(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE, in Palo Alto for "CUBE Conversation" with Chris Jones, Director of Product Management at Platform9. I've got a series of questions, had a great conversation earlier. Chris, I have a couple questions for you, what do you think? >> Let's do it, John. >> Okay, how does Platform9 Solution, you- can it be used on any infrastructure anywhere, cloud, edge, on-premise? >> It can, that's the beauty of our control plane, right? It was born in the cloud, and we primarily deliver that SaaS, which allows it to work in your data center, on bare metal, on VMs, or with public cloud infrastructure. We now give you the ability to take that control plane, install it in your data center, and then use it with anything, or even in air gap. And that includes capabilities with bare metal orchestration as well. >> Second question. How does Platform9 ensure maximum uptime, and proactive issue resolution? >> Oh, that's a good question. So if you come to Platform nine we're going to talk about always on assurance. What is driving that is a system of three components around self-healing, monitoring, and proactive assistance. So our software will heal broken things on nodes, right? If something stops running that should be running, it will attempt to restart that. We also have monitoring that's deployed with everything. So you build a cluster in AWS, well, we put open source monitoring agents, that are actually Prometheus, on every single node. That means it's resilient, right? So if you lose a node, you don't lose monitoring. But that data importantly comes back to our control plane, and that's the control plane that you can put in your data center as well. That data is what alerts us, and you as a user, anytime of the day that something's going wrong. Let's say etcd latency, good example, etcd is going slow. We'll find out, we might not be able to take restorative action immediately, but we're definitely going to reach out and say,, "You have a problem, let's get ahead of this and let's prevent that from becoming a bigger problem." And that's what we're delivering. When we say always on assurance, we're talking about self-healing, we're talking about remote monitoring, we're talking about being proactive with our customers, not waiting for the phone call or the support desk ticket saying, "Oh we think something's not working." Or worse, the customer has an outage. >> Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Can you explain the process for implementing Platform9 within a company's existing infrastructure. >> Are we doing air gap, or on-prem or SaaS approached? SaaS approach I think is by far the easiest, right? We can build a dedicated Platform9 control plane instance in a manner of minutes, for any customer. So when we do a proof of concept or onboarding, we just literally put in an email address, put in the name you want for your fully qualified domain name, and your instance is up. From that point onwards, the user can just log in, and using our CLI, talk to any number of, say, virtual machines, or physical servers in their environment for, you know, doing this in a data center or colo, and say, "I want these to be my Kubernetes control plane nodes. Here's the five of them. Here's the VIP for the load balancing, the API server and here are all of my compute nodes." And that CLI will work with the SaaS control plane, and go and build the cluster. That's as simple as it, CentOS, Ubuntu, just plain old operating system. Our software takes care of all the prerequisites, installing all the pieces, putting down MetalLB, CoreDNS, Metrics Server, Kubernetes dashboard, etcd backups. You built some servers. That's essentially what you've done, and the rest is being handled by Platform9. It's as simple as that. >> Great, thanks for that. What are the two traditional paths for companies considering the cloud native journey? The two paths. >> The traditional paths. I think that's your engineering team running so fast that before you even realize that you've got, you know, 10 EKS clusters. Or, hey, we can do this. You know, I've got the I can build it mentality. Let's go DIY completely open source Kubernetes on our infrastructure, and we're going to piecemeal build it all up together. They're, I think the pathways that people traditionally look at this journey, as opposed to having that third alternative saying can I just consume it on my infrastructure, be it cloud or on-premise or at the edge. >> Third is the new way, you guys do that. >> That's been our focus since the company was, you know, brought together back in the open OpenStack days. >> Awesome, what's the makeup of your customer base? Is there a certain pattern to the size or environments that you guys work with? Is there a pattern or consistency to your customer base? >> It's a spread, right? We've got large enterprises like Juniper, and we go all the way down to people with 20, 30, 50 nodes in total. We've got people in banking and finance, we've got things all the way through to telecommunications and storage infrastructure. >> What's your favorite feature of Platform9? >> My favorite feature? You know, if I ask, should I say this as a pre-sales engineer, let me show you a favorite thing. My immediate response is, I should never do this. (John laughs) To me it's just being able to define my cluster and say, go. And in five minutes I have that environment, I can see everything that's running, right? It's all unified, it's one spot, right? I'm a cluster admin. I said I wanted three control plane, 25 workers. Here's the infrastructure, it creates it, and once it's built, I can see everything that's running, right? All the applications that are there. One UI, I don't have to go click around. I'm not trying to solve things or download things. It's the fact that it's unified and just delivered in one hit. >> What is the one thing that people should know about Platform9 that they might not know about it? >> I think it's that we help developers and engineers as much as we can help our operations teams. I think, for a long time we've sort of targeted that user and said, hey, we, we really help you. It's like, but why are they doing this? Why are they building any infrastructure or any cloud platform? Well, it's to run applications and services, to help their customers, but how do they get there? There's people building and writing those things, and we're helping them, right? For the last two years, we've been really focused on making it simple, and I think that's an important thing to know. >> Chris, thanks so much, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, John. >> Okay, that's theCUBE Q&A session here with Platform9. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome back to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Got a great conversation around Cloud Native, Cloud Native Journey, how enterprises are looking at Cloud Native and putting it all together. And it comes down to operations, developer productivity, and security. It's the hottest topic in technology. We got Chris Jones here in the studio, director of Product Management for Platform9. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Hey, thanks. >> So when we always chat about, when we're at KubeCon. KubeConEU is coming up and in a few, in a few months, the number one conversation is developer productivity. And the developers are driving all the standards. It's interesting to see how they just throw everything out there and whatever gets adopted ends up becoming the standard, not the old school way of kind of getting stuff done. So that's cool. Security Kubernetes and Containers are all kind of now that next level. So you're starting to see the early adopters moving to the mainstream. Enterprises, a variety of different approaches. You guys are at the center of this. We've had a couple conversations with your CEO and your tech team over there. What are you seeing? You're building the products. What's the core product focus right now for Platform9? What are you guys aiming for? >> The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers. We don't want people going back to what I've been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It's, hey, I've been told to do something. I kicked off this Container initiative. I need to run my software somewhere. I'm just going to go figure it out. We want to keep those people productive. At the same time we want to enable velocity for our operations teams, be it PlatformOps or DevOps. >> Take us through in your mind and how you see the industry rolling out this Cloud Native journey. Where do you see customers out there? Because DevOps have been around, DevSecOps is rocking, you're seeing AI, hot trend now. Developers are still in charge. Is there a change to the infrastructure of how developers get their coding done and the infrastructure, setting up the DevOps is key, but when you add the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise, what changes? What is the, what is the, I guess what is the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise these days? >> The Cloud Native journey or the change? When- >> Let's start with the, let's start with what they want to do. What's the goal and then how does that happen? >> I think the goal is that promise land. Increased resiliency, better scalability, and overall reduced costs. I've gone from physical to virtual that gave me a higher level of density, packing of resources. I'm moving to Containers. I'm removing that OS layer again. I'm getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I'm running Kubernetes. What does that, what does that fundamentally do to my operations? Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I'm running and how it's running so it fits that infrastructure? And that's the reality, is you can't just take a Container and drop it into Kubernetes and say, hey, I'm now Cloud Native. I've got reduced cost, or I've got better resiliency. There's things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is a Cloud Native. And then there's what I think is one of the largest shifts of virtual machines to containers. When I was in the world of application performance monitoring, we would see customers saying, well, my engineering team have this Java app, and they said it needs a VM with 12 gig of RAM and eight cores, and that's what we gave it. But it's running slow. I'm working with the application team and you can see it's running slow. And they're like, well, it's got all of its resources. One of those nice features of virtualization is over provisioning. So the infrastructure team would say, well, we gave it, we gave it all a RAM it needed. And what's wrong with that being over provisioned? It's like, well, Java expects that RAM to be there. Now all of a sudden, when you move to the world of containers, what we've got is that's not a set resource limit, really is like it used to be in a VM, right? When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes. So instead of just being able to say, hey, I'm throwing over the fence and now it's just going to run on a VM, and that VMs got everything it needs. It's now really running on more, much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors. They are going to impact who's making that decision around resourcing. Because that Kubernetes concept of over provisioning and the virtualization concept of over provisioning are not the same. So when I look at this problem, it's like, well, what changed? Well, I'll do my scale tests as an application developer and tester, and I'd see what resources it needs. I asked for that in the VM, that sets the high watermark, job's done. Well, Kubernetes, it's no longer a VM, it's a Kubernetes manifest. And well, who owns that? Who's writing it? Who's setting those limits? To me, that should be the application team. But then when it goes into operations world, they're like, well, that's now us. Can we change those? So it's that amalgamation of the two that is saying, I'm a developer. I used to pay attention, but now I need to pay attention. And an infrastructure person saying, I used to just give 'em what they wanted, but now I really need to know what they've wanted, because it's going to potentially have a catastrophic impact on what I'm running. >> So what's the impact for the developer? Because, infrastructure's code is what everybody wants. The developer just wants to get the code going and they got to pay attention to all these things, or don't they? Is that where you guys come in? How do you guys see the problem? Actually scope the problem that you guys solve? 'Cause I think you're getting at I think the core issue here, which is, I've got Kubernetes, I've got containers, I've got developer productivity that I want to focus on. What's the problem that you guys solve? >> Platform operation teams that are adopting Cloud Native in their environment, they've got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes plus this fundamental change of how an app runs. What we're doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location. Be that an air gap environment like a, let's say a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G. That's one thing that we can deploy and achieve in a completely inaccessible environment all the way through to Platform9 running traditionally as SaaS, as we were born, that's remotely managing and controlling your Kubernetes environments on-premise AWS. That hybrid cloud experience that could be also Bare Metal, but it's our platform running your environments with our support there, 24 by seven, that's proactively reaching out. So it's removing a lot of that burden and the complications that come along with operating the environment and standing it up, which means all of a sudden your DevOps and platform operations teams can go and work with your engineers and application developers and say, hey, let's get, let's focus on the stuff that, that we need to be focused on, which is running our business and providing a service to our customers. Not figuring out how to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster, add new nodes, and configure all of the low level. >> I mean there are, that's operations that just needs to work. And sounds like as they get into the Cloud Native kind of ops, there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes wrong. Or you go, oops, what do we buy into? Because the CIOs, let's go, let's go Cloud Native. We want to, we got to get set up for the future. We're going to be Cloud Native, not just lift and shift and we're going to actually build it out right. Okay, that sounds good. And when we have to actually get done. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You got to spin things up and stand up the infrastructure. What specifically use case do you guys see that emerges for Platform9 when people call you up and you go talk to customers and prospects? What's the one thing or use case or cases that you guys see that you guys solve the best? >> So I think one of the, one of the, I guess new use cases that are coming up now, everyone's talking about economic pressures. I think the, the tap blows open, just get it done. CIO is saying let's modernize, let's use the cloud. Now all of a sudden they're recognizing, well wait, we're spending a lot of money now. We've opened that tap all the way, what do we do? So now they're looking at ways to control that spend. So we're seeing that as a big emerging trend. What we're also sort of seeing is people looking at their data centers and saying, well, I've got this huge legacy environment that's running a hypervisor. It's running VMs. Can we still actually do what we need to do? Can we modernize? Can we start this Cloud Native journey without leaving our data centers, our co-locations? Or if I do want to reduce costs, is that that thing that says maybe I'm repatriating or doing a reverse migration? Do I have to go back to my data center or are there other alternatives? And we're seeing that trend a lot. And our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those, those occurrences. So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds. And we've worked with a lot of those users and customers that we have and asked the questions, what's important? And today, when we look at the world of Cloud Native, you can run virtualization within Kubernetes. So you can, instead of running two separate platforms, you can have one. So all of a sudden, if you're looking to modernize, you can start on that new infrastructure stack that can run anywhere, Kubernetes, and you can start bringing VMs over there as you are containerizing at the same time. So now you can keep your application operations in one environment. And this also helps if you're trying to reduce costs. If you really are saying, we put that Dev environment in AWS, we've got a huge amount of velocity out of it now, can we do that elsewhere? Is there a co-location we can go to? Is there a provider that we can go to where we can run that infrastructure or run the Kubernetes, but not have to run the infrastructure? >> It's going to be interesting too, when you see the Edge come online, you start, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, KubeCon events we're going to be at, the conversation is not just about public cloud. And you guys obviously solve a lot of do-it-yourself implementation hassles that emerge when people try to kind of stand up their own environment. And we hear from developers consistency between code, managing new updates, making sure everything is all solid so they can go fast. That's the goal. And that, and then people can get standardized on that. But as you get public cloud and do it yourself, kind of brings up like, okay, there's some gaps there as the architecture changes to be more distributed computing, Edge, on-premises cloud, it's cloud operations. So that's cool for DevOps and Cloud Native. How do you guys differentiate from say, some the public cloud opportunities and the folks who are doing it themselves? How do you guys fit in that world and what's the pitch or what's the story? >> The fit that we look at is that third alternative. Let's get your team focused on what's high value to your business and let us deliver that public cloud experience on your infrastructure or in the public cloud, which gives you that ability to still be flexible if you want to make choices to run consistently for your developers in two different locations. So as I touched on earlier, instead of saying go figure out Kubernetes, how do you upgrade a hundred worker nodes in place upgrade. We've solved that problem. That's what we do every single day of the week. Don't go and try to figure out how to upgrade a cluster and then upgrade all of the, what I call Kubernetes friends, your core DNSs, your metrics server, your Kubernetes dashboard. These are all things that we package, we test, we version. So when you click upgrade, we've already handled that entire process. So it's saying don't have your team focused on that lower level piece of work. Get them focused on what is important, which is your business services. >> Yeah, the infrastructure and getting that stood up. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting, if you look at the market right now, you mentioned cost savings and recovery, obviously kind of a recession. I mean, people are tightening their belts for sure. I don't think the digital transformation and Cloud Native spend is going to plummet. It's going to probably be on hold and be squeezed a little bit. But to your point, people are refactoring looking at how to get the best out of what they got. It's not just open the tap of spend the cash like it used to be. Yeah, a couple months, even a couple years ago. So okay, I get that. But then you look at the what's coming, AI. You're seeing all the new data infrastructure that's coming. The containers, Kubernetes stuff, got to get stood up pretty quickly and it's got to be reliable. So to your point, the teams need to get done with this and move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> 'Cause there's more coming. I mean, there's a lot coming for the apps that are building in Data Native, AI-Native, Cloud Native. So it seems that this Kubernetes thing needs to get solved. Is that kind of what you guys are focused on right now? >> So, I mean to use a customer, we have a customer that's in AI/ML and they run their platform at customer sites and that's hardware bound. You can't run AI machine learning on anything anywhere. Well, with Platform9 they can. So we're enabling them to deliver services into their customers that's running their AI/ML platform in their customer's data centers anywhere in the world on hardware that is purpose-built for running that workload. They're not Kubernetes experts. That's what we are. We're bringing them that ability to focus on what's important and just delivering their business services whilst they're enabling our team. And our 24 by seven proactive management are always on assurance to keep that up and running for them. So when something goes bump at the night at 2:00am, our guys get woken up. They're the ones that are reaching out to the customer saying, your environments have a problem, we're taking these actions to fix it. Obviously sometimes, especially if it is running on Bare Metal, there's things you can't do remotely. So you might need someone to go and do that. But even when that happens, you're not by yourself. You're not sitting there like I did when I worked for a bank in one of my first jobs, three o'clock in the morning saying, wow, our end of day processing is stuck. Who else am I waking up? Right? >> Exactly, yeah. Got to get that cash going. But this is a great use case. I want to get to the customer. What do some of the successful customers say to you for the folks watching that aren't yet a customer of Platform9, what are some of the accolades and comments or anecdotes that you guys hear from customers that you have? >> It just works, which I think is probably one of the best ones you can get. Customers coming back and being able to show to their business that they've delivered growth, like business growth and productivity growth and keeping their organization size the same. So we started on our containerization journey. We went to Kubernetes. We've deployed all these new workloads and our operations team is still six people. We're doing way more with growth less, and I think that's also talking to the strength that we're bringing, 'cause we're, we're augmenting that team. They're spending less time on the really low level stuff and automating a lot of the growth activity that's involved. So when it comes to being able to grow their business, they can just focus on that, not- >> Well you guys do the heavy lifting, keep on top of the Kubernetes, make sure that all the versions are all done. Everything's stable and consistent so they can go on and do the build out and provide their services. That seems to be what you guys are best at. >> Correct, correct. >> And so what's on the roadmap? You have the product, direct product management, you get the keys to the kingdom. What is, what is the focus? What's your focus right now? Obviously Kubernetes is growing up, Containers. We've been hearing a lot at the last KubeCon about the security containers is getting better. You've seen verification, a lot more standards around some things. What are you focused on right now for at a product over there? >> Edge is a really big focus for us. And I think in Edge you can look at it in two ways. The mantra that I drive is Edge must be remote. If you can't do something remotely at the Edge, you are using a human being, that's not Edge. Our Edge management capabilities and being in the market for over two years are a hundred percent remote. You want to stand up a store, you just ship the server in there, it gets racked, the rest of it's remote. Imagine a store manager in, I don't know, KFC, just plugging in the server, putting in the ethernet cable, pressing the power button. The rest of all that provisioning for that Cloud Native stack, Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization is done remotely. So we're continuing to focus on that. The next piece that is related to that is allowing people to run Platform9 SaaS in their data centers. So we do ag app today and we've had a really strong focus on telecommunications and the containerized network functions that come along with that. So this next piece is saying, we're bringing what we run as SaaS into your data center, so then you can run it. 'Cause there are many people out there that are saying, we want these capabilities and we want everything that the Platform9 control plane brings and simplifies. But unfortunately, regulatory compliance reasons means that we can't leverage SaaS. So they might be using a cloud, but they're saying that's still our infrastructure. We're still closed that network down, or they're still on-prem. So they're two big priorities for us this year. And that on-premise experiences is paramount, even to the point that we will be delivering a way that when you run an on-premise, you can still say, wait a second, well I can send outbound alerts to Platform9. So their support team can still be proactively helping me as much as they could, even though I'm running Platform9s control plane. So it's sort of giving that blend of two experiences. They're big, they're big priorities. And the third pillar is all around virtualization. It's saying if you have economic pressures, then I think it's important to look at what you're spending today and realistically say, can that be reduced? And I think hypervisors and virtualization is something that should be looked at, because if you can actually reduce that spend, you can bring in some modernization at the same time. Let's take some of those nos that exist that are two years into their five year hardware life cycle. Let's turn that into a Cloud Native environment, which is enabling your modernization in place. It's giving your engineers and application developers the new toys, the new experiences, and then you can start running some of those virtualized workloads with KubeVirt, there. So you're reducing cost and you're modernizing at the same time with your existing infrastructure. >> You know Chris, the topic of this content series that we're doing with you guys is finding the right path, trusting the right path to Cloud Native. What does that mean? I mean, if you had to kind of summarize that phrase, trusting the right path to Cloud Native, what does that mean? It mean in terms of architecture, is it deployment? Is it operations? What's the underlying main theme of that quote? What's the, what's? How would you talk to a customer and say, what does that mean if someone said, "Hey, what does that right path mean?" >> I think the right path means focusing on what you should be focusing on. I know I've said it a hundred times, but if your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ah, I need Metrics Server to make something function. I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler and I need this other thing, now I need to manage that. That's not the right path. That's literally learning what other people have been learning for the last five, seven years that have been focused on Kubernetes solely. So the why- >> There's been a lot of grind. People have been grinding it out. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. They've been standing up the, when Kubernetes started, it was all the promise. >> Chris: Yep. >> And essentially manually kind of getting in in the weeds and configuring it. Now it's matured up. They want stability. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Not everyone can get down and dirty with Kubernetes. It's not something that people want to generally do unless you're totally into it, right? Like I mean, I mean ops teams, I mean, yeah. You know what I mean? It's not like it's heavy lifting. Yeah, it's important. Just got to get it going. >> Yeah, I mean if you're deploying with Platform9, your Ops teams can tinker to their hearts content. We're completely compliant upstream Kubernetes. You can go and change an API server flag, let's go and mess with the scheduler, because we want to. You can still do that, but don't, don't have your team investing in all this time to figure it out. It's been figured out. >> John: Got it. >> Get them focused on enabling velocity for your business. >> So it's not build, but run. >> Chris: Correct? >> Or run Kubernetes, not necessarily figure out how to kind of get it all, consume it out. >> You know we've talked to a lot of customers out there that are saying, "I want to be able to deliver a service to my users." Our response is, "Cool, let us run it. You consume it, therefore deliver it." And we're solving that in one hit versus figuring out how to first run it, then operate it, then turn that into a consumable service. >> So the alternative Platform9 is what? They got to do it themselves or use the Cloud or what's the, what's the alternative for the customer for not using Platform9? Hiring more people to kind of work on it? What's the? >> People, building that kind of PaaS experience? Something that I've been very passionate about for the past year is looking at that world of sort of GitOps and what that means. And if you go out there and you sort of start asking the question what's happening? Just generally with Kubernetes as well and GitOps in that scope, then you'll hear some people saying, well, I'm making it PaaS, because Kubernetes is too complicated for my developers and we need to give them something. There's some great material out there from the likes of Intuit and Adobe where for two big contributors to Argo and the Argo projects, they almost have, well they do have, different experiences. One is saying, we went down the PaaS route and it failed. The other one is saying, well we've built a really stable PaaS and it's working. What are they trying to do? They're trying to deliver an outcome to make it easy to use and consume Kubernetes. So you could go out there and say, hey, I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster. Sounds like Argo CD is a great way to expose that to my developers so they can use Kubernetes without having to use Kubernetes and start automating things. That is an approach, but you're going to be going completely open source and you're going to have to bring in all the individual components, or you could just lay that, lay it down, and consume it as a service and not have to- >> And mentioned to it. They were the ones who kind of brought that into the open. >> They did. Inuit is the primary contributor to the Argo set of products. >> How has that been received in the market? I mean, they had the event at the Computer History Museum last fall. What's the momentum there? What's the big takeaway from that project? >> Growth. To me, growth. I mean go and track the stars on that one. It's just, it's growth. It's unlocking machine learning. Argo workflows can do more than just make things happen. Argo CD I think the approach they're taking is, hey let's make this simple to use, which I think can be lost. And I think credit where credit's due, they're really pushing to bring in a lot of capabilities to make it easier to work with applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It's not just that, hey, here's a GitOps tool. It can take something from a Git repo and deploy it and maybe prioritize it and help you scale your operations from that perspective. It's taking a step back and saying, well how did we get to production in the first place? And what can be done down there to help as well? I think it's growth expansion of features. They had a huge release just come out in, I think it was 2.6, that brought in things that as a product manager that I don't often look at like really deep technical things and say wow, that's powerful. But they have, they've got some great features in that release that really do solve real problems. >> And as the product, as the product person, who's the target buyer for you? Who's the customer? Who's making that? And you got decision maker, influencer, and recommender. Take us through the customer persona for you guys. >> So that Platform Ops, DevOps space, right, the people that need to be delivering Containers as a service out to their organization. But then it's also important to say, well who else are our primary users? And that's developers, engineers, right? They shouldn't have to say, oh well I have access to a Kubernetes cluster. Do I have to use kubectl or do I need to go find some other tool? No, they can just log to Platform9. It's integrated with your enterprise id. >> They're the end customer at the end of the day, they're the user. >> Yeah, yeah. They can log in. And they can see the clusters you've given them access to as a Platform Ops Administrator. >> So job well done for you guys. And your mind is the developers are moving 'em fast, coding and happy. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> And and from a customer standpoint, you reduce the maintenance cost, because you keep the Ops smoother, so you got efficiency and maintenance costs kind of reduced or is that kind of the benefits? >> Yeah, yep, yeah. And at two o'clock in the morning when things go inevitably wrong, they're not there by themselves, and we're proactively working with them. >> And that's the uptime issue. >> That is the uptime issue. And Cloud doesn't solve that, right? Everyone experienced that Clouds can go down, entire regions can go offline. That's happened to all Cloud providers. And what do you do then? Kubernetes isn't your recovery plan. It's part of it, right, but it's that piece. >> You know Chris, to wrap up this interview, I will say that "theCUBE" is 12 years old now. We've been to OpenStack early days. We had you guys on when we were covering OpenStack and now Cloud has just been booming. You got AI around the corner, AI Ops, now you got all this new data infrastructure, it's just amazing Cloud growth, Cloud Native, Security Native, Cloud Native, Data Native, AI Native. It's going to be all, this is the new app environment, but there's also existing infrastructure. So going back to OpenStack, rolling our own cloud, building your own cloud, building infrastructure cloud, in a cloud way, is what the pioneers have done. I mean this is what we're at. Now we're at this scale next level, abstracted away and make it operational. It seems to be the key focus. We look at CNCF at KubeCon and what they're doing with the cloud SecurityCon, it's all about operations. >> Chris: Yep, right. >> Ops and you know, that's going to sound counterintuitive 'cause it's a developer open source environment, but you're starting to see that Ops focus in a good way. