(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in theCUBE Studios. We've got a special video here. We love when we have startups that are launching. It's an exclusive video of a hot startup that's launching. Got great reviews so far. You know, word on the street is, they got something different and unique. We're going to' dig into it. Amit Govrin who's the CEO and co-founder of Kubiya, which stands for Cube in Hebrew, and they're headquartered in Bay Area and in Tel Aviv. Amit, congratulations on the startup launch and thanks for coming in and talk to us in theCUBE >> Thank you, John, very nice to be here. >> So, first of all, a little, 'cause we love the Cube, 'cause theCUBE's kind of an open brand. We've never seen the Cube in Hebrew, so is that true? Kubiya is? >> Kubiya literally means cube. You know, clearly there's some additional meanings that we can discuss. Obviously we're also launching a KubCon, so there's a dual meaning to this event. >> KubCon, not to be confused with CubeCon. Which is an event we might have someday and compete. No, I'm only kidding, good stuff. I want to get into the startup because I'm intrigued by your story. One, you know, conversational AI's been around, been a category. We've seen chat bots be all the rage and you know, I kind of don't mind chat bots on some sites. I can interact with some, you know, form based knowledge graph, whatever, knowledge database and get basic stuff self served. So I can see that, but it never really scaled or took off. And now with Cloud Native kind of going to the next level, we're starting to see a lot more open source and a lot more automation, in what I call AI as code or you know, AI as a service, machine learning, developer focused action. I think you guys might have an answer there. So if you don't mind, could you take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, what's different about Kubiya, what's happening? >> Certainly. So thank you for that. Kubiya is what we would consider the first, or one of the first, advanced virtual assitants with a domain specific expertise in DevOps. So, we respect all of the DevOps concepts, GitOps, workflow automation, of those categories you've mentioned, but also the added value of the conversational AI. That's really one of the few elements that we can really bring to the table to extract what we call intent based operations. And we can get into what that means in a little bit. I'll save that maybe for the next question. >> So the market you're going after is kind of, it's, I love to hear starters when they, they don't have a Gartner Magic quadrant, they can fit nicely, it means they're onto something. What is the market you're going after? Because you're seeing a lot of developers driving a lot of the key successes in DevOps. DevOps has evolved to the point where, and DevSecOps, where developers are driving the change. And so having something that's developer focused is key. Are you guys targeting the developers, IT buyers, cloud architects? Who are you looking to serve with this new opportunity? >> So essentially self-service in the world of DevOps, the end user typically would be a developer, but not only, and obviously the operators, those are the folks that we're actually looking to help augment a lot of their efforts, a lot of the toil that they're experiencing in a day to day. So there's subcategories within that. We can talk about the different internal developer tools, or platforms, shared services platforms, service catalogs are tangential categories that this kind of comes on. But on top of that, we're adding the element of conversational AI. Which, as I mentioned, that's really the "got you". >> I think you're starting to see a lot of autonomous stuff going on, autonomous pen testing. There's a company out there doing I've seen autonomous AI. Automation is a big theme of it. And I got to ask, are you guys on the business side purely in the cloud? Are you born in the cloud, is it a cloud service? What's the product choice there? It's a service, right? >> Software is a service. We have the classic, Multi-Tenancy SAAS, but we also have a hybrid SAAS solution, which allows our customers to run workflows using remote runners, essentially hosted at their own location. >> So primary cloud, but you're agnostic on where they could consume, how they want to' consume the product. >> Technology agnostic. >> Okay, so that's cool. So let's get into the problem you're solving. So take me through, this will drive a lot of value here, when you guys did the company, what problems did you hone in on and what are you guys seeing as the core problem that you solve? >> So we, this is a unique, I don't know how unique, but this is a interesting proposition because I come from the business side, so call it the top down. I've been in enterprise sales, I've been in a CRO, VP sales hat. My co-founder comes from the bottom up, right? He ran DevOps teams and SRE teams in his previous company. That's actually what he did. So, we met each other halfway, essentially with me seeing a lot of these problems of self-service not being so self-service after all, platforms hitting walls with adoption. And he actually created his own self-service platform, within his last company, to address his own personal pains. So we essentially kind of met with both perspectives. >> So you're absolutely hardcore on self-service. >> We're enabling self-service. >> And that basically is what everybody wants. I mean, the developers want self-service. I mean, that's kind of like, you know, that's the nirvana. So take us through what you guys are offering, give us an example of use cases and who's buying your product, why, and take us through that whole piece. >> Do you mind if I take a step back and say why we believe self-service has somewhat failed or not gotten off. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So look, this is essentially how we're looking at it. All the analysts and the industry insiders are talking about self-service platforms as being what's going to' remove the dependency of the operator in the loop the entire time, right? Because the operator, that scarce resource, it's hard to hire, hard to train, hard to retain those folks, Developers are obviously dependent on them for productivity. So the operators in this case could be a DevOps, could be a SecOps, it could be a platform engineer. It comes in different flavors. But the common denominator, somebody needs an access request, provisioning a new environment, you name it, right? They go to somebody, that person is operator. The operator typically has a few things on their plate. It's not just attending and babysitting platforms, but it's also innovating, spinning up, and scaling services. So they see this typically as kind of, we don't really want to be here, we're going to' go and do this because we're on call. We have to take it on a chin, if you may, for this. >> It's their child, they got to' do it. >> Right, but it's KTLOs, right, keep the lights on, this is maintenance of a platform. It's not what they're born and bred to do, which is innovate. That's essentially what we're seeing, we're seeing that a lot of these platforms, once they finally hit the point of maturity, they're rolled out to the team. People come to serve themselves in platform, and low and behold, it's not as self-service as it may seem. >> We've seen that certainly with Kubernetes adoption being, I won't say slow, it's been fast, but it's been good. But I think this is kind of the promise of what SRE was supposed to be. You know, do it once and then babysit in the sense of it's working and automated. Nothing's broken yet. Don't call me unless you need something, I see that. So the question, you're trying to make it easier then, you're trying to free up the talent. >> Talent to operate and have essentially a human, like in the loop, essentially augment that person and give the end users all of the answers they require, as if they're talking to a person. >> I mean it's basically, you're taking the virtual assistant concept, or chat bot, to a level of expertise where there's intelligence, jargon, experience into the workflows that's known. Not just talking to chat bot, get a support number to rebook a hotel room. >> We're converting operational workflows into conversations. >> Give me an example, take me through an example. >> Sure, let's take a simple example. I mean, not everyone provisions EC2's with two days (indistinct). But let's say you want to go and provision new EC2 instances, okay? If you wanted to do it, you could go and talk to the assistant and say, "I want to spin up a new server". If it was a human in the loop, they would ask you the following questions: what type of environment? what are we attributing this to? what type of instance? security groups, machine images, you name it. So, these are the questions that typically somebody needs to be armed with before they can go and provision themselves, serve themselves. Now the problem is users don't always have these questions. So imagine the following scenario. Somebody comes in, they're in Jira ticket queue, they finally, their turn is up and the next question they don't have the answer to. So now they have to go and tap on a friend, or they have to go essentially and get that answer. By the time they get back, they lost their turn in queue. And then that happens again. So, they lose a context, they lose essentially the momentum. And a simple access request, or a simple provision request, can easily become a couple days of ping pong back and forth. This won't happen with the virtual assistant. >> You know, I think, you know, and you mentioned chat bots, but also RPA is out there, you've seen a lot of that growth. One of the hard things, and you brought this up, I want to get your reaction to, is contextualizing the workflow. It might not be apparent, but the answer might be there, it disrupts the entire experience at that point. RPA and chat bots don't have that contextualization. Is that what you guys do differently? Is that the unique flavor here? Is that difference between current chat bots and RPA? >> The way we see it, I alluded to the intent based operations. Let me give a tangible experience. Even not from our own world, this will be easy. It's a bidirectional feedback loop 'cause that's actually what feeds the context and the intent. We all know Waze, right, in the world of navigation. They didn't bring navigation systems to the world. What they did is they took the concept of navigation systems that are typically satellite guided and said it's not just enough to drive down the 280, which typically have no traffic, right, and to come across traffic and say, oh, why didn't my satellite pick that up? So they said, have the end users, the end nodes, feed that direction back, that feedback, right. There has to be a bidirectional feedback loop that the end nodes help educate the system, make the system be better, more customized. And that's essentially what we're allowing the end users. So the maintenance of the system isn't entirely in the hands of the operators, right? 