>> Host: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube! Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. (electronic music) Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're here live at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern CX Show, Modern Customer Experience, this is the Cube, I'm John Furrier. My co-host, Peter Burris, two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Day two, my next guest is Katrina Gosek, Senior Director Commerce Product Strategy, (mumbles) Oracle upper world a few years ago, and Alistair Galbraith Sr, Director of CX, Customer Experience Innovation Lab with Oracle. Welcome to The Cube, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, welcome. >> So commerce is part of the story, it's just not marketing, there's transactions involved, there's R & D, there's a lot of technology. The show here is the common theme of just modernizing the customer experience, which is good, because it's the outcomes. But commerce is one of them. Give us the update, what's hot for you guys this week? >> Yeah, I think what's different this year, from any other year in the past is the pace of innovation is changing, because I think there's so much disruption in the commerce space, and particularly in retail and also B to B commerce. There's lots of new expectations from customers. I know we've been saying that for years, right? But I think the technologies now, that can enable some new experiences, have rapidly changed. Now it's completely fathomable to leverage AI to drive more high-end personalization or to leverage internet of things, to embed commerce more into everyday experience. >> John: Where's the innovation in retail? 'Cause retail's not a stranger to data. They've had data models going back, but certainly digital changes things, they're at the edge of the networks, so it's a little bit of internet of things meets consumer data, the data's huge if you can get the identity of the person. That seems to be the key conversation: how do you guys enable that to take advantage of the sea of data that you're providing form the data cloud, third party and first party data? >> Well I think there's a lot of fun approaches. Oracle has a technology called the Oracle ID Graph, which starts to merge a lot of identities across channels, so where customers are using data cloud, that can inform those micro interactions as they move between channels, and I think one of the trends we've been seeing this year that we're talking about as My Channel, is that customers no longer really complete one interaction or one transaction in one place. They might start on mobile, move to voice, move into a physical store, and we're trying to track that customer in all of those places, so a lot of our focus, and you see data cloud moves into AI, is enabling brands to move this data around more easily without needing to know everything about the customer themselves. >> John: Well that's the key for the experience of the customer, because they don't want to have to answer the same questions again if they're on a chat bot, and they've already been at a transaction. Knowing what someone's doing at any given time is good contextual data. >> Alistair: Yep. >> Well it's funny you say that, because when we talk to customers or end consumers, they're not thinking, "I need more artificial intelligence, "I need more data around my experience, "I need internet of things", they're thinking, "I want convenience, I want this to be fast and quick, "I want you to know me as a brand, "I don't want to have to re-enter everything. "If I'm talking to a customer service agent, "versus someone in the store, versus interacting online". So data's a huge part of that, the challenge is how do you make it consistent? >> John: Katrina has a great point: it's not the technology, it's about what they're trying to do. >> Katrina: Yeah, exactly, very much. >> Well the experience comes back to, in many respects, convenience, and, "I want you to sustain "the state of where I am in my journey for me". >> Katrina: Correct, yeah. >> Or at least not blow my state up. So it's interesting, the journey used to be a role or a context thing, and now we're adding physical location to it, as well as device. So go back to this notion of new experiences. 'Cause it's got to be more than, you can look at something on your phone and then transact on your phone. What are some of the new experiences on the horizon? 'Cause that is a lot to do with where you guys think digital technology's going to go. >> I think some of those experiences are micro-interactions, so that could be people are using voice shopping, but not for the entire purchase, just a re-order this thing, what's the status of this thing? And brands are also using the data that they're gathering to tweak and adjust those interactions. So we're seeing data coming from real world devices and IOT changing the expectation of the customer, as they, maybe, we showed some stories where people are re-ordering products using voice, and then when they shift between these channels, that micro piece of data is really changing that interaction. The other challenge we're seeing is the consistency of the interaction, you said yourself, not only it's the complexity of "what did I do?", but if I do something here and I do something here, I should get the same experience both times. >> So we're talking mostly at this point about the B to C, the consumer world. In many respects, some of the most interesting experiences, we can envisage in the B to B world, where a community of sellers is selling to a community of buyers, and the state that's really important is how does that buying community interact with each other? As they discover things and share information. So how do you see this notion of new experiences starting to manifest itself in the B to B world? >> Katrina: Yeah, it's interesting you say that, because I often, we work with both B to C and B to B clients, and I actually think B to B has always been more focused on personalization, because they do have so much information about their customers, contract data, a lot of information about the buyer, the companies, they've always done kind of online custom personalized catalogs. So I think there's a lot that B to C can learn from B to B about how to leverage that data to personalize experiences. >> John: And vice-versa too, it's interesting, to that point, the B to C is a leading indicator on the experience side, but B to B's got the blocking and tackling down, if they have the data. 'Cause having the data, you get the goods. Okay, so here's the question for you: with the consumers going to digital, you're seeing massive, we were reporting yesterday, here on The Cube and also on siliconhill.com, as well as Adage, not that we didn't predict this, but ad spend now on digital has surpassed TV for the first time. Which is an indicator, but the ad tech world's changing, because how people are engaging with the customer is changing, so the question is, what technology is going to help transition those ad dollars, from banner ads to older formats to something more compelling and using data? 'Cause you can imagine retail being less about click, buy, to sharing data. So the spend's going to only grow on advertising or reaching consumers. That conversion, that experience is going to have to move from direct response clicking, to more experience, what tech is out there? >> Well, I think the biggest challenge has always been tracking and personalizing for a unique interaction. Just the sheer volume of data that's coming in, it's just too hard to consume. So I think the blend of AI and AI with the ability to tweak, adjust, look at multi-variate tests, and change the interaction as it goes, that's going to really massively affect the journeys for retailers, and I think the big benefit as brands move to the cloud, the cost of innovation, the cost of trying something and failing is so much less, and the pace of innovation is so much faster, I think we're seeing people try new things with the data they've got. Find out what works and what doesn't. >> Here's a question for you guys. We're talking to Jess Cahill, when this came up yesterday as well, Peter brought this up as part of the big data action going on with the AI and whatnot. Batch to real time is a shift, and this is clear here in the show that the batch is there, but still an older, but real time data in motion consumers in motion are out there, so the real time is now the key. Can you comment on that? >> I think it goes back to what Alistair was saying earlier about those micro-moments. I think transacting in new and unexpected places, ways, I think that's the key, and that's actually a huge challenge for our customers, because you have to be able to use that data in real time, because that customer is standing there with their phone, or in front of Alexa, or a speaker. >> John: It's an opportunity. >> It's a huge opportunity, and I think those opportunities are everywhere now. In a couple of years be the refrigerator, if you're re-ordering groceries, leveraging the screen, so I think that's going to be the challenge, but I think we've got time to help our customers figure out how to leverage that in real time. I think staying nimble and agile is going to be key and failing fast, and I guess a more positive way to say this-- >> The Agile Marketer, I think we had Roland Smart on yesterday, he literally wrote the book. But this is interesting, if you have the data, you can do these kinds of things. So the question is, certainly your point about the refrigerator and all these different things is going to create the omni-channel nightmare. It's not going to be, certainly multi-multi-omni. It's going to be too many challenges to deal with. >> Alistair: I think we prefer to see it as the omni-channel dream, than the nightmare. (group laughs) >> So many channels, there's no more channels, right? >> Well I think that's where things like Marketing Cloud, things like Integration Cloud help orchestrate that omni-channel journey, so that to your point on marketing and ad-spend, being able to analyze whether a benefit or promotion I showed during one micro-interaction affected something somewhere else, is so challenging but so important when you're moving this ad spend around. And I think where orchestrating and joining these micro-moments together, it's really where we're focusing a lot of our investment at the moment. >> One of the big things that's happening in the industry today is we're starting to develop techniques, and approaches, methods, for conceptualizing how a real thing is turned into a digital representation. IBM calls and not to mention them, or GE, perhaps more of a customer ... (group laughs) Yeah, I just did. >> That's all right. >> This notion of a digital twin. Commerce succeeds, where online electronic commerce succeeds as we are more successful at representing goods and services digitally. What's the relationship between IOT and some of these techniques for manifesting things digitally? And commerce, because commerce can expand its portfolio, things it can cover, as more of these things can be successfully digitally represented? >> I think that's key, and that's actually one of the predictions that we talked about in our keynote is how do you represent new ways of representing the physical store, the physical space with customers, so for me, I think something that probably Back to the Future or Judy Jetson, like a few years ago, augmented reality, or virtual reality, I think now we're going to see that more. We're starting to see it more with furniture sales, for example, you're on your iPad at home, and you can put the couch you've chosen in the space, right there with you, and see if it fits, but you're in your home, you don't have to go to the furniture store, and kind of guess with your tape measure whether the couch fits or not. And I think that's applicable in B to B as well, as 3D CAD drawings, you can kind of see them in VR, or AR. >> Amazon just announced Look, yesterday, which is the selfie tool that allows you to see what you're wearing. >> I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the coming years. >> Well, in many respects, it also, going back to this, we asked the question earlier about B to B, B to C, and the ability to represent that community. We're going to start seeing more of a household approach, as to just a consumer approach, and I think you just mentioned a great one. When we are successfully, or when we are willing to start capturing more data about our physical house or what's going on inside, so that we can make more informed decisions, with others, about how we want to do things, has an enormous impact on the quality of the experience, and where people are going to go to make their purchases. >> Alistair: Definitely, and I think that as we try and merge those experiences between B to B and B to C, what we know about someone as a consumer also directly affects their buying decisions, as a B to B employee buying for their brand. And that just increases the sheer volume of data that people are trying to manage and test and orchestrate. I think we're seeing a shift not only in people being prepared to surrender some degree of privacy for a increased experience, but we're also seeing people trusting in that virtual experience being a reality when they buy. So people have a much higher trust level in AR, if I visualize a couch and then buy it, I've got a degree of faith that when it turns up, it'll be like the one I looked at. And I think that increased trust is really making virtual experiences, digital commerce, so much easier. >> I think that's an interesting point, we had CMO of Time Warner on yesterday, Kristen O'Hara, and she was, we asked her, "Oh yeah, these transformations", big use case, she's on stage, but I asked her, "How was it like the old way? "What would you do before Oracle?", she goes, "Well, there was no old way", they never did. The point is, she said, the point was we became a direct to consumer company, so B to B and B to C are completely merging. So now the B to B's have to be a B to C, inherently because of the direct connect to the consumer. Not saying that their business model's changing, just that's the way the consumer is impacting. >> Peter: Or is it data connection to a consumer? >> A data connection, and where there's gesture data, or interaction data coming in, so this makes, the B to Bs now have to bolt on more stuff, like loyalty, you mentioned loyalty, things of that nature. >> Yeah, if you're a B to B company, you're selling to other businesses, but who are the people on the other business? There are people who shop every day in consumer applications, so their expectations are, "I'm going to have a great personalized experience, "I'm going to be able to leverage the same tools "that I see in my consumer shopping experiences "for my B to B experience, why would it be different?" So I think that's something that B to B is really learning from B to C as well. >> True, but although there seems to be something of a counter-veiling trend, but an increasing number of people are now working at home. So in many respects, where we're going to, is we're talking about experience, not just being online. One of my little heroes, when I was actually trying to do development, a million years ago, was Christopher Alexander. The Timeless Way of Building, which was one of the basic texts that people use for a lot of this customer experience stuff, and the observation that he made was, you talk about spaces, you talk about people moving into spaces to do things in context. And increasingly, the spaces that we have to worry about are not just what's on the screen, but the physical space that people move in, and operate in, an the idea is, I'm going somewhere to do something, and I'm bringing physical