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Infrastructure as code way. >> Chris: Yep. >> What's your reaction to that? How would you summarize where we are in the industry relative to, am I getting, am I getting it right there? Is that the right view? What am I missing? What's the current state of the next level, NextGen infrastructure? >> It's a good question. When I think back to sort of late 2019, I sort of had this aha moment as I saw what really truly is delivering infrastructure as code happening at Platform9. There's an open source project Ironic, which is now also available within Kubernetes that is Metal Kubed that automates Bare Metal as code, which means you can go from an empty server, lay down your operating system, lay down Kubernetes, and you've just done everything delivered to your customer as code with a Cloud Native platform. That to me was sort of the biggest realization that I had as I was moving into this industry was, wait, it's there. This can be done. And the evolution of tooling and operations is getting to the point where that can be achieved and it's focused on by a number of different open source projects. Not just Ironic and and Metal Kubed, but that's a huge win. That is truly getting your infrastructure. >> John: That's an inflection point, really. >> Yeah. >> If you think about it, 'cause that's one of the problems. We had with the Bare Metal piece was the automation and also making it Cloud Ops, cloud operations. >> Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think Ironic did really well was saying let's just treat that piece of Bare Metal like a Cloud VM or an instance. If you got a problem with it, just give the person using it or whatever's using it, a new one and reimage it. Just tell it to reimage itself and it'll just (snaps fingers) go. You can do self-service with it. In Platform9, if you log in to our SaaS Ironic, you can go and say, I want that physical server to myself, because I've got a giant workload, or let's turn it into a Kubernetes cluster. That whole thing is automated. To me that's infrastructure as code. I think one of the other important things that's happening at the same time is we're seeing GitOps, we're seeing things like Terraform. I think it's important for organizations to look at what they have and ask, am I using tools that are fit for tomorrow or am I using tools that are yesterday's tools to solve tomorrow's problems? And when especially it comes to modernizing infrastructure as code, I think that's a big piece to look at. >> Do you see Terraform as old or new? >> I see Terraform as old. It's a fantastic tool, capable of many great things and it can work with basically every single provider out there on the planet. It is able to do things. Is it best fit to run in a GitOps methodology? I don't think it is quite at that point. In fact, if you went and looked at Flux, Flux has ways that make Terraform GitOps compliant, which is absolutely fantastic. It's using two tools, the best of breeds, which is solving that tomorrow problem with tomorrow solutions. >> Is the new solutions old versus new. I like this old way, new way. I mean, Terraform is not that old and it's been around for about eight years or so, whatever. But HashiCorp is doing a great job with that. I mean, so okay with Terraform, what's the new address? Is it more complex environments? Because Terraform made sense when you had basic DevOps, but now it sounds like there's a whole another level of complexity. >> I got to say. >> New tools. >> That kind of amalgamation of that application into infrastructure. Now my app team is paying way more attention to that manifest file, which is what GitOps is trying to solve. Let's templatize things. Let's version control our manifest, be it helm, customize, or just a straight up Kubernetes manifest file, plain and boring. Let's get that version controlled. Let's make sure that we know what is there, why it was changed. Let's get some auditability and things like that. And then let's get that deployment all automated. So that's predicated on the cluster existing. Well why can't we do the same thing with the cluster, the inception problem. So even if you're in public cloud, the question is like, well what's calling that API to call that thing to happen? Where is that file living? How well can I manage that in a large team? Oh my God, something just changed. Who changed it? Where is that file? And I think that's one of big, the big pieces to be sold. >> Yeah, and you talk about Edge too and on-premises. I think one of the things I'm observing and certainly when DevOps was rocking and rolling and infrastructures code was like the real push, it was pretty much the public cloud, right? >> Chris: Yep. >> And you did Cloud Native and you had stuff on-premises. Yeah you did some lifting and shifting in the cloud, but the cool stuff was going in the public cloud and you ran DevOps. Okay, now you got on-premise cloud operation and Edge. Is that the new DevOps? I mean 'cause what you're kind of getting at with old new, old new Terraform example is an interesting point, because you're pointing out potentially that that was good DevOps back in the day or it still is. >> Chris: It is, I was going to say. >> But depending on how you define what DevOps is. So if you say, I got the new DevOps with public on-premise and Edge, that's just not all public cloud, that's essentially distributed Cloud Native. >> Correct. Is that the new DevOps in your mind or is that? How would you, or is that oversimplifying it? >> Or is that that term where everyone's saying Platform Ops, right? Has it shifted? >> Well you bring up a good point about Terraform. I mean Terraform is well proven. People love it. It's got great use cases and now there seems to be new things happening. We call things like super cloud emerging, which is multicloud and abstraction layers. So you're starting to see stuff being abstracted away for the benefits of moving to the next level, so teams don't get stuck doing the same old thing. They can move on. Like what you guys are doing with Platform9 is providing a service so that teams don't have to do it. >> Correct, yeah. >> That makes a lot of sense, So you just, now it's running and then they move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, right. >> So what is that next thing? >> I think Edge is a big part of that next thing. The propensity for someone to put up with a delay, I think it's gone. For some reason, we've all become fairly short-tempered, Short fused. You know, I click the button, it should happen now, type people. And for better or worse, hopefully it gets better and we all become a bit more patient. But how do I get more effective and efficient at delivering that to that really demanding- >> I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's not just people are getting short-tempered. I think it's more of applications are being deployed faster, security is more exposed if they don't see things quicker. You got data now infrastructure scaling up massively. So, there's a double-edged swords to scale. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maintenance, downtime, uptime, security. So yeah, I think there's a tension around, and one hand enthusiasm around pushing a lot of code and new apps. But is the confidence truly there? It's interesting one little, (snaps finger) supply chain software, look at Container Security for instance. >> Yeah, yeah. It's big. I mean it was codified. >> Do you agree that people, that's kind of an issue right now. >> Yeah, and it was, I mean even the supply chain has been codified by the US federal government saying there's things we need to improve. We don't want to see software being a point of vulnerability, and software includes that whole process of getting it to a running point. >> It's funny you mentioned remote and one of the thing things that you're passionate about, certainly Edge has to be remote. You don't want to roll a truck or labor at the Edge. But I was doing a conversation with, at Rebars last year about space. It's hard to do brake fix on space. It's hard to do a, to roll a someone to configure satellite, right? Right? >> Chris: Yeah. >> So Kubernetes is in space. We're seeing a lot of Cloud Native stuff in apps, in space, so just an example. This highlights the fact that it's got to be automated. Is there a machine learning AI angle with all this ChatGPT talk going on? You see all the AI going the next level. Some pretty cool stuff and it's only, I know it's the beginning, but I've heard people using some of the new machine learning, large language models, large foundational models in areas I've never heard of. Machine learning and data centers, machine learning and configuration management, a lot of different ways. How do you see as the product person, you incorporating the AI piece into the products for Platform9? >> I think that's a lot about looking at the telemetry and the information that we get back and to use one of those like old idle terms, that continuous improvement loop to feed it back in. And I think that's really where machine learning to start with comes into effect. As we run across all these customers, our system that helps at two o'clock in the morning has that telemetry, it's got that data. We can see what's changing and what's happening. So it's writing the right algorithms, creating the right machine learning to- >> So training will work for you guys. You have enough data and the telemetry to do get that training data. >> Yeah, obviously there's a lot of investment required to get there, but that is something that ultimately that could be achieved with what we see in operating people's environments. >> Great. Chris, great to have you here in the studio. Going wide ranging conversation on Kubernetes and Platform9. I guess my final question would be how do you look at the next five years out there? Because you got to run the product management, you got to have that 20 mile steer, you got to look at the customers, you got to look at what's going on in the engineering and you got to kind of have that arc. This is the right path kind of view. What's the five year arc look like for you guys? How do you see this playing out? 'Cause KubeCon is coming up and we're you seeing Kubernetes kind of break away with security? They had, they didn't call it KubeCon Security, they call it CloudNativeSecurityCon, they just had in Seattle inaugural events seemed to go well. So security is kind of breaking out and you got Kubernetes. It's getting bigger. Certainly not going away, but what's your five year arc of of how Platform9 and Kubernetes and Ops evolve? >> It's to stay on that theme, it's focusing on what is most important to our users and getting them to a point where they can just consume it, so they're not having to operate it. So it's finding those big items and bringing that into our platform. It's something that's consumable, that's just taken care of, that's tested with each release. So it's simplifying operations more and more. We've always said freedom in cloud computing. Well we started on, we started on OpenStack and made that simple. Stable, easy, you just have it, it works. We're doing that with Kubernetes. We're expanding out that user, right, we're saying bring your developers in, they can download their Kube conflict. They can see those Containers that are running there. They can access the events, the log files. They can log in and build a VM using KubeVirt. They're self servicing. So it's alleviating pressures off of the Ops team, removing the help desk systems that people still seem to rely on. So it's like what comes into that field that is the next biggest issue? Is it things like CI/CD? Is it simplifying GitOps? Is it bringing in security capabilities to talk to that? Or is that a piece that is a best of breed? Is there a reason that it's been spun out to its own conference? Is this something that deserves a focus that should be a specialized capability instead of tooling and vendors that we work with, that we partner with, that could be brought in as a service. I think it's looking at those trends and making sure that what we bring in has the biggest impact to our users. >> That's awesome. Thanks for coming in. I'll give you the last word. Put a plug in for Platform9 for the people who are watching. What should they know about Platform9 that they might not know about it or what should? When should they call you guys and when should they engage? Take a take a minute to give the plug. >> The plug. I think it's, if your operations team is focused on building Kubernetes, stop. That shouldn't be the cloud. That shouldn't be in the Edge, that shouldn't be at the data center. They should be consuming it. If your engineering teams are all trying different ways and doing different things to use and consume Cloud Native services and Kubernetes, they shouldn't be. You want consistency. That's how you get economies of scale. Provide them with a simple platform that's integrated with all of your enterprise identity where they can just start consuming instead of having to solve these problems themselves. It's those, it's those two personas, right? Where the problems manifest. What are my operations teams doing, and are they delivering to my company or are they building infrastructure again? And are my engineers sprinting or crawling? 'Cause if they're not sprinting, you should be asked the question, do I have the right Cloud Native tooling in my environment and how can I get them back? >> I think it's developer productivity, uptime, security are the tell signs. You get that done. That's the goal of what you guys are doing, your mission. >> Chris: Yep. >> Great to have you on, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Chris: Thanks very much. 0 Okay, this is "theCUBE" here, finding the right path to Cloud Native. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to our Cube special programming on "Securing Compute, Engineered for the Hybrid World." We got Cole Humphreys who's with HPE, global server security product manager, and Mike Ferron-Jones with Intel. He's the product manager for data security technology. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on this special presentation. >> All right, thanks for having us. >> So, securing compute, I mean, compute, everyone wants more compute. You can't have enough compute as far as we're concerned. You know, more bits are flying around the internet. Hardware's mattering more than ever. Performance markets hot right now for next-gen solutions. When you're talking about security, it's at the center of every single conversation. And Gen11 for the HPE has been big-time focus here. So let's get into the story. What's the market for Gen11, Cole, on the security piece? What's going on? How do you see this impacting the marketplace? >> Hey, you know, thanks. I think this is, again, just a moment in time where we're all working towards solving a problem that doesn't stop. You know, because we are looking at data protection. You know, in compute, you're looking out there, there's international impacts, there's federal impacts, there's state-level impacts, and even regulation to protect the data. So, you know, how do we do this stuff in an environment that keeps changing? >> And on the Intel side, you guys are a Tier 1 combination partner, Better Together. HPE has a deep bench on security, Intel, We know what your history is. You guys have a real root of trust with your code, down to the silicon level, continuing to be, and you're on the 4th Gen Xeon here. Mike, take us through the Intel's relationship with HPE. Super important. You guys have been working together for many, many years. Data security, chips, HPE, Gen11. Take us through the relationship. What's the update? >> Yeah, thanks and I mean, HPE and Intel have been partners in delivering technology and delivering security for decades. And when a customer invests in an HPE server, like at one of the new Gen11s, they're getting the benefit of the combined investment that these two great companies are putting into product security. On the Intel side, for example, we invest heavily in the way that we develop our products for security from the ground up, and also continue to support them once they're in the market. You know, launching a product isn't the end of our security investment. You know, our Intel Red Teams continue to hammer on Intel products looking for any kind of security vulnerability for a platform that's in the field. As well as we invest heavily in the external research community through our bug bounty programs to harness the entire creativity of the security community to find those vulnerabilities, because that allows us to patch them and make sure our customers are staying safe throughout that platform's deployed lifecycle. You know, in 2021, between Intel's internal red teams and our investments in external research, we found 93% of our own vulnerabilities. Only a small percentage were found by unaffiliated external entities. >> Cole, HPE has a great track record and long history serving customers around security, actually, with the solutions you guys had. With Gen11, it's more important than ever. Can you share your thoughts on the talent gap out there? People want to move faster, breaches are happening at a higher velocity. They need more protection now than ever before. Can you share your thoughts on why these breaches are happening, and what you guys are doing, and how you guys see this happening from a customer standpoint? What you guys fill in with Gen11 with solution? >> You bet, you know, because when you hear about the relentless pursuit of innovation from our partners, and we in our engineering organizations in India, and Taiwan, and the Americas all collaborating together years in advance, are about delivering solutions that help protect our customer's environments. But what you hear Mike talking about is it's also about keeping 'em safe. Because you look to the market, right? What you see in, at least from our data from 2021, we have that breaches are still happening, and lot of it has to do with the fact that there is just a lack of adequate security staff with the necessary skills to protect the customer's application and ultimately the workloads. And then that's how these breaches are happening. Because ultimately you need to see some sort of control and visibility of what's going on out there. And what we were talking about earlier is you see time. Time to seeing some incident happen, the blast radius can be tremendous in today's technical, advanced world. And so you have to identify it and then correct it quickly, and that's why this continued innovation and partnership is so important, to help work together to keep up. >> You guys have had a great track record with Intel-based platforms with HPE. Gen11's a really big part of the story. Where do you see that impacting customers? Can you explain the benefits of what's going on with Gen11? What's the key story? What's the most important thing we should be paying attention to here? >> I think there's probably three areas as we look into this generation. And again, this is a point in time, we will continue to evolve. But at this particular point it's about, you know, a fundamental approach to our security enablement, right? Partnering as a Tier 1 OEM with one of the best in the industry, right? We can deliver systems that help protect some of the most critical infrastructure on earth, right? I know of some things that are required to have a non-disclosure because it is some of the most important jobs that you would see out there. And working together with Intel to protect those specific compute workloads, that's a serious deal that protects not only state, and local, and federal interests, but, really, a global one. >> This is a really- >> And then there's another one- Oh sorry. >> No, go ahead. Finish your thought. >> And then there's another one that I would call our uncompromising focus. We work in the industry, we lead and partner with those in the, I would say, in the good side. And we want to focus on enablement through a specific capability set, let's call it our global operations, and that ability to protect our supply chain and deliver infrastructure that can be trusted and into an operating environment. You put all those together and you see very significant and meaningful solutions together. >> The operating benefits are significant. I just want to go back to something you just said before about the joint NDAs and kind of the relationship you kind of unpacked, that to me, you know, I heard you guys say from sand to server, I love that phrase, because, you know, silicone into the server. But this is a combination you guys have with HPE and Intel supply-chain security. I mean, it's not just like you're getting chips and sticking them into a machine. This is, like, there's an in-depth relationship on the supply chain that has a very intricate piece to it. Can you guys just double down on that and share that, how that works and why it's important? >> Sure, so why don't I go ahead and start on that one. So, you know, as you mentioned the, you know, the supply chain that ultimately results in an end user pulling, you know, a new Gen11 HPE server out of the box, you know, started, you know, way, way back in it. And we've been, you know, Intel, from our part are, you know, invest heavily in making sure that all of our entire supply chain to deliver all of the Intel components that are inside that HPE platform have been protected and monitored ever since, you know, their inception at one of any of our 14,000, you know, Intel vendors that we monitor as part of our supply-chain assurance program. I mean we, you know, Intel, you know, invests heavily in compliance with guidelines from places like NIST and ISO, as well as, you know, doing best practices under things like the Transported Asset Protection Alliance, TAPA. You know, we have been intensely invested in making sure that when a customer gets an Intel processor, or any other Intel silicone product, that it has not been tampered with or altered during its trip through the supply chain. HPE then is able to pick up that, those components that we deliver, and add onto that their own supply-chain assurance when it comes down to delivering, you know, the final product to the customer. >> Cole, do you want to- >> That's exactly right. Yeah, I feel like that integration point is a really good segue into why we're talking today, right? Because that then comes into a global operations network that is pulling together these servers and able to deploy 'em all over the world. And as part of the Gen11 launch, we have security services that allow 'em to be hardened from our factories to that next stage into that trusted partner ecosystem for system integration, or directly to customers, right? So that ability to have that chain of trust. And it's not only about attestation and knowing what, you know, came from whom, because, obviously, you want to trust and make sure you're get getting the parts from Intel to build your technical solutions. But it's also about some of the provisioning we're doing in our global operations where we're putting cryptographic identities and manifests of the server and its components and moving it through that supply chain. So you talked about this common challenge we have of assuring no tampering of that device through the supply chain, and that's why this partnering is so important. We deliver secure solutions, we move them, you're able to see and control that information to verify they've not been tampered with, and you move on to your next stage of this very complicated and necessary chain of trust to build, you know, what some people are calling zero-trust type ecosystems. >> Yeah, it's interesting. You know, a lot goes on under the covers. That's good though, right? You want to have greater security and platform integrity, if you can abstract the way the complexity, that's key. Now one of the things I like about this conversation is that you mentioned this idea of a hardware-root-of-trust set of technologies. Can you guys just quickly touch on that, because that's one of the major benefits we see from this combination of the partnership, is that it's not just one, each party doing something, it's the combination. But this notion of hardware-root-of-trust technologies, what is that? >> Yeah, well let me, why don't I go ahead and start on that, and then, you know, Cole can take it from there. Because we provide some of the foundational technologies that underlie a root of trust. Now the idea behind a root of trust, of course, is that you want your platform to, you know, from the moment that first electron hits it from the power supply, that it has a chain of trust that all of the software, firmware, BIOS is loading, to bring that platform up into an operational state is trusted. If you have a breach in one of those lower-level code bases, like in the BIOS or in the system firmware, that can be a huge problem. It can undermine every other software-based security protection that you may have implemented up the stack. So, you know, Intel and HPE work together to coordinate our trusted boot and root-of-trust technologies to make sure that when a customer, you know, boots that platform up, it boots up into a known good state so that it is ready for the customer's workload. So on the Intel side, we've got technologies like our trusted execution technology, or Intel Boot Guard, that then feed into the HPE iLO system to help, you know, create that chain of trust that's rooted in silicon to be able to deliver that known good state to the customer so it's ready for workloads. >> All right, Cole, I got to ask you, with Gen11 HPE platforms that has 4th Gen Intel Xeon, what are the customers really getting? >> So, you know, what a great setup. I'm smiling because it's, like, it has a good answer, because one, this, you know, to be clear, this isn't the first time we've worked on this root-of-trust problem. You know, we have a construct that we call the HPE Silicon Root of Trust. You know, there are, it's an industry standard construct, it's not a proprietary solution to HPE, but it does follow some differentiated steps that we like to say make a little difference in how it's best implemented. And where you see that is that tight, you know, Intel Trusted Execution exchange. The Intel Trusted Execution exchange is a very important step to assuring that route of trust in that HPE Silicon Root of Trust construct, right? So they're not different things, right? We just have an umbrella that we pull under our ProLiant, because there's ILO, our BIOS team, CPLDs, firmware, but I'll tell you this, Gen11, you know, while all that, keeping that moving forward would be good enough, we are not holding to that. We are moving forward. Our uncompromising focus, we want to drive more visibility into that Gen11 server, specifically into the PCIE lanes. And now you're going to be able to see, and measure, and make policies to have control and visibility of the PCI devices, like storage controllers, NICs, direct connect, NVME drives, et cetera. You know, if you follow the trends of where the industry would like to go, all the components in a server would be able to be seen and attested for full infrastructure integrity, right? So, but this is a meaningful step forward between not only the greatness we do together, but, I would say, a little uncompromising focus on this problem and doing a little bit more to make Gen11 Intel's server just a little better for the challenges of the future. >> Yeah, the Tier 1 partnership is really kind of highlighted there. Great, great point. I got to ask you, Mike, on the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable capabilities, what does it do for the customer with Gen11 now that they have these breaches? Does it eliminate stuff? What's in it for the customer? What are some of the new things coming out with the Xeon? You're at Gen4, Gen11 for HP, but you guys have new stuff. What does it do for the customer? Does it help eliminate breaches? Are there things that are inherent in the product that HP is jointly working with you on or you were contributing in to the relationship that we should know about? What's new? >> Yeah, well there's so much great new stuff in our new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processor. This is the one that was codenamed Sapphire Rapids. I mean, you know, more cores, more performance, AI acceleration, crypto acceleration, it's all in there. But one of my favorite security features, and it is one that's called Intel Control-Flow Enforcement Technology, or Intel CET. And why I like CET is because I find the attack that it is designed to mitigate is just evil genius. This type of attack, which is called a return, a jump, or a call-oriented programming attack, is designed to not bring a whole bunch of new identifiable malware into the system, you know, which could be picked up by security software. What it is designed to do is to look for little bits of existing, little bits of existing code already on the server. So if you're running, say, a web server, it's looking for little bits of that web-server code that it can then execute in a particular order to achieve a malicious outcome, something like open a command prompt, or escalate its privileges. Now in order to get those little code bits to execute in an order, it has a control mechanism. And there are different, each of the different types of attacks uses a different control mechanism. But what CET does is it gets in there and it disrupts those control mechanisms, uses hardware to prevent those particular techniques from being able to dig in and take effect. So CET can, you know, disrupt it and make sure that software behaves safely and as the programmer intended, rather than picking off these little arbitrary bits in one of these return, or jump, or call-oriented programming attacks. Now it is a technology that is included in every single one of the new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors. And so it's going to be an inherent characteristic the customers can benefit from when they buy a new Gen11 HPE server. >> Cole, more goodness from Intel there impacting Gen11 on the HPE side. What's your reaction to that? >> I mean, I feel like this is exactly why you do business with the big Tier 1 partners, because you can put, you know, trust in from where it comes from, through the global operations, literally, having it hardened from the factory it's finished in, moving into your operating environment, and then now protecting against attacks in your web hosting services, right? I mean, this is great. I mean, you'll always have an attack on data, you know, as you're seeing in the data. But the more contained, the more information, and the more control and trust we can give to our customers, it's going to make their job a little easier in protecting whatever job they're trying to do. >> Yeah, and enterprise customers, as you know, they're always trying to keep up to date on the skills and battle the threats. Having that built in under the covers is a real good way to kind of help them free up their time, and also protect them is really killer. This is a big, big part of the Gen11 story here. Securing the data, securing compute, that's the topic here for this special cube conversation, engineering for a hybrid world. Cole, I'll give you the final word. What should people pay attention to, Gen11 from HPE, bottom line, what's the story? >> You know, it's, you know, it's not the first time, it's not the last time, but it's our fundamental security approach to just helping customers through their digital transformation defend in an uncompromising focus to help protect our infrastructure in these technical solutions. >> Cole Humphreys is the global server security product manager at HPE. He's got his finger on the pulse and keeping everyone secure in the platform integrity there. Mike Ferron-Jones is the Intel product manager for data security technology. Gentlemen, thank you for this great conversation, getting into the weeds a little bit with Gen11, which is great. Love the hardware route-of-trust technologies, Better Together. Congratulations on Gen11 and your 4th Gen Xeon Scalable. Thanks for coming on. >> All right, thanks, John. >> Thank you very much, guys, appreciate it. Okay, you're watching "theCube's" special presentation, "Securing Compute, Engineered for the Hybrid World." I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to the Cube's Continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation Epic launch. I'm Dave Nicholson and I'm joining you here in our Palo Alto Studios. We have two very interesting guests to dive into some of the announcements that have been made and maybe take a look at this from an AI and ML perspective. Our first guest is Milland Doley. He's a senior director for software and solutions at amd, and we're also joined by Shamus Jones, who's a director of server engineering at Dell Technologies. Welcome gentlemen. How are you? >>Very good, thank >>You. Welcome to the Cube. So let's start out really quickly, Shamus, what, give us a thumbnail sketch of what you do at Dell. >>Yeah, so I'm the director of technical marketing engineering here at Dell, and our team really takes a look at the technical server portfolio and solutions and ensures that we can look at, you know, the performance metrics, benchmarks, and performance characteristics, so that way we can give customers a good idea of what they can expect from the server portfolio when they're looking to buy Power Edge from Dell. >>Milland, how about you? What's, what's new at a M D? What do you do there? >>Great to be here. Thank you for having me at amd, I'm the senior director of performance engineering and ISV ecosystem enablement, which is a long winter way of saying we do a lot of benchmarks, improved performance and demonstrate with wonderful partners such as Shamus and Dell, the combined leverage that AMD four generation processes and Dell systems can bring to bear on a multitude of applications across the industry spectrum. >>Shamus, talk about that relationship a little bit more. The relationship between a M D and Dell. How far back does it go? What does it look like in practical terms? >>Absolutely. So, you know, ever since AM MD reentered the server space, we've had a very close relationship. You know, it's one of those things where we are offering solutions that are out there to our customers no matter what generation A portfolio, if they're, if they're demanding either from their competitor or a m d, we offer a portfolio solutions that are out there. What we're finding is that within their generational improvements, they're just getting better and better and better. Really exciting things happening from a m D at the moment, and we're seeing that as we engineer those CPU stacks into our, our server portfolio, you know, we're really seeing unprecedented performance across the board. So excited about the, the history, you know, my team and Lin's team work very closely together, so much so that we were communicating almost on a daily basis around portfolio platforms and updates around the, the, the benchmarks testing and, and validation efforts. >>So Melind, are you happy with these PowerEdge boxes that Seamus is building to, to house, to house your baby? >>We are delighted, you know, it's hard to find stronger partners than Shamus and Dell with AMD's, second generation epic service CPUs. We already had undisputable industry performance leadership, and then with the third and now the fourth generation CPUs, we've just increased our lead with competition. We've got so many outstanding features at the platform, at the CPU level, everybody focuses on the high core counts, but there's also the DDR five, the memory, the io, and the storage subsystem. So we believe we have a fantastic performance and performance per dollar performance per what edge over competition, and we look to partners such as Dell to help us showcase that leadership. >>Well. So Shay Yeah, through Yeah, go ahead >>Dave. What, what I'd add, Dave, is that through the, the partnership that we've had, you know, we've been able to develop subsystems and platform features that historically we couldn't have really things around thermals power efficiency and, and efficiency within the platform. That means that customers can get the most out of their compute infrastructure. >>So this is gonna be a big question moving forward as next generation platforms are rolled out, there's the potential for people to have sticker shock. You talk about something that has eight or 12 cores in a, in a physical enclosure versus 96 cores, and, and I guess the, the question is, do the ROI and TCO numbers look good for someone to make that upgrade? Shamus, you wanna, you wanna hit that first or you guys are integrated? >>Absolutely, yeah, sorry. Absolutely. So we, I'll tell you what, at the moment, customers really can't afford not to upgrade at the moment, right? We've taken a look at the cost basis of keeping older infrastructure in place, let's say five or seven year old infrastructure servers that are, that are drawing more power maybe are, are poorly utilized within the infrastructure and take more and more effort and time to manage, maintain and, and really keep in production. So as customers look to upgrade or refresh their platforms, what we're finding right is that they can take a dynamic consolidation sometimes 5, 7, 8 to one consolidation depending on which platform they have as a historical and which one they're looking to upgrade to. Within AI specifically and machine learning frameworks, we're seeing really unprecedented performance. Lin's team partnered with us to deliver multiple benchmarks for the launch, some of which we're still continuing to see the goodness from things like TP C X AI as a framework, and I'm talking about here specifically the CPU U based performance. >>Even though in a lot of those AI frameworks, you would also expect to have GPUs, which all of the four platforms that we're offering on the AM MD portfolio today offer multiple G P U offerings. So we're seeing a balance between a huge amount of C P U gain and performance, as well as more and more GPU offerings within the platform. That was real, that was a real challenge for us because of the thermal challenges. I mean, you think GPUs are going up 300, 400 watt, these CPUs at 96 core are, are quite demanding thermally, but what we're able to do is through some, some unique smart cooling engineering within the, the PowerEdge portfolio, we can take a look at those platforms and make the most efficient use case by having things like telemetry within the platform so that way we can dynamically change fan speeds to get customers the best performance without throttling based on their need. >>Melin the cube was at the Supercomputing conference in Dallas this year, supercomputing conference 2022, and a lot of the discussion was around not only advances in microprocessor technology, but also advances in interconnect technology. How do you manage that sort of research partnership with Dell when you aren't strictly just focusing on the piece that you are bringing to the party? It's kind of a potluck, you know, we, we, we, we mentioned P C I E Gen five or 5.0, whatever you want to call it, new DDR storage