'Cause that's the part that they dread. And the maintenance of the system is democratized across all the users that they can teach the system, give input to the system, hone in the system in order to make it more of the DNA of the organization. >> You and I were talking before you came on this camera interview, you said playfully that the Siri for DevOps, which kind of implies, hey infrastructure, do something for me. You know, we all know Siri, so we get that. So that kind of illustrates kind of where the direction is. Explain why you say that, what does that mean? Is that like a NorthStar vision that you guys are approaching? You want to' have a state where everything's automated in it's conversational deployments, that kind of thing. And take us through why that Siri for DevOps is. >> I think it helps anchor people to what a virtual assistant is. Because when you hear virtual assistant, that can mean any one of various connotations. So the Siri is actually a conversational assistant, but it's not necessarily a virtual assistant. So what we're saying is we're anchoring people to that thought and saying, we're actually allowing it to be operational, turning complex operations into simple conversations. >> I mean basically they take the automate with voice Google search or a query, what's the score of the game? And, it also, and talking to the guy who invented Siri, I actually interviewed on theCUBE, it's a learning system. It actually learns as it gets more usage, it learns. How do you guys see that evolving in DevOps? There's a lot of jargon in DevOps, a lot of configurations, a lot of different use cases, a lot of new technologies. What's the secret sauce behind what you guys do? Is it the conversational AI, is it the machine learning, is it the data, is it the model? Take us through the secret sauce. >> In fact, it's all the above. And I don't think we're bringing any one element to the table that hasn't been explored before, hasn't been done. It's a recipe, right? You give two people the same ingredients, they can have complete different results in terms of what they come out with. We, because of our domain expertise in DevOps, because of our familiarity with developer workflows with operators, we know how to give a very well suited recipe. Five course meal, hopefully with Michelin stars as part of that. So a few things, maybe a few of the secret sauce element, conversational AI, the ability to essentially go and extract the intent of the user, so that if we're missing context, the system is smart enough to go and to get that feedback and to essentially feed itself into that model. >> Someone might say, hey, you know, conversational AI, that was yesterday's trend, it never happened. It was kind of weak, chat bots were lame. What's different now and with you guys, and the market, that makes a redo or a second shot at this, a second bite at the apple, as they say. What do you guys see? 'Cause you know, I would argue that it's, you know, it's still early, real early. >> Certainly. >> How do you guys view that? How would you handle that objection? >> It's a fair question. I wasn't around the first time around to tell you what didn't work. I'm not afraid to share that the feedback that we're getting is phenomenal. People understand that we're actually customizing the workflows, the intent based operations to really help hone in on the dark spots. We call it last mile, you know, bottlenecks. And that's really where we're helping. We're helping in a way tribalize internal knowledge that typically hasn't been documented because it's painful enough to where people care about it but not painful enough to where you're going to' go and sit down an entire day and document it. And that's essentially what the virtual assistant can do. It can go and get into those crevices and help document, and operationalize all of those toils. And into workflows. >> Yeah, I mean some will call it grunt work, or low level work. And I think the automation is interesting. I think we're seeing this in a lot of these high scale situations where the talented hard to hire person is hired to do, say, things that were hard to do, but now harder things are coming around the corner. So, you know, serverless is great and all this is good, but it doesn't make the complexity go away. As these inflection points continue to drive more scale, the complexity kind of grows, but at the same time so is the ability to abstract away the complexity. So you're starting to see the smart, hired guns move to higher, bigger problems. And the automation seems to take the low level kind of like capabilities or the toil, or the grunt work, or the low level tasks that, you know, you don't want a high salaried person doing. Or I mean it's not so much that they don't want to' do it, they'll take one for the team, as you said, or take it on the chin, but there's other things to work on. >> I want to add one more thing, 'cause this goes into essentially what you just said. Think about it's not the virtual system, what it gives you is not just the intent and that's one element of it, is the ability to carry your operations with you to the place where you're not breaking your workflows, you're actually comfortable operating. So the virtual assistant lives inside of a command line interface, it lives inside of chat like Slack, and Teams, and Mattermost, and so forth. It also lives within a low-code editor. So we're not forcing anyone to use uncomfortable language or operations if they're not comfortable with. It's almost like Siri, it travels in your mobile phone, it's on your laptop, it's with you everywhere. >> It makes total sense. And the reason why I like this, and I want to' get your reaction on this because we've done a lot of interviews with DevOps, we've met at every CubeCon since it started, and Kubernetes kind of highlights the value of the containers at the orchestration level. But what's really going on is the DevOps developers, and the CICD pipeline, with infrastructure's code, they're basically have a infrastructure configuration at their disposal all the time. And all the ops challenges have been around that, the repetitive mundane tasks that most people do. There's like six or seven main use cases in DevOps. So the guardrails just need to be set. So it sounds like you guys are going down the road of saying, hey here's the use cases you can bounce around these use cases all day long. And just keep doing your jobs cause they're bolting on infrastructure to every application. >> There's one more element to this that we haven't really touched on. It's not just workflows and use cases, but it's also knowledge, right? Tribal knowledge, like you asked me for an example. You can type or talk to the assistant and ask, "How much am I spending on AWS, on US East 1, on so and so customer environment last week?", and it will know how to give you that information. >> Can I ask, should I buy a reserve instances or not? Can I ask that question? 'Cause there's always good trade offs between buying the reserve instances. I mean that's kind of the thing that. >> This is where our ecosystem actually comes in handy because we're not necessarily going to' go down every single domain and try to be the experts in here. We can tap into the partnerships, API, we have full extensibility in API and the software development kit that goes into. >> It's interesting, opinionated and declarative are buzzwords in developer language. So you started to get into this editorial thing. So I can bring up an example. Hey cube, implement the best service mesh. What answer does it give you? 'Cause there's different choices. >> Well this is actually where the operator, there's clearly guard rails. Like you can go and say, I want to' spin up a machine, and it will give you all of the machines on AWS. Doesn't mean you have to get the X one, that's good for a SAP environment. You could go and have guardrails in place where only the ones that are relevant to your team, ones that have resources and budgetary, you know, guidelines can be. So, the operator still has all the control. >> It was kind of tongue in cheek around the editorialized, but actually the answer seems to be as you're saying, whatever the customer decided their service mesh is. So I think this is where it gets into as an assistant to architecting and operating, that seems to be the real value. >> Now code snippets is a different story because that goes on to the web, that goes onto stock overflow, and that's actually one of the things. So inside the CLI, you could actually go and ask for code snippets and we could actually go and populate that, it's a smart CLI. So that's actually one of the things that are an added value of that. >> I was saying to a friend and we were talking about open source and how when I grew up, there was no open source. If you're a developer now, I mean there's so much code, it's not so much coding anymore as it is connecting and integrating. >> Certainly. >> And writing glue layers, if you will. I mean there's still code, but it's not, you don't have to build it from scratch. There's so much code out there. This low-code notion of a smart system is interesting 'cause it's very matrix like. It can build its own code. >> Yes, but I'm also a little wary with low-code and no code. I think part of the problem is we're so constantly focused on categories and categorizing ourselves, and different categories take on a life of their own. So low-code no code is not necessarily, even though we have the low-code editor, we're not necessarily considering ourselves low-code. >> Serverless, no code, low-code. I was so thrown on a term the other day, architecture-less. As a joke, no we don't need architecture. >> There's a use case around that by the way, yeah, we do. Show me my AWS architecture and it will build the architect diagram for you. >> Again, serverless architect, this is all part of infrastructure's code. At the end of the day, the developer has infrastructure with code. Again, how they deploy it is the neuron. That's what we've been striving for. >> But infrastructure is code. You can destroy, you know, terraform, you can go and create one. It's not necessarily going to' operate it for you. That's kind of where this comes in on top of that. So it's really complimentary to infrastructure. >> So final question, before we get into the origination story, data and security are two hot areas we're seeing fill the IT gap, that has moved into the developer role. IT is essentially provisioned by developers now, but the OP side shifted to large scale SRE like environments, security and data are critical. What's your opinion on those two things? >> I agree. Do you want me to give you the normal data as gravity? >> So you agree that IT is now, is kind of moved into the developer realm, but the new IT is data ops and security ops basically. >> A hundred percent, and the lines are so blurred. Like who's what in today's world. I mean, I can tell you, I have customers who call themselves five different roles in the same day. So it's, you know, at the end of the day I call 'em operators 'cause I don't want to offend anybody because that's just the way it is. >> Architectural-less, we're going to' come back to that. Well, I know we're going to' see you at CubeCon. >> Yes. >> We should catch up there and talk more. I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys get the feedback from the marketplace. It should be interesting to hear, the curious question I have for you is, what was the origination story? Why did you guys come together, was it a shared problem? Was it a big market