>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. >> All right, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Day 4 of coverage MWC 23. We've been talking all week about the disaggregation of the telco networks, how telcos need to increase revenue how they're not going to let the over the top providers do it again. They want to charge Netflix, right? And Netflix is punching back. There maybe are better ways to do revenue acceleration. We're going to talk to that topic with Dave Trigg who's the Global Vice President of Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. And Ken Burns, who's a global telecom partner, sales lead. Guys, good to see you. >> Good to see you. Great to be here. >> Dave, you heard my, you're welcome. You heard my intro. It's got to be better ways to, for the telcos to make money. How can they accelerate revenue beyond taxing Netflix? >> Yeah, well, well first of all, sort of the promise of 5G, and a lot of people talk about 5G as the enterprise G. Right? So the promise of 5G is to really help drive revenue enterprise use cases. And so, it's sort of the promise of the next generation of technology, but it's not easy to figure out how we monetize that. And so we think Dell has a pretty significant role to play. It's a CEO conversation for every telco and how they accelerate. And so it's an area we're investing heavily into three different areas for telcos. One is the IT space. Dell's done that forever. 90% of the companies leaning in on that. The other places network, network's more about cost takeout. And the third area where we're investing in is working with what we call their line of businesses, but it's really their business units, right? How can we sit down with them and really understand what services do they take to market? Where do they go? So, we're making significant investments. So one way they can do it is working with Dell and and we're making big investments 'cause in most Geos we have a fairly significant sales force. We've brought in an industry leader to help us put it together. And we're getting very focused on this space and, you know, looking forward to talking more about it. >> So Ken, you know, the space inside and out, we just had at AT&T on... >> Dave Trigg: Yep. >> And they were saying we have to be hypersensitive because of our platinum brand to the use of personal information. >> Ken: Yeah. >> So we're not going to go there yet. We're not going to go directly monetize, but yet I'm thinking well, Netflix knows what I'm watching and they're making recommendations and they're, and and that's how they make money. And so the, the telcos are, are shy about doing that for right reasons, but they want to make better offers. They want to put, put forth better bundles. You know, they don't, they don't want to spend all their time trying to figure that out and not being able to change when they need to change. So, so what is the answer? If they're not going to go toward that direct monetization of data? >> Ken: Yeah. >> How do they get there? >> So I, I joined Dell in- at the end of June and brought on, as David said, to, to build and lead this what we call the line of business strategy, right? And ultimately what it is is tying together Dell technology solutions and the best of breed of what the telecoms bring to bear to solve the business outcomes of our joint customers. And there's a few jewels inside of Dell. One of it is that we have 35,000 sellers out there all touching enterprise business customers. And we have a really good understanding of what those customer needs are and you know what their outcomes needs to be. The other jewel is we have a really good understanding of how to solve those business outcomes. Dell is an open company. We work with thousands of integrators, and we have a really good insight in terms of how to solve those business outcomes, right? And so in my conversations with the telecom companies when you talk about, you know combining the best assets of Dell with their capabilities and we're all talking to the same customers, right? And if we're giving them the same story on these solutions solving business outcomes it's a beautiful thing. It's a time to market. >> What's an example of a, of a, of a situation where you'll partner with telcos that's going to drive revenue for, for both of you and value for the customer? >> Yeah, great question. So we've been laser focused on four key areas, cyber, well, let me start off with connected laptops, cyber, private mobility, and edge. Right? Now, the last two are a little bit squishy, but I'll I'll get to that in a bit, right? Because ultimately I feel like with this 5G market, we could actually make the market. And the way that we've been positioning this is almost, almost on a journey for IOT. When we talk about laptops, right? Dell is the, is the number one company in the world to sell business laptops. Well, if we start selling connected laptops the telcos are starting to say, well, you know what? If all of those laptops get connected to my network, that's a ton of 5G activations, right? We have the used cases on why having a connected workforce makes sense, right? So we're sharing that with the telcos to not simply sell a laptop, but to sell the company on why it makes sense to have that connected workforce. >> Dave Vellante: Why does it make sense? It could change the end customer. >> Ken: Yeah. So, you know, I'm probably not the best to answer that one right? But, but ultimately, you know Dell is selling millions and millions of laptops out there. And, and again, the Verizon's, the AT&T's, the T-mobile's, they're seeing the opportunity that, you know, connecting those laptops, give those the 5G activations right? But Dave, you know, the way that we've been positioning this is it's not simply a laptop could be really a Trojan horse into this IOT journey. Because ultimately, if you sell a thousand laptops to an enterprise company and you're connecting a thousand of their employees, you're connecting people, right? And we can give the analytics around that, what they're using it for, you know, making sure that the security, the bios, all of that is up to date. So now that you're connecting their people you could open up the conversation to why don't we we connect your place and, you know, allowing the telecom companies to come in and educate customers and the Dell sales force on why a private 5G mobility network makes sense to connecting places. That's a great opportunity. When you connect the place, the next part of that journey is connecting things in that place. Robotics, sensors, et cetera, right? And, and so really, so we're on the journey of people, places, things. >> So they got the cyber angle angle in there, Dave. That, that's clear benefit. If you, you know, if you got all these bespoke laptops and they're all at different levels you're going to get, you know, you're going to get hacked anyway. >> Ken: That's right. >> You're going to get hacked worse. >> Yeah. I'm curious, as you go to market, do you see significant differences? You don't have to name any names, but I imagine that there are behemoths that could be laggards because essentially they feel like they're the toll booth and all they have to do is collect, keep collecting the tolls. Whereas some of the smaller, more nimble, more agile entities that you might deal with might be more receptive to this message. That seems to be the sort of way the circle of life are. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing the big ones? Are you seeing the, you know, the aircraft carriers realizing that we got to turn into the wind guys and if we don't start turning into the wind now we're going to be in trouble. >> So this conference has been absolutely fantastic allowing us to speak with, you know, probably 30 plus telecom operators around this strategy, right? And all of the big guys, they've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in their 5G network and they haven't really seen the ROI. So when we're coming into them with a story about how Dell can help monetize their 5G network I got to tell you they're pretty excited >> Dave Nicholson: So they're receptive? >> Oh my God. They are very receptive >> So that's the big question, right? I mean is, who's, is anybody ever going to make any money off of 5G? And Ken, you were saying that private mobility and edge are a little fuzzy but I think from a strategy standpoint I mean that is a potential gold mine. >> Yeah, but it, for, for lot of the telcos and most telcos it's a pretty significant shift in mentality, right? Cause they are used to selling sim cards to some degree and how many sim cards are they selling and how many, what other used cases? And really to get to the point where they understand the use case, 'cause to get into the enterprise to really get into what can they do to help power a enterprise business more wholly. They've got to understand the use case. They got to understand the more complete solution. You know, Dell's been doing that for years. And that's where we can bring our Salesforce, our capabilities, our understanding of the customer. 'cause even your original question around AT&T and trying to understand the data, that's just really a how do you get better understanding of your customer, right? >> Right. Absolutely. >> And, and combined we're better together 'cause we bring a more complete picture of understanding our customers and then how can we help them understand what the edge is. Cause nobody's ever bought an Edge, right? They're buying an Edge to get a business outcome. You know, back in the day, nobody ever bought a data lake, right? Like, you know, they're buying an outcome. They want to use, use that data lake or they want to use the edge to deliver something. They want to use 5G. And 5G has very real capabilities. It's got intrinsic security, which, you know a lot of the wifi doesn't. It's got guaranteed on time, you know, for areas where you can't lose connectivity: autonomous vehicles, et cetera. So it's got very real capabilities that helps deliver that outcome. But you got to be able to translate that into the en- enterprise language to help them solve a problem. And that's where we think we need the help of the telcos. I think the telcos we can help them as well and, and really go drive that outcome. >> So Dell's bringing its go to market expertise and its technology. The telcos obviously have the the connectivity piece and what they do. There's no overlap in terms of the... >> Yeah. >> The, the equipment and the software that you're selling. I mean, they're going to, they're going to take your equipment and create new networks. Beautiful. And, and it's interesting you, like, you think about how Dell has transformed prior to EMC, Dell was, you know, PC maker with a subpar enterprise business, right? Kind of a wannabe enterprise business. Sorry Dell, it's the truth. And then EMC was largely, you know, a company sold storage boxes, but you owned VMware and then brought those two together. Now all of a sudden you had Dell powerhouse leader and Michael Dell, you had VMware incredibly strategic and important and it got EMC with amazing go to market. All of a sudden this Dell, Dell technologies became incredibly attractive to CIOs, C-level executives, board level. And you've come out of that transition VMware's now a separate company, right? And now, but now you have these relationships and you got the shops to be able to go into these edge locations at companies And actually go partner with the telcos. And you got a very compelling value proposition. >> Well, it's been interesting as in, in this show, again most telcos think of Dell as a server provider, you know? Important, but not overly strategic in their journey. But as we've started to invest in this business we've started to invest in things like automation. We've brought together things in our Infra Blocks and then we help them develop revenue. We're not only helping 'em take costs out of their network we're not helping 'em take risk out of deploying that network. We're helping them accelerate the deployment of that network. And then we're helping 'em drive revenue. We are having, you know, they're starting to see us in a new light. Not done yet, but, you know, you can start to see, one, how they're looking at Dell and two, and then how we can go to market. And you know, a big part of that is helping 'em drive and generate revenue. >> Yeah. Well, as, as a, as a former EMC person myself, >> Yeah? >> I will assert that that strategic DNA was injected into Dell by the acquisition of, of EMC. And I'm sticking... >> I won't say that. Okay I'll believe you on that. >> I'm sticking with the story. And it makes sense when you think about moving up market, that's the natural thing. What's, what's what's nearly impossible is to say, we sell semi-trucks but we want to get into the personal pickup truck market. That's that, that doesn't work. Going the other way works. >> Dave Trigg: Yeah. >> Now, now back to the conversation that you had with, with, with AT&T. I'm not buying this whole, no offense to AT&T, but I'm not buying this whole story that, you know, oh we're concerned about our branded customer data. That sounds like someone who's a little bit too comfortable with their existing revenue stream. If I'm out there, I want to be out partnering with folks who are truly aggressive about, about coming up with the next cool thing. You guys are talking about being connected in a laptop. Someone would say, well I got wifi. No, no, no. I'm thinking I want to sim in my laptop cause I don't want to screw around with wifi. Okay, fine. If I know I'm going to be somewhere with excellent wifi connectivity, great. But most of the time it's not excellent. >> That's right. >> So the idea that I could maybe hit F2 and have it switch over to my sim and know that anywhere that I've got coverage, I have high speed connections. Just the convenience of that. >> Ken: Absolutely. >> I'd pay extra for that as an end user consumer. >> Absolutely. >> And I pay for the service. >> Like I tell you, if it interests AT&T I think it's more not, they ask, they're comfortable. They don't know how to monetize that data. Now, of course, AT&T has a media >> Dave Nicholson: Business necessity is the mother of invention. If they don't see the necessity then they're not going to think about it. >> It's a mentality shift. Yes, but, but when you start talking about private mobility and edge, there's there's no concern about personal information there. You're going in with basically a business transformation. Hey, your, your business is, is not, not digital. It's not automated. Now we're going to automate that and digitize that. It's like the, the Dell booth with the beer guys. >> Right. >> You saw that, right? >> I mean that's, I mean that's a simple application. Yeah, a perfect example of how you network and use this technology. >> I mean, how many non-digital businesses are that that need to go digital? >> Dave Nicholson: Like, hundred percent of them. >> Everyone. >> Dave Nicholson: Pretty much. >> Yeah. And this, and this jewel that we have inside of Dell our global industries group, right, where we're investing really heavily in terms of what is the manufacturing industry looking for retail, finance, et cetera. So we have a CTO that came in, that it would be the CTO of manufacturing that gives us a really good opportunity to go to at AT&T or to Verizon or any telco out there, right? To, to say, these are the outcomes. There's Dell technology already in place. How do we connect it to your network? How do we leverage your assets, your manager professional services to provide a richer experience? So it's, there's, you said before Dave, there's really no overlap between Dell and, and our telecom partners. >> You guys making some serious investments here. I mean I, I've been, I was been critical over the years of, hey, you can't just take an X86 block, put a name on it that says edge something and throw it over the fence because that's what you were doing. >> Dave Trigg: And we would agree. >> Yeah. Right. But, of course, but that's all you had at the time. And so you put some... >> We may not have agreed then, but we would agree. >> You bought, brought some people in, you know, like Ken, who really know the business. You brought people into the technical side and you can really see it happening. It's not going to happen overnight. You know, I mean, you know if I were an investor in Dell, I'd be like, okay when are you going to start making money at this business? I'd be like, be patient. You know, it's going to take some time but look at the TAM. >> Yep. >> You know, you guys do a good, good TAM. Tennis is a pro at this stuff. >> We've been at, we've been at this two, three years and we're just now coming with some real material products. You've seen our server line really start to get more purpose-built, really start to get in there as we've started to put out some software that allows for quicker automation, quicker deployments. We have some telcos that are using it to deploy at 10,000 locations. They're literally turning up thousands of locations a week. And so yeah, we're starting to put out some real capability. Got a long way to go. A lot of exciting things on the roadmap. But to your point, it doesn't, you know the ship doesn't turn overnight, you know. >> It could be a really meaningful portion of Dell's business. I'm, I'm excited for the day that Tom Sweet starts reporting on it. Here's our telco business. Yeah. The telco business. But that's not going to happen overnight. But you know, Dell's pretty good at things like ROI. And so you guys do a lot of planning a lot of TAM analysis, a lot of technical analysis, bringing the ecosystem together. That's what this business needs. I, I just don't, it's, it feels unstoppable. You know, you're at this show everybody recognizes the need to open up. Some telcos are moving faster than others. The ones that move faster are going to disrupt. They're going to probably make some mistakes, you know but they're going to get there first. >> Well we've, we've seen the disruptors are making some mistakes and are kind of re- they're already at the phase where they're reevaluating, you know, their approach. Which is great. You know, you, you learn and adjust. You know, you run into a wall, you, you make a turn. And the interesting thing, one of the biggest learnings I've taken out of the show is talking to a bunch of the telcos that are a little bit more of the laggards. They're like, Nope, we, we don't believe in open. We don't think we can do it. We don't have the skillset. They're maybe in a geo that it's hard to find the skillset. As they've been talking to us, and we've been talking about, there's almost a glimmer of hope. They're not convinced yet, but they're like, well wait, maybe we can do this. Maybe open, you know, does give us choice. Maybe it can help us accelerate revenue. So it's been interesting to see a little bit of the, just a little bit, but a little bit of that shift. >> We all remember at 2010, 2011, you talked to banks and financial services companies about, the heck, the Cloud is happening, the Cloud's going to take over the world. We're never going to go into the Cloud. Now they're the biggest, you know Capital One's launching Cloud businesses, Western Union, I mean, they're all in the cloud, right? I mean, it's the same thing's going to happen here. Might, it might take a different pattern. Maybe it takes a little longer, but it's, it's it's a fate are completely >> I was in high school then, so I don't remember all that. >> Sorry, Dave. >> Wow, that was a low blow, like you know? >> But, but the, but the one thing that is for sure there's money to be made convincing people to get off of the backs of the dinosaurs they're riding. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> And also, the other thing that's a certainty is that it's not easy. And because it's not easy, there's opportunity there. So I know, I know it's, it, it, it, it, it all sounds great to talk about the the wonderful vision of the future, but I know how hard the the road is that you have to go down to get people, especially if you're comfortable with the revenue stream, if you're comfortable running the plumbing. If you're so comfortable that you can get up on stage and say, I want more money from you to pump your con- your content across my network. I love the Netflix retort, right Dave? >> Yeah, totally Dave. And, but the, the other thing is, telco's a great business. It's, they got monopolies that print money. So... >> Dave Nicholson: It's rational. It's rational. I understand. >> There's less of an incentive to move but what's going to be the incentive is guys like Dish Network coming in saying, we're going to, we're going to disrupt, we're going to build new apps. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> Well and it's, you know, revenue acceleration, the board level, the CEO level know that they have to, you know, do things different. But to your point, it's just hard, and there's so much gravity there. There's hundreds of years literally of gravity of how they've operated their business. To your point, a lot of them, you know, lot- most of 'em were regulated and most Geos around the world at one point, right? They were government owned or government regulated entities. It's, it's a big ship to turn and it's really hard. We're not claiming we can help them turn the ship overnight but we think we can help evolve them. We think we can go along with the journey and we do think we are better together. >> IT the network and the line of business. Love the strategy. Guys, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> All right, for Dave, Nicholson, Dave Vellante here, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio banging out all the news, keep it right there. TheCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back.

(bright upbeat music) >> Now welcome back to theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent 22, or of course in the Venetian here in Las Vegas. It's Wednesday day, I guess two and a half of the show. Things are going really well here and we're going to move our attention now to banking and tech like so many other verticals that financial industry making huge moves with their digital plays. And we're going to talk about that with a couple of guys that know what that is all about. Ken Meyer, chief Information and Experience Officer at Truist. Ken, good to see you, sir. >> Good to have me. Thank you very much. >> It is. And Gys Hyman, who is a principal at Deloitte the lead though for a converge prosperity we'll explain that in just a second. Hi, it's good to see you as well. >> Nice, yeah. Awesome having me. >> Right, so jump in on that for a converge prosperity so we understand what the product is and or what the opportunity is for what Deloitte brought to market for what folks like Truist are putting into practice. >> Yeah, so converge prosperity is really our focus where we building solutions production reduced solutions for the financial services industry. So if you think about the demand on the bank side right now is they want to launch new products, new services those innovative products and services that they want to take to market. And they also want to modernize, a lot of their sort of legacy infrastructure and modernize some of the components within their architecture. So we, together with AWS actually, are co-investing sort of in a multi-year strategy where we're saying, let's build these solutions that we can take to market that can sort of help these banks be more agile, launch products faster to market and also help address the modernization journey for the banks. And that's really sitting within the converged prosperity business unit within Deloitte. >> And Ken, for you, what was the attraction or what is the attraction in terms of that kind of an offering? >> Well, I think when you think about the banking journey to the Cloud, a lot of folks look on the channel experiences and they've leveraged Cloud to create differentiated experiences that are just... They couldn't build before with the speed of the scale and everything else. But, the challenges that many banks have is once you get below that layer there's a lot of legacy type technology that lives in the product offerings that we all offer. So, the idea of these folks or others that are trying to make that a little bit easier to kind of connect that front end to that backend all with the true modern stack is something that's differentiated. >> Yeah, if I hear pulling this big old weight along with me right? >> That's right. >> I've got all this old stuff but I still have to use some of the old stuff. >> Well, and some of the old stuff works, right? It runs. So, why would you want to mess up anything that's running? And so even that if these folks and others can find ways to start breaking it into more modular pieces so we can consume things differently than we've done before versus take that big old elephant on every time, it's a differentiator. >> So what's the trick then in making sure that what is new is working with what is old? Because what is new these days, obviously you know, faster, sleek, or, I mean, we go on and on as opposed to what you were working with in Legacy. So what's the trick there, Gys in making sure that you're doing the right match up? >> It's part of the approach. I mean, you can either do a big bang approach which is sort of lengthy and high risk for the bank which is obviously we don't see a lot of appetite in the banks to take the big bang approach or the large transformational approach. And then the approach that we sort of take to this is to say, and that we're seeing that success in the market is around more a phased approach which we call on the edge, is really to say, how can we launch something on the side, and take that to market really quick to show the benefit to the business and demonstrate success. And at the same time have a really sort of modular architecture that you can say, you don't have to have this monolith solution that you need to plug or replace your existing one. That you can really sort of componentize that and say which are the components that we want to start replacing in a phased approach, with these new next generation technologies, which, yeah. >> The part that he mentioned there at the end on module architecture is a 100% the key, right? I mean, architecture matters probably now more than ever. When you're trying to stitch all these things to together and you can find ways to make it a little bit more seamless versus some of the monoliths that we've dealt with in the past, it's extremely helpful. >> So, give us some examples here for what your experience has been then. >> Yeah... >> 'I mean, you are as I see you're the experience officer, so, (all laughing) >> We'll leave that one alone, (all laughing loudly) but now, I mean I think some of the on the edge stuff that Gys has been talking about, we're a large bank, we have subsidiaries we have a subsidiary, which is our national lending platform and LightStream as an example. And we decided to say, Hey let's really learn from what we could do with a more modern core banking platform. And we ultimately stood that up in production and we're close to going generally available but we've got production accounts on modern core platforms that we're learning every day from. And it's not just the learning on the tech side, that tech side might be the easy part, to be honest. The change in this technology and the different technologies that are available it really is impacting how we run our operations. So moving from batch processing which has always been how banks operate to this concept of real time processing, that's a big step. And not only does it change in the operations and how we service our clients but now you got to think about compliance, right? And legal and all of the the risk elements, >> 'security changing. >> Security, all that. It's all a part of that change. So you could say that the tech is really hard and it's difficult and we got to look at the architecture but at the end of the day, it's about bringing the entire organization back to the table to say how do we do this different? And how do we create a better experience and create new value for our clients through the technology. >> All right, can you gimme an example though? I mean, about some... What's going to be the biggest change you think then? >> I think operationally is the biggest change, in my opinion. I mean, when you start thinking about the way in which we've worked for years around this concept of batch processing, so, you know, yes, you make a deposit at your branch and that's really nice and we might credit you and you do the memo post but it doesn't clear until the night runs and you finish your batch process, at 3:00 AM and then all your downstream systems run and all of that. And even the concept of collecting checks, right? And thinking about all the item processing aspects of that when you start talking about real time and it immediately you make your deposit and immediately balances your general ledger and it clears and it's all right there at that point in time, all of those processes go away, right? The batch processes change the way in which all the downstream impacts for reporting and analytics and all of those things, it all changes. And so that can be really scary, but it also can be really exciting when you think about creating new products and new services that are truly real time and changing the way in which we operate with our clients. >> So scary and exciting, right? A couple of moods or situations that maybe some folks in banking don't want to be in, right? I don't like scary. I want here... >> Well change is scary for a lot of people right? But there's an evolution in this space. >> Gys, what are you seeing with your experiences in terms of... >> 'i think that it also creates opportunity to sort of (clears throat) to lay the foundation of how do you coexist between the old world and the new world? And these modern technologies really allow you to sort of, put a event driven platform in place to say, understand that the banking world is fairly batch driven right now as Ken's comment and also the broader banking ecosystem is still batch driven but it allows us to put a platform in place to say how do we coexist with that batch environment and the real time environment? And the other thing that the banks are trying to do is they're trying to work with a number of sort of the fintechs out there in the market, these leading fintechs that are offering new products and services that they can embed into their offering and then offer as a service to their customers at the end of the day. But doing that with existing banking technology is difficult because it's not as modular, it's not as open. These next generation technologies and certainly the solution that we building with AWS is really sort of that power strip or that fabric layer where we are allowing fintechs to plug in easier into that ecosystem and into the bank's ecosystem as well. >> Yeah, I think with Goldman Sachs is that what I read is that one that comes to mind about repurposing and making it available to their client base. >> They certainly building a platform model where they're bringing other ecosystem partners into their platform and then they're offering out as business services to their customers. >> So, Ken how do you get buy in on this? I mean, because, it sure looks good on paper, right? But when it comes to time actually execute and implement, you need, you know, buy in for more than just your slice of the business, right? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of different elements that come into getting that buy in and kind of making that leap and starting to experiment. One is our clients, right? So our clients are demanding new products, new services they don't expect things like maintenance windows and other, like they want what they want when they want it. So if you're listening to your clients and they want more product innovation and they want everything available when they need it that's clear. Cloud and security, we've... Everything that we've ever done when it comes to moving workloads or building experiences with the Cloud has been by continuing to increase our security posture. So we can create a more secure environment and a more available environment because we've have deployments that are spanning different regions and they're continuously available, and the automation and the speed in which we can go to market. I mean, when you can create a new product and launch a new product in weeks versus months or years in the past with all of the complexity and create simplicity while also using modern capabilities to create intelligent experiences, that's a game changer. And it's hard to argue with it but I think the other part of it that's a reality is that we're facing a really interesting time where there's not a whole lot of COBAL programmers laying around these days. And so at some point there's going to be a workforce issue. >> Skills gap. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. So looking at it with through your Deloitte lens, then I mean, that's a very real threat, right? Is it not to all of a sudden, not a regression but certainly a delay in progress, (chuckles) how do we overcome that as far as training and skills and whatever? >> We believe that this on the edge approach also, the other benefit to the bank is it allows the benefit to sort of test and learn a little bit with these new technologies. These new Cloud native, Cloud based technologies are very different, you know, different skill set that you need in the design side and the build side and also in the maintain and operate side. But it allows the bank to sort of take more of a phased approach and sort of get the training wheels around the skills, get comfortable around how these different platforms work, and how do you slowly sort of phase that into the organization, which makes a big difference. >> So what's the training part of that then? I mean, what does that look like? >> It's training at the engineering level to say there are a new set of tools. You know if you think about the Cloud the infrastructure layer, those technologies are very different from, servicing the on-prem technologies that the banks are used to servicing. So that's certainly at the engineering level there's a difference in training, but there's also a different training required at how do you configure and work with these new next generation, core platforms, which opens up a whole set of opportunities of what are the types of financial services products that the banks can take to market, but they work very differently than your sort of your traditional more monolithic technologies. And then I think the bigger area, as Ken mentioned is on the servicing side, the bank has now got a say we are now introducing a new solution together with an old solution, and how do we coexist and how do we create a servicing layer for the customer to have that sort of consistent experience across all the new but also your middle office and your back office and your front office, people have got to work on this platform and how do you not give them a broken experience in the... >> 'well, and your clients don't care about what your black end platforms look like. >> All right. That's right. >> So you want to be able to, it's kind of it's do it on the device, right? It doesn't matter what if it's a hundred years old or if it's 10 days old, it doesn't matter. >> Right, right. You talked about the modular configurations, right? Are some more critical than others? I mean, not knowing what that looks like or have you been able to give feedback on the converged prosperity side, say, you know, fine tune... >> 'i give a lot of feedback. >> Okay, (all laughing loudly). >> We won't do his review right now. >> All right, all right, good. All right, so let's not do... >> 'no, I think that we've done a lot of learning together throughout all of these processes because before they had this really fancy converge prosperity thing we were just working together, right? And we've been able to learn along the way and there's some learnings that are great for us and there's other things that they can tailor for a broader set of clients, which is great. I mean that's what the partnerships about is continuing to learn together and Gys and his team have been phenomenal partners. As we think about being very, very intentional about how we launch products on these new platforms we give a lot of feedback on, Hey these are areas that might be really important for you to think about as you look to build out your side of the platform. And some of those things we might consume some of those things we might not, and that's okay. But for us it's about truly partnering and doing that test and learn and trying to learn about how does this impact all of the downstream stuff because it's not just about technology, although we like to think it is every once in a while this is about clients. And so you got to continue to put them in the front and then similarly, our teammates that we have because they're servicing those clients on the front lines every day. >> Yeah, they'll tell you if it's working. >> 'they will tell you. >> 'you'll know right away. >> Absolutely. >> See what kind of use we have going on here and... >> 'a 100%. >> And if something's broken or not. Just real quick about the relationship going forward then, like you've launched converged prosperity, right? It's been out in the marketplace less than a year, but you got it up and running, things are going well. When you hear feedback like this from Ken and others what kind of fine tunings going on in here with you? And then from your side of the equation too what do you want more of? What do you want to see more of here in 2023? >> Yeah, I mean we work with sort of the non-traditional banks out there. So we work with FinTech that want to launch banking offerings. So there are a lot of lessons that we learn from them in terms of what are the features and capabilities that they're looking for. We work with some of the larger banks that are saying, we want to be more modular in terms of how we consume the banking suite solution. We don't want to take sort of an end-to-end proposition. We really want to take selective components of that banking suite solution and embed it into our existing or new infrastructure. And I think the lessons for us is really just around what are the new customer capabilities that their customers are looking for that we should be building for in our platform. I think the other thing that you need to look at is these next generation core banking platforms they are like any new software business they are growing, they are learning and they are maturing. So you are also looking for customers that have the appetite to grow with some of those and whose product roadmap aligns with those vendors out there. So, I guess for us, it's important to work with partners that are willing to work with us and walk that journey. But we also feel that these technologies and solutions are really.... Banks are moving past design, past thinking, they are really now thinking about how do we start implementing and making it real and how do we take that initial use case sort of to market out there. >> Yeah, I would say, if I simplify what Gys and team have done they've taken modernization of commodity services, right? So, banks don't want to just go out and build commodities all the time, right? That's not how we're going to differentiate. So we need to be thinking about what are the different ways that we can create a competitive advantage against everybody else who has, a lot of different and similar products and service offerings. So, if we can continue to look and help influence roadmaps and also consume some of those types of services that are truly commoditized, and we can go focus on the modernization of the areas that are the biggest possible competitive advantages for us then there's a lot of value in that type of value problem. >> I know we didn't have time for this, but do you have a pick by the way, in the national championship in college football? >> I'm a dog. >> I know you are, (laughing loudly). >> I'm a dog. >> How about them dogs? >> How about them dogs? >> All right, thanks for the time guys. >> Thanks much. >> Really do appreciate it much. Really great session. Talking about banking and what's going on at the bottom really is AWS, driving things and making it happen. All right, you've been watching the Cube, of course. The leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello friends and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022 from the Venetian Expo in Vegas, baby. This show is absolutely packed. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, Dave this is day two, but really full day one of our wall to wall coverage on theCUBE. We've had great conversations the last half day this morning already, we've been talking with a lot of companies, a lot of Amazonians and some Amazonians that have left and gone on to interesting more things, which is what we're going to talk about next. >> Well, I'm excited about this segment because it's a really interesting space. You've got a search company who's gotten into observability and security and through our ETR partner our research, we do quarterly research and Elastic off the charts. Obviously they're the public company, so you can see how well they're doing. But the spending momentum on this platform is very, very strong and it has been consistently for quite some time. So really excited to learn more. >> The voice of the customer speaking loudly, from Elastic, its Chief Product Officer joins us, Ken Exner. Ken, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you, good to be here. >> Dave Vellante: Hey Ken. >> So a lot of us know about Elastic from Elastic Search but it's so much more than that these days. Talk about Elastic, what's going on now? What's the current product strategy? What's your vision? >> Yeah. So people know Elastic from the ELK Stack, you know Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana. Very, very popular open source projects. They've been used by millions of developers for years and years. But one of the things that we started noticing over the years is that people were using it for all kinds of different use cases beyond just traditional search. So people started using Elastic Search to search through operational data, search through logs, search through all kinds of other types of data just to find different answers. And what we started realizing is the customers were taking us into different spaces. They took us into log analytics they started building log management solutions. And we said, cool, we can actually help these customers by providing solutions that already do this for them. So it took us into observability, they took us into security, and we started building solutions for security and observability based on what customers were starting to do with the platform. So customers can still use the platform for any number of different use cases for how do you get answers added data or they can use our pre-built packaged solutions for observability and security. >> So you were a longtime Amazonian. >> I was. I was. >> Talk a little bit about some of the things that you did there and what attracted you to Elastic? 'Cause it's only been a couple months, right? >> I've been here three months, I think three months as of yesterday. And I was at AWS for 16 years. So I was there a long, long time. I was there pretty much from the beginning. I was hired as one of the first product managers in AWS. Adam Selipsky hired me. And it was a great run. I had a ton of fun, I learned a lot. But you know, after 16 years I was kind of itching to do something new and it was going to take something special because I had a great gig and enjoyed the team at AWS. But I saw in Elastic sort of a great foundational technology they had a lot of momentum, a huge community behind it. I saw the business opportunity where they were going. I saw, you know the business opportunity of observability and security. These are massive industries with tons of business problems. Customers are excited about trying to get more answers out of data about their operational environment. And I saw, you know, that customers were struggling with their operating environments and things were becoming increasingly complicated. We used to talk in AWS about, you know how customers want to move from monolithic applications to monoliths, but one of the secrets was that things were increasingly complicated. Suddenly people had all these different microservices they had all these different managed services and their operating environment got complicated became this constellation of different systems, all emitting data. So companies like Elastic were helping people find answers in that data, find the problems with their systems so helping tame that complexity. So I saw that opportunity and I said I want to jump on that. Great foundational technology, good community and building solutions that actually helped solve real problems. >> Right. >> So, before you joined you probably looked back, and said, let think about the market, what's happening in the market space. What were the big trends that you saw that sort of informed your decision? >> Well, just sort of the mountain of data that was sort of emerging. Adam Selipsky in his talk this morning began by talking about how data is just multiplying constant. And I saw this, I saw how much data businesses were drowning in. Operational data, security data. You know, if you're trying to secure your business you have all these different endpoints you have all these different devices, you have different systems that you need to monitor all tons of data. And companies like Elastic were helping companies sort of manage that complexity, helping them find answers in that. So, when you're trying to track intruders or trying to track you know, malicious activity, there's a ton of different systems you need to pay attention to. And you know, there's a bunch of data. It's different devices, laptops and phone devices and stuff that you need to pay attention to. And you find correlations across that to figure out what is going on in your network, what is going on in your business. And that was exciting to me. This is a company sort of tackling one of the hardest problems which is helping you understand your operating environment, helping you understand and secure your business. >> So everybody's getting into observability. >> Yep. >> Right, it's a very crowded space right now. First of all, you know it's like overnight it just became the hottest thing going. VCs were throwing money at it. Why was that and how were you guys different? >> Well, we began by focusing on log analytics because that was the core of what we were doing. But customers started using it beyond log analytics and started using it for APM and started using it for performance data. And what we realized is that we could do all this for customers. So we ended up, sort of overnight over the course of three years building that a complete observe observability suite. So you can do APM, you can do profiling, you can do tracing, sort of distributed tracing, you can do synthetic monitoring everything you want to do, wheel user wondering. >> Metrics? >> All of it, metrics, all of it. And you can use the same system for this. So this was sort of a powerful concept, not only is it the best in leading log system, it also provides everything you need for complete observability. And because it's based on this open platform you can extend it to a number of different scenarios. So this is important, a lot of the different observability companies provide you something that's sort of packaged and as long as you're trying to do what it wants to support, it's great. But with Elastic, you have this flexible data architecture that you can use for anything. So companies use it to monitor assembly lines, they use it to monitor dish networks, for example use it to not only manage their fleet of servers they also use it to manage all their devices. So 25 million desktop devices. So, you know, observability systems like that that can do a number of different scenarios, I think that's a powerful thing. It's not just about how do you manage your servers how do you manage the things that are simple. It's how do you manage anything? How do you get observability into anything. >> Multiple use cases. >> Sorry, when you say complete, okay you talked about all the different APM, log analytics tracing, metrics, and also end-to-end. >> Ken Exner: End-to-end, yeah. >> Could you talk about that component of complete? >> So, if you're trying to find an issue like you have some metric that goes into alarm. You want to have a metric system that has alarming. Once that metric goes in alarm you're going to want to dig into your log. So you're going to want it to take you to the area of your logs that has that issue. Once you gets to there, you're going to want to find the trace ID that takes you to your traces and looks at sort of profiling, distributed tracing information. So a system that can do all of that end-to-end is a powerful solution. So it not only helps you track things end-to-end across the different signals that you're monitoring, but it actually helps you remediate more quickly. And the other thing that Elastic does that is unique is a lot of ML in this. So not only helping you find the information but surfacing things before you even know of them. So anomaly detection for example, helps you know about something before you even realize that there was an issue. So you should pay attention to this because it's anomalous. So a lot of systems help you find something if you know what to look for. But we're trying to help you not only find the things that you know to look for, but help you find the things that you didn't even think to know about. >> And it's fair to say one of your differentiators is you're open, open source. I mean, maybe talk about the ELK stack a little bit and how that plays. >> Yeah, well, so the great thing about this is we've extended that openness to both security and to observability. An example of this on the security side is all the detection rules that you use for looking for intrusion all the detection rules are open source and there's an entire community around this. So if you wanted to create a detection rule you can publish an open source, there's a bunch in GitHub you can benefit from what the community is doing as well. So in the world of security you want to be supported by the entire community, everyone looking for the same kind of issues. And there's an entire community around Elastic that is helping support these detection rules. So that approach, you know wanting to focus on community is differentiating for us. Not just, we got you covered as long you use things from us you can use it from the entire community. >> Well there implies the name Elastic. >> Yeah >> Talk a little bit about the influence that the customer has in the product roadmap and the direction. You've talked a little bit in the beginning about customers were leading us in different directions. It sounds very Amazonian in terms of following the customers where they go. >> It does, it actually does, it was one of the things that resonated for me personally is the journey that Elastic took to observability and security was customer led. So, we started looking at what customers were doing and realized that they were taking us into log analytics they were taking us into APM, they were taking us into these different solutions, and yeah, it is an Amazonian thing, so it resonated for me personally. And they're going to continue taking us in new places. Like we love seeing all the novel things that customers do with the platform and it's sort of one of the hallmarks of a great platform is you can have all kinds of novel things that, novel use cases for how people use your platform and we'll continue to see things and we may get taken into other solutions as well as we start seeing things emerge, like common patterns. But for now we're really excited about security and observability. >> So what do you see, so security's a big space, right? >> Yep. >> You see the optiv taxonomy and it makes your eyes bleed 'cause there's so many tools in there. Where do you fit in that taxonomy? How do you see and think about the security space and the opportunity for your customers? >> Yeah, so we began with logs in the security space as well. So SIEM, which is intrusion detection is based on aggregating a bunch of logs and helping you do threat hunting on those logs. So looking for patterns of malicious behavior or intrusion. So we started there and we did both detections as well as just ad hoc threat hunting. But then we started expanding into endpoint protection. So if we were going to have agents on all these different devices they were gathering logs, what if we also started providing remediation. So if you had malicious activity that was happening on one of the servers, don't just grab the information quarantine it, isolate it. So that took us into sort of endpoint protection or XDR. And then beyond that, we recently got into cloud security as well. So similar to observability, we started with logs but expanded to a full suite so that you can do everything. You can have both endpoint protection, you can have cloud security, all of it from one solution. >> Security is a very crowded market as well. What's your superpower? >> Ken Exner: What's our super power? >> Yeah. >> I think it, a lot of it is just the openness. It's the open platform, there's the community around it. People know and love the, the Elastic Search ELK stack and use it, we go into businesses all the time and they're familiar, their security engineers are using our product for searching through logs. So they're familiar with the product already and the community behind it. So they were excited about being able to use detection rules from other businesses and stay on top of that and be part of that community. The transparency of that is important to the customers. So if you're trying to be the most secure place, the most secure business, you want to basically invest in a community that's going to support that and not be alone in that. >> Right, absolutely, so much that rides on that. Favorite customer example that you think really articulates the value of Elastic, its openness, its transparency. >> Well, there's a customer Dish Media Dish Networks that's going to present here at re:Invent tomorrow at 1:45 at Mandalay Bay. I'm excited about their example because they use it to manage, I think it's 10 billion records a day across 25 million devices. So it illustrates the scale that we can support for managing observability for a company but also just sort of the unique use cases. We can use this for set top boxes for all their customers and they can track the performance that those customers are having. It's a unique case that a lot of vendors couldn't support but we can support because of the openness of the platform, the open data architecture that we have. So I think it illustrates the scale that we support, the elasticity, but also the openness of the data platform. >> Awesome and folks can catch that tomorrow, 1:45 PM at the Mandalay Bay. Last question for you, Ken, is you have a bumper sticker. >> Ken Exner: A bumper sticker? >> A bumper sticker you're going to put it on your fancy sexy new car and it's about elastic, what does it say? >> Helping you get answers out of data. So yeah. >> Love it, love it. Brilliant. >> Ken Exner: Thank you. >> Short and sweet. Ken, it's been a pleasure. >> It's been a pleasure being here, thank you. >> Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us as an Amazonian now into Elastic what Elastic is doing from a product perspective. We will keep our eyes peeled as Dave was saying. >> Ken Exner: Fantastic. >> The data show is really strong spending momentum so well done. >> Thank you very much, good to meet you. >> Our pleasure. For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>How do y'all and welcome back to the cube where we're live from Dallas at a Supercomputing 2022. My name is Savannah Peterson. Joined with L AED today, as well as some very exciting guests talking about one of my favorite and most complex topics out there, talking about quantum a bit today. Please welcome Ken and Matthew. Thank you so much for reading here. Matthew. Everyone's gonna be able to see your shirt. What's going on with hybrid quantum? I have >>To ask. Wait, what is hybrid quantum? Yeah, let's not pretend that. >>Let's not >>Pretend that everybody knows, Everyone already knows what quantum computing is if we goes straight to highway. Yeah. Okay. So with the brief tour detour took qu regular quantum computing. Yeah, >>No, no. Yeah. Let's start with quantum start before. >>So you know, like regular computers made of transistors gives us ones and zeros, right? Binary, like you were talking about just like half of the Cheerios, right? The joke, it turns out there's some problems that even if we could build a computer as big as the whole universe, which would be pretty expensive, >>That might not be a bad thing, but >>Yeah. Yeah. Good for Dell Got mill. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. We wouldn't be able to solve them cuz they scale exponentially. And it turns out some of those problems have efficient solutions in quantum computing where we take any two state quantum system, which I'll explain in a sec and turn it into what we call a quantum bit or qubit. And those qubits can actually solve some problems that are just infeasible on even these world's largest computers by offering exponential advantage. And it turns out that today's quantum computers are a little too small and a little too noisy to do that alone. So by pairing a quantum computer with a classical computer, hence the partnership between IQ and Dell, you allow each kind of compute to do what it's best at and thereby get answers you can't get with either one alone. >>Okay. So the concept of introducing hybridity, I love that word bridge. I dunno if I made it up, but it's it for it. Let's about it. Abri, ding ding. So does this include simulating the quantum world within the, what was the opposite? The classical quantum world? Classical. Classical, classical computer. Yeah. So does it include the concept of simulating quantum in classical compute? >>Absolutely. >>Okay. How, how, how do, how do you do that? >>So there's simulators and emulators that effectively are programmed in exactly the same way that a physical quantum machine is through circuits translated into chasm or quantum assembly language. And those are the exact same ways that you would program either a physical q p or a simulated >>Q p. So, so access to quantum computing today is scarce, right? I mean it's, it's, it's, it's limited. So having the ability to have the world at large or a greater segment of society be able to access this through simulation is probably a good idea. >>Fair. It's absolutely a wonderful one. And so I often talk to customers and I tell them about the journey, which is hands on keyboard, learning, experimentation, building proof of concepts, and then finally productization. And you could do much of that first two steps anyway very robustly with simulation. >>It's much like classical computing where if you imagine back in the fifties, if, if the cube was at some conference in 1955, you know, we wouldn't have possibly been able to predict what we'd be doing with computing 70 years later, right? Yeah. That teenagers be making apps on their phones that changed the world, right? And so by democratizing access this way, suddenly we can open up all sorts of new use cases. We sort of like to joke, there's only a couple hundred people in the world who really know how to program quantum computers today. And so how are we gonna make thousands, tens of thousands, millions of quantum programmers? The answer is access and simulators are an amazingly accessible way for everyone to start playing around with the >>Fields. Very powerful tool. >>Wow. Yeah. I'm just thinking about how many, there's, are there really only hundreds of people who can program quantum computing? >>I kind of generally throw it out there and I say, you know, if you looked at a matrix of a thousand operations with hundreds of qubits, there's probably, I don't know, 2000 people worldwide that could program that type of a circuit. I mean it's a fairly complex circuit at that point and >>I, I mean it's pretty phenomenal When you think about how early we are in adoption and, and the rollout of this technology as a whole, can you see quite a bit as, as you look across your customer portfolio, what are some of the other trends you're seeing? >>Well, non quantum related trends or just any type you give us >>Both. >>Yeah. So >>We're a thought leader. This is >>Your moment. Yeah, so we do quite a bit. We see quite a bit actually. There's a lot of work happening at the edge as you're probably well aware of. And we see a lot of autonomous mobile robots. I actually lead the, the research office. So I get to see all the cool stuff that's really kind of emerging before it really regrets >>What's coming next. >>Let's see, Oh, I can't tell you what's coming next, but we see edge applications. Yes, we see a lot of, of AI applications and artificial intelligence is morphing dramatically through the number of frameworks and through the, the types and places you would place ai, even places I, I personally never thought we would go like manufacturing environments. Some places that were traditionally not very early adopters. We're seeing AI move very quickly in some of those areas. One of the areas that I'm really excited about is digital twins and the ability to eventually do, let's come up on acceleration with quantum technologies on, on things like computational fluid dynamics. And I think it's gonna be a wonderful, wonderful area for us moving forward. >>So, So I can hear the people screaming at the screen right now. Wait a minute, You said it was hybrid, you're only talking the front half. That's, that's cat. What about the back half? That's dog. What about the quantum part of it? So I, on Q and, and I apologize. Ion Q >>Ion >>Q, Yeah Ion Q cuz you never know. You never never know. Yeah. Where does the actual quantum come in? >>That's a great >>Question. So you guys have one of these things. >>Yeah, we've built, we currently have the world's best quantum computer by, by sub measures I drop there. Yeah, no big deal. Give me some snaps for that. Yeah, Ken knows how to pick em. Yeah, so right. Our, our approach, which is actually based on technology that's 50 years old, so it's quite, quite has a long history. The way we build atomic clocks is the basis for trapped eye quantum computing. And in fact the first quantum logic gate ever made in 1995 was at NIST where they modified their atomic clock experiment to do quantum gates. And that launched really the hardware experimentalist quantum Peter Revolution. And that was by Chris Monroe, our co-founder. So you know that history has flown directly into us. So to simplify, we start with an ion trap. Imagine a gold block with a bunch of electrodes that allow you to make precisely shaped electromagnetic fields, sort of like a rotating saddle. >>Then take a source of atoms. Now obviously we're all sources of atoms. We have a highly purified source of metal atium. We heat it up, we get a nice hot plume of atoms, we ionize those atoms with an ionizing later laser. Now they're hot and heavy and charged. So we can trap them in one of these fields. And now our electromagnetic field that's spitting rapidly holds the, the ions like balls in a bowl if you can imagine them. And they line up in a nice straight line and we hold them in place with these fields and with cooling laser beams. And up to now, that's how an atomic clock works. Trap an item and shine it with a laser beam. Count the oscillations, that's your clock. Now if you got 32 of those and you can manipulate their energy states, in our case we use the hyper fine energy states of the atom. >>But you can basically think of your high school chemistry where you have like an unexcited electron, an excited electron. Take your unexcited state as a zero, your excited state as a one. And it turns out with commercially available lasers, you can drive anywhere between a zero, a one or a super position of zero and one. And so that is our quantum bit, the hyper fine energy state of the atrium atom. And we just line up a bunch of them and through there access the magical powers of supervision entanglement, as we were talking about before, they don't really make sense to us here in the regular world, but >>They do exist. But what you just described is one cubit. That's right. And the way that you do it isn't exactly the same way that others who are doing quantum computing do it. That's right. Is that okay? >>And there's a lot of advantages to the trapped iron approach. So for example, you can also build a super conducting qubit where you, where you basically cool a chip to 47 mil kelvin and coerce millions of atoms to work together as a single system. The problem is that's not naturally quantum. So it's inherently noisy and it wants to deco here does not want to be a quantum bit. Whereas an atom is very happy to be by itself a qubit because we don't have to do anything to it. It's naturally quantum, if that makes sense. And so atomic qubits, like we use feature a few things. One the longest coherence times in the industry, meaning you can run very deep circuits, the most accurate operations, very low noise operations. And we don't have any wires. Our atoms are connected by laser light. That means you can connect any pair. So with some other technologies, the qubits are connected by wires. That means you can only run operations between physically connected qubits. It's like programming. If you could only use, for example, bits that are adjacent with an i untrapped approach, you can connect any pair so that all to all connectivity means your compilation is much more efficient and you can do much wider and deeper circuits. >>So what's the, what is the closest thing to a practical application that we've been able to achieve at this point? Question. And when I say practical, it doesn't have to be super practical. I mean, what is the, what is the sort of demonstration, the least esoteric demonstration of this at this point? >>To tie into what Ken was saying earlier, I think there's at least two areas that are very exciting. One is chemistry. Chemistry. So for example, you know, we have water in our cup and we understand water pretty well, but there's lots of molecules that in order to study them, we actually have to make them in a lab and do lots of experiments. And to give you a sense of the order of magnitude, if you wanted to understand the ground state of the caffeine molecule, which we all know and has 200 electrons, you would need to build a computer bigger than the moon. So, which is, you know, again, would be good profit for Dell, but probably not gonna happen time soon. That's >>Kind of fun to think about though. Yeah, that's a great analogy. That >>Was, yeah. And in fact it'd be like 10 moons of compute. Okay. So build 10 moons of >>Computer. I >>Love the sci-fi issue. Exactly. And now you can calculate caffeine, it's crazy or it just fits in a quantum computer the size of this table. And so we're using hybrid quantum computing now to start proving out these algorithms not for molecules as complex as caffeine or what we want in the future. Like biologics, you know, new cancer medications, new materials and so forth. But we are able to show, for example, the ground state of smaller molecules and prove a path to where, you know, decision maker could see in a few years from now, Oh, we'll be able to actually simulate not molecules we already understand, but molecules we've never been able to study a prayer, if that makes sense. And then, >>Yeah, I think there's a key point underneath that, and I think goes back to the question that you asked earlier about the why hybrid applications inherently run on the classical infrastructure and algorithms are accelerated through qs, the quantum processing units. >>And so are you sort of time sharing in the sense that this environment that you set up starts with classical, with simulation and then you get to a point where you say, okay, we're ready, you pick up the bat phone and you say I wanna, >>I would say it's more like a partnership, really. Yeah, >>Yeah. And I think, I think it's kind of the, the way I normally describe it is, you know, we've taken a look at it it from a really kind of a software development life cycle type of perspective where again, if you follow that learn experiment, pro proof of concept, and then finally productize, we, we can cover and allow for a developer to start prototyping and proofing on simulators and when they're ready all they do is flip a switch and a manifest and they can automatically engage a qu a real quantum physical quantum system. And so we've made it super simple and very accessible in a democratizing access for developers. >>Yeah. Makes such big difference. Go ahead. >>A good analogy is to like GPUs, right? Where it's not really like, you know, you send it away, but rather the GPU accelerates certain operations. The q p. Yeah, because quantum mechanics, it turns out the universe runs on linear algebra. So one way to think about the q p is the most efficient way of doing linear algebra that exists. So lots of problems that can be expressed in that form. Combinatorial optimization problems in general, certain kinds of machine learning, et cetera, get an exponential speed up by running a section of the algorithm on the quantum computer. But of course you wouldn't like port Microsoft Word. Yeah, exactly. You know, you're not gonna do that in your product. It would be a waste of your quantum computer. >>Not just that you wanna know exactly how much money is in your bank account, not probabilistically how much might be ballpark. Yeah. Realm 10, moon ballpark, right? >>10 moon ballpark. Be using that for the rest of the show. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Ken, tell me a little bit about how you identify companies and like I n Q and and end up working with Matthew. What, what's that like, >>What's it like or how do you >>Find it's the process? Like, so, you know, let's say I've got the the >>We're not going there though. Yeah. We're not >>Personal relationship. >>Well, >>You can answer these questions however you want, you know. No, but, but what does that look like for Dell? How do you, how do you curate and figure out who you're gonna bring into this partnership nest? >>Yeah, you know, I, I think it was a, it's, it was a, a very long drawn out learning opportunity. We started actually our working quantum back in 2016. So we've been at it for a long time. And only >>In quantum would we say six years is a long time. I love >>That. Exactly. >>By the way, that was like, we've been doing this for age for a >>Long time. Yeah. Very long time before >>You were born. Yes. >>Feels like it actually, believe it or not. But, so we've been at it for a long time and you know, we went down some very specific learning paths. We took a lot of different time to, to learn about different types of qubits available, different companies, what their approaches were, et cetera. Yeah. And, and we ended up meeting up with, with I N Q and, and we also have other partners as well, like ibm, but I N q you know, we, there is a nice symbiotic relationship. We're actually doing some really cool technologies that are even much, much further ahead than the, you know, strict classical does this, quantum does that where there's significant amount of interplay between the simulation systems and between the real physical QS. And so it's, it's turning out to be a great relationship. They're, they're very easy to work with and, and a lot of fun too, as you could probably tell. Yeah. >>Clearly. So before we wrap, I've got it. Okay. Okay. So get it. Let's get, let's get, yeah, let's get deep. Let's get deep for a second or a little deeper than we've been. So our current, our current understanding of all this, of the universe, it's pretty limited. It's down to the point where we effectively have it assigned to witchcraft. It's all dark energy and dark matter. Right. What does that mean exactly? Nobody knows. But if you're in the quantum computing space and you're living this every day, do you believe that it represents the key to us understanding things that currently we just can't understand classical models, including classical computing, our brains as they're constructed aren't capable of understanding the real real that's out there. Yeah. If you're in the quantum computing space, do you possess that level of hubris? Do you think that you are gonna deliver the answers? >>I'm just like, I think the more you're in the space, the more mysterious and amazing it all seems. There's a, but there is a great quote by Richard Feinman that sort of kicked off the quantum exploration. So he gave a lecture in 1981, so, you know, long before any of this began, truly ages ago, right? Yeah. And in this lecture he said, you know, kind of wild at that time, right? We had to build these giant supercomputers to simulate just a couple atoms interacting, right? And it's kind of crazy that you need all this compute to simulate what nature does with just a handful >>Particles. Yeah. >>Really small. So, and, and famously he said, you know, nature just isn't classical. Damn it. And so you need to build a computer that works with nature to understand nature. I think, you know, the, the quantum revolution has only just begun. There's so many new things to learn, and I'm sure the quantum computers of 40 years from now are not gonna look like the, you know, the computers of today, just as the classical computers of 40 years ago look quite different to us now, >>And we're a bunch of apes. But you think we'll get there? >>I, yeah, I, I mean, I, I have, I think we have, I feel incredibly optimistic that this tool, quantum computing as a tool represents a sea change in what's possible for humans to compute. >>Yeah. I think it's that possibility. You know, I, when I tell people right now in the quantum era, we're in the inac stage of the quantum era, and so we have a long way to go, but the potential is absolutely enormous. In fact, incomprehensibly enormous, I >>Was just gonna say, I don't even think we could grasp >>In the, from the inac is they had no idea of computers inside of your hand, right? Yeah. >>They're calculating, you know, trajectories, right? Yeah. If you told them, like, we'd all be video chatting, you >>Know, >>Like, and kids would be doing synchronized dances, you know, you'd be like, What? >>I love that. Well, well, on that note, Ken Matthew, really great to have you both, everyone now will be pondering the scale and scope of the universe with their 10 moon computer, 10 moons. That's right. And, and you've given me my, my new favorite bumper sticker since we've been on a, on a roll here, David and I, which is just naturally quantum. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's one of my new favorite phrases from the show. Thank you both for being here. David, thank you for hanging out and thank all of you for tuning in to our cube footage live here in Dallas. We are at Supercomputing. This is our last show for the day, but we look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning. My name's Savannah Peterson. Y'all have a lovely night.