space with me. So all of these, the ability to represent space, time and interests and wants and needs, are going to have an enormous impact on experience. Wouldn't you agree? >> Massively, and I think the challenge using that same approach is that people are co-existing in multiple spaces concurrently. They no longer do one thing at the same time. >> Peter: They may be in the same physical place, but have two different contexts associated with it. Like working my home office, I'm both a father, as well as an employee. >> Alistair: Yes. >> And those two sometimes conflict. (Katrina laughs) >> Yeah, absolutely, and you're a consumer and an employee, and as a father, you're potentially affecting the decisions that the rest of your household is making, as well as the decisions that your business is making, all in slightly different ways. But those two experiences with the B to B and B to C, overlap one another. >> Peter: In fact, switching contexts from consumer to father is one of the primary reasons why I lose where I am in the journey. So these are very powerful, and the ability to have the data and then go to your customers, and say, "We will be able to provide that end to end for you, "so that you can provide a consistent "and coherent experience for your customers" is really crucial. Is that kind of where you're taking us? >> Yeah, I mean we've always commerce isn't kind of a standalone little thing, it really connects and glues together so many other types of experiences, so it connects to marketing, it connects to service, you need all of that, to be able to make the experience work. So we're really focused on making sure that it's easy to connect those applications together, that its easy to manage them behind the scenes, and that it appears seamless to the customer on the front end. >> One other thought that I have is, and in many respects, increasingly, because we're going to be able to represent more things digitally, which means we'll be able to move more stuff through commerce platforms. This is where the CX is going to meet the customer road, is in the commerce platforms. Do you guys agree with that? You're going to measure things all over the place, but I'm just curious-- >> John: It's their products, yeah. >> What do you think? Is it going to be increasingly the basis for honest CX? >> Well we're already seeing it become the basis, so I wouldn't say it's a future thing, I think it's been a reality for quite some time, where commerce is the hub that kind of connects, in retail, the store to marketing experiences. >> John: It's bonafide data is what it is too. >> Yeah. >> That's good data. >> Katrina: It holds so much product information, transaction information, customer information, and it just connects and leverages. I don't know if you would agree? >> Alistair: I would agree completely, and I think you look at the fact that most companies ultimately are selling a product, so that's commerce, and I think the transition is that rather than going into the commerce site or the commerce space, you see a lot of brands over the last 12 months have got rid of their store.brand.com thing and just merged their commerce experience into everything else, you're always selling. And we've customers deploy commerce without the cart, but as a product and communication marketing model, to get this tracking data moving around. >> We were talking about Jack earlier, yesterday, Berkowitz, who was talking data, we were talking about data, good data, dirty data, clean data, and data quality in general. >> Katrina: It's a tough problem. >> In context to value, and he said a quote, he said, "Good data makes things happen, "great data makes amazing things happen". And to your point, retail, commerce data, you can't, it's undisputed, it's a transaction. It's a capture in time, and that can be used in context to help other data sets become more robust. >> Well, in many respects it's the most important first person data that you have in your business. >> Katrina: Yeah, and I think from an Oracle perspective, what we're doing with the adaptive intelligent applications for commerce, and for the other applications as well, and particular for commerce is combing that first hand information you have about your products and your customers as an online business, but then the immense amount of data that the data cloud has behind the scenes that augments and allows you to automatically personalize, when a customer comes to your storefront, because they're coming already with all the context that they have elsewhere out in the world, and you can combine that with your own data, and I think really enhance the experience. >> John: Yeah it's funny, we were joking yesterday, Oracle went to bed a software company, woke up a data company. >> Katrina: Yeah (laughs). >> So the data cloud is pretty impressive, what's happened there and what that's doing. >> Katrina: It's amazing, it's a huge differentiator for us. >> Huge differentiator. Okay, final word, I'd like both you guys to just quickly comment to end this segment, awesome segment on commerce and data, which we love. But your reaction to the show, what's the bottom line, what's exciting you this week? Share with the folks, each of you, a quick soundbite of what's happening here and the impact people should know about. >> Sure from a commerce perspective, this is the first year where we've got a 50/50 split in our customer base, so we're seeing a lot of our un-premise customers move to cloud, which is great, and we're really growing our commerce cloud customer base. I'm very excited about that. >> And you're trying to get 100% now, it's never going to be a hundred. >> Katrina: (laughs) Yeah, we need to work with customers and what's right for them, but yeah, it's very exciting right now. >> Alistair, your take? >> I think for me, it's just the sheer pace of innovation, we're seeing brands go from un-premised stories that would take 12, 15, 18 months to add new features, make changes to small nimble brands rolling out incredible innovative features in 12, 18 week time frames, and we're seeing more people having more discussions around the art of the possible. >> John: All right, Katrina, Alistair, great comment, great insight, great conversation about data and commerce, of course cloud, it's the marketing clouds, all cloud world, it's commerce cloud, it's data cloud, it's just the cloud (laughs). I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, move live coverage here from Las Vegas, Oracle Modern CX after this short break. (electronic music) >> Host: Robert--

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi friend, welcome to this CUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, Travis Hartman Director of Analytics and Weather at Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada who's the Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation Branch at NOAH. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Maxar. What do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Maxar is an organization that does a lot of different activities in earth intelligence as well as space. We have about 4,000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure actually building satellites, and all the infrastructure that's going to help get us back to the moon, and things like that, and then on the other side we have an earth intelligence group which is where I sit, and we leverage remote sensing information, earth science information to help people better understand how and what they do might impact the earth, or how the earth, in its activities, might impact their business mission or operations. So what we wanted to set out to do is help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, businesses, or operations. A big element of that was doing it with speed. So we knew NOAH had capabilities of running numerical weather prediction models and very traditional on-prem, big, beefy, high performance supercomputers, but we wanted to do it in the cloud. We wanted to use AWS as a key partner. So we collaborated with Vijay and NOAH and his teams there to help pull that off. They gave us access, public domain information but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of our research scientists talkin' and yeah, after a pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time, we were able to pull something off a lot of people didn't think was possible. And we got pretty excited once we saw some of the outcomes. >> Travis, Vijay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together? Because this is not your classic Amazon Partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together, Vijay and your team, with AWS. Talk about the relationship and how Amazon played because it's a unique partnership. Explain in more detail, that specific relationship. >> Yeah, with Maxar and AWS, our partnership has gone back a number of years. Maxar being a fairly large organization, there's lots of different activities. I think Maxar was the first client of AWS Snowmobile where they had the big tractor trailer backed up to a data center, load all the data in, and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that 'cause we had over a hundred petabytes of satellite imagery in an archive that just movin' it across the internet it'd probably still be goin'. So the Snowmobile was a good success story for us but just with the amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day, and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or the scalable AIML, we're able to scale out that architecture, scale out the compute, the much easier dynamic and really cost-effective way with AWS 'cause when we don't need to use the machines, we turn 'em off. We don't have a big data center sittin' somewhere where we have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on, literally. AWS allows us to run our organization in a much more efficient way. And NOAH, they're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing, as far as how they could use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud, from cloud architecture, cloud compute, and things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here at Maxar, with our HPC solution in the cloud is something that's pretty interesting to NOAH and it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >> If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute, how did you guys set up the services and what lessons did you learn from that process? >> We're still learnin' is probably the short answer, but it all started with our people. We have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, so they understand the physics of, you know, why the wind blows the way it does and why clouds do what clouds do. But we also, having a key strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to tap into some of their subject-matter experts, and we really put those people together and come up with new solutions and new, innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We were able to steer a little bit of AWS's product roadmap as far as what we were tryin' to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it, but by interacting with us, gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards, and then that's what allowed us to move in a pretty quick fashion. It's neat stuff, technology, but it really comes down to the people. I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here, at Maxar, as well as AWS, as well as bein' able to collaborate with the great teams at NOAH. It's been a lot of fun. >> Well Travis, got a great example, I think it's a template that can be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got a large scale, multi-scale situation, there. Congratulations. Final question, what does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards? As part of the show, you're the best-in-show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give is a quick stub from the field. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that can kind of sum it up. I shared the news with the team last night and you know, there were a lot of, lot of good responses that came from it. A lot of people think it's cool, and at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. And being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing, I think we take a lot of that to heart and we're very honored and proud of what we're able to do and proud that other people recognize the neat stuff that we're doin'. >> Well, certainly takin' advantage of the cloud which is large scale, but you're on a great wave, you've got a great area. I mean, weather, you talk about weather, it's exciting, dynamic, it's always changing, it's big data, it's large scale. So you got a lot of problems to solve and a lot of impact too, when you get it right. So congratulations on an excellent-- >> Thank you very much. >> Great mission. >> Thank you. >> Love what you do, love to followup again and maybe do another interview, and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. Travis, thank you very much. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center, that's your organization. You guys are competing to be the best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level, then we'll jump into some of the successes. >> So the National Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecasts to save lives and property, and improve the economy of the nation. And as part of that, the National Weather Service is responsible for providing data and also the forecast to the public and to the industry. We are responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are, at the Environmental Modeling Center, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modeling, government, and a nucleation of all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. And that's the kind of the range of products that we download and provide. Our key for managing the emergency of services and hazard management and mitigation, and also improve in the nation's economy by preparing well in advance, for the future events. And it's a science-based organization and we have world-class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the Environmental Modeling Center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modeling, space weather, all weather-related areas, and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most doubled up, advanced modeling center that we use almost all possible computational services available in the world, so this is heavily computational in terms of use of data, use of computers, use of all the power that we can get, and we have a 3.5 protoflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts. And they provide these services every hour for some census like we see the weather outbreaks and for every three hours for hurricanes, and for every six hours for the regular weather like precipitation, the temperature forecasts. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media or the government agencies, they all are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. And I think NOAH is the only center in the world that provides all this information free of cost. So it is a public service organization and we pride in our service to the society. >> Well, I love your title, Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation title, branch over all these organizations. This is, weather's critical. I want to get your thoughts 'cause we were talking before you came on about how the hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forced everyone to kind of rethink things. Weather is an evolving system so it's always changing. Either there's a catastrophe or something happens, or you're trying to be proactive, predicting say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things goin' on. It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big jobs, there's a lot of data, you need horsepower, you need computing, you need to stand up some HPC. Take us through the thinking around the organization and what's the impact that you see, because weather does have that impact. >> So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned there are various weather phenomena that you described like the fiber of the hurricanes, the heavy precipitation, the flooding, so we download solutions for individual weather phenomena. And we have grown in that direction by downloading separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon, it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking had to be changed. And then there is another bigger problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community, like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated government act duty, that we cannot take advantage, and there are no incentives for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking, and as you mentioned, hurricane Katrina was an eye-opener. We have the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information was not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. >> How are you guys using AWS? Because HPC, high performance computing, I mean, you can't ask for more resources than the massive cloud that is Amazon. How has that helped you? Can you take a minute to explain, walk us through AWS partnership? >> There are a few examples I can cite, but before then, I would really like to appreciate Travis Hartman from Maxar who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now, we are expanding on that. So we were able to share our immunity cords with Maxar and with our help, they were able to establish this entire modeling system as it is done in operations at NOAH. They were able to reproduce our operational forecasts using the cloud resources and then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems as they can run even faster and quicker than what NOAH operations can do. So that gives you one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce globally, which will take about eight minutes per day, and Maxar was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement in the efficiency of the cords. And now, the one advantage of this is that the improvements that Maxar or other collaborators are using our cords, that they're putting into the system, are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that in improving the efficiency in operations. So this like a win-win situation for both of what part is fitting in the R&D and what using in operations. And on top of it, you can create multiple conflagrations of this model in various instances on the cloud where you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be catered to individual needs. And the one additional thing I wanted to mention about the user cloud is that this is like when you have a need, you can surge the compute, you can instantiate thousands of simulations to test a new innovation, for instance. You don't need to wait for the resources to be done in sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production of these equipments in no time, and without worrying about, of course, the cost is a factor that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there, the facilities are there to take advantage of the cloud solutions. >> Well Vijay, I'm very impressed with your organization. I'd love to do a followup with you. I love the impact that you're doing. Certainly, the weather impacts society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's planning for potentially a fire season or a water shortage, or anything goin' on, there. But also it's a template. You are succeeding a new kind of way to innovate with community, with large scale, multi-scale data points, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here, part of AWS Partner Awards Program, best HPC solution. Great example, great use case, great conversation. Thanks for watching. Two great interviews here, as part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier. The best-in-show for HPC solutions, Travis Hartman, Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada at NOAH, two great guests. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>>from around the globe. It's >>the Cube with digital coverage of >>AWS Public Sector Partner Awards >>brought to you by >>Amazon Web services. Everyone, welcome to this cube coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube with two great guests here. Travis Department director of analytics and Weather at Max. Our technologies and VJ teleplay Gotta Who's the chief? Modeling and data a simulation branch at Noah. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Max are what you guys do. >>Yeah, so Macs are is an organization. Does a lot of different activities unearth intelligence as well as space? We have about 4000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure, actually building satellites on all the infrastructure that's going to help us get us back to the moon and things like that. And then on the other side we have a north of intelligence group, which is where, I said, and we leverage remote sensing information for science information to help people better understand how, how and what they do might impact the Earth or have the earth, and it's activities might impact their business mission. Our operation. So what we wanted to set out to do was help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, business or operations. And a big element of that was doing it with speed. Ah, so we we knew? No. I had capabilities running America weather prediction models and very traditional on Prem. Big, beefy ah, high performance compute supercomputers. But we wanted to do it in The cloud we want to do is AWS is a key part. So we collaborated with B. J and Noah and his team is there to help pull that off. They gave this access public domain information, but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of the research scientists talking, and after pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time. We were able to pull something off that a lot of people didn't think was possible. I'm we got pretty excited. Once we saw some of the outcome >>Travis to be, Jay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together because this is not your classic Amazon partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together V. J and your team with AWS. Talk about the relationship and that and how Amazon plays because it's a unique partnership plane in more detail at specific relationship. >>Yeah, with Max or in AWS. You know, our partnership has gone back A number of years on Macs are being a fairly large organization. There's lots of different activities. I think Max Star was the first client of AWS Snowmobile, where they have the big tractor trailer back up to a data center, load all the data in and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that because we had over 100 petabytes of satellite imagery and archive that just moving across the Internet would probably still be going. Um, so the snowmobile is a good success story for us, but just with >>the >>amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or, you know, the scalable Ai ml were able to scale out that architecture scale out that compute the much easier, dynamic and really cost effective way with AWS, because when we don't need to use the machines, we turn them off. We don't have a big data center sitting somewhere. We have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on. Literally. AWS allows us to run our organization and a much more efficient way. Um and Noah, you know, they're They're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing as far as how they can use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud from cloud architecture, cloud computer, things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here, Max our with our HPC HPC solution in the cloud. It's something that's pretty interesting to know, and it's it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >>If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute. How did you guys set up the services, and what lessons did you learn from that process? >>We're still learning. It was probably the the short answer, but it all started with our people. Uh, you know, we have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, you know? So they understand the physics. So you know why the wind blows is the way it doesn't. Why Cloud's doing clouds to do, Um, but we also having a key strategic partnership with AWS. We really have to tap into some of their subject matter experts. And we really put those people together, you know, and come up with new solutions, new innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We're able to steer a little bit of AWS is product roadmap for is what we were trying to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it. But by interacting with us gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards. And then that's that's what allowed us to move pretty quick fashion. Um, you know, it's it's neat stuff technology, but it really comes down to the people. Um, and I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here. Attacks are as well as aws, um, as well as being able to collaborate with your great teams. That power, it's been a lot of fun. Well, >>Travis gonna create example? I think it's a template that could be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got large scale, multi scale situation there. Congratulations. Final question. What does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards as part of the show? You're the best in show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give us a quick side from the field? >>Yeah. I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that kind of sum it up. It's Ah, I shared the news with the team last night, and you know, there are a lot of a lot of good responses that came from a lot of people think it's cool. And at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team, you know, took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. Ah, and being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing. Um, I think we take a lot of that to heart. And, ah, we're very honored and proud of what we were able to do and proud that other people recognize the need stuff that we're doing well, >>Certainly taking advantage. The cloud, which is large scale. But you you're on a great wave. You've got a great area. I mean, whether you talk about whether it's exciting, it's dynamic. It's always changing. It's big data. It's large scale. So you get a lot of problems to solve in a lot of impact to get it right. So congratulations on ECs. >>Thank you very much. Great mission. Thank you. >>Love what you do love to follow up again. Maybe do another interview and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. But, Travis, thank you very much. >>Thank you. Appreciate it. >>Good to see you. >>Thank you. Good to be here. >>So Noah, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center year. That's your organization? You guys are competing to be best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level. Then we'll jump into some of the successes. >>So the national Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecast to save lives and property and improve the economy of the nation. And that's part of that. That the national weather services responsible for providing data and also the forecasts to the public and the industry and be responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are at the Environmental Modeling Center, uh, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modelling development, and you play it off all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. That's that's the kind of a range of products that we don't lock and provide are our key for managing the emergency services and patch it management and mitigation and also improving the nation's economy by preparing well in advance for the future events. And it's it's a science based organization, and we have ah well class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the moment of modeling center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modelling space weather, all weather related areas and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most. Uh huh. Most developed, uh, advanced modelling center that we use almost all possible computational resources available in the world. So this is a really computational in terms of user data, user computer seems off. Uh, all the power that we can get and we have a 3.5 petaflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts, and they provide the services every hour. For some sense is like the CDO rather our rates for every three hours for hurricanes and for every six hours for the regular, Rather like the participation, uh, the temperature forecast. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media, our department agencies, they are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. I think no one is the only center in the world that provides all this information for your past. So it is, ah, public service organization and we riding on a visa with society. >>We'll I love your title, Chief modeling and data, a simulation title branch of a lot of these organizations. This >>is >>whether it's ever critical. I want to get your thoughts cause we were talking before we came on about how the Hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forcing you to rethink things. Whether it is an evolving system, it's always changing. Either the catastrophe or something happens. Were you trying to proactive predicting, say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things going on that's not It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big job. It's a lot of data you need. Horsepower need computing. You need to stand up. Some HPC take us through like like the thinking around the organization. And what was The impact is that you see, because whether does have that impact. >>So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned, there are radius weather phenomenon that you describe like the five rather the Americans, every presentation, the flooding. So we developed solutions for individual weather phenomena, and, uh, we have grown in that direction by developing separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking has to be changed. And then there is Another big problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas, and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated, uh, development activity that we cannot take advantage. And they have no incentive for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking. And as you mentioned, Hurricane Katrina was an eye opener. We had the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information waas not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. How are >>you guys using AWS? Because HPC high performance computing I mean you can't ask for more resources in the massive cloud that is Amazon. How is that help to you? Can you take a minute to explain, but walk us through? >>What? >>Aws? There >>are a few example. Second site. But before then, I would like to really appreciate a Travis Hartman from Max. Are you know who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now we're expanding on. That s so we were able to share our community. Cores with Max are and without how they were able to establish this and drive modeling system as it is done in operations that Noah and they were able to reproduce operational forecast using the cloud resources. And then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems is that it can run even faster and quicker them are what insert no operations can do. So