cards, Nicks, accelerators, all of those, all of those things. How do you keep that straight when those aren't things that you actually build? >>Well, excellent question, Dave. And you know, as we are developing the next platform, obviously the, the ongoing relationship is there with Dell, but we start way before launch, right? Sometimes it's multiple years before launch. So we are not just focusing on the super high core counts at the CPU level and the platform configurations, whether it's single socket or dual socket, we are looking at it from the memory subsystem from the IO subsystem, P c i lanes for storage is a big deal, for example, in this generation. So it's really a holistic approach. And look, core counts are, you know, more important at the higher end for some customers h HPC space, some of the AI applications. But on the lower end you have database applications or some other is s v applications that care a lot about those. So it's, I guess different things matter to different folks across verticals. >>So we partnered with Dell very early in the cycle, and it's really a joint co-engineering. Shamus talked about the focus on AI with TP C X xci, I, so we set five world records in that space just on that one benchmark with AD and Dell. So fantastic kick kick off to that across a multitude of scale factors. But PPP c Xci is not just the only thing we are focusing on. We are also collaborating with Dell and des e i on some of the transformer based natural language processing models that we worked on, for example. So it's not just a steep CPU story, it's CPU platform, es subsystem software and the whole thing delivering goodness across the board to solve end user problems in AI and and other verticals. >>Yeah, the two of you are at the tip of the spear from a performance perspective. So I know it's easy to get excited about world records and, and they're, they're fantastic. I know Shamus, you know, that, you know, end user customers might, might immediately have the reaction, well, I don't need a Ferrari in my data center, or, you know, what I need is to be able to do more with less. Well, aren't we delivering that also? And you know, you imagine you milland you mentioned natural, natural language processing. Shamus, are you thinking in 2023 that a lot more enterprises are gonna be able to afford to do things like that? I mean, what are you hearing from customers on this front? >>I mean, while the adoption of the top bin CPU stack is, is definitely the exception, not the rule today we are seeing marked performance, even when we look at the mid bin CPU offerings from from a m d, those are, you know, the most common sold SKUs. And when we look at customers implementations, really what we're seeing is the fact that they're trying to make the most, not just of dollar spend, but also the whole subsystem that Melin was talking about. You know, the fact that balanced memory configs can give you marked performance improvements, not just at the CPU level, but as actually all the way through to the, to the application performance. So it's, it's trying to find the correct balance between the application needs, your budget, power draw and infrastructure within the, the data center, right? Because not only could you, you could be purchasing and, and look to deploy the most powerful systems, but if you don't have an infrastructure that's, that's got the right power, right, that's a large challenge that's happening right now and the right cooling to deal with the thermal differences of the systems, might you wanna ensure that, that you can accommodate those for not just today but in the future, right? >>So it's, it's planning that balance. >>If I may just add onto that, right? So when we launched, not just the fourth generation, but any generation in the past, there's a natural tendency to zero in on the top bin and say, wow, we've got so many cores. But as Shamus correctly said, it's not just that one core count opn, it's, it's the whole stack. And we believe with our four gen CPU processor stack, we've simplified things so much. We don't have, you know, dozens and dozens of offerings. We have a fairly simple skew stack, but we also have a very efficient skew stack. So even, even though at the top end we've got 96 scores, the thermal budget that we require is fairly reasonable. And look, with all the energy crisis going around, especially in Europe, this is a big deal. Not only do customers want performance, but they're also super focused on performance per want. And so we believe with this generation, we really delivered not just on raw performance, but also on performance per dollar and performance per one. >>Yeah. And it's not just Europe, I'm, we're, we are here in Palo Alto right now, which is in California where we all know the cost of an individual kilowatt hour of electricity because it's quite, because it's quite high. So, so thermals, power cooling, all of that, all of that goes together and that, and that drives cost. So it's a question of how much can you get done per dollar shame as you made the point that you, you're not, you don't just have a one size fits all solution that it's, that it's fit for function. I, I'm, I'm curious to hear from you from the two of you what your thoughts are from a, from a general AI and ML perspective. We're starting to see right now, if you hang out on any kind of social media, the rise of these experimental AI programs that are being presented to the public, some will write stories for you based on prom, some will create images for you. One of the more popular ones will create sort of a, your superhero alter ego for, I, I can't wait to do it, I just got the app on my phone. So those are all fun and they're trivial, but they sort of get us used to this idea that, wow, these systems can do things. They can think on their own in a certain way. W what do, what do you see the future of that looking like over the next year in terms of enterprises, what they're going to do for it with it >>Melan? Yeah, I can go first. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, >>Sure. Yeah. Good. >>So the couple of examples, Dave, that you mentioned are, I, I guess it's a blend of novelty and curiosity. You know, people using AI to write stories or poems or, you know, even carve out little jokes, check grammar and spelling very useful, but still, you know, kind of in the realm of novelty in the mainstream, in the enterprise. Look, in my opinion, AI is not just gonna be a vertical, it's gonna be a horizontal capability. We are seeing AI deployed across the board once the models have been suitably trained for disparate functions ranging from fraud detection or anomaly detection, both in the financial markets in manufacturing to things like image classification or object detection that you talked about in, in the sort of a core AI space itself, right? So we don't think of AI necessarily as a vertical, although we are showcasing it with a specific benchmark for launch, but we really look at AI emerging as a horizontal capability and frankly, companies that don't adopt AI on a massive scale run the risk of being left behind. >>Yeah, absolutely. There's an, an AI as an outcome is really something that companies, I, I think of it in the fact that they're adopting that and the frameworks that you're now seeing as the novelty pieces that Melin was talking about is, is really indicative of the under the covers activity that's been happening within infrastructures and within enterprises for the past, let's say 5, 6, 7 years, right? The fact that you have object detection within manufacturing to be able to, to be able to do defect detection within manufacturing lines. Now that can be done on edge platforms all the way at the device. So you're no longer only having to have things be done, you know, in the data center, you can bring it right out to the edge and have that high performance, you know, inferencing training models. Now, not necessarily training at the edge, but the inferencing models especially, so that way you can, you know, have more and, and better use cases for some of these, these instances things like, you know, smart cities with, with video detection. >>So that way they can see, especially during covid, we saw a lot of hospitals and a lot of customers that were using using image and, and spatial detection within their, their video feeds to be able to determine who and what employees were at risk during covid. So there's a lot of different use cases that have been coming around. I think the novelty aspect of it is really interesting and I, I know my kids, my daughters love that, that portion of it, but really what's been happening has been exciting for quite a, quite a period of time in the enterprise space. We're just now starting to actually see those come to light in more of a, a consumer relevant kind of use case. So the technology that's been developed in the data center around all of these different use cases is now starting to feed in because we do have more powerful compute at our fingertips. We do have the ability to talk more about the framework and infrastructure that's that's right out at the edge. You know, I know Dave in the past you've said things like the data center of, you know, 20 years ago is now in my hand as, as my cell phone. That's right. And, and that's, that's a fact and I'm, it's exciting to think where it's gonna be in the next 10 or 20 years. >>One terabyte baby. Yeah. One terabyte. Yeah. It's mind bo. Exactly. It's mind boggling. Yeah. And it makes me feel old. >>Yeah, >>Me too. And, and that and, and Shamus, that all sounded great. A all I want is a picture of me as a superhero though, so you guys are already way ahead of the curve, you know, with, with, with that on that note, Seamus wrap us up with, with a, with kind of a summary of the, the highlights of what we just went through in terms of the performance you're seeing out of this latest gen architecture from a md. >>Absolutely. So within the TPC xai frameworks that Melin and my team have worked together to do, you know, we're seeing unprecedented price performance. So the fact that you can get 220% uplift gen on gen for some of these benchmarks and, you know, you can have a five to one consolidation means that if you're looking to refresh platforms that are historically legacy, you can get a, a huge amount of benefit, both in reduction in the number of units that you need to deploy and the, the amount of performance that you can get per unit. You know, Melinda had mentioned earlier around CPU performance and performance per wat, specifically on the Tu socket two U platform using the fourth generation a m d Epic, you know, we're seeing a 55% higher C P U performance per wat that is that, you know, when for people who aren't necessarily looking at these statistics, every generation of servers, that that's, that is a huge jump leap forward. >>That combined with 121% higher spec scores, you know, as a benchmark, those are huge. Normally we see, let's say a 40 to 60% performance improvement on the spec benchmarks, we're seeing 121%. So while that's really impressive at the top bin, we're actually seeing, you know, large percentile improvements across the mid bins as well, you know, things in the range of like 70 to 90% performance improvements in those standard bins. So it, it's a, it's a huge performance improvement, a power efficiency, which means customers are able to save energy, space and time based on, on their deployment size. >>Thanks for that Shamus, sadly, gentlemen, our time has expired. With that, I want to thank both of you. It's a very interesting conversation. Thanks for, thanks for being with us, both of you. Thanks for joining us here on the Cube for our coverage of AMD's fourth generation Epic launch. Additional information, including white papers and benchmarks plus editorial coverage can be found on does hardware matter.com.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. We are live in Chicago. This is day two of Waldo Wall coverage on the cube. John Fhrer here with me. Lisa Martin. John, today's a big news day. Yeah, >>Big time. I mean, we got the chief architect on this segments to be great. We have the lead product management. All the new stuff coming out really is a game changer. It's very cool and relevant. Very key to be relevant. And then, and being a part of the future. This is a changeover you see in the NextGen Cloud developer environment. Open source all coming together. So Ansible we've been covering for many, many years. We've always said they're in the middle of all the action and you're starting to see the picture. Yes. For me. So we're looking forward to a great segment. >>Yes. We've got two alumni back with us to unpack the news and all the great stuff that's going on here. Richard Hensel joins us Senior manager, Ansible Product Management, and Matthew Jones here, fresh from the keynote stage, Chief architect of Ansible Automation. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks >>For having us. Good to be here. >>So this morning was all about event driven Ansible. Unpack that. Talk about the impact that this is gonna have, The excitement, the buzz that you've heard on the show floor today. >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's exciting. We've been working on this for a while. We've been really excited to show this off because it's something that feels like the natural evolution of the platform and where it's going. Really being able to connect the automation with the sources of data and the actions that we know people want to use. We, we came into this knowing everybody here at this conference, this is something that everybody will be able to use. >>Talk about the innovations strategy. Cause we've always had these great conversations with Ansible. Oh yeah. The, the practitioners, they're, they're building the product with you. You guys are very hardcore on that. No secret. This is different. This is like a whole nother level of opportunity that's gonna take the, the community to new heights in terms of what they do in their job and free them up to do more creative development. >>Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, we, we know that people need to bring that sort of reactive and active automation to it. We've, we've done a lot of work to bring automation to everybody, to the masses. Now we need to meet them at the place where they are, where the, the where, where they have to do the most work and, and act in the most strategic and specific ways. >>All right. So now before we get into some of the deep dive, cause a ton of questions. This is really exciting product. Take a minute to explain what was the key announcement? Why, what specifically does this mean for the audience, watching customers and future customers? What's the big deal? To take a minute to explain what was announced. >>So this is about the, the evolution and the maturity of the automation that our users are doing. So, you know, you think about provisioning servers, you know, configuring networks, all that sort of, the stuff that we've established and everybody's been doing for a number of years. And then you go, Well, I've invested in that. I've done the heavy lifting, I've done the things that cost me agility. I think that cost me time. Well now I need to go further. So what can I go further into? And you move further at the stacks. You move away from the infrastructure, please. You move away from infrastructure as code. You move towards through configures code, up to officer's code. And you start to get into, well, I've got, I've got road tasks, I've got repetitive actions that I'm doing. I've got investigations, I've got remediations, I've got responses. >>Well, there's work that I do on a daily basis that is toil. Right. It's not efficient work. Right. Actually, we doing valuable work in the operation space as much as you were doing in, in the build space. And how do we move them up into that space? And it's, this is all based off observation. You can do this today, but how do we make it easier? We've gonna make it easier for them to do that and get, it's all about success. It's about the outcomes we're gonna drive users towards. They need to be successful as quickly as possible. How do we make that >>Happen? And Matt, I remember we talked in 2019 with Ansible, the word platform where we say, Hey, you know, platforms are super important. It's not a tool, tools and platforms as distinctions. You mentioned platform. This is now platform. A lot of people put a lot of work in into this Yeah. Claim what went on behind the scenes. So >>You're exactly right. And we've spent the last couple of years really taking that disparate set of tools that, that we've invested a lot of time in building that platform. It's been exciting to see it come together. We always knew that we wanted to capture more of, more of where people find automation and find they need automation, not just out on the edge, on the end of the, of the, of the actions and tasks that they need to do. They've got a lot of things coming in, a lot of things that they need to take care of. And the community is really what drives this for us. People who have been doing this for years and they've been asking us, Meet me halfway. Give me something. Give me a part of this platform and a capability that enables me to do this. So I I feel like we've done that and you did >>It. Yeah, exactly. For step one. >>And that must feel pretty good too, to be able to deliver what, you know, the masses are looking for and why they're looking >>For it. Yeah. This was, there was no question that we knew this was gonna deliver the kind of real value that people were looking for. >>Take us through the building blocks real quick. I know on stage you went through it in detail. What should people know about the core building blocks of, of this particular event driven >>Piece? Yeah. You know, I think the most important thing to understand at the, at the outset is the sources of data and events that come in. It's really easy to get lost in the details. Like, what do you mean a source? But, you know, we've shown examples using Kafka, but it's not just Kafka, right? It's, it's, it's web hooks, it's CI systems, it's any, any place that you can imagine an evict coming from your monitoring platforms. You can bring those together under the same umbrella. We're not requiring you to pick one or choose or what's your favorite one. You can bring, you can use them all and and condense them down into the, into the same place. >>There's a lot of data events everywhere now. There's more events. Yeah. Is there a standard interface? Is what's the, is there any kind of hook in there? Is what's, what's gonna limit? Or is there any limits? >>I I don't think there is a limit. I, you know, it's, and we can't even imagine where events and data are gonna come from, but we know we need to get them into the system in a way that makes the most sense for the, the customers. And then that, that drives through into the rule books. Like, okay, we have the data now, but what do we do with that data? How do we translate that into, into the action? What are the rules that need to follow? It's giving the, the, the person who is automating, who understands the data that's coming in and understands the task that they need to take. The, the rules are where they map those into it. And then the last part, of course is the playbook, the automation itself, which they already know. They're already experts in the system. So we've, we've, we've built this like eight lane highway. They get some right end of those actions. >>Let's talk about Richard, let's unpack those actions and the really kind of double click on the business outcomes that this is actually gonna enable organizations and any industry to achieve. >>Yeah, so >>I mean, it's, it, like Matt said, it's really hard to encapsulate everything that we see as possible. But if you just think about what happens when a system goes down, right? At that point in time, I'm potentially not making money, right? I'd say it's costing me time, it's costing me, that's a business impact. If I can speed up how quick I can resolve that problem, if I can reduce time in there, that's customer improvement, that's custom satisfaction. That's bottom line money for businesses, right? But it's also, it's also satisfaction for the users. You know, they're not involved in having the stressful get online, get quickly, activate whatever accounts you need to do, go and start doing discovery. You can detect a lot of that information for the discovery use case that we see, respond to an event, scan the system for that same logic that you would normally do as a user, as a human. >>And that's why the rules are important to add into ed. It's like, how do I take that human, that brain part that I would say, well, if I see this bit, oh, I'll go and have a look in this other log file. If I see this piece, I'll go and do something different. How do we translate that into Ansible so that you've got that conditional logic just to be able to say, if this do that, or if I see these three things, it means a certain outcome has happened. And then again, that defined, that's what's gonna help people like choose where it becomes useful. And that's how we, that's how we take that process >>Forward. I'm sure people are gonna get excited by this. I'm not sure the community already knows that, but as it's gonna attract more potential customers, what's different about it? Can you share the differentiation? Like wait minute, I already have that already. Do they have it already? What's different? What makes this different? What's, what's in it for them? >>Yeah. When we step up into a customer situation, an enterprise, an organization, what's really important becomes the, the ability to control where you do some of that work. So the control and the trust, You know, would you trust an automatic system to go and start making changes to hundreds of thousands of devices? And the answer is often not, not straight away. So how do we put this sort of sep the same separation of duties we have between dev and ops and all the nice structures we've done over the last number of years, and actually apply that to that programmatic access of automation that other systems do. So let's say a AIML systems that are detecting what's going on, observability platforms are, are much more intru or intrusive is the wrong word. They're much more observable of what's going on in the systems, right? But at the same time you go, I wanna make sure that I know that any point in time I can decide what, what is there and what can be run and who can run it and when they can run it. And that becomes an important dimension. >>The versatility seems like a big deal too. They can, Yeah. Any team could get >>Involved. And, and that's the, the same flexibility and the same extensibility of Ansible exists in this use case, right? The, the, the ability to take any of those tasks you wanna do in action, string them together, but what the way that it works for you, not the way that it works that we see, but the way that you see and you convert your operational DNA into how you do that automation and how that gets triggered as you see fit. >>Talk about this both of you. I'd like to get your perspectives on event driven Ansible as part of the automation journey that businesses are on. Obviously you can look at different industries and different businesses are, are at different places along that journey, but where does this fit in and kind of plugin to accelerating that journey? That's, >>That's a good question. You know, sometimes this ends up being like that last mile of we've adopted this automation, we've learned how to write automation. We even understand the things that we would need to automate, but how do we carry it over that last topic and connect it to our, our knowledge systems, our data stores, our data lakes, and how do we combine the expertise of the systems that we're managing with this automation that we've learned? Like you, you mentioned the, the, the community and the, the coalescing of data and information, the, the definition of the event rules and, and the event driven architecture. It lives alongside the automation that you've developed in the exact same place where you can feel that trust and ubiquity that we keep talking about. Right? It's there, it's certified. And we've talked a lot about secure supply chain recently. This gives you the ability to sign and certify that the rules and actions that we're taking and the sources that we're communicating with works exactly the same way. Yeah. And >>There's something we didn't, we didn't correlate this when we first started doing the work. We were, we were, we observe teams doing self-healing and you know, extending Ansible. And then over the last 18 months, what we've also seen is this movement, this platform engineering movement, the SRE teams becoming much more prominent. And this just nicely sits in as a type of use case for that type of transformation. You know, we've gotta remember that Ansible at is heart is also a transformative tool. Is like, how do you teach this behavior to a bunch of people? How do you upscale a larger base of engineers with what you want to be able to do? And I think this is such an important part that we, we just one say we stumbled into it, but it was a very, very nice, >>It was a natural progression. >>Exactly. >>Yeah. Yeah. Tom, Tom, when we were talking about Tom yesterday, Tom Anderson and he said, You guys bring up the SRE to you guys when you come on the cube. This is exactly a culture shift that we're talking about. I mean, SRE is really his legacy with Google. We all know that. Everyone kind of knows that, but it's become like a job title. Well they kind of, what does that even mean now if you're not Google, it means you're running stuff. DevOps has become a title. Yeah. So what that means is that's a cultural shift, not so much semantics Yeah. On title. This is kind of what you guys are targeting here, enabling people to run platforms, engineer them. Yeah. Like an architect and enable more co composability coding. >>And, and it's, so that's, that distinction is so important because one of the, you know, we see many customers come from different places. Many users from, you know, all the legacy or heritage of tools that have existed. And so often those processes are defined by the way that tool worked. Right? You had no other way that, that, and the, and it's, it happened 10 years ago, somebody implemented it, that's how it now works. And then they come and try and take something new and you go, well, you can't let the tool define your process. Now your culture and your objective has to define the process. So this is really, you know, how do we make sure we match that ability by giving them a flexible tool that let's say, Well what are you trying to achieve? I wanna achieve this outcome. That's the way you can do it. I >>Mean, that's how we match basically means my mind to get your reaction. It means I'm running stuff at scale. Yep. Engineer, I'm engineering and infrastructure at scale to enable, >>I'm responsible for it. And it's, it's my, it's my baby. It's my responsibility to do that. And how do we, how do we allow people to do that better? And you know, it, it's about, it's about freeing people up to focus on things that are really important and transformative. We can be transformative. And we do that by taking away the complexity and making things work fast. >>And that's what people want. People in their daily jobs want to be able to deliver value to the organization. You wanna feel that. But something Richard that you were talking about that struck me a couple minutes ago is, was a venture of an Ansible. There's employee benefits, there's customer benefits, Those two are ex inextricably linked. But I liked how you were talking about what it facilitates for both Yes. And all the way to the customer satisfaction, brand reputation. That's an important Yeah. Element for any brand to >>Consider. And that, I mean, you know, think about what digital transformation was all about. I mean, as we evolve past all these initial terms that come about, you know, we actually start getting to the meat of what these things are. And that is it connecting what you do with actually what is the purpose of what your business is trying to achieve. And you can't, you can't almost put money on that. That's, that's the, that's the holy grail of what you're trying to get to. So how, you know, and again, it just comes back to how do we facilitate, how do we make it easy? If we don't make it easier, we're not doing it right. We've gotta make it easier. >>Right. Well, exciting news. I want to get your guys' reaction and if you don't mind sharing your opinion or your commentary on what's different now with Ansible this year than just a few years ago in terms of the scope of what's out there, what's been built, what you guys are doing for the, for the customer base and the community. What's changed? Obviously the people's roles looked that they're gonna expand and have more, I say more power, you know, more keys to the kingdom, however you wanna look at it. But things have changed. What's changed now from a few years >>Ago. It's, you know, it, it's funny because we've spent a lot of time over the last couple years setting up the capabilities that you're seeing us deliver right now. Right. We, we look back two or three years ago and we knew where we wanted to be. We wanted to build things like eda. We wanted to invest in systems like Project Wisdom and the, the types of content, the cloud journey that, that now we're on and we're enabling for folks. But we had to make some really big changes. And those changes take time and, and take investment. The move into last year, John, we talked about execution environments. Yeah. And separating the control plane from the execution plane. All of that work that we did and the investment into the platform and stability of the platform leads us now into what >>Cap. And that's architectural decision. That's the long game in mind. Exactly. Making things more cohesive, but decoupled, that's an operating system kind of thinking. >>It, it totally is. It's a systems engineering and system architecture thinking. And now we can start building on top of these things like what comes after ed, what does ED allow us to do within the platform? All of the dev tools that we focused on that we haven't spent a lot of time talking about that from the product side. But being, coming in with prescriptive and opinionated dev tools, now we can show you how to build it. We can show you how to use it and connect it to your systems. Where can we go next? I'm really excited. >>Yeah. Your customer base two has also been part of from the beginning and they solve their own problems and they rolled it up, grow with it, and now it's a full on platform. The question I then ask is, okay, you believe it's a platform, which it is, it's enabling. What do you guys see as that possible dots that could connect that might come on top of this from a creativity standpoint, from an ecosystem standpoint, from an Ansible standpoint, from maybe Red Hat. I mean, wisdom shows that you can go into the treasure trove of IBM's research, pull out some AI and some machine learning. Both that in or shim layered in whatever you do. >>I mean, what I'm starting to see much more, especially as I, the nice thing about being here is actually getting face to face with customers again and you know, actually hearing what they're talking about. But you know, we've moved away from a Ansible specific story where I'm talking about how I, I was always, I was looking to automate, I was looking to go to Ansible. Well now I've got the automation capability. Now we've enhanced the automation. Capabil wisdom enhances the automation capability further. What about all those, those broader set of management solutions that I've got that I would like to start connecting to each other. So we're starting to take the same like, you know, you mentioned as then software architecture, software design principles. We'll apply those same application design principles, apply them to your IT management because we've got data center with the pressures on there. We've got the expansion into cloud, we've got the expansion to the edge, right? Each adding a new layer of complexity and a new layer of, you know, more that you have to then look after. But there's still the same >>Number of people. So a thousand flower blooms kind of situation. >>Exactly. And so how do I, how do I constrain, how do I tame it, right? How do I sit there and go, I, I can control that now I can look after that. I contain that. I can, I can deal with what I wanna do. So I'm focusing on what's important and we are getting stuff done. >>We, we've been quoting Andy Grove on the cube lately. Let chaos, rain and then rain in the chaos. Yes. Right? I mean that's kind of every inflection point has complexity before it gets simpler. >>Yeah, that's right. >>Yeah. You can't, there's answer that one. That's >>Perfectly. >>Yeah. Yeah. What do you expect to see chief ar you gotta have the vision. What's gonna pop out? What's that low, low hanging fruit? What's gonna bloom first? What do you think's gonna come? >>I, you know, my overarching vision is that I just want to be able to automate more. Where, where can we bring back, So edge cloud, right? That's obvious, but what things run in the cloud and and on the edge, right? Devices, you heard Chad in the keynote this morning talk about programmable logic controllers, sensors, fans, motors, things like that. This is the, the sort of, this is the next frontier of automation is that connecting your data centers and your systems, your applications and needs all the way out to where your customers are. Gas stations, point of sale systems. >>It's instant. It's instant. It is what it is. It's like just add, Just >>Add faster and bigger. Yeah. >>But what happens if, I'll give you a tease. What I think is, is what happens if this happens? So I've got much more rich feature, rich diverse set of tools looking after my systems, observing what's going on. And they go through a whole filtering process and they say such and such has happened, right? Wisdom picks that up and decides from that natural language statement that comes outta the back of that system. That's the task I think is now appropriate to run. Where do you run that? You need a secure execution capability. Pass that to an support, that single task. And now we run inside the automation platform at any of those locations that you just mentioned, right? Stitching those things together and having that sequence of events all the way through where you, you predefine what's possible. You know, you start to bias the system towards what is your accepted standard and then let those clever systems do what you are investing in them for, which is to run your IT and make it >>Easier. Rich here was on earlier, I said, hey, about voice activated it. Provision the cluster. Yeah. >>Last question guys, before we run out of time for this. For customers who take advantage of this new frontier, how can they get started with the bench of an what's? >>That's a good question. You know, we, we've engaged our community because they trust us and we trust them to build really good products. ansible.com/events. Oh man, >>I did have the, I >>Had the cup, the landing page. >>Find somebody find that. >>Well it's on GitHub, right? GitHub It is. >>Yeah it >>Is. Absolutely ansible.com. It's probably a link somewhere if I on the front page. Exactly. On GitHub. The good code too. >>Right? Exactly. And so look at there, you can see where we're going on our roadmap, what we're capable of today. Examples, we're gonna be doing labs and blogs and demonstrations of it over the next day, week, month. Right. You'll be able to see this evolve. You get to be the, the sort of vanguard of support and actions on this and >>Cause we really want, we really want users to play with it, right? Of course. We've been doing this for a while. We've seen what we think is right. We want users to play with it. Tell us whether the syntax works, whether it makes sense, how does it run, how does it work? That's the exciting part. But at the same time, we want the partners, you know, we, we don't know all the technologies, right? We want the partners that we have that work with us already in the community to go and sort of, you know, do those integrations, do those triggers to their systems, define rules for their stuff cuz they'll talk to their customers about it as >>Well. Right? Right. It'll be exciting to see what unfolds over the next six to nine months or so with the partners getting involved, the community getting involved. Guys, congratulations on the big announcements. Sounds like a lot of work. I can tell. We can tell. Your excitement level is huge and job well done. Thank you so much for joining us on the Cube. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our pleasure. Just All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be right back with our next guest of Stay tuned.

