strong, and they're our biggest advocates. They get brought in very, very early on in terms of learning about our new technologies and learning our story and understanding our strategy and where we're moving. I think you may have talked to some of our A-Team members before. >> John: Quite strong, very strong. >> But they are an amazing group of people and we believe highly that their advocacy is what is really going to help us to stay in touch and be really close to these new buyers as well. >> And you've got to really internalize that too in the company. Operationally, any best practices you can share with other CMOs? 'Cause this is a challenge for a lot of marketers is, how do you operationalize something new? >> Yes, well, we're finding that this notion of reinvention and it starts with the company itself. And it starts with their own employees. So when we talk about the shift from storage to data, we're even having our own employees talk about their own data story and how do they connect data. George talked about his data story, actually, on the main stage in our keynote the other day. But connecting to that's been really important. This notion of transforming to think about these new customers and new buyers, it starts with the customer needs, it's not about a product-out discussion. And so, a new story to a new buyer, relevancy, what's happening in their industry, and then engagement, engagement, engagement. >> I've been following NetApp since they were start-up and they went public, great story. They have a DNA of reinvention. David Hitz is going to to come out, I'm sure. We'll talk about that, because he's been an entrepreneur, but he's also had that entrepreneurial DNA. It's kind of still in the company, so my question to you is, from a personal perspective, what have you learned or observed at NetApp during this reinvention, not a pivot, it's not at all. It's more of an inflection point for NetApp and a new way, a new way to engage with customers, a new way to build products, a new way to do software development, a new way to use data. This is a theme we're seeing. What's your personal observation, learnings that you could share? >> Well, in my first month, what I really learned is just the absolute amazing culture of what NetApp has and this notion of we're always embracing what our customers want to where we move. So what our customer wants, we move with it. We embrace it holistically. Years and years ago, you know, Linux and Windows. A couple of years later, virtualization, virtualized environments. Could've killed us. Made us stronger. Now, embracing the cloud. A lot of our customers say, "I would have canceled the meeting with you, but now I understand that you're interested in the cloud and that you're in the cloud, I've totally changed my mind." And we say, "We love the cloud. We embrace the cloud holistically." >> You guys are progressive. I've noticed it's a competitive strategy kind of theory but as the old expression goes, "You got to eat your own to get to the new market. Some companies will milk the market share dry and then can't get to the new model. This is the reinvention challenge. When do you stop making profits to build for the future? It's a tough call. >> It is, but that's why we listen to what our customers say. And so, when they talked about wanting to move to the cloud a few years ago, we said, "We're going to be the first to holistically embrace the cloud." >> Okay, so you got the NetApp Insight 2017 going on in Berlin. Okay, that brings up the question, because it's in Germany, so I have to ask. GDPR has been super hot. The global landscape, how is that going on for NetApp? Obviously you have some experience in outside the US. It's not always the US, North America centric world. What's the global story for NetApp? >> It's not. I lived in China and Singapore, and I know that there are demands that are not just US-centric. When we talk about Germany, I was just there a few months ago, and this notion of how do we start to address the articles that are in GDPR that help to make sure that we have the right compliance and protection for data inside of a country and inside of Europe. We actually have expertise in that area. We've been actually consulting and talking with customers about what they want to do with data compliance and we're being asked now to say, "How does NetApp help address those articles? How do we come back with solutions to help control data and make sure we have the right access of data?" So, we're already consulting with customers. We know it's a top priority, and we have expertise to be able to help. >> We had Sheila FitzPatrick on. She's the Chief Privacy Officer. Very colorful, very dynamic, a lot of energy. >> Jean: She is. (laughs) >> She's going to slap anyone around who says you don't bolt on privacy. Good policy conversations, the policies converging in with that. It's interesting, the global landscape- The Cube will be in China next week for the Alibaba Cloud Conference, so we're going to go report, see what's going on there, so huge international challenge around regulations and policy. Does that affect the marketing at all? Because policy kind of is data privacy and security. Security super hot, obviously. Data security is number- A big thing. How does policy intersect with the technology? How as a CMO do you get that realized and put into action? >> Well, I think basing on the foundation that we're always optimized to protect. That's one of our key foundations of why people choose NetApp. We definitely know that there are other demands that are happening in local markets. I was just in Australia few weeks ago and