>>from around the globe. >>It's the cube >>covering fortunate security summit brought to you by ford in it. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage, affording that security summit at the ford championship here in napa. I'm lisa martin and I'm very pleased to welcome back to the cube kenzi founder and chairman and ceo affording that, ken. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you is uh, we're happy to be here after almost two years and uh, >>I know it's great to see you in person. I was saying before we went live, I forgot how tall you are. So this is a great event. But I want you to talk to me a little bit about some of the amazing growth. The Fortinet has seen 500,000 customers close to 30% year on year growth continuing to post solid earnings stock is more than double this year. What are some of the things that you attribute this group to and what do you think in your opinion differentiates format? >>I think some of the more strategic long term investment we made started paying off like uh, we're still the only company actually develop basic chip which can making a huge computing power advantage compared to using software to all the security function computing Because security tend to need about like 1300 times more company in power to process the same data as a routing switching. So that's where for the network security definitely a chap, a huge advantage And we invested very early and take a long term and also a big investment and so far started paying off the other thing we also keeping a lot of innovation and the internal organic growth for the company instead of do a lot of acquisition and that's also started making all these different products integrate well ultimately to get well. And that's also driving a huge growth, not just that was security, but also we see the fabric also has global fast, >>interesting. So you're really keeping it organic, which is not common a lot of these days we see a lot of acquisitions, but one of the things, a lot of growth, another thing that we do know that's growing is the threat landscape I was mentioning before we went live that I spoke with Derek Manky a couple times this summer and John Madison and the global threat landscape report showing ransomware up nearly 11 times in the last year. Of course we had this rapid transition to work from home and all these devices on accessing corporate networks from home. Talk to me about some of the security challenges that you're helping customers deal with. >>I think during the pandemic, definitely you see a lot of security issues that come up because work from home with your remote access a lot of important information, a lot of important data there At the same time. The ransomware attacks studying like a mentioning 11 times compared to like one or two years ago all this driving all there's a new technology for security. So now you cannot just secure the board anymore. So you have a secure the whole infrastructure. Both internal to a lot of internal segmentation And also go outside security when like I see when the 5G. Connection and how to secure work from home and they trust their trust access environment all these drive a lot of security growth. So we see the yeah it's a it's a pretty healthy market >>it's definitely a healthy market that's one thing looking at it from that lens. What are some of the customer conversation? How have the customer conversations changed? Are you now talking with different levels and organizations security Being a board level conversation discussion and talk to me about how those conversations have evolved. >>Security now become very important part of I. T. And uh pretty much all top one top two on the 80 spending now and the same time what to work from home or some other uh definitely seeing the board level conversation right now because you can see if there's a security issue for the company the damage could be huge. Right? So that's where the secure awareness especially ransomware is very very huge And plus the supply chain issues some other attack on the infrastructure. So we see a lot of security conversation in the bowl level in the Ceo in the in the executive level now compared to before more I. T. Conversation. So it's to drive the huge awareness of security and that's also we see everybody citing concerns security now. >>But I'm sure I imagine that's across every industry. Yes. >>Yeah pretty much all the vertical right? And especially a lot of new area traditionally they don't have much security like some smb some consumer some traditional Ot IOT space now it's all security studying that very important for them now. >>So let's talk about, here we are. The security summit at the fortunate championship. Give me your perspective on the P. G. A. Ford in that relationship. >>Uh first I think it's a golf is also event sports especially during the epidemic that's probably become the most favorite spot. And for me also I'm a golfer for 30 years. Never market golfer but I love the sport on the other side we see sometimes it's uh working with a lot of a customer a lot of a partner they behave if we can combine some business and there was certain like activity especially outdoor that's also be great. And also helping Brandon and that's another way we can contribute back to the community. So they say hey then then that's that's the first time for us. We just love it gets going. >>It's great to be outdoors right at 40 minutes doing an event outdoors showing that yes you can do that safely. But also I also hear from some of your other team members that it's a very culturally synergistic relationship. The pgn format. >>Yes. Exactly. Yeah that's where we love this golf and especially working with a different partner and different partner and also all the team working together. So it's a team sport kind of on the other side it's all do and enjoy a combined working uh activity altogether. Everybody love it. >>Something that so many of us have missed Ken for the last 18 months or so. So we're at the security summit, there's over 300 technology leaders here. Talk to me about some of the main innovations that are being discussed. >>Uh definitely see security starting uh little covered whole infrastructure and uh especially in a lot of environment. Traditionally no security cannot be deployed like internal segmentation because internal network can be 10, 200 faster than the one connection. So it has to be deployed in the in the internal high speed environment whether inside the company or kind of inside the data center, inside the cloud on the other side, like a lot of one connection traditionally like whether they see one or the traditional like cuba more than the S E O. They also need to be combined with security and also in the zero trust access environment to really supporting work from home and also a lot of ot operation technology and a lot of other IOT space utility. All these different kind of like environment need to be supported, sometimes recognized environment. So we see security studying deport everywhere whether the new small city or the like connected car environment and we just see become more and more important. That's also kind of we studying what we call in a secure driven networking because traditionally you can see today's networking just give you the connectivity and speed so they treat everything kind of uh no difference but with security driven network and you can make in the networking decision move based on the security function, like a different application or different content, different user, different device, even different location, you can make a different kind of level decision so that we see is a huge demand right now can make the whole environment, whole infrastructure much secure. >>That's absolutely critical that pivot to work from home was pretty much overnight a year and a half ago and we still have so many people who are permanently remote, remote but probably will be permanently and a good amount will be hybrid in the future, some TBD amount. Uh and one of the challenges is of course you've got people suddenly from home you've got a pandemic. So you've got an emotional situation, you've got people multitasking, they've got kids at home trying to learn maybe spouses working, they're trying to do Everything by a video conferencing and collaboration tools and the security risks. There are huge and we've seen some of that obviously reflected in the nearly 11 x increase in ransomware but talk to me about what 14 announced yesterday with links is to help on that front in a considerable way. >>That's where we totally agree with you the work from home or kind of hybrid way to work in. Pretty much will become permanent. And that's where how to make a home environment more kind of supporting is a remote working especially like when you have a meeting, there are some other things going on in the whole activity and also sometimes data you access can be pretty important, pretty confidential. That's where whether in the zero trust environment or making the home connection more reliable, more secure. It's all very, very important for us. Uh, that's where we were happy to partner with Lynxes and some other partner here uh, to support in this hybrid working environment to make work from home more secure. And uh, as we see is a huge opportunity, >>huge opportunity and a lot of industries, I had the pleasure of talking with links to Ceo Harry do is just an hour or so ago and I asked him what are some of the vertical, since we know from a security and a ransomware perspective, it's just wide open. Right, Nobody's safe anymore from it. But what are some of the verticals that you think are going to be early adopters of this technology, government health care schools, >>I think pretty much all vertical start and see this work from home and it's very, very important for us. There's a few top vertical, traditionally finance service, uh, spend a lot of money healthcare, spend a lot of money on security. So they are still the same? We don't see that change March on the other side. A lot of high tech company, which also one of the big vertical for us now, I say maybe half or even more than half the employee they want to work for home. So that's also making they say uh they call home branch now, so it's just make home always just secure and reliable as a branch office and at the same time of Southern government and the sort of education vertical and they all started C is very, very important to do this, remote their trust access approach and the same time working with a lot of service providers to supporting this, both the D. N. A. And also the sassy approach. So we are only companies on the saturday company partner, a lot of IT service provider. We do believe long term of the service provider, they have the best location, best infrastructure, best team to supporting Sassy, which we also build ourselves. If customers don't have a service provider, we're happy to supporting them. But if they have a service provider, we also prefer, they go to service provider to supporting them because we also want to have a better ecosystem and making everybody like uh benefit has women's situation. So that's what we see is whether they trust no access or sassy. Very happy to work with all the partners to making everybody successful. >>And where our customers in that evolution from traditional VPN to Z T and a for example, are you seeing an acceleration of that given where we are in this interesting climate >>uh definitely because work from home is uh if you try to access use VPN, you basically open up all the network to the home environment which sometimes not quite secure, not very reliable. Right? So that's where using a Z T N A, you can access a certain application in a certain like environment there. And the same leverage ste when there's other huge technology advantage can lower the cost of the multiple link and balance among different costs, different connection and uh different reliability there. Uh it's a huge advantage, >>definitely one of the many advantages that reporting it has. So this afternoon there's going to be a, as part of the security summit, a panel that you and several other Fortinet execs are on taking part in A Q and a, what are some of the topics that you think are going to come up? And as part of that Q and >>A. I see for certain enterprise customer, definitely the ransomware attack, how to do the internal segmentation, how to securely do the remote access work from home. So we are very important For some service provider. We also see how to supporting them for the sassy environment and certain whole infrastructure security, whether the 5G or the SD went because everyone has a huge demand and uh it's a group over for us, we become a leader in the space. It's very very important for them. We also see uh like a different vertical space, Some come from healthcare, some from come from education. Uh they all have their own kind of challenge. Especially like there's a lot of uh oh T IOT device in healthcare space need to be secured and the same thing for the O. T. IOT space, >>Tremendous amount of opportunity. One thing I want to ask it, get your opinion on is the cybersecurity skills gap. It's been growing year, over year for the last five years. I know that just last week 14 that pledge to train one million professionals in the next five years, you guys have been focused on this for a while. I love that you have a veterans program. I'm the daughter of a Vietnam combat veterans. So that always warms my heart. But is that something, is the cybersecurity skills got something that customers ask you ken? How do you recommend? We saw this? >>Yes, we have been doing this for over 10 years. We have the program, we call the network secured expert program a different level. So we have 24 million people. We also commit a traditional million people because there's a huge shortage of the scale separate security expert there. So we do work in with over like a 4500 university globally at the same time. We also want to offer the free training to all the people interested, especially all the veterans and other Like even high school graduate high school student there and at the same time anyone want to learn several security. We feel that that's, that's very good space, very exciting space and very fast-growing space also still have a huge shortage globally. There's a 3-4 million shortage of skilled people in the space, which is a or fast growing space. And so we were happy to support all the train education with different partners at the same time, try to contribute ourselves. >>I think that's fantastic. Will be excited to see over the next five years that impact on that training one million. And also to see it to your point with how much the industry is changing, how much, how fast supporting that's growing. There's a lot of job opportunity out there. I think it was Sandra who said that I was talking to her this morning that there's no job security like cybersecurity. It's really true. If you think about it. >>Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. Like remember a few years ago when we started the first time to do all this interview, I said, hey, it's a barber hot space now, let's get harder and harder, more people interested now. And I really thank you cube and you give all the support it all these years and we're happy to be here. >>Absolutely. It's our pleasure. Well, I know you are paired up. You said tomorrow with Phil Mickelson for the pro am. That's pretty exciting, ken. >>I'm not sure I'm a very good golfer, but I will try my best. >>You try your best. I'm sure it will be a fantastic experience. Thank you for having the cube here for bringing people back together for this event, showing that we can do this, we can do this safely and securely. And also what Fortinet is doing to really help address that cyber security skills gap and uh, really make us more aware of the threats and the landscape and how we, as individuals and enterprises can help sort to quiet that storm >>also will be happy to be here and also being honored to be part of the program at the same time. We also want to thank you a lot of partner model customer and join us together for this big PJ event and thank you for everyone. >>Absolutely. And you guys are a big partner driven organization. I'm sure the partners appreciate that, ken, Thank you so much. >>Thank you. Thank you lisa >>for kenzi. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cue from the Fortinet security summit in napa valley. >>Yeah. Mhm

welcome everyone to thecube virtual i am your host rebecca knight today we are talking about cyber security and health care our guest is ken checker he is a problem solver at netscout thanks so much for coming on the show ken oh my pleasure thank you for having me i love your job title a problem solver tell our viewers a little bit about netscout and about your role there sure no i appreciate that uh yeah netscout's been around since 1984 uh and the the gentleman starter company two gentlemen starter company uh anil sengal is still our ceo he's very passionate about what we do believes in what we do and our focus really is is really service triage and making sure that important customer services and none more important than health care are are up and running and functional and so our focus is really they're really protecting we call ourselves guardians of the connected world uh we take that very seriously uh because when you think about the the technology uh the complexity and how we all really the reliance on everything that we do and how we uh rely on technology as a just a society um we really our focus is protecting that so the applications the services the network uh that's all part of the the service chain for that well we know that healthcare organizations and hospitals are under tremendous strain and pressure because of the covet-19 pandemic but also recently hospitals all over the country have been hit and targeted in a scourge of ransomware attacks can you tell our viewers a little bit about what you're seeing and what's what's happening right now oh yes it's uh it's really sad uh it's just an interesting uh it's an interesting time in the world obviously uh but we are seeing a very heavy increase in the number of attacks on from a cyber security perspective really an extortion and ransomware and there's a there's a slight difference between the two um but effectively what's happening the we'll call them the uh the bad guys are going after healthcare organizations that have some some vulnerabilities uh where you know they have some they have some areas where they can be attacked and effectively what happens is they will either launch a denial of service attack which is really a lot of robot type computers launching just directed attacks at these particular caregiving organizations these hospitals uh and then so they're trying to take down services um and that's one thing and so that's really more of a ransomware where they hey we showed you we can do it now we're going to extort money from you until you pay the other one is more of a ransomware where they've already penetrated the what we'll call defenses of the of the hospital and then now they're they're saying okay we've already we've already taken control of your system and they lock you out until you pay the ransom both we're seeing lots of attacks in that realm so what is the upshot in terms of patient care i mean this this sounds awful what are patients seeing what are doctors seeing well it's a really good point uh especially in today's world with the pandemic but really any time for health care we all have you know children aunts uncles moms dads nobody wants to be in the hospital for extended periods of time and when they're in the hospital we want to make sure that you know from a healthcare organization they want to make sure they give the best care possible and the caregiver so the nurse the doctor has the opportunity to do what they do and focus on what their their caregiving and not on the technology so when things like ransomware extortion or any particular uh impact on performance for a particular application it just impacts the caregiver which is you know and it affects us because these are people that you care about you don't want them in the hospital you don't want them in pain and the caregivers there you know these are passionate people that do what they do obviously they're dedicated to it so when there's an impact from a cyber security perspective or a application or network issue that affects health care that affects our loved ones and you just you know you really put yourself in that position we uh especially netscout we like to view we partner with our customers so and we don't take that lightly that's something that we mean and it's heartfelt and the reason for that is we look at ourselves as an extension of their team this is what healthcare organizations offer to their to their patients and they're there for for care to get well we want to make sure they have every opportunity to do that and because those healthcare organizations rely so much on technology networks applications and really protection from bad guys in cyber security uh we just want to make sure that those services are assured and that's why that's where our focus is so this i mean there are lives in the balance as you're describing this is a technical challenge but it's also one of resources a lot of these organizations just simply do not have the resources to deal with these problems effectively great point that's a great point i mean especially in today's world the the actual industry for healthcare has really taken a beating because it really had to focus their their whole uh all of their funds frankly and all of their uh the resources towards the pandemic which would be personal equipment mobile hospitals and that's that's taken a tremendous toll and they've also from just a revenue perspective they've really taken a beating frankly on on what happens from their revenue cycles because elective surgeries are way down so when you start looking at you take that into consideration so they've got very very tight resources and cyber security in general is a just a thankless job they're under attack every single day no matter what their industry is so when you look at the at the current situation to get tight resources cyber security is under a lot of stress and oh by the way here come the ransomware and extortion attacks it's just it's just a it's terrible what's going on but this is an area where where we feel this is a spot where we can really help number one our focus is really on network and service assurance so the applications in the network and that's what we're very good at and been doing it for many years but the the upside and the place where we really feel we can help uh is really twofold and that is that same solution the same deployment that we have for network and application really can be leveraged by cyber security folks as well mainly towards the areas of denial of service mainly towards areas of voice over ip we think of telecommunications and telemedicine that's all being leveraged and heavily leveraged right now specifically by healthcare organizations well again if i'm a bad guy and i know you're trying to use your telemedicine to take care of your patients and have that interaction with the doctor and the patient and i take those services down well now i've impacted patient care though that all runs over unified communications protocols voice and video things that we can monitor not only for performance but also when we see cyber type issues and that's a it's a really big uh i would call it a bit of a hole at the moment because that's a spot where cyber security teams are so strapped so resource strapped as well uh from from what they're trying to deal with every day that's a spot we can help with and help with immediately and as i mentioned the other part is really the denial of service pieces which is that's part of what we do as part of our our framework of what we deliver for services so you're describing an exceedingly complex caregiver chain on so many different levels in terms of cyber security in terms of telemedicine um and you also said that netscout really partners with its clients talk a little bit about netscout solution and how it helps clients and or healthcare organizations grapple with these challenges no that's a great question well the the one thing uh right off the bat is we look at network traffic and that means application traffic so while we plug in on the network and take traffic from taps and spans and whatnot we take traffic into our appliances so that we can then we crunch that the data through our smart data we call adaptive service intelligence that's our patent and we run it through that engine and that creates smart data and that smart data then can be leveraged for muji is my problem with my network is my problem with my application is it something like a service enabler like dns or dhcp or ldap which is really the basic uh basic building box for active directory for authentication uh so when you look at a complete as you mentioned a complex chain uh an electronic medical records application uh an emr that's really the that's really the go-to application for for a hospital uh because it's scheduling that's billing that's diagnosis that's that's history that's patient history it's just so it's so integral to what they do and when there's an impact with that that affects patient care and no one ever wants to hear oh my goodness we we log we had a bad outcome with the patient because of a complete a computer glitch you know network application what have you uh and so what we do is the ability to take all that data in crunch it through our engine and then and then display that in dashboards that are very easily consumable by not just network people but really application even management cyber security unified communications folks and and the focus here is we want to get the problem set we know they're going to be problems it happens every day and you know networks and applications are complex the idea is when we have an issue like that let's get the problem to the right team so that they can then go through their service restoration process and again the whole point here is keep services up and running but the the challenge becomes in a complex application team set up where you've got dns dhcp ldap radius so you've got service enablers then you've got web servers application server database servers load balancers firewalls when somebody says oh my goodness the emr is down or we're having issues with our network that's a very tough chain to try and pinpoint it's almost needle in a haystack so what we do and this is kind of our our bailiwick in the world is really we take all of that different traffic and we expose uh where where the hot spots where's the latency where are the error codes where do we see protocols that aren't behaving well where are we seeing things that are we're seeing authentication failures and the big win for the for the healthcare organization on that and that standpoint is i can see all of my traffic all of my applications and then i can pinpoint where i'm having issues so that i can restore services very quickly what are some of the best practices that have emerged in terms of the company in terms of the organizations and hospitals that are doing this well what would you say that they're doing right one thing they want a partner so they recognize the fact that number one you know they've got limited staff uh and they actually want to partner with netscout and what that means is we actually go in and we'll design solutions that will address their specific requirements that's that's very important what we do but when we do so we take uh you know we different product sets but our infinite stream our infinite stream next generation isng is our data collector and that's really the the workhorse of our solution it processes all the packets from you know we'll get technical here for a second one gig to 100 gig and that's a lot of data to to to process and because we can just get to the point with the process to the smart data engine and get to the problem show me where my latency is show where my problems are showing my protocols uh pulling that up through our packet flow which engine which kind of facilitates us collecting from multiple hops of the network uh a lot of times uh iit folks will ask us well we want hop to hop views of this i'm like great let's do that we can do it right now we just need to sit down design it but we really design towards their their use cases and in healthcare it's very common you can have dmz's you're going to have people accessing their electronic medical records through their dmz uh and things like that and as it goes through the back end services we basically take a traffic feed from all those different hops of the network or in cases there that make the most sense uh the primary spartan choke points and then take that data in and then we do what we do we expose the data and expose the performance information and most customers and it's like this in the world people usually don't call you up to say hey rebecca you're doing a great job today i want to buy you a cup of coffee especially in i.t they call up to say hey things aren't working hey fix it hey i can't do something and so our our job is to help facilitate with those customers and really partner with them to design solutions so that they can not only view that information uh but also triage it really quick and the word triage makes a great deal of uh sense in health care for example if you have a you know you hurt your finger they're not going to take an x-ray of your foot it makes no sense because they've already triaged that that's not your problem we do the same thing but we do it more from the network and application side to see where the hot spots are you are the it triage so talk a little bit about about this you are a problem solver and so right now we have a crisis on our hands of monumental proportions do you think that it has forced healthcare organizations and hospitals to innovate more quickly at this time or do you think that there is still just so much uncertainty taking place right now that it is hard to see the forest for the trees what what are you seeing that's a that's a really good question uh we're seeing both uh just to put it just very so one of the biggest changes that really the the pandemics had on everybody is the switch to everybody went from i have 10 maybe 20 of my workers working remotely over vpn contractors uh things like people are there just can't be in the office for a reason they switched from 10 to 20 to 70 80 90 percent so it was an overnight change so think of the impact on that the caregivers are at the hospital they're actually you know the frontline workers they're at the hospital you know serving their p their their patients but people in the administration accounting i.t other things that are important to the organization all had to switch to work from home obviously for safety reasons so the impact on just the internet link number one huge impact before it was used for outbound hey i'm gonna go check you know i'm gonna go do some research i'm gonna go check a website i'm gonna you know see what's what's uh what sports activities going on today now all the traffic is coming inbound on the internet and number so that's number one number two big change vpns vpns took an enormous beating that maybe they were size for for that type of scalability overnight and maybe they weren't so the organizations that were kind of prepped for it not such a big change and we've seen some good results from that but there are also organizations that immediately had to switch to oh my goodness i need to upgrade my vpns and my internet links because i wasn't prepared for this um so the the larger organizations sometimes have a little more uh capabilities to make that change quick the smaller organizations that's a tough call so they really have had to innovate quite a quite a bit on that side of it but when you add the that stress on things that also puts shows that the internet and the vpn is really points where the bad guys are going to target which again we're seeing we're starting to see that in the ransomware and the extortion attacks so it has forced innovation certainly um but you bring it to the point of force through the trees uh there's still a lot of work to be done uh so that's that's where we're really uh putting a lot of our focus especially in health care right now because it's got the the biggest impact uh well frankly to society right now and the religious uh the companies so as company as healthcare organizations are navigating this period of new normal and of course we've had some positive vaccine news so we can say that that perhaps there is going to be an end to this pandemic uh in the coming year but how are they planning ahead i want you to close us out here with how healthcare organizations are thinking about the next 12 to 24 months and if you have any advice for them i'm sure they would be all ears uh yeah i think we could all use some good advice right now on that one short answer is you know i don't know either right now in healthcare it is a big challenge because of that as mentioned earlier the impact on on on the personal protection equipment mobile hospitals and and frankly where they've had in the revenue laws so it's become a you basically have to do more with less right now uh which is one of the things that we do uh and really it's kind of our message for customers anyway i'm a big proponent of use what we have what if you have our solution use what you have and use it to its fullest extent uh especially while times are lean you know we just don't the wallets aren't as big right now so we're gonna have to really focus yet i mean has there been a bigger time in healthcare ever than right now i can't think of one so our focus right now and our message to our customers and anyone else is if you've got our types of solution use it to its fullest capability so that you can triage and so that you can you know not have patient impacting issues and on top of all the other things you have to deal with you bring up the point about the vaccines one of the things that we've seen especially for what's called healthcare organizations that are more research focused is um the bad guys aren't very nice so the bad guys are going to go after organizations where they can have a big we'll call it splash or they can steal something so research hospitals that that are working on vaccines or something in that realm have been huge targets again ddos for ransomware and extortion my message for anyone in healthcare right now is you know bless you first of all and second of all use what you have to its fullest extent which means a solution like ours yes use it for network monitor use it for application monitoring but but please use it to protect yourself for cyber security type visibility uh we typically in a lot of cases uh we'll see uh traffic that that some cyber security tools don't and not because they're bad tools but because we're installed in places that they sometimes aren't so that might be uh where they're typically installed maybe on the perimeters of network and endpoints we actually are instrumented through that service chain so not only the outbound internet the wide area network links the vpns and dmzs and and vdi and all those acronyms that i'm throwing out those are typical spots for us as well as though virtualization so that can be cloud or private cloud so effectively we have areas of visibility that can be leveraged in big bigger and better ways even really on the cyber security and unified communication sides of the fence so my message would be to be just use the what you have to its fullest capability uh especially when times are lean and uh keep up the good fight excellent leverage what you got ken checkout problem solver at netscout thank you so much for coming on thecube thank you for having me been a pleasure i'm rebecca knight stay tuned for more of the cube virtual you

