>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to The Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to The Cube. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Google Cloud Next 2018, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. (techy music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here. We're in San Francisco for Google Cloud's major conference, Next 2018. I'm John Furrier, here for three days. Wall to wall coverage on day one. We've got two great guests from SignalFX, Karthik Rau, founder and CEO, and Rajesh Raman, who's the chief architect. Signal's a hot startup in the area. Way ahead of its time, but now as the world gets more advanced, the solution is front and center as the value proposition if cloud moves into the mainstream, devops going to a world at large scale. Not just networking, monitoring, applications, you've got service meshes booming, great topic. Karthik, great to see you, Rajesh, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> John, great to be on. >> So, first of all let's just get it out of the way, you guys have some fresh funding in May, so just quickly give an update on the company. You guys raised-- >> Yeah >> A series... >> A series D. >> Series D, give us, but how much? >> Yeah, so we raised $45 million from General Catalyst leading the round back in May, been building a ton of momentum as a company, close to a couple hundred people today. We're using a lot of that to expand internationally. We've got a team in Europe now, just opened up a team in Australia. So, things have been going great. >> Congratulations, we've had chats before, always been impressed. You guys have a great stable of awesome engineers and talent in the company doing some great work, but it begs the question, I always like to get into the what ifs. What if I could have large scale application development environments with programmable infrastructure, how does that change things? So, Karthik, what's... How as that what if changes, now that is what's happening you're starting to see the cloud at scale for the common masses of enterprises, where old ways of doing things are kind of moving away. It's like horse and buggy versus having a car for the first time-- >> Yeah. >> Jobs are changing, but the value doesn't necessarily change. You still go from point A to point B, you still got an engine, people who care about fixing cars, so people just want to drive the cloud, some people want to get under the hood, whole new architecture. >> Yeah. >> What's the what if of if I could have all these resources, what's the challenges and what do you guys solve. >> Well, I think there are a couple of challenges in this new environment. One is the number of components are just orders of magnitude more than they used to be in a cloud environment, right? We went from having physical machines that live for three years in a data center, divide it up into VMs 10 years ago, now divided up into containers for every process. Not only that, but these containers get spun up and spun down every few minutes or every few hours, and so it's just the number of components in the churn is just massive. So, that in and of itself requires a far more analytics-based approach to understand patterns rather than what's happening on an individual component. The second thing that's changed is the operating model's fundamentally different, because now you're building and running web services, and when you're running web services the people who build the software are the ones who technically are responsible for operating it. And so, you know, you have more updates, you've got more people involved, you've got lots of different components that all need to interact with one another, and so having a communication framework across all of these disparate teams become really, really, really critical. So, those are the two fundamental changes as you move from, you know, for operating these modern, massively distributed-- >> Yes. >> Applications. >> And I'll just add just some observation data that we've seeing in theCUBE is those same folks building aren't necessarily operators, so they want to be in and out fast, right? (laughs) >> They don't want to be running and operating all the time, they want to push some code. Melody Meckfessel here at Google ran a survey with developers and said, you know, "What makes you happy," and it was two things that bothered developers: technical debt and speed for deployments, commits, and the commit number was around minutes. If you can't get something done in minutes then they're onto something else, so the mind share attention of developers and technicos. So, this is a challenge at scale when you have technical debt, which we've seen companies come out of the woodwork, "Oh, yeah, "I'm going to automate something, "I'm going to throw some compute at it with the cloud "with the best monitoring package on the planet "and look how great it is," but all they did was just code some instrumentation and that's it. >> Mm-hmm. >> They weren't dealing with a lot of moving parts. Now as more things come in this is a challenge that a lot of companies face. You guys kind of solved this problem... >> Yeah, absolutely, so maybe Rajesh was a part of the team at Facebook that built the Facebook monitoring system, and that's actually what gave us a lot of the vision to start SignalFX five-and-a-half years ago, so maybe-- >> Tell about the protection, the vision-- >> Yeah. >> And what you guys are doing. >> Yeah, so CICD, you know, it kind of, like, underlies a lot of this vision of, like, moving fast. You mentioned that people wanted, like, you know, push their code in a few minutes... The thing that makes that possible is for you to have observability into what's happening while that push happens, because it's one thing to push very fast, it's another thing to recognize that you might have pushed something bad and to be able to revert it very quickly, too. And so, you'd only need, like, you know, good observability into all the things that matter that characterize the health of your system to be able to quickly recognize patterns, to be able to quickly recognize anomalies, and to be able to maybe push forward or even roll back very quickly. So, I