>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM. Oh, welcome to here to the cube as we continue our series of IBM. Thank on John Walls. Your host here on the cube for our discussion with Scott Leighton, who is the senior partner and global finance transformation practice at IBM Scott. Thanks for joining us here on the cube. Good to see you today. >>Oh, great. See you, John. Thanks for having me. You >>Bet. Absolutely looking forward to it. Um, first off, I want you to just