opportunity? Was it an itch you guys were scratching? Did you feel like you needed to come together and start this company? What was the real vision behind the origination? Take a take a minute to explain the story. >> No, absolutely. So I've been living in Palo Alto for the last couple years. Previous, also a founder. So, you know, from my perspective, I always saw myself getting back in the game. Spent a few years in AWS essentially managing partnerships for tier one DevOps partners, you know, all of the known players. Some in public, some of them not. And really the itch was there, right. I saw what everyone's doing. I started seeing consistency in the pains that I was hearing back, in terms of what hasn't been solved. So I already had an opinion where I wanted to go. And when I was visiting actually Israel with the family, I was introduced by a mutual friend to Shaked, Shaked Askayo, my co-founder and CTO. Amazing guy, unbelievable technologists, probably one the most, you know, impressive folks I've had a chance to work with. And he actually solved a very similar problem, you know, in his own way in a previous company, BlueVine, a FinTech company where he was head of SRE, having to, essentially, oversee 200 developers in a very small team. The ratio was incongruent to what the SRE guideline would tell. >> That's more than 10 x rate developer. >> Oh, absolutely. Sure enough. And just imagine it's four different time zones. He finishes day shift and you already had the US team coming, asking for a question. He said, this is kind of a, >> Got to' clone himself, basically. >> Well, yes. He essentially said to me, I had no day, I had no life, but I had Corona, I had COVID, which meant I could work from home. And I essentially programed myself in the form of a bot. Essentially, when people came to him, he said, "Don't talk to me, talk to the bot". Now that was a different generation. >> Just a trivial example, but the idea was to automate the same queries all the time. There's an answer for that, go here. And that's the benefit of it. >> Yes, so he was able to see how easy it was to solve, I mean, how effective it was solving 70% of the toil in his organization. Scaling his team, froze the headcount and the developer team kept on going. So that meant that he was doing some right. >> When you have a problem, and you need to solve it, the creativity comes out of the woodwork, you know, invention is the mother of necessity. So final question for you, what's next? Got the launch, what are you guys hope to do over the next six months to a year, hiring? Put a plug in for the company. What are you guys looking to do? Take a minute to share the future vision and get a plug in. >> A hundred percent. So, Kubiya, as you can imagine, announcing ourselves at CubeCon, so in a couple weeks. Opening the gates towards the public beta and NGA in the next couple months. Essentially working with dozens of customers, Aston Martin, and business earn in. We have quite a few, our website's full of quotes. You can go ahead. But effectively we're looking to go and to bring the next operator, generation of operators, who value their time, who value the, essentially, the value of tribal knowledge that travels between organizations that could be essentially shared. >> How many customers do you guys have in your pre-launch? >> It's above a dozen. Without saying, because we're actually looking to onboard 10 more next week. So that's just an understatement. It changes from day to day. >> What's the number one thing people are saying about you? >> You got that right. I know it's, I'm trying to be a little bit more, you know. >> It's okay, you can be cocky, startups are good. But I mean they're obviously, they're using the product and you're getting good feedback. Saving time, are they saying this is a dream product? Got it right, what are some of the things? >> I think anybody who doesn't feel the pain won't know, but the folks who are in the trenches, or feeling the pain, or experiencing this toil, who know what this means, they said, "You're doing this different, you're doing this right. You architected it right. You know exactly what the developer workflows," you know, where all the areas, you know, where all the skeletons are hidden within that. And you're attending to that. So we're happy about that. >> Everybody wants to clone themselves, again, the tribal knowledge. I think this is a great example of where we see the world going. Make things autonomous, operationally automated for the use cases you know are lock solid. Why wouldn't you just deploy? >> Exactly, and we have a very generous free tier. People can, you know, there's a plugin, you can sign up for free until the end of the year. We have a generous free tier. Yeah, free forever tier, as well. So we're looking for people to try us out and to give us feedback. >> I think the self-service, I think the point is, we've talked about it on the Cube at our events, everyone says the same thing. Every developer wants self-service, period. Full stop, done. >> What they don't say is they need somebody to help them babysit to make sure they're doing it right. >> The old dashboard, green, yellow, red. >> I know it's an analogy that's not related, but have you been to Whole Foods? Have you gone through their self-service line? That's the beauty of it, right? Having someone in a loop helping you out throughout the time. You don't get confused, if something's not working, someone's helping you out, that's what people want. They want a human in the loop, or a human like in the loop. We're giving that next best thing. >> It's really the ratio, it's scale. It's a scaling. It's force multiplier, for sure. Amit, thanks for coming on, congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> See you at KubeCon. Thanks for coming in, sharing the story. >> KubiyaCon. >> CubeCon. Cube in Hebrew, Kubiya. Founder, co-founder and CEO here, sharing the story in the launch. Conversational AI for DevOps, the theory of DevOps, really kind of changing the game, bringing efficiency, solving a lot of the pain points of large scale infrastructure. This is theCUBE, CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from London, England, it's the Cube, Covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, and welcome to the Excel Center in London, England, where 3500 customers, partners, and employees of Nutanix have gathered for the annual European show of Nutanix .Next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for two days of wall to wall exclusive coverage from the Cube is Joep Piscaer, our first European co-host. Joep, I first met you two years ago at the Nutanix show in Vienna. Last year was in Nice. We're now in London, and now you're not just a guest, but a host. Thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you. So, it was awesome three years ago I was a customer, then I transitioned into a tech champion as well, for getting to know the technology and the people behind Nutanix, and now I'm here as a co-host, looking at Nutanix as a company. >> Well, we really appreciate you joining us. Give us, first of all, some more credibility in the European space, and also we always love to get the practitioner viewpoint. So, you have been a customer, you're part of I believe the NTC Program that Nutanix has, so you understand the technology. We're going to get to talk to some of the customers, some of those executives, and the like, so lookin' forward to havin' ya' sit with me, and dig into it, including, a first on the Cube, you're going to do one interview in your native tongue of Dutch. >> Yes, oh yeah. It's going to be completely in Nederlands, so completely Dutch, and I'm looking forward to that. >> Alright, so Dheeraj Pandey was on stage this morning, and Dheeraj, masterful, gives quite a good keynote, talking about how Nutanix is now nine years old, and so therefore he says still very young when you look at most of the technology companies out there, but they've come a long way. I've watched Nutanix since the very early days, and still kind of blows my mind. Some of the companies I've watched in their ascendancy, I remember VMware back when they were about 100 people. Nutanix, I met when they were about 30 people. Pernixdata that Nutanix bought, Soft Jamb that we're going to have on later today, introduced me to the company when it was three people and a dog, and Nutanix now, over I think 3000, 3500 people, announced last night their Q 1 2019 earnings, and some of the quick speeds would be 313 million dollars of revenue. That is up 14% year over year for the quarter, up 3% quarter over quarter from the previous quarter. Strong growth in a lot of the financials, really moving strongly along their path to be software, which is 51% of billings were from the software, and expect to read somewhere between 70 and 75% in the next four to six quarters, so aggressively meeting that, and publicly traded company, you kind of look at it and say "Wow, this Nutanix has a seven billion dollar market cap before the market opened today. We'll see what the market thinks of their earnings." What's just it that at a high level, you've been watching Nutanix for a while, so what's your take on the company? >> So, you know, I met em' a couple years ago as well. I think they were 100 people big back then. I learned from them from a technology perspective, so I just got to know the technology, got to know why they were building the startup, building this technology, and this was back in the day when it was basically a VDI product, and it was hardware. It was a thin layer of software, and they kept building that out, and building it out. At some point I became a customer of them, when their appliances were becoming so mature, that I actually saw the advantages that they were touting. Ease of management, one click for everything, and that made such a difference in the world back then, that it's just so good to see them growing and growing from the VDI product it was at some point, all to where it is now. This is not a startup anymore, this is a big company, with a portfolio that's becoming very broad, very deep as well. So seeing them grow this quickly, it's been pretty much amazing to see. I haven't seen a company go that fast in a long time. >> Yeah, well it's one of the things that really, if you look at where we are in technology today, things move fast. So the rest of the team for the Cube is at Amazon re:Invent, and the amount of announcements coming out of them is just staggering, but we're going to talk here about Nutanix. Actually the amount of announcements that Nutanix had, considering as you said they started out, really you think of that thin layer, to really simplify IT. Deeraj in the keynote talked about, "We want to achieve invisible together." was the line that he used, and simplifying things are really tough. That's really what characterized the wave of hyperconverged infrastructure in my mind. When I talk to users, why the bought it, it was simplifying it. It was not, when you think back to VMware, VMware was real easy. It was "Oh, I'm going to consolidate. I'm going to get high utilization.", and there was a clear cost savings. Well today, this hyperconverge is, if you look at building it one way, versus buying it this other way, the actual raw dollars was not that immediately compelling. It is the operational simplicity, and therefore I can allow, in many ways they say IT can now say yes to the business, and focus on things that add value to the business. Move up the stack. a line that I've used at a few of these Nutanix shows is "First, I want to modernize my platform, and then I can do things like modernize my application, modernize all my operations around that." It's catalyst to help customers along their journey for digital transformation. Is that what you've seen? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So looking at my own experience, I've seen it so clearly that simplifying that infrastructure later, five, six years ago, that was the driver for us to move there. It's become so much more than just a simplification. It's become a story of freeing up time from the IT ops personnel to do other stuff. Just like you said, saying yes to the business, because infrastructure used to be hard. It used to be difficult. You'd need to spend a lot of time on it, and now it's really so easy, it's become a commodity. You either get it from the cloud, you get it from Nutanix or VM or whoever, and that frees up time for the IT ops personnel to do value add stuff on top of it, and I kind of see Nutanix going along that same route. They focused on the infrastructure part. They're still an infrastructure company I think, but they're expanding into that whole journey the customer's going through as well. I think we're going to here a lot more about the hybrid strategy, about cloud, about hybrid cloud, about how to manage that, instead of just the infrastructure stuff. >> Yeah, you bring a good point, that customer journey is definitely one that they talked about, and let's talk about the way you look at the Nutanix portfolio now. The way that Nutanix has framed it, is they gave, it was the customer journey of crawl, walk, run. So first, we have Core, which really is the primary product we've been thinking about, it's what the vast majority of Nutanix customers use, it's HCI, it's Prism, it's those pieces to manage that Core piece. Then, we add on top of that is Essentials, which really looked at some of the expansion areas. Files is one that they launched as an announcement about two years ago I believe it was, that they have Blocks now, which is now a highly scalable object model there, and the Prism Pro, so a bunch of pieces to add on and go beyond the Core, and then they have Enterprise, which is is ICloud's kind of the branding that they have along these, but Leap is DR as a service. They've got Frame, which is desktop as a service. They've got Era, and they've got a whole lot of other software solutions out there that make up this whole portfolio. I wouldn't say it was simple. It took me two or three times of hearing it before it started to crystallize, but if you look out from that customer lens, the customer doesn't need to worry about where these buckets have, it's the, you know, "I'm buying Core stuff, I'm probably growing to Essentials, and then there's areas where Enterprise will make sense.", and it's likely going to be a different go to market and different buying motion. Take something like Frame, who we're going to have on the program today. Frame today is not attached to the Nutanix appliance itself, it was born in the cloud, and many of the enterprise solutions are born in the cloud, multi-cloud. So what's your take on how they're splitting up and discussing the portfolio? >> Just like you said, it took me awhile to figure out what that whole portfolio was, you know, the Core, Essentials, Enterprise stuff, but I do think looking at it from a customer perspective, it does make sense. So they started out simplifying the Core infrastructure. Now they're simplifying the Essentials in the data center as well, like files, like micro-segmentation, like monitoring. Those are topics that customers still spend a lot of time on, but they don't necessarily want to. They want to have something that is readily off the shelf, it's easy to use, easy to expand upon, so I do see Essentials as a good expansion of that messaging that they have been giving for quite a number of years already. Simplifying what is already in the data center already, and then the stretch into the cloud, into the hyper-cloud, delivering services that are still so difficult to do yourself, like take VDI for example. That's still difficult. Sending up an entire environment, managing it, you have to have really specialized people to do that for you, to do the do the design, and being able to get that directly from the cloud makes that so much easier. So I do agree with the de-segmentation into three big buckets, and I do think customers are going to respond positively to it. >> Alright, so, you brought up a term hyper-cloud, that I really didn't feel that we heard a lot about in the keynote this morning. It's an area I want to poke and understand a little bit more when I hear from Nutanix. I was talkin' to one customer in prep for this, and he said a year ago, and the last couple of times, but hearin' a lot about Google. Diane Greene on the stage, I believe it was the D.C show, I didn't see Google here. I know there is updates as to where the Google relationships are going. They did mention Kubernetes. The Kubernetes offer that Nutanix has is called Karbon. I actually expect to see not only what we will have Nutanix on the program here to talk about it, but at the Kubernetes show Kubcon in Seattle in two weeks. Nutanix is one of the sponsors that we'll have on the program there. Other than Kubernetes and how that fits into the cloud native discussion, I haven't heard a good cohesive message as to Nutanix's hybrid, they talk about how Nutanix lives in a lot of environments, and many of their products live in multi-cloud, and there's some nuance there. I think VMware has a nice clear message on hybrid. Microsoft of course, and of course VMware is the partnership with Amazon is really the core of what they're doing there. They're doing more cloud native and Kubernetes. They bought Heptio. There are things going on there. Amazon is talking a lot more about hybrid. We'll see if they actually use the term hybrid when they talk about it. Nutanix's messaging, we're going to have Deeraj on today, he says "Azure Stack gets a lot of press, but there's not a lot of people using it. VMware on AWS gets a lot of press, once again, not a lot of companies using it yet". And while I agree, customers actually feel comforted by the message that they understand how do I get from where I am today, to where I need to go? And of course I'm not saying that everybody goes 100% public cloud. The hybrid multi cloud world kind of looks like where we'll be for the next five or 10 years at least, and Edge puts a whole 'nother spin on things. What do you want to hear from Nutanix? What is hybrid, customers might not care about hybrid, but the message about where they're going with cloud is I think what they want clarity on. >> Yeah, I agree. So I think Nutanix doesn't call it hybrid, they're calling it hyperconverged cloud, which makes sense from their historical background. I do think Nutanix has ways to go in developing their own hybrid. Cloud story, making a management layer on top of it, like VMware's done, like Microsoft's doing. So I do think Nutanix is only on the beginning of this journey for themselves, but you're only seeing the small acquisitions they're doing, or the small steps they're taking. Acquiring Frame is one of those unexpected things for me. I would never have thought Nutanix would go that direction, So I do think Nutanix is taking small steps in the right direction. But like you said, they're story isn't complete yet. Its not a story that customers can buy into fully just now, so they do still need a little bit of time for that. >> Yeah, well Joep, really appreciate you helpin' us break down this. We've got two days of full coverage. So much your goin' is that, right, MNA in the space, it's a software world, picking up pieces are easy, heck, one of the under riding rumors I've heard for the last couple of years is "will someone take Nutanix off the table?" Not something I expect them to specifically direct, but at a seven billion dollar market, that would be a large acquisition, but we have seen a few of those in the last couple a' years. so for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman, stay with us for two days. Wall to wall coverage. Thecube.net is of course where to see all of the live and on demand content. Thanks so much for watchin' the Cube. (contemplative music)

(techy music) >> Hello, everyone, I'm John Furrier, here in theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto for a special CUBE Conversation. Breaking news here in Silicon Valley and at Cisco Systems. News around Cisco partnering with Amazon Web Services, and here to talk about it is Fabio Gori, senior director of cloud solutions marketing at Cisco. Good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hello, John, how are you doing? >> So, big news, Cisco and AWS collaborate to accelerate innovation. A first kind of its kind of announcement. Love the pioneering aspect of this announcement. Obviously Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud provider who's been into hybrid cloud lately because they've been talking about that as their connection point into the enterprise. You guys are the leader in the enterprise at networking and other services. I don't even know how much market share you have these days, but you guys pretty much own the enterprise. Everyone kind of knows that. This deal with Amazon, you guys are doing the first hybrid Kubernetes on AWS. Talk about the announcement, what's the, why is this so important to Cisco? >> So, you named it, the solution name is actually a bit of a mouthful, but you mentioned the three keywords: is hybrid, is Kubernetes, is AWS, and this is the first solution of this kind that really integrates these two environments in a way that will be exceptionally beneficial for organizations that want to accelerate their innovation path, which ultimately means delivering applications faster without having to worry about constraints in terms of where to develop, where to deploy. This will really set them free to take their decisions. >> You know, one of the things we've been speculating on theCUBE a lot around cloud... There's been tons of debates, hybrid cloud, private cloud, multi-cloud, public cloud. All this stuff's been going on. One thing that's been very clear is the public cloud has demonstrated speed, agility, faster time to value, and for app developers that's been great. Cloud native, if you're born in the cloud it's just a great environment. If you've been on-premise and you had that legacy and/or existing pre-cloud environment, that trend has been more toward cloud operations, so not so much everything's moving to the cloud, although, you know, Andy Jassy would love to see everything move to Amazon, and that's his goal, but stuff stays on-prem, it's going to be for a while, but the cloud operations on-premise is essentially cloud but on-premise. So, that's this new hybrid dynamic. This is what enterprises have been re-imagining their infrastructure on. This is where a lot of the energy has been. How does that, that your solution for Kubernetes with Amazon, solve that problem? Does it help customers