>>Okay, welcome back to everyone. Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John fur, host of the cube. Two sets three days of live coverage. Dave Ante's here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all host of the cube 12 interviews today, just we're with Rocklin and rolling, getting down to the end of the show. As we wind down and look back and look at the future. We've got Steven Jones. Here's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS. He's with Amazon web service. Steven Jones. Welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. >>Welcome back cube alumni. I've been on many times going back to 2015. Yeah. >>Pleasure to be here. Great >>To see you again. Thanks for coming on. Obviously 10 years at AWS, what a ride is that's been, come on. That's fantastic. Tell me it's been crazy. >>Wow. Learned a lot of stuff along the way, right? I mean, we, we, we knew that there was a lot of opportunity, right? Customers wanting the agility and flexibility of, of the cloud and, and we, we still think it's early days, right? I mean, you'll hear Andy say that animals say that, but it really is. Right. If you look at even just the amount of spend that's being spent on, on clouds, it's in the billions, right. And the amount of, of spend in it is still in the trillion. So there's, there's a long way to go and customers are pushing us hard. Obviously >>It's been interesting a lot going on with VM. We're obviously around with them, obviously changing the strategy with their, their third generation and their narrative. Obviously the Broadcom thing is going on around them. And 10 years at abs, we've been, we've been, this'll be our ninth year, no 10th year at reinvent coming up for us. So, but it's 10 years of everything at Amazon, 10 years of S three, 10 years of C two. So if you look at the, the marks of time, now, the history books are starting to be written about Amazon web services. You know, it's about 10 years of full throttle cube hyperscaler in action. I mean, I'm talking about real growth, like >>Hardcore, for sure. I'll give you just one anecdote. So when I first joined, I think we had maybe two EC two instances back in the day and the maximum amount of memory you could conversion into one of these machines was I think 128 gig of Ram fast forward to today. You literally can get a machine with 24 terabytes of Ram just in insane amounts. Right? My, my son who's a gamer tells me he's got 16 gig in his, in his PC. You need to, he thinks that's a lot. >>Yeah. >>That's >>Excited about that. That's not even on his graphics card. I mean, he's, I know it's coming next. The GPU, I mean, just all >>The it's like, right? >>I mean, all the hardware innovation that you guys have done, I mean, look at every it's changed. Everyone's changed their strategy to copy AWS nitro, Dave ante. And I talk about this all the time, especially with James Hamilton and the team over there, Peter DeSantos, these guys have, are constantly going at the atoms and innovating at the, at the level. I mean that, that's how hardcore it is over there right now. I mean, and the advances on the Silicon graviton performance wise is crazy. I mean, so what does that enabling? So given that's continuing, you guys are continuing to do great work there on the CapEx side, we think that's enabling another set of new net new applications because we're starting to see new things emerge. We saw snowflake come on, customer of AWS refactor, the data warehouse, they call it a data cloud. You're starting to see Goldman Sachs. You see capital one, you see enterprise customers building on top of AWS and building a cloud business without spending the CapEx >>Is exactly right. And Ziggy mentioned graviton. So graviton is one of our fastest growing compute families now. And you know, you mentioned a couple of ISVs and partners of ours who are leaning in heavily on porting their own software. Every event Adam announced that we're working with SAP to, to help them port their HANA cloud, which is a, a database of service offering HANA flagship to graviton as well. So it's, it's definitely changing. >>And I think, you know, one of the, and we're gonna circle back to VMware is kind of a point to this. This conversation is that, is that if you look at the trends, right, okay. VMware really tried hard to do cloud and they had a good shot at it V cloud air, but it just, they didn't have the momentum that you guys had at AWS. We saw a lot, lot of other stragglers try to do cloud. They fell off the road, OpenStack, HP, and the list goes on and on. I don't wanna get into that, but the point is, as you guys become more powerful and you're open, right? So you have open ecosystem, you have people now coming back, taking advantage and refactoring and picking up where they left off. VMware was the one of the first companies that actually said, you know what pat Gelsinger said? And I was there, let's clear up the positioning. Let's go all in with AWS. That's >>Right >>At that time, 2016. >>Yeah. This was new for us, for >>Sure. And then now that's set the standard. Now everybody else is kind of doing it. Where is the VMware cloud relationship right now? How is that going out? State's worked. >>It's working well very well. It's I mean, we're celebrating, I think we made the announcement what, five years ago at this conference. Yeah. 2016. So, I mean, it's, it's been a tremendous ride. The best part are the customers who were coming and adopting and proving to us that our vision back then was the right vision. And, and, and what's been different. I think about this relationship. And it was new for us was that we, we purposely went after a jointly engineered solution. This wasn't a, we've got a, a customer or a partner that's just going to run and build something on us. This is something where we both bring muscle and we actually build a, a joint offering together. Talk about, about the main difference. >>Yeah. And that, and that's been working, but now here at this show, if you look at, if you squint through the multi-cloud thing, which is like just, I think positioning for, you know, what could happen in, in a post broad Broadcom world, the cloud native has traction they're Tansu where, where customers were leaning in. So their enterprise customer is what I call the classic. It, you know, mainstream enterprise, which you guys have been doing a lot of business with. They're now thinking, okay, I'm gonna go on continu, accelerate on, in the public cloud, but I'm gonna have hybrid on premise as well. You guys have that solution. Now they're gonna need cloud native. And we were speculating that VMware is probably not gonna be able to get 'em all of it. And, and that there's a lot more cloud native options as customers want more cloud native. How do you see that piece on Amazon side? Because there's a lot of benefits between the VMware cloud on AWS and the services that you guys have natively in your cloud. So we see customers really taking advantage of the AWS goodness, as well as expanding the cloud side at VMware cloud on AWS. >>Yeah. There's probably two ways I would look at this. Right? So, so one is the combination of VMware cloud on AWS. And then both native services just generally brings more options to customers. And so typically what we're seeing now is customers are just able to move much faster, especially as it comes to data center, evacuations, migrating all their assets, right? So it used to be that, and still some customers they're like, I I've gotta think through my entire portfolio of applications and decide what to refactor. And the only way I can move it to cloud is to actually refactor it into some net new application, more and more. We're actually seeing customers. They've got their assets. A lot of them are still on premises in a VMware state, right. They can move those super quick and then modernize those. And so I think where you'll see VMware and AWS very aligned is on this, this idea of migrate. Now you need to get the benefits of TCO and, and the agility that comes with being in the cloud and then modernize. We took a step further, which is, and I think VMware would agree here too, but all of the, the myriad of services, I think it's 200 plus now AWS native services are for use right alongside any that a customer wants to run in VMware. And so we have examples of customers that are doing just, >>And that's, that's how you guys see the native and, and VMware cloud integrating in. Yeah, that's, that's important because this, I mean, if I always joke about, you know, we've been here 12 years listening in the hallways and stuff, you know, on the bus to the event last night, walking the parties and whatnot, listening in the streets, there's kind of two conversations that rise right to the top. And I wanna get your reaction to this Steven, because this seems to be representative of this demographic here at VMware conference, there's conversations around ransomware and storage and D dub and recovery. It's all, a lot of those happen. Yeah. Clearly a big crowd here that care about, you know, Veeam and NetApp and storage and like making sure stuff's secure and air gapped. And a lot of that kind of, I call nerdy conversations and then the other one is, okay, I gotta get the cloud story. >>Right. So there's kind of the operational security. And then there's like, okay, what's my path to true cloud. I need to get this moving. I need to have better applications. My company is the application now not it serves some sort of back office function. Yeah. It's like, my company is completely using technology as its business. So the app is the business. So that means everything's technology driven, not departmental siloed. So there's a, that's what I call the true cloud conversation. How do you, how do you see that evolving because VMware customers are now going there. And I won't say, I won't say they're behind, but they're certainly going there faster than ever before. >>I think, I think, I mean, it's an interesting con it's an interesting way to put it and I, I would completely agree. I think it's, it's very clear that I think a lot of customer companies are actually being disrupted. Right. And they have to move fast and reinvent themselves. You said the app is now becoming the company. Right. I mean, if, if you look at where not too many years back, there were, you know, big companies like Netflix that were born in the cloud. Right. Airbnb they're disruptors. >>There's, that's the >>App, right? That's the app. Yeah. So I, I would exactly agree. And, and that's who other companies are competing with. And so they have to move quickly. You talked about some, some technology that allows them to do that, right? So this week we announced the general availability of a NetApp on tap solution. It's been available on AWS for some time as a fully managed FSX storage solution. But now customers can actually leverage it with, with VMC. Now, why is that important? Well, there's tens of thousands of customers running VMware. On-premises still, there's thousands of them that are actually using NetApp filers, right? NetApp, NetApp filers, and the same enterprise features like replication. D do you were talking about and Snapp and clone. Those types of things can be done. Now within the V VMware state on AWS, what's even better is they can actually move faster. So consider replicating all this, you know, petabytes and petabytes of data that are in these S from on-premises into AWS, this, this NetApp service, and then connected connecting that up to the BMC option. So it just allows customers much, much. >>You guys, you guys have always been customer focus. Every time I sat down with the Andy jazzy and then last year with Adam, same thing we worked back from, I know it's kind of a canned answer on some of the questions from media, but, but they do really care. I've had those conversations. You guys do work backwards from the customer, actually have documents called working backwards. But one of the things that I observed, we talked about here yesterday on the cube was the observations of reinvent versus say, VM world. Now explore is VM world's ecosystem was very partner-centric in the sense of the partners needed to rely on VMware. And the customers came here for both more of the partners, not so much VMware in the sense there wasn't as much, many, many announcements can compare that to the past, say eight years of reinvent, where there's so much Amazon action going on the partners, I won't say take as a second, has a backseat to Amazon, but the, the attendees go there generally for what's going on with AWS, because there's always new stuff coming out. >>And it's, it's amazing. But this year it starts to see that there's an overlap or, or change between like the VMware ecosystem. And now Amazon there's, a lot of our interviews are like, they're on both ecosystems. They're at Amazon's show they're here. So you start to see what I call the naturalization of partners. You guys are continuing to grow, and you'll probably still have thousands of announcements at the event this year, as you always do, but the partners are much more part of the AWS equation, not just we're leasing all these new services and, and oh, for sure. Look at us, look at Amazon. We're growing. Cause you guys were building out and look, the growth has been great. But now as you guys get to this next level, the partners are integral to the ecosystem. How do you look at that? How has Amazon thinking about that? I know there's been some, some, a lot of active reorgs around AWS around solving this problem or no solve the problem, addressing the need and this next level of growth. What's your reaction to >>That? Well, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a good point. So I have to be honest with you, John. I, I, I spent eight of my 10 years so far at AWS within the partner organization. So partners are very near and dear to my heart. We've got tens of thousands of partners and you are you're right. You're starting to see some overlap now between the VMware partner ecosystem and what we've built now in AWS and partners are big >>By the way, you sell out every reinvent. So it's, you have a lot of partners. I'm not suggesting that you, that there's no partner network there, but >>Partners are critical. I mean, absolutely naturally we want a relationship with a customer, but in order to scale the way we need to do to meet the, the needs of customers, we need partners. Right. We, we can't, we can't interact with every single customer as much as we would like to. Right. And so partners have long built teams and expertise that, that caters to even niche workloads or opportunity areas. And, and we love partners >>For that. Yeah. I know you guys do. And also we'll point out just to kind of give props to you guys on the partner side, you don't, you keep that top of the stack open on Amazon. You've done some stuff for end to end where customers want all Amazon, but for the most part, you let competition come in, even on, so you guys are definitely partner friendly. I'm just observing more the maturization of partners within the reinvent ecosystem, cuz we're there every year. I mean, it's, I mean, first of all, they're all buzzing. I mean, it's not like there's no action. There's a lot of customers there it's sold out as big numbers, but it just seems that the partners are much more integrated into the value proposition of at a AWS because of the, the rising tide and, and now their enablement, cuz now they're part of the, of the value proposition. Even more than ever before >>They, they really are. And they, and they're building a lot of capabilities and services on us. And so their customers are our customers. And like you say, it's rising tide, right. We, we all do better together. >>Okay. So let's talk about the VMware cloud here. What's the update here in terms of the show, what's your, what's your main focus cuz a lot of people here are doing, doing sessions. What's been some of the con content that you guys are producing here. >>Yeah. So the best part obviously is a always the customer conversations to partner conversations. So a, a lot of, a lot of sessions there, we did keynote yesterday in Ryan and I, where we talked about a number of announcements that are, I think pretty material now to the offering a joint announcement with NetApp yesterday as well around the storage solution I was talking about. And then some, some really good technical deep dives on how the offering works. Customers are still interested in like how, how do I take what I've got on premises and easily move into AWS and technology like HSX H CX solution with VMware makes it really easy without having to re IP applications. I mean, you know, it is super difficult sometimes to, to move an application. If you've got figure out where all the firewall rules are and re iPing those, those things source. But yeah, it's, it's been fantastic. >>A lot of migrations to the cloud too. A lot of cloud action, new cloud action. You guys have probably seen an uptake on services right on the native side. >>Yes. Yes. For sure. So maybe I just outlined some of the, some of the assets we made this week. So absolutely >>Go ahead. >>We, we announced a new instance family as a, a major workhorse underneath the VMware cloud offering called I, I, you mentioned nitro earlier, this is on, based on our latest generation of nitro, which allows us to offer as you know, bare metal instances, which is, which is what VMware actually VMware was our first partnership and customer that I would say actually drove us to really get Nira done and out the door. And we've continued to iterate on that. And so this I four, I instance, it's based on the, the latest Intel isolate processor with more than double the Ram double the compute, a whopping 75 gigabytes per second network. So it's a real powerhouse. The cool thing is that with the, with the NetApp storage solution that we, we discussed, we're now disaggregating the need to provision, compute and storage at the same time. It used to be, if you wanted to add more storage to your VSAN array, that was on a V VMware cloud. Yeah. You'd add another note. You might not need more compute for memory. You'd have to add another note. And so now customers can simply start adding chunks of storage. And so this opens up customers. I had a customer come to me yesterday and said, there's no reason for us not to move. Now. We were waiting for something that like this, that allowed us to move our data heavy workloads yeah. Into VMware cloud. It's >>Like, it's like the, the alignment. You mentioned alignment earlier. You know, I would say that VMware customers are lined up now almost perfectly with the hybrid story that's that's seamless or somewhat seems it's never truly seamless. But if you look at like what Deepak's doing with Kubernetes and open source, you, you guys have that there talking that big here, you got vs a eight vSphere, eight out it's all cloud native. So that's lined up with what you guys are doing on your services and the horsepower. They have their stuff, you have yours that works better together. So it seems like it's more lined up than ever before. What's your take on that? Do you agree? And, and if so, what folks watching here that are VMware customers, what's, what's the motivation now to go faster? >>Look, it is, it is absolutely lined up. We are, as, as I mentioned earlier, we are jointly engineering and developing this thing together. And so that includes not just the nuts and bolts underneath, but kind of the vision of where it's going. And so we're, we're collectively bringing in customer feedback. >>What is that vision real quick? >>So that vision has to actually help an under help meet even the most demanding customer workloads. Okay. So you've got customer workloads that are still locked in on premises. And why is that? Well, it used to be, there was big for data and migration, right? And the speed. And so we continue to iterate this and that again is a joint thing. Instead of say, VMware, just building on AWS, it really is a, a tight partnership. >>Yeah. The lift and shift is a, an easy thing to do. And, and, and by the way, that could be a hassle too. But I hear most people say the reason holding us back on the workloads is it's just a lot of work, a hassle making it easier is what they want. And you guys are doing that. >>We are doing that. Absolutely. And by the way, we've got not just engineering teams, but we've got customer support teams on both sides working together. We also have flexible commercial options, right? If a customer wants to buy from AWS because they've negotiated some kind of deal with us, they can do that. They wanna buy from VMware for a similar reason. They could buy from VMware. So are >>They in the marketplace? >>They are in the market. There, there are some things in the marketplace. So you talked about Tansu, there's a Tansu offering in the marketplace. So yes. Customers can >>Contract. Yeah. Marketplaces. I'm telling you that's very disruptive. I'm Billy bullish on the market AIOS marketplace. I think that's gonna be a transformative way. People have what they procure and fully agree, deploy and how, and channel relationships are gonna shift. I think that's gonna be a disruptive enabler to the partner equation and, and we haven't even seen it yet. We're gonna be up there in September for their inaugural event. I think it's a small group, but we're gonna be documenting that. So even final question for you, what's next for you? What's on the agenda. You got reinvent right around the corner. Your P ones are done. Right? I know. Assuming all that, I turn that general joke. That's an internal Amazon joke. FYI. You've got your plan. What's next for the world. Obviously they're gonna go this, take this, explore global. No matter what happens with Broadcom, this is gonna be a growth wave with hybrid. What's next for you and your team with AWS and VMware's relationship? >>Yeah. So both of us are hyper focused on adding additional options, both from a, an instance compute perspective. You know, VMware announced some, some, some additional offerings that we've got. We've got a fully complete, like, so they're, they announce things like VMware flex compute V VMware flex storage. You mentioned earlier, there was a conversation around ransomware. There's a new ransomware based offering. So we're hyper focused on rounding out, continuing to round out the offering and giving customers even more choice >>Real quick. Jonathan made me think about the ransomware we were at reinforce Steven Schmidtz now the CSO. Now you got a CSO. AJ's the CSO. You got a whole focus, huge emphasis on security right now. I know you always have, but now it's much more public. It's PO more positive, I think, than some of the other events I've been to. It's been more Lum and doom. What's the security tie in here with VMware. Can you share a little bit real quick on the security piece update around this relationship? >>Yeah, you bet. So as you know, security for us is job zero. Like you don't have anything of security. And so what are the things that, that we're excited about specifically with VMware is, is the latest offering that, that we put together and it's called this, this ransomware offering. And it's, it's a little bit different than other ransomware. I mean, a lot of people have ransomware offerings today, just >>Air gap. >>Right, right, right. Exactly. No, that's easy. No, this one is different. So on the back end, so within VMC, there's this, this option where CU we can be to be taking iterative snapshots of a customer environment. Now, if an event were to occur, right. And a customer is like, I have to know if I'm compromised, we can actually spin up super easy. This is cloud. Remember? Yeah. We can spin up a, a copy of this environment, throw a switch, pick a snapshot with NSX. So VMware NSX firewall it off and then use some custom tooling from VMware to actually see if it's been compromised or not. And then iterate through that until you actually know you're clean. And that's different than just tools that do maybe a >>Little bit of scam. We had Tom gills on yesterday and, and one of the things Dave ante had to leave is taking the sun to college is last one in the house and B nester now, but Tom Gill was on. We were talking about how good their security story is ware. And they really weren't showboating it as much as they could have here. I thought they could have done a better job, but this is an example of kind of them really leaning in with you guys. That's the key part of the relationship. >>Yeah, it really is. And I think this is something is materially different than what you can get elsewhere. And it's exciting for, >>Okay. Now the, the real question I want to know is what's your plans for AWS reinvent the blockbuster end of the year, Amazon surf show that gets bigger and bigger. I know it's still hybrid now, but it's looking be hybrid, but people are back in person last year. You guys were the first event really come back and still had massive numbers. AWS summit, New York at 19,000. I heard last week in Chicago, big numbers. So we're expecting reinvent to be pretty large this year. What are you, what are you gonna do there? What's your role there? >>We are expecting, well, I'll be there. I cover multiple businesses. Obviously. We're, we're planning on some additional announcements, obviously in the VMware space as well. And one of the other businesses I run is around SAP. And you should look for some things there as well. Yeah. Really looking forward to reinvent, except for the fact that it's right after Thanksgiving. But I think it >>Always ruins my, I always get an article out. I like, why are you we're having, we're having Thanksgiving dinner. I gotta write this article. It's gotta get Adam, Adam. Leski exclusive. We, every year we do a, a CEO sit down with Andy was the CEO and then now Adam. But yeah, it's a great event to me. I think it sets the tone. And it's gonna be very interesting to see the big clouds are coming to the big cloud. You guys, and you guys are now called hyperscalers. Now, multiple words. It's interesting. You guys are providing the CapEx goodness for everybody else now. And that relationship seems to be the new, the new industry standard of you guys provide the enablement and then everyone you get paid, cuz it's a service. A whole nother level of cloud is emerging in the partner network, GSI other companies. Yeah. >>Yeah. I mean we're really scaling. I mean we continue to iterate and release regions at a fast clip. We just announced support for VMware in Hong Kong. Yeah. So now we're up to 21 regions for this service, >>The sovereign clouds right around the corner. Let's we'll talk about that soon. Steven. Thanks for coming. I know you gotta go. Thank you for your valuable time. Coming in. Put Steven Jones. Who's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS business. Four AWS here inside the cube day. Three of cube coverage. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm basically sitting with the cloud. I got a power panel here with me. You are not gonna wanna miss the segment, please. Welcome, nor Barage I probably did. I do. Okay on that. Great, thank you. VP and GM of cloud solutions at VMware. Thanks for joining us. Field brother tune is back our alumni VP solutions and alliances at NetApp bill. Great to see you in person. Thank you. And Steve Jones, GM SAP, and VMware cloud at Amazon. Welcome guys. Thank you. Pleasure. So we got VMware, NetApp and Amazon. I was telling Phil before we went live, I was snooping around on the NetApp website the other day. And I saw a tagline that said two is the company three is a cloud, but I get to sit with the cloud. This is fantastic. Nora, talk to us about the big news that came out just about 24 hours ago. These three powerhouse, we >>Were super excited. We are celebrating five years of VMware cloud this week. And with three powerhouses here, we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud and AWS with NetApp on tap. We have AWS FSX. And so this solution is now generally available across all global regions. We are super excited with all our joint customers and partners to bring this to the market. >>So Steve, give us your perspective as AWS as the biggest hyperscaler. Talk about the importance of the partnership and the longstanding partnerships that you've had with both NetApp and VMware. >>Yeah, you bet. So first all, maybe I'll start with Ryan and VMware. So we've had a very long standing partnership with VMware for over five years now. One thing that we've heard consistently from customers is they, they want help in reducing the heavy lifting or the, the friction that typically comes with cloud adoption. And VMware's been right in the trenches with us and helping with that over the years with the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And, and now that we've got NetApp, right, the FSX on tap solution, a managed storage solution that is, is been known and trusted in the on-premises world. Now available since September on AWS, but now available for use with VMware cloud is just amazing for customers who are looking for that agility, >>Right? Phil talk about NetApp has done a phenomenal job in its own digital transformation journey. Talk about that as an enabler for what you announced yesterday and the, and the capabilities that NetApp is able to bring to its customers with VMware and with AWS. >>Yeah. You know, it started, it's interesting because we NetApp's always been a company that works very closely with our partners. VMware has been a huge partner of ours since gosh, 2005 probably, or sometime like that. I started working with Amazon back in about 20 13, 20 14, when we first took on tap and brought it to the Amazon platform in the marketplace ahead of what's. Now FSX ends like a dream to bring a fully managed ONAP onto the world's biggest cloud. So that work you you're really looking at about. I mean, it depends how you look at it, 15 years of work. And then as Ryan was saying that VMware was working in parallel with us on being a first party service on Amazon, we came together and, or Ryan and I came together and VMware and NetApp came together about probably about two years ago now with this vision of what we're announcing today and to have so to have GA of this combination for meaning global availability, anybody can try it today. It's just an amazing day. It's really a great day. >>Yeah. It's unbelievable how we have sort of partnered together and hard engineering problems to create a very simple outcome for customers and partners. One of the things, you know, VMware cloud is a very successful service offering with a lot of great consumption and different verticals. Things like cloud migration, you know, transforming your entire, you know, data center and moving to the cloud. Things like, you know, modernizing our apps, disaster recovery now ransomware this week. So really, really exciting uptake and innovation in that whole service. One thing customers always told us that they want more options for storage decouple from compute. And so that really helped customers to lower their total cost of ownership and get to, you know, get even more workloads into VMware cloud. And this partnership really creates that opportunity for us to provide customers with those options. >>Let me give you an example, just I was walking over here just before I walked over here. We were with a customer talking about exactly what Orion's talking about. We were modeling using a TCO calculator that we all put together as well on what we call data intensive workloads, which is in this case, it was a 500 gigabytes per VM. So not a huge amount of data per VM. The, the case study modeled out of 38% cost savings or reduction in total cost, which in the case was like 1.2 million per year of total cost down to 700 million. And just, you could do the, just depends on how many VMs you have and how big odes you have, but that's the kind of cost savings we're talking about. So the, this is a really easy value to talk about. You save a lot of money in it's exactly as nor Ryan said, because we can separate the compute and the storage. Yep. >>Yep. I was just gonna say the reason for that is it used to be with VMware cloud on AWS. If you wanted more storage for your workload, you would have to add another node. So with another node, you would get another compute node. You would get the compute, you'd get the memory and the storage, but now we've actually decoupled the ability to expand the storage footprint from the compute, allowing customers to really expand as their needs grow. And so it's, it's just a lot more flexibility. Yep. That customers had. Yeah. >>Flexibility is key. Every customer needs that they need to be agile. There's always a competitor waiting in the rear view mirror behind any business, waiting to take over. If, if they can't innovate fast enough, if they can't partner with the best of the best to deliver the infrastructure that's needed to enable those business outcomes, I wanna get your perspective, Steve, what are some of the outcomes that when you're talking to customers, you talked about fill the TCO. Those are huge numbers, very compelling. What are some of the other outcomes that customers can expect to achieve from this solution? >>That's a great question. I think customers want the flexibility. We talked about customers absolutely wanna be able to move fast. They're also very demanding customers who have had an experience with solutions like NetApp on tap on premises, right? So they've come to expect enterprise features like thin provisioning, snapshoting cloning, rapid cloning, right? And even replication of data given that customers now can leverage this type of functionality as well through the NetApp solution with VMC, they're getting all those enterprise class features from, from the storage in combination with what they already had with vs a and, and VMC. >>Steve earlier mentioned the word we used, we kind of took it from VMware or from Amazon was friction is so many workloads run in VMware VMs today to be able to just simply pick them up as is move them to Amazon makes cloud adoption. Just, I mean, frictionless is an extreme word, but it's really lowers the friction to cloud adoption. And as Steve said, then you've get all these enterprise features wherever you need to run. >>Just brings speed. >>I was just about to say, it's gotta be the speed. It has to be a huge factor here. Yep, >>Yep. Yeah. >>Sure. One of the things that we've seen with VMware cloud is operational consistency as, as a customer value because when customers are thinking about, you know, complex enterprise apps, moving that to the cloud, they need that operational consistency, which drives down their costs. They don't have to relearn new skills. They're used to VMware, they're used to NetApp. And so this partnership really fosters that operational consistency as a big customer value, and they can reuse those skills and really reapply them in this cloud model. The other thing is the cloud model here is super completely managed. If you think about that, right, customers have to do less VMware, AWS and NetApp is doing more for them. That's true in this model. >>So you're able to really deliver a lot of workforce efficiency, workforce productivity across the stack. >>Absolutely. >>And that's definitely true that it just, as it gets more complex, how do you manage it? Just continue, hear everybody talking about this, right. So when a completely managed service by VMware and Amazon is such a savings in com in management complexity, which then gets back to speed. How do I grow my plant faster? >>I mean, and really at the end of the day, customers are actually able to focus on what differentiate differentiates them, obviously versus the management of the underlying infrastructure and storage and all those, those things that are still critical, but exactly, but >>For, for the customer to be able to have to abstract the underlying underlying technology layer and focus on what differentiates them from the competition. That's like I said, right back here, right. That's especially if there's anything we've learned in the last couple of years, it's that it, that is critical for businesses across every industry, no industry exempt from this. >>None. One other thing, just an example of what you're talking about is we all work a lot on modernization techniques like using Kubernetes and container technologies. So with this, if you think about this, you, this solution, you can move an app as is modernize on the cloud. You can modernize, you can modernize and then move. You can, the flexibility that this enables like. So it's sort of like move to the cloud at your rate is a really big benefit. >>And we've seen so many customer examples of migrating modernize is how we like to summarize it, where customers are, you know, migrating, modernizing at their own pace. Yep. And the good, good thing about the platform and the service is that it is the home for all applications, virtual machines containers with Kubernetes backed by local storage, external storage options. The level of flexibility for all applications is really immense. And that drives down your TCO even more. >>What, from a target customer perspective, Noran, talk about that. Who, who is the target? Obviously I imagine VMware customers, it's NetApp customers, it's AWS, but is there, are there any targets kind of within that, that are really prime candidates for this solution? >>Yeah. A great question. First of all, the, the easy sort of overlap between all of us is our shared customer pool. And so VMware and NetApp have been partners for what, 20 years, something like that. And we have thousands of customers using our joint solutions in the data center. And so that's a very clear target for this solution, as they're considering use cases such as, you know, cloud migration, disaster recovery, virtual desktops, application modernization. So that's a very clear target and we see this day in and day out, obviously there are many other customers that would be interested in this solution, as well as they're considering, you know, AWS and we provide a whole range of consumption options for them. Right. And I think that's one of the, sort of the, the good things about our partnership, including with AWS, where customers can purchase this from VMware can purchase this from AWS and all of these different options, including from our partners really makes it very, very compelling. >>Talk a little bit about from each of your perspectives about the what's in it. For me as a partner of these companies, Steve, we'll start with you. >>I mean, what's in it for me is that it's what my customers have been asking for. And we, we have a long history, I think of providing managed services again, to remove that heavy lifting that customers often just don't want to have to do. Having seen the, the adoption of managed storage offerings, including the, the NetApp solution here and now being able to bring that into the VMware space where they're already using it in an on-premises world, and now they're moving those, those workloads being able to satisfy that need that a customer's asking for is awesome. >>We, every time we're at an AWS event, we are always talking about it's absolute customer obsession, and I know NetApp and VMware well, and know that that is a shared obsession across the three companies. >>Hey, Lisa, let me add one more thing. It's interesting, not everybody sees this, but it's really obvious that the NetApp on-prem installed base with VMware, which is tens of thousands of customers. This is an awesome solution. Not quite as obvious is that every on-prem VMware customer gets that TCO benefit. I mentioned that's not limited to the NetApp on-prem installed base. So we're really excited to be able to expose all the market that hasn't used our products on-prem to this cloud solution. And, and it's really clear customers are adopting the cloud, right? So we're, that's one of the reasons we're so excited about this is it opens up a huge new opportunity to work with new customers for us. Talk >>About those customer conversations, Phil, how, where are they happening at? What level are you talking with customers about migration to cloud? Has it changed in the last couple >>Of years? Oh yeah. You know, I've been working on this for years and a lot of the on-prem conversation, it's been a little bifurcated that on-prem is on-prem and cloud developers or cloud developers. And Amazon's done a huge amount to break that down. VMware getting in the game, a lot of it's networking complexities, those have gone down. A lot of people are cross connected and set up today, which that wasn't so true five years ago. So now it's a lot of conversations about, I hear carbon footprint reduction. I hear data all in around data center reduction. The cloud guys are super efficient operators of data center infrastructure. We were talking about different use cases like disaster recovery. It's it's everybody though. It's small companies, it's big companies. They're all sort of moving into this, it call it at least hybrid world. And that's why when I say we're get really excited about this, because it does get rid of a lot of friction for moving loads in those directions, at the rate, the customer wants to do it. >>And that one last really quick thing is I was using NetApp as an example, we have about 300 enterprise workloads. We wanna move to the cloud two, right? And so they're all running VMware, like most, most of the world. And so this solution is, looks really good to us and we're gonna do the exact, I was just out with our CIO. We're going, looking at those 300, which do we just lift and move? Which do we refactor? And how do we do that? In fact, that Ryan was out to dinner with us last night, talking about >>This it's more and more it's being driven top down. So in the early days, and I've been with Amazon for 10 years now. Yep. Early days, it was kind of developer oriented, often initiated projects. Now it's top level CIOs. Exactly. I >>Are two mandates today talking to customers. >>I think of reinvent as an it conference. Now in the way, some of these top down mandates are driven, but listen, I mean, we got great customer interest. We have been in preview for three to six months now, and we've seen a lot of customers were not able to drag their entire data center workloads because of different reasons of PCO data, intensive workloads, et cetera. And we've seen tremendous amounts of interest from them. And we're also seeing a lot of new customers in the pipeline that want to consider VMware cloud now that we have these great storage options. >>So there's a pretty healthy Tam I'm hearing. >>Absolutely. >>I think so. Yeah. It's interesting. Another, just both like WWT and Presidio, channel partners, big, huge channel partners. It takes no selling to explain. We, we just say, Hey, we're doing this. And they start building services. Presidio is here with us talking about a customer win that they got. So this is it. It's easy for people to see why this is a cool, a cool solution. >>The value prop is there >>Definitely >>There's no having appeal the onion to >>Find it. No, the money savings. It's just in what or Ryan said, a lot of people have seen the, the seen an obstacle of cost. Yeah. So the TCO benefit, I mentioned removes that obstacle. And then that opens the door to all the features Steve was talking about of the advanced storage features and things on the platform. >>So is there a customer that's been in beta on this solution that you can talk about in, in terms of what they were looking for, the challenges that you helped them erase and the outcomes they're achieving? >>Yeah, sure. I can. I can provide one example. A large financial customer was looking at this during the preview phase and you know, for, for, for reasons before that were already a customer, but they were not able to attract a lot of their other workloads from other business units. And with this solution, now the service is a much better candidate for those workloads and those business units that had not considered VMware cloud. So we're really excited to see new workloads coming from that particular customer, given this particular solution and the whole TCO math for them was very, very straightforward and simple. And this became a more attractive option for that particular customer. >>Is there a shadow it elimination factor here in this technology and who you're selling to? >>Not real, I, don't not intent. Wouldn't intentionally. I wouldn't say yeah, not intentionally. I, it was funny with the customers I was thinking is yes. The question, the customers that are in the preview are seeing the benefits that we're talking about. The, one of the reasons we started the project on our side a number of years ago was this very large cement company was looking for carbon CO2 reduction. Part of that was moving disaster recovery to the cloud. There was a lot of friction in the solution prior to this, the, the customers have done some of the things we're talking about, but there's a, it takes a lot of skill. And we were looking at working with that customer going, how could we simplify this? And that was from our point of NetApp's point of view, it, it drove us to VMware and to AWS saying, can't we pull some of the friction of this out. And I think that that's what we've seen in the, in the previews. And it's, that's what I meant. It's so exciting to go from having say, I know we have about 20 previews right now, going to the globe today is the, is the exciting news today. >>And is the solution here in booze that it can be demoed and folks can kind of get their hands on it. >>Yeah. Yeah. They can go to the VMware cloud booth at the expo and they can get their hands on their demo and they can take it for a test drive. >>Excellent. >>You can run TCO calculators and do your own math and see what you're gonna all this, the all that's integrated today. We >>Also have pilots where we can help walk customers through a scenario of their own. >>Yep. Excellent. Is there, is there a, a joint website that you guys have, we should drive folks to? >>Yeah, it's >>Actually talk about the press release. It's >>It's yours. So >>It's it's prominently on our website. Okay. VMware cloud. It is onc.vmware.com where we also have the other, you know, our corporate marketing websites that have this vmware.com is a great starting point. Yeah. And we feature the solution. Prominently customers can get started today and they can even participate in the hands on labs here and take the solution for a test drive. >>All right. Last question, nor Ryan, we'll start with you on this. Here we are. I love the theme of this event, the center of the multicloud universe. Does it not sound like a Marvel movie? I feel like there should be some, is there any superheroes running around? Cause I really feel like there should be, how is this solution an enabler of allowing customers to really extract the most of value from their multi-cloud world that they're living in? >>Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, our mission is to build, run, managed, secure applications in any cloud, right. And regu has been talking about this with the keynote this morning as well. You know, at least with NetApp, we share a very good joint vision of enabling customers to, you know, place applications with really good TCO across clouds. And so it's really good story I feel. And I think this is a really good step in that direction where customers have choice and flexibility in terms of where they put their applications in the TCO value that they get. >>Awesome. Guys, you gotta come back next with a customer would love to dig. Maybe at reinvent sounds, we can dig into more and to see a great story of how a customer came together and is really leveraging that the power that is sitting next to me here. Thank you all so much for joining me and having this great conversation. Congratulations on the announcement and it being GA. >>Thank you. Awesome. >>Thank you. Thanks Lisa. All right. Fun conversation. I told you power panel for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, keep it right here for more live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 from downtown San Francisco. We'll be right back with our next guest.