from around the globe it's thecube with coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon north america 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners welcome to thecube's coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon 2020 the virtual edition i'm lisa martin i've got a couple of guests with me here today please welcome ken holtz the principal partner manager for red hat hey ken and welcome to the cube hi lisa thank you and benito lopez is also joining us senior manager of business development and the solutions provider services provider vertical excuse me f5 from f5 hi benito how are how are you i'm good you're in san francisco thank you all right yes we're all very socially distanced so guys kubecon cloudnativecon the virtual version here still the opportunity to engage with a lot of leaders in the community folks interested let's go ahead and start with you as we look at this very dynamic environment in which we are all living and working organizations are under even more pressure to deliver the information and the services and the experiences that customers demand internal customers external customers i know f5 is known for load balancing and load balancing is one of those tools that can certainly help with that but talk to us about what's kind of going on what's new in that respect from fbi's perspective we have evolved into an adaptive application services company what do i mean by adaptive application services it's the ability to scale secure and protect application applications wherever they may recite whether they're in the far edge whether in the cloud whether they're on premises and the ability to also observe the the analytics and telemetry emanating from those applications to be able to act upon what we see in that space so when we talk about service based architecture it's all about no longer being reliant on a in the on a single vendor on a monolithic application set of services or on what they call a vertical stack appliance service based architecture means you want it to be a scalable architecture whereby you can add the dock subtract um different types of network functions in 5g so the way this is going to be depend the the key enabler for a services-based architecture is going to be container based services whereby services will no longer just be applications are going to be disaggregated into micro services right in container clusters and f5's role here is to be able to scale and secure that traffic into a service provider environment more importantly our role is to turn a container-based architecture which is not service provider grade into a service provider-grade architecture which means we can actually see the services provide specific protocols into that container cluster and more importantly um scale and secure and apply the right policies within a containerized environment again containers is all about a service base is part of a service based architecture and containers today especially on kubernetes need a service provider grade platform of which we provide that market all right so kubernetes seeing a lot of activity with telco customers what are some of the challenges major we'll stick with you for another few seconds here what are some of the challenges that you're seeing that you're helping customers to work through well one is the first challenge is how do you make kubernetes telco great that's the first challenge so what f5 does is we actually um act as the ingress and egress point into kubernetes environment whereby we see telco as we were able to scale and secure telco specific protocols that kubernetes today um does not support and we work closely with red hat in that space um together with their open shift architecture to open shift platform cut we work with red hat today uh with um uh with respect to the openshift platform and that helps the service provider have a telco cloud-like platform that is um scalable that is secure and that is highly performant and low-latent all right so speaking of red hat let's bring ken into the conversation here kind of same question for you as we look at the activity uh in telco with respect to kubernetes let's talk to some of the ways that that red hat is helping customers address some of the challenges so that they can leverage that technology to to really move their businesses forward especially in such a dynamic environment right now thanks lisa so red hat has a goal of ensuring our openshift platform is ready and hardened enough to enable telco workloads for our 5g platform while we work with other partners f5 has been one of our key partners in this particular space for the first time openshift networking is natively integrating seamlessly with the commercial load balancer from f5 making it ready for telco 5g this is a co-engineered co-developed solution a new piece of software that we've implemented together oven kubernetes is enterprise and service provider ready we believe ovn will help significantly with latency overall and this is an evolution we have our first implementation of this now and we're working now on making this even more cloud-native which means making it more performant more resilient and even more capable and ready for telco grade requirements so can continuing on with you for a second in terms of how you're working together with customers to maybe customize or adapt the technologies can you talk to me a little bit about some of the customer feedback like some of those challenges that they're facing in today's environment which as we know is so dynamic and probably going to be for a while what's the customer like influence in terms of the partnership and the code development well so my focus at red hat is on partnership and the ecosystem partner management team allows red hat to meet the needs of a growing number of red hat partners the team serves as a partner's single point of contact for product questions roadmap updates engineering interlocks and general guidance for how to partner with red hat and with open source communities to achieve their business goals so uh we we're we're helping the end customers through our tight partnership imagine a lot of collaboration there so benito let's talk from your perspective from f5's perspective on the partnership and the collaboration that you have together and with your customers to help them be successful well ecosystems partnerships are going to be critical for our success as a company and more importantly as service providers today especially as i mentioned earlier around with respect to us they migrate and transform their networks from 4g to 5g um the architecture is going to horizontalize it's going to require a telcograde type of infrastructure manager a telcograde os and at the same time it's going to require a telco grade um and security platform and therefore red hat with its um them with them being what we call as a leader in open source and open and containers with their openshift platform we see them as a vital partner in working with service providers to transform their networks into a teleco great containerized environment right so as they migrate into um as they migrate from just software virtualization to containerization which is going to be critical for 5g um red hat is a key partner for us to work with to ensure that their network is their containerized network is telego-grade and highly performant and secure excellent thanks and ken back to you i know the audience would like to hear kind of some more specifics on the collaboration between you guys and also kind of beyond what they can see what's coming down the pipe in terms of open source projects or kind of beyond that yeah so some of some examples of our work together uh would include joint roadmap alignment uh we're very closely tied together on on the roadmap front early pre-pre-ga enablement early access to code and we have a goal of achieving certification here so we'd like to to achieve certification which provides assurance of compatibility and support avoids vendor lock-in and dispels any security concerns that customers may have excellent well guys anything else that you want to add here to the audience that is attending this virtual edition of kubecon cloud nativecon 2020 benito to you well i'd like to just say that as you migrate to as your network begins to transform and you are looking at the containerized architecture f5 and red hat are your best partners to have that telco grade architecture infrastructure in place i like that both statement very well put ken less thoughts from you i think benito said it best and i just wanted to say thanks a lot for having having us and this has been fun excellent guys thank you for sharing what's going on with the f5 red hat partnership how you're helping customers in telco with kubernetes the challenges there to alleviate ken bonito thanks for joining me on thecube today thank you thank you for my guests i'm lisa martin and you're watching thecube you

>> Presenter: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto Studios with our ongoing coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020, the digital version. It would have been the North American version but obviously everything is digital. So we're excited, we've been coming back here for years and we've got a founder of CNCF and also a practitioner, really great opportunity to get some insight from someone who's out in the field and putting this stuff into work. So we're joined in this next segment by Ken Owens. He is the Vice President of Software Development Engineering for MasterCard, and he's a founding member of the CNCF, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Ken, great to see you. >> Yeah, great. Thank you for having me, I have, I've enjoyed theCUBE over the years and I'm glad to be a part of it again. >> Yeah, so we're, we're psyched to have you on, and I think it's the first time I've got to talk to you. I think you might've been on in LA a couple of years ago, or I was kind of drifting around that show. I don't think I was a it was on the set that day, but before we jump into kind of what's going on now, you were a founding member of CNCF. So let's take a step back and kind of share your perspective as to kind of where we are now from where this all began and kind of this whole movement around Cloud Native. Certainly it's a good place to be. >> Yeah, yeah definitely. It's been a great ride. In our industry, we go through these sort of timeframes every decade or so, where something big kind of comes along and you get involved in and you participate in it. And it gets to be a lot of fun and it either dies or it evolves into something else, right? And with CloudNativeCon Cloud Native itself, this concept of just how difficult it was to really move with the type of agility and the type of speed that developers in the enterprise really need to move at. It was just, it was hard to get there with just traditional infrastructure, traditional ways of doing configurations of doing management of infrastructure and it really needed something different and something to kind of help, it was called orchestration of course but at the time we didn't know it was called orchestration right. We knew we needed things like service mesh, but they weren't called service meshes then. There were more like control planes. And how do you, how do you custom create all of these different pieces? And the great thing about the CNCF is that we, when we started it, we had very simple foundational principles we wanted to follow right. One was, we wanted to have end users involved. A lot of foundations as become very vendor-driven and very vendor-centric. And you kind of lose your, your core base of the practitioners as you call us right? The guys who actually need to solve problems they're trying to make a living solving problems for the industry, not just for selling products, right? And so it was important that we get those end users involved and that, and that's probably the biggest changes. It's a great technology body. We had great technologists, great engineers and the foundation but we also have a huge over 150 end users that have engaged and been very involved and contributing to the end users things of the community, contributing to the foundation now. And it's been awesome to see that come to fruition over the last three years. >> Yeah, it certainly part of the magic of open source, that's been so, so transformative. And we've seen that obviously with servers and Linux and what what that did, but we've been talking a lot lately too about kind of the anniversary of the of the Agile Manifesto and kind of the Agile Movement and really changing the prioritization around change and really making change a first class citizen as opposed to kind of a nightmare I don't want to deal with and really building systems and ways of doing things that adopt that. I want to just to pull up the Cloud Native definition 'cause I think it's interesting. We talk about Cloud Native a lot and you guys actually wrote some words down and I think it's worth reading them that Cloud Native Technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in dynamic environments. Dynamic environments is such a key piece to this puzzle because it used to be, this is your infrastructure person, you've got to build something that fits into this. Now with an app-centric world has completely flipped over and the application developer doesn't have to worry about the environment anymore, right? It's spin it up and make it available to me when I need it. A really different way of thinking about things than kind of this static world. >> Definitely and then that was the big missing piece for all those years was how do you get to this dynamic environment, right, that embraces change and embraces risk to some extent. Not risk like you heard in the past with risk avoidance is so important to have, right. It's really more, how do you embrace risk and fail earlier in the process, learn earlier in the process so that when you get to production you're not failing, you're not having to worry about failure because you cut as much as you could in the earlier phases of your development life cycle. And that's been set, like you said that dynamic piece has just been such the difference. I think in why it's been taken off. >> Yeah. >> And industry this last five years now that we've been around. >> Yeah, for sure. So then the next one well, I'm just going to go through them 'cause there's three main tenants of this thing. These techniques and techniques enabled loosely coupled systems that allow engineers to make high impact changes frequently and predictably with minimum toil. I mean, those are, those are really hard challenges in a classic waterfall way with PRDs and MRDs and everything locked down in a big, giant Gantt chart that fills half of the half the office to actually be able to have loosely coupled systems. Again a really interesting concept versus hardwired, connected systems. Now you're talking about APIs and systems all connecting. Really different way to think about development and how do you build applications. >> Yeah and the interesting thing there is the very first definition we came up with five plus years ago was containers, containerized workloads, right? And being technologist, everyone focused on those words containers and containerized and then everything had to be a container, right? And to your point, that isn't what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to create services that are just big enough to support whatever is needed for that service to support and be able to scale those up and down independently of other dependent systems that may have different requirements associated with what they have to do, right. And it was more about that keeping those highly efficient type of patterns in mind of spinning up and spinning down things that don't have impact or cause impact to other larger components around them was really the key not containers or containerized. >> Right. >> Obviously that's one of the patterns you could follow to create those types of services and those patterns, but there is nothing that guarantees it has to be a container that can do that. Lots of BMS today and lots of Bare Metal Servers can have a similar function. They're just not going to be as dynamic as you may want them to be in other environments. >> Right and then the third tenant, three of three is fostering sustainable ecosystem of open source vendor neutral projects, democratizing state-of-the-art patterns to make these innovations accessible for everyone. So just the whole idea of democratization of technology, democratization of data, democratization of tools, to do something with the data to find the insight democratization of the authority to execute on those decisions once you get going on that, I mean the open source and kind of this democratization to enable a broad distribution of power to more than just mahogany row, huge fundamental shift in the way people think about things. And really even still today, as everyone's trying to move their organizations to be more data-centric in the way they operate, it is really all about the democratization and getting that information and the tools and the ability to do something with it to as broad a group of people as you can. And that's even before we talk about open source development and the power of again, as you said, bringing in this really active community who want to contribute. It's a really interesting way that open source works. It's such a fun thing to watch, and I'm not a developer from the outside, but to see people get excited about helping other people. I think that's probably the secret to the whole thing that really taps into. >> Yeah, it is. And open source, there were discussions about open source for 20 plus years trying to get more into open source contributing to open source in an enterprise mindset, right? And it could never really take off 'cause it's not really the foundation or the platforms or the capabilities needed to do that. And now to your point, open source was really the underlying engine that is making all of this possible. Without open source and some of those early days of trying to get more open source and understanding of open source in the enterprise, I think we'd still be trying to get adoption but open source had just gotten to that point where everyone wanted to do more with open source. The CNCF comes along and said, here's the set of democratized, we're not going to have kingmakers in this organization. We're going to have a lot of open solutions, a lot of good options for companies to look at, and we're not going to lock you in to anything. 'Cause that's another piece of that open source model, right. Open source still can lock you in, right. But if you have open choices within open source, there's less, lock-in potential and locking isn't really a horrible thing. It's just one of those tenants you don't want to be tied too tightly to any one solution or one hope, open source even program because that could 'cause issues of that minimal toil we talked about, right. If you have a lot of dependencies and a lot of, I always joked about OpenStack but if I have to email two guys, if I find an issue in OpenStack about security that's not really a great security model that I can tell my customers I have your security covered, right? So, you want to get away from emails and having to ask for help, if you see a big security issue you want to just address it right then and fix it fast. >> Right, right. So much to unpack there. And for those that don't follow you, you've done a ton of presentations. You've got a ton of great content out of the internet with deep technical dives, into some of this stuff and the operational challenges in your philosophies but good keeping it kind of high level here. 'Cause one of the themes that comes up over and over in some of the other stuff I saw from you is really about asking the right questions. And we hear this time and time again, that the way to get the right answer first you got to frame the question right. And you talk quite extensively about asking the why and asking the how. I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit as to why those two questions are so important and how do you ask them in a way that doesn't piss everybody off or scare them away when you're at a big company like MasterCard that has a lot of personal information, you're in the finance industry, you got ton of regulation but still you're asking how and you're asking why. >> Yeah, definitely. And those, those are two questions that I keep coming back to in the industry because they are, they're not asked enough in my opinion. I think they, for the reasons you brought up those there's too much pushback or there's, you don't want to be viewed as someone who's being difficult, right? And there maybe other reasons why you don't want to ask that but I like to ask the why first because it, you kind of have to understand what's the problem you're trying to solve. And it kind of goes back to my engineering background, I think right. I love to solve problems and one of my early days and you might have heard this on one of my, my interviews, right. But in my early days, I was trying to fix a problem that I was on an advanced engineering team. And I was tier four support in a large Telco. And for months we had this issue with one of our large oil based companies and no one could solve it. And I was on call the night that they called in. And I asked the guy a simple question, tell me which lights you see on this DHUC issue? Which is a piece of equipment that sits between a ATM network and a regular Sonnet network. So we're watching, I'm asking them as kind of find out where in this path, there's a problem. And the guy tells me where there's no lights on. And I'm like well, plug in the power and let me know when it boots up and then let's try another test. And that was the problem. So my, the cleaning crew would come through and unplugged it. And so I learned early on in my crew that if you don't ask those simple questions, you just assume that everything's working almost nine times out of 10, it's the simple, easy solution to a problem. You're just too busy thinking of all the complex things that could go wrong and trying to solve all the hard problems first. And so I really try to help people think about, ask the why questions, ask, why is this important? Why do we need to do this now? Why, what would happen if we don't do this? If we did it this other way, what's the downside of doing it this other way? Really think through your options, 'cause it may take you 20, 30 minutes to kind of do a good analysis of a problem, but then your solution you're not going to spend weeks trying to troubleshoot when it doesn't work because you put the time upfront to think about it. So that's sort of the main reason why I like to ask the why and the how, because it forces you to think outside of your normal, my job is to take this cog and put it over here and fix this, right. And you don't want to be in that, that mode when you're solving complex problems because you overlook or you miss the simple things. >> Right. So you don't like the 'cause we've always done it that way? (both laughing) >> I do not. And I hear that a lot everywhere I've been in the industry and anywhere, any company you have those, this is the way we've always done it. >> Yeah, yeah. Just like the way we've always traveled, right. And the way we've always been educated and the way we've always consumed entertainment. It's like really? I wanted to (indistinct) >> I have learned though that there's a good, I like to understand the reason behind why we've always done it that way. So I do always ask that question. >> Right. >> I don't turn around on someone and get mad at them and you say, Oh, we can't we have to do it differently. I don't have the mindset of let's throw that out the window because I realized that over time something happened. It's like when I had younger kids, I always laugh because they put these warnings on those whatever they call them at the kids stand up in them. >> Right, the little, the little (indistinct) >> Don't put them on top of the stairs right. These stupid little statements are written on there. And I always thought I was dumb. And if somebody told me, well that's because somebody put their kid near the pool and they drown. >> Right, right. >> You have to kind of point out the obvious to people and so, >> Yeah. >> I don't think it's that dangerous of a situation and in the work environment, but hopefully we're not making the same mistakes that have been prevented by not allowing just the, not because we've done it this way before modeled it to go forward. >> Right, right now we have a rule around here too. There's a reason we have every rules is because somebody blew it at some point in time. That's why we have the rule that I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about automation, right? 'Cause automation is such a big and important piece of this whole story especially as these systems scale, scale, scale. And we know that people are prone to errors. I mean, I had seen that story about the cleaner accidentally unplugging things. We all know that people fat fingers, copy and paste is not used as universally as it should be. But I wonder if you could share, how important automation is. And I know you've talked a lot about how people should think about automate automation and prioritizing automation and helping use automation to both make people more productive but also to prioritize what the people should be working on as well as lowering the error rate on stuff that they probably shouldn't be doing anyway. >> Exactly, yeah automation to me is, as you've heard me say before is it's something that is probably almost as big of a key tenet as open source should be, right? It's one of those foundational things that it really helps you to get rid of some of that churn and some of the toil that you run into in a production environment where you're trying to always figure out what went wrong and why did this system not work on this point in time and this day and this deployment, and it's almost to your point always a fat finger, someone deleted an IP address from the IPAM system. There's all kinds of errors that you can people can tell you about that have happened. But to the root of your question is automation needs to be thought about from three different primary areas in my view, in my experience. The first one is the infrastructure as code, software defined infrastructure, right. So the networking teams and the storage teams and the security teams are probably the furthest behind in adopting automation in in their jobs, right. And their jobs are probably the most critical pieces of the infrastructure, right? And so those are, those are pieces that I really highly encouraged them to think about how can they automate those areas. The second piece is I think is equally as important as the infrastructure piece is the application side. When I first joined multiple enterprises in the past, the test coverage is in the low 10's to 20%, right. And your test coverage is a direct correlation to how well your application is going to behave and production in terms of failures, right? So if you have low test coverage, you're going to have high failure rates. It's sort of over over all types of industries every study has shown that, right. So getting your test coverage up and testing the right things not just testing to have test coverage right. >> But actually. >> Right, right. >> Thinking through your user stories and acceptance criteria and having good test is really, really important. So you have those two bookends, right. And in between, I think it's important that you look at how you connect to these services, these distributed systems we talked about in the opening right. If you fully automate your infrastructure and fully automate your application development and delivery, that's great. But if in the middle you have this gooey middle that doesn't really connect well doesn't really have the automation in place to ensure that your certificates are there that your security is in place. That middle piece can become really a problem from a security and from a availability issue. And so those those are the two pieces that I say really focus on is that gooey middle and then that infrastructure piece is really the two keys. >> Right, right. You've got another group of words that you use a lot. I want you to give us a little bit more color behind it. And that's talking to people to tell them that they need to spend more time on investigation. They need to do more experimentation. And then and the one that really popped out to me was it was retro to retrospective to not necessarily a postmortem which I thought is interesting. You say retrospective versus the postmortem, because this is an ongoing process for continuous improvement. And then finally, what seems drop dead dumb obvious is to iterate and deliver. But I wonder if you can share a little bit more color on how important it is to experiment and to investigate and to have those retrospectives. >> Yeah definitely. And then it kind of goes back to that culture we want to create in a Cloud Native world, right. We want to be open to thinking about how we can solve problems better, how we can have each iteration we want, to look at, how do we have a less toil, have less issues. How do we improve the, I liked kind of delight in your experience, how do you make your developers and your customers specific, but specifically how do you make your customers so happy with your service? And when you think about those sort of areas, right. You want to spend some portion of your time dedicated to how do I look at and investigate better ways of doing things or more improvements around the way my customer experience is being delivered. Asking your customers questions, right. You'd be surprised how how many customers don't ever get asked for their opinion on how something works, right. And they want to be asked, they'd love to give you feedback. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to go do it that next iteration, right? The old adage I like to use is if Henry Ford had listened to his customers he would have tried to breed a faster horse, right? And so you have to kind of think about what you want to try to deliver as a product and as an organization but at the same time, that input is important. And I think, I say carve it out, because if you don't, we're so busy today and there's so much going on in our lives. If you don't dedicate and carve out some of that time and protect that time, you will never get to that, right. It's always a, I'll get to that next year. Maybe our next iteration I'll try, right. And so it's important to really hold that time as sacred and spend time every week, every couple of weeks, whatever it works out in the schedule, but actually put that in your calendar and block out that time and use it to really look at what's possible, what's relevant, what kind of improvements you can have. I think those are really the key the key takeaways I can have from that piece of it. And then, the last one you asked about, which I think is so important, is the retrospective, right. Always trying to get better and better at what you do is, is an engineer's goal, right? We never liked to fail. We never liked to do something twice, right? We don't want to, we want to learn the first time we make a mistake and not make it over and over again. So that those retrospectives and improving on what you're doing iteratively. And to the point you brought up and I like to bring this up a lot, 'cause I've been part not at MasterCard, but at other companies parts of companies that would talk a great game come up with great stories, say here's our plan. And then when we get ready to go to deliver it, we go and we reinvestigate the plan and see if there's a better plan. And then we get to a point where we're ready to go execute. And then we go back and start all over again, right. And you've got to deliver iteratively, if you don't, you're the point I like to always make is you're never going to be ready, right. It's like, when are you ready to have kids? You never ready to have kids, right. You just have to go and you'll learn as you go. You know so. >> Right, right, I love that. Well again, Ken, you have so much great stuff out there for technical people that want to dive in deep? So I encourage them just to do a simple YouTube or excuse me, YouTube search or Google search but I want to give you the last word. One word, I'm going to check the transcript when this thing is over that you've used probably more than any other word while we've been talking for the last few minutes is toil. And I think it's really interesting that it brings up and really highlights your empathy towards what you're trying to help developers avoid and what you're trying to help teams avoid so that they can be more productive. You keep saying, avoid the toil, get out of the toil, get out of this kind of crap that inhibits people from getting their job done and being creative and being inventive and being innovative. Where does that come from? And I just love that you keep reinforce it and just kind of your final perspective as we wrap on 2020 and another year of CNCF and clearly containers and Kubernetes and Cloud Native is continues to be on fire and on a tear. I just wonder if you can share a little bit of your perspective as a founding member as we kind of come to the end of 2020. >> Yeah definitely. Thanks again for having me. It's been a great, great discussion. I am a developer by background, by trade today, I still develop. I still contribute to open source and I've had this mantra pretty much my entire career that you have to get into the weeds and understand what everyone's experiencing in order to figure out how to solve the problems, right. You can't be in an ivory tower and look down and say, Oh, there's a problem, I'm going to go fix that. It just doesn't work that way. And most problems you try to solve in that model will be problems that no other team has really experienced. And there not going to be help, they're not going to be thankful that you solved the problem they don't have, right? They want you to solve a problem that they have. And so I think that that's sort of a key for the reason why I spent so much time talking about that as I live it every day. I understand it. I talk with my development community and with a broader community of developers at MasterCard and understand the pains that they're going through and try to help them every day with coming up with ways to help make their lives a lot easier. So it's important to me and to to all organizations out there and in all of the, in the world. So, CNCF its been great. It's still growing. I'm always looking for end users. I'd love to talk to you. Well, you can reach out to, to the CNCF if you'd like to learn more, our website has information on how to get connected to the end user community. We community within the CNCF that is not, it's a private community. So you don't have to worry about your information being shared. If you don't want people to know you belong to the community, you don't have to list that information. If you want to list it, you're welcome to list it. There's no expectations on you to contribute to open source, but we do encourage you to contribute, and are here to support that end user community any way we can. So thanks again for having us and looking forward to, to a great show in North America. >> All right well, thank you, Ken, for sharing your information sharing the insight, sharing the knowledge really appreciate it and great to catch up. All right. He's Ken, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE with our ongoing coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020 North America Digital. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about a very important topic around de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. This is critical, especially in the era of COVID. And with me, to really explore this issue is Dr. Rico, who's the vice president office of the CTO at INFINIDAT Doc. Good to see you. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> And Ken Steinhardt, is also here as a field CTO at INFINIDAT and I got to tell the audience, Doc, you're also the chairman of the Mass Motorcycles Association. You're a very cool guy. You're a pilot, you're a firearms instructor, all about safety, and Ken and Doc you're both musicians, right? Doc, I think he played the drums, and Ken, I know when we first met, you're a music guy, so wow. Surrounded by talent so, thank you so much for coming on. >> Glad to be here. Great to see you. >> For the other thing too is that you guys are long time storage industry experts. I've known you both for many, many years. INFINIDAT deep engineering expertise of course, everybody knows about Moshay, he created the most successful product in the history of the storage industry. And we're going to talk about the importance of data, especially in this era of COVID, and how mission criticality has really become more and more important. So, I want to start Doc with you and this notion of business continuity. How are you thinking about, and INFINIDAT thinking about business continuity in this isolation era? >> Well, that's a really great question Dave, because it has changed quite a bit. And as you said, we've known each other a long time, all the way back to when I still had hair, that was how long ago it was. But, business continuity is something that every business constantly looks at throughout their evolution. And it's one of these things where certain applications are typically more mission critical than others. And lately, what we've seen is this genre of a lights out data center that has become absolutely critical operating a business today. People can't just be on site anymore. People need to be working remotely, and that includes data center personnel and in many respects. So, this whole concept of business continuity now encompasses not only the operation equipment that's on premises, or sometimes even off premises, but it also encompasses applications that people need access to that they may not have thought of mission critical before, because working from home was a convenience or working remotely was a convenience, not a requirement for that business. >> You, Ken, I know you talked to a lot of CIOs. I was sitting at a CIO round table with my friends down at ETR recently, and one of the CIO said, when COVID hit, we realized that our business quote unquote business continuity plans were just way too narrowly focused on DR. What do you see from the IT community? >> It's funny because I literally was on a CIO round table with the West Coast this morning. And there were a couple of interesting comments that really stuck out to me from some of the people there. One was commenting of just reaffirming, what Doc said, how much people are working from home now. They said, traditionally they'd had traditional offices and they've just recently hired in this company about 250 people. He said, all of them are going to be remote workers and their normal from here on out, for the next 150 they're looking to hire is just that business as usual will be remote work. And one of the other CIOs chimed in with a quote that really stuck out to me. He said, "Remote work requires always on infrastructure in this day and age." And it's just a whole new way of having to make sure that businesses are operational and their workers can do what they're supposed to do. >> Well, so let's stay on that. I mean, ransomware's on everybody's mind. I mean, all you have to do is look at the stock market, you see, what's happened with Zoom, it's exploded. All the end point securities, identity access management security companies are going crazy, because (chuckles) people are now so vulnerable. So, they're more exposed to ransomware, Ken, what do we really need to know about ransomware? First, the smart company, smart organization is the one that is prepared and assumes the worst. Which means don't think it can't happen to you, especially when you look at a couple of the more public examples in the last couple of years in particular. So, it means you must take steps to protect yourself, particularly for the sake of your company, your business, your employees, your shareholders, your customers, everyone else. And that means deploying technology that assumes that if the worst case scenario could happen to you, how do you make sure that you have taken the steps that you can avoid the worst possible scenarios that could happen? >> Well, you know, Doc, lot of times when you have this discussion on ransomware, people say, well, should I pay the ransom? And sometimes people say, well, yeah, maybe it should go. You hope you never get there, right? (chuckles) >> Right, you absolutely hope you never get there. There is such horrible examples of paying ransom that just don't work. Just look at the Somalia pirates as an example, right? It doesn't stop them at all, but, take a look at what the potential impact is, not the potential impact to your business and your employees, but the potential impact to society. A couple of years ago with Sony, was very notorious case. More recently, a couple of months ago, Garmin. As you mentioned, I'm a pilot, but I was very worried as what reservoir, a lot of people in the aircraft and in aviation industry. What's going to happen not only with our private information, the account information, but what's going to happen with avionics updates? If Garmin didn't have a fallback plan, a way to recover, then what was going to happen? And I'm sure they were going through the process and the thoughts of, should we pay this year? How else do we get out of this? But, fortunately they had a very good plan in place and it only took them a couple of days to restore back to normal operations. Arguably as far as avionics goes, they were lucky in the sense that this happened to them right in the middle of an update cycle, which is 28 day cycle. But the fact that it only took them a couple of days, congratulations to them. I'm sure that with even better plans and a little bit of extra effort, it could have been a matter of hours instead of days. >> Well, let's come back to business continuity. Ken, do you feel as though businesses are not prepared based on the conversation we were having earlier? >> Some are, some aren't. It will be getting into that, I think in a little bit more detail as well, but historically, organizations I think have focused far too much just on traditional disaster recovery, usually with things like some of the technologies that have been around a long while like backup, and onto often having focused towards the technologies that really do keep the business running without human intervention if something were to ever go wrong. >> So, Doc, anything you'd add to that? I mean, what's the state of business continuity from your perspective? Are people having to really starting to accelerate a journey because of this COVID? >> I absolutely think they're accelerating a journey. They're also looking now at, this concept of multiple active sites. The concept of active sites is not something new, it's something that dates back a couple of decades and a lot of the financial industry. When they were struck, they were looking at some very significant changes in their operational paradigm because they realized that the system is going down and is only a small percentage of the problem that people impact is far worse. The operational procedures, the human intervention. So, what they would do is typically build out multiple sites and rotate the applications between them. What they really haven't done yet, at least not on a broad scale and certainly not in the U.S and some cases in Europe, they started this journey, having applications running simultaneously in multiple sites accessing the same data sets. It's not a brand new concept, but it's something that has improved significantly. The technologies have improved significantly over the course of the past decade. And with the introduction of our active backend solution, a couple of years ago, even brought it to an entirely new level. >> The people aspect that Doc mentioned is so critical. And that's certainly been one of the key lessons learned when real disasters have occurred is that the systems have to be, if you really want to keep your business operating making an assumption that people are going to have depending upon the nature of the disaster. Very different priorities and one of them is not, Gee, do I keep these ITs systems running or not? They're going to be worried about their co-workers, their families, other things, et cetera. So, the ultimate has to be systems that are capable of continuing the operation of the business in the face of a site failure, a metropolitan area failure or whatever it takes without the requirement necessarily for human intervention. >> So, I want to get into active-active. But before we do, I wonder if we could do a little sort of data protection one on one, a back up, a replication, you got snapshots, Doc, what do we need to know about each in the context of this discussion? >> I think the important thing to look at when you think about the different types of technologies and say you apply the solutions is that some of them apply to specific equipment failures, and some of them apply to data failure. And I separate equipment from data in the sense that data can be corrupted in some shape or form. It can be through malicious attack, like ransomware as an example, only one example, other types of malware can play a factor as well, or it can be incidental. Somebody pressing the wrong button, it can be an operational procedure, perhaps another system failure that causes a change in the data or corruption in the data that makes it essentially unusable. So, whenever we're looking at this, we have to start with what is the recovery point objective. The RPO that's where most people start with. And in the RPO, in essence, if you think of time zero, right now, it's where the failure occurs. Walk backwards. How far back can I go and still sustain my business? Now, there may be other procedural things you can do to catch up as close to that RPO and zero as you can, but each of these technologies that we're talking about give you a different RPOs, like rewinding a tape back to a point in time. So, that's the first place to start. >> Okay. So, let's bring up that slide actually. I actually liked this as the fireball slide I call it, but this is how people measure sort of the business impact, if you will, RPO and RTO. And what I like about this is in this digital world, it's kind of a cliche, but everything's getting more intense. People want, they don't want to lose data when you ask a customer, how much data are you willing to lose? They say none. >> None. >> And you say, well, how much are you willing to pay? So, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of describe that tension and that dynamic that's really underscored in this slide. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah, you hit it on the head David. It's the traditional trade off between RPO, RTO and cost. As Doc described with RPO, the objective would be to get as close to zero data loss as you could possibly get, with RTO which measures the time associated with how long will it take you to get back to your acceptable level of RPO. That is a time factor where for every minute or second, that goes by that you're not in business, that's the extension of the RTO. And historically, the closer you get as you approach zero RPO and zero RTO, usually the greater the cost goes up. And it's always been the eternal trade off, is a great analogy. It's sort of like if you want to buy a car. RPO equates for the quality of the solution, RTO is time or speed and cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast, it won't be cheap. If it's good, and it's cheap, it won't be fast. And if it's fast, and it's cheap, it won't be good. So, usually that's the kind of tradeoff we will have to deal with there. And, the factors that will impact that, as Doc alluded to can be many. There's many aspects that you have to consider in terms of what is the service level that the business requires, and do we have solutions in place that can actually give us what is the real service level of the business requires if something were to go bad. >> Because, customers have gone through, unnatural acts, and Doc before you were kind of describing what some people would refer to as, as a three site, data centers and all kinds of things that people will do, but that brings us to active-active, Doc, what is active-active? >> Yeah, let me interject a point there, and then I'll get to your question about active-active. First is the question I can raise about service level, that's absolutely critical. And business may have different service levels for different applications. >> Dave: Right. >> And you never really know what that is. For example, I was working with a university a few years back, you normally think, well, universities is where they worried about, they're worried about their grading systems. Everybody's always worried about their financial systems. This particular university was worried about their golf course reservations system. (laughs) And their number one mission critical application, and I'm sure there was a little chunk tongue and cheek there as well, was the golf course reservation system because that directly impacted, there were alumni and had a direct correlation to the incoming donations for the following year. So, you never know what's going to be mission critical. Closer to home working very recently, there's a great case study from Aultman Hospital on a website. One of the things that they did, which I thought was absolutely astounding, was they took advantage of our offer to loan them free storage for a while, leveraging some of the COD that they're passing on demand that they weren't using. One of the reasons that they wanted this extra capacity was so that they can make telepresence available to their patients to visit with their families. At a time when families can't go into the hospital visit, when people are ill, what a great comfort to their family. So, this is a great way to look at it. When you think about these different service levels now, and you think about the different types of replication technologies that are available. Look at the multisite, what is multisite really doing for you? Multisite is giving you some level of synchronous replication so that you have an RPO of zero recovery point objective. It still may not be an RTO or zero, but it will be darn close to it. But more importantly, it's giving you an additional site to really maintain that RPO of zero in case the disaster radius, the blast area, the impact zone is even further away. Now, this isn't going to prevent any type of malicious intent, it's not going to prevent the ransomware case, and things like that, but it'll certainly prevent the catastrophic failure of the data center. What does active-active do? Well, active-active now, gives you the read write capability. And now our multisite implementation by the way, leverages our active-active. So, gives you the ability now to have the simultaneously running instance of an application in multiple data centers, reading and writing from the same dataset. And what that gives you, is not only an RPO of zero, but an RTO of zero, because now you can have an application in another data center stand in and take over for it. Naturally, the application needs to be able to do that. There are a lot of applications that are capable of it. The Oracle parallel server or rack technology, gives you that capability. There are other types of clustering technologies that will fail almost instantaneously, that will give you that capability. So, that's where really active-active comes into play. >> Yeah, makes sense for me. When I started the industry, the VAX clusters were sort of the now thing, right? >> Yup. >> (indistinct) (Dave chuckles) >> All right. So, what are you seeing in the marketplace? Are you seeing... What's the adoption look like? Are there any differences that you see by region? What can you tell us there? >> Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the first organizations that obviously jumped on to active-active type solutions, were those where there were in particularly, in things like financial services, some compliance requirements or financial incentives or motivation to make sure that the business was always operational. And it's interesting because there was a study that was done all the way back in 2003, by Roper, that asked business executives and IT executives the same questions relative to their perceptions of their companies or organizations ability to meet RPO or RTO service level agreements. >> Right. And we have some data on this that I want to bring up. So, this is the RPO data but please carry on. >> Ken: Exactly, and so they asked questions that really were about RPO or RTO. Hey, if a disaster hit, would you lose data and how much? And what the data showed was that the business executives and IT executives in Europe, were actually pretty much on the same page. They both said, yeah, we probably would lose some data or a reasonable amounts associated with it. But what was a little frightening, was there appeared to be a chasm of disconnect between the business executives, from the IT executives in the U.S. And what it showed was that the IT executives were on the same page as the European IT executives and the business executives from Europe, saying that, yeah, we'd probably lose some data. But it showed that very few of the business executives thought that they would. And then similarly, when they were asked the question about RTO, how long would it take? In terms of days, hours, et cetera, for your full operation to be back in operational and granted they were talking in 2003 terms back then, which was a little longer than where the technology can now address it now. There was, again, this consistency between the IT executives in both continents and countries, as well as the European business executives, but again, a disconnect where the business executives in the U.S thought, oh, no, we'll be fine. We'll have everything back in a couple of days or less than, it won't be an issue. In my opinion, in looking at that data, when it first came out, my impression was, well, now I understand why a lot of business continuity projects don't get approved because the IT people know that they need it, but the business executives have, if I could be so bold, an unrealistically optimistic view of their ability to achieve RPO and RTO, I'll give you a great example. There was a major high tech company around that timeframe that actually had a major outage in their email system. And email was not perceived to be at the time, ultra mission critical application for them. I know it seems strange in this day and age, but back then it was considered sort of an afterthought and they had a four hour SLA in case something went down where, hey, if we're down for four hours, we get it back and four hours, we're fine. And so, IT thought, they were doing a great job, 'cause they got it back in less than four. It was about three point something. And it turned out that the real impact of the business was so overwhelming, they had to completely overhaul the IT infrastructure that they've put in place to deliver that. So, it's an interesting issue, and it's the kind of thing where, as a result, I believe that as we sit here today in 2020, the disconnect in the U.S still exists. If you look across Europe, you tend to find a lot of deployments of active-active. The first country that probably did a ton of it was Germany, and then, lot of the other European countries did as well. For a multitude of reasons, you tend to see a lot of active-active deployments in Europe, but you don't see anywhere near as many as if I could be so bold, we probably should be seeing in the U.S, and I believe a major contributing factor to that is that there is still this disconnect, between business executives having a false sense of security that is unfounded by the infrastructures that they have in place. And if they were to ask their IT people, and maybe that's a good idea for them to talk more, they'd probably find that they're more exposed than they ever realized. >> Right. And of course in Europe, you've got, much tighter proximity, and you're up against borders of a 200 mile or a 200 kilometer roll, governments have tried to impose here, really can't be imposed in a lot of cases. Okay. Let's get into what you guys are doing here in the space. So, Doc, how do you approach ensuring access to mission critical data? What's INFINIDAT's angle? >> Yeah, I think it's several different layers that need to be applied here. The first INFINIDAT angle starts with the fact that our storage is a hundred percent data availability guarantee. It's simple enough. It's triple redundant architecture, seven nines reliability design, which equates to 3.16 seconds per year of downtime, which is less than a scuzzy time (laughs) I bet you know. Let's start with just, right, forget the nonsense, the system's are a hundred percent available guaranteed. We put some teeth behind that, and that's a great way to start. It's not necessarily going to fundamentally protect your data from site outages and network outages and server outages and things like that, so, let's be fed up and can go to in active-active infrastructure. And now you can take the system and put it either elsewhere behind a firewall on the same data center floor, or in a metropolitan area. Wherever you need it to be, separate power zones, separate networks zones, make it even more available. And then if you really want to go that next level of protection because you're worried about regional outages and things of that nature, multisite replication. But now it's up the ante even further. Let's look at the malicious intent, let's look at the data corruption. Let's look at all of the other possibilities of things that can happen to your data. So, implement snapshotting technology, in this snapshot technology, and InfiniBox is essentially free. There's no cost for the software, there is no performance impact because it's part of metadata updates that are happening all the time anyway. So, there's zero additional overhead of that. There's no additional, there's no copying of data going on with a snapshot, so there's no additional cost penalty associated with it. And you can snapshot this frequently for a Snapshot any of your data frequently to protect against data corruption. And if you're worried about some sort of malicious aspect, that's going to engage and perhaps gain access to the snapshots, we have immutable technology, and that is also free. It's there, it doesn't cost you anything other than the time it takes for the administrator to determine what the policy is. And now that can not be modified. It can't be deleted, it can't be modified, it can't be updated, can't be written to your inside whatever the polyp the defined policy is. So, now you're protected, you're a hundred percent availability, increase data hundred percent availability with active-active, and then increase your RPO capability with dissonance and protect yourself against data corruption with immutable snapshots. Or some combination of standard snapshots and immutable snapshots. >> Yeah, so, I was going to ask Ken, if this is a cost effective approach, but, I mean, it's free, it comes in the stack. >> That is the key word, and you both just said it. Standard and included functionality all based on that great snapshot technology, which was the foundation for it that Doc described. Active-active, standard and included, the ability to go to a third site for disaster recovery at the industry's lowest asynchronous RPO with a remote site. Standard and included, immutable snaps, standard and included. So, compared to traditional views of what most people had back to our illustrious triangle earlier of RPO versus RTO versus cost, you're still going to have the additional cost of media and remote site for protecting your data, obviously, but in terms of software license costs, we're making it simpler, we're making it easier, we're making it standard and included, and we're just making it so much more readily available for organizations to be able to achieve superior RTO and RPO at a cost point that maybe certainly is a little bit higher than just having that single system that Doc alluded to, it's still a hundred percent available, but it's way below what the expectations of this industry have been over the last 20 years. >> Yeah, which is double, triple, I mean easily. Well, can I understand you for a second. You've worked for a lot of different storage companies, Doc you as well, but how different is this? How unique is this? >> There are surprisingly few vendors that can offer true zero RPO at two zero RTO. There's really only a handful. We're one of them. And by handful, I mean about three in the industry, including ourselves, and where I think we differentiate is fundamentally to a lot of those points we just mentioned. The software standard and included so we're not going to charge you extra for it. It's going to be relatively simple to deploy and integrate a stock alluded to earlier with server cluster software and the key components that people would use there in terms of databases and in terms of operating systems. And it's fundamentally going to be able to offer not just that zero RPO, zero RTO active-active environment, but if you do, and when you do need to go to a third site at distance for the true disaster recovery, if you ever lost a metropolitan area, we're going to be able to do it at an RPO that is lower than anything else on the market. >> Doc, are there complexities associated with doing this at petabyte scale? I mean, you guys make a big deal out of that, and you're clearly excited about it, but, is it extra hard to do at that kind of volume at scale? >> I'm going to give you two answers, and say, yes, it's incredibly difficult to do, but then I'm going to say it's incredibly easy for the customer to do because we've made it easy. There a lot of ramifications to doing things at petabyte scale. There's the size of the caching cables that you don't have to worry about. There's the numbers of things that need to be checked, and counter checked and constantly crosscheck for validity. There's also the scale of things that happen like silent data corruption that need to be factored in. All of those things are being done by InfiniBox, on a constant basis with no impact to the customer, no impact to the administrator, no impact to the running application. And I think that's a frankly, another differentiator as well. Ken and I have some common history as well. (chuckles) Used to constantly talk about internally, what happens as things get larger, systems slow down. That simply doesn't happen with InfiniBox. And that's why service providers use us as well. Cloud service providers managed service providers are some of our biggest customers. Because they know they can have these large scale systems running with all these different workloads, all these different functions, be they snapshots, clones, whatever they are, with no impact and very easy and rapid to deploy. >> Yeah, I set up top, you got to be storage hardos to make this stuff work. (laughs) It's very complicated and we've seen it for years and years. Last question. Again, huge changes in the last 150 days where people are just really tuned in to things like digital transformation, I talked about security, business resiliency, business continuity. Where... I'll start with you Ken, how should users be thinking about this? What steps should they be taking like now? >> What a great question. And back to sort of where we started, because of the nature of how things have changed, more applications are mission critical than they've ever been before. And providing, and always on infrastructure to make sure that you can give your users and your customers and your business, the opportunity to stay alive in the face of just about anything that could happen has never been more important in the history of this industry. >> Doc, I'll give you the final word, you can pile on that. >> I think Ken summed it up really well, but I'm going to take a different twist on it. It's all about de-risking, and a lot of the CIOs and CTOs of companies that I've been talking to over the course of the past couple of months, have basically said, hey, my digital transformation initiatives are on hold right now because I've got to keep the lights on, I've got to keep my business running. In some cases, maybe I've had to sadly pare down my staff, but I've got, remote workers have got to worry about. So, find a partner that's going to de-risk your infrastructure for you. Take a look at some of the things that we've announced in the past few months as well. We'll take a lot of that risk way, not only from the availability perspective, but we're going to take the risk away from a cost perspective. If you want to talk about INFINIDAT, don't worry about things like, how am I going to migrate over to it? We're going to do that for you. We're going to work with you, we're going to come up with a plan, we're going to make as much of it non-disruptive as we can, and we're going to assume the cost of doing it. We're going to take away all the risk of availability. We just talked about all of that. We're going to give you guarantees, that are a hundred percent availability. We'll help you architect the right solution for you and we'll protect you moving forward. You might need some flex area of capacity as you work through some of these new applications and new initiatives, so, you've got to be willing to take the risk away with our elastic pricing models. Use the storage when you need it, return it when you don't, and you don't have to pay for it anymore. We'll make it that simple for you. We'll give you that cloud operating paradigm on premises, and by the way, no egress costs. (Dave laughs) >> Well, this is a hard problem for people because they've had to do the work from home pivot, IT people, specifically, I mean, they've had to spend to shore up that infrastructure and of course, organizations just saying, well, we're going to pull from other places, but, look, if you're not digital today, you're not being able to transact business. And so, you can't relax your business continuity plans, in fact, you have to evolve them. Guys, thanks very much for sharing your perspectives and insights on this whole notion of de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave, is always a pleasure. Thank you. >> Cheers, and thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vallante for theCube, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about a very important topic around de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. This is critical, especially in the era of COVID. And with me, to really explore this issue is Dr. Rico, who's the vice president office of the CTO at INFINIDAT Doc. Good to see you. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> And Ken Steinhardt, is also here as a field CTO at INFINIDAT and I got to tell the audience, Doc, you're also the chairman of the Mass Motorcycles Association. You're a very cool guy. You're a pilot, you're a firearms instructor, all about safety, and Ken and Doc you're both musicians, right? Doc, I think he played the drums, and Ken, I know when we first met, you're a music guy, so wow. Surrounded by talent so, thank you so much for coming on. >> Glad to be here. Great to see you. >> For the other thing too is that you guys are long time storage industry experts. I've known you both for many, many years. INFINIDAT deep engineering expertise of course, everybody knows about Moshay, he created the most successful product in the history of the storage industry. And we're going to talk about the importance of data, especially in this era of COVID, and how mission criticality has really become more and more important. So, I want to start Doc with you and this notion of business continuity. How are you thinking about, and INFINIDAT thinking about business continuity in this isolation era? >> Well, that's a really great question Dave, because it has changed quite a bit. And as you said, we've known each other a long time, all the way back to when I still had hair, that was (indistinct). But, business continuity is something that every business constantly looks at throughout their evolution. And it's one of these things where certain applications are typically more mission critical than others. And lately, what we've seen is this genre of a lights out data center that has become absolutely critical operating a business today. People can't just be on site anymore. People need to be working remotely, and that includes data center personnel and in many respects. So, this whole concept of business continuity now encompasses not only the operation equipment that's on premises, or sometimes even off premises, but it also encompasses applications that people need access to that they may not have thought of mission critical before, because working from home was a convenience or working remotely was a convenience, not a requirement for that business. >> You, Ken, I know you talked to a lot of CIOs. I was sitting at a CIO round table with my friends down at ETR recently, and one of the CIO said, when COVID hit, we realized that our business quote unquote business continuity plans were just way too narrowly focused on DR. What do you see from the IT community? >> It's funny because I literally was on a CIO round table with the West Coast this morning. And there were a couple of interesting comments that really stuck out to me from some of the people there. One was commenting of just reaffirming, what Doc said, how much people are working from home now. They said, traditionally they'd had traditional offices and they've just recently hired in this company about 250 people. He said, all of them are going to be remote workers and their normal from here on out, for the next 150 they're looking to hire is just that business as usual will be remote work. And one of the other CIOs chimed in with a quote that really stuck out to me. He said, "Remote work requires always on infrastructure in this day and age." And it's just a whole new way of having to make sure that businesses are operational and their workers can do what they're supposed to do. >> Well, so let's stay on that. I mean, ransomware's on everybody's mind. I mean, all you have to do is look at the stock market, you see, what's happened with Zoom, it's exploded. All the end point securities, identity access management security companies are going crazy, because (chuckles) people are now so vulnerable. So, they're more exposed to ransomware, Ken, what do we really need to know about ransomware? First, the smart company, smart organization is the one that is prepared and assumes the worst. Which means don't think it can't happen to you, especially when you look at a couple of the more public examples in the last couple of years in particular. So, it means you must take steps to protect yourself, particularly for the sake of your company, your business, your employees, your shareholders, your customers, everyone else. And that means deploying technology that assumes that if the worst case scenario could happen to you, how do you make sure that you have taken the steps that you can avoid the worst possible scenarios that could happen? >> Well, you know, Doc, lot of times when you have this discussion on ransomware, people say, well, should I pay the ransom? And sometimes people say, well, yeah, maybe it should go. You hope you never get there, right? (chuckles) >> Right, you absolutely hope you never get there. There is such horrible examples of paying ransom that just don't work. Just look at the Somalia pirates as an example, right? It doesn't stop them at all, but, take a look at what the potential impact is, not the potential impact to your business and your employees, but the potential impact to society. A couple of years ago with Sony, was very notorious case. More recently, a couple of months ago, Garmin. As you mentioned, I'm a pilot, but I was very worried as what reservoir, a lot of people in the aircraft and in aviation industry. What's going to happen not only with our private information, the account information, but what's going to happen with avionics updates? If Garmin didn't have a fallback plan, a way to recover, then what was going to happen? And I'm sure they were going through the process and the thoughts of, should we pay this year? How else do we get out of this? But, fortunately they had a very good plan in place and it only took them a couple of days to restore back to normal operations. Arguably as far as avionics goes, they were lucky in the sense that this happened to them right in the middle of an update cycle, which is 28 day cycle. But the fact that it only took them a couple of days, congratulations to them. I'm sure that with even better plans and a little bit of extra effort, it could have been a matter of hours instead of days. >> Well, let's come back to business continuity. Ken, do you feel as though businesses are not prepared based on the conversation we were having earlier? >> Some are, some aren't. It will be getting into that, I think in a little bit more detail as well, but historically, organizations I think have focused far too much just on traditional disaster recovery, usually with things like some of the technologies that have been around a long while like backup, and onto often having focused towards the technologies that really do keep the business running without human intervention if something were to ever go wrong. >> So, Doc, anything you'd add to that? I mean, what's the state of business continuity from your perspective? Are people having to really starting to accelerate a journey because of this COVID? >> I absolutely think they're accelerating a journey. They're also looking now at, this concept of multiple active sites. The concept of active sites is not something new, it's something that dates back a couple of decades and a lot of the financial industry. When they were struck, they were looking at some very significant changes in their operational paradigm because they realized that the system is going down and is only a small percentage of the problem that people impact is far worse. The operational procedures, the human intervention. So, what they would do is typically build out multiple sites and rotate the applications between them. What they really haven't done yet, at least not on a broad scale and certainly not in the U.S and some cases in Europe, they started this journey, having applications running simultaneously in multiple sites accessing the same data sets. It's not a brand new concept, but it's something that has improved significantly. The technologies have improved significantly over the course of the past decade. And with the introduction of our active backend solution, a couple of years ago, even brought it to an entirely new level. >> The people aspect that Doc mentioned is so critical. And that's certainly been one of the key lessons learned when real disasters have occurred is that the systems have to be, if you really want to keep your business operating making an assumption that people are going to have depending upon the nature of the disaster. Very different priorities and one of them is not, Gee, do I keep these ITs systems running or not? They're going to be worried about their co-workers, their families, other things, et cetera. So, the ultimate has to be systems that are capable of continuing the operation of the business in the face of a site failure, a metropolitan area failure or whatever it takes without the requirement necessarily for human intervention. >> So, I want to get into active-active. But before we do, I wonder if we could do a little sort of data protection one on one, a back up, a replication, you got snapshots, Doc, what do we need to know about each in the context of this discussion? >> I think the important thing to look at when you think about the different types of technologies and say you apply the solutions is that some of them apply to specific equipment failures, and some of them apply to data failure. And I separate equipment from data in the sense that data can be corrupted in some shape or form. It can be through malicious attack, like ransomware as an example, only one example, other types of malware can play a factor as well, or it can be incidental. Somebody pressing the wrong button, it can be an operational procedure, perhaps another system failure that causes a change in the data or corruption in the data that makes it essentially unusable. So, whenever we're looking at this, we have to start with what is the recovery point objective. The RPO that's where most people start with. And in the RPO, in essence, if you think of time zero, right now, it's where the failure occurs. Walk backwards. How far back can I go and still sustain my business? Now, there may be other procedural things you can do to catch up as close to that RPO and zero as you can, but each of these technologies that we're talking about give you a different RPOs, like rewinding a tape back to a point in time. So, that's the first place to start. >> Okay. So, let's bring up that slide actually. I actually liked this as the fireball slide I call it, but this is how people measure sort of the business impact, if you will, RPO and RTO. And what I like about this is in this digital world, it's kind of a cliche, but everything's getting more intense. People want, they don't want to lose data when you ask a customer, how much data are you willing to lose? They say none. >> None. >> And you say, well, how much are you willing to pay? So, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of describe that tension and that dynamic that's really underscored in this slide. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah, you hit it on the head David. It's the traditional trade off between RPO, RTO and cost. As Doc described with RPO, the objective would be to get as close to zero data loss as you could possibly get, with RTO which measures the time associated with how long will it take you to get back to your acceptable level of RPO. That is a time factor where for every minute or second, that goes by that you're not in business, that's the extension of the RTO. And historically, the closer you get as you approach zero RPO and zero RTO, usually the greater the cost goes up. And it's always been the eternal trade off, is a great analogy. It's sort of like if you want to buy a car. RPO equates for the quality of the solution, RTO is time or speed and cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast, it won't be cheap. If it's good, and it's cheap, it won't be fast. And if it's fast, and it's cheap, it won't be good. So, usually that's the kind of tradeoff we will have to deal with there. And, the factors that will impact that, as Doc alluded to can be many. There's many aspects that you have to consider in terms of what is the service level that the business requires, and do we have solutions in place that can actually give us what is the real service level of the business requires if something were to go back? >> Because, customers have gone through, unnatural acts, and Doc before you were kind of describing what some people would refer to as, as a three site, data centers and all kinds of things that people will do, but that brings us to active-active, Doc, what is active-active? >> Yeah, let me interject a point there, and then I'll get to your question about active-active. First is the question I can raise about service level, that's absolutely critical. And business may have different service levels for different applications. >> Dave: Right. >> And you never really know what that is. For example, I was working with a university a few years back, you normally think, well, universities is where they worried about, they're worried about their grading systems. Everybody's always worried about their financial systems. This particular university was worried about their golf course reservations system. (laughs) And their number one mission critical application, and I'm sure there was a little chunk tongue and cheek there as well, was the golf course reservation system because that directly impacted, there were alumni and had a direct correlation to the incoming donations for the following year. So, you never know what's going to be mission critical. Closer to home working very recently, there's a great case study from Aultman Hospital on a website. One of the things that they did, which I thought was absolutely astounding, was they took advantage of our offer to loan them free storage for a while, leveraging some of the COD that they're passing on demand that they weren't using. One of the reasons that they wanted this extra capacity was so that they can make telepresence available to their patients to visit with their families. At a time when families can't go into the hospital visit, when people are ill, what a great comfort to their family. So, this is a great way to look at it. When you think about these different service levels now, and you think about the different types of replication technologies that are available. Look at the multisite, what is multisite really doing for you? Multisite is giving you some level of synchronous replication so that you have an RPO of zero recovery point objective. It still may not be an RTO or zero, but it will be darn close to it. But more importantly, it's giving you an additional site to really maintain that RPO of zero in case the disaster radius, the blast area, the impact zone is even further away. Now, this isn't going to prevent any type of malicious intent, it's not going to prevent the ransomware case, and things like that, but it'll certainly prevent the catastrophic failure of the data center. What does active-active do? Well, active-active now, gives you the read write capability. And now our multisite implementation by the way, leverages our active-active. So, gives you the ability now to have the simultaneously running instance of an application in multiple data centers, reading and writing from the same dataset. And what that gives you, is not only an RPO of zero, but an RTO of zero, because now you can have an application in another data center stand in and take over for it. Naturally, the application needs to be able to do that. There are a lot of applications that are capable of it. The Oracle parallel server or rack technology, gives you that capability. There are other types of clustering technologies that will fail almost instantaneously, that will give you that capability. So, that's where really active-active comes into play. >> Yeah, makes sense for me. When I started the industry, the VAX clusters were sort of the now thing, right? >> Yup. >> (indistinct) (Dave chuckles) >> All right. So, what are you seeing in the marketplace? Are you seeing... What's the adoption look like? Are there any differences that you see by region? What can you tell us there? >> Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the first organizations that obviously jumped on to active-active type solutions, were those where there were in particularly, in things like financial services, some compliance requirements or financial incentives or motivation to make sure that the business was always operational. And it's interesting because there was a study that was done all the way back in 2003, by Roper, that asked business executives and IT executives the same questions relative to their perceptions of their companies or organizations ability to meet RPO or RTO service level agreements. >> Right. And we have some data on this that I want to bring up. So, this is the RPO data but please carry on. >> Ken: Exactly, and so they asked questions that really were about RPO or RTO. Hey, if a disaster hit, would you lose data and how much? And what the data showed was that the business executives and IT executives in Europe, were actually pretty much on the same page. They both said, yeah, we probably would lose some data or a reasonable amounts associated with it. But what was a little frightening, was there appeared to be a chasm of disconnect between the business executives, from the IT executives in the U.S. And what it showed was that the IT executives were on the same page as the European IT executives and the business executives from Europe, saying that, yeah, we'd probably lose some data. But it showed that very few of the business executives thought that they would. And then similarly, when they were asked the question about RTO, how long would it take? In terms of days, hours, et cetera, for your full operation to be back in operational and granted they were talking in 2003 terms back then, which was a little longer than where the technology can now address it now. There was, again, this consistency between the IT executives in both continents and countries, as well as the European business executives, but again, a disconnect where the business executives in the U.S thought, oh, no, we'll be fine. We'll have everything back in a couple of days or less than, it won't be an issue. In my opinion, in looking at that data, when it first came out, my impression was, well, now I understand why a lot of business continuity projects don't get approved because the IT people know that they need it, but the business executives have, if I could be so bold and unrealistically optimistic view of their ability to achieve RPO and RTO, I'll give you a great example. There was a major high tech company around that timeframe that actually had a major outage in their email system. And email was not perceived to be at the time, ultra mission critical application for them. I know it seems strange in this day and age, but back then it was considered sort of an afterthought and they had a four hour SLA in case something went down where, hey, if we're down for four hours, we get it back and four hours, we're fine. And so, IT thought, they were doing a great job, 'cause they got it back in less than four. It was about three point something. And it turned out that the real impact of the business was so overwhelming, they had to completely overhaul the IT infrastructure that they've put in place to deliver that. So, it's an interesting issue, and it's the kind of thing where, as a result, I believe that as we sit here today in 2020, the disconnect in the U.S still exists. If you look across Europe, you tend to find a lot of deployments of active-active. The first country that probably did a ton of it was Germany, and then, lot of the other European countries did as well. For a multitude of reasons, you tend to see a lot of active-active deployments in Europe, but you don't see anywhere near as many as if I could be so bold, we probably should be seeing in the U.S, and I believe a major contributing factor to that is that there is still this disconnect, between business executives having a false sense of security that is unfounded by the infrastructures that they have in place. And if they were to ask their IT people, and maybe that's a good idea for them to talk more, they'd probably find that they're more exposed than they ever realized. >> Right. And of course in Europe, you've got, much tighter proximity, and you're up against borders of a 200 mile or a 200 kilometer roll, governments have tried to impose here, really can't be imposed in a lot of cases. Okay. Let's get into what you guys are doing here in the space. So, Doc, how do you approach ensuring access to mission critical data? What's INFINIDAT's angle? >> Yeah, I think it's several different layers that need to be applied here. The first INFINIDAT angle starts with the fact that our storage is a hundred percent data availability guarantee. It's simple enough. It's triple redundant architecture, seven nines reliability design, which equates to 3.16 seconds per year of downtime, which is less than a scuzzy time (laughs) I bet you know. Let's start with just, right, forget the nonsense, the system's are a hundred percent available guaranteed. We put some teeth behind that, and that's a great way to start. It's not necessarily going to fundamentally protect your data from site outages and network outages and server outages and things like that, so, let's be fed up and can go to in active-active infrastructure. And now you can take the system and put it either elsewhere behind a firewall on the same data center floor, or in a metropolitan area. Wherever you need it to be, separate power zones, separate networks zones, make it even more available. And then if you really want to go that next level of protection because you're worried about regional outages and things of that nature, multisite replication. But now it's up the ante even further. Let's look at the malicious intent, let's look at the data corruption. Let's look at all of the other possibilities of things that can happen to your data. So, implement snapshotting technology, in this snapshot technology, and InfiniBox is essentially free. There's no cost for the software, there is no performance impact because it's part of metadata updates that are happening all the time anyway. So, there's zero additional overhead of that. There's no additional, there's no copying of data going on with a snapshot, so there's no additional cost penalty associated with it. And you can snapshot this frequently for a Snapshot any of your data frequently to protect against data corruption. And if you're worried about some sort of malicious aspect, that's going to engage and perhaps gain access to the snapshots, we have immutable technology, and that is also free. It's there, it doesn't cost you anything other than the time it takes for the administrator to determine what the policy is. And now that can not be modified. It can't be deleted, it can't be modified, it can't be updated, can't be written to your inside whatever the polyp the defined policy is. So, now you're protected, you're a hundred percent availability, increase data hundred percent availability with active-active, and then increase your RPO capability with dissonance and protect yourself against data corruption with immutable snapshots. Or some combination of standard snapshots and immutable snapshots. >> Yeah, so, I was going to ask Ken, if this is a cost effective approach, but, I mean, it's free, it comes in the stuff. >> That is the key word, and you both just said it. Standard and included functionality all based on that great snapshot technology, which was the foundation for it that Doc described. Active-active, standard and included, the ability to go to a third site for disaster recovery at the industry's lowest asynchronous RPO with a remote site. Standard and included, immutable snaps, standard and included. So, compared to traditional views of what most people had back to our illustrious triangle earlier of RPO versus RTO versus cost, you're still going to have the additional cost of media and remote site for protecting your data, obviously, but in terms of software license costs, we're making it simpler, we're making it easier, we're making it standard and included, and we're just making it so much more readily available for organizations to be able to achieve superior RTO and RPO at a cost point that maybe certainly is a little bit higher than just having that single system that Doc alluded to, it's still a hundred percent available, but it's way below what the expectations of this industry have been over the last 20 years. >> Yeah, which is double, triple, I mean easily. Well, can I understand you for a second. You've worked for a lot of different storage companies, Doc you as well, but how different is this? How unique is this? >> There are surprisingly few vendors that can offer true zero RPO at two zero RTO. There's really only a handful. We're one of them. And by handful, I mean about three in the industry, including ourselves, and where I think we differentiate is fundamentally to a lot of those points we just mentioned. The software standard and included so we're not going to charge you extra for it. It's going to be relatively simple to deploy and integrate a stock alluded to earlier with server cluster software and the key components that people would use there in terms of databases and in terms of operating systems. And it's fundamentally going to be able to offer not just that zero RPO, zero RTO active-active environment, but if you do, and when you do need to go to a third site at distance for the true disaster recovery, if you ever lost a metropolitan area, we're going to be able to do it at an RPO that is lower than anything else on the market. >> Doc, are there complexities associated with doing this at petabyte scale? I mean, you guys make a big deal out of that, and you're clearly excited about it, but, is it extra hard to do at that kind of volume at scale? >> I'm going to give you two answers, and say, yes, it's incredibly difficult to do, but then I'm going to say it's incredibly easy for the customer to do because we've made it easy. There a lot of ramifications to doing things at petabyte scale. There's the size of the caching cables that you don't have to worry about. There's the numbers of things that need to be checked, and counter checked and constantly crosscheck for validity. There's also the scale of things that happen like silent data corruption that need to be factored in. All of those things are being done by InfiniBox, on a constant basis with no impact to the customer, no impact to the administrator, no impact to the running application. And I think that's a frankly, another differentiator as well. Ken and I have some common history as well. (chuckles) Used to constantly talk about internally, what happens as things get larger, systems slow down. That simply doesn't happen with InfiniBox. And that's why service providers use us as well. Cloud service providers managed service providers are some of our biggest customers. Because they know they can have these large scale systems running with all these different workloads, all these different functions, be they snapshots, clones, whatever they are, with no impact and very easy and rapid to deploy. >> Yeah, I set up top, you got to be storage hardos to make this stuff work. (laughs) It's very complicated and we've seen it for years and years. Last question. Again, huge changes in the last 150 days where people are just really tuned in to things like digital transformation, I talked about security, business resiliency, business continuity. Where... I'll start with you Ken, how should users be thinking about this? What steps should they be taking like now? >> What a great question. And back to sort of where we started, because of the nature of how things have changed, more applications are mission critical than they've ever been before. And providing, and always on infrastructure to make sure that you can give your users and your customers and your business, the opportunity to stay alive in the face of just about anything that could happen has never been more important in the history of this industry. >> Doc, I'll give you the final word, you can pile on that. >> I think Ken summed it up really well, but I'm going to take a different twist on it. It's all about de-risking, and a lot of the CIOs and CTOs of companies that I've been talking to over the course of the past couple of months, have basically said, hey, my digital transformation initiatives are on hold right now because I've got to keep the lights on, I've got to keep my business running. In some cases, maybe I've had to sadly pare down my staff, but I've got, remote workers have got to worry about. So, find a partner that's going to de-risk your infrastructure for you. Take a look at some of the things that we've announced in the past few months as well. We'll take a lot of that risk way, not only from the availability perspective, but we're going to take the risk away from a cost perspective. If you want to talk about INFINIDAT, don't worry about things like, how am I going to migrate over to it? We're going to do that for you. We're going to work with you, we're going to come up with a plan, we're going to make as much of it non-disruptive as we can, and we're going to assume the cost of doing it. We're going to take away all the risk of availability. We just talked about all of that. We're going to give you guarantees, that are a hundred percent availability. We'll help you architect the right solution for you and we'll protect you moving forward. You might need some flex area of capacity as you work through some of these new applications and new initiatives, so, you've got to be willing to take the risk away with our elastic pricing models. Use the storage when you need it, return it when you don't, and you don't have to pay for it anymore. We'll make it that simple for you. We'll give you that cloud operating paradigm on premises, and by the way, no egress costs. (Dave laughs) >> Well, this is a hard problem for people because they've had to do the work from home pivot, IT people, specifically, I mean, they've had to spend to shore up that infrastructure and of course, organizations just saying, well, we're going to pull from other places, but, look, if you're not digital today, you're not being able to transact business. And so, you can't relax your business continuity plans, in fact, you have to evolve them. Guys, thanks very much for sharing your perspectives and insights on this whole notion of de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave, is always a pleasure. Thank you. >> Cheers, and thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vallante for theCube, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Everyone welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public sector summit. Virtual, of course, is the Cube virtual. We're here sheltered in place in our quarantine studio. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Got a great guest here? Cube Alumni. Can Eisner, Who's the director of worldwide education programs for AWS Amazon Web services? Ken, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. This could be a great segment. Looking forward to chatting. >>Thanks so much, John. Great to talk to you again. >>You know, I'll say, Cube Virtual public sector summit Virtual. We've been virtualized as a society. I'll see the pandemic and all the things that is going on around has been pretty crazy. And one of the things that's most notable is the impact on Education. New York Times This morning and many published reports around the impact College education. Not only economics on the campus aside, the state of the people in the society and Covert 19 is pushed schooling online for the foreseeable future. What's your reaction is you're in charge you've done a lot of work on the foundational level to get Amazon educational programs out there. Take a minute to explain how how this has impacted you guys and your ability to bring that educational stuff to the to the foreseeable future. >>Yeah, the first thing I'd say is this This truly is an absolutely unprecedented time There. Move from virtual instruction. Excuse me from in person classroom instruction into the virtual world at such amazing scale, rapidity is something that educational institutions weren't ready for that couldn't be ready for at this time. We had to enter it with amazing lump levels of empathy for what was going on on the ground in K 12 schools and higher ed schools with our educational technology and publisher providers. So I think the first thing was we had or for the speed at which it happened, we did have to step back and look at what was going on. There are some changes that are happening in the immediacy, and there are some things that Corbett, 19 is has sped educational institutions around the world to look at. An AWS is working with those K 12 providers, higher educational providers teachers and so on on that switch, whether it's providing infrastructure that move into online learning, helping teachers as they prepare for this sort of new normal you some of examples of what has happen. We've been working with the University of Arizona. Help them stand up contact centers with the onset of of cove it and students and teachers. It's being pushed into their home environment or into virtual environments to give instruction to receive instruction. There have been a lot of calls that happen in virtual environments to staff to help them support this. And so we stood up with the University of Arizona and Amazon Amazon Connect help staff provide mobile solutions through the cell phone or computer for for students. >>I want to get your thoughts. Absolutely. I talked to Andy Jassy about this as well as well about agility. This is the Amazon wheelhouse, and you guys have gone into the I T world now developers. You went cloud native, you in that market. He won the enterprise I t market. But the reason why is that you took an old school outdated, antiquated system of I t and made it agile. That seems enough This is the country with Teresa and Andy about education in public sector. The modernization is happening, but there's also the triage and you guys have to do now in terms of getting people online. So what specifically are you doing to help education customers continue their instruction online? Because they still got to execute. They still need to provide this discussion around the fall window Coming up. You got to have the foundational things. I know you've done that, but it is hard. So what's the downstream triage when you come out of this mode of Okay, here you go. And how do you get people set up and then how they transform and re invent? >>Yeah, at this time, the disaster recovery from how do you get in that phase one with this immediate move was so prominent. And we're trying to work through that phase one and sort into sort of phase two delivery of education, which is you're moving with scale moving with agility into this world, speed and agility are really going to be the new normal for education. There were some advances that just weren't happening quick enough. Students should always have access to 24 7 learning, um, and access into that mobile arena. And they weren't having that several things that we did was we looked at our infrastructure were some of those key infrastructure elements that helped with both learning and work remotely. There were things such as Amazon, your work Doc's, which enables thieves virtual our workspaces, which enable virtual desktop environments, and appstream, which enables it APs to be streamed through virtual arena onto your removal or your desktop. Yeah, Amazon connect as I. As I mentioned before, there were services that were vital in helping speed into the cloud that was quick burst into the cloud. And so we enabled some of those services to have special promotional free rates or a given time period, and we have actually now extended that offer a into the fall into September 30th. So first we have to help people really quickly with educators. So I run this program AWS Educate, which is Amazon's global program. To provide students and educators around the world with resource is needed, help them get into cloud learning. But what we saw was that teachers around the world we're not prepared for this massive shift what we did to help that preparedness is we looked at our educators. We found that we did a survey over the weekend and found that 68% of them had significant experience or enough experience in teaching distance or online virtual education, too. Potentially leverage that for other educators around the world. So we and the other thing is teachers are really eager to help other teachers in this move, especially as they saw and they empathize with With her was the panic. Our confusion are best practices and moving into that online arena. So we saw both that they had that experience in a mass willingness to help other people, and we immediately spun up a Siri's of educator and educator help tools, whether it was a Morris Valadez are No a gift, and Doug Berman providing webinars and office hours for other educators around the world. We also did a separate tech talks offering for students. So there were there was the helping scale, whether it's getting blackboard as they ramped up to over 50 x of their normal load in 24 hours to help them deliver on that scale, whether it waas the Egyptian ministry that was trying to had to understand. How could they help students access the information that they need it in speed? And they worked with thinkI, which is a net educational technology provider, to provide access to 22 million students who needed to get access online or whether it was the educator mobilization initiative that we ran. Threat US of AWS Educate Helps Teachers have the resource is that they need it with the speed that they needed to get online. This is we are working. We're learning from our customers. As this happens, this is a moving target. But when I move from this immediacy of pushing people into the virtual space into what's gonna happen this summer, as students need toe recapture, learning that they might have lost in the spring are depending where you are worldwide. There's getting to your point all K 12 higher ed and educational technology providers into the position where they can act with that agility and speed. And it's also helping those educators as they go through this. We're learning from our customers every day. >>Yeah, I want to get into those some of those lessons, but one of things that will say, You know, I'm really bullish about what you do. Getting cloud education, I think, is going to change the literacy and also job opportunities out there. I'm a huge believer that public sector is the next growth wave, just like I t was. And it's almost the same movie, right? You have inadequate systems. It's all outdated. You need these workloads, need to run and then run effectively, which you guys have done. But the interesting thing with Cove it is it essentially exposes the scabs and the uh out there because, you know, online has been an augmentation to the physical space. So when you pull that back, people like me go, wait a minute. I have kids. I'm trying to understand their learning impact. Everyone sees it now. It's almost like it's exposed. Whether it's under provisioned VP ends or black boys networking and everyone's pointing their fingers. It's your fault and its the end. So you brought this up. There's now stakeholders whose jobs depend upon something that's now primary that wasn't primary before. Whether it's the presenter, the content presented the teacher certainly high availability. I t. Um >>all these things >>are just under huge pressure. So I gotta ask you, what are the key lessons and learnings that you have seen over the past few months that you could share because people are shell shocked and they're trying to move faster? >>Yeah. So first of all is speed and agility and education are the new normal. They should have been here for a while. They need to be here now when you've got a 30 year textbook, your ruling over education when students need to get the skills of tomorrow. Today we need to be adapting quickly in order to give those students the skills to give educational institution those opportunities. Every institution needs to be enable virtual education. Every institution needs to have disaster recovery solutions and they weren't in place. These solutions need to be comprehensive. Students need access to devices. Teachers need access to professional development. We need contact centers. We worked with Los Angeles Unified School District not just to stand up a contact center, which we did with yeah, Amazon connect. But we also connected their high school seniors too, with headphones. I think we provide 132,000 students with headphones. We are helping to source with through our Amazon business relationship devices for everybody. Every student needs access in their home. Every student needs access to great learning and they needed on demand. Teachers need that readiness. I think the other thing that's happening is the whole world is again speeding through changes that probably should have happened to the system already that virtual learning is vital. Another thing that's vital is lifelong learning. We're finding that and we probably should have already seen. This is everybody needs to be a student throughout their entire life, and they need to be streaming in and out of education. The only way that this could be properly done is through virtual environments through the cloud and through an access to on demand learning. We believe that this that the work that's being done I was actually talking to some people in Australia the other day and they're saying, You know, the government is moving away from degree centrist city and moving into a more modular stackable education. We've been building AWS educate to stack to the job to stack to careers, and that type of move into education, I think, is also being spent So were you were seeing the that move Apple absolutely accelerate. We're also seeing the need to accelerate the speed to research. Obviously with what's going on going on with Kobe 19 there is a need for tools to connect our researchers two cures to diagnostic, um, opportunities. We worked with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver General Hospital and the Vancouver I Get this thing, the Vancouver Coastal Health Research UNE Institute to develop to use Amazon sage maker to speed ai diagnostic tool so that pushed towards research is absolutely vital as well. We just announced a $20 million investment in helping you speak that that research to market so education needs to operate at scale education needs to operate at speed, and education needs to deliver to a changing customer. And we've got to be partners on that journey. >>And I think I would just add reinvent a word. You guys name your conference after every year. This is a re invention opportunity. Clearly, um, and you know, I was talking to some other parents is like, I'm not going to send my kids to school online learning for zoom interview, zoom, zoom, zoom classes. I'm like, Hey, you know, get a cloud data engineering degree from Amazon educate because they'll have a job like that. Once you put on linked in the job skills are out there. The jobs are needed. Skills aren't so. I got to ask you, you know, with this whole re Skilling, whether it's a Gap year student in between semesters, while this takes care of our up Skilling people on the job, this is huge world economic form said by 2020 half of the employees will need to be re skilled up skilled. This is a huge impact and even more focus with covert 19. >>That's absolutely correct. Yeah, I think one thing that's happening is we're cloud computing has been the number one Lincoln skill for the past four or five years. The the skill. Whether it's software development in the cloud cloud architecture, your data world, our cyber security and other operational rules, those are going to be in the most demand. Those are the skills that are growing. We need to be able prepare people for rules in technology. The lifelong worker, the re skill up skill opportunities, absolutely vital Gap year is going to be available for some students. But we also got a look at you know how the this that how covert 19 can accelerate gaps between students. Every student needs access to high quality education. Every teacher needs to be equipped with the latest professional development. We've got focused like a laser, not just on. The people could afford a gap. Here are the people who who are going to be some schools who actually had solutions that could immediately push there kids into their their youth, their students in college or even employees. You need those re skills. We're all home. But it also needs to extend into the middle of the middle of Los Angeles and and you're into low income students. And in Egypt, I was really excited. We we've been working with Northern Virginia community colleges as I think you know, they were one of the lead institutions. On launching an associate degree in the cloud, they took their courses and offer what they call a jump year to 70,000 high school senior. Our high school students in Northern Virginia in the northern Virginia area, including enabling some of our cloud computing horses, are the work courses that we worked on with them to the students. So yeah, those new partnerships, that extension of college into high school and college into re skill up skills, absolutely vital. But institutions need to be able to move fast with the tools that the cloud provides you into those arena. >>Well, you know, I think you've got a really hard job to do there. It's foundational in love, what you're doing and you know me. I've been harping people who watch the Cube know that I'm always chirping and talking about how the learning is non linear. It's horizontally scalable. There's different application. You can have an application for education. It's a Siri's of different things. The workload of learning is completely different. I think to me what you guys are doing right now setting that basics foundation infrastructure. It's like the E. C two s three model. Then you got more on top of it platform, and I think ultimately the creativity is going to come from the marketplace. Whoever can build those workloads in a very agile, scalable way to meet the needs, because, let's face it, it can't be boring. Education is gonna be robust, resilient and got to deliver the payload and that's gonna be customized applications that have yet to be invented. Reinvented >>absolutely. Hopefully were jump starting that next wave of innovation spreading the opportunities Teoh all students. Hopefully we are really looking at those endemic issues and education and following leaders like University of Arizona. What the Ministry of Education, um in in Egypt has done and Northern Virginia community. Hopefully we are really taking this the opportunity of this disaster to invent on behalf of our students. Bring in you forward to the 21st century as opposed to yeah, just looking at this naval gazing way we do wrong and the past. This is an exciting opportunity, albeit a obviously scary one is we're all dealing with this with this and >>there's no doubt once we've retrenching and get some solid ground postcode 19. It's a reinvention and a reimagine growth market opportunity because you got changing technology, changing economics and changing expectations and experiences that are needed. These are three major things going down right now. >>Absolutely, absolutely. And to your point, the retraining of workers, the up skill that the great thing is that governments realize this imperative as do educational institutions and obviously yet students. This is, and we seem like what educators can do when they want to help. Yeah, other educators, this is This is an opportunity in our society to really look at every everybody is a constant learner were a constant learning from our customers. But everybody, there is no end to education. It cannot be terminal. And this is an opportunity to really provide the students learners with skills that they need in an on demand fashion at all times and re think re innovate, reinvent the way we look at education in general. >>Well, a man, Jeff Bezos says Day one. It's a new day, one, right? So you know that there is going to reinvent Ken. You doing great work. Director of worldwide education programs Ken Eisner with Amazon Web services, Certifications and degrees and cloud computing will be the norm. It's gonna happen again. If you're a cloud data engineer. Data says you're going to get a job. I mean, no doubt about it. So thanks so much for sharing your insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you, >>John. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. >>Can guys They're here Inside the Cube. Virtual coverage of AWS Public sector Online Summit. We've been virtualized. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back to Barcelona Spain everybody this is the cube the leader and live tech coverage and we're here day one for us at Cisco live Barcelona even though we did a little preview game preview yesterday my good friend kena Reilly is here he's the director of customer experience at Cisco and he's joined by Kyle winters Technical Marketing engineer for the customer experience technology and transformation group it's six to go guys great to see you thanks for coming on and you know we love talking customer experience Cisco is a it's a big company big portfolio and a lot of complexity for clients and so bring it all together and customer experience is very important can't we have it a conversation with Alastair early today and he was talking about Cisco's commitment from the top chuck Robbins on down to really improve that customer experience bring essentially a digital virtual experience to your customers and you guys obviously fit into that right absolutely so about two years ago when Chuck brought in Maria Martinez that was the first step into really pushing Cisco to focus more on successful outcomes for customers so we had already always sold that way but with the complexity of technology and how fast technology is moving accelerating value realization for customers has never been bigger especially in the security space because as we've talked before you know with everything that goes on today and the fact that the bad guys are trying to get data faster quicker and different getting the technology in play operational and production it has never been more important and we're gonna dig in with Kyle with some detail and double click into the lifecycle specifically and the different points of that journey but that's really important for any customer experience is really understanding that lifecycle that maturity model can you talk about that a little bit yeah so so with us you know we've been at it for about six years when we started as Lancope so we've got a great model and you know our approach to getting outcomes for customers is completely in line with with the strategy of our products and technologies and all security so it's really important that you align with that strategy because salespeople sell and they sell you the what we sell the how we're gonna get you and so you have to understand what it is that customers need and how that technology maps because you don't want a shelf where and you don't want products or technology sitting there waiting to be implemented because you know these days especially with the move to the cloud it's got to get up and running you know within an hour so our model has always been that way we built our model with customer first and so we are you know we are the security experts we're the trusted security adviser so when we go in and work with customers we completely know exactly those outcomes that they need and with all the sort of technologies and products that we have not only with stealthWatch but the other products that sent ulema tree to us we have in Kyle will talk about how our service is completely aligned with those outcomes and the journeys that we will take our customers on yes a faster adoption means faster time to value obviously let's focus in on stealthWatch Kenneth you came in with the stealthWatch acquisitions been very successful I mean Cisco security business grew 22% last quarter we'll talk more about the sort of umbrella but let's drill in with Kyle to stealthWatch services specifically maybe you could sort of take us through you know at a high level what what the areas are and then we can sort of follow up on yeah yes so so our customer maturity model when it comes to services there's kind of three different stages to it it starts with the visibility stage so we have services around being able to deploy an operational I stealthWatch will bring in our best practices and help customers get up to speed and using the system quickly and efficiently from there we also have services around detection capabilities so being able to use automation and integrations to further the detection capabilities of stealthWatch things like being able to classify host groups through automation from source like IP address management systems things like asset discovering classification service that helped drive segmentation efforts all of these things help improve the behavioral algorithms and processes that stealthWatch is using to detect these threats in real time and then from there we have an integration stage as well - which is all about bridging the gap between stealthWatch and the rest of not only Cisco's portfolio but the entirety of our customer security portfolio as well and some of those services include things like sim integrations being able to integrate stealthWatch with Splunk we have services such as our proxy integration service as well a lot of different types of services that we're able to help get our customers to the next stage with their stealth watch environments I got a lot of questions yeah we could get to it and you guys could take it by stage so yes the sort of visibility that's where you start that's when you do the discovery right so what what are you discovering how do you actually do that discovery so a lot of that is about making sure that we've got all the flow and telemetry that we need from the various different sources of our network coming into stealthWatch feeding into the processes and algorithms that are going on there so a lot of things is not only net flow data but getting ice integrated in there as well being able to pull that user attribution data and being able to find sources of data where we maybe can convert it into net flow if it's not already net flow and be able to ingest that data as well we also in that space typically to help set up customers with a lot of different best practices that kind of get them operationalized very quickly and things like being able to build custom reports and dashboards for them will work through them which is kind of understanding the system from a base level to more of a professional fully operational level a lot of times we come in during the stage two and customers don't even understand what's going on in their network they're seeing things that maybe they've never seen before one stealthWatch turns on a great example actually as we were at a large financial firm and we were able within 30 minutes of being on site with them through our services team we were able to identify rogue DNS servers unsecured telnet going on sequel injections suspicious SMB and that's the sage traffic this is all just within 30 minutes of us coming on there and taking a look at this stuff you don't even want to look at sometimes yeah so who's doing this can I mean is this sort of all automated you've got professionals sort of overseeing it in our society yeah so the team that we have the technology transformation team when we've talked about it before that team is kind of on the bleeding edge of helping customers and you know a lot of these services that that Kyle talked about is we are building services that customers are consuming based on their needs today and that's why the team is very flexible we build you know a lot of these integrations with those requirements in mind and then we take those and we can scale that so these are all field engineers we have developers so in in essence it is like a mini development team that goes out and works on the specific things that customers need to protect themselves okay and my understanding is there's a there's an ongoing learning with the customers and a it's a transfer of knowledge from day one right there the customer is with you on this in each of these phases and you're sort of learning as they go along and that's sort of part of the transfer of knowledge it's I would say even a tool a transfer knowledge too because we're teaching them our best practices and how to best be successful with these systems but we also learn from them what's going on what are the trends that they're seeing how can we help get them to the next stage and that's where our technology and transformation group comes and they're able to be on the cutting edge here the problems that the customers are talking about and be able to take stealthWatch to the next level okay let's dig it to the detection phase so this is where you're classifying things like host groups etc I'm interested in how that happens is that you know it used to be you'd get everybody in a room you start drawing pictures and that just doesn't scale it's too complicated today so can you auto classify stuff how does that all work and use them oh yeah genius math to do that so so traditionally the the you know the MIT's a manual effort to classify your whole group somebody who's very familiar with the network comes in and they say okay these are the DNS servers these are the web servers these are this network scanners oh oh today but the problem is that today's networks are so dynamic and fluid that what the network looks like today is not necessarily going to be the same tomorrow so there needs to be that relief from the analyst to be able to come in there needs to be that automation that they can go in each day and know that their system is going to be classified accurately and meaningfully that way the behavioral detection that is built into stealthWatch is also driven and accurate and meaningful - so we have this service so for example our host group automation service and through that we're able to pull in telemetry and data from various different sources such as IP address management systems cmdbs we can do threat feeds as well external threat feeds and we're able to drive the classification based off of the metadata that we see from these different sources so we're able to write different types of automation rules that essentially pull this data in detect the different patterns that we're seeing with that metadata and then drive that classification stealthWatch that way when you come in that next day you know that your network scanners are gonna be classified as Network scanners and your web servers are gonna be web servers etc etc so you you have that integrity of data coming in every single day yeah so a lot of different data sources data quality obviously really important I mean you'd love it if somebody had like you know a single CMDB from ServiceNow boom and pop it right in but that's not always the case we never always the case there's always a challenge and that's where kind of our services engineers come in they're able to work through these different environments and understand what the main admit what the metadata is where we need to go and how we need to classify and driving the classification from there so it does require a little bit of a human element on the front-end but once we get it worked out it can be fully automated you know there's lots of different sources and the quality of the data is not always there we've seen for example customers who have Excel spreadsheets and everything is just you're all over the place and we have to figure out a way to work with that and that's part of what our engineer success is so before we get to the integration piece can you been following this industry for for a while um security is really exciting space it's growing like crazy it's really hard I did a braking analysis piece you know a few weeks ago just talking about the fragmentation in the business you see startups coming out like crazy big valuations at the same time you see companies like Cisco with big portfolios yeah you mentioned Splunk before and they've kind of become a gold standard for for log files but very complex and you talk to security practitioners and they'll tell you our number one problem is just skillsets so get you know paint a picture of what's going on in the security world and what's in the house cisco is trying to address that so the security teams the analysts all the way up the management chain to the sea so they're under tremendous pressure their businesses are growing and so when their businesses are growing the sort of a tax base is growing and the business is growing faster than they can protect it so with the sort of increase in the economy more money more investment to build more point products so you've got a very stressed team a lot of turnover skill sets aren't great and what do we do as an industry we just give them more technology right more tools more tools complexity avalanche ok they're buried all right so we feel and we've made great strides within the security group within Cisco is we're taking the products that we have and we're integrating them under one platform so that it is in a bunch of point products and so that the that's what everybody else is doing I mean the other guys are acquiring companies then they're trying to integrate those because the customers are saying I don't need another point protocol yeah yeah it's too much so you know with us that's the way we approach it and now with the platform that's going to be launching this year the cisco threat response that we've launched you're gonna see later on in this year that we will be selling and positioned in implementing the entire platform yeah so I have a stat I came up with this and my one of my analyses it was the the worldwide economy is like 86 trillion and we spent about 0.014 percent on security so we're barely scratching the surface so this sort of tools avalanche probably isn't gonna change though integration becomes an extremely important aspect of the customer journeys and it's through that and to continue on that point you just made as well - I believe in our Cisco cybersecurity report from 2017 only fifty four six percent or fifty seven percent of actual threats are being investigated remediated so there's always that need to kind of help build bridge that gap make it easier for people to understand these threats and and mitigate and prioritize know what to go after right which part the integration exactly so we do have a lot of different integration services as well - for example I mentioned our sim integration service one thing that we can really do that's really awesome with that is we're able to deploy for example with Splunk a full-fledged stealthWatch for Splunk application that allows you to utilize stealth watches capabilities directly inside of Splunk without having to actually store an index any data inside of Splunk so all these api's are on demand inside of this app and available throughout the rest of the Splunk capabilities as well so you can extend it into other search reporting correlate that against other sets of data that you have and Splunk you can do quite a bit with it we also have other ways absolutely advantage of that is just obviously integration you're not leaving the environment plus its cost you're saving customers money a lot of a lot of customers kind of see their sim as a single pane of glass so being able to bring that stealthWatch value into that single pane is a huge win for our customers not to mention that reduction in licensing costs as well we have other ways to that we can reduce licensing costs some customers like to send their flow data into their sim for deeper analytics and long-term retention and we have a service we call it our flow adapter service and through this service we're essentially able to take buy flow off of the stealthWatch flow collectors and the buy flow is essentially when the raw net flow hits the stealthWatch flow collectors it's coming from multiple different routers and switches on the network this is gets converted into bi flow which is bi-directional deduplicated stitched together flow records so right there by sending that data into a sim or a data Lake as opposed to ronette flow we see data reduction cost anywhere from 15 to 80% depending on how the customers network is architected great any any favorite customer examples you have that you can share where ya guys have gone in you know provided these services and and it's had an outcome that got the customer excited or you found some bad guys or there's one that's one of my favorites so we have this service we call it our asset discovering classification service and I mentioned the host tree of automation service that's if you have some sort of authoritative source we can pull that information in but if a customer doesn't have that authoritative source they don't know what's on their network and a lot of times too they want to do a segmentation effort they're undergoing network segmentation but they need to understand what's on their network how these devices are communicating and that's where our asset discovery classification service comes in we're able to pull in telemetry not just from stealthWatch but other sources such as ice tetration Active Directory I Pam's again as well and we're able to essentially profile these different devices based off of the nature of their behavior so we were at a kind of a large technology company and we were essentially in this effort trying to segment their security cameras and upon segmenting their security cameras we were able to build this report where we can see the security camera and how its communicating with the other parts of the network and we noticed that there was essentially two IP addresses from inside of their network that were accessing all these different security cameras but they were not authorized to so with this service we were able to see that these different these two hosts were unauthorized actually accessing these devices that got reported up through the management chain and ultimately those two employees were no longer at that technology permanence that was discovered nice to love it alright bring us on we're here in the dev net zone sort of all about hit for structures code and software and and and and talk a little bit about the futures where you see this all going yeah so for us for Cisco security the future is really bright we've either built or acquired a portfolio that the customers really need that get absolute outcomes that customers need and through the customer experience organization certainly stealthWatch is fitting into the broader play to to get customers who have all those technologies get that operational and get them success so when we talked last summer I told you the jury was still out we would see how the journeys gonna go and the journey has started it has gotten much better since the summer and this year I think we're gonna be doing some great things for our customers just we can't get in too much of the business but stealthWatch customers are still expanding because I think we told you last time customers can never get enough stealthWatch okay the attack surface is too big right so so we we feel really good about that and the other technologies that they're building really fit into what customers need we're going to the cloud so they're gonna be able to consume cloud on-prem hybrid protect networks the campus protect their cloud infrastructure so we're really checking a lot of boxes in our group brings it all together and takes all the complexity out of that for customers just to get them the outcomes that I named us Cisco is one of my four star security companies for 2020 okay based on spending data that we share from our friends at ETR and the reason was because cisco has both a large presence in the market and but also you have spending momentum I mentioned 22% you know growth last quarter and the security business but you've also got the expertise you put your money where your mouth is you know the big portfolio which helps if you can bring it together and do these types of integrations it simplifies the customers environment and so that's a winner in my book so I named you along with some other high fliers right you know and you see some really interesting startups coming out and probably acquisition targets probably something that aren't your radar but guys thanks so much for coming on the cube thank you thank you I keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest is a Dave Volante for the cubes 2 min Amanda John Faria are also in the house at Cisco live Barcelona right back

>>Locke from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering KWS executive sub brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit here at AWS reinvent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Dan Sheeran, the director of global accounts at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We have Ken Schwartz, vice president, enterprise analytics at health first. Welcome Ken and shale Jane lead data business group in North America. Accenture. Thank you so much. I am glad to have you all here. Good to be here. Yes. So we're talking today about driving digital transformation via data and analytics. I'm going to start with, you can tell us our viewers a little bit about health first as a business. >>Sure. Health first is the largest not-for-profit health plan in New York city. It's a 26 year old company. It's owned by 15 sponsor hospitals. So the business model is a little different than most health plans. The sponsor hospitals who own us, we actually share risk with the sponsor hospitals. So if our members obtain their medical services at sponsor hospitals, we have the same goal of keeping them out of the hospital essentially. And we, the revenue stays within the health healthcare delivery system. So it's a little bit different business model. We've been very successful. We're very local plan, so we have a big footprint in the communities, the very diverse communities in New York city. We're kind of part of the fabric of New York city and that's really very much part of our brand. >>So your patient population is mostly, I mean who, who, who are cuckoo prizes? >>1.4 million members, 1.4 million people mostly in New York city. So we like to say if you ride the subway in New York city, it's very likely that one in eight people are health first members, a one in three if you're in the Bronx, mostly underserved populations in a lot of cases. And people that really, like I said, sort of the, the real fabric of communities in the city. >>So what were the reasons that health works? Health first embarked on this data transformation. >>Really just again, a 26 year old company kind of outgrowing its infrastructure and really wanting to make sure that we can keep up with growth. We've been lucky to grow steadily over our entire history and at a certain point in time the legacy systems and legacy data systems don't support the new ways to do things. Prescriptive, predictive analytics, some of the great new capabilities that you can do in the cloud. So it became really important to get off the legacy hardware, get off the legacy approaches and big people change management to make that happen. I mean that's kind of what we've been living for about the last three years. >>So what were some of the goals? >>The goals are just to be able to do things at scale for in the legacy systems. I think we really didn't support analytics across our entire membership and our entire 30 million claims a year. 1.4 million members, 37,000 providers. So just being able initially just being able to query and do sort of business intelligence at scale across that, that much data, the old infrastructure just didn't support it from there. We've gone into launching our data science platform and things like that. So like I said, just, just being able to keep up with the times and provide more information, get to know everything we can possibly know about our members so that we can reach out to them in better and more effective ways. >>So shale, I want to bring you in here a little bit. How was, how did Accenture partner with health first and helping it achieve this goal? >>Yeah, so, um, we work with companies like health verse all the time and you almost have to embark on a journey that starts with a concept, almost the imagination, if you will. And then you take it into a test mode, the pilot mode in the scale up mode. And we were fortunate enough to actually to be involved in, in the journey that health first has had all throughout that, those stages, if you will. Um, and it's been, it's been a very rewarding experience because health first is one of those companies that actually took a very early lead on moving to the cloud, moving to the new data architectures and actually trying new technologies such as we recently finished a, uh, a knowledge graph project with them as well, which is relatively new in this space. So it's been a rewarding experience for us as well. >>So what are kind of, what are some of the challenges that you faced along this journey? Organization of lead technically and how did you overcome them? >>I think early on it's, it's whole new roles and new new technical paths that just didn't exist at the company. So Accenture being partner, good support from AWS really helped us. So we didn't have machine learning engineers and data engineers and cloud practitioners. So you don't grow that overnight. So having professionals come on graph as well. We oftentimes you start off with the use case and you have somebody just download things and get going. Right. And that's great, but that doesn't really land it. So getting professionals who have done things in the new environments on board to help us out was, was really key in the challenges side. I really think the people change management can be really hard. Again, if you're a sort of a brand new company or startup and you're just, you have to do your business on the cloud and it's dependent on that from day one. >>It's a lot different than we have a lot of people. Our company has been successful for 26 years. We have to look to the future to make these changes, but we've been doing pretty well sort of on our legacy platforms and things like that. So it's not always easy to just get people to change streams and say like, Hey, you really should be be doing this differently. So I think the people change management realizing you have to kind of sometimes lead with use cases, lead with pilots, lead people by the hands to get from point a to point B was kind of surprising. But we've, we've learned that that's true. >>So Dan, he you had a nice shout out from Ken here by giving you some prompts buddy in the U S and what you bring to the value you bring to the table. What do you, what do you make of what he said about the people change and how that is in a lot of ways the hardest >>couldn't agree more. In fact, that was the first point that Andy Jesse led off with this morning in his keynote that it's any of these projects, if you don't start with leadership that is both committed to the change and coordinated among themselves, then you've got no chance of success. Now that's, that's a necessary condition. It's not sufficient. You do need to drive that change through the organization and this, the scenario that Ken described is very common in what we see in that you start with enthusiasts typically that will, we often call builders who are going to be at a department who are playing around with tools because one of the advantages of course of AWS is it's all self-serve. You can get started very easily create your own account. But it is tricky to make sure that before that gets too far along that an enterprise wide architecture and strategy is agreed upon or else you can get sort of half pregnant with an approach that really is not going to serve the longterm objectives. And that's the reason why working with Accenture, getting the reference architecture for a data Lake really agreed on early on in this project was essential and that's what allowed once that foundation was in place. All these other benefits to accrue pretty quickly. >>So on a project like this, how closely are you all working together in teams to get the job done? I mean, and what is the collaboration, what is the process and what does it look like? >>Well, you know, I'm sure that each of us is going to have an answer to that, but our perspective on that at AWS is to always be customer led. We have some customers who themselves want to use a journey like this to become a builder organization. And one of their strategic objectives is that their developers are the ones who are really at the controls longterm building out a lot of new features. We have other customers who really want to be principally buyers. They'll have some enthusiasts here and there in their organization, but they really want to principally define the objectives, participate in the architecture, but then really lean on somebody like an Accenture to implement it >>and to also stand behind it afterwards. So in this case, Accenture played a central role, but we really think that the very first meeting needs to be sit down and listen to what the customer wants. Yeah. I'd say we're builders but with guidance that against them we want people who have, who have hit their heads on things and kind of learn from that and that's, that can be a force multiplier instead of having, and we definitely jumped into use cases that we wanted to just build. Like I said in a year later, we're a little bit spinning our wheels. It's not really hurting anything cause it's not necessarily anything anybody else's for anyway is standing up a graph database. It's just something we wanted to do. Right. So having these guys come in as force multiplier has been really useful. So we reach out to AWS, have really good support from AWS when we need it. AWS also has great online training, the loft in lower Manhattan or in Soho we go to things as well so we can help ourselves. And the next venture is just really been embedded with us too. We have seven or eight data engineers that have really walked pretty much every mile with us so far on this journey. So >>yeah, the only thing I would, I would add to it is that, you know, we have a very strong relationship with AWS and as such we become privy to a lot of the things that are coming down the pike, if you will. So that can add value. At the same time, we have very good access to some of the top technologists within AWS as well, so we can bring that to bear so that that all kind of works really well together. Having a partnership with AWS and then with our, we have different parts of the organization. They can also bring not just the technology skills but also domain skills as well. So we can add to some of the thinking behind the use cases as well. So that's another part of the collaboration that happens including in the security model. Right. And if we don't have that right from the beginning, then very true. Nothing else becomes possible. And there's a lot of domain expertise within Accenture. It helps us scale. >>One of the things that we, that I've heard a lot today at the Accenture executive summit is this idea of thinking differently about failure. And this is an idea that's in Silicon Valley, failed, fail better, fail happier, fail up all these things. Fail fast. Exactly. But all of them do. How do you, how but how does a co does a nonprofit in New York city, how does it embrace that? I mean, as we've talked about a lot here just now is the people are, are the hardest part that then that's a really different mindset in a really big change for an organization like health first. >>But the, the, the business model of working with AWS to is pay as you go and everything. It's like failing cheapest, very possible. You know, we're not putting out huge upfront costs to turn something on. We can turn it on for pennies sometimes and do a use case. So it really does support experimentation. We've been, one of our successes I think is we really just try a lot of things. So we've, we've had to learn how to do that and learn how to sort of either pull in more experienced people to help us or just just cut it off kind of in some cases. So yeah, the cloud patterns and AWS is business model just makes it really easy. >>And it's also key of course, to have some quick wins that are highly visible. So to my understanding that in the case of health first there was, you know, whether it's reimbursement claims or there's potential fraud that can be detected, that is a lot easier to start doing once you got your data into a common data Lake and you've got world-class analytics tools that are available directly to the business analysts. Instead of requiring lots of hand holding and passing datasets around, when you get those initial quick wins that builds the kind of enthusiasm that allows you to then take this from being a project that people are skeptical about to people really seeing the value >>and people get excited about it too. So talk about some of the benefits that your members have seen from this. >>Sure. So again, we have 1.4 million members. So just something pretty simple. Every health plan wants to prevent readmissions. So someone's been in the hospital and then they have to go right back with the same condition. That's bad for the member or bad for the plan. Bad for everybody, right? So just just being able to take a data science model on our own data, train it up for predicting readmissions. Again, we have large care management community. Many nurses go out in the field every day and meet members, but now that we can give them a list of the 500 most important members and it's also self-service, it's, it's in a dashboard that's running in red shift and people can go and just get their lists. I mean that's really profoundly satisfying and important to change our members health outcomes. You know, that's only one example. That was kind of the first model we've built, but we have models for people being adherent to their medication. Just a lot of things that we can do. Targeted interventions instead of kind of having a bunch of business rules. Kind of in your head of who you think you should reach out to. This is the data's telling us who's most at risk and sometimes empowering the call center personnel >>when you can give them access to data that allows them to really personalize that, that phone call experience with somebody. It's a, it's a relatively low cost way to surprise and delight the patient or the health plan member. And that then drives customer satisfaction scores, which are very important in the healthcare industry for all sorts of reasons related to accreditation are related to reimbursement. And also frankly just related to enrollment and retention. >>I speak from experience when I say the best, the companies are the ones with the good call centers that you just are happy and you get off the phone, you don't want to slam it down, you're, you're happy to talk to them. So final pieces of advice for companies that are, that are trying to drive change through data analytics. What, what is a best practice? Best piece of advice? Well, because you looked at me, I'll let you go first. >>Um, we always, it sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly often not the case. Once you get past the initial five minutes of a conversation, really stress are we actually focused on a real problem as opposed to something that sounds cool or fun to go experiment with. Because these tools, as Ken said, these are, it's fun to play with these self-service AI tools. You can predict all sorts of things. Isn't an actual pain point for either an internal customer or an external customer. >>Yeah, I think you hit it on the head as well. That's advice to starting this as get, get some wins, get some early wins and then don't be afraid to experiment and don't be afraid to think outside the box. I think I would say there are two pieces of advice. One is focused on strategy like Dan was talking about before, because with tools like AWS where you can literally use your credit card to get started, you can lose sight of the big picture. So have a data strategy that is directly tied to your business strategy is very important. And the second is instead of thinking about building a data pipeline for a specific use case, think about building a platform, a data platform that can serve the need of today and tomorrow as well in a, in an architecture that is, that is fit for purpose architecture like Andy Jesse talked about today. So don't go for a Swiss army knife approach. Go for fit for purpose platforms, products, models, if you will, that can allow you to build that platform that can serve the need of the future as well. >>Excellent. Thank you so much shale. Ken and Dan, thanks for coming on the cube. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit.