that gives us one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce, ah, globally, which will take about eight minutes per day. And, uh, Max I was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement and in the efficiency of the colors. And now the one piece of this is that the improvements that matter are other collaborators are using, or cords that they're putting into the system are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that, improving the efficiency in operations. So this is that this is like a win win situation for both, uh, who are participating in the R and D on who are using it in operations, and on top of it, you can create multiple configurations of this model in various instances on the cloud when you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be captured toe individual needs. And the one additional thing I want to mention about User Cloud is, is that you know, this is like when you have a need, you can search the compute you can. Instead she 8000 sub simulations to test a new innovation. For instance, you don't need to wait for the resources to be done in a sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production off these apartments in no kind and without Don't worry about. Of course, the cost is the fact that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there. The facilities are reacting to take advantage of the cloud solutions. If I'm a >>computer scientist person, I'm working on a project. Now I have all this goodness in the cloud, how's morale been and what's the reaction been like from from people doing the work. Because usually the bottleneck has been like I gotta provision resource. I gotta send a procurement request for some servers or I want to really push some load. And right now, I got a critical juncture. I mean, it's got a push morale up a bit, and you talk about the impact to the psychology of the people in your organization. >>Um, I haven't. I have two answers to this question. One from a scientist perspective like me. You know, I was not a computer scientist from the beginning, but I became a software engineer, kind of because I have to work with these software and hardware stuff more more on solving the computational problems than the critical problems. So people like us who have invested their careers in improving the science, they were not care whether it's ah, uh hbc on premise Cloud, what will be delighted to have, uh, resources available alleviate that they can drive. But on the other hand, the computer computational engineers are software engineers who are entering into this field. I think they are probably the most excited because of these emerging opportunities. And so there is a kind of a friction between the scientific and the computational aspects off personnel, I would say. But that difference is slowly raising on and we are working together as never before. So the collective moral is very high to take advantage of these resources and opportunities. I think way of making the we're going in the right direction. >>It's so much faster. I mean, in the old days, you write a paper, you got to get some traction. Gonna do a pilot now It's like you run an experiment, get it out there. VJ I'm very impressed with the organization. Love to do a follow up with you. I love the impact that you're doing certainly in the weather impact society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's providing for potentially a fire season or water shortage or anything going on there. But also it's a template. You're exceeding a new kind of waiting to innovate with community with large scale, multi scale data points. So congratulations and >>thank you. >>Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here part of AWS partner Awards program. Best HPC solution. Great. Great Example. Great use case. Great conversation. Thanks for watching two great interviews. Here is part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrier. The best in show for HPC Solutions. China's Hartman Max, our technologies and Vijay tell Apartado at Noah. Two great guests. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Orlando, Florida at Cisco Live 2018. Our first year here at Cisco Live. We were in Barcelona this past year. Again, Cisco transforming to a next generation set of networking capabilities while maintaining all the existing networks and all the security. I'm John Furrier your host with Stu Miniman my co-host for the next three days. Our next guest is Arun Garg. Welcome to theCUBE. You are the Director of Product Management Converged Infrastructure Group at NetApp. >> Correct, thank you very much for having me on your show and it's a pleasure to meet with you. >> One of the things that we've been covering a lot lately is the NetApp's really rise in the cloud. I mean NetApp's been doing a lot of work on the cloud. I mean I've wrote stories back when Tom Georges was the CEO when Amazon just came on the scene. NetApp has been really into the cloud and from the customer's standpoint but now with storage and elastic resources and server lists, the customers are now startin' to be mindful. >> Absolutely. >> Of how to maximize the scale and with All Flash kind of a perfect storm. What are you guys up to? What's your core thing that you guys are talking about here at Cisco Live? >> So absolutely, thank you. So George Kurian, our CEO at NetApp, is very much in taking us to the next generation and the cloud. Within that I take care of some of the expansion plans we have on FlexPod with Cisco and in that we have got two new things that we are announcing right now. One is the FlexPod for Healthcare which is in FlexPod we've been doing horizontal application so far which are like the data bases, tier one database, as well as applications from Microsoft and virtual desktops. Now we are going vertical. Within the vertical our application, the first one we're looking in the vertical is healthcare. And so it's FlexPod for Healthcare. That's the first piece that we are addressing. >> What's the big thing with update on FlexPod? Obviously FlexPod's been very successful. What's the modernization aspect of it because Cisco's CEO was onstage today talking about Cisco's value proposition, about the old ways now transitioning to a new network architecture in the modern era. What's the update on FlexPod? Take a minute to explain what are the cool, new things going on with FlexPod. >> Correct, so the All Flash FAS, which is the underlying technology, which is driving the FlexPod, has really picked up over the last year as customers keep wanting to improve their infrastructure with better latencies and better performance the All Flash FAS has driven even the FlexPod into the next generation. So that's the place where we are seeing double-digit growth over the last five quarters consistently in FlexPod. So that's a very important development for us. We've also done more of the standard CVDs that we do on SAP and a few other are coming out. So those are all out there. Now we are going to make sure that all these assets can be consumed by the vertical industry in healthcare. And there's another solution we'll talk about, the managed private cloud on FlexPod. >> Yeah, Arun, I'd love to talk about the private cloud. So I think back to when Cisco launched UCS it was the storage partners that really helped drive that modernization for virtualization. NetApp with FlexPod, very successful over the years doing that. As we know, virtualization isn't enough to really be a private cloud. All the things that Chuck Robbins is talking about onstage, how do I modernize, how do I get you know, automation in there? So help us connect the dots as to how we got from you know, a good virtualized platform to this is, I think you said managed private cloud, FlexPod in Cisco. >> Absolutely. So everybody likes to consume a cloud. It's easy to consume a cloud. You go and you click on I need a VM, small, medium, large, and I just want to see a dashboard with how my VMs are doing. But in reality it's more difficult to just build your own cloud. There's complexity associated with it. You need a service platform where you can give a ticket, then you need an orchestration platform where you can set up the infrastructure, then you need a monitoring platform which will show you all of the ways your infrastructure's working. You need a capacity planning tool. There's tens of tools that need to be integrated. So what we have done is we have partnered with some of the premium partners and some DSIs who have already built this. So the risk of a customer using their private cloud infrastructure is minimized and therefore these partners also have a managed service. So when you combine the fact that you have a private cloud infrastructure in the software domain as well as a managed service and you put it on the on-prem FlexPod that are already sold then the customer benefits from having the best of both worlds, a cloud-like experience on their own premise. And that is what we are delivering with this FlexPod managed private cloud solution. >> Talk about the relationship with Cisco. So we're here at Cisco Live you guys have a good relationship with Cisco. What should customers understand about the relationship? What are the top bullet points and value opportunities and what does it mean to the impact for the customer? >> So we, all these solutions we work very closely with the Cisco business unit and we jointly develop these solutions. So within that what we do is there's the BU to BU interaction where the solution is developed and defined. There is a marketing to marketing interaction where the collateral gets created and reviewed by both parties. So you will not put a FlexPod brand unless the two companies agree. >> So it's tightly integrated. >> It's tightly integrated. The sales teams are aligned, the marketing, the communications team, the channel partner team. That's the whole value that the end customer gets because when a partner goes to a high-end enterprise customer he knows that both Cisco and NetApp teams can be brought to the table for the customer to showcase the value as well as help them through it all. >> Yeah, over in one of the other areas that's been talked about this show we talk about modernization. You talk about things like microservices. >> Yes. >> Containers are pretty important. How does that story of containerization fit into FlexPod? >> Absolutely. So containerization helps you get workloads, the cloud-native workloads or the type two native. Type two workloads as Gartner calls them. So our mode two. What we do is we work with the Cisco teams and we already had a CVD design with a hybrid cloud with a Cisco cloud center platform, which is the quicker acquisition. And we showed a design with that. What we are now bringing to the table is the ability for our customers to benefit with a managed service on top of it. So that's the piece we are dealing with the cloud teams. With the Cisco team the ACI fabric is very important to them. So that ACI fabric is visible and shown in our designs whether you do SAP, you do Oracle, you do VDI and you do basic infrastructure or you do the managed private cloud or FlexPod on Healthcare. All of these have the core networking technologies from Cisco, as well as the cloud technologies from Cisco in a form factor or in a manner that easily consumable by our customers. >> Arun, talk about the customer use cases. So say you've got a customer, obviously you guys have a lot of customers together with Cisco, they're doing some complex things with the technology, but for the customer out there that has not yet kinda went down the NetApp Cisco route, what do they do? 'Cause a lot of storage guys are lookin' at All Flash, so check, you guys have that. They want great performance, check. But then they gotta integrate. So what do you say to the folks watching that aren't yet customers about what they should look at and evaluate vis-a-vis your opportunity with them and say the competition? >> So yes, there are customers who are doing all this as separate silos, but the advantage of taking a converged infrastructure approach is that you benefit from the years of man experience or person experience that we have put behind in our labs to architect this, make sure that everything is working correctly and therefore is reduces their deployment time and reduces the risk. And if you want to be agile and faster even in the traditional infrastructure, while you're being asked to go to the cloud you can do it with our FlexPod design guides. If you want the cloud-like experience then you can do it with a managed private cloud solution on your premise. >> So they got options and they got flexibility on migrating to the cloud or architecting that. >> Yes. >> Okay, great, now I'm gonna ask you another question. This comes up a lot on theCUBE and certainly we see it in the industry. One of the trends is verticalization. >> Yes. >> So verticalization is not a new thing. Vertical industry, people go to market that way, they build products that are custom to verticals. But with cloud one of the benefits of cloud and kind of a cloud operations is you have a horizontally scalable capability. So how do you guys look at that, because these verticals, they gotta get closer to the front lines and have apps that are customized. I mean data that's fastly delivered to the app. How should verticals think about architecting storage to maintain the scale of horizontally scalable but yet provide customization into the applications that might be unique to the vertical? >> Okay, so let me give a trend first and then I'll get to the specific. So in the vertical industry, the next trend is industry clouds. For example, you have healthcare clouds and you'll have clouds to specific industries. And the reason is because these industries have to keep their data on-prem. So the data gravity plays a lot of impact in all of these decisions. And the security of their data. So that is getting into industry-specific clouds. The second pieces are analytics. So customers now are finding that data is valuable and the insight you can get from the data are actually more valuable. So what they want is the data on their premise, they want the ability all in their control so to say, they want the ability to not only run their production applications but also the ability to run analytics on top of that. In the specific example for health care what it does is when you have All Flash FAS it provides you a faster response for the patient because the physician is able to get the diagnostics done better if he has some kind of analytics helping him. [Interviewer] - Yeah. >> Plus the first piece I talked about, the rapid deployment is very important because you want to get your infrastructure set up so I can give an example on that too. >> Well before we get to the example, this is an important point because I think this is really the big megatrend. It's not really kinda talked much about but it's pretty happening is that what you just pointed out was it's not just about speeds and feeds and IOPs, the performance criteria to the industry cloud has other new things like data, the role of data, what they're using for the application. >> Correct. >> So it's just you've gotta have table stakes of great, fast storage. >> Yes. >> But it's gotta be integrated into what is becoming a use case for the verticals. Did I get that right? >> Yes, absolutely. So I'll give two examples. One I can name the customer. So they'll come at our booth tomorrow, in a minute here. So LCMC Health, part of UMC, and they have the UMC Medical Center. So when New Orleans had this Katrina disaster in Louisiana, so they came up with they need a hospital, fast. And they decided on FlexPod because within three months with the wire one's architecture and application they could scale their whole IT data center for health care. So that has helped them tremendously to get it up and running. Second is with the All Flash FAS they're able to provide faster response to their customer. So that's a typical example that we see in these kind of industries. >> Arun, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job. In following NetApps recent success lately, as always, NetApp's always goin' the next level. Quick question for you to end the segment. What's your take of Cisco Live this year? What's some of the vibe of the show? So I know it's day one, there's a lot more to come and you're just getting a sense of it. What's the vibe? What's coming out of the show this year? What's the big ah-ha? >> So I attended the keynote today and it was very interesting because Cisco has taken networking to the next level within 10 base networking, its data and analytics where you can put on a subscription mode on all the pieces of the infrastructure networking. And that's exactly the same thing which NetApp is doing, where we are going up in the cloud with this subscription base. And when you add the two subscription base then for us, at least in the managed private cloud solution we can provide the subscription base through the managed private cloud through our managed service provider. So knowing where the industry was going, knowing where Cisco was going and knowing where we want to go, we have come up with this solution which matches both these trends of Cisco as well as NetApp. >> And the number of connected devices going up every day. >> Yes. >> More network connections, more geo domains, it's complicated. >> It is complicated, but if you do it correctly we can help you find a way through it. >> Arun, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE with Stu Miniman here with NetApp at Cisco Live 2018. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube, covering ZertoCON 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is the Cube, I'm Paul Gillin, we're on the ground here in Boston for ZertoCON 2018 and joining me is Bill Manning who's in infrastructure operations at Woodforest National Bank. Now I was not familiar with Woodforest National Bank but I understand that regular visitors to WalMart in the south probably are. You're the WalMart bank I understand. >> That's what a lot of people like to call us. >> Your many branches are located in WalMarts in other words. And based in Houston, which has been no stranger to disasters lately >> Correct. >> The topic of IT resilience very much fresh on your mind. What is IT resilience mean in terms of your operations at Woodforest? >> We need to be very resilient in terms of natural disasters, hurricanes mostly. So, in order to prepare ourselves for that we migrate, 70% of our infrastructure between data centers every six months. When hurricane season starts we migrate away from Houston. When it's done, we migrate back. >> Now, why the migration strategy? Why move between data centers? Why not just settle on one data center that's out of harm's way if you will. >> Well there's no one data center that's out of 100% harm's way, so you need to make sure that if one data center goes down, you can always come up at your backup, or your primary data center. >> Now how did you become a Zerto customer? I understand you were one of their first, their first customer? >> We were their first customer we had Kashya before them and then RecoverPoint. Kashya was the precursor to Zerto. And whenever we were having issues with our replication appliance, we decided to look into Zerto, and we bought, implemented, and turned on Zerto fairly quickly. So we were the first customer and then we were the first customer that was using it. We actively utilized it to run a migration. And so far everything's going great. We love the product. And it works very well for us. >> Now being the first customer of a product is typically thought of as a risky proposition. What pushed you over the tipping point? >> We had an appliance that kept failing on us and the last failure was the straw, that broke the back. So we already had Zerto in a, I believe it was an alpha, possibly a beta test implementation, and when that straw finally broke, we turned off the appliance and we turned on Zerto. And it was very seamless. And yes there were headaches. We had issues with it. But a lot of the support tickets, all of the enhancement requests, a lot of those have our name on it. Because we utilized it. >> So you're doing the cloud migration every six months. What are some of the operational issues that you have to take into account when you're moving that size of processing load a couple hundred miles away? Or maybe Austin, maybe 100 miles away. >> We do it so often it's kind of second nature to us now. But we know the pain points of if you do it regularly, you know what happened last time. Hopefully you documented it. And you know what can happen this time. And a lot of times it's Firewall rules, it's what did we do at our current data center that we forgot to do at our other data center, in preparation for migration. So our biggest pain point is making sure we don't forget, oh hey we did something here, let's make sure to replicate it over and do the same thing over at our other data center. >> How has the role of backup changed over the time you've been using Zerto? It's not really, you don't have the luxury of point in time backups anymore. It's a continuous process, isn't it? >> Well we don't utilize Zerto for backups. We utilize another product for our primary backup system and we are a bank. We have seven year retention policies. So there are certain things that we have to keep on tape or on disk for a certain number of years. And Zerto doesn't immediately offer that to us. However we do utilize Zerto in a kind of pseudo backup process. If we need to recover a file that got deleted accidentally, I can either spend an hour using our other process or 10 minutes using Zerto. So we just pop into Zerto, use the journal file level recovery and there you go. >> You had, being in Houston you had a number of major storms in recent years. Are there any stories you can share with us about how you have managed to stay up and running during those storms? >> Our first storm, our first big storm right after Katrina was Rita. And when Rita came through, we didn't have what we have today. We ended up powering down non-critical items and making sure our critical applications were up and running. And luckily we didn't lose much power. We didn't lose any networking. Where as, during Harvey, we lost some networking for a week or two. The difference was we already moved everything to our secondary data center well away from the hurricane. And sure, one of our redundant paths was down. Our other one was up. We still had connectivity and we were doing great. So in terms of where we progress, hurricane season is what we are mainly concerned with. So we utilize Zerto, we move everything over. So if our data center, our primary data center in Houston goes down, we're mildly affected and customers shouldn't even notice. >> How does this make your business more resilient? I mean is this actually, is there business benefits to your, for your customers? >> Of course. >> Of the business being this resilient? >> If we're a bank and our ATMs go down, and we can't get them back up for a few days, our customers notice. If we're a bank and our primary systems go down and you can't take money out of your account for I believe the timeframe is 72 hours, the Federal government comes in and they own us now. We are no longer a bank. Because we didn't, we failed at providing services for our customers, for an extended period of time. And that's unacceptable. So to mitigate that we use a DR strategy. We use a business continuity plan. And we make sure that if something were to happen, even if it were outside of hurricane season, or if we were during hurricane season, and we had an issue at our other data center, Zerto allows us to bring everything back up within minutes. And because we do it regularly, if we're not going to have as many headaches as someone that just says, "Oh, well we've implemented Zerto but we don't utilize it." We run a few test failovers to make sure that we can actually migrate, but we don't bring anything up and run production load. We run production load every six months using Zerto. So that's how we get around making sure that we're highly available and we don't get taken over by the government. >> I hear a lot of talk, Bill, these days about digital transformation. How real is that to what Woodforest is doing? How are you changing the way you do business? >> I think it's already hard for us. I mean we've already gone digital. When I first started, we had couriers picking up paperwork from the branches and taking them to centralized processing locations, and running everything manually. Now it's all digitally. And that was partially thanks to 9/11. There was proof work they couldn't run for weeks because airports were down. And because of that banks started already going digital. So we already have digital transactions. Now if you write a check at WalMart, instead of taking a few days or a week or two to clear, it clears that day or the next day. Because it's all digital. WalMart went digital, we went digital. Most banks are already going digital or have already gone digital. So we just kind of, people ask, we're mostly already there. We're already digital. >> How about cloud? What's your road map when it comes to using multiple cloud providers? >> We're definitely looking into it, they give us a lot of benefit. They give us a lot of service that we can... >> You got a lot of flexibility. >> Flexibility, sure. Flexibility in doing things that we can't necessarily do ourselves. Right now we're taking baby steps. We're not throwing full production load into the cloud. We're looking at, let's put our development environment up there and see what it can provide for our developers. And so far they're enjoying what the opportunities or the possibilities can be. So we're looking forward to hopefully this year getting them up and running and in the cloud and enjoying all of the benefits from there. And after that once we get some development done in there, then we'll probably start seeing some production applications being put into the cloud. Some sort of probably SAS server offering. >> Well hurricane season is coming up in just a couple of months. I wish you the best >> Thank you so much. >> this season. Bill Manning thanks very much for joining us. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. >> We'll be right back from ZertoCON, I'm Paul Gillin, this is the Cube. (upbeat tech beats)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's The Cube! Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. (light techno music) >> Welcome to New Orleans, everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is VeeamOn 2017. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm with my co-host Stuart Miniman. Stu, it's always a pleasure to be workin' with you. >> Great to be here with you, Dave. Second time I think we've done The Cube in New Orleans, my first time I've been at a conference here in over a decade. It's hard to believe, a lot's changed. Been back since Katrina a couple of times, but first time we're here. I'm excited. A lot of people we know here. About 3,000 people in attendance. Very international audience, just like Veeam's customers. >> Yeah, it's a good venue for VeeamON. Veeam is a company, for those of you who don't know, $600 million in bookings last year, growing at almost 30% a year, penetrating the Fortune 500 very deeply, about 70% of the Fortune 500 purchases some products and services from Veeam. Global 2000, the penetration is a little bit lower, around 50%. But this is a company that has been on a meteoric rise. We saw today that one of the most telling slides from a business standpoint that I saw was that Peter McKay put up a slide showing companies that have ascended to $800 million, which is where Veeam is on the track to get to very shortly. We're talkin' about Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, the leaders in the software business, and here's this infrastructure company that started in, really in VMware backup, very focused on VMware backup, and now becoming the availability platform for, you know, what they're calling the always on digital enterprise. Now, let's talk about that for a second. The strategy is quite interesting, Stu. I mean, you think about this for a second and you say, "Okay, well everybody's going to do backup in the cloud. Everybody's goin' to AWS. They're going to backup on AWS." But the use cases that are emerging for Veeam are actually quite substantial. Let's talk about them. One is on OnPrem. So, if you can have the best availability solution OnPrem, obviously that's of interest to you and that's really what Veeam has done historically with VMware in particular, but now growing out. Then there's the use case of, well, I have my data in the cloud, but I kind of don't think it's, I trust the cloud so much. I'd like to have, you know, some security, and maybe I'd like to backup from the Cloud OnPrem. There's another use case which is cloud-to-cloud. I want to go from AWS to Azure. And that's a use case that's emerging within this infrastructure. So, you've really got a diverse set of use cases that are emerging and this company's tryin' to position is the strategic partner for always on availability for the digital enterprise. Powerful messaging, but simple. >> Yeah. And Dave, I want to add on that a little bit. If you follow the data, where do people have their data? As you said, right? On-Premises, where Veeam started, VMware specific, expanded out to Hyper-V. A lot of things I want to dig into this week. One of them, they've got, what is it? 231,000 customers last year. How many of those pay? How many are free? But, you know, VMware has 500,000 customers worldwide. You know, that's pretty good penetration into those environments. But SaaS applications, you know, I have lots of data there. How do I back it up? How do I pull that in to all of my environments? Third piece, public cloud, as you said. How do I manage all of those environments when I have a hybrid or MultCloud? We heard some announcements today, something I know we're going to be digging into a lot this week, but how do all those piece go together? We heard, like with VMware, the VAIO integration. Well, if I'm doing that, and I'm doing Amazon, how do those play together? How do things like VMware support in AWS work for a company like Veeam? I was really impressed, we went to the media session this morning, some of it's still embargoed, but really broad partnerships that Veeam has built had VMware and Cisco on as some of the big elite people on stage. The expo is right off to the side where we are here at the show Dave, lots of partners, lots of big companies, many legacy companies, but also lots of new interesting companies that are helping to push kind of the cloud native, you know, multi/hybrid cloud world that we live in today. >> Yeah, so again, the ascendancy of Veeam really came about as a focus company on VMware backup. Now if you think about VMware in the early days what was happening was you were consolidating physical servers. You were taking underutilized physical servers and then consolidating them and getting much more efficiency out of your IT. There was an agility aspect as well, there's certainly availability components, but one key challenge the customers had when they consolidated all those servers is that, yes the servers were underutilized, but the one application that wasn't underutilized was backup, that you used a lot of your server to do a backup, you know, a big stream of data. And so, a lot of customers had to re-architect their backup, they