>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got two great guests here. Dave Lindquist Vice President of Software Engineering at Red Hat and Matthew Jones, Chief Architect, and Ansible Engineer Architect of the automation platform. Matthew, great to see you, Dave, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on for the, for this CUBE conversation. >> Great to see you John, thank you. >> So the big theme here is automation, we've been talking about it for a while. Dave, I think last year we hit this point a couple of times hard. This year, it's kind of going mainstream and it's really exciting because like, this is stuff that's been kind of going around. So it's been growing rapidly. So building on the themes from last year, throughout this year and cloud native with the edge right around the corner, automation is growing rapidly. Okay, so what arenas do you guys think we're in the too hard, too easy, you know, comments like yeah, repetitive tasks are good, but it's more complicated than that now. Are there areas that your customers think are better for automation than others? Can you guys introduce where the action is? >> Sure. Well, I'll get started John. We are clearly seeing an acceleration at our applied automation across full life cycles, across domains. If you step back and think about the journey, many customers are on with their development environments, continuous delivery, inter-cloud, hybrid cloud. The challenges are how to accelerate the use of automation across the full life cycle, across your workloads, across security compliance, across networking, across storage, how to remediate situations. So it's just an acceleration of how do you apply automation into all these different domains? >> Is there areas specifically you think customers thought, no, we'll never going to get there that they're getting there now? Is there specific things you're seeing low-hanging fruit or is there a clear path? What do you guys see about that? Cause you know, this is now we're seeing things now that certainly with the pandemic, a lot more visibility into automation with cloud scale. Is there areas where your customers are saying I didn't think I can get that. Now we can get that. Now we can automate that. >> Yeah. I think a couple of areas jump to mind quickly. One is sometimes referred to as a shift left, but how do you start bringing automation earlier, earlier into the life cycle? One of the things we talked about last year that we've been building on is with advanced cluster management and containers and Kubernetes. And how do you insert automation from Ansible into all the different life cycles? Whether it's setting up clusters, it's deploying applications, it's remediating from security events or compliance activities that's, we're starting to see where customers are really starting to push the envelope on their use automation across those life cycles. >> Matt, how has Ansible evolving to address the demands we've heard in previous interviews with customers specifically to grow past their traditional management automation environments, because that's the real action here. What are you guys doing to address those demands? >> Yeah, you're, you're exactly right. Our, the way that we're evolving is in you know, right. Like we, where we've started as with basic command line tools, really basic integration with systems that developers have been familiar with for years, decades, right? Where we want to grow into is the native automation that makes up the cloud that makes up the services and infrastructure that not just developers interface with, but administrators, DevOps, SRE, common users, normal people who are just trying to get things done. We want to meet them at the systems and at the footprints that they expect. And that's what we want to do. And that the systems and the tools that we're introducing this year, next year, that we've been working on through the pandemic. So I'm moving the ball forward into those areas. >> W what's been along those lines, what's been the, the thought around footprint expansion. Cause that's become a big topic, right? I want to expand my automation space. I want to hire more people. Good luck with that. And it's hard to hire people in this market, but again, automation is, is a human machine and software perspective. So you still need humans. So footprint, automation and team scale. Can you talk about that, Matthew? What do you think about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we've spent a lot of time focusing on automation in the system space and how these tools connect to those systems and a big theme this year of AnsibleFest has been, how do we, how do we get back to the tools and the processes that people are using and people are building to do that. We've, we've created a whole developer focus space within the automation platform, a suite of tools that integrate into their development environments, their own automation workflows, making it easier to share and collaborate on automation, building communities within their organizations and among their, their internal stakeholders. And I think you'll see that represented here at AnsibleFest and the dedication to those tools and the integration of workloads and not just, not just the tools that they've had before, but the tools that they're learning and gaining experience with right now, the container based workloads and how do we share automation and verify and validate feel good about that automation that it's going to work when we go to production with it, those are the kinds of tools and processes that we're developing and delivering for our customers, for the community, for their stakeholders in their community also. >> What's the big updates this year at AnsibleFest for those people who want to jump in and make and have it be easier for teams to use Ansible and experienced Ansible. And also for the new, the newbies people coming in who are new to automation that could be savvy developers. I mean, people are shifting left with security and everyone's bolting on automation and, or planning it in from the beginning on architecture. So you're seeing a new, a new user base come in to answer well, that's what I hear. What, what specifically are you guys announcing? >> And those new people, they need to be able to come into an organization's process and get up to speed on what their automation, what automation they're working on and learn the ropes, be able to share and collaborate with people who are automating in this space already. We need to be able to give them access to documentation and tooling that helps them get started right away rather than having to fumble around the documentation, have meetings and learn the ropes. We want, we want to make the smooth and, and we want the pipeline of automation to go from the developer and their team into the content publisher publishing and management of automation hub using collections and execution environments that we're introducing here. The same things that they work on and build and produce as automation developers are what they'll use in the automation platform to actually run the automation. And that feels really good, right? The things that you're seeing on your developer workspace that you share with your team and your internal community, you can follow it right through your editor, your ID, through to automation hub. You're going to proving the content right out through automation controller and the automation platform through running that automation. >> Yeah, I think this is a huge point. I mean, Matthew nailed it. I think you have to have the, the ability to go from newbie accelerate quickly to expert because you know, this is the cloud that's cloud scale. There's the life cycle of software development is changing. It's very agile. It's very integrated and newbies can come in quickly and be awesome fast. It's not, you don't need to go to the training old school kind of training modules and get ramped up. You could be instantly running hard. So I think that's a huge point. And we're hearing that. So congratulations. Dave, I want to bring you in and talk about the, how other Ansible adjacent systems that you oversee come together with this release of Ansible. So, so what does it mean for the products okay. That are working together in the management space, because you know, you now have Ansible great track record. Now you have a system in these distributed systems now, enterprising cloud environments or systems working together. What's the impact. >> Yeah, no great question, John, maybe just to start to follow on some of the areas that Matthew was going through, some of the advances in Ansible automation platform are really to ease the deployment and then be able to grow that deployment with scale and distribution, putting execution nodes, wherever you, wherever those nodes need to be the ability to simplify, creating content, access to content collections so that the automation maturity and the use automation can grow. So that couples very nice with many of the investments we have in the broader space of, of management around advanced cluster management for Kubernetes, with ACM around, around our insights, around our edge management initiatives across, across the board. So what I'm seeing, what we're all seeing is how many of the solutions are looking at how you bring many of these disciplines to Garret together. For example, how do we start realizing the promise of event driven architectures from insights? How can we understand what's happening with workloads or infrastructure or compliance issues? And then from the management systems, we can pick up the inventory and the workload and all the specifics about that workload. And then with Ansible, we can then automate and remediate either scale that workload address a, you know, your, your service management processes or hook into even remediation say of a compliance issue. So you're basically bringing together insights with policy, during mechanisms with the automation capabilities of Ansible, which is fascinating and how we start building much more robust automation solutions. Which are required where everything's headed in this hybrid cloud environment. >> I mean, what are some of the challenges that your customers have on that point? There's robust solutions are what everyone wants. It's a natural extension. I mean, you can see what you just laid out. What, what are some of the customer challenges, data that you're seeing there, because this is a path everyone's going down, I'm hearing people discuss this, you know, in the hallways and virtual hallways these days. But you know, for the most part, like, okay, I, I know what I know. I love what I have. I got to start connecting these other adjacent systems together and make them work and automate together. What's the biggest challenge is, is it culture? Is it blockers? Or what's the, or that evolution, maybe you can weigh in too, if you want, this is, this is the key question that everyone's asking. >> Yeah, it's a, it's a key question. And these challenges have been around for some time. One of the, one of the more complex things always in maturing, the use of automation is the interaction with a lot of the existing processes that teams use, which are usually focused on particular domains. So many of the areas that we've been talking about automating the full, the fuller lifecycle is you're actually cutting across the domains and intersecting integrating with many of, many of the processes. So how do you allow the customer to incrementally evolve the automation of these processes across the domains, which brings in identity and access and authorization. It brings in visibility into the resources and the applications and the dependencies. And then of course the wealth of automation, the collections and the playbooks, essentially the content. How do you bring the content together? So the challenges are how do you allow the collaboration across the processes. How do you accelerate access to the content? And then how do you have a level of control to grow identity and access and authentication systems? >> That's awesome. Matthew, what's your reaction on this? Because I mean, you architected the system and you have to envision it working in the future as a lot of headroom involved in this area a lot of automation, what's the blockers? And what's the customer challenges right now that you see that can be easily turned into opportunities. >> Yeah. You know, the culture of automation is so different between, between the different between the different parts of the community, right? Developers expect something completely different than dev ops and network administrators, systems administrators. They just have different expectations on how automation should work. I've been writing software for a long time and the, the, the tension and conflicts between the teams can be extreme sometimes, right? We want to build and design automation capability that works in the domains that each of those people work in so that they can meet in the middle with a common set of tools. Dave mentioned identity, and event based automation, we all know that there are common things that are needed, but we also know that there are different ways to kind of achieve that depending on the space that you're in. And so a lot of, a lot of that has to do with these teams, being able to meet in the middle, collaborate on the automation, use content in the way that they expect, and then still provide that governance and reassurance that it's going to work and do the things that they want to do. Everything that we're doing here is about enabling that and supporting them. >> That's a great point. And I'd say that now more than ever this cultural, I won't say collision, there's always been tension as long as I can remember going back to my career in the eighties. When I started coding back in the day and the systems revolution, it was always tension between these groups because they had their own different worlds and they, (indistinct). But now with automation, there's almost like a peace treaty evolving where the speed game and cloud development becomes the unifying factor, right? If you can enable systems that can go faster because what this, what pisses people off, when someone's slower than they are. Where's that update, or, you know, but now we had harmony, this is cult. This is (indistinct), not touchy feely, Matthew. This is kind of what's going on right now. And David I'd love your reaction because this is like state-of-the-art issue. >> This is this a state-of-the-art particularly when we push the envelope on event driven automation, which leads right into AI ops and edge management and bleach fleet management. Being able to do this automation at scale at tremendous scale, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of endpoints. But let's also, we also have to keep in mind is behind all this is, how do you control the environment? How do you really lock down the security? How do you lock down the full supply chain in this automation, from the content creation to the execution, to what's being authorized to the policies? So these are all the pieces that we're investing in to start pulling together so that we can really push the envelope where automation is taking businesses and their ability to react to change and opportunities and challenges, but also in a controlled manner. >> Yeah. Give me infrastructure code, give me network security and transit and all that good stuff that goes on the network layer. And that mean push code when I want and automate the stuff that pisses people off. And we all get along, right? Matthew is, that's the, that's the future. >> That's right. None of it's optional anymore. Right? There's a lot of people out there. We see that with vulnerabilities and, and security issues that have cropped up over the, over the last year. It's, it's got to be one of the most important things that every organization is thinking about. >> Yeah, I think this site, this whole unification benefit is, is one of the most beautiful things that comes out of the technical benefits of the speed and the, and the advantages of, of the time to value with, with the enablement there. So I think that this is a really cutting edge issue. And thanks for bringing that up and, and discussing, and we're going to continue to talk more about it because we're seeing it very positive outcomes come from this with when you have all of these operational things automating away and then enabling more faster development for modernization. So thanks for, thanks for sharing that. So I just want to close out Matthew with you on saying, congratulations. I know you've been involved a lot of history with Ansible, but I got to ask you, what are you looking forward to most with this release? >> Oh, that's, that's such a good question because the engineering team working, working on some of the core features that we're bringing this time around, we have something that we'd been working on for years now, and it's all coming together with this release. We're really excited about it. Then we've talked a little bit before about collections and execution environments. You know, that goes back to AnsibleFest last year was like, what are we, what are we bringing this year? What, what are we giving you a window into, into our minds? And, you know, we talked about developer tools, but one of the things we've we've spent the most time on is how can we give you that window into your automation, worldwide planet, planet scale, data centers, clouds. It doesn't matter. You, you should be able to run automation anywhere that you need automation to run the Ansible automation platforms, automation mesh lands in this release. And it's the thing I'm most excited about because it gets that automation out to where you need it to run. If you're defining and governing your automation on the east coast of the U S and deploying it on the west coast in Asia, in Europe. Now you can do that and feel really good that it's going to work. It's survivable, it's reliable and it's fast. And the automation mesh brings, brings that to the production side, Ansible automation. And it works with the collections and the execution environments and the developer tools that we built around that to make sort of one scene one system for worldwide automation. And we'll spend the next year building on top of these technologies that we've mentioned that Dave's mentioned event based automation, compliance governance. Now we have the foundation we can build on to really, really sort of take it into the future next. >> You feel there's a lot of headroom there for innovation. >> Tons of headroom. >> Right? >> It's something we're really excited about. >> It's kind of like, it's like, when's the air conditioning going to come out? And they got all these new features coming out. You got to have great stuff there. Congratulations, Dave, we'll end it with you. I want to get your thoughts as AnsibleFest continues to have success with the community. The larger cross domain point that you brought up was key will be a coop con open sources continue to be a tailwind for developers and AI ops. Now you've got the edge exploding with value, new architectures, distributed computing, you know, Red Hats in the middle of it at many levels. What's your take on this revolution in software engineering, as opensource continues to drive as, and, and this new agile and automation kicks in, what's the impact? How do you see that this impacting the, the software, careers and outcomes of producing software? >> Well, the impact of open communities, ecosystems is incredible. It has been for years, and it just continues to accelerate. What I look forward to John with Fest and through this year, and next year is how is how we help bring together the wealth and capabilities of automation to enterprises to scale it to the enterprise across all the areas that they're driving towards. And you rattled off quite a few of them, including edge and security and how we bring the open communities, the open ecosystems, the content creation together with to deliver this value with customers. The growth has been incredible in this space. I don't see it slowing down. I just see it accelerating as the demands on businesses to really accelerate their delivery of new capabilities into market in new regions, with edge in a secure, in a secure manner. So being able to pull the open communities together and scaling this across enterprises, that that's the impact we're having. And it's great. >> It's really like, it's really almost a pinch me moment where you go, Hey, you know, a lot of the stuff we used to worry about is actually being solved. People are getting along scale is the new competitive advantage, modern applications, driving business value. This is kind of like nirvana coming around the corner it's happening. I mean, this is like what we, we, we would, we talked about decades ago, like technology will evolve to a point where it's faster and contributing more to humans. >> Yes, exactly, exactly. >> Great stuff. Okay, Matthew, thank you so much for coming on, Dave. Thank you for sharing. Congratulations. Great event. Stay, stay right there for more continued coverage of AnsibleFest, 2021. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, two guests joining me next. Matt Morgan is here. Vice-president cloud infrastructure business group at VMware and Steven Jones joins us as well. Director of services at AWS gentlemen. That's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>Glad to see everyone's doing well. Here we are virtual. So we are just around the four year anniversary of VMware cloud on AWS. Can't believe it's been 20 17, 4 years. Matt talked to us about VMware AWS partnership and how it's progressed over that time. >>The partnership has been fantastic and it's evolved. We announced VM-ware cloud on AWS general availability all the way back at VMworld, 2017, we've been releasing new features and capabilities every other week with 16 major platform releases and 300 features as customers have requested. So it's been an incredible co-engineering relationship with AWS. We've also expanded our go to market by announcing a resale program in which AWS can resell VMware cloud on AWS. We did that back in 2019 and in 2020, we've announced that AWS is VMware's preferred public cloud partner for vSphere based workloads. And VMware is AWS's preferred service for vSphere based workloads. >>So as you said, Matt, a tremendous amount of evolution and just a short four year timeframe. Stephen talked to me about the partnership through AWS, this lens. >>Yeah. You bet. Look, I agree with Matt that the partnership has been fantastic and it's just amazing to see how fast four years has gone. I really think that AWS and VMware really are a really good example of how two technology companies can work together for them. The benefit of our mutual customers, um, as Matt indicated, VM-ware is our preferred service for vSphere based workloads. And we're broadly working together as a single team across both engineering and go-to-market functions to help customers drive business value from the, the, the investments they made over the years. And then also as they work to transform their businesses into the future with cloud technology, >>Let's talk about digital transformation. That is a term we've been, we've been talking about that for many years on this program. And at every event we've all been at, right. What we've seen in the last year and a half is a massive acceleration. Now talk to me about how VMware and AWS are helping customers facilitate that digital transformation. >>So our customers see modern it infrastructure as the core pillar of a digital transformation strategy and public cloud has been a digital transformation enabler for organizations. And that's because they have so many benefits when they embraced the public cloud, including the ability to elastically consume infrastructure. That's required the ability to employ a pay as you go financial model and the ability to reduce operational overhead, which helps save both monetary costs, but also provides more flexibility. But the big driver now is the ability to embrace innovative cloud services and those services help accelerate application development, deployment and management VMware cloud on AWS is a prime example of such an offering, which not only provides these benefits, but enhances them with operational consistency working the same way their it architecture works today, giving them familiarity and enterprise robustness that VMware technologies are known for, but being able to maximize the power of the global AWS cloud >>And every year from a customer adoption perspective, that's doubling Steven walked through a couple of customer examples that really highlight the value of VMC on AWS. >>Yeah, I've got a couple here. I think, uh, Kiko Milano is a good one. There a then our Italian company, they sell cosmetics and beauty products through about 900 retail stores in 27 different markets. So quite large, but they found that their on premises data center and outsourcing partner was just too inflexible for the changing needs of their company. And within four months, uh, Kiko actually migrated all of their core workloads to Amazon. Is he too, and particularly surprised how easy it was to migrate over 300 servers to the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And this is, this is key because the actually leveraging the same platform that they were used to, which was BMR. Uh, the Kiko team actually didn't have to perform any testing or modify any other existing applications. They also, they didn't have to actually train their teams again, because again, they were already up-skilled with being able to leverage the BMR technology. >>So again, we think it's the best of both worlds customers like Kiko can come and use VMware cloud on AWS, consolidate their server footprint and also take advantage of, of a hyperscale platform. That's pretty cool. Another customer, uh, SAP global ratings that our company provides a high quality market intelligence in the form of credit ratings, research, and thought leadership to help educate market participants to make better financial decisions who doesn't want to make a better financial decision. Right? So in order to accelerate their business growth and globalization really meet new business capabilities, they knew they needed to move a hundred percent to the cloud and wanted to know how they're actually going to do that. Now they also have an aging data center system outages, which are becoming more frequent, which to them actually concerned that they actually might, um, uh, face in the future, some penalties from the sec. >>So they didn't want to do that. So over the period of about eight months, think about this eight months, they moved to 150 financial apps to AWS leveraging VMware on AWS. Uh, pretty impressive. They reduce technical debt, uh, from legacy systems that were hosted on sun Solaris, Oracle excavator, and a X. And then now actually able to meet the goal demands of their business. The fun part here is they're actually meeting their uptime, uh, needs a hundred percent of the time since it actually moves these workloads to the VMware cloud on AWS. So pretty exciting. See customers link this kind of journey, >>Absolutely impressive journeys. Also short time periods to do a massive change there. It sounds like the familiarity with VMware in the console is a huge facilitator of the speed of migration and folks being able to get up and running. Stephen talked to me about some of the trends that you were seeing in organizations like the customers that you just mentioned. >>Yeah. So there are some emergency transfer store and a lot of customers want to leverage the same cloud operating models, but also in their own data centers. So they can take advantage of agility and innovation of cloud will also meeting requirements that they sometimes have that keep them from adopting cloud. Uh, you can think of workloads that sometimes have low latency requirements, right? Or they need to process large volumes of data locally. Uh, other times customers tell us they really need the flexibility to run data workloads, um, in a particular area that has data sovereignty or residency requirements. So when, as we talk about customers, um, they tell us that not only do they want to minimize their, their need to actually manage and operate infrastructure, um, and focus on business innovation is sometimes need to do this, um, in a, in a data center this close to them, if that makes sense. So they're looking for the best again of both worlds. >>Got it. The best of both worlds and Matt, you have some breaking news to share. What is it? >>So today we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud on AWS outposts. >>Awesome. Congratulations. Tell me about that. Let's dig into it. >>So for customers looking to extend their AWS centric model to an on-premise location, that data center edge location via more cloud on AWS, outposts delivers the agility and innovation of AWS cloud, but on premises and VMware cloud on AWS outpost is based on VMware cloud, a jointly engineered service. So together we're delivering this service on premises as a service. This gives us the capability to integrate VMware's enterprise class architecture and platform with next generation dedicated Amazon nitro based ECE to bare metal instances. It provides a deeply integrated hybrid cloud operating environment that extends from a customer's data center to these particular services running on premises in the data center, the edge, or to the public cloud and having a unified control plane between all of it. >>A unified control plan is absolutely critical. Uh, Stephen eight, >>We have a detailed plan to offer integrated AWS services, and that capability really enhances the innovation angle for customers as they embraced the modernization of their applications. >>Another great example of how deep the partnership is Steven AWS outpost was announced at reinvent, I think 2019, which was the last time I was at an event in person. So coming up on a couple of years here, when GA talked to me about some of the key use cases that you're seeing, where it really excels. >>Yeah. So Matt, Matt highlighted a number of these, right. And you're right. It was 2019. Uh, we were all together back then and hopefully we can do that, uh, very soon here, um, quickly on apple. So overall, since, since we're talking about outposts, uh, VMware cloud on a post as well. So the thing here and Matt highlighted this is that without posts, we actually live we've leveraged, leveraged literally the same hardware and control plane technology that we leverage in our own data centers so that the customers will come to know and love and expect about the AWS platform and VMC on AWS, uh, uh, is, is, is the exact same thing that we'll be able to get with the Apple's technology. I'll give you a couple of customer examples. I think that that actually speaks to the use cases best. So, um, you remember, I talked a little bit about data locality and residency requirements. >>So first ABI Dhabi bank, uh, is the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, right? And they were offering corporate investment and personal banking service, and they wanted to deliver a digital banking service, including email and mobile payments, but they had to follow a specific residency and data retention requirements and they had to do it in the UAE. And so what they've done is they've actually leveraged multiple AWS outposts in the UAE to allow them to provide business continuity while also leveraging the same API APIs that they had to come to know about, uh, and love about the AWS services in region, right? Phillips healthcare is another really good example. Um, you can imagine that, uh, what they do every day is, is, uh, very important things like predictive analytics for preventative treatments. And so outposts Phillips has actually taken those and that developed cloud applications, again, deployed on the same infrastructure they were used to within region. Now they can actually do this in clinics at hospitals, and they're in managing that the same tools providing, uh, same end-to-end, um, view and to their own providers, 19 administrators. And so they actually estimate they have over 70,000 servers now distributed across 12,000 locations or 1200 locations. Excuse me. So that's an example of, again, just two use cases that really broadened the reach and the flexibility of customers to run workloads in the cloud, but in a on-premise fashion. Does that make sense? >>Yes, it does. And you mentioned two great stories there. One in financial services, the other one healthcare, two industries that have had to massively pivot in the last 18 months amongst many others, but let's talk a little bit more Steven, about some of the things that you're hearing from some of the early customers of BMC on outpost. What are some of the near term opportunities that you're uncovering? >>Yeah, I've got to say here too, that, uh, customers are VMware customers have been asking us for this for quite some time. I'm sure Matt would agree. Um, so look from, uh, go back to some of the use cases we've discussed low latency compute requirements. So one of our higher education customers today who has migrated workloads to be more cloud on AWS, um, is looking at, uh, extending the same capability to an on-premise experience specifically for, um, uh, school applications that require a low latency, um, uh, integration, um, from a local data processing perspective. Again, one of our VMware on AWS top biopharmaceutical companies, uh, here again in the U S um, is planning to use VMware cloud on AWS outposts for health management applications with patient records that need to be retained locally at the hospital hospital sites. And then finally you can kind of going back to the story around data residency. We have a large telco provider in Europe that is planning to use this particular offering for their applications that need to remain on premises to meet regulatory requirements. So again, you know, we're just super pleased with the amount of interest, not only in VMware cloud on AWS, but also in this new run that we're announcing today. And we're really excited to be able to support the VMware cloud experience really on the AWS Apple's platform for a of these use cases. >>One of the things we've talked about for many years with both VMware and AWS is the dedication to listening to the voice of the customer. Not obviously this is a great example, Steven, as you said, VMware customers have been asking for this for awhile. So while customers have a ton of choice, I want you guys to unpack what the differentiators are of this service. And Matt, if we can start with you to bring you back into the conversation, we'd love to get your, your input on those differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So people have to look at this for the service that's delivered and on the VMware side of the equation, we're delivering the full VMware cloud infrastructure capability. This is delivered as a service as a cloud service on premises. So why is this valuable? Well, it relieves the it burden of infrastructure management and fully maximizes the value of a fully managed cloud service, giving an organization, the capability to unlock the renovation, budgets, and start to invest truly an innovation. This is all about continuous life cycle management, ongoing service monitoring, automated processes to ensure the health and security the infrastructure. And of course, this is backed by expert VMware site recovery and reliability engineers, to ensure that everything works perfectly. We also enable organizations to leverage best in class enterprise grade capabilities that we've talked about in our compute storage and networking for best-in-class resiliency auto-scaling and intrinsic availability. >>So there's no long procurement cycles to set up these environments. And that means it's developer ready right out of the box. We're also deeply integrated with what customers do today. So end to end hybrid cloud usually requires end-to-end hybrid processes. And with this integration into those processes is instant, no reconfiguration, no conversion, no refactoring, no rearchitecture of existing applications using VMware HDX or B motion organizations can move applications to leverage this cloud service instantly. It allows you to use established on premises governance, security, and operational policies, and ensures that that workload portability I mentioned goes both ways. It's bi-directional as customers need to have portability to meet their business requirements. As we mentioned earlier, there's a unified hybrid control plane with a single pane of glass to manage resources across the end-to-end hybrid cloud environment. And we're giving direct access to 200 plus native AWS services. And that enables an organization to truly modernize their applications, starting where they are today. And so that gives you the real capability to deliver a unique service. One that gives you an organization, the ability to migrate without any downtime have fast, fast cost effective capabilities and a low risk to their hybrid cloud strategy. >>Excellent. That's a pretty jam packed list of differentiators there, but one of the things that it really sounds like not from what you said is how much work has gone on to make the transition smooth for customers, give them that flexibility and that portability that they need. Those are marketing terms you and I know are used very frequently, but it really seems like the work that you've done here will be done straight to that. I want to ask you Stephen, that same question from AWS's perspective, what really differentiates the solution. >>It is a good question. I'll just, uh, I'll agree that there has been a ton of work first that is, has gone, gone into actually making this happen. Right. Um, and to, to all the points that Matt made. And I would just add that again. 80 was outpost is built on the same AWS nitro system and infrastructure. The customers have already come to love in the cloud. And so gone really are the days where customers have to worry about procuring and racking and stacking their own gear layer on all the benefits, the map outline from a VMware perspective. And again, we, we really believe the customers are getting the best of both worlds here. Um, with, with specifically with the compute that comes in the outpost rack, um, customers actually get getting kind of built in redundancy and resiliency, hard security, all those things that customers don't know, they need certain things. >>The customers know they need to pay attention to, but also want some help with. And so we've, we, we put a lot of thought and effort into this. Um, but could I just, uh, explain a little bit about the customer experience, um, when a customer orders and AWS outposts rack, right? AWS actually signs up, uh, to do a fully managed experience here. Like we'll bring people in to actually do site assessments. Um, we'll manage the hardware, setup, the installation and the maintenance of that gear over time. Well, VM-ware also manages the, the software defined data center construct as well as, um, the, the single point for, uh, for support questions. And so together, we really thought through how customers is met, but it get an end to end experience from hardware all the way up through application modernization. It's pretty exciting, >>Very deep partnership there. And we're out of time, but I do want to ask you guys, where can customers go, who are interested in learning more about this new service? >>So at VM world, there are a collection of DMR cloud, AWS sessions, including sessions, dedicated to VMware cloud on AWS outpost. We encourage everyone who's attending VMworld to look up those sessions and you'll learn all about the hardware, the service, the capabilities, the procurement, and how to get started. In addition, on vmware.com, we have a web portal for you to gain additional knowledge through a digital consumption. That's vmware.com/vmc-outposts. >>Awesome. Matt, thank you. I'm sure folks will be just drinking up all of this information at the sessions at VMworld 2021. And I hope to see you in person at next year's VM. I'm crossing my fingers. Great to see you guys Format Morgan and Steve Jones. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cubes coverage of the em world to 2021.