get to the cloud faster? Is it an operating model? Explain the nuance of how customers-- >> It's fundamentally all of that. If you think about it, and your introduction is spot-on, is customers really want to use the public cloud, right? The services in the public cloud, why? Because it gives them speed. I think that's a big change that we've seen since, I would say a few quarters, right, where people started really trading off speed and innovation for cost, right? Originally it was like, "I want to shut down my data center. "The cloud is going to be cheaper." Well, it's not about cheaper, it's faster, and people want to develop new digital experiences, which boils down to building applications faster. So, what ultimately they want to do is making the infrastructure on-prem looking like a bit more like the public cloud. Now, it's never going to be just like the public cloud with all the bells and whistles and innovation, but it's got to be such that you can actually take the best innovation of the public cloud, Kubernetes first, to the on-prem, rather than the other way around, right? That's our North Star, that's our belief, and Kubernetes is clearly a big winner in the container market. The way to develop new applications is based on containers. Kubernetes is the orchestrator right now in the marketplace. Every single big cloud provider has launched Kubernetes-based services in various forms, and so the enterprises are now looking at businesses of every size. They are trying to figure out how to really develop this capability on-prem, because in the end, as you know, it's never kind of black and white, right? We're still working with mainframes, long life to the mainframes. Going to be around for 20 years, probably. We're going to have traditional databases, ERP systems and the like for a very, very long time. What do you do, right? Everything that you develop new in the cloud needs to ultimately connect back to the existing systems because that's what you need. >> So, the simplicity of this is interesting. I want to just rewind that for a second. So, you're taking the best of Amazon, the container service, and alas, a container service with Kubernetes, bringing, making that available on-premises through the Cisco container platform-- >> Correct. >> So, this is the linchpin, so it's almost like-- >> Correct. >> You're not trying to take Cisco and say, "Oh, we're cloudified." >> Correct. >> You're taking the Cisco environment, which everyone runs, and some people think it runs great and-- >> Correct. >> They're not going to change that overnight, (chuckles) but you now enable them to take what they're doing here and make it compatible with the cloud and on-ramp to the cloud? >> So, the idea is fundamentally not so much taking EKS on-prem, that's not the thing, but the idea is having a container platform that fundamentally gives you pretty much a transparent way of interacting with the other side, and when I say transparent I really mean the linchpin of the solution, which is around the identity and authentication, right? What we've done that really differentiates this, that makes this so unique right now is that we have integrated IAM, you know, identity and authorization, sorry, and authentication in common. So, you're going to use the same set of keys on both sides, which of course is a developer dream because you don't have to use different type of keys in authentication models if you're a user. It's the same thing, and it's a dream for IT operation, because of course this is much simpler, as well as for the CSO and the security team. This makes it extremely secure, reduces the risk so that you have really a very consistent, integrated kind of solution, which is good-- >> So, there's engineering involved on Cisco's side. Can you elaborate on-- >> Actually, it's been a collaboration between the two sides, so-- >> Okay, explain, explain the partnership. >> So, absolutely, it's actually a collaboration. So, we've been collaborating to build this integrated architecture, right? It is a Cisco solution, but developed in collaboration with AWS, right, and so what we've been doing is fundamentally looking at how EKS was going to available to the container platform-- >> Mm-hm. >> Right, so that you'll be able to fundamentally orchestrate your containers in the most efficient way, regardless of where the containers actually end up being, which is actually what we're hearing from customers. Customers want to just take the containers that are coming from the developers and be free to develop whatever they want. Sorry, to deploy whatever they want. >> So, the containers are key here. So, the container service-- >> Yeah. >> And Kubernetes, which orchestrates containers, works across with the identity layer allows for, what, seamless interaction? Is that the key for developers is that I can... Take me through a quick use case. Explain it with an example. >> I don't know, you may take a new application in the banking, on the banking side, or you can take some new artificial intelligence kind of applications, or machine learning. What you fundamentally can do now is deciding, well, first of all what kind of tools you want to use. Do you want to use the AWS cloud with all the development tools, do you want to use yours? It doesn't matter, at the end there is an endover between the developers and the IT operations team, and the IT operations team, now with this solution, can fundamentally, quickly and easily provision clusters wherever they want, right, and they do it on the basis of their specific parameters, their specific goals, what do you want? It could be cost, it could be security, it could be reliability. Whatever it is, right? >> Mm-hm. >> It doesn't matter, this is not about the religion of whether it's public cloud or on-prem. It's just using the best of both worlds and deploying wherever it makes sense. >> You know, Andy Jassy and I always talk when we, at re:Invent. He always comes back to the same refrain, he always hits the same notes: "We listen to our customers, we're driven by the customers. "They take us where we want to go." >> Yeah. >> I know Cisco's been very customer-centric as well. How is the customers' reaction? What have they been telling you around why the solutions to develop... I mean, because we know Shadow IT's been going on with Amazon-- >> Yeah. >> For, you know, almost a decade. They put their credit card, they sneak up on Amazon, build some stuff, and look how easy, and then bring back to the IT department saying, "Hey, look what I did in the cloud, now you implement it." "Whoa, we've got network policies." So, there's been kind of that kind of tension, kind of R&D, if you will-- >> Yeah. >> But it's still happening. That kind of goes away here with this kind of announcement. How is the customer needs been profiled as you look at the announcement? What's the key reasons why they want this solution, and why did Amazon glob onto it, because they're not going to do something unless-- >> Yeah. >> It's a customer need. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that. >> Well, I would say, you know, it's really meeting the customer where they are, right, and again, we have two environments that, you know, have been inspired by different kind of criteria, right? There's a lot about application modernization, there's a lot about security, all about compliance on-prem. Of course the cloud is also very secure. I think we're over these kind of artificial discussions, but as AWS will say, it's a shared responsibility model, right? They guarantee the security of the cloud, and you're responsible for the security in the cloud, and so ultimately what people want to have is how can we actually integrate these two worlds in a consistent fashion, right, so that I have a consistent environment. That's really the keyword here, consistent environment where I have comomino networking between these things, wherever they are, comomino securing them, including authentication, identity and authentication, comomino monitoring this application, because the alternative is building another silo, and that's what people don't want to do. >> Mm-hm. >> Right? If I add another silo I may add innovation, but it comes to a very high cost. >> Yeah. >> People want to add innovation without disruption. They want to have this consistency and just extend the way they do things, of course going into a devops model and getting faster and faster, because that's the way to compete. >> Now, I think IT operations is an area, with the development enablement you guys have had, and with the work you guys have been doing DevNet and DevNet Create, this notion of programmability-- >> Yeah. >> You're right in line with the wave that everyone wants to ride, which is lower the cost of mundane tasks and/or scripts and things of that nature, command line interface, that's kind of like a hodge podge, make the network programmable and automate, and make the developer freer to do better things seems to be the trendline, so with that in mind, does this fit that horizontally scalable vision of the cloud? Do you see this having impact into say network sales, application, where's the key impact points for the customer, what impacts them? >> It's a huge impact, right, and depends whether you're taking like a tactical view of things, like literally application by application, or classes of application, or you're really thinking about where is this trend kind of taking you, right? Now, if you take the former kind of approach, then you're starting kind of identifying a whole bunch of different issues, like again, for instance the security one. The networking one is huge, right? People go, I don't know, Office 365 and they get disappointed. Why, because all the traffic gets tromboned through the data center because that's how things were. >> Choked them. >> Right? Now you're completely changing the application on top, and you discover that the infrastructure underneath hasn't been designed to accommodate those kind of traffic flows-- >> Yeah. >> Right, and so you're starting solving problem by problem. The fact of the matter is with the rise of the cloud the infrastructure and the processes in IT need to change altogether. Its infrastructure, its processes with of course the rise of devops, its relentless automation, right, potentially driven by, you know, more and more machine learning, and you know, AI kind of capabilities unfold. >> Just talk about that, because this is a big discussion, because I'm interviewing a lot of CIOs or CXOs or senior IT practitioners, and the ones that are successful are the ones who recognize the wave. Some people take different steps, they'll experiment, they'll do some tests. Some will just go all in and revamp, but they all recognize the one point. They've got to re-architect and re-imagine-- >> Yeah. >> The It infrastructure-- >> Yeah. >> Up and down, and the cloud is a big force and function-- >> Yeah. >> A role of data, programmability, automation. Now new concepts in some cases. Containers we all have been around for a while, but how do you guys talk to your customers, because this is something-- First of all, do you believe in that, and two, what do you talk to your customers about when you're saying, "Look, the hard truth "is how we got here is not how we go forward." >> Absolutely, well, you know, there are different