had to simplify their backup, and that's really where Veeam came in, and then you started to see this company explode. Now you're hearing, you know, going from backup to replication, we heard that's sort of second journey, there was a lot of that goin' on, but now it's really the center of the availability console, and I think you nailed it when you talked about the ecosystem. They've got 45,000 partners. That's a tremendous number, so obviously the channel is very important. We're going to be unpacking that this week. The business driver is to shrink RPO, Recovery Point Objective, that is the amount of data you can afford to lose, and RTO, Recovery Time Objective, the speed at which you can get your applications back up and running. Those are really the two metrics that translate into business terms, like I don't want to lose data, I don't want to be down, and that's a challenge that every backup software company, and every company generally, has to face. >> Yeah Dave, absolutely. And that was highlighted in one of the announcements that Veeam made this morning. Their continuous data protection, or CDP, announcement, not using snapshots really allows them to dial it down rather than 15 minute, you know, RPO, it's down to 15 seconds. But, is that something now that's going to compete against some of what many of their partners have? So there is that give and take. There's a large TAM that Veeam has, but as they expand, just as with every software company, you've got that ecosystem. What products do you put out there that might compete against some of the other offerings that you have there? Good energetic group, partners, I know we're excited. You know, multi year they've been doing this show, you know, real good energy, and lots of good announcements. Sometimes you go to the shows and it's like, oh, okay, you know, a couple of yawn things up on stage, but the crowd was really excited for some of the demos. A lot of good pieces, in that we're going to have, you know, full slate of guests to be able to dig into for this week. >> Yeah, just to geek out on one of those points for a minute. So you were talking about the CDP, Continuous Data Protection, the granularity historically of that has been 15 minutes using snapshots. Even though snapshots are space efficient, they're still less efficient than doing things directly through the kernel, through deep integration. Now VAIO, it's the vSphere API for IO, IO (snapping fingers) Come on, help me. Anyway, it's these geeky things that VMware they publish these specs and you got to get the SDK. So I'm interested how long they had the SDK. >> Yeah, and by the way, Dave, I checked the, there's a compatibility guide for VMware and there's about 10 partners that are listed on there and Veeam isn't there yet, probably because they just announced, you know, version 10 here of Veeam availability suite that supports that. One of the first questions is going to be, all right, when's this full GA, and when's this supported? >> These are key things. It's vSphere API for IO filtering, by the way. Okay, so these are key things that partners have to get ahold of through the SDK. Now, you know, it's interesting right? Because VMware used to be owned by EMC, and now it's owned by Dell. Do Dell and EMC have the inside track on this stuff? Does VMware sub optimize its business and its ecosystem to stack the deck for Dell or EMC? Historically, no. But, you know, this is something that we have to watch. So, we're going to be asking some of those tough questions on The Cube today. You know, David Floyer had a great quote in a SiliconANGLE article. He said, "Look, VMware would be better off in my opinion integrating with Veeam and giving Veeam a piece of that market, because it'll serve customers better, and ultimately will lower costs, which is what the software company, VMware in this case, should be doing." That was an interesting perspective from Floyer, but we're going to be going wall-to-wall coverage. Two days, Stu. Last point before the break. >> Yeah, so Dave, I got a question for you, actually. There's been some management change, Peter McKay is now co-CEO. There are rumors of acquisition. They're now, you know, over $600 million, going towards $1 billion. When do the IPO, or does one of the big players out there decide to grab them because they've got some, you know, clear IP, they've got a loyal and excited customer base, there's many companies that would love to have that in the portfolio. >> The company's cashflow positive since the early days. >> Stu: Yeah, that doesn't happen. Cashflow positive? >> No outside money taken in. There were rumors that they would go for $1 billion. The company's worth much more than $1 billion right now, so I mean, I guess that's the dilemma for Veeam, you know, what a nice problem to have. But if you look at software, even in revenue multiples, and just do the simple back of the napkin math, $1 billion in my opinion wouldn't get it done, so, that's why that deal, one of the reasons probably why it never happened. This is The Cube, we're live from New Orleans VeeamON 2017 and I say wall-to-wall coverage for two days. We got three shows goin' on this week, we got SAP Sapphire, we got Informatica, and Stu and I are here at VeeamOn. Keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (light techno music) (soft techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back here. We're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, talk to the influencers, the experts, thought leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, anyone we can that has data we can share with you. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burr is my co-host for the two days here. Our next is Jay Baer from Convince and Convert, CUBE alumni, great guy, super influential, knows his marketing stuff, perfect guest to summarize and kind of package up what the hell Modern CX means here at the Oracle show. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Jay: Good to see you guys, welcome. >> So you were hosting the CMO Summit that was going on in parallel they had the Marquise Awards which is their awards dinner. >> 11th annual Marquise Awards it's like a thing. >> It's amazing, it looked like the Golden Globes. >> It was beautiful this year, it was like, legit. >> Peter: Is that the one with the O on the top? >> And they delivered an award with a drone. It was a great night. >> Awesome stuff. So give us the package, what's going on, tease out the story here. >> Yeah, I think the story is two-fold. One, Oracle's got an interesting take on the marketing software space because they really are trying to connect it between the overall customer service experience initiative, and then marketing as a piece of that. This event in particular, the Modern Customer Experience event has tracked almost full conferences for marketing, for customer service, for sales and for commerce. So all four of those are the verticals underneath this umbrella and that's a really unusual conference setup but I think it reflects where Oracle's head is at from a thought leadership standpoint. That like, look, maybe were going to get to a point where marketing and customer service really are kind of the same. Maybe we're going to get to the point where sales and marketing really are kind of the same. We're not there yet, by any stretch of the imagination. But I think we all feel that convergence coming. And my world the marketing side, CMO's are starting to get more and more responsibility inside organizations and so if that happens, maybe we do need to start to align the software as well. It's and interesting take on the market, and I think it's sort of prescient for where we're going to head. >> It's interesting you mention of all those different silos, or different departments or different functions in a digital end-to-end fabric experiences are all about the customer, it's one person, they're going to have different experiences at any given time on that life cycle, or product spectrum or solution spectrum. So the CMO has to take responsibility of that. >> Well, I feel like somebody has to be responsible for it. Mark Hurd said this in one of his remarks over the course of the show, the CEO of Oracle said look, there is no data department, everybody has to be responsible for data but somebody has to figure what the ins and the outs are and maybe that's the CMO, maybe it's the CXO, I don't think we've fully baked that cake yet. But we're going to have to get to the point where the single record of truth about the customer and their customer journey has to exist and somebody's got to figure out how to wire all those together. We're gettin' there. >> It's so funny, I was joking, not here on theCUBE, but in the hallways about the United Airlines snafu and I'm like, to me as a kind of a developer mindset software should have solved that problem. They never should have been overbooked to begin with. So if you think about just these things where the reality of a consumer at any given time is based upon their situation. I need customer support, I need this, I need that. So everyone's got to be customer ready with data. >> Talk about relevance, relevancy is the killer app, that's it, right. Relevancy is created by technology, and with people, people who actually know how to put that technology into practice in a way that the customers actually care about. So, one of the things that Mark said, he said look, here's the issue, it's not about data, nor is it about clout, it's not about any of that. It's about taking that data and creating understanding out of it. But he said a really interesting thing, he said what we have to do is push those understandings out to the front lines where somebody on the front lines can do something with it that actually benefits the customer. I think that's a really smart point because so often right now we're talking about, oh we've got these data stores, and we've got DMP's and we've got all these things. That's great but until that gets manifested at the front lines, who cares, you've just got a big pile of numbers. >> We had Katrina on from the commerce side, it's funny, she was making a retail comment look, they don't care about the tech, they don't care about blockchain and all the speed and feed, they have to do a transaction in the speak of the consumer. And the language of the customer is not technology. >> No they don't care, solve my problem right. Just solve my problem, and I don't care how you solve it, what sort of magic you have behind the scenes, if I want a sweater, I want this sweater, and I want it right now. >> OK, Jay, share with the audience watching right now and us conversation hallways you've had, that's always the best because you had a chance, I'll see ya on the big stage doing your hosting thing, but also you get approached a lot people bend your ear a lot, what's happening? >> You know what's been an interesting theme this week is we've made such great advances on the technology side and I think we're starting to bump up against okay well now we've got to make some organizational changes for that technology to actually flourish. Had a lot of conversations this week with influencers, with CMO's, with attendees about, I really want to do this I really want to sort of bring sales and marketing together or commerce and sales, et cetera. But our org chart doesn't support that. The way our company thinks, the way our people are aligned, does not support this convergence. So I think were it an inflection point where we're going to have to like break apart some silos, and not data silos, but operational, what is your job, who manages you and what is your bonus based on? There is a lot of legacy structures, especially at the enterprise that do not really facilitate. >> John: Agile. >> Cross-departmental circumstances that we're looking for. So a lot people are like, oh wow, we're going to have to do some robust organizational change and that ain't easy. Somebody's going to have to drive that. Your marketing practitioners, which is my world, they can't drive that. That's got to come from up here somewhere. >> And also people got to be ready for the change. No one likes change. But we were taking about this yesterday called Add the Agile process into development being applied to marketing, really smart. >> Oh, all the time so many marketing teams now are using Agile and daily Scrum and Stand-ups and all those kind of things as opposed to Waterfall which everybody's used forever I think it's fantastic. >> Yeah, and that's something that we're seeing and Roland Smart had to point, he had a book got a signed copy Peter and I, but this is interesting, if you of Agile, to your point, you just can't read the book you've got to have a commit to it, organizational impact is Agile. >> One of the things we had a CMO Summit, we had 125, 150 CMO's from all around the world and one of the things we talked about in that session yesterday was, jeeze, we need to start taking people or hiring people out of a software development world, people who have Agile experience and put them as PM's on a marketing team. Which is going to put that group of people have the Agile background in even greater demand. Because they won't just be doing tech roles for project management but also marketing project management and sort of teaching everybody how Agile works. I think it's really interesting. >> But they've been doing that for a while. I mean the Agile, Agile started in software development but moved broader than that when it went to the web. >> No question, but a lot of these CMO's do not have those type of skills on their team today. They're still using a Waterfall. >> Or they don't recognize that they have the skills. Because most of them will have responsibility for website, website development, so it's that they don't again, it goes back to. >> Web versus marketing. >> Yeah, they probably have it somewhere, they just don't appreciate it and elevate it. >> It's silo'd within the marketing team. >> It's silo'd within the marketing team. So there's going to be, these are the consequence of changes. We'll see the degree to which it really requires a whole bunch of organizational stuff. But at the end of the day, you're right, it's a very very important thing. What are some of the other things you see as long as we're talking about it, other than just organizational. >> Actual other sort of baseline skills. It wasn't that long ago that your social media teams and contact marketing teams, it was manifestly a written job you made things that were rooted in copy. Now we talked a lot about, you have to have like a full video team on your marketing org chart because the core of the realm now is video content and while companies are getting there it's still a struggle for a lot of them. Should we have our agency do this, should we get somebody else to do it, they're like now I got to have all these people, I got to have video editors and camera crew. >> It's expensive. >> Of course it is, yeah. Not everybody can be theCUBE. >> We'll they're tryin'. No, but I think video's been coming down to the camera level you see Facebook with VR and AR certainly the glam and the sex appeal to that. Then you got docker containers and software development apps, so I call that the app culture, you've got the glam, apps, and then you've got cloud. So those things are going on so are the marketing departments looking to fully integrate agency-like stuff in house or is the agency picking up that? What's your take on the landscape of video and some of these services? >> It depends on how real-time they're thinking about video. We're starting to Facebook Live in a public relations circumstance. You saw when Crayola announced the death of the blue crayon or whatever it was a few weeks ago. They did a press release on that, but the real impetus for that