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Balanta. And welcome to the cubes Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with a special focus on the A p N partner experience. I'm excited to have two great guests on the program. Fernando Castillo is the head s a p on AWS Partner Network and s A P Alliance and AWS and Stephen Jones is the general manager s a p E c to enterprise that aws Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Great to see you. >>I'm here. >>So guys ASAP on AWS. It's a core workload for customers. I call it the poster child for mission Critical workloads and applications. Now a lot has happened since we last talked to you guys. So So tell us it. Maybe start with Stephen. What's going on with Sapna Ws? Give us the update. >>I appreciate the question Day. Look, a lot of customers continue to migrate. These mission critical workloads State of us on a good example is the U. S. Navy right? Who moved their entire recipe landscape European workload AWS. This is a very large system of support. Over 72,000 users across 66 different navy commands. They estimate that 70 billion worth of parts and goods actually transact through the system every year. Just just massive. Right? And this this type of adoptions continued to accelerate a very rapid clip. And today, over 5000 customers now are running SFP workloads. I need to be us on there really trusting us, uh, to to manage and run these workloads. And another interesting stat here is that more than half of these customers are actually running asap, Hana, which is a safe He's flagship in memory database. >>Right, Fernando, can you add to that? >>Sure. So definitely about, you know, the customs are also SCP themselves continue to lose a dollar less to run their own offerings. Right? So think about conquer SCP platform. SCP analytics were when new offers like Hannah Cloud. In addition to that, we continue to see the P and L despondent network to grow at an accelerated pace. Today we have over 60 SNP company partners all over the world helping SFP customers s O that customers are my green. There s appeal asking CW's. They only look for reduced costs, improved performance but also toe again access to new capabilities. So innovate around their core business systems and transform their businesses. >>So for now, I wonder if I could stay with you for a minute. I mean, the numbers that Steve was putting out there, it's just massive scale. So you obviously have a lot of data. So I'm wondering when you talk to these customers, Are you discerning any common patterns that are emerging? What are some of the things that you're hearing or seeing when you analyze the data? >>Sure. So just to give a couple example right. Our biggest customers are doing complete ASAP. Transformations on Toe s four Hana. Their chance they're going to these new S a p r p code nine All customers have immediate needs, and they're taking their existing assets to AWS, so looking to reduce costs and improve performance, but also to sell them apart for innovation. This innovation is something that operation or something that they can wait. They need it right now. It's they This time to innovate is now right on some of these customers saying that while s and P has nice apart. So that is a multi year process on most organizations and have a look from waiting for this just before they start innovating. So instead of that, they focus on bringing what they have on start innovating right away on Steve has some great stories around here, so maybe Steve can share with that. Goes with that? >>Yeah, that'd be great, Steve. >>Yeah. Look, I think a good example here on and Fernando touched it, touched on it. Well, right. So customers coming from all kind of different places in their journey aws as it relates to this this critical workload and some are looking to really reap the benefits of the investments they made over the last couple decades sometimes. And Vista is a really good example Here, um there a subsidiary of Cook Industries, they migrated and moved their existing S a P r P solution called E c C. To AWS. They estimate that this migration alone from an infrastructure cost savings perspective, has netted them about two million per year. Additionally, you know, they started to bring some of the other issues they were trying to solve from a business perspective, together now that they were on the on the on the business on the AWS platform. And one thing that recognizes they had different data silos, that they had been operating in an on premises world. Right? So massive factories solution and bringing all of that data together on a single platform on AWS and enriching that with the SCP data has allowed them to actually improve their forecasting supply chain processes across multiple data sources and the estimate that that is saving them additional millions per year. So again, customers are not necessarily waiting to innovate. Um, but actually moving forward now. >>All right, so I gotta ask, you don't hate me for asking this question, but but everybody talks about how great they are. Supporting s a P is It's one of the top, of course, because s a p, you know, huge player in the in the application space. So I want you guys to address how aws specifically compares Thio some of your competitors that are, you know, the hyper scaler specifically as it relates to supporting S a P workloads. What's the rial differential value that you guys bring? Maybe Steve, you could start >>Sure, you're probably getting to know us a little bit. Way don't focus a lot on competition, Aziz mentioned week We continue to see customers adopt AWS for S a p a really rapid clip. And that alone actually brings a lot of feedback back into how we consider our own service offerings as it relates to this particular workload on that, that's it. That's important signal right for what we're building. But customers do tell us the security performance availability matters, especially for this workload, which, you know, to be honest, is the backbone of many, many organizations. Right? And we understand why. And there was a study that was done recently about a. D. C. Where they found that even a single hour of unplanned downtime as a released this particular workload could cost millions. And so it's it's super important. And if you look at, um, you know, publicly available data from an average perspective, um, it has considerably less downtime than the other hyper scale is out there way. Take the performance and availability of oh, our entire global footprint and in this workload in particular, super important. >>Well, you know, that's a great point, Steve. I mean, if you got critical mission critical applications like ASAP supporting the business, that's driving revenue. It's driving productivity. The higher the value of the application, the greater the impact when it's down, I wonder, Fernando, you know, Steve said, You guys don't focus on the competition. Well, is an analyst. You know, I always focused on the competition, So I wonder if you're gonna add anything to that. >>Sure. So again, as you can imagine, multiple analyst called Space right. And, uh, everybody shares information. And analysts have agreed that Italy's clean infrastructure services, including the three quite a for CP across the globe. So we feel very humble and honor about this recognition on this encourages to continue to improve ourselves to give you a couple examples for a 10 year in a row. Italy's US evaluated as a leader in the century Gardner Magic Quadrant, right for cloud infrastructure from services. And, as you know, the measure to access right they measure very execute on complete, insufficient were the highest, both of them. Another third party, just not keep with one is icy, right? You know, technology research dreamers, you already you might know advice for famous Well, the reason they publisher s a p on infrastructure service provider lands reports long name which, basically, the analyzers providers were best suited to host s a. P s four hana workloads on more broadly s a p Hannah landscapes, you know, very large scape ASAP 100 landscapes. So they recognize it, at least for the third year in a row. And conservative right, the best class enterprise. Great infrastructure towards security performances, Steve mentioned, but also making the panic community secure. Differentiation. Andi, they posted. They mentioned it all us as a little position in quadrant for the U. S. U K France, Germany, the Nordics in Brazil. So again, really honor and humble on discontinued in court just to continue to improve. >>You know, Steve, I just wrote a piece on Cloud 2030 trying to project what the next 10 years is gonna look like in one of the I listed a lot of things, but one of the things I talked about was some of the technical factors like alternative processors, specialized networks, and you guys have have have really, always done a good job of sort of looking at purpose built, you know, stuff that that can run workloads faster. How relevant is that in the the S A P community? >>Oh, that's a great question, David. It's It's absolutely relevant. You take a look at what? What we've done over the years with nitro and how we've actually brought the ability for customers to run on environmental infrastructure but still have that integrated, uh, native cloud experience. Uh, that is absolutely applicable to Unless if you workload and we're actually able toe with that technology, bring the capability to customers to run thes mission critical workloads on instances with up to 24 terabytes of brand, albeit bare metal, but fully integrated into the AWS network fabric, >>right? I mean, a lot of people, you know, need that bare metal raw performance on, and that makes sense that you've been, you know, prioritize such an important class of workload. I'm not surprised that that I mean, the numbers that you threw out a pretty impressive eso. It's clear you're leading the charge here. Maybe you could share a little glimpse of what's coming in the future. Show us a little leg, Steve. >>Yeah, well, look, uh, we know that infrastructure is super important. Thio. Our customers and in particular the customers are running these mission critical workloads. But there's a lot of heavy lifting, uh, that that we also want to simplify. And so you've seen some indications of what we've done here over the years, uh, ice G that Fernando mentioned actually called out. AWS is differentiating here, right? So for for many years, we've actually been leading in releasing tools for customers to actually orchestrate and automate the deployment of these types of worthless so ASAP in particular. I mean, if you think about it a customer who is coming to a to a hyper scale platforms like AWS and having to learn what that means, Plus understand all the best practices from S, A, P and AWS to make that thing really shine from a performance and availability perspective, that's a heavy asked. Right? So we put a lot of work from a tooling perspective into into automating this and making this super simple not just for customers, but also partners. >>Anything you wanna chime in on that particular the partner side, Fernando. >>Sure. So this is super important for public community, right? As you can imagine, the tooling that we're bringing together toe. The market is helping the Spanish to move quicker, right? So they don't have to reinvent. They will all the time. They will just take this and move and take it and move forward. Give an example. One of our parents in New York, three hosts. Thanks for lunch. We start with Steve just reference right. They want to create work clothes in an automated way. Speeding up the delivery time. 75% corporation is every environments. So it just imagine the the impact of these eso a thing here that is important is our goal is to help customers and partners move quicker, removing any undifferentiated heavy lifting, right, Andi, that's kind of the mantra of this group. >>You know, when you think about what Doug Young was saying is in the keynote, um, the importance of partners and I've been on this kick about we've moved in this industry from products to platforms, and the next 10 years is gonna be about leveraging ecosystems. The power of many versus the resource is of a few or even one is large is a W s so so partners air critical on I wonder if you could talk toe the role that that the network partners air playing in affecting S a p customer outcomes and strategies. Maybe Steve, you could take that first. >>Yeah, but look, we recognize that the migration on the management of these systems it's complex, right? And for years, we've invested in a global community of partners many partners who have been fundamental to s a p customer success over over a couple decades, Right? And so, um, that there are some nuances that that need to be realized when it comes to running ASAP on on a hyper scale platforms like AWS. And so we put a lot of work into making sure these partners are equipped to ensure customers have have a really good experience. And I mean, in a recent conversation I had with a CEO of a large, uh, CPG company, he told me he reflected that the partners really are the glue. That kind of brings it all together for them. And, uh, you know, just to share something with you today, our partners, our partner community network for S. If he is actually helping over 90% of net new customers who are coming toe migrate as if you were close to AWS, so they're just absolutely critical. >>So, Fernando, there's the m word, the migration, you know, it's you don't want to unless you have to, but people have to move to the cloud. So So what can you add to this conversation? >>Sure, they So again, just to echo what Steve mentioned, right? Uh, migration. Super important. We have ah group of partners that are right now specializing in migration projects. And they have built migration factories. You may have seen some of them. They have been doing press releases through the whole year saying that they're part of these and their special cells they're bringing to the helping customers adopt AWS. So they go through the next, you know, very detailed process. We call them map for ASAP partners. So they have these incremental value on top of being SCP competent funds, which I referred earlier on. This group has, as mentioned, you know, show additional capability to safeguard these migrations on. Of course, we appreciate and respect and we have put investment programs for them to help them support their own customers right in those in these migrations. But because the SNP ecosystem on it. But it's not about only migrations, right? One important topic that we need technologies as you as Steve mentioned, we have these great set of partner of customers have trusted us or 5000 through a year on these, uh, these customers asking for innovation right there, asking us how come the ecosystem help us innovate faster? So these partners are using a dollars a plan off innovation, creating new solutions that are relevant for SCP. So basically helping customers modernize their business processes so you can take an example like Accenture Data Accelerator writers taking SCP information and data legs Really harm is the power of data there or the Lloyd you know, kinetic finances helping, you know, deploy Central finance, which is a key component of SCP, or customer like partners like syntax that has created our industrial i o. T. Offering that connects with the SNP core. So more and more you will see thes ecosystem partners innovating on AWS to support SNP customers. >>You know, I think that's such an important point because for for decades have been around for a while. It's the migrations air like this. Oftentimes there's forced March because maybe a vendor is not going to support it anymore. Or you're just trying to, you know, squeeze Mawr costs out of the lemon. What you guys are talking about is leveraging an ecosystem for innovation and again that ties into the themes that we're talking about about Cloud 2030 in the next decade of innovation. Let's close, guys. What can customers ASAP customers AWS customers expect from reinvent this year? Um, you know, maybe more broadly, what can they expect from A W S in the coming 12 months? Maybe, Steve, you could give us a sense, and then Fernando could bring us home. >>You bet. Look, um, this year we've really tried to focus on customer stories, right? So we've we've optimized. There's a number of sessions here agreement this year. We want customers and partners to learn from other from other customer experiences, so customers will be able to listen to Bristol Myers Squibb talk about their performance, their their experiences, Alando Newmont's and Volkswagen. And I'll be talking about kind of different places where they are on this, this journey to cloud and this innovation life cycle, right, because it really is about choice and what's right for their business. So we're pretty excited about that. >>Yeah. Nice mix of representative Industries there. I Fernando bring us home, please. >>Sure. So, again, we think about 21 in the future. Rest assured, we'll continue to invest heavily to make sure it values remains the platform innovation. Right on choice for recipe customers where a customer wants to move their existing investments on continue to add value. So what they have already done for years or goto export transformation. We're here to support their choice. Right? And we're committed to that as part of our customers Asian culture. So we're super excited about the future. And we're thankful for you to spend time with us today. >>Great, guys, Look, these are the most demanding workloads we're seeing that that rapid movement to the cloud is just gonna accelerate over the coming years. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate it. >>Our pleasure. Thank >>you. All >>right. Thank you for watching everyone keep it right there from or great content. You're watching the cube aws reinvent 2020

>> Welcome back to AnsibleFest. I'm Matthew Jones, I'm the architect of the Ansible Automation Platform. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about what we've got coming in 2021, and some of the things that we're working on for the future. Today, I really want to cover some of the work that we're doing on scale and flexibility, and how we're going to focus on that for the next year. I also want to talk about how we're going to help you grow and manage and use your content on the Automation platform. And then finally, I want to look a little bit beyond the automation platform itself. So, last year we introduced Ansible Content Collections. Earlier this year, we introduced the Ansible Automation Hub on Red Hat Cloud. And yesterday you heard Richard mentioned on private automation hub that's coming later this year. And automation hub, Ansible tower, this is really what the automation platform means for us. It's bringing together that content, with the ability to execute and run and manage that content, that's really important. And so what we really want to do, is we want to help you bring Red Hat and partner content that you trust together with community content from galaxy that you may need, and bring this together with content that you develop for yourself, your roles, your collections, the automation that you actually do. And we want to give you control over that content and help you curate that content and build a community around your automation. We want to focus on a seamless experience with this automation from Ansible Tower and from Automation Hub for the automation platform itself, and make it accessible to the automation and infrastructure that you're managing. Now that we've talked about content a little bit, I want to talk about how you run Ansible. Today an Ansible Tower, use virtual environments to manage the actual execution of Ansible, and virtual environments are okay, but they have some drawbacks. Primarily they're not very portable. It's difficult to manage dependencies and the version of Ansible. Sometimes those dependencies conflict with the other systems that are on the infrastructure itself, even Ansible Tower. So what we've done is created a new system that we call execution environments. Execution environments are container-based. And what we're doing is bringing the flexibility and portability of containers to these Ansible execution environments. And the goal really is portability. And we want to be able to leverage the tools that the community develops as well as the tools that Red Hat provides to be able to produce these container images and use them effectively. At Ansible we've developed a tool called Ansible Builder. Ansible builder will let you bring content collections together with the version of Ansible and Red Hats base container image so that you can put together your own images for execution environments. And you'll be able to host these on your own private registry infrastructure. If you don't already have a container registry solution, Automation Hub itself provides that registry. The idea here is that, unlike today where your virtual environments and your production execution environments diverge a little bit from what your developers, your content developers and your automation developers experience, we want to give you the same experience between your production environments and your development environments, all the way through your test and validation workloads. Red Hat's also going to provide some prebuilt execution environments. We want to have some continuity between the experience that you have today on the Ansible tower and what you'll have next year, once we bring execution environments into production. We want you to be able to trust the Ansible, the version of Ansible that's running on your execution environments, and that you have the content that you expect. At the same time, we're going to provide a version of the execution environment, that's just the base execution environment. All it has is Ansible. This will let you take those using Ansible builder, take the collections that you've developed, that you need in your automation and combine them without having to bring in things that you don't need, or that you don't want in your automation and build them together into a very opinionated, container image. If you're interested in execution environments and you want to know how these are built and how you'll use them, we actually have them available for you to use today. Shane McDonald and Adam Miller are giving a talk later with a walk through how to build execution environments and how you'll use them. You can use this to make sure that you're ready for execution environments coming to the automation platform next year. Now that we've talked about how we build execution environments, I want to talk about how execution runs in your infrastructure. So today when you deploy Ansible tower, you're deploying a monolithic web application. Your execution capability is tied up into how you actually deploy Ansible tower. This makes scaling Ansible tower and your automation workloads difficult, and everything has to be co-located together in the same data center. Isolated nodes solve this a little bit, but they bring about their own sort of opinionated challenges in setting up SSH and having direct connectivity between the control nodes and the execution nodes themselves. We want to make this more flexible and easier to use. And so one of the things that we've created over the last year and that we've been working on over the last year is something that we call receptor. Receptor is an overlay network that's an Automation Mesh. And the goal here is to separate the execution capability of your Ansible content from the control plane capability, where you manage the web infrastructure, the users, the role-based access control. We want to draw a line between those. We want you to be able to deploy execution environments anywhere. Chris Wright earlier today mentioned Edge. Well Edge Cloud, we want you to be able to manage data centers anywhere in the world, and you can do this with the Automation Mesh,. The Automation Mesh connects your control plane with those execution nodes, anywhere in the world. Another thing that the Automation Mesh brings is, we're going to be able to draw the lines between the control plane themselves and each Automation Mesh node. This means that if you have an outage or a problem on your network and on your infrastructure, if you can draw a line between the control plane itself and the node that needs to execute, the sensible work, the Automation Mesh can route around problems. The Automation Mesh in the way it's deployed, also allows this to fit closer with ingress and egress policies that you have between your infrastructure. It doesn't matter which direction the Automation Mesh itself connects in. Once the connection is established, automation will be able to flow from the control systems to the execution nodes and get responses back. Now, this all works together with automation of the content collections that we mentioned earlier, the execution environments that we were just talking about and your container registries. All of these work together with these Automation Mesh nodes. They're very lightweight and very simple systems. This means you can scale up and scale down execution capacity as your needs increase or decrease. You don't need to keep around a lot of extra capacity just in case you automate more, just because you're not sure when your execution capacity needs will increase and decrease. This fits into an automated system for scaling your infrastructure and scaling your execution capacity. Now that we've talked about the content that you use to manage, and how that execution is performed and where that execution is performed. I want to look a little bit beyond the actual automation platform itself. And specifically, I want to talk about how the automation platform works with OpenShift and Kubernetes. Now we have an existing installer for Ansible tower that we'll deploy to OpenShift Kubernetes, and we support OpenShift and Kubernetes as a first-class system for deploying Ansible tower. But I mentioned automation hub and Ansible tower as this is what the automation platform is for us. So we want to take that installer and replace it with an operator-based full life cycle approach to deploying and managing the automation platform on OpenShift. This operator will be available in OperatorHub. So there's no need to manage complex YAML files that represent the deployment. Since it's available in OperatorHub, you have one place that you can go to manage deployments, upgrades, backup and restore. And all of this work seamlessly with the container groups feature that we introduced last year. But I want to take this a little bit beyond just deploying and upgrading the automation platform from the operator. We want to look at what other capabilities that we can get out of those operators. So beyond just deploying and upgrading, we're also creating a resource operators and CRDs that will allow other systems running in OpenShift or Kubernetes to directly manage resources within the automation platform. Anything from triggering jobs and getting the status of jobs back, we want to enable that capability if you're using OpenShift and Kubernetes. The first place we're starting with this, is Red Hats Advanced Cluster Management system. Advanced Cluster Management brings together the ability to manage OpenShift and Kubernetes clusters to install them and manage them, as well as applications and products in managing the life cycle of those across your clusters. So what we really want to do, is give you the ability to connect traditional and container-based workloads together. You're already using the Ansible automation platform to manage workloads with Ansible. When using Advanced Cluster Management and OpenShift and Kubernetes, now you have a full system. You can manage across clouds across clusters, anywhere in the world. And this sort of brings me back to one of the areas of focuses for us. Our goal is complete end-to-end automation. We want to connect your people, your domains and the processes. We want to help you deliver for you and your customers by expanding the capabilities of the Ansible automation platform. And we want to make this a seamless experience to both curate content, control the content for your organization, and run the content and run Ansible itself using the full suite of the Ansible automation platform. So the Advanced Cluster management team is giving a talk later where you'll actually be able to see Advanced cluster Management and the Ansible automation platform working together. Don't forget to check out Adam and Shane's talk on execution environments, how those are built and how you can use those. Thank you for coming to AnsibleFest, and we'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. I'm your host with theCUBE John Furrier. And we've got two great guests. A CUBE alumni, Robyn Bergeron, senior manager, Ansible community team. Welcome back, she's with Ansible and Red Hat. Good to see you. And Matt Jones, chief architect for the Ansible Automation Platform. Again, both with Red Hat, Ansible was acquired by Red Hat. Robyn used to work for Red Hat, then went to Ansible. Ansible got bought by Red Hat. Robyn, great to see you, Matt, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me back again. It's good to see you. >> We're not in person. It's the virtual event. Thanks for coming on remotely to our CUBE virtual, really appreciate it. I want to talk about the, and I brought that Red Hat kind of journey Robyn. We talked about it last year, but it really is an important point. The roots of Ansible and kind of where it's come from and what it's turned into and where it is today, is an interesting journey because the mission is still the same. I would like to get your perspectives because you know, Red Hat was acquired by IBM, Ansible's under Red Hat, all part of one big happy family. A lot's going on around the platform, Matt, you're the chief architect, Robyn you're on the community team. Collections, collections, collections, is the message, content, content, content, community, a lot going on. So take a minute, both of you explain the Ansible roots, where it is today, and the mission. >> Right, so beginning of Ansible was really, there was a small team of folks and they'd actually been through an iteration before that didn't use SSH called Funk, but you know, it was, let's make a piece of software that is open source that allows people to automate other things. And we knew at the time that, you know, based on a piece of research that we had seen out of Harvard that having a piece of software be architected in a modular fashion wasn't just great for the software, but it was also great for developing pathways and connections for the community to actually contribute stuff. If you have a car, this is always my analogy. If you have a car, you don't have to know how the engine works in order to swap out the windshield wipers or embed new windshield wipers, things like that. The nice thing about modular architectures is that it doesn't just mean that things can plug in. It means you can actually separate them into different spots to enable them to be plugged in. And that's sort of where we are today with collections, right? We've always had this sense of modules, but everything except for a couple of points in time, all of the modules, the ways that you connect Ansible to the vast array of technologies that you can use it with. All of those have always been in the full Ansible repository. Now we've separated out most of, you know, nearly everything that is not absolutely essential to having in a, you know, a very minimal Ansible installation, broken them out into separate repositories, that are usually grouped by function, right? So there's probably like a VMware something and a cloud something, and a IBM, z/OS something, things like that, right? Each in their own individual groups. So now, not only can contributors find what they want to contribute to in much smaller spots that are not a sea of 5,000 plus folks doing work. But now you can also choose to use your Ansible collections, update them, run them independently of just the singular release of Ansible, where you got everything, all the batteries included in one spot. >> Matt, this brings up the point about she's bringing in more advanced functionality, she's talking about collections. This has been kind of the Ansible formula from the beginning in its startup days, ease of use, easy, fast automation. Talk about the, you know, back in 2013 it was a startup. Now it's part of Red Hat. The game is still the same. Can you just share kind of what's the current guiding principles around Ansible this year? Because lots going on, like I said, faster, bigger, a lot going on, share your perspective. You've been there. >> Yeah, you know, what we're working on now is we're taking this great tool that has changed the way that automation works for a lot of people and we want to make it faster and bigger and better. We want it to scale better. We want it to automate more and be easier to automate, automate all the things that people want to do. And so we're really focusing on that scalability and flexibility. Robyn talked about content and collections, right? And what we want to enable is people to bring the content collections, the collections, the roles, the models, and use them in the way that they feel works best for them, leaving aside some of the things that they maybe aren't quite as interested in and put it together in a way that scales for them and scales for a global automation, automation everywhere. >> Yeah, I want to dig into the collections later, Robyn, for sure. And Matt, so let's, we'll put that on pause for a minute. I want to get into the event, the virtual event. Obviously we're not face to face, this year's virtual. You guys are both keynoting. Matt, we'll start with you. If you can each give 60 seconds, kind of a rundown of your keynote talk, give us the quick summary this year on the keynotes, Matt, we'll start with you. >> Yeah. That's, 60 seconds is- >> If you need a minute and a half, we'll give you 90 seconds, Robyn, that's going to be tough. Matt, we'll start with you. >> I'll try. So this year, and I mentioned the focus on scalability and flexibility, we on the product and on the platform, on the Ansible Automation Platform, the goal here is to bring content and flexibility of that content into the platform for you. We focused a lot on how you execute, how you run automation, how you manage your automation, and so bringing that content management automation into the system for you. It's really important to us. But what we're also noticing is that we, people are managing automation at a much larger scale. So we are updating the Ansible Tower, Ansible AWX, the automation platform, we're updating it to be more flexible in how it runs content, and where it can run content. We're making it so that execution of automation doesn't just have to happen in your data center, in one data center, we recognize that automation occurs globally, and we want to expand that automation execution capability to be able to run globally and all report back into your central business. We're also expanding over the next six months, a year, how well Ansible integrates with OpenShift and Kubernetes. This is a huge focus for us. We want that experience for automation to feel the same, whether you're automating at the edge, in devices and virtual machines and data centers, as well as clusters and Kubernetes clusters anywhere in the world. >> That's awesome. That's why I brought that up earlier. I wanted to get that out there because it's worth calling out that the Ansible mission from the beginning was similar scope, easy to do and simplify, but now it's larger scale. Again, it's everywhere, harder to do, hence complexity being extracted away. So thank you for sharing. We'll dig into that in a second. Okay, Robyn, 60 seconds or more, if you need it, your keynote this year at AnsibleFest, give us the quick rundown. >> All right. Well, I think we probably know at this point, one of the main themes this year is called automate to connect and, you know, the purpose of the community keynote is really to highlight the achievements of the community. So, you know, we are talking about, well, we are talking about collections, you know, going through some of the very broad highlights of that, and also how that has contributed, or, not contributed, how that is included as part of the recent release of Ansible 2.10, which was really the first release where we've got it very easy for people to actually start using collections and getting familiar with what that brings to them. A good portion of the keynote is also just about innovation, right? Like how we do things in open source and why we do things in certain ways in open source to accelerate us. And how that compares with the Red Hat, traditional product model, which is, we kind of, we do a lot of innovation upstream. We move quickly so that if something is maybe not the right idea, we can move on. And then in our products, that's sort of the thing that we give to our customers that is tried, tested and true. All of that kind of jazz. We also talk about, or I guess I also talk about the, all of our initiatives that we're doing around diversity and inclusiveness, including some of the code changes that we've made for better, more inclusive language in our projects and our downstream products, our diversity and inclusion working group that we have in the community land, which is, you know, just looking to embrace more and more people. It's a lot about connectivity, right? To one of Matt's points about all the things that we're trying to achieve and how it's similar to the original principles, the third one was, it's always, we need to have it to be easy to contribute to. It doesn't necessarily just mean in our community, right? Like we see in all of these workplaces, which is one of the reasons why we brought in Automation Hub, that folks inside large organizations, companies, government, whatever it is, are using Ansible and there's more and more, and, you know, there's one person, they tell their friend, they tell another friend, and next thing you know, it's the whole department. And then you find people in other departments and then you've got a ton of people doing stuff. And we all know that you can do a bunch of stuff by yourself, but you can accomplish a lot more together. And so, making it easy to contribute inside your organization is not much different than being able to contribute inside the community. So this is just a further recognition, I think, of what we see as just a natural extension of open source. >> I think the community angle is super important 'cause you have the community in terms of people contributing, but you also have multiple vendors now, multiple clouds, multiple integrations, the stakeholders of collaboration have increased. It was just like, "Oh, here's the upstream and et cetera, we're done, and have meetings, do all that stuff." And Matt, that brings me to my next question. Can you talk about some of the recent releases that have changed the content experience for the Ansible users in the upstream and within the automation platform? >> Well, so last year we released collections, and we've really been moving towards that over the 2.9, 2.10 timeframe. And now I think you're starting to see sort of the realization of that, right? This year we've released Automation Hub on cloud.redhat.com so that we can concentrate that vendor and partner content that Red Hat supports and certifies. In AnsibleFest you'll hear us talk about Private Automation Hub. This is bringing that content experience to the customer, to the user of this content, sort of helping you curate and manage that content yourself, like Robyn said, like we want to build communities around the content that you've developed. That's the whole reason that we've done this with collections is we don't want to bind it to Ansible core releases. We don't want to block content releases, all of this great functionality that the community is building. This is what collections mean. You should be free to use the collections that you want when you want it, regardless of when Ansible core itself has released. >> Can you just take a minute real quick and just explain what is collections, for folks out there who are rich? 