ways. You can either boil the ocean, or for instance you take a solution like this. If you take a solution like this, you can actually sit down and discuss how to build a solution and architect a solution like this in collaboration with AWS. It took establishing four key principles, right? The first one has got to be hybrid, right, which means you need to strive to build this consistent environment between the two domains. Second, it has to be production-grade. We're speaking with customers adopting Kubernetes. They're saying that they get to a point where they need to integrate 20 opensource tools. Now, I wonder whether that's going to take you anywhere over the long term once you scale, you know, your operation. Can you actually do it with that kind of approach? Third, and this is a big one, you have to be able to manage this new hybrid reality, managing not just the new apps, but the old apps as well, and fourth, it's got to be extensible. You're starting from, like-- >> Yeah. >> Containers and authentication, how about everything else, right? How about cloud management and orchestration? How about application performance management, because now apps are getting everywhere, and of course, you know, that's probably the next episode of theCUBE that we can do together, they're going to the edge. >> (chuckles) Yeah. >> So, it's getting very, very complicated. So, even with a simple, well, "simple" example like this, you're starting seeing some principles that you need to establish, and that should inspire how you actually transform your infrastructure and operation. The worst thing that you can do is taking a tactical approach and just going step-by-step, and then, you know, move by move. >> Well, let's definitely do that CUBE. A couple of segments we'll have to do more of a deep dive with some slides. Certainly the edge is going to be a big point, but I want to ask you the impact to your customer base, because I think this is a game-changing announcement. I mean, Amazon Web Services, they don't do a lot of Barney deals. They don't do, you know, a lot of deals that look good on paper. They're very specific about how they do their business development, so it's a huge win for them, I think, and for you guys, but I think Cisco customers are going to be impacted, so please explain the impact to Cisco customers. What does it mean to me, I'm a Cisco customer. I've got routers, I've got switches, I've got UCS servers. I got all kinds of stuff in there. How does this impact my life, what changes, do I throw away gear, do I buy new gear, do I buy software? How do I buy the service, am I buying Amazon, do I have to now... Explain all that, how does the customer engage with the solution, and what's the impact to their environment? >> Well, that's a very big question. (laughs) Let me frame it a little bit, right? First of all, how are they impacted? They're impacted by the cloud altogether, right, and very often they're using multiple clouds, so we know it's multiple services, so they need to start thinking in terms of those principles that we said before. From a company standpoint, of course we've been well known over the last 30, 35 years, right, not to leave everybody behind. We're trying to, of course, accommodate the change of the infrastructure, and for instance, how do you move from CLI to more programmability through, for instance, you know, the rise of IBN, which is the intent-based networking where you have more policy-based models that help you fundamentally automate in the network, whether it's about, you know, connecting your data centers or connecting your branches, you have to fundamentally adopt more and more automation into your strategy, and so what we're doing is we're fundamentally helping customers making this kind of transformation. You mentioned DevNet, I think that's like the tip of the iceberg of also a new Cisco wave, right, where it's all about, if you want, transforming the talent that's been working with us in the company and outside the company, and having them taking it to the next level where instead of, you know, going classic CLI you're more and more kind of thinking in an automated fashion, because you have to get fast. The only thing that really matters is getting faster. >> I noticed you guys aren't just... Give you guys a lot of props here because you guys have a lot of meat on the bones with this announcement. Simplifying container orchestration with the Cisco hybrid solution for Kubernetes on AWS. You know, Linux Foundation wants to see it that way, Amazon's that way, but you guys have a lot of code up and running on the Sandboxes, and for the folks watching, developer.cisco.com/aws. developer.cisco.com/aws. You already got Sandboxes up already. >> Absolutely. >> Five labs for cloud native, you got the EKS-- >> Yep. >> Cloud thing up and running. >> Yeah, and we'll continue adding more and more material. The cloud is a different world, right? People want to experiment it, and by the way, if you think about how we're packaging and pricing the solution, you can actually start in a very modular way, right? You can just go with the software if you want, or you can buy the software and the hardware underneath. You can go with one, three, or five years. You can get demos of the solution. If you want, it's a different way of experimenting Cisco, but we're there. I mean, we made the change. We're totally for adding a softer motion to an already strong kind of hardware component that has been traditionally our strength, and if you think about it, having the full stack we can do some magic. If you buy Cisco software, like this solution, and then you put in Cisco hardware, such as HyperFlex and ACIR data center infrastructure-- >> Yeah. >> That a lot of customers are using you get fundamentally greater performance, you get a single number to call-- >> Yeah. >> Which is actually great. >> You know, it's interesting Fabio, and I talked with Lou Tucker years ago and then, well, continue to talk to him every year, as well as Susie Wee, and we see this on the cloud native, born on the cloud side, IT doesn't exist in a lot of these cloud native companies because the developers do all the IT, so you guys are seeing a surge in DevNet and DevNet Create where the Cisco ecosystem, your customers are turning into developers naturally-- >> Absolutely. >> And so we've seen that shift at Cisco-- >> Yeah. >> And that has happened internally. You guys recognize that the developer ecosystem, not the cloud native, but the application developers and-- >> Yeah. >> That your command line interface guys-- >> Yeah. >> And gals are turning into developers because-- >> Absolutely. >> Slinging code these days is pretty straightforward. >> Absolutely, if you look at our, actually my friend Susie Wee and how she is pitching this change. She talks about DevNet ops, others talk about DevSec ops. Whatever that is, you know, whatever kind of terminology you're using, it boils down to the same concept. You have to automate the way that you manage the infrastructure, right? >> Mm-hm. >> Infrastructure needs to become more responsive and faster. You can open five or six trouble tickets just to provision, you know, a container to a developer that's not going to carry it in the future. >> Yeah, it's kind of against them. >> It's got to be fast. >> Yeah, and then, you know, making the network programmable is the devops movement that's coming 2.0. >> Absolutely. >> And you guys are aware of, I know you are. It's interesting to see how Amazon relates to that. When you talk about that to AWS, what's the conversation like? Do they like, they obviously get it, and they're smart, they must get it immediately. >> I mean, absolutely, the reason why we're having this collaboration is very simple. I mean, they get the same requests from the customer. We're fundamentally speaking to the same people. Yeah, there may be differences sometimes, you know, the developer versus the IT operation, but in the end it boils down to the request, "Hey, you know, the public cloud is fantastic, "but I also want to have a solution for on-prem," right? "I have my needs," and if you're not totally burned into the cloud you have to, you want to have investment protection. You want to have, you know, your on-prem environment for whatever reason, right, and it's not about religion, it's about economics, it's about, you know, viability of certain solutions and the likes. >> Well, great news, congratulations. Fabio, great announcement with Amazon Web Services, good deal, hybrid cloud. Now, you guys, also at Cisco, you guys aren't married to one cloud, so I've got to ask the hard question. With impact to Google, Microsoft, you guys have relationships. How does this match up from an integration standpoint with other clouds? Is it deeper, is it more coming on the other clouds? Can you just kind of give us a description of the evolution of Cisco with the other clouds in this hybrid architecture? >> You know, I want to stay true to one of the principles that we mentioned and we orbited around this conversation, right, for the last 15 minutes, and that is we're customer-centric, right? Customers want to use the clouds that they want to use, we're there to help them, right? Now, AWS is of course, if you look at the share it's a pretty big market leader, but we will work with all the providers that our customers want to use. That's actually the North Star that we have. Now, if you look at the kind of, if you want, products or stacks or architectures, you will see that there is a huge degree of commonality across all of this, right? So, we're using kind of the same baseline software, but configuring slightly different ways for a, different way, for a simple reason, right, because the clouds are different, and not just the clouds are different, the cloud providers are different. So, we're paying full respect, you sit down, you discuss objectives, and then you actually go after those goals. >> Yeah, you just got to get out there and do those... You got to just do the work and integrate in. >> So, you have to expect a slight degree of integration-- >> Yeah. >> Because of the nature of the cloud business and the cloud providers, but I think when you look from a customer standpoint, what they want and what they're asking Cisco to do, they want to have commonalities. >> Mm-hm. >> Right? They want to have the same mean of networking, the same mean of securing these environments. They want to have the same way of extracting analytics, especially for application performance, and they want to have comomino managing and orchestrating all of these resources because the alternative is fundamentally getting lost into different tools and different clouds that by design cannot work in other environments, and so that's what customers want, and that's what we're pursuing as a company. >> Fabio, talk about the announcement in terms of just summarizing it real quick. You talked to a lot of customers, you've been doing press tours all day today, analysts, financial Wall Street, all the whole nine yards. Now you're here on theCUBE. What's the summary, what's the big walkaway looking back now after the announcement? Talk about the impact, what is this about? What is actually happening in your mind? How are people reacting to it, how big will this be? >> You know, I have two things in mind when I give