announcement was a Facebook Live video. Which puts Facebook and live video as your new PR apparatus. That's really interesting. So in those circumstances the question is do we do that with the agency, is it easier to do it in-house. I think ultimately my advice would be you have to have it in both places. You have to be able to do at least some things in-house you have to be able to turn it quickly and then maybe for things you have more a lead time, you bring in your agency. >> One of the things we're seeing and just commenting while we're on this great subject, it's our business as well, is content is hard. Good, original content is what we strive for as SiliconANGLE, wikibon and theCUBE is something that we're committed to serving the audience at the same time, we collaborate with marketers in this new, native way so that the challenge that I see, and I see in this marketing cloud, is content is a great piece of data. >> Content is data. >> Content is data. >> And it also helps you get more data because there is a lot of data exchanged. >> So a lot of companies I see that fail on the content marketing side, they don't punch it in the red zone. The ball's on the one yard line all they got to do is get it over the goal line, and that's good content, and they try to fake it. They don't have authentic content. >> Another way of saying that John. >> John: They blew it on the one yard line. >> Yeah, another way of saying that is the historically agencies have driven the notion of production value. They have driven the notion of production value, to make the content as expensive as possible because that's how they make their money. What we're talking about is when we introduce a CX orientation into this mix now we're talking about what does the customer need in context, how can video serve that need? It's going to lead to, potentially, a very very different set of production value. >> You bring up a good point, I want to get Jay's reaction on it because he sees a lot too. Context is everything so at the end of the day what is engaging, you can't buy engagement, it's got to be good. >> What serves the customer. >> John: And that is defined by the customer, there is nature of reality silver bullet there's no engagement bullet. >> Sometimes you can argue that the customer values a lower fidelity content execution because it has a greater perceived authenticity. >> You may not know this Jay, I'm going to promote us for a second. A piece of video that's highly produced in the technology industry generates attention for a minute and a half to a minute and 45 seconds. theCUBE can keep attention for 12 or 13 minutes, why? >> John: We have interesting people on. >> If we were a digital agency. >> I would say the hosts, obviously. >> The hosts, the conversation. >> It's back to relevancy. >> It informs the customer. And that's what, increasingly, these guys have to think about. So in may respects, we'll go back to your organization and I want to test you in this, is that in many respects that the CMO must heal thyself first. By starting to acknowledge that we have to focus on the customer, and not creative and not the agency, and rejigger things so that we can in fact focus on the customer and not the agency's needs for us to spend more. >> There was, one of the great conversations in the CMO Summit was this point that, look, with all this technology we have all the opportunities and darnit, all we're doing is finding other ways to send people a coupon. Like isn't there something else that we could use this technology for. And what if we just flip the script and said what do customers genuinely want? Which is knowable and certainly inferable today in a way that has never been historically why don't we use that data to give them what they want, when they want it, how they want it, instead of constantly trying to push them harder. >> Focus on value and not being annoying. >> I mean I wrote a while book about it. >> Well your key point there, is that you're going to infer and actually get signals that, we've never been there before. Chatter signals. >> But let's use them for good not evil I think is the subtext there. >> Yeah, don't jam a coupon down their throat. >> But as Mark says it's hard because CEO's are under tremendous pressure to raise top line in an environment that is not conducive to that. You're going to have to take share. The economy is not growing so fast that you can just show up and grow your company. CEO's have tons of pressure, they're then droppping that pressure on the CMO who then says you need to grow top line revenue. So the CMO says we've got all this technology I guess we'll just send out more offers we'll have a stronger call to action and as opposed to using this information, the inferences, the data, to be more customer focused. I think in some cases we're being less customer focused which, if anything is short-sighted and at worst is a cryin' shame. >> So the solution there is to use the data to craft relevant things at the right time to the right people. >> And it will work but it requires two things that a lot of organizations simply don't have. Time and courage, right. It requires time and courage to purposely push less hard. Because you know it will payoff eventually you've got to buy into that, and that ain't easy always. Sometimes it's not even your decision. >> What we don't want is we don't want to automate and accelerate bad practices. At the end of the day what CMO's are learning, this conversation came out yesterday is, jeeze maybe marketing really isn't that good. Maybe we have to learn ourselves from what this technology is telling us, what the data is telling us and start dramatically altering the way we think about marketing, the role that marketing plays. The techniques we use, the tactics we use, that will lead to organizational changes. I'm wondering, did you get a sense out of the session that they are in fact stepping back and saying we got to look in the mirror about some of this stuff. >> Absolutely, absolutely. I thought it was remarkable, considering who runs this company, Mark Hurd, came in and did a little Q&A at the CMO Summit and he said, And this is the guy who runs Oracle, who's puttin' this who thing together and is sellin' tons of marketing software and says look guys, I'm not even sure if what we're doing here is right because we've got all this technology we have been doing this for a long time, we've got all these smart people and still, what's our conversion rate, 1%? If we've got the greatest technology in the history of the world, we supposedly know all this about customer service and customer journey mapping and our conversion rate is still 1%. Maybe something identified fundamentally broken with how we think about marketing. I thought for somebody in that role to come in and just drop that on a group of CMO's, I was like whoa. >> I think he's right. >> Totally right. >> But to have a CEO of a company like this just walk in and say here's what I think. >> This is a question for you and I'll ask it by saying we try to observe progressive CMO's as a leading indicator to the comment you mentioned earlier, which is flip things upside down and see what happens. What are you seeing for those progressive CMO's that have the courage to say ya know what, we're going to flip things upside down and apply the technology and rethink it in a way that's different. What are they doing? >> One of the markers that we see on the consulting side of my business is CMO's who are thinking about retention first. Not only from a practical execution layer, but even from a strategic layer. Like, what if we just pulled back on the string here a little bit and just said how can we make sure that everyone who's already given us money, continues to give us money and moreso. And essentially really turn the marketing focus from a new customer model, to a customer retention and customer growth model, start there. Start with your current customers and then use those inisights gained and then do a better job with customer acquisition. As customer service and marketing start to converge, mostly because on online. Online customer service is very brand driven and more like marketing. As this two things are converging we're seeing smart CMO's say well what if we change the way we look at this and took care of our own first. Learn those lessons and then applied them outwardly. I think that's a real strong marking signal. >> It's a great starting point and it's almost risk free from a progressive standpoint. >> It's not always risk-free inside the organization. >> I mean it's harder to get new guinea pig customers to like see what works, but go to your existing customers and you have data to work with. >> But wouldn't you also say that the very nature of digital which is moving the value proposition from an intrinsic statement of the values in the product and caveat emptor, towards a utility orientation where the value's in the use of it, and we want to sustain use of it. We're moving more to a service to do that and digital helps us to do that. That the risk of taking your approach goes down because at the end of the day, when you're doing a service orientation you have to retain the customer because the customer has constantly got the opportunity to abandon you. >> Yes the ability to bail out is very very easy these days I completely agree. But what find is that it makes sense to us. It makes sense to us on theCUBE, but in the real world it's not. Not everybody's drinkin' that punch yet. >> John: And why? >> I don't know. >> Sounds like courage. >> It is definitely courage is one of 'em because you're essentially saying look, I've been taught to do marketing one way for 40 years or 20 years. >> Yeah, I'm going to lean on my email marketing all day long. >> Yeah, I'm going to keep pressing send. It's easy, there's almost no net cost. So there's that. And also just the pressure from above, I think. From the CEO to grow top line, net new customer revenue, I think that's certainly part of it. And some if it, I think we went back to earlier about org charting and skills and resources. There's a heck of a lot more people out there at every level of the marketing organization who are trained in customer acquisition moreso than customer retention. How many MBA's are there in customer retention are there? Zero. How many MBA's are there in marketing and sales? >> Lot of 'em at Amazon. >> A thousand? >> A lot of 'em at Apple. >> Yeah, but they were trained there. They didn't come in like that, so they trained them up. >> Jay, great to have you on theCUBE. Great insight as usual, and I think you're right on the money. I think the theme that I would just say for this show, and agree with you is that if you look at Oracle, you look at IBM, you look what Amazon is doing Microsoft in some way maybe a little bit, but those three, data's at the center of the value proposition. Oracle is clearly saying to the marketers, at least we want to say digital it's end to end if you use data, it's good for you. This is the new direction. If you think data-driven CMO, that seems to be the right strategy in my mind. >> The best quote in the CMO Summit, you guys need a CUBE bumper sticker that you can manufacture with this. Data is the new bacon. I was like, oh I love that, that's the best right. >> Who doesn't love bacon. Jay, great to see you. Real quick, what's up with you, give us a quick update on you're opportunities what you're going these days. >> Things are great, running around the country doing fantastic events just like you guys are. Working on a new content marketing master class for advanced marketers on how to take their content marketing strategy to the next level. That launches in a couple of weeks. Continue to do four or five podcasts a week, a new video show called Jay Today where I do little short snippets three minutes a day. JayToday.tv if you want to subscribe to that. >> Beautiful, Jay Baer, great on theCUBE great thought leader, great practitioner, and just a great sharer on the net, check him out. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burr here at Oracle Marketing CX more live coverage after this short break.

live from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you buy vmware and its ecosystem sponsors well welcome back inside mandalay bay as we continue our coverage at vmworld here on the cube along with peter burrows i'm john walls are now joined by David Cabrera Solutions Architect CDW and leek as well vice president product storage for the VMware storage and availability business unit gentlemen thanks for being here good to see you great to hear house show going so far for you oh it's on fire man did we give a tiger by the tail here that's been great don't let go don't let go even though this for a long time and we were just talking about your history your back i said yeah i first got into virtualization back at y2k wow I remember that how far we've come huh and yeah yeah again I did it why i use it for y2k testing and then from there i worked for a disaster recovery services company and we have these customers katrina rita in 911 they just came in with their stuff and i didn't have enough physical servers to you know in their contract to recover their businesses and they were taking out vmware evaluation licenses to get their businesses up and running and vmware was super supportive of that and they knew you know the licenses would come and wow yeah it was it was like rust in the esxi or ESX at the time I you know just it's actually you know easy and as we think about what's happening on hyper conversions now right yeah it's the same idea right I mean it was actually practicality you not a necessity right of using VMware because gosh I needed to do it for kind of TCO reasons and what happened was esxi started out at the fringe almost right and then came roaring into the you know into the core as people realize hey I really can run like mission-critical applications business collapse the same trajectory is happening now with VC an HCI right and our DCM writing notes we're starting off like outside startup VDI test and dev right you know all that you know to management clusters right but now what's happening the majority of applications mates business apps right yeah yeah it's it I firmly 1,000% believe that you know any application can run ova n no I say and it's we were talking about this i still have customers they they talk about running exchange or sequel on physical servers and I'm like why so now you take all those benefits of virtualization and you add v san on top of it and make everything totally portable on on just you know commodity based hardware and you know pretty soon our job as storage architects building figuring out sans and raid groups and you know how big my lund is supposed to be who cares throw some storage in the server adam as you need and keep going well to that point lee you're talking before we went on the air here about how people you know professionals company who's saying i want to get my attention from here to up here all right i want to be able to look at business and not so much about what's going on behind the scenes in the back office is this thing i was even at CDW recently right we're talking about how long it takes to train someone on enterprise storage versus you know the actually the less you know about storage that the more a hyper conversion system words to what you expect i add a note yeah of course it gets bigger right i mean why wouldn't it right so the idea that you can get people trained up not just using the product but actually selling the product I mean it's actually a very interesting dynamic one of the other interesting things we're seeing right now is just a overlap of flash right all flash right which first you know blue you know came blazing onto the scene for performance right for an