think, like, observability is like a very key aspect of this entire CICD story. >> That's great, and that's great to know that you were over at Facebook because obviously Facebook built, at scale from the ground up, a lot of opensource. Obviously they contributed a lot to opensource, but it's interesting, as they matured and you start to see their philosophy change. It used to be move fast, break stuff. >> Yeah. >> To move fast, be reliable. >> Yeah. >> This is now the norm that's the table stakes in cloud. You have to move fast, you got to push code, but you got to maintain an operational integrity. This is, like, not like an option. This is, like, standard. >> Absolutely. >> How do you guys help solve that problem? >> So, I think there are a few different aspects to it. So, the first is to, you know, people need to ensure that they have observability into their application, so this is ensuring that you have the right kind of instrumentation in place. Thankfully this is kind of becoming commoditized right now and getting metrics from your system. The second part, and the more key part, is then being able to process this data in a real time way. You know, have high resolution, very low latency, and then to be able to do real time streaming analytics on this data. In highly elastic environments when things come and go very quickly, the identity of any individual, like, component is less important than the aggregate system behavior, and so you really need the analytics capability to kind of, like, go across this data, do various kinds of aggregations, compare it against past data, do predictive analytics, that sort of thing. So, analytics becomes the very key concept of, you know, how you operate these environments. >> It sounds so easy. >> Yeah, well one thing I'll add to that, so you know, to your point a lot of big companies sometimes are scared by this. You know, "How do we," you know... "We can't move quickly and break things," and everything that they've designed is around having process and structure to check and make sure everything is clean before they push changes out, and now we're in this world where, you know, an intern or a developer can push directly on a production, how do you manage that? The key thing in this modern world when you're trying to release software quickly, Rajesh hit on this earlier, you need the magic undo button. >> Yeah. >> That is the key to this entire process. You need to design your software, you need to design your process, and you need to design your tools so that if you introduce something bad you catch it immediately and you can roll it back. So, lots of devops practices are oriented around this, right? The idea of a canary release, I'm going to roll out an update to one percent of my systems and users, test it out, observe all the metrics, make sure everything is clean before I roll it out to everyone else, and the ability to roll back quickly is also important. But in order to do all of this you need the visibility, you need the metrics, and you need to be able to do analytics on it quickly to identify the patterns as they emerge. >> That's a great point and I'd love to just double down on that and get your thoughts because some of the Google Cloud people who are operating at this scale, I put them on this whole service-centric architecture, because they're services. We're talking about services, managing sets of services, having analytics, observation space, the reverting back and the undo button, the magic button do-over, whatever you want to call it, but the interesting thing is clean. Having a clean service whether it's an API, message queue, or an event, this stuff's happening all over the place in the new services world. How do you guys help there, is that where you guys get involved? Do you see up in that layer, how far up are you guys looking at some of the instrumentation and the insights? >> Yeah, you want to take that? >> Yeah, sure, so you know, the one thing that we really like about SignalFX and we were very keen on when we built the platform is that we are very agnostic about metrics. We're happy to accept metrics from anywhere, we'll take instrumentation-- >> (chuckles) You don't discriminate against metrics. >> We'll take instrumentation from cloud environment, we'll take, you know, metrics from opensource systems and premier applications, so you know, some of these systems are already kind of built in to get metrics from. You know, we talk to the Kafkas and Cassandras of the world, for example. We can also talk to GCP and AWS and grab metrics from their system. I think the interesting question is like when people really are taking the devops philosophy of, like, so how do you instrument your own application, what questions do you want to ask from your environment that answer the critical questions that you kind of have, and so you know, that's the one, that's the next step in the hierarchy of needs is for people to ask the right kinds of questions, and you know, instrument their applications properly. But like having done that, we can go up and down the stack in terms of, like, insight into whether all the way from your cloud environment through opensource systems, all the way up-- >> So, you guys'll take data from anyone, just stream it in-- >> Yeah. >> Normal mechanisms there, what's the value added, where's the secret sauce on SignalFX? >> So, I think value, it's all about analytics. We are all about analytics, so we are able to look at patterns of the data, we can go up and down the stack and correlate across different layers of software, look at interactions across components in your microservice, for example. You know, one really interesting thing that's happening, as you might be aware, like the whole service mesh aspect of it, which lets us, gives us insight into interactions between components-- >> Yeah. >> In a microservices architecture, so you know, we are able to get all that data and give you insight into how your whole system is working. >> So, you guys, you can see in the microservices layer? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> That's powerful. >> And the key point is monitoring really has become an analytics problem, that's what we keep saying, right, because what's happening on an individual component is no longer as interesting as what's happening across the entire service, so you have to aggregate the information and look at the trend across the entire service, but the second thing that's really important is you need to be able to do it quickly, and this is where our streaming real time system really mattes. And people might ask, "Why does it "matter to do something real time." Like, "Seconds versus minutes, can a human actually "process something in seconds versus minutes?" Perhaps not, but everyone's moving towards automation, right? >> Yeah. >> So, if you want to move to a system where you have a closed loop, you have automation, and guess what, all of these modern systems, all the stuff that Google's talking here is all about automation. >> Yeah. >> And in that world seconds versus minutes, it means a tremendous amount of difference, right, where if you can find signals that will tell you there's an emerging problem within seconds and then you can revert a bad code push or you can auto-scale a cluster or you can, you know, change your load balancing algorithms all within seconds, that is what enables you to deliver, you know, 4.9s, 5.9s type of availability. >> And the consequences of not having that is outages-- >> Yeah, outages. >> Performance. >> Performance degradations, unhappy customers. I mean the cost to a brand now of having any kind of a performance issue is enormous, right? People are on Twitter before your team knows about it. (chuckles) >> Actually, you guys have a lot of the things you're solving, what is the core problem that you solve, what's the value proposition if you narrow it down that's high order bit for SignalFX? What's the corporate problem you solve? >> Well, we're solving the monitoring and observation problem for people operating cloud applications, so what happens is when you use SignalFX you have the confidence to move quickly, right? It gives you the safety net to be able to deploy changes on a daily basis, to have the shared context across a distributed team, so if you've got hundreds of two pizza box teams working together we give you that framework, the communication framework and the proactive intelligence to find issues as they emerge and proactively address them. And bottom line what that means is you can move as quickly as a Google or a Facebook or a Netflix even if you're a traditional Fortune 500 company that's regulated, and you know, you think you may not be able to do it but you really can. >> You give them the turbo charge, basically, for the analytics. All right, here's a question for you, what are the core guiding principles for the company? You guys obviously have a lot going on so you've got a core tech team, I mentioned it earlier. >> Mm-hmm. >> What are some of the guiding principles as you guys hire, build product, talk to customers, what's the key DNA of SignalFX? >> Yeah, I would say we are a very impact-driven company, so I'm, you know, very, very proud of all the people that we have on the team. We've got a lot of entrepreneurs who are focused on solving big problems, solving problems that customers may not necessarily know they need at the time, but as the market evolves we're there to solve it for them. So, we're a very customer-centric company. We have fantastic, we invest aggressively in technology, so it's not just about wrapping a pretty UI around, you know, Bolton Tech. We have real differentiated technology that solves real problems for people, and you know, I think we've in general just tried to skate to where the puck is and understand where the market's headed as a company. >> What are some of the customer feedback that you're getting? For folks that don't know SignalFX, what are some of the things that you're hearing from customers, why are you winning, what are some of the examples, can you share some color commentary? >> Yeah, I'll give one example, a Fortune 500 company that has been very aggressively investing in cloud the past, you know, four or five years, built an entire digital team, and their entire initiative is, like a lot of people in the Fortune 500 now, is to have a direct-to-consumer type of a relationship, and one of the things that they struggled with early was how do they move quickly, support product launches that might have massive load, and have the visibility to know that they can do that and catch issues as they emerge, and they didn't have a solution that could give that visibility to them until they leveraged SignalFX. And so now, if you talk to people there they'll say that they've essentially gone from defense every time they did one of these product launches to being on offense and really understanding what it takes to successfully launch a product and they're doing way more of these, so-- >> Moving the needle on time to market. >> Moving their business forward, you know, and digital transformation just by-- >> Yeah. >> Having SignalFX as a core enabler. >> It's the cloud version of putting out fires, so to speak, when you do product launches, right? >> Yeah. >> I got to ask you guys a question. You guys are both industry veterans, obviously Facebook has a storied history. We know all the great things that happen on the infrastructure side. Karthik, you've been in VM where you've seen the movie before where VM, where it made the market, changed IT for the better, still talk about the VMwares now. Now as we see cloud taking that next transformational push, describe the wave we're on right now, because it's kind of an interesting time in tech history where the talent that's coming in is pretty amazing. The young guns coming in with opensource the way it's flourishing is pretty phenomenal. Some of the smartest computer science and/or engineering talent is really solving what was old school B2B problems that really no one really wanted to solve. I mean, it was people were buying IT. Now you're talking about building operating systems, so the computer science kind of mojo in the enterprise has upped a bit. >> Mm-hmm. >> What's this wave about, how would you describe the wave of this time in history of the tech industry? >> Do you want to... (laughs) I'll add my take but why don't you go first. >> I think the thing that I find