myself that kind of question, right? The first one is I have this concept in my mind of making Kubernetes the engine of your innovation, right? This is about really transforming this new container orchestration technology that sounded esoteric until (chuckles) a few months ago into the cornerstone of the innovation, right? We've been talking about hybrid for a long while, but we believe that it's about mostly taking the best of the public cloud and making it work on-prem, rather than going the other way around, that's for sure, and I would say in general is this is a big first step into closing that gap between the infrastructure and the applications, which is kind of by definition closing the public cloud, but when it comes to the on-prem world we're still pretty far away, right, and so clearly there's a lot of competition in the marketplace, and we want to win that battle to close this gap, and closing that gap means fundamentally enabling customers to innovate and developing their new digital experience faster, and that's actually the nature of their business. >> Yeah, and they get value. >> It's not an IT conversation anymore, it's a business. >> And the value extraction and creation from new applications, and I think you've got to give credit to the Kubernetes community, because what's great about Kubernetes and then watching that evolve. We were there-- >> Yeah. >> theCUBE present at creation when it started, you know, hanging around OpenStack and all the different activities around the Linux Foundation before it went there, was that you had containers obviously happening, but the industry got behind kind of a defacto standard. >> Yeah. >> We've seen this before, TCPIP sounds like one of those things that just became a defacto standard and then it became a standard-- >> Well, another example with Linux itself, right? I mean, once, you know, big companies started going behind it and offering enterprise cloud support we saw really very, very rapid ramp-up. I think we're seeing the same with Kubernetes. I think now there are a bit less doubts about where the world is going. This is a clearly a winner, and people, I think, are now-- >> Yeah, and it's clear you guys are getting behind it. It's just Amazon doesn't do deals, like I said, unless it's a serious thing, so congratulations. You guys are getting behind Kubernetes. >> Yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Yeah, thank you for that. >> All right, Fabio Gori. Here inside the studio with Cisco, breaking down the hot news, game-changing news, Cisco's partnering with AWS with Kubernetes to really bring a level of industry standard and seamless integration between on-premises and the cloud, and excited to keep bringing you more action. Coming up we're going to be at the CNCF event, Kubcon, check us out there and also Amazon re:Invent, theCUBE will have multiple sets there. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for this CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 here in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. And happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, Mark Collier, who's the chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me back. >> Thank you for having us back and thank you again for doing the show in Vancouver, so-- >> Oh man, such an amazing place. Like this convention center, I don't think it's fair to call it a convention center because it's like a work of art, you know? >> And it's my second time here for this show, and I think kudos to your team because you have good enough content that people aren't just wandering around, taking pictures of the mountains. My wife is off seizing the whale watching right now, but everybody else here, they're engaged. And that's what you want in the community. >> Yeah, definitely. I guess you have to make sure you don't lose their attention to the whales and the sea planes, but so far everyone seems to be gettin' down to business. >> You know, I think it would be fair to say that there's some transitions going on in the marketplace in general, and at this show I notice when I got the invitation, it's like the OpenStack slash open infrastructure summit. Got a big track on edge computing, got another one on containers, been talking about containers for a few years at this show, which really interesting to talk about. And I mean, the edge stuff, we were talking about it as NFV and the telcos and all that stuff in the past. What is the OpenStack Summit these days, Mark? >> Yeah, I mean I think that it's evolving to reflect what people are doing with open source when it comes to infrastructure. And so we call it open infrastructure, but basically it's just a world of possibilities have been opened up by, of course, OpenStack, but also many, many other components, some of which came before like Linux and things like that, and some of which started after, like Kubernetes, and there's many other examples, TensorFlow for AI machine learning. So there's kind of this like embarrassment of riches these days if yo want to automate your infrastructure in a cloud-like fashion. You can do so many more things with it, and OpenStack solves a very specific, very important layer which is that kind of traditional infrastructure as a service layer, compute storage and networking. But once you automate that, it's proven, it's reliable, you could run millions of cores with it like some of our users are doing. You want to do more and that means layering other things on top or sort of connecting them in different ways. So just trying to help users get something more out of the technology is really what we're about and OpenStack becomes like an enabler rather than kind of like the whole conversation. Yeah, one of the things I always say in this industry, sometimes we just don't have the right expectations going into these environments. You know, when I think back 15 years ago as to what we thought Linux was going to do. Oh it's going to crush Microsoft. It's like, well, Microsoft is still doing quite well and Linux has done phenomenal. We wouldn't have companies like, Google if it wasn't for the likes of Linux. In an open source you've got a lot of tools out there. So while there are the CERNs and Walmarts of the world that take a full OpenStack distribution and put out tons of cores, I've run into software companies where when I dig into their IP, oh what do ya know, there's a project from OpenStack in there that enables what they're doing. So I've seen at a lot of shows they're like, there's companies that are like, yes, I want it, and then there's like, oh no, there's this piece of it I want, there's that piece what I want. And that's kind of the wonder of OpenStack that I can do all of those things. >> Yeah exactly. I think we've talked before about sort of calling it composable open infrastructure, and making, OpenStack's always been architecturally designed from, in terms of the goals around it, to be pluggable so from the beginning you could plug multiple hypervisors kind of underneath and you could plug different backends for storage and networking, so that sort of concept of being something, integration engine that plugs things in is part of the OpenStack kind of philosophy, but now you see that the OpenStack services themselves are sort of, you can think of them as microservices, and like if you just need block storage you can use sender. And that may make sense for some specific environments, and are you running OpenStack? Well, you are, but it gets a little bit fuzzy in terms of are you running all of it or part of it? And the reality is the things are not as simple as a binary yes or no. It's just that the options are much greater now. >> Well Mark, that has been some of the discussion in the community over the last few years, the core versus the big tent, and now of course with all this interoperability, conversations with both OpenStack participating in other communities and other communities here today, this week. I mean, what's the current state of that conversation about what is OpenStack and how does it interrelate? I think you kind of touched on it with this composable idea. >> Yeah, I mean I think that basically it's kind of like OpenStack is as OpenStack does, you know? So what are people doing with it and that tells you kind of what it is and what people are doing with it. There are a lot of different patterns. There's no like one specific deployment pattern that everyone uses, but probably by and large, by far the most common pattern is OpenStack plus Kubernetes. And so when you talk about the interop piece, this is a really good example where OpenStack has evolved to become a better, kind of better citizen, I guess, of open infrastructure by having more reliable APIs, kind of being a target that tools that build on top can rely on and not sort of have to worry about the snowflakes of different clouds and there's still more work to be done in that area, but we talked about OpenLab, which is an initiative, this morning, that puts together OpenStack, Kubernetes, and other pieces like Terraform and things like that, and does constant end-to-end testing on it, and that's really how you make sure that you know kind of what combinations work well together, and sometimes you just find bugs, and it turns out a couple of changes need to be made upstream in Kubernetes or in OpenStack or in gophercloud or in Terraform, and just if you don't know, then the user kind of with the some assembly required model, finds out and they're like, I don't know, it doesn't work, it's broken. Well, is it OpenStack's fault or Kubernetes's fault, and they don't, they just want it to work. >> So you're saying >> Identified upstream we can fix it. >> You're saying OpenStack has become more of a stable layer of the (mumbles). >> Yes exactly, yes. It has become a much more stable layer. >> Which means there wasn't a whole lot of flashy storage network and compute up on stage actually. >> A lot of the talk-- >> Yeah, it's a really good point. I think it's just really proven in that way, and you know, one of the things that was highlighted was like the virtual GPUs, right? So, if OpenStack is designed to be pluggable, what do people want to have as an option now in terms of compute storage and networking, on the compute side is they want GPUs, because that gives an AI machine learning much faster, if they're bit coin miners, like I'm sure you all are in your basement, they're going to want GPUs. And what was really interesting is that the PTL, like the technical leader of the Nova Project, got up and talked about virtual GPUs. I was back in the green room and like three of the other keynote speakers were like, oh man, we are so excited about this VGPU support. Like, our customers are asking for it, the guy, Mohammad from Vexos, is the CEO of Vexos, he said, our customers are demanding this queens release, which is the latest OpenStack, and we were kind of surprised, they just really want this queens release. So we asked them why and they're like well they want VGPU. So that's kind of an example of an evolution in OpenStack itself, but it's an extension, enabler for things like GPUs, and that's kind of an exciting area as well. >> You know, it's interesting because in previous years it was the major release was one of the main things we talked about. Queens, as you mentioned, other than