was meeting with the New South Wales government, which they've had a mandate that all of the agencies need to use their own cloud platform. They've been working with NetApp to ensure that they can have the right data management solutions on that platform. And from a marketing perspective, we embrace that. And so we work with, whether it's Telstar, we're working with New South Wales, we're thinking about how do we ensure that that message is strong, because we know customers there have different demands than just what's in the US. >> So when you get CIOs and and senior executives together at a summit like you guys had over the past few days, ideas start to percolate, problem start to come across. What was some of the biggest policy concerns throughout those conversations? Was it GDPR? Was it something else? What's top-of-mind? >> What we're hearing top-of-mind right now is data governance. And I think that that could be towards data compliance in terms of GDPR for Europe. I think it expands beyond Europe, though. I just heard, like I said, in Australia, where they're having demands based on the government of what's needed to be really driven through a cloud platform. We're hearing through our customers in the last couple weeks about if I'm moving to the cloud, number one, I want to have seamless transition during the move in or out of the cloud, but I got to make sure I've got the right governance model in place. >> So we've heard this repeatedly. Customers moved into the cloud. How many customer are coming to you saying, "You know what, for whatever reason, whether it's cost, agility, the overall capability we thought we'd have available in the cloud, not really what we thought it would be. We need help moving it back." And what is that conversation like? >> Well, it's a conversation that we're able to help with pretty easily. Right now, we have had customers that have either had one, a cloud mandate, so they got to think about how am I going to move all my data to the cloud. Once they actually start getting into the detail, we do a design workshop where we help them think about maybe there's not all workloads going to the cloud. Maybe some workloads go in the cloud. We have had a customer who did move the majority of workloads in the cloud and then decided, actually, we think we'll get better cost performance and better efficiencies if we actually have those back on-prem. We said, "No problem. We can help you with that too." And I think that's the beauty of what we talked about with data fabric is, we're able to help them think through, no matter where they want their data, on-prem or in the cloud, we can help them. >> Jean, thanks for coming up here. I know your time is super valuable. I got to get one more point in, 'cause I want to make sure we get that out there. Public sector. NetApp's position strong, getting better? What's your thoughts? A quick update on public sector. >> We are very, very strong on public sector. We've actually had a strong presence in public sector with our customers for many years. And we're continuing to help them think about too how they start to look at cloud environments. >> All right, Jean English, CMO here on The Cube. Getting the hook here in the time. She's super busy. Thanks for coming. Congratulations- >> Jean: Thank you. >> On great positioning and looking forward to chatting further at The Cube. Live coverage here, Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay. I'm John Furrier, Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>from San Francisco. It's the queue covering our essay conference. 2020. San Francisco Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media's >>Welcome Back Around Here at the Cube. Coverage for our conference. Mosconi, South Floor. Bring you all the action day one of three days of cube coverage where the security game is changing, the big players are making big announcements. The market's changing from on premise to cloud. Then hybrid Multi cloud was seeing that wave coming. A great guest here. Barr, our VP of product strategy and co founder of the Mystery, was acquired by Palo Alto Networks. Worries employed now, Rishi. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Absolutely happy to be here. So, first of all, great journey for your company. Closed a year ago. Half a 1,000,000,000. Roughly give or take 60. Congratulations. Thank you. Big accomplishments. You guys were taken out right in the growth phase. Now at Palo Alto Networks, which we've been following, you know, very careful. You got a new CMO over there, Jean English? No, we're very well. We're very bullish on Palo Alto. Even though that the on premise transitions happening cloud. You guys are well positioned. How's things going things are going fantastic. We're investing a lot in the next Gen security business across the board, as mentioned Prisma Cloud is big business. And then on the other side, which is what I'm part of the cortex family focused on the Security operations center and the efficiencies That's fantastic and, ah, lot off product innovations, investment and the customer pull from an operations perspective. So very excited. You guys had a big announcement on Monday, and then yesterday was the earnings, which really kind of points to the trend that we're seeing, which is the wave to the cloud, which you're well positioned for this transition going on. I want to get to the news first. Then we get into some of the macro industry questions you guys announced the X ore, which is redefining orchestration. Yes. What is this about? What's this news about? Tell us. >> So this news is about Mr was acquired about a year ago as