striking is just like, you know, when people used to talk about big data, you know, a few years ago, and now that is like, that's just normal. >> Yeah. >> And like, the amount of compute and the amount of storage that people are able to, you know, bring to command at-- >> Yeah. >> On any problem, it's just incredible, and that's just going to, I think, like continue to grow, right? That's going to be an amazing thing to watch. I think, you know, what this means... It also has interesting implications for, you know, companies like SignalFX who are trying to be in the monitoring space because the mojo used to be you had to have all this complicated software to do the instrumentation. Well, the instrumentations part is easy, but now all the value that's going to come about monitoring is in what you do with all that data, how you analyze it and look for, like, you know, so the whole AI ops and all that is going to be the key of the whole monitoring problem going forward, you know, five, 10 years from now, but we already see that analytics is such a key aspect of the whole thing, so... >> Yeah, I'm very, I think we're at the beginning, still at the beginning of a massive 30 to 40 year cycle, and this hasn't happened since the PC revolution in the 1970s, right, so the smartphone comes out 2007, massively opens up the market for software-based services to several billion people who are connected all the time now, drives a massive refresh of the backend infrastructure, drives the adoption of opensource, and so we're at this magical point now where the market for software-based services is just exploding, and every enterprise, you know, is becoming a software company, and you know, I think the volume of data that we're accumulating is just growing exponentially and what you can do with AI at this point, it's just... We're just beginning to see the benefit of it, so I think this is a really, really exciting time and I think we're just at the beginning. Most of the enterprises, and even the tech companies, are just beginning to capitalize on what is in store for us in the industry. >> I find it to be intoxicating, fun, and just great people coming in. To your point about the beginning of a 40 year run, also the nature of software development is being modernized at an extremely accelerated pace, so as people in the enterprise start re-imagining how they do software, because if they're a software company they've never had product managers. I mean, so the notion of what is a product, how do you launch a product, is all kind of first generation problems and opportunities, so I think to me it's really the enablement... And this is really what I think people are looking for is who can take the burden off my shoulders, help me move faster, more gas, less brake. >> Mm-hmm. >> Go faster, drive value, and then ultimately compete, because competitive advantage with technology... What does that mean to you guys, because how do you react to that because what you essentially are doing is creating instrumentation for enabling companies to create new value faster with technology and software, in some cases at a level that they've never seen before. What do you, how do you react to that? >> Well, I think that's exactly what we do, right, I mean, every company, I think most companies realized that they had to invest in software and focus on all these new opportunities at the early part of this decade. First thing they had to do was figure out who's going to build all this software, so most of them had to go hire engineers or build digital teams. They had to decide where are they going to run, the cloud wars of, you know, the early part of this decade. Do we build a private cloud, do we use a public cloud, I think both of those things have happened and people are now comfortable with those decisions. The third leg, which is squarely in the space that we're in, which is how do you operationalize this new model, and I think people are working through that now. As they get through that in the next few years, the companies like SignalFX helping every company, operationalize it very quickly, I think that's when the true promise of this new digital era will be realized where you'll start to see all of these fantastic applications, mobile apps, web service apps, direct-to-consumer streamlined supply chains. We're just beginning to see the benefit of that, and we'll see when that happens then the volume of data that they're collecting will increase exponentially and then the promise of machine learning and AI will take an altogether nother step. >> You got to know how to automate it before you can automate it, basically. What's next, final question for you guys, what's going on with SignalFX, what are you guys going to conquer, what's the next major milestones for you guys, what are you looking to do? >> Yeah, well we're continuing to focus on driving value for our customers, so we're expanding our geographic presence, so we're doing a lot of international expansion at this point. We're hiring a lot of engineers, so if anyone is interested in a development job, reach out to us. >> What kind of engineers are you looking to hire? >> Rajesh, you want to take that, sorry. (chuckles) What kind of engineers... >> What kind of engineers you looking to hire? >> Everything. (chuckles) >> I mean, all kinds of engineers, especially distributed systems engineers, front end engineers, full stack engineers, like real tech, all the good engineers we can get. >> (chuckles) Awesome. >> A lot of product development, there's a lot of interesting things happening in this space, and so we're, you know, continuing to invest very aggressively. >> Large scale distributed systems. >> Yep. >> You've got decentralized right around the corner, so you've got a lot of stuff happening. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Great job to have you coming on, thanks for coming on, Karthik. >> Great, great to be on. >> Rajesh, thank you so much. >> My pleasure. >> SignalFX here in the cloud of Google here at Next, it's theCUBE, theCUBE cloud, CUBE data, we're bringing it all to you. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. More coverage, stay with us, we'll be back after this short break. (techy music)