'Cause that's the big theme here, collections, collections, collections. That's what I'm hearing resonate throughout the virtual hallways, if you will. Twitter and beyond. >> That's a good question. Like what is a collection itself? So we've talked a lot in the past about reusable content for Ansible. We talk a lot about roles and modules and we sort of put those off to the side a little bit and say, "These are your reusable components." You can put 'em anywhere you want. You can put 'em in source control, distribute them through email, it doesn't matter. And then your playbooks, that's what you write. And that's your sort of blessed content. Collections are really about taking the modules and roles and plugins, the things that make automation possible, and bundling those up together in groups of content, groups of modules and roles, or standing by themselves so that you can decide how that's distributed and how you consume that, right? Like you might have the Azure, VMware or Red Hat satellite collection that you're using. And you're happy with that. But you want a new version of Ansible. You're not bound to using one and the same. You can stick with the content that matters to you, the roles, the modules, the plugins that work for you. And you decide when to update those and you know, what the actual modules and plugins you're using are. >> So I got to ask the content question, you know, I'm a content producer. We do videos as content, blog posts content. When you talk about content, it's code, clarify that role for us because you got, you're enabling developers with content and helping them find experts. This is a concept. Robyn, talk about this. And Matt, you can weigh in, too, define what does content mean? It means different things. (indistinct) again, content could be. >> It is one of those words, it's right up there with developers, you know, so many different things that that can mean, especially- >> Explain content and the importance of the semantics of that. Explain it, it's important that people understand the semantics of the word "content" with respect to what's going on with Ansible. >> Yeah, and Matt and I actually had a conversation about the murkiness of this word, I believe that was yesterday. So what I think about our content, you know, and I try to put myself in the mind, my first job was a CIS admin. So I try to put myself in the mind of someone who might be using this content that I'm about to attempt to explain. Like Matt just explained, we've always had these modules, which were included in Ansible. People have pieces of code that show very basic things, right? If I get one of the AWS modules, it would, I am able to do things like "I would like to create a new user." So you might make a role that actually describes the steps in Ansible, that you would have to create a new user that is able to access AWS services at your company. There may be a number of administrators who want to use that piece of stuff, that piece of code over and over and over again, because hopefully most companies are getting bigger and not smaller, right? They want to have more people accessing all sorts of pieces of technology. So making some of these chunks accessible to lots of folks is really important, right? Because what good is automation, if, sure we've taken care of half of it, but if you still have to come up with your own bits of code from scratch every time you want to invoke it, you're still not really leveraging the full power of collaboration. So when we talk about content, to me, it really is things that are constantly reusable, that are accessible, that you tie together with modules that you're getting from collections. And I think it's that bundle, you can keep those pits of reusable content in the collections or keep them separate. But, you know, it's stuff that is baked for you, or that maybe somebody inside your organization bakes, but they only have to bake it once. They don't have to bake it in 25 silos over and over and over again. >> Matt, the reason why we're talking about this is interesting, 'cause you know what this points out, in my opinion, it's my opinion. This points out that we're talking about content as a word means that you guys were on the cutting edge of new paradigms, which is content, it's essentially code, but it's addressable, community it's being shared. Someone wrote the code and it's a whole 'nother level of thinking. This is kind of a platform automation. I get it. So give us your thoughts because this is a critical component because the origination of the content, the code, I mean, I love it. Content is, I've always said content, our content should be code. It's all data, but this is interesting. This is the cutting edge concept. Could you explain what it means from your perspective? >> This is about building communities around that content, right? Like it's that sharing that didn't exist before, like Robyn mentioned, like, you know, you shouldn't have to build the same thing a dozen times or 100 times, you should be able to leverage the capabilities of experts and people who understand that section of automation the best, like I might be an expert in one field or Robyn's an expert in another field, we're automating in the same space. We should be able to bring our own expertise and resources together. And so this is what that content is. Like, I'm an expert in one, you're an expert in another, let's bring them together as part of our automation community and share them so that we can use them iterate on them and build on them and just constantly make them better. >> And the concepts are consumption, there's consumption of the content. There's the collaboration of the content. There's the sharing, all this, and there's reputation, there's expertise. I mean, it's a multi sided marketplace here, isn't it? >> Yeah. I read a article, I don't know, a year or two ago that said, we've always evolved in the technology industry around, if you have access to this, first it was the mainframes. Then it was, whatever, personal computers, the cloud, now it's containers, all of this, but, once everybody buys that mainframe or once everybody levels up their skills to whatever the next thing is that you can just buy, there's not much left that actually can help you to differentiate from your competitors, other than your ability to actually leverage all of those tools. And if you can actually have better collaboration, I think than other folks, then that is one of those points that actually will get you ahead in your digital transformation curve. >> I've been harping on this for a while. I think that cloud native finally has gone, when I say "mainstream" I mean like on everyone's mind, you look at the container uptake, you're looking at containers. We had IDC on, five to 10% of the enterprises are containerizing. That's huge growth opportunity. The IPO of, say, Snowflake's on Amazon. I mean, how does this happen? That's a company that's went public, It's the most valuable IPO in the history of IPOs on Wall Street. And it's built on Amazon, it has its own cloud. So it's like, I mean, this points to the new value that's being created on top of these new cloud native architectures. So I really think you guys are onto something big here. And I think you're starting to see this, new notions of how things are being rethought and reimagined. So let's keep it, while I've got you guys here real quick, Ansible 2.1 community release. Tell us more about the updates there. >> Oh, 2.10, because, yeah. Oh, that's fine. I know I too have had, I'm like, "Why do we do that?" But it's semantic versioning. So I am more accustomed to this now, it's a slightly different world from when I worked on Fedora. You know, I think the big highlight there is really collections. I mean, it's collections, collections, collections. That is all the work that we did, it's under the hood, over the hood, and really, how we went from being all in one repo to breaking things out. It's a big line for, we're advancing both the tool and also advancing the community's ability to actually collaborate together. And, you know, as folks start to actually use it, it's a big change for them potentially in how they can actually work together in their organizations using Ansible. One of the big things we did focus on was ensuring that their ease of use, that their experience did not change. So if they have existing Ansible stuff that they're running, playbooks, mod roles, et cetera, they should be able to use 2.10 and not see any discernible change. That's all the under the hood. That was a lot of surgery, wasn't it, Matt? Serious amounts of work. >> So Matt, 2.10, does that impact the release piece of it for the developers and the customers out there? What does it change? >> It's a good point. Like at least for the longer term, this means that we can focus on the Ansible core experience. And this is the part that we didn't touch on much before now with the collections pieces that now when we're fixing bugs, when we're iterating and making Ansible as an engine of automation better, we can do that without negatively impacting the automation that people actually use. We could focus on the core experience of actually automating itself. >> Execution environments, let's talk about that. What are they, are they being used in the community today? What do you guys react to that? >> We're actually, we're sort of in the middle of building this right now. Like one of the things that we've struggled with is when you, you need to automate, you need this content that we've talked about before. But beyond that, you have the system that sits underneath the version of Linux, the kernel that you're using, going even further, you need Python dependencies, you need library dependencies. These are hard and complicated things, like in the Ansible Tower space, we have virtual environments, which lets you install those things right alongside the Ansible Tower control plane. This can cause a lot of problems. So execution environments, they take those dependencies, the unit that is the environment that you need to run your automation in, and we're going to containerize it. You were just talking about this from the containerization perspective, right? We're going to build more easily isolated, easy to use distinct units of environments that will let you run your automation. This is great. This lets you, the person who's building the content for your organization, he can develop it and test it and send it through the CI process all the way up through production, it's the exact same environment. You could feel confident that the automation that you're running against the libraries and the models, the version of Ansible that you're using, is the same when you're developing the content as when you're running it in production for your business, for your users, for your customers. >> And that's the Nirvana. This is really where you talk about pushing it to new limits. Real quick, just to kind of end it out here for Ansible 2020, AnsibleFest 2020. Obviously we're now virtual, people aren't there in person, which is really an intimate event. Last year was awesome. Had theCUBE set right there, great event, people were intimate. What's going on for what you guys have for people that obviously we got the videos and got the media content. What's the main theme, Robyn and Matt, and what's going on for resources that might be available for folks who want to learn more, what's going on in the community, can you just take a minute each to talk about some of the exciting things that are going on at the event that they should pay attention to, and obviously, it's asynchronous so they can go anywhere anytime they want, it's the internet. Where can they go to hang out? Is there a hang space? Just give the quick two second commercial, Robyn, we'll start with you. >> All right. Well of course you can catch the keynotes early in the morning. I look forward to everybody's super exciting, highly polite comments. 'Cause I hear there's a couple people coming to this event, at least a few. I know within the event platform itself, there are chat rooms for each track. I myself will be probably hanging out in some of the diversity and inclusion spaces, honestly, and I, this is part of my keynote. You know, one of the great things about AnsibleFest is for me, and I was at the original AnsibleFest that had like 20 people in Boston in 2013. And it happened directly across the street from Red Hat Summit, which is why I was able to just ditch my job and go across the street to my future job, so to speak. We were... Well, I just lost my whole train of thought and ruined everything. Jeez. >> We got that you're going to be in the chat rooms for the diversity and community piece, off platform, is there a Slack? Is there like a site? Anything else? 'Cause you know, when the event's over, they're going to come back and consume on demand, but also the community, is there a Discord? I mean, all kinds of stuff's going on, popping up with these virtual spaces. >> One thing I should highlight is we do have the Ansible Contributor Summit that goes on the day before AnsibleFest and the day after AnsibleFest. Now, normally this is a pretty intimate event with the large outreach that we've gotten with this Fest, which is much bigger than the original one, much, much, much bigger, we've, and signing up for the contributor summit is part of the registration process for AnsibleFest. So we've actually geared our first day of that event to be towards new or aspiring contributors rather than the traditional format that we've had, which is where we have a lot of engineers, and can you remember sit down physically or in a virtual room and really talk about all of the things going on under the hood, which is, you know, can be intimidating for new people. Like "I just wanted to learn about how to contribute, not how to do surgery." So the first day is really geared towards making everything accessible to new people because turns out there's a lot of new people who are very excited about Ansible and we want to make sure that we're giving them the content that they need. >> Think about architects. I mean, SREs are jumping in, Matt, you talked about large scale. You're the chief architect, new blood's coming in. But give us an update on your perspective, what people should pay attention to at the event, after the event, communities they could be involved in, certainly people want to tap into you are an expert and find out what's going on. What's your comment? >> Yeah, you know, we have a whole new session track this year on architects, specifically for SREs and automation architects. We really want to highlight that. We want to give that sort of empowerment to the personas of people who, you know, maybe you're not a developer, maybe you're not, operations or a VP of your company. You're looking at the architecture of automation, how you can make our automation better for you and your organization. Everybody's suffered a lot and struggled with the COVID-19. We're no different, right? We want to show how automation can empower you, empower your organization and your company, just like we've struggled also. And we're excited about the things that we want to deliver in the next six months to a year. We want you to hear about those. We want you to hear about content and collections. We want you to hear about scalability, execution environments, we're really excited about what we're doing. You know, use the tools that we've provided in the AnsibleFest event experience to communicate with us, to talk to us. You can always find us on IRC via email, GitHub. We want people to continue to engage with us, our community, our open source community, to engage with us in the same ways that they have. And now we just want to share the things that we're working on, so that we can all collaborate on it and automate better. >> I'm really glad you said that. I mean, again, people are impacted by COVID-19. I got, it sounds like all channels are open. I got to say of all the communities that are having to work from home and are impacted by digital, developers probably are less impacted. They got more time to gain, they don't have to travel, they could hang out, they're used to some of these tools. So I think I guess the strategy is turn on all the channels and engage in new ways. And that seems to be the message, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Alright, Robyn Bergeron, great to see you again, Matt Jones, great to chat with you, chief architect for Ansible Automation Platform and of course, Robyn senior manager for the community team. Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. It's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here in the studio in Palo Alto. We're virtual. This is theCUBE virtual with AnsibleFest virtual. We're not face to face. Thank you for watching. (calm music)

live from San Francisco it's the queue covering micron insight 2019 back to you by micron welcome back to micron insight 2019 in San Francisco you watching the cube the leader and live tech coverage we're wrapping up our day Dave Volante with David Floria we're Kia Jones is here she's the senior principal for 5g connectivity in the GPM group at Microsoft great to see you great to see you guys it's been a wonderful day yeah nice job up on stage today you know we're gonna talk a little bit about a 5g and get your perspectives on it but tell us more about your group and sort of what you focused yeah well you know I'm in Azure and azure is even though it's our cloud infrastructure there has to be a lot of backbone support so inside of networking we have all those components that would support the physical structure of cloud technology so we focus on virtualizing a lot of the different managed services that we have and we provide those to customers for scalability and sustainable models that allow them to pretty much transport data safely what's it like inside of Microsoft these days I mean what a transformation of the company I did a little segment on LinkedIn the other day a little video segment there's a lot of ways if you want to spend some money there's a lot of ways to spend money with Microsoft you know you got cloud you got an application management you got security you got all the abs I mean really is you're hitting on all cylinders it's what a dynamic what's it like inside of there these days you know I think I think the world now is very different I see Microsoft making a huge transformation over the last have only been there three years but what I can say to you is that I see that the opportunity is there for partnership now which is something that I don't think we focused on we did too well in the past with our new CEO Satya Nadella and Peggy Johnson who leads our business development I mean we are really taking the the game and just changing and and making making it more something that we can do with everyone instead of in silo and so the culture is definitely changing is their opportunity yeah but I think our company is dedicated and focused on you know creating more diverse technology that can meet two customer's needs all over the yeah I mean windows are still a huge part of Microsoft's business but it's not the future of Microsoft it's very very impressive to see that transformation all right what what should we know about 5g what's Microsoft's put point of view on 5g what's the opportunity for you well that's a great question a lot of people were like Microsoft and 5g how does that work well in the past I think with the telcos and all the communication service providers we've always been either their customer or they've been our customer the new world that we're going into now is how do we help the telcos now be better enablers so that we can accelerate business and so I took over this charter along with my boss Yusuf Khalidi and about a year ago and our vision for what we thought we could do came to really great reality when we understood the the ecosystem that already existed this this business of 5g is not as simple as it sounds so what we decided to do and we released a press release back in July was we're going pretty much all in in a sense with AT&T in helping them with their global strategy for really Wireless you know to help stabilize their wireless network and combine some software-defined principles and capabilities so what they're they're already planning for in the future so I think with that transformation honestly a lot of it is unknown but we're taking a day by day we're talking earlier about a lot of is unknown in terms of like what apps are going to emerge who's gonna pay for what but but there's a lot of hype around 5g certainly a lot of folks in the technology community you're excited about it yeah help us understand what's real and what's not what's hype and what sort of things that users can actually expect and then I want to know exact months and you know what I think if you can imagine it it's a possibility I think it all boils down to the type of partnerships I always say that it's the power of three in the sense in the past has always been the power of two where two companies come together we can make it work well now you need you need an extra component not only do you need a company like Microsoft but you need to tell Co but you're going to need a system integrator right and I'm not talking about the hardware side but more of the software application side I think if a lot of people talking about like these things we know that smart city we think that's a possibility real soon mmm I still think we got it way to go with a lot of the townships and the city infrastructures moving so slow with governmental policies changing I think that we can likely see improvement in connected vehicles connected you know Internet of Things in and if everything is coming we first must be able to connect the dots with those things first before we actually bring in a government entity I think they have a lot of questions that we're not yet ready to answer and so I think there's a lot of great need for POCs and that's what my team focuses on inside of Azure networking he's looking at what can be the next PLC where we can help truly define the next generation requirements you're kind of acting as the accelerant I like the power three analogy a bump set spike yeah right now fashion sports analogies in the cube and then you know you point about I think governments is right on I was saying the earlier to David that I participated in a mayor of Boston as this you know the Smart City future initiative and you're talking 2050 oh yeah you know that's their time horizon I'm trying to figure that that's right around the corner yeah I mean I can't believe we're about to be in the 2020 feels like I just graduated high school when you're looking at these opportunities there seems to be a big divergence of opinion in terms of networking between are you going to push the processing out to the edge and do as much of it possible there and only take the the subset of data from that processing or are you going to bring it in to some sort of center to do do the processing there yeah what are you what are you seeing in your five-year as the models of computer putting together compute storage and networking yeah for me I have a this is rukia's opinion but I think that in the future when we talk about compute we need to be able to chop it up and we need to sell it to individuals individuals could be enterprises or consumer in my world and the way I think about this I think that we have an enormous amount of opportunity to give customers freedom and flexibility if we're not able to give them freedom and flexibility I think that we really limit the possibilities of what truly podgy can bring and so in my world I believe that you should be able to prepay for your computing power I believe that you can literally distribute it among all your devices within your families like you know you have the family rate plans that the telcos are selling well think about this and that family rate plan now there's an additional component that you will sell which will be compute I may not want to go as fast as you like for gaming for instance absolutely right okay gaming for everyone and at the speed of what you need so atomic of components of compute that you can actually assign to individual users applications workloads yeah it's not - you told me tomorrow rookie what do you want to do that's not saying ok so what what are you doing here what's the connection between sort of Microsoft your role and you know this micron insight event micron is a a great partner with with Microsoft I think we do a lot of business as it relates to chips I specifically am here because Peggy Johnson supports the company and she's over our business development operations for the companies and she believes micron is on to something and so I'm proud to be here and getting to know more about the business visit micron and the partnerships that we can create in the future well we more partnerships obviously you need membrane storage to run all this totally do we can do it part of the build-out well Rukia thank you so much for for coming on the cube we'll give you the last word your takeaway is what should we be watching for from you and your group yeah I mean I think that as we go forth with our partnership with AT&T which happens to be one of the global carriers around the world we are planning for some amazing things and we will make announcements at our Microsoft ignite event in early November and so I hope that everyone will attend that event and perhaps support us by sharing the information and coming to talk to us about new partnerships with our clouds networking department great well we'll be there at ignite hope to have you back on that'll be great thank you and thank you everybody thank you David Fleur a great job with the crew which is a wrap from Pier 27 at Microsoft blending Microsoft mega you both say the same names right the insight conference micron inside 2019 check out Silicon angle comm check out the cube net for all the videos and we'll see you next time is Dave Volante for David floor thank you

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Splunk dot com. 19. Brought to you by spunk. >>Okay, welcome back. Everyone secures live coverage in Las Vegas response dot com. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube. We're here for three days is a spunk. Spunk dot com 10 anniversary of their end user conference way Got some great guests here. They talk about diversity, inclusion breaking the barrier. Women in tech We got some great guests. Jane Heights, I add Si io National government service is Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Carol Jones, CEO Sandy and National Labs from Albuquerque Think coming on to CEOs of excited Suzanne McGovern. Diversity and inclusion talent leader for Splunk Thanks for guys joining us. Really appreciate it. I want to get into a panel you guys discuss because this is the area of really important to the workforce. Global workforce is made up of men and women, but most of the software text built by mostly men. But we get that second. I want to get in, find out what you guys are doing in your rolls because you guys, the journey is breaking through the barrier. Start with you. What's your role. What do you do? Their CEO. >>So I am CEO for National Government Service Is we do Medicare claims processing for the federal government. We also have a number of I t contracts with CMS. And, um, I organ. I have an organization of 331 people. Very different organization, Data center, infrastructure security gambit of I t, if you will. A great group of people divers were in Baltimore. Where? In Indianapolis. We're out of the kingdom office. How >>long have you been in 19 >>My career. So yes. Yeah. The waves. Yes. I have seen the waves have Daryl >>Jones and I'm c i o same National Laboratories. It's a federally funded research and development center. So we do research and development from on behalf of the U. S. Government. I have about 500 employees and 400 contractors. So we provide the I T for Sadia, all gametes of it, including some classified environments. >>A lot of security, your role. What's wrong? >>I'm the chief diversity officer. It's Plus I get the pleasure to do that every day. A swell, a cz. It's everyone's job. Not just magically explode. But I'm very honored to do that. How to look after talent. >>I want to compliment you guys on your new branding. Thank not only is a cool and really picking orange, but also that position is very broad and everything is trade message. But the big posters have diversity. Not a bunch of men on the posters. So congratulations, it's anger. Representative is really important. Worth mentioning. Okay, let's start with the journey. The topic you guys just talked about on a panel here in Las Vegas is female leaders smashing the glass ceiling. So when you smash his last ceiling, did you get caught? Was her bleeding? What happened? Take us for your journey. What was big? Take away. What's the learnings? Share your stories. >>Well, a lot of it, as I shared today with Panel, is really learning and be having that Lerner mindset and learning from something that you do, which is part of your life. And I use the example of I'm married to an Indian Muslim, went to India, spent some time with his family, and they told me Let's be ready at 6 30 and I said, Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready. Dressed in 6 30 nobody else was ready. And everyone in the room said, Well, we're gonna have Chai first we're gonna have some tea And I was like, Well, you said 6 30 and I'm ready And, um, everyone said, Well, you know, we need to relax. We need to connect. We need to have some time So I took that back and said, You know what? We all need to make time for tea Way. All need to connect with our people and the individuals that work with us, And I've kind of taken that on through the last 20 years of being married, Tim. But connecting with individuals and your teams and your partner's is what's important and as what Lead Meeks. I've built those allies and that great group of people that >>being people centric, relationship driven, not so much chasing promotions or those kinds. >>That's what's worked for me. Yes, >>Carol, it's been your journey. Stories >>start a little bit of beginnings. I've been in Tech over 30 years. I got a bachelor's and marketing, and then I was looking to get my master's. So I got, um, I s degree, but I didn't know even to go into that field. So my professor said you needed to go into my s, so don't know that's too hard. You can't do that. You know, you could do it. So it's always been challenging myself and continuing learning. I worked at IBM then I was there in the time when they did great layoffs. So no, e he was 93 right to left. Only wonder he's gonna be left by the end of the year. >>You know, for the younger audience out there M I s stands from management information systems. Before that, there was data processing division which actually relevant today. Quite a journey. What a great spirit. What's the one thing that you could share? Folks, this is a lot of young women coming into the workforce, and a lot of people are looking at inspirational figures like yourselves that have been there and done that. There's a lot of mentoring going on is a lot of navigation for young women and understand minorities. And they just you guys, there's no real playbook. You guys have experiences. What's your advice, folks out watching >>my number one advice. And I gave this to people who are wanting to go into leadership. Trust yourself. Trust to you. Are you all got to this place because of the successful person you are and just continue to trust yourself to take advantage of those opportunities. Take a risk. I took a risk when my total focus was in Medicare. I was asked to do another job and I took another, you know, position. And it wasn't in Medicare. So you have to take those opportunities and risk and just trust that you're gonna get yourself. >>Carol. You're >>similar. It's to continue to grow and to be resilient, there'll be times in your career like a layoff where you don't know what you're gonna do. You bounce back and make it into uneven. Better job on. Take risks. I took a risk. I went into cybersecurity. Spent 10 years there, continuing learning and the Brazilian >>learnings key, right? I mean, one of the things about security mentioned 10 years. So much has changed, hasn't it? >>Well, it's bad. Guys still outnumber the good guys. That has changed faster. Exactly. Technologies change. >>Just talk about the diversity inclusion efforts. You guys have a Splunk Splunk cultures very open transparent on the technology solutions very enabling you actually enabling a lot of change on the solution side. Now we're seeing tech for good kind of stories because Texas Tech Tech for business. But also you're seeing speed and times value time to mission value, a new term way kicked around this morning. It's time to mission value. >>Yes. So I'm glad you mentioned data, right? We're data company, and we're very proud that we actually whole star diversity inclusion numbers, right? So way moved the needle 1.8% on gender last year, year on year pride, but not satisfied. We understand that there's much more to diversity inclusion than just gender, But our strategy is threefold for diversity. Inclusion. So it's work force, workplace marketplace farces around just where talk is improving our representation so that these women are no longer the only. These are in the minority that were much more represented, and we're lucky we have three women and our board. We have four women in our C suite, so we're making good good progress. But there's a lot more to do, and as I say, it's not just about gender. We want to do way, nor the innovation is fueled by diversity. So we want to try. You know, folks of different races, different ethnicity, military veterans, people with disability. We need everyone. It's belongs to be, since >>you guys are all three leaders in the industry, Thanks for coming on. Appreciate that. I want to ask you guys because culture seems to be a common thread. I mean, I do so money talks and interviews with leaders for all types, from digital transformation to Dev ops, the security and they always talk speeds in fees. But all the change comes from culture people on what I'm seeing is a pattern of success. Diversity inclusion works well if it's in the culture of the company, so one filter for anyone a woman or anyone is this is a company culturally aligned with it. So that's the question is what do you do when you have a culture that's aligned with it? And what do you do? There's a culture that's not allow, so you want to get out. But how do you unwind and how do you navigate and how do you see the size of signals? Because the date is there >>a way to certainly really harness and failed a culture of inclusion. And that's through employee resource groups in particular. So it's plunks. More than 50% of our spelunkers are actually members. Followers are allies on employee resource. So gives community. It gives that sense of inclusion so that everyone could bring their whole Selves to work. So, to your point, it really does build a different culture, different level of connection. And it's super different. >>Any thoughts on culture and signals look for good, bad, ugly, I mean, because you see a good ways taken right. Why not >>take a chance, right? Right. No, I think, you know, like you look at it and you decide, like some young women we were talking to, You know, Is this the right company for you? And if not, can you find an ally? You know, it's a feeling that the culture isn't there and helped educate him on help to get him to be Jack of what does he and his leaders, I think we have to always ask ourselves, Are we being inclusive for everyone >>and mine? I would spend it a little bit. Is that diversity and thoughts And how? When I joined this organization. Culture is a big factor that needs to change and some of the things that I'm working on, but to bring people to the table and hear those different thoughts and listen to them because they all do think differently. No matter color, race, gender, that sort of thing. So diversity and thought is really something that I try to focus in on >>carry. Palin was just on the Cuban CMO of Splunk and top of the logo's on the branding and, she said, was a great team effort. Love that because she's just really cool about that. And she said we had a lot of diversity and thought, which is a code word for debate. So when you have diversity, I want to get your thoughts on this because this is interesting. We live in a time where speed is a competitive advantage speed, creativity, productivity, relevance, scale. These air kind of the key kind of modern efforts. Diversity could slow things down, too, so but the benefit of diversity is more thought, more access to data. So the question is, what do you guys think about how companies or individuals could not lose the speed keep the game going on the speed and scale and get the benefits of the diversity because you don't want things to grind down. Toe halts way Slugs in the speed game get data more diverse. Data comes in. That's a technical issue. But with diversity, you >>want a challenge that, to be honest, because we're a data company in the details. Irrefutable. Right? So gender diverse Teams up inform homogeneous teams by about 15% if you take that to race and ethnicity was up to 33%. Companies like ourselves, of course, their numbers see an uptick in share price. It's a business imperative, right? We get that. It's the right thing to do. But this notion that it slows things down, you find a way right. You're really high performance. You find a way best time. So it doesn't always come fast, right? Sometimes it's about patients and leadership. So I'm on the side of data and the data is there. If you tickle, di bear seems just perform better, >>so if it is slowing down, your position would be that it's not working >>well. Yes, I know. I think you got to find a way to work together, you know? And that's a beautiful thing about places like spun were hyper cool, right? It's crazy. Tons of work to do different things were just talking about this in the break way have this unwritten rule that we don't hire. I'll see jerks for >>gender neutral data, saris, origin, gender neutral data. >>Yeah, absolutely no hiring folks are really gonna, you know, have a different cultural impact there. No cultural adds the organization way. Need everyone on bats. Beautiful thing. And that's what makes it special. >>I think you know, is you start to work and be more inclusive. You start to build trust. So it goes back to what Jane was talking about relationships. And so you gotta have that foundation and you can move fast and still be reversed. I >>think that's a very key point. Trust is critical because people are taking chances whether they're male or female. If the team works there like you see a Splunk, it shouldn't be an issue becomes an issue when it's issue. All right, so big Walk away and learnings over the years in your journey. What was some moments of greatness? Moments of struggle where you brought your whole self to bear around resolving in persevering what were some challenges in growth moments that really made a difference in your life breaking through that ceiling. >>Wow. Well, um, I'm a breast cancer survivor, and I, uh, used my job and my strength to pull me through that. And I was working during the time, and I had a great leader who took it upon herself to make sure that I could work if I wanted. Thio are not. And it really opened that up for me to be able to say, I can still bring my whole self, whatever that is today that I'm doing. And I look back at that time and that was a strength from inside that gave me that trust myself. You're going to get through it. And that was a challenging personal time, But yet had so many learnings in it, from a career perspective to >>story thanks for sharing Caroline stories and struggles and successes that made him big impact of you. Your >>life. It was my first level one manager job. I got into cybersecurity and I didn't know what I was doing. I came back. My boss of Carol. I don't know what you did this year, and so I really had to learn to communicate. But prior to that, you know that I would never have been on TV. Never would have done public speaking like we did today. So I had to hire a coach and learn hadn't forward on communications. Thanks for sharing stories, I think a >>pivotal moment for me. I was in management, consultants say, for the first half of my career, Dad's first child and I was on the highway with a local Klein seven in the morning. Closet Night started on a Sunday midday, so I didn't see her a week the first night. I know many women who do it just wasn't my personal choice. So I decided to take a roll internal and not find Jason and was told that my career would be over, that I would be on a track, that I wouldn't get partner anymore. And it really wasn't the case. I find my passions in the people agenda did leadership development. I didn't teach our role. I got into diversity, including which I absolutely love. So I think some of those pivotal moments you talked about resilient earlier in the panel is just to dig, dying to know what's important to you personally and for the family and really follow your to north and you know, it works out in the end, >>you guys air inspiration. Thank you for sharing that, I guess on a personal question for me, as a male, there's a lot of men who want to do good. They want to be inclusive as well. Some don't know what to do. Don't even are free to ask for directions, right? So what would you advise men? How could they help in today's culture to move the needle forward, to support beach there from trust and all these critical things that make a difference what you say to that? >>So the research says that women don't suffer from a lack of mentorship. The sucker suffer from a lack of advocacy. So I would say if you want to do something super easy and impactful, go advocate for women, go advocate for women. You know who is amazing I there and go help her forward >>in Korea. And you can do that. Whatever gender you are, you can advocate for others. Yeah, also echo the advocacy. I would agree. >>Trust relationships, yes, across the board >>way, said Thio. Some of the women and our allies today WAAS bring your whole self. And I would just encourage men to do that, to bring your whole self to work, because that's what speeds up the data exchange. That's what it speeds up. Results >>take a chance, >>Take a chance, bring your whole self >>get trust going right. He opened a communicated and look at the date on the photo booth. Datable driver. Thank you guys so much for sharing your stories in The Cube, you think. Uses the stories on the Cube segments. Cube coverage here in Las Vegas for the 10th stop. Compass Accused seventh year John Ferrier with Q. Thanks for watching.