well. This is taking that Mr Platform and expanding it on, expanding it to include a very core piece, which is Intel management. If you look at a traditional saw, what has happened is soccer teams have had the same dead and over the last few years acquired a sword platform such as a mystery security orchestration, automation and response platform. But the Edge Intel team has always been still separate the threat Intel feeds that came in with separate. With this, we are expanding the power of automation and applying doc to the threat intelligence as well. That is, thread intelligence, current state of the art right now. So the current state of the art of threat intelligence is are the larger organizations typically subscribe to a lot of faith, feeds open source feeds and aggregate them. But the challenge is to aggregate them the sit in a repository and nobody knows what to do with them. So the operationalization of those feeds is completely missing. >> So basically, that is going to have data pile. Corpus is sitting there. No one touches it, and then everyone has to. It's a heavy lift. It's a heavy lift, and nobody knows. Cisco sees the value coming out of it. How do you proactively hunt using those? How do you put them to protecting proactively to explain cortex X, or what is it? And what's the value? So the cortex X or as a platform. There are four core pieces, three off which for the core tenants of the misto since the big one is automation and orchestration. So today we roughly integrate with close to 400 different products security and I t products. Why are the FBI on let customers build these work flows come out of the box with close to 80 or 90 different workloads. The idea of these workloads is being able to connect to one product for the data go to another taken action there Automation, orchestration builds a visual book second s case management and this is very critical, right? I mean, if you look at the process side of security, we have never focused as an industry and the process and the human side of security. So how do you make sure every security alert on the process the case management escalation sl A's are all managed. So that's a second piece off cortex. Third collaboration. One of the core tenants of Mr Waas. We heard from customers that analysts do not talk to each other effectively on when they do. Nobody captures that knowledge. So the misto has an inbuilt boardroom which now Cortex X or has the collaboration war room on that is now available to be able to chat among analysts. But not only that charged with the board take actions. The fourth piece, which is the new expanded platform, is the personal management to be able to now use the power of orchestration, automation collaboration, all for threat intelligence feeds as well. Not only the alerts >> so and so you're adding in the threat. Intelligence feeds, yes. So is that visualize ai on the machine Learning on that? How is that being process in real time? How does that on demand work for that fills. So the biggest piece is applying the automation and intelligence to automatically score that on being able to customize the scoring the customer's needs. Customized confidence score perfect. And once you have the high fidelity indicators automatically go block them as an example. If you get a very high fidelity IOC from FBI that this particular domain is the militias domain, you would want to block that in. Your firewall is executed immediately, and that is not happening today. That is the core, and that's because of the constraint is I don't know the data the way we don't know the data and it's manual. Some human needs to review it. Some human needs to go just not being surfaced, just not. So let's get back into some of the human piece. I love the collaboration piece. One of things that I hear all the time in my cube interviews across all the hundreds of events we go to is the human component you mentioned. Yes, people have burnt out. I mean, like the security guys. I mean, the joke was CIOs have good days once in a while, CSOs don't have any good days, and it's kind of a job board pejorative to that. But that's the reality. Is that it works? Yes. We actually okay, if you have another job. Talking of jokes, we have this. Which is what do you call and overwork security analyst. A security analyst, because every one of them >>is over word. >>So this is a huge thing. So, like the ai and some of the predictive analytics trend Is tourist personalization towards the analyst Exactly. This is a trend that we're seeing. What's your view on this? What? You're absolutely We're seeing that trend which is How do you make sure analyst gets to see the data they're supposed to see at the right time? Right. So there's one aspect is what do you bring up to the analyst? What is relevant and you bring it up at the right time to be able to use it. Respond with that. So that comes in one from an ML perspective and machine learning. And our cortex. XDR suite of products actually does a fantastic job of bringing very rich data to the analyst at the right time. And then the second is, can we help analyst respond to it? Can we take the repetitive work away from them with a playbook approach? And that's what the cortex platform brings to that. I love to riff on some future scenarios kind of. I won't say sci fi, but I got to roll a little bit of a future to me. I think security has to get to like a multi player gaming environment because imagine like a first person shooter game, you know where or a collaborative game where it's fun. Because once you start that collaboration, yes, then you're gonna have some are oi around. I saw that