>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the covering Nutanix dot. Next 2019 you by Nutanix. Hello everybody and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of Nutanix dot. Next here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We're joined by Ken ring doll. He is the vice president global Alliance architecture at V. thank you so much for coming on the cube. It is your sixth time on the cube. So you are an illustrious I know. And then a ring and then a ring for is 10. We've got some sticks. Yeah, here you go. So you're here to talk about the partnership with Nutanix and, and uh, and, and mine. So why don't you tell us a little bit about this partnership and the mine ecosystem and, and how would what you see for the future? >>Yeah, absolutely. So a, you know, Nutanix is a really strategic partner for us. Uh, you know, I'd say we've been partners for quite awhile, probably five, six years. But I would say the, the real sort of tipping point for our partnership was when we committed to go integrate with HV. You know, we had supported vSphere from the beginning. That's, that's what VM was founded on. That's where the foundation of our success, we went and did hyper V and 2011 and we didn't do another hypervisor. We still haven't even done KVM yet, but we saw the value in the Nutanix partnership and we committed to doing HV and delivered that, you know, middle of last year. And we've seen, you know, good pickup on that. But that was really the tipping point when we sort of came in and sort of wrapped our arms around the Nutanix ecosystem. And really, you know, if you want to embrace Nutanix, you're in praise HV cause that's the core, right? That's, that's where they're going. That's their differentiation. Um, and so that was, that was sort of the tipping point. And of course, you know, we can certainly get into mine and everything else we're doing. >>That was, well Ken, first of all, it definitely was, you know, very much noticed in the industry. Uh, you know, Veeam, I remember back when hyper V support was announced and kind of a ripple went through the virtualization, uh, industry on that and Veem stepping forward and supporting HV was a, a real, uh, you know, speaking to not only the partnership but to the maturity of where Nutanix sits out there. Um, we know that the data protection space is quite hot and a question people have had from day one was, well, we'll Nutanix address that directly themselves. Uh, they had Veem rubrics here, you know, other partners are here. So it's how they are addressing that space and mine, uh, that, that is pretty interesting in different from, uh, you know, much of what we see out there. So, uh, bring us inside mine and you know, uh, Nutanix, it wants optionality to be there. So Veem is one of the partners, but also the, you know, uh, likely the most important first one. Uh, there. >>Yeah. So you know, this, there's a lot of similarities between Nutanix and Veem, especially when it comes to the general approach to partners. You know, where we're a software defined, uh, data protection platform. Nutanix, you're right hat an option, Hey, maybe we go build this ourself or we acquire and try to get that revenue, maybe the data protection revenue. And they've decided to partner just like we've decided to partner, you know, for secondary storage and everything else. And that, that really does lead us to mind because you know, a lot of our competitors do ship their software on white box hardware. Uh, some of the emerging startups are doing that and even some of the legacy players are all, you know, whether it's a Supermicro box and Intel box, we've taken a different approach and said, Hey look, you know, we, we, we know what we're good at and we know we want customer choice. >>And even, you know, Dheeraj and others at the keynote today talked about no vendor lock in. We're where we are. We have very similar approaches. And so, you know, we got together over a year ago, year and a half ago and said, Hey, look, you know, as Veem in a, we, we see some customers that are now asking for their data protection. You know, VM was founded on being simple and easy and there's even ways to take that to another level like mine, which is, Hey look, we want to now even simplify the day zero one the zero experience that even into the day one day two ops in terms of an integrated UI and other ways to to bring, you know, the infrastructure together with your data protection. And so it made perfect sense. We got together and it was like boom, a light bulb went off. We got on a whiteboard and we're like, yeah, we can do this. >>Like, you know, it's going to require joint development. And we've sort of made those commitments on both sides and it's been well received now. It's not in the market yet. It will be soon. Um, but the customer feedback has been incredible. We've done this very successful beta, we've got lots and lots of pent up customer demand. So it's like the sales teams are now saying, Hey, when can we, have you been talking about it for a while? When can we have this? Because we have customers ready to buy. So where we're there now that we're ready to bring this to market and excited about the opportunity together. >>So talk a little bit about the, the ins of that partnership. And you were just describing your ethos, which is making everything simple and easy, which is what we're hearing a lot here today. A. Dot. Next. So does that just mean that you attract the same kinds of employees, so then therefore they work well together in the sandbox? I mean, how would you describe the, the cultures coming together in this joint development process? >>Yeah, I think we're, we're similar companies, right? We're a similar size. We're a similar age. We're similar, you know, just, just all around, you know, our, our culture of innovation. So, you know, when we got together it was, it was pretty simple. Now, now doing development as two companies together is always hard. It's never easy. It's even hard to do it when it's one company on your own, right. And get a, get a product to market. Um, so I'd be lying if I said that weren't bumps along the way. There always are. Uh, but you know, we've, we've, we've worked through and we've, you know, we're, we're now, like I said at that point, and I think our, our, just our similarities and our cultures and really we have alignment at the executive level. And that's important, right. To, to get things done because, you know, well, well, you know, all of us that are sort of working on this thing, maybe a level or two, but when executive leadership is aligned, that's when things get done. And we have that between Nutanix and beam. >>Yeah. And Ken did the messaging that I'm hearing from Nutanix now reminds me of what I was hearing a couple of years ago from Veem specifically when you talk to cloud, uh, so a couple of years ago very much, I saw Microsoft up on stage, you know, living with AWS. What are you hearing from your customers and you know, do you see those parallel journeys or will the AHV integration mean that as Nutanix goes along that journey that Newtanics offerings will be able to live in these multiple cloud environments sometime too? >>Yeah. So I think a little bit of both, right? I think, I think the definitely be able to live out there. I mean, you know, you see VM-ware now wrapping their arms around all the hyperscale public cloud vendors. I mean, we heard about XY clusters and that was announced in Anaheim and we saw a demo of it today. And, and, and, you know, our goal is to support those workloads wherever they are. You know, we've, as I said before, we, we sorta made, made our hay and we were founded on attaching the vSphere then hyper V than HV and now AWS and Azure and all these other environments. And really, you know, the roots of it, we, we follow our customers along their journey, right? So, you know, this customers today that, that, you know, maybe smaller, newer companies that go straight to AWS, straight to Azure, they're born in the cloud and they're cloud only. >>You know, they may not be the best fit for Vien maybe a couple of years from now. Uh, they, they may just buy point solutions for the customers, the larger customers that have hybrid environments. That's what we're looking to attack. And you know, whether that's with Nutanix and VMware and those workloads that go, we, we want to make sure we attach here and give our customers the best experience and the ability to burst to the cloud and move around and workload portability, you know, we built features into the product. We've changed our, revolutionized our licensing to make that easier. So, so that's what we're after is is those hybrid customers solving those problems and those challenges they haven't building on our strength, which starts on prem but has moved into the cloud and, and, and spread quite a bit. Yeah. >>What do you see as some of the trends on the horizon? I mean, as you said, you just described your dream customer, which there, there's, there's a few of them out there so you'll be okay. So talk about some of the, the problems that you, that are keeping them up at night and how your solution solves them. >>You know, when it comes to data protection it, you know, everyone can say, Hey, my backups, they were 100% successful. It comes down to restore and reliability. And security, right? And we, you know, we've, we've built a lot into our product to give customers the peace of mind that, Hey, you know, when that call comes at at 11 o'clock at night and I need to recover assistant cause it's down, you know, we need to have hundred percent confidence that that will be there. And oftentimes when, you know, when we're converting customers over from maybe a competitor's product, that's what we hear the most is, is Hey, you know, it's the reliability and the confidence in the infrastructure and that's what we focus on most. And so, you know, we hear that a lot from customers and, and that's really where our focus is. We've got feet, as I said, features built into the product. >>You know, that, that that goes straight after that can, we've watched Newtanics really increased the breadth of what they're offering through through their software. Uh, they've been talking a lot. Files is one of the, you know, strong growth areas. There. Objects is another one that I, I expect would have some interaction with your environment. What are you hearing from customers? Where is Veeam moving with the HP support for some of these other solutions that Nutanix has? Yeah, so, so we've got a very big release coming, you know, in the next call it few months, quarter or so. Um, that is called V 10. You know, and if you guys read Vema on a couple of years ago, we've talked about V 10 and that was a number of features in there. NAS is a big one for us. Um, and it's one that that is probably the most asked for feature that we currently don't have. >>And so having support for files and we've already tested with the beta, you know, we know when we come out with that in a GA form that we're going to be successful with, with files. Uh, object storage is another one that was also part of the V tenet umbrella when we announced it, you know, while ago. Um, and it's been hugely successful for us. It's revolutionized, kind of the way that our customers look at longterm storage is, is, Hey, I can, I can move that to AWSs three or Azure blob or, you know, cloudy in or Swift stack or something else on pram or Nutanix objects. Um, you know, because again, customer choice, but, but we've, you know, we've embraced that because that's where customers are going. She asks, you know, what a customer that, that's, that's where, that's where they're going. They, they, they say, Hey, I want, you know, a lot of them want to get rid of tape, you know, and, and what's the best way to get in this is features of tape in object storage, right? There's object lock and ways to do, you know, uh, write once, read, read many times. So we're, you know, we look at object storage a little bit as, as the next generation of tape. Now it's, you know, it's not exactly that. There's lots of different use cases, but, but for us and for our customers, they're looking, they're looking to, to do the next generation data center. And that includes having object storage is a longterm tier. Uh, you know, for cost reasons, for manageability reasons, you know, of the light. >>Can you talk a little bit about the partner ecosystem and the evolution of it and particularly because the technology industry is, is changing so fast and you, you, you started this conversation by talking about how much your culture is aligned with Nutanix culture. How do you see, with, with these fast changing companies, fast changing technologies, how do you see five, 10 years from now, what will the technology landscape look like? >>Yeah, certainly. I mean obviously the, the push to cloud, that's big, right? Where we're making a lot of, a lot of changes on our site, where, where we're bringing out new products or bringing out new features that specifically take you to cloud. Um, you know, we, we were on with you guys at, at world and, and you know, there was, you know, project Tansu and all this other stuff about Cuba and it was, it was, that was the Coobernetti's conference. Right. And, and, uh, you know, I said earlier, you know, we want to move along at the pace that our customers want to go. So, you know, those, those sort of born in the cloud companies are going straight to Kubernetes, but we're moving along with our customers when it comes to Kubernetes and containers. So, so yeah, we're, we're paying attention to it. Do we have a product that can support every bit of, you know, Kubernetes and containers yet? >>No, but, but we're, you know, there's these things that we're working on and you know, in, in the way that Veem usually develops software, we're not usually first, but we usually come out with something that is rock solid, ready to go, customer ready. We have 355,000 customers we can't afford to and, and, and we're the stewards of their data. Uh, so when we come out with something yet, we may take slightly longer to do it, but you can be sure that it's rock solid, stable, robust, and that's, you know, that's our general approach. And so when you ask, you know, where our customers going, you know, they're definitely going to the cloud, they're going to Kubernetes, they're, you know, all these, all these new technologies, and, and, and, and we sort of like step back and we ask our customers, Hey, are you doing this? You know, what's your plan for this? Is it two years? Is it one year? Is it five years? Um, and we adjust accordingly. >>Yeah. Uh, can anything particular for your European customers that, that, that you can share? >>Yeah, I think, you know, when you think European customers and uniqueness from the rest of the world, I mean, you start with GDPR, right? That that was, you know, a huge thing that went into effect a year ago. Um, and we've, you know, we've, we've done things there, but they're, they're, they're very sensitive to, you know, that and, and being able to, you know, provide that capability for their customers. So, so I'd, I'd put that at the top of the list. I mean, cloud is a big one. You know, I think as we look at the hyperscalers in particular, AWS and Azure, you know, the U S is a big country. You don't need a lot of data centers to cover the country. But now you look at GDPR and some things need to stay in the, in the envelope of a, of a country. And Hey, this, you know, lots of countries in Europe and, and, and so more and more data centers. So the support of those public cloud vendors and the, the sprawl of, of the date and the sprawl of the data centers is, is really important. So having that coverage and being able to provide customer choice is incredibly important to European customers. >>Well, Ken, thank you so much for coming back on the cube. We always have a fun time talking to you. Right. Thank you. Next time I'll be here. Seventh, I'm Rebecca night for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Nutanix. Dot. Next.

(upbeat music) >> Introducer: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VM Ware, and it's ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, from VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, 10 years of theCUBE, covering VMworld. A lot's changed, a lot's happening, 10 more years. Two great guests here from Veeam. Carey Stanton is VP of Global Alliances and Ken Ringdahl who is the VP of Global Alliance Architecture. Both with Veeam. Love the green. >> Good to see you gents. >> Epic party last night. You guys are known for the legendary party. >> Yes. Andy Rammer? Did you? It was great. We had 2,500 people waving, shouting. Yeah it was great. >> So welcome back to theCUBE. So what's the news for you guys? You're always popping some news out. What's going on here for you guys at VMworld 2019? Top story. >> Top story for us I think is continuation of what we're doing with VMware on VMC and AWS, you know we continue to be the number one data protection workload on VSAN, working with them on their new marketplace as a design partner that they just launched this week as well, so I would say that we are always everything to VMware and then we just continue to ratch it up with continuing to grow out their ACF platform with VSAN and the new marketplace which is their VCPP, which is a big part of our business. >> And the cloud's certainly a big part of the equation for VMware this year. I mean you've seen the announce cloud native support, kubernetes on Vsphere, so they're starting to get their software mojo down on trying to build that next generation platform. You guys are kind of there with your solution. What's the big takeaway technically that's going on that customers should care about in your mind Ken? What do you think? >> Yeah, you know. Certainly this, is a big push towards Cloud I think. You know as Ratmir our co-founder would tell you, "hey, we track VMware." So when VMware started on print we would track along, they've now moved into the public cloud, and we're following along there, so whether it's VMC and AWS, the new relationships with Azure and Google, you know, goodness for us because we provide inherent support there. But you know some of the next generation things, a lot of news about project Pacific, and kubernetes, and next generation cloud native applications and, yeah we're here to support our customers, you know we're looking at all the new things that are there, we've done a lot of things recently about adopting object storage for cloud storage, etc. A lot of things we're doing from a product and technology perspective. >> So Pat Gelsinger, on theCUBE one time said, "If you don't ride the waves you're going to become driftwood." You guys have always been wave riders. When you see something like the project Pacific, what does that mean to you? How do you respond to that? Do you talk to customers? Do you sort of huddle internally and start designing? >> We do. We certainly take a lot of feedback, you know as we all know in tech, there's a lot of things that come and go, some of these things are great ideas, and at VM where you can look at vCloud Air right? You know, it was great momentum for a while and VMware made a very good pivot right? They understood that, we shouldn't compete in the space, we should partner in this space, and so we do the same thing, we look at when we're evaluating new technologies, kubernetes, etc., I mean I think at this point we know kubernetes is here to stay right? That's not a fad. It's very clear, the adoption is clear, so we're evaluating how we participate there. Our customers are largely, on-prem customers but moving to the cloud it's a real hybrid story, and so when we go in and implement our support and look at how we're going to integrate that, it's all about how we help our customers in that world. So when you see a new trend you say what, "We can protect that." Right? It's anything, everything needs to be protected. How do you think about protecting containers? Yeah so we look at it and say, hey look, the way that containers are delivered it's inside of a system regardless so, sometimes it's inside a VM, sometimes it's within a physical system. We can protect what support's there and we're looking at how can we help customers today. A lot of customers are moving their workloads. Similar to when server virtualization came up, it was a little bit of a lift in shift right, I'm going to take what was working on physical, move it to virtual. A lot of customers today are moving what they have in legacy apps and they're just putting 'em into containers just to get there, and then they're building new applications, they're moving in a more stateless fashion. We can support the customers today when they move to a stateful system. And we're evaluation how we support more the stateful longterm view of kubernetes. >> But Carey so you obviously know VMware very well. Yes sir. I've spent some time there. When you think about how the ecosystem's evolving, VMware now is a networking company, they're a storage company, obviously they compute, but they haven't sort of aimed the cannon at data protection, they've left that to the eco system. Your thoughts on how the ecosystem is evolving, your relationship with VMware, and the broader. >> Yeah I think it's not dissimilar to, if we just pick vSAN, storage, primary workload, they don't play in the secondary storage, and they allow their customers to work with reference architectures that we create to say which data protection partner would you like to have. We're fortunate to be number one, if you look at HBE, right, again, they have a lot of partners, we're number one with them, NetApp, Cisco and the like, so you know, VMware's not any dissimilar, so we're fortunate to have that Tier 1 relationship with them that they're looking to us as serving their customers. And then we also have a very close working relationship with them on the engineering side to ensure that we're always protecting their customers, and we have lots of other great meetings this week and lots of other things to be announced in the weeks ahead with working with them and their customers so we're very excited on what they're doing in that space and how we can solve their customers. >> That's interesting. None of the big platform players really have attacked ever, historically, back up, I mean I guess IBM kind of, but that's for different reasons. They'd probably say, "Okay, we've replicated, we're good." Why do you think that is? Is this cause it's so hard? You guys as an industry are that far ahead of the functionality? It's a tough business? >> Well I think it's.. It's big, it's a large business I think it is. It's a 6+ billion dollar town. I think that it's also a legacy. I mean if you look at where Veeam came in and we were disrupters when VMware was it and doing the virtualization, we were disrupting the legacy players without saying all the names what we did, and I believe that with the two decade plus world the data protection has been in, and the evolution, that it would take a lot of work on their part to want to come in and say that they're going to get into that space and try and have a solution that is as credible as Veeam is in the marketplace. So again we're fortunate, we stay very close with them and you know we continue to see them as one of our Tier 1 partners as well. >> Talk about the integration aspect because you're Tier 1, you guys are number 1 recommended with these guys, relationship's strong, integration's are key, for you guys and with VMware but also as customers, look at the Cloud 2.0 world, and you guys are following VMware with multi-Cloud, you guys can play everywhere. You're going to be integrating a lot, so that has to be a core competence for you guys. Can you just talk about, how you guys view your integration with VMware and then, from a customer standpoint, why is it important? >> I'll take the first crack and then pass it Ken, but if you look at two years ago with VMC on AWS when they made those announcements, we were a design partner in, and then they started to evolve that and doing those pilot, we're starting to see those pilots turn into large enterprises deployments. You hear Pat and Sanjay talking about the evolution that they're having and we're seeing the result of that, the customer's saying, "I need what was using on-pram." And that's moving to the Cloud and it just works, the Veeam slogan, it just works. So we're seeing a lot of those deployments for customers taking those enterprise solutions that they had on AWS and scaling them out, and we're going to continue to do that across all of, you know, what Ken was just talking about kubernetes, the Pacific project and others that were.. Again, we're at the table working with them, but I don't think that Veeam is going to stay away, we're only going to get closer as go into new technologies. >> You have to and the tech's getting better too. >> Yeah, what I'll say also is, Veeam, when you look at the data protection landscape we're a pure play ISV. That actually makes us pretty unique because all of our competitors either sell their software on a piece of hardware, or it's at least an option. We have no Veeam whitebox option that you'll see a Veeam label on it, and it really resonates with out partners. We're totally non-competitive, or non-overlapping with our partners and so, they welcome us with open arms as a result of that, and it really helps us drive in. But the integrations are critical and just to quickly make a comment about the last question about sort of the point solutions and why doesn't the big platform players. I'll give you two examples, two public Cloud examples: Azure and AWS, the two primary hyperscale Cloud vendors. They both have backup solutions, AWS has site recovery, sorry, Azure has site recovery, AWS come out with AWS backup. About a year ago they announced that at Reinvent. They need that for point solutions for customers that are looking for a checkbox. Customers, really that more the developer that just needs the base level protection. But they partner with folks like ourselves, for the broader support, for the hybrid support, because silicon angle right? I just read an article yesterday, or two days ago on silicon angle. It's a hybrid cloud world. You guys, talking all about it. That's where our strength is and that's why we have these partners coming to us. You know they build point solutions on their own, again for that checkbox, we're not checkbox, we're deep integrations, we're hybrid cloud, portability, flexibility, reliability. >> And that's smart of the cloud guys to do that because some people want end to end or compliance reasons they have to use the cloud's solution, or it's a requirement, but look at Cloud Trail, and data job's going public. You got New Relic. You got these companies that are winning in adding value with their products through leadership. Not necessarily. Amazon's got a solution out there but they're not really, going down that road. >> And John, and what I would say is also they see, the number of customers and the size of the petabytes that we're driving on the respective clouds, again back to Ken's point on AWS and Azure, I mean that business for us is growing 30 to 35%, month over month, and so they understand the number of customers, and they see that this is a hybrid play, the customers tiering off data to the cloud, but their primary workload is on-prem >> That will give you more EC2 cycles. I mean, crank up the EC2 baby. >> And they know that we're coming out with cloud native solutions as well so, I mean we're doing all the heavy RD investment, solving their customer problems, so again reason number 452 as to why they would want to go in and be disrupted to that? >> As you guys do these integrations, a lot of cloud action, you got VMC on AWS, Cloud Tier with AWS and Azure, you have a bunch of stuff going on with VMware solutions with Cloud Simple. As you work in this multi-cloud world, how are you changing your licensing and pricing models to adapt? Yeah a think Ratmir and Danny were on this week and talking about instances, so we're moving the portability of the license no longer, making the customer have to make a hard decision on the day of licensing with Veeam, is we're saying, hey, the license, it's an instance, it's on-prem, it's an instance in the cloud, you determine what's right for your business and move those licenses. So we were the first to really make that giant leap and we're going to continue to evolve that solution and make it even easier for them to do that, and then another thing that Veeam is there's no tax, we don't charge the customer any money if you want to move those data environments up into the public cloud, and again that's Veeam differentiating as it were, that customer company. We're always focused on what's right for the customer, from the product, right down to the licensing model. Yeah you're tag line is it just works. And I don't know it that's the tag line but that's what customers always say. >> It was for many years. And it's more than just a product, it's the business model. You guys have always been, pretty innovative in that regard. And especially with partners, you and I have talked about this in terms of how you make a transparent for the partner, for the sales reps. On the partner's side, to not care, whether it's they're selling on-prem or if it's a cloud solution. >> And it's been well received as you know we have global resell agreement with the Cisco's and HP's and NetApp's of the world and they're very appreciate to the way that we make it easy for them to sell to their customers and allow them to have that portability of the licenses. >> It's been great following you guys and your events, and getting to see you guys be successful, the product does the talking, and the customers are the references. I mean they vote with their wallets. You know and you guys are a Tier 1 partner. Congratulations. >> Yeah. Thank you very much. >> Final question for you, is the event successful in your mind for you guys? What do you think is happening here? What's the top story coming out of the event overall for the folks that didn't make it here? >> So, first and foremost, huge success, we're 100% back here next year trying to make it even bigger, and I would say that what's coming out of it is just the, the success that our customers show by coming to our booth and showing us that they're looking to keep with Veeam on the journey as they go with VMware. And Ken touches on kubernetes and look at all the new solutions, and so we have an overwhelming support to customers saying, "Hey, I've been with you for the last decade, I want to be with you on the journey." And so that's, we've hear that over and over again this week so very strong. >> Yeah, I think I'll second what Carey said and maybe I'll give you a broader picture. I mean if you look at what VMware's done over the last 12 to 15 months. Last year at VMworld they announced the Cloud Health acquisition, they acquired Security Company, Pivotal, you know they're really broading and they're seeing that hey look, it's not just about on-prem server virtualization, we need to have a very broad story. We need to be relevant in the public cloud, we need to provide some management and multi-cloud capabilities. We're doing the same, but I think VMware is clearly in a period of transition and figuring out.. You know I think VMC and AWS is a great step. You know having the CloudSimple relationship and virtustream for Azure, you know runnig VMware, and Azure, and Google, but I think you'll continue to see that evolve and I think they've put the breadcrumbs down so that as we go forward here in the coming months, weeks, and next year when we're here at VMworld, you'll see that continue. >> And it's certainly a great growth in terms of infrastructure's, code. You're starting to see the Enterprise Cloud start to stand up a little bit. Hybrid cloud's got visibility. It's not as easy as leaving stuff in the cloud, getting the enterprise to work, you guys know that first hand. And Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much. Appreciate it >> VMworld 2019 CUBE coverage. Here live in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)