(mellow music) >> Voiceover: Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE, here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Dr. WandaJean Jones. She is the Digital Learning Evangelist at GE Healthcare. Thank you so much for coming on the show! >> Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. >> Well we're excited to have you. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do as the Digital Learning Evangelist, which is a very cool title. >> As Digital Learning Evangelist, the main part of my job is to manage our digital learning ecosystem. So, we have a learning management system, we use Adobe Captivate Prime. And then the other part of my job is to teach people how to use digital tools that will help make their lives a little bit easier. Save time, automate processes, and, you know, all the way around, create efficiencies. >> And how (chuckles). Are the employees willing to go there? Or are they naturally skeptical? I mean, what would you say? I mean, introducing a new technology to employees is famously a hard thing to do. How do you find it? >> Well, I'm a teacher at heart, so what I like to do is take what they already know and build off of that. So typically, if an employee comes to me and says, "WandaJean, we really want to learn "how to manage all of these Excel spreadsheets, "there's lots of data." I tell them, you know, "Come to the meeting with your Excel spreadsheets," and then I want them to tell me the story about their process, and then I go through and match them, kind of play matchmaker, and match them to that technology that already fits within their current behavior. There's some things that they'll have to change just a little bit, but we don't want to do it so much that they find it overwhelming, and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm never going to get this." So, I want to make sure they're comfortable and, you know, listening to them talk and seeing the sophistication in their current process, I'll know how far I can go. >> Now are these kind of next-gen productivity tools that you're getting them onto? Or are these kind of new collaboration tools that the company's taken on? What are some of the things you're transitioning them off of and putting them onto? >> I think one of the things is, the best part is, most of the work that's coming to me to transform, if you will, it's very manual. So, it's knowing where the tools are, and I make sure that I am very tool promiscuous. I like to go and look at all of these tools, and I like to understand which tools do what. And then I want to understand the role of the person and what they do for the business. And how those two can come together. So it's a matchmaker. The tools are, most of the time, digital collaborative tools. So we have a full suite of all sorts of tools at GE Healthcare. So we're definitely no short of tools. But sometimes people just haven't taken that digital leap to figure out, "How do I get my process "a little more digitized and save myself some time?" >> So what kinds of things are the people on your team working through, in terms of the kinds of processes you're helping them automate, the kinds of things you're helping them do manually, and how is Smartsheet coming into play here? >> Okay. So, I like to look at things from the triple constraints: Cost, quality, and speed. So, when you think about cost, quality, and speed, you want to take cost out of the process. You want to improve the quality by, you know, creating some sort of a standardization that everybody's going to do. And then you want to speed up the process that people can bring that, whatever it is, to market. And when I look at those three levers, this is exactly what my end users want to do anyway. So Smartsheet is able to answer all of those in such a remarkable way. That's usually the top of the list, when it comes to, you know, how are we going to implement this new digital process, Smartsheet is up there. It's the all-in-wonder. I call it the all-in-wonder tool at work, and people say, "Okay, here she comes. "She's going to talk about Smartsheet." That's because, I always say, "Smartsheet does a thousand things." That's why I really want to listen to what is necessary. I don't want to tell you about a thousand things. I only want to tell you about the things that, you know, you're looking at in this process. When the person starts using the new Smartsheet process, almost always they come back to me and say, "Look what else I found." So as they go on that journey, they start finding other things as well. And then we get excited together, and I say, "But did you see this?" And so, this whole, you know, Santa Claus is comin' to town (all laugh) That's kind of what it feels like. >> So, how has the collaboration culture changed over time? A lot of the conversations here around Smartsheet is that, A, you know, you can bring in people from an external organization, not to mention you can bring in external people from your organization within the big company. Have you seen a big change in you know, kind of how the teams form, and what's kind of the collaborative workgroup as these collaboration tools have suddenly become available? >> I think the biggest part with collaboration is now people know the upstream process and the downstream process. So, what information is going into this process, what do I need to do with it, and then what is the way that it needs to be ready for that next handoff, from a process perspective? So I like that. The @mentions are beyond wonderful. When I think about those @mentions, we have the place, especially in Smartsheet, to create comments. And you create the comment, but I'm too busy. I'm not going to go back to row 87 and see what you said. But, if you do this @mention, I've noticed that people, when they're using the app, you know, the @mention comes through. Even if they're not directly at their email, they'll go and see, "Oh, somebody's talking to me here." And so their app is helping them respond in real time. So, another part of the collaboration piece is cutting out collaboration. So, a lot of meetings, "'Kay, give me the status, what's the status." Well we can certainly just automate those reports, and make it exactly what, you know, the executive or the leader wanted to know, from a high-level perspective. And so, we don't have to have as many meetings. >> I love it though. That collaboration means cutting out collaboration. >> Mm-hmm. >> That is so important. One of the things that you said that was really striking is, understanding the upstream and the downstream. Because we heard on the main stage, and we are hearing a lot today, about how it's providing much more visibility. And leaders are able to see the big picture, and understand where things are working and where things are not working. But it actually, it's also helpful for the everyday employees, for the people who are several notches below, to understand and have that full picture. Can you talk about how having the full information has changed the way your company gets work done? >> Absolutely. So, inside of the process that I own, I'm in a learning and development team, and there are several trainers. There are several people who own curriculum and, you know, we are serving about 4,000 employees. We want to make sure these employees are getting the right learning that they need, and preparing them to do their job. So I certainly want to empower those trainers and curriculum owners to do their thing. I'm not going to go to class with you. I probably don't even know your content. But when I looked at Smartsheet dashboards, I started, you know, reporting is great. But when you flip it around, it's now a portal. And this is a information portal that everybody can be connected to. So, if we have a release in our system, if there's new materials that they can share, these can be happening right there at that portal. So I like it that I can empower people to not need me. And sometimes that can be scary. You think, "Oh, automation, it's coming, "and a robot's going to take over my job!" It's not that it's going to do, I have lots to do. But having this portal view allows people to go in and really be empowered. The other thing I have is sort of a ticketing system. So there's one of me, and 4,000 of them, and everybody might want something from WandaJean. So, I have a intake form that could easily take that work in and talk to me, and I get to know, you know, they put timeframes around when they need this. So I get to bubble up which ones are the most important ones, and which ones I can put off for a little bit. But at the end of the year, my leader might want to come back to me and say, "You know, what have you done for me lately?" And so, all of this input that has come through in this really standardized way could create a dashboard about what I've been doing, and I get to celebrate and understand, wow, I've had 50% more learning requests, and this many people wanted to learn about a tool, and, so I would have those metrics to even celebrate my own work and what I do as an individual. >> That's really interesting, right? 'Cause then you go from, the classic paradigm is there's data, right, which then becomes information, which then hopefully becomes some insight that you can actually take action. So it sounds like you're pulling that just on your straight-up inbound form, to actually get a whole lot of information on what's going on in that community, and where you can prioritize your time, your activities. >> Yes, well we create job requisitions and we hire people for roles. You know, you get this job description, you will do this and you will do that. It will be interesting at the end of the year to look back at this intake and see everything that you've actually done, versus what you signed up to do when you took the job. So, sometimes it looks really different, like, "Wait a minute, I think I need some more money." (Rebecca laughs) "'Cause I didn't get hired for this." >> Right, right, right, I've done so much more. >> Yes. >> Talk a little bit about the silos within the organization, and the ways in which the Smartsheet is helping break down those silos. >> Okay. So I talked to you guys a little earlier and told you that I believe that silo is an acronym for Secrets in the Learning Organization. And when you have those secrets, and you have no idea what this team or this team is doing, it could really cost the company cost, quality, speed. It's going to slow us down. We're going to both duplicate processes. And the quality of our product, instead of having process excellence, we'll have pockets of excellence. And we want to make everybody into these rockstars for the company. So, putting it together and making it more of, you know, a transparent ecosystem is awesome. The one thing that I really like is, when you map out a process and you pull in the right people and get those people involved, you'll get to understand, you know, resource management, any constraints, and you know, "Why is it, Bob, that you haven't done anything with this?" Where, I don't do that. And, you know, it starts a conversation. We can see, number one, what's wrong. And then we could have a conversation with the person about what's wrong. And it gives another action item for us to make it right. So without these sorts of, you know, without Smartsheet really helping us technologically bring those things together, it would be hard for me to even know where Bob is. It's a very big company. GE Healthcare is about 60,000 people. So, I don't know. I don't even know where Bob is right now. Bob, where are you? (laughter) But if Bob gets pulled into that Smartsheet, it shrinks the world, and it makes our big giant company just that much smaller, and people start knowing who you are and what you're supposed to be doing. And you get the right traffic of work. And then anything else that doesn't belong to you, it can get rerouted. >> Love to get your take on re-skilling, which isn't directly part of what you're doing, but you're currently doing re-skilling in terms of tools to execute different, you're training people to probably be more collaborative by using these tools and that different types of process. So important that re-skilling happens in the future, as all the jobs change. Just, you know, are people up for this? Are they excited to learn a new tool? Do they see that there're different ways to get work done than maybe our tradition? Or you still got the old codgers in the back, saying, you know, "That's not the way we did it 20 years ago!" >> Exactly, you do have that, you do have that. But, you know, this whole fake it until you make it, it's not going to work anymore. There's so many opportunities, especially within our company. We are sharing with our people leaders how to have collaboration across teams. Really don't think that your whole world is just right here inside of your job. Think broadly about what you do. And I like to say that, you know, I act locally but I think globally. So that just means, if I see that there is a process that I'm a part of, this is a mindset that we're sharing with our employees. If you see there's a process that you're a part of, and you see that it's broken and you fix it, fix it in such a way that it scales, and that it's applicable. You know, if we're all process managers, you probably have this problem too. So, create the fix, and then celebrate that socially, and show someone else, you can do it too. >> Rebecca: You can replicate this. >> You can replicate this. It's the classic before and after. You know, if we want to lose weight, we don't want to see the skinny person and telling, you know, how we got skinny. We want to see when you were larger, you know? You want to see the before and the after, and make sure that, you know, and when people see that, like, "It's possible? "I don't have to be, like, this superstar coder?" When they see how easy it is and they grab that process, I've seen them just do wonderful things. It's amazing, what our employees do. >> So, as a Digital Learning Evangelist, I mean, I don't know, how many are there of you in the world? And is it lonely? Do you come to these conferences to sort of have some community and some commiseration and understanding? I mean, what is it like, and how do you share your best practices with other people who do what you do in other companies? >> Well, in other companies, of course, our social networks, LinkedIn and those professional communities that I'm a part of, Smartsheet has a user group community, we can share there. Internally, there are people who are very interested in process. We use Yammer, so Microsoft Yammer. And we have a Smartsheet Yammer channel. This is one of the most healthiest channels in our business. We can see the stats on how many people are asking questions. And you have people coming there and saying, "Has anybody ever done this?" When I see that sort of curiosity, when I see someone in Europe jumping to help somebody in Mexico, it really is energizing, and it lets us know that everybody's trying to help everybody win. But how do I collaborate and get with other people? I do. I collaborate with other companies that, you know, I found out that Starbucks actually used Smartsheet during a disaster where there was a hurricane and they sent a Smartsheet forum out to their baristas, "Are you okay? "Can you make some coffee?" And, you know-- (laughter) >> Can you make the coffee. >> "And, oh by the way, take good pictures of the damage, "so we can submit it to our insurance." So, that's something that our company can use. And I'll take that back to our team, and say, "Guess what Starbucks did with this?" And, "Guess what PayPal did with this?" I sent PayPal's Smartsheet movie around to our executive team. They were very impressed. Now, it's not just that they were impressed. It's that, over the next two months, I heard that very same executive say, "We're going to create an integrated marketing calendar, "and we're going to use Smartsheet." That just made me feel so rewarded, that, you know, somebody is listening. You're not just talking! (Rebecca laughs) There are some converts! >> Great. Well, WandaJean, a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Please come back again. >> Yes, I will! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Jeff Fricks, stay tuned of more of theCUBE's live coverage of ENGAGE 2019. (minimal techno tone) (mellow music)

>> Male Voiceover: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we're coming to you live from the show floor of Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia. And we're welcoming to theCUBE for the first time Adam Jones, the chief revenue officer of the Miami Marlins. Adam, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to join you both today. >> So, baseball fans, White Sox, San Francisco Giants, Miami Marlins. Always cool to talk sports and technology when we can bring those two things together. I think the San Francisco Giants and the Miami Marlins might have something in common right now, but regardless of the standings, everybody wants to go to a game. You have to deliver, as chief revenue officer, a great a fan experience. You got to make sure all the vendors are there to deliver what those fans want, regardless of the standings. People still want to go to the games. Talk to us a little bit about your role as the CRO of the Miami Marlins, how long you've been doing it, and then we'll get into what you're doing with Citrix. >> Sure. So, joined the Marlins 18 months ago as part of new ownership and the new leadership team brought in to reset the standard for what the Miami Marlins organization could be. We want to be a world class sport entertainment enterprise. That means we're going to evolve beyond a traditional baseball team and ballpark. 26 years into the history of the franchise, eight years into the operating rights of a ballpark, and there's a lot of work to be done around those two assets but as we take the organization forward, we want to continue to broaden that enterprise to focus on more sport and entertainment offerings. >> So, chief revenue officer. We don't get many chief revenue officers at a technology conference. Help make the connection. You're a busy person. What made you take time out of your schedule to come to Citrix Synergy? >> Well, I think it's indicative of the culture we're building within our organization that we're putting data at the very center of our culture. We're going to make informed and timely decisions and we need our technology to enable that culture. And so, when it came to where we were going to align our IT group and it's a group that has built out a very robust, on-prem infrastructure over the past seven years following the opening of Marlins Park, the alignment under strategy, which was my initial title coming in, and now chief revenue officer as I took on more responsibility for the business side of the organization, was a strategic decision to make sure that the infrastructure was meeting the requirements of the organization as we rapidly evolve what our priorities are and what we need in order to deliver on their very aggressive and lofty expectations for their organization. >> So this morning during the keynote, we heard a lot about the digital workplace, the employee experience being really critical for any type of organization's digital transformation, and I just thought it was a really interesting viewpoint because we go to a lot of tech shows here at theCUBE, all over the world, and we don't often talk about employee experience or even culture, as a leading edge indicator of how successful a digital transformation is going to be, but employee experience is really critical to any business because whether those employees are interacting with seven to 10 apps a day based on their job, or they're interacting with your other users, in your case, Marlins fans, making sure those employees are productive, have what they need, in a personalized way, is critical. Talk to us about what the employee experience means for the Marlins, and also, as an indicator on the revenue side. >> Absolutely, so we have an evolving workforce. It's very young across a very diverse enterprise of activities. What we've been able to do in partnership with Citrix since day one of the ballpark, where we went from an organization of roughly 100-150 employees around the team to 300 plus across the team and the ballpark, is build out an infrastructure that was very light in terms of hardware, focused very much on the digital workspace keeps us very nimble, allows us to deploy capital in areas that we see tremendous value back in terms of application and utility. So, as we continue to make our workforce more mobile, I ask them to deliver and work at a higher rate of speed. We need to arm them with the tools that allow them to perform those roles in the office, out of the office, engage beyond more just than a 81 day transactional relationship across Marlins baseball, but how across 12 months out of the year, creating that 365 day touchpoint. They still have tools and access in order to create those memories, those engagements that we want with the market. >> So, talking about customer experience, Marlin baseball is more than just the 300 employees. It is your partners, it's all of your contractors. When I go to a ballpark, I don't see Mark the hot dog vendor I see Mark, the guy that works for the Marlins. My user experience, my customer experience needs to be excellent across that. As CRO, that's part of your responsibility, assuring that the whole Marlin family is presented as one unity. Talk to us about from not just a user experience perspective but also, security expectations of how you need to make that real for your customers. >> Sure, on the experience side, what we are doing is resetting the standard, not only for Marlins and for South Florida, but the industry as a whole. We've brought on a lot of great talent to the organization from across the industry that knows what's worked, what hasn't across our peers. We're applying that. We're challenging conventional practice trying to get out in front of the curve as to what is going to be the future of a game day experience, what is a sport entertainment enterprise more holistically. And so, as a result, we have to arm our employees with those tools that will allow them to engage consistently across all the touchpoints with our fans, with our partners. Try not to centralize data to the point where only a select few have and feel informed and empowered to make decisions and take action, but disseminate that information and empower everyone to deliver consistently across all of those touchpoints. On the security side, being a public interest entity, we're vulnerable. We're a target. There's plenty of precedent around the type of activity that these types of organizations can be prone to try to address, and so, security is a number one priority of ours to make sure that the IP we're creating maintains and stays ours, as well as the information we are collecting around our customers, around our players, stays within that secure environment as well. >> So if I think about going to a baseball game, which I love, there are so many sellable moments there. Whether I'm in the stands and I want to go buy food and beverage, or I want a new hat, or some sort of merchandise for my nephew or something. You have, as CRO, you've got all these different sellable moments, not just in the ballpark, in the physical experience, but even online. So having this kind of cohesive opportunity to sell not just tickets, but food and beverage, merchandise, in person, on mobile, on a tablet, on a desktop, it's got to be a critical part of your strategy Talk about the alignment with yourself and you said a lot of your IT guys have FOMO cause you're here, but I imagine that those experiences are essential that you have the right foundation and technological foundation to deliver sellable moments that deliver. >> That's right. So the ecosystem of a sport is a fairly diverse one from the ticketing transaction to all of the ballpark touchpoints. What we're trying to create is that 12 month relationship with a fan, so that goes into creating a lot of content and how we distribute that content, in order to continue to earn that engagement well beyond 81 plus dates of baseball. And the technology behind there, in terms of our storage and our accessibility, is what allows us to begin to personalize and tailor not only those core, traditional transactions and touchpoints of sport, but how we've begun to transition into more of that broader entertainment enterprise in making sure that we can deliver those as personalized and tailored as we can. >> So there was another Chicago team that showed the age of baseball. It was over 100 years before they won a-- >> Another Chicago team-- >> Yeah, another Chicago team that won a championship. So baseball has a lot of tradition. You're in a unique opportunity that you're coming into a new ownership, but still, baseball has traditions that are hard to compete against. So let's talk about what are some of the cultural changes and opportunities that you see that baseball needs to engage in where technology can help. >> Why I think an interesting thought around baseball and where it's been scrutinized as whether we pace a play or number of games, of not keeping up with the times, not being as snackable, short-form consumption as other sporting content. As everything tracks that way, baseball starts to differentiate itself in terms of the ability to create a very distinct and differentiated experience to a millennial, to a family, to an older consumer who has grown up with the traditions of baseball. And so while baseball needs to continue to innovate and modernize, there's actually this interesting equilibrium as to how much it continues to challenge those traditions that differentiate it from many of other points of contact and where it should continue to preserve those elements to hold what has been generational-type engagement. >> You know a great example of that is mlb.com and being able to watch a game anywhere. Baseball does an amazing job of embracing digital transformation, at least in baseball. One of the things that we talked about, or that David talked about onstage today, is the seven trillion dollar opportunity. That's big, even in baseball numbers. There's no bigger sporting numbers than baseball, but seven trillion dollars is opportunity. What are you excited about coming out of this show when you look at some of the potential game efficiencies from some of the automation announcements that were made today? >> For our organization, while there has been significant investment in infrastructure, great collaboration with Citrix up until this point. The exciting transformation for us is our migration into more of a hybrid cloud environment, which is going to allow us to onboard a number of new applications, tools, for our sales team, our service team, our game presentation groups, to continue to innovate and challenge how they've gone to market in the past. And having Citrix as a partner that has that environment for us to step into, one, gives us a ton of assurance in taking that next step and having someone that continues to bring us new tools within that environment, as well. So our ability to collaborate across the organization, I'd say we've only just skimmed the surface as to the true capability and power of a lot of the tools we've had in place, and very excited about unlocking the true power and potential of that environment moving forward. >> So this is your second season with the Marlins. You spent 15 years at PWC and before we went live, I thought, wow, that must have been a pretty big change going from PWC to major league baseball. But you actually have quite a history in sports. Tell us a little about that and maybe some of the similarities between major league baseball as an industry to other industries that kind of surprised you. >> Sure. Organizations couldn't be different, more different, in terms of profile and in set-up. What I did day-to-day, advising across sport and entertainment leading the sports practice at PWC positioned me for this incredible opportunity or challenge that is the Miami Marlins and what we're building in this aggressive vision that we've set as to how we're going to reset the standard and become world class as an enterprise. PWC and the history with the firm and professional services gave me a unique perspective as to how to take on many of the challenges that we have. Had the opportunity working across sport to really understand what works, what doesn't, so that we can avoid some of those missteps that others who have taken on this roadmap ahead of us have encountered. The breadth of infrastructure that a firm of PWC's size, also gives me a little more of a lens as to what the power and scale of a large organization can deliver in more of a small, mid-size business form, and not accept size or employee base as a constraint as to the types of tools and sophistication of our technology that we can deploy within a sports organization. >> Well, Adam, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon, talking about how you are helping to make big positive impacts for the Miami Marlins. We appreciate your time. >> I enjoyed it. Thank you. >> Go MLB. All right, for Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from our first day of coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)