already. Don't waste your time or you get to know people. So sharing has been a big part? Yes. How soon do you think we're gonna get to an environment where I won't say like gaming? But that notion of a headset on I got some data. I know you are your reputation. I think your armor, you're you're certifications. Metaphorically putting. I think way have a lot of these aspects and I think it's a very critical point. You mentioned right one of the things which we call the virtual war room and like sex or I was pointing out the fact that you can have analysts sit in front of a collaboration war room not only charge for the appears but charged with a boat to go take care of. This is equivalent to remember that matrix movie plugging and says, you know how to fly this helicopter data and now I do. That's exactly what it is. I think we need to point move to a point where, no matter what the security tool is what your endpoint is, you should not have to learn every endpoint every time the normalization off, running those commands via the collaboration War Room should be dead. I would say we're starting to see in some of the customers are topics or they're using the collaboration war room to run those commands intractably, I would say, though, there's a big challenge. Security vendors do not do a good job normalizing that data, and that is where we're trying to reach you. First of all, you get the award for bringing up a matrix quote in The Cube interview. So props to that. So you have blue teams. Red teams picked the pill. I mean, people are people picking their teams. You know what's what's going on. How do you see the whole Red Team Blue team thing happening? I think that's a really good stuff happening. In my opinion, John, what's going on is right now so far, if you see if I go back three years our adversaries were are committing. Then we started to see this trend off red teaming automation with beach automation and bunch of companies starting to >>do that >>with Cortex X or on similar products, we're starting to now automate the blue team side of things, which is how do you automatically respond how do you protect yourself? How do you put the response framework back there? I think the next day and I'm starting to see is these things coming together into a unified platform where the blue team and the team are part of the same umbrella. They're sharing the data. They're sharing the information on the threat Intel chair. So I see we are a very, very good part. Of course, the adversities. I'm not gonna sit idle like you said about the Dev ops mindset. Heavens, notion of knowledge coming your way and having sharing packages all baked out for you. She doesn't do the heavy lifting. That's really the problem. The data is a problem. So much demand so much off it. And you don't know what is good and what is not. Great. Great conversation again. The Matrix reference about your journey. You've been an entrepreneur and sold. You had a great exit again. Politics is world class blue chip company in the industry public going through a transition. What's it like from an entrepreneur now to the big company? What's the opportunity is amazing. I think journey has been very quick. One. We saw some crazy growth with the misto on. Even after the acquisition, it's been incredibly fast pace. It's very interesting lot of one of the doctors like, Hey, you must be no resting is like, No, the journey is amazing. I think he s Polito Networks fundamentally believe that. We need to know where it really, really fast to keep the adversaries out on. But that's been the journey. Um, and we have accelerated, in fact, some of our product plans that we hard as a start up on delivering much faster. So the journey has been incredible, and we have been seeing that growth Will they picked you guys write up? There's no vesting interesting going on when you guys were on the uphill on the upslope growth and certainly relevance for Palo Alto. So clearly, you know, you haven't fun. People vested arrest when they checked out, You guys look like you're doing good. So I got to ask you the question that when you started, what was the original mission? Where is it now? I mean this Is there any deviation? What's been the kind? Of course you know, this is very, very relevant questions. It's very interesting. Right after the acquisition, we went and looked at a pitch deck, which we presented overseas in mid 2015. Believe it or not, the mission has not changed, not changing iron. It had the same competent off. How do you make the life off a security person? A security analyst? Easy. It's all the same mission by automating more by applying AI and learning to help them further by letting them collaborate. All the aspects off case management process, collaboration, automation. It's not changed. That's actually very powerful, because if you're on the same mission, of course you're adding more and more capabilities. But we're still on the same path on going on that. So every company's got their own little nuanced. Moore's Law for Intel. What made you guys successful was that the culture of Dev ops? It sounds like you guys had a certain either it was cut in grain. I think I would say, by the way, making things easy. But you got to do it. You got to stay the course. What was that? I think that's a fundamental cultural feature. Yeah, there's one thing really stand by, and I actually tweeted about a few weeks ago, this which is every idea, is as good as good as its execution. So there's two things between really focus on which is customer focused on. We were really, really portable about customer needs to get the product needs to use the product, customer