application is now coming in because customers want to spend less time actually man is that looking down I want to look down anymore right and so the idea that the customer satisfy you arts because the risk of Miss configuring something actually really low right it is you know that nearly as much time and you don't worry about it right right so you have the performance you need you have the space you need you know you get the deduplication and and it just as you will you need more performance you need more space at another node and on top of that you get compute memory and everything else so their stores some challenges associated with applications and selecting the technology and there's a lot of transformation and transition there's a lot of new technologies coming online that's right even in the storage world so how is virtualization helping customers or helping protect customers for making bad choices with current products now one thing you want to look at is where do I manage this from right how many silos do I have right and so the extent that you can leverage the Center for example right as a common management domain not just for storage by the way right well we started off with compute right they get source we also have networking right so what we have today with NSX right integrating that together we've heard what we announced the show here there it is this VMware cloud foundation great way to go and integrate right all the rich functionality and now you've got it in one user interface right that simplifies the deployment and then the support right making everything easy so you know putting everything together plug it in run a wizard everything's set up for you and it and it's set up the way it should be yeah so it's not as dependent upon the underlying type or choice that you made about storage it's now more what does the application need and let's just point the application at the pool yeah so so there's still I still see you know there's going to be those needs where that super low latency super fast care that shared storage is going to be critical and is going to be needed for specific applications but all that other stuff all that normal day-to-day web servers applications email file shares all that stuff you can just throw it on there and it works you don't have to worry about all the silos and all the different management people that you need so going back to John's question the day on your point later the idea that getting people to raise up defectives Dave how much time are you now saving not doing the physical stuff actually starting to talk to developers the people are taking all of this day to all these assets and turning it into the business value are you able to spend more time and directly supporting them as you go into customers and design the it does seem like that that shadow IT or DevOps or you know the people that aren't depending or depend on IT the consumer is becoming more of the decision maker or at least the influencer and what what V San brings to the table for those kind of people especially with the automation and and and you know the whole private cloud piece of it it takes down that I call it the IT stop sign okay so you know why is DevOps going to the public cloud because it's easy so you have to be as easy as wherever they're going in order to bring them back and and keep that governance on your data and keep your IP where it belongs whether it's in that private cloud or off into a secure more secure public cloud or through a hybrid cloud or whatever v san kind of keeps everything contained for that so yeah and I think there seems to be a trend or at least a thread here that I'm hearing a different conversation here about simplicity right felicity just not keeping things simple for people letting them focus on their core competencies and the right there really what they're paid to do and not distract them away from having to learn like you said it up to speed in 15 minutes as opposed to hours or weeks of training week looks you having these three clicks yeah yes yeah I ask customers pretty routinely now you know what is your budget gonna be is it higher or lower this year the answer it's like it's lower right there like you do you have more people or less people and I call less people they're shrinking data centers right and all of a sudden and then you say well and how many projects do you have like all of every every project now as an IT component right so now it's the pace of change right and so if you don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure as much now all of a sudden it just becomes easier to start worrying about hey how do I go in scale we had a customer this morning I was talking to Buddy that was talking about well you know the other thing it does is it gives me the opportunity to have kind of bite-size chunks right so the risk of making the wrong decision is actually low right up by a set of servers and as opposed to you know I buy something that's this big where I have to basically predict what's going to happen for the next five years this looks more like hey you know what I kind of have to know what's going to happen over the next six months and then we'll figure it out from there that's today's mentality so easier to change one piece instead of the whole puzzle that I died nobody the dance for that that's a great point it's it there's not that many IT shops that are refreshing their entire data set there are but that's not that many usually it's a silo so but there's always projects PDI some sort of new essay p application or you know we're migrating to a new version of exchange or whatever it is it's okay let's start there and and and and let's just slip it in try it out you'll see you like it it's like sorry it's like crack everybody needs more all right so Rach wait liberal lawyers yeah try it out and you'll see you like it and then from there it'll just roll and and and as the the old siloed equipment starts to age out they'll just easily transition it into visa it's wedding we just get emotional over at a new server shut that down we could we just finished a survey of 250 decent customers and you know one of the things that we were watching is so what about the applications right because when we started like it was hey I'm going to try this in test em I'll try it over here or dr is a good one right I try it and you know it's not i'm not running like my real stuff on it right you know now what we're finding it this year's switched right so we flipped into the majority are now business-critical applications right there an X equal exchange share with the whole Microsoft stack during Oracle databases right there make Percona right i mean of mice equal variance right it's really your singing so all of a sudden they're like that you know there's no real hesitation right and it's the economics that drive this right once you started looking to say you know here's how i can go and do this in more bite-sized chunks starts to become more you know but it's more cloud like i think from that standpoint it's also the risk because as you said you make a design decision today yeah it's not going to be the right design decision in 18 months to make a product decision today it's probably not going to be the right product decision in 18 months you make the right you know you want to your company decides to buy a new company or wants to diverse the vessel you don't want the infrastructure getting in the way of those business decisions so it's it's certainly economics but it's a lot of it has to do with the fact that as you said the pace of change is so great that the only way to ensure that you can keep up is to focus on where the change really needs to be and diminish I focus on where the change isn't as required that make sense it does make sense in you know one of the things that you know degrees of freedom that customers also want is we're finding you know they're pretty used to being able to configure servers and choose their own server all right so the idea that we give choice right running software on a server where you get to choose right i mean we have what 15 different partners right server partners building something called a vc n ready node right so you can take our software pre-configured right to strip out the integration risk if you will there's also some customers who just want like the simplest easiest fully integrated we're working with emc that VX rail product is an integrated CDW offers both of these right so for customers who want just to say I want a single point of support integrated backup I mean that's a world-class product right as an integrated appliance that's one way to buy right one way to deploy but on the other hand if I'm a ucs shop I can go and say hey here's how i get a ucs if I may HPE shop here's how I do it 100 right all works all precor oh oh ya habla del e course right exactly yeah yeah thank you for that by the way so no sway be back yeah value out of the right there we go exactly yeah you know last before your eyes therefore that's all good right right but this this choice right i mean it's interesting because certainly customers are looking at like what level of choice and flexibility do they want and this server choice right is a big one yeah yeah it there's the reason why people buy servers isn't because it's a specific brand I mean you know if you if you look at the open up servers and you look inside it's really it's Intel processors or maybe an AMD processor a bunch of ram and some disks the the software that the vendors offer to manage those or what's important and and it's funny since vcenter mm-hmm even before it was vcenter you know just I guess 20 was it being able to integrate the management of the servers into vcenter and having all those sensors and all that stuff kind of bubble up into vcenter is huge and be able to hook in and take like we realize automation or viewer orchestrator and make it to pull the physical hardware as well as a virtual it's it's big have that in with ES and it just kind of makes it easy so Dave's you working with a lot of customers every single day yep they are also starting to deploy cloud or at least procure plot proud as part of their core strategy talk a bit about about talk a little bit about the challenges associated with intercloud communication and a role that brutalization plays yeah yeah so it's it's still kind of the wild wild west out there with with that I know you know VMware with NSX trying to and that with the new announcements and I haven't fully digested all this stuff from yesterday but it was out just the idea of providing that that kind of peanut butter of policy you know for security and networking and all that from you know whatever you need to keep up button the other way that's a technical term I like that or Paula I like that I have more creative butter of policy in your private cloud and being able to kind of spark that up in in whatever public cloud you choose to use kind of brings that core via you know so vmware's message was always whatever Hardware you have your choice now it's whatever cloud you have your choice yeah it kind of makes sense now and and yet security and the networking is is the biggest piece of it and that if you look at the NIS T official version of hybrid cloud it's it's being able to move things back and forth seamlessly and that's what it brings his David a big part of this cross cloud message right and there's an obligation and it turns out I I'd argue that your most strategic engagement with the cloud is actually data alright VMS you can spin up spin down right there transitory it's on or off but you know the decision about where you place data is long-standing what do and what data sovereignty issues about you know it takes you know data is not quick to move anywhere right so it takes time and it takes you know from a cost standpoint right you all of a sudden lock yourself in on data to keeping it going right so those sort of issue didn't if you want to take it back by the way you know there's some egress fees and other things to go and manage so what we announced right in this cross cloud world about how we're running for example you know in IBM SoftLayer right and you can now spin up vcn and soft layer right and see the same policy based management right across the cloud now right I mean that extension right into the public clouds right is a really interesting way for us to go and talk about moving from just a storage you know provide into a data services data management right that becomes a key element how do you convince people to be early adopters then of that because now that they're making decisions that not that they they all matter that are those matter maybe a little more is it really early adoption though this far into the game I mean wow I mean everybody we came out a transitory element yeah you're saying ok I want you to take another step yeah I want you go a little further out and so that's what I was saying well here's here's where I'd let me out a little bit too that is what I'd say is that you said data management yes i would say data Asset Management's there that's so you know we were talking earlier digital business is about how you're going to apply data differently to retain and sustain your customers and so this point ocean of data as an asset you really elevates this conversation about what data where when all those other things and to the degree that virtualization simplifies those conversations it's going to have a major impact on business flexibility agility even designed so you guys agree so degree yes so think about that and and I have to credit a vmware se his name is Paul Rowan think of NSX as kind of a bodyguard okay and every chunk of data whatever it is as a bodyguard kind of leading them leading the way and protecting that piece of data from whatever it is that it needs to protect it wherever it goes and that's really a real simple analogy so it's not just I have to configure a firewall over here and make sure that if it goes into cloud that that firewall has the same rules it doesn't matter anymore because my bodyguards going with me and and and I'm that bodyguard is making sure that all the policies are applied no matter where I end it also opens up new areas you know when you talk about data asset management now I started thinking about well you know maybe I want to do some big data analytics I'm where my data is right where where do i locate it right and you could locate different places for sovereignty security local performance for example right back up any geolocation issues right and then I also started thinking of a policy base rate we call source policy based management and that sort now it says you know it's not just capacity right maybe want to be thinking of a performance right how do I think about allocating performance how do I think about managing performance across different assets for example right so lot I mean this is what's exciting i think is once you start where we've started from which is at the hypervisor level you're at a natural architectural injection point to go and say we could take all of these pieces in and very efficiently go and manage them provide new functionality right that's a really interesting way as customers trying an SS like my date it may not just be here anymore right may be out here may be out there how do i go and get a handle on that that's true once you hit that inflection point where in the industry starts coming to you right that's right VMware's clearly hit that point and then some yeah interesting well we've had peanut butter policy we've had bodyguards i wish made more time to do morals of wisdom okay the big IT stop sign I like that too are you good thanks for joining this guy's thank you have a great show all right our coverage on the cube vmworld continues in just a moment here from Las Vegas