the VGPUs and that little discussions, spent a lot more time outside, talked to a lot of the users. You talked about the new tracks that were there. And something I heard a lot this year that I hadn't heard for a few years was, get involved, we're looking to build. And I was trying to think of a sports analogy, and maybe it was like, okay, we're actually building more of a league here and we're looking to recruit as opposed to or is it rebuilding what exactly OpenStack 2.0 is in the future? >> Yeah, that's a really interesting point. You're absolutely right, and I can imagine or can remember sort of talking to some of the speakers as they were working on their content, and I don't think I totally picked up that that was a big trend, but you're absolutely right, that was a major call to action from so many different people. I think it's because when we think about what we are as a community, I talked about how we're a community of people who build and operate open infrastructure, and it's really about solving problems, and if you're as open to community collaboration and you want to solve problems, you can't be afraid to stand up and say we have problems. And sometimes maybe that feels awkward. It's like the tech 101 is get up and say you solved all the problems and you should buy it today. It's online or downloaded or whatever. And I think we just realized that the magic of our community is solving problems. There's always going to be more problems to solve, now you're putting more pieces together, which means the pieces themselves have to evolve and the testing and integration has to evolve. Like it's just a new set of challenges and sort of saying, here's what we're trying to solve, it's not done, help us, actually is more, I think, true to kind of what the community is all about. >> I'm wondering, do we know how many people are at the show this year? >> I don't have the exact count. I think it's around 2600, something like that. >> Yeah, so fair to say it might be a little bit less than last year's North America show? >> Yeah, it is a little bit less. >> And what are you hearing from the user? What are the main things they come for? That you got the new tracks, you've got the open dev conference co-located. What kind of key themes can you get from the users? >> Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we found is that we have twice as many cloud architects this year than a year ago. So I think there's always this period of time where conference attendance is driven by curiosity. Like, I've heard about this thing, what is it, or it's the cool factor, hype curves and all that stuff, I want to learn about it. At this point people know what OpenStack is. We've got tons of ways you can learn about it. There's local meetups, there's OpenStack Days all over the world, there's content, videos online. It's just not like a mystery anymore. Like the mystery draws in kind of the people that are just poking around to learn. Now we're at that point of, okay I know what it is, I know what it's for, I want to architect a solution around it, so seeing twice as many cloud architects I think is an interesting data point to think about how we're shifting more towards, people are not asking if it's proven, they're like it's been proven for whatever, two, three years, however, the perception is, but the technology is just very, very solid. It's running infrastructure all over the world, the largest banks and so on and so, I think that's kind of how things are shifting to what else can we do and put on top of it, now that it's a solid foundation. >> I wonder, sometimes there's that buzz as to what's going on out there. There was a certain large analyst firm that wrote a report a couple months ago that wasn't all that favorable about OpenStack. There's others that watching on Twitter during the keynote, and they're like, they're spending all their time talking about containers, why isn't this just part of the Cloud Native Con, KubCon show? What's the foundation's feedback on, what are you hearing kind of, what's your core deliverables? And why this show should continue in the future? >> Sure, I mean I think that what we're hearing generally from users and seeing in our data as well as from analysts like 451 and IDC, those are a couple of different reports coming out, like right now or just came out, that Jonathan mentioned this morning, I think is adoption just continues to grow, and so you know, I think people are not looking at just one technology stack. And maybe they never were, but I think there was this kind of temptation to just think of it, is it containers versus VMs or is it Kubernetes versus OpenStack? And it's like, no one who really runs infrastructure thinks like that because they might have thought it until they tried it, they realized these things go together. So I think the future of this conference is just becoming more and more centered around what are the use cases? What are the technical challenges we're trying to solve? And to the extent we're getting patterns and tools that are emerging like the lamp stack of the cloud, so to speak. How can people adopt them? So you think about cloud as taking all kinds of new forms, edge computing, those are the kinds of things that I think will become a bigger part of the conference in the future. I do like the open infrastructure angle on this. I mean, as infrastructure folks, right, you know that that storage compute network doesn't manage itself, doesn't configure itself. >> Mark: Totally. >> Doesn't provision itself. And so a lot of the app layer things should rely on this lower layer. And I thought last year in Boston there was this kind of curious OpenStack or containers conversation, which seemed odd at the time, and that's clarified, I think, at a number of levels from a number of camps and vendors. >> Yeah I agree, I think we have done our best from our point of view, from the foundation, myself, and the others that are involved in our community to try to dispell those myths or tamper down that kind of sense of a rivalry, but it takes time and I do feel like there is kind of a sea change now. There are just so many people running in production with various container tools, predominantly Kubernetes and in OpenStack that I think that that sort of myth that they're, that one's replacing the other, it's hard for that cognitive dissonance to last forever when you're given like the hundredth example of like somebody running in production at scale. Like they must be doing it for a reason, and then people start to go, well why is that? >> And I did like the comment you did make about cloud is not consolidating and simplifying, right? Even at the Dell Technologies World show, Michael Dell got up and talked about the distributed core, which is a little bit of an oxymoron, but the fact is compute and compute is everywhere, right? And it's not only, it's on the edge, it's on telephone poles, it's in little boxes in our, you know, going to be on our walls, in our walls, right? And this open infrastructure idea can play everywhere. It's not just about an on-prem data center anymore. >> Yeah and I think that's a big part of why we started to say open infrastructure instead of cloud, just because, I mean, you know, I guess we spent 10 years arguing over the definition of cloud, now we can argue over open infrastructure. But to me it's a little more descriptive and a little less kind of, I don't know, a little less baggage than the term cloud. >> Yeah, definitely differentiates it as to where you sit in the marketplace. And one thing I definitely want to give the foundation great kudos on, the diversity of this show is excellent. Not just that there was a welcome happy hour and there's a lunch, but look at all the PTLs, the project leads that are there, a lot of diversity, up on stage. It's just evident. >> Mark: Thank you. >> And it's just something kind of built into the community, so great job there. >> Thank you, I'm very proud of the fact that we had just so many excellent keynote speakers this morning, and you know, that's always something that we strive for, but I feel like we got closer to the goal than ever in terms of just getting broad representation up on the stage. And some amazing leaders. >> It's always nice from our standpoint because we always say give us your keynote speakers and give us some of the main people making things happen, and it just naturally flows that we have a nice diversity, from gender, from geography. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> From various backgrounds, so that's good. All right, want to give you the final word. Take aways that you want people after the show or maybe some things that people might not know if they didn't make it here for the show. >> I mean, I think, you know, the number one take away is it's all about the people, and we want to make it about the headlines or the technology, and even the technology is about the people, but certainly the operators are not, like I said, logos don't operate clouds or infrastructure, people do, so getting to meet the people, seeing what they're doing, like the Adobe I mentioned, they're marketing cloud. They have 100,000 cores of compute with four people operating it. So if you've got the right four people and the right playbook, you can do that, too. But you got to meet those people and find out how they're doing it, get their recipe, get their playbook, and they're happy to share it, and then you can run at that kind of scale, too, without a big team and you can change the way you operate. >> Yeah, I know I said in my last question, but the last thing, I know there's been a big emphasis to not just do the two big shows a year, but the OpenStack days and other events globally, give people, how do they get involved and where can they come to find out more? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked because, there are so many ways to get involved and of course it's online, it's IRC, it's mailing lists 24/7, but there's no substitute when it's about the people for meeting in person. So we have the two summits a year. We're also having an event which is called the PTG, which is really for the developers and some of the operators will be coming this fall as well where we're having it in Denver, but the summits are the big shows twice a year, but the OpenStack days are really important. Those are annual, typically one to two day events, in 15 plus countries around the world. One in particular that is going to be really exciting this year is in Beijing. You know, we've had that for the last couple of years. Huge event, but of course, others throughout Europe and Asia. Tokyo is always an awesome OpenStack day, and then there are quite a few in Europe as well. So that's another way you can get involved. Not necessarily have to fly around the world, but if you do have to fly around the world, being in Vancouver is not a bad spot, so. >> Yeah, absolutely, and boy we know there's a lot of OpenStack happening in China. >> Yes there is. >> So Mark Collier, thanks again to the foundation for allowing theCUBE to cover this. >> Sure. >> And thanks so much for joining us. >> Mark: Thank you. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back here with lots more of three days wall-to-wall coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music) (shutter clicks)