focus and execution. As we heard the customers loud and clear, every small better. And that's what we also did. You guys have this agile mindset as well, absolutely agile mindset and the development that comes with the customer focus because way kind of these micro payments customer wants this like, why do they want this? What is the end goal? Attributed learner. Move on to make a decision making line was on Web services Way debate argue align! Go Then go. And then once you said we see great success story again Startup right out of the gate 2015. Acquire a couple years later, conventions you and your team and looking forward to seeing your next Palo Alto Networks event. Or thanks for coming on. Great insight here on the cube coverage. I'm John Furrier here on the ground floor of our S e commerce on Mosconi getting all the signal extracting it from the noise here on the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, yeah,

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

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamOn 2018 brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamOn 2018, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Stu, always great working with you. Bruce Shaw is here, he's the Senior Director of Global Alliances and Industry Solutions at NetApp. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, I got to start out with NetApp, I mean, we've followed NetApp for decades, ya know, from the very beginning back when I was at IDC, Stu, you were probably still in your mother's womb. (laughing) But you guys are back in a big way, I mean, for a while there it looked vulnerable. You took advantage of the Dell EMC merger. You're gaining share again, you're growing, stock price is up, there's a spring in your step, what's going on? >> Well, a lot of things are going on. I think we've had a lot of leadership additions to the company, Henri Richard joined and took over as the CSO with the company. We've got a new CMO in Jean English. But more importantly, a lot of the areas that we were late to the market, and candidly we've admitted we were late. We didn't have a good Flash story a couple years ago. We've been very aggressive with Flash over the last 24 to 18 months. We're now the fastest growing Flash storage provider out in the market, and we think we'll exit this year as number one. In fact, we think that's the current course and trajectory. We're very happy with where that's going. The FlexPod partnership with Cisco was great this past year. We had a record year in Converged infrastructure, which was a down market, we picked up about 13 points a share according to IDC, so a lot of the cylinders are starting to fire, but the one that is probably the biggest and the most shocking for folks is three, four years ago, the belief was that cloud was going to kill on-prem storage for companies like NetApp. I think the one thing that they did right ahead of the curve was they embraced the cloud. They've got great partnerships with Google, Amazon, the hyperscalers, and cloud strategy and the business that drives the company there is the fastest part of the company, and Anthony Lye runs that team, and it's doing an amazing job. >> Explain how, and you're absolutely right, many, most, frankly myself at times, felt that way. Explain how cloud is a tailwind and not just a one-way street into the roach motel. >> Oh well, there isn't an enterprise today that isn't thinking about cloud in some way, shape, or form, right? Now, ya have prognosticators on either side saying it's all going to the cloud or something less than that, but the truth is when you look at a strategy like ONTAP and the ability to move your data, whether it's on-prem or to the cloud and manage it through our data fabric story, that's where NetApp really starts coming into their own. I think, again, that's where we've been able to take advantage, and it's not just having it one way or the other or being good just with the hyperscalers or good with the guys that want to be secure because most companies do a hybrid story, and they want to bit of both. >> Well, I think the one thing that I would observe about NetApp, having followed the company for many, many years, which I think gives you an advantage, is NetApp really has always had storage services in software that were largely decoupled from the hardware, and that allowed you to get into cloud early, don't ya think, Stu? >> Yeah, absolutely, and Bruce, we're here at VeeamOn, and their message sounds a lot like that to me, so maybe help explain, we were just talking to Veeam's CMO, when you hear some of the descriptions of storage services, software, multicloud, and everything, NetApp and Veeam sound alike. How are they complementary in, ya know, maybe where do they bump up against each other, yeah? >> Yeah, well, we both compete in the same market, which is storage, so of course, there's areas where we're going to compete with each other, but we are very complementary in terms of the story and the markets that we serve, right? NetApp is incredible strong in the enterprise. Veeam has great commercial channel presence, so from a route to market there's a lot of complementary stuff we do with each other. Price point, in terms of where we hit the market and the things that we go after, we have a lot of opportunity where there's not overlap to help each out to the point they're now, the relationship's evolved over the last four years where we're actually doing OEM of each other's products. We've got our E-Series we just announced yesterday that we're OEMing with these guys, which again is targeted at exactly those markets. The story between the two that we're both at our core not hardware companies, not storage companies, but data management companies really is where this starts to come together and play well. The fact that they're mutually supportive of each other makes for a really strong value proposition for the customer and the channel, especially the guys like the service providers or ya know, hybrid cloud providers, it's a big time story for them. >> So you're growing with, the partnership with Veeam is growing. >> Right. >> Ya got a combination of trends that become tailwinds, but then you've got execution. Can you explain what are those tailwinds, and what's the execution ethos with the partnership? >> We are a channel-only company for all intents and purposes. >> Dave: Oh yeah, I don't know what the number is now, but you've always been very, very high performing. >> Yeah, I know, so we look at businesses that we drive, and channel is at the core of what we do, so when you have a tailwind like, ya know, where we are with Flash and the growth there, the channel partners are making more money, the programs that are coming for them, we're not taking business that they're doing today and pushing it towards the cloud. Again, we're talking about the story that's transitory between the two, so for a lot of the channel providers that are out there getting in the market, that's a very powerful story for them. That it's not a competitive business, we're not going to try to create our own cloud service to take away from them. We want to help them as they migrate between the two. >> All right, Bruce, one of the other areas we're hearing a lot about at this show that I think lines up with NetApp is the analytics and AI, can you maybe talk about how that ties into the products? >> Yeah, I mean, you look at a lot of these markets like AI, like analytics in terms of what companies are doing, it sheds off a tremendous amount of data, right? And that data is at the heart of what they want to analyze and go through, and when they bring those things to market, the goal is how I quickly move it from where I'm capturing it to where I need it, and ONTAP does a really good job of doing that in terms of being able to take the data to where they need it, whether it's at the edge or whether it's back at the core of the company, so that you can actually do the real work with it and gain the insights that drive the business. >> Bruce, what's the resale agreement that you have with Veeam, can you explain that? >> We have Veeam on our price list. Our sales reps can sell Veeam, can be compensated for it, vice versa, they can absolutely hook in and drive away with NetApp, and now that we're getting products like E-Series where their product is embedded in ours, that only strengthens that kind of motion. So for a NetApp sales rep today, if they have an opportunity where Veeam is needed on it as part of the offering, it's absolutely in their wheelhouse to go sell it, and they get the sale level of love and attention from quote and comp standpoint that they would if it was NetApp only products. >> So this is kind of interesting innovation that Veeam, I think, has been out in front of, they, and I dunno how they do it, Stu, but I think Veeam understands the lifetime value of a customer and is willing to make, put sweat equity into a deal as part of a partnership to make it transparent to a partner sales force. >> Yeah absolutely. >> That's innovation in business model. >> Absolutely, we're very proud of our sales force and the work that they're able to do. We view ourselves as kind of the last big enterprise standalone storage company that's out there doing this, and I run strategic alliances, and some partners integrate really well with our sales guys. Others, it's more of a, ya know, it requires more work. To your point, Veeam has done a superb job at identifying how and where they play with our folks and getting together where we go to market together. >> It's interesting, we used to, ya know, several years ago now, ask the question can NetApp remain independent. We've seen all these independent storage companies kind of go away. Used to have this conversation with David Scott at 3PAR all the time, EMC itself wasn't able to maintain it, and then NetApp got to the point where it was almost too big for an acquisition, and although stock price was down, everybody, NetApp was the rumor of MNA more than any company I can think of in the storage business, but now you're seeing sort of antithetical to what most people expected, it's kind of like the cloud we were talking about before, storage companies emerged. Pure was the first one over a billion since NetApp. What are your thoughts, and what's that, I wonder what, you guys must talk in the hallways about that whole, the dynamics of the industry. It seems like it's still a viable business model to be best of breed. >> It's very viable, so I took over running the strategic alliances at the beginning of January, and my dance card's full. I can't believe the number of folks that are calling up wanting to partner. I think we've gotten much more mature in terms of how we view the market and our ability to get strategically with other companies to be successful, and there absolutely is always going to be a place out there for a best of breed story. Customers want the best technology that they can get to handle their business needs, and if we partner with great partners, whether it's Veeam or others to provide that for them, I think the viability of NetApp only gets stronger not weaker. >> It's interesting because now ya got NetApp, Pure, Nutanix, soon to be Veeam, as billion dollar independent pure play companies in the storage business. Isilon couldn't get there, Data Domain couldn't get there, Compellent couldn't get there, 3PAR couldn't get there, Lefthand couldn't get, EqualLogic, I can go down the list. They were never able to reach that escape velocity, and maybe it is cloud, maybe cloud is that weird tailwind for people who can figure out how to take advantage of cloud and hybrid cloud, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think it is, number one. I think also the companies that you mentioned at various times, and I'm a hardware industry dinosaur, I've been around forever. A lot of those companies you talk about the difficult moment from them was hey, we're a storage company, now we want to add compute or now we want to go into this part of the market that put them at odds with the guys they were partnering with. George, our CEO, has been absolutely maniacal with his vision of our path forward is managing data, period. Whatever that form takes, we don't need to be a compute company, we don't need to be a networking company, we want to be a data company. I think how that then drives the decisions, whether it's partnering with cloud, whether it's going into new markets with HCI, even if it's things about transforming the legacy data center from traditional data center and how it's managed on-prem to something that's all Flash driven and much more efficient and much more programmable than it was in the past, so it's easier to administer, those are the areas that we can go innovate, and as long as we're partnering with the right partners out in the industry, that makes us a very good viable destination for the customer without worrying about well, do we have a compute node, are we in the server business now, are we suddenly in the switch business? Those are things that are not even on our radar. >> Yeah, I mean, you guys are in a unique position from that standpoint. You're very large now, you're the largest independent storage company, so everybody wants to work with you. You don't bump up into these adjacencies, and you can make bets, you can place your chips in areas whereas some of the startups, there's tons of innovation, but it's really hard to hit that escape. The amount of resources that you need, the money you need for promotion, the talent war that's going on out there, the go-to-market challenges, the partner challenges, so you guys are in a pretty good position right now. >> We really are, and I think we've actually done a lot of the restructuring internally to continue that and capitalize on it. Probably the biggest change, which outside the company, most folks wouldn't notice immediately, is that we moved at the beginning of this year to a three distinct business unit structure where we're focusing on three parts of the business to go forward. We've got our cloud business unit, which is driving into, as I said, the hyperscalers under Anthony Lye. We've got cloud data center, which is more of the new technologies like HCI and Converge and object storage technology like StorageGRID, and that's, right now that's an incredibly fast growing business for us. Then, of course, we've got our traditional storage software infrastructure business where we have products like E-Series and modernizing the data center, which is primarily driven with this transition to Flash. You've got three BUs now that are maniacally focused on the different areas of the market where we see here's an immediate opportunity in Flash. Here's a slightly longer opportunity in things like hybrid cloud and HCI and Converge infrastructure and a much longer term bet was how does the cloud really become a piece where we're managing between all of those. It lets us be a lot nimble between it. It's almost like three subbusinesses where we're going to market. >> Yeah, Dave, and actually that aligns perfectly with the research we've been doing for over five years from server stand and true private cloud, you've got the hyperscale, you've got the transformation locally in spanning those two, and then you've got that transition from the traditional. >> Oh, I think it's a sound strategy, and it'll serve us well in the years to come. >> There's obviously a lot of noise about artificial intelligence in the marketplace. You've got some companies trying to position to be the platform for machine intelligence or artificial intelligence, what's NetApp's point of view on that? >> Well certainly, we share some of that, but again, I think at the end of the day for us, it's much more important about fine, wherever I'm capturing that artificial intelligence is not likely the place where I'm going to do a lot of the analytics and work on it, so it really does come down to, ya know, am I moving it up to the cloud to do that work, where am I making my big insights, where am I mining through it, and then how am I relating that back, whether it's at the edge or whether it's at the core data center, and again, we think with ONTAP, with the partners that we're going to market with for AI, for ML, IoT, that's the difference maker for us at the end of the day. It's not that we're just another storage company storing the telemetry data off of a car for AI, we're putting it into a format and a form that's usable quickly, efficiently, real time, where Tesla can go make a decision on the car right now, not days, weeks, months from now. >> All right, Bruce, well hey, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time and good luck. >> Enjoyed having me, thank you. >> All right, great. >> Good to see you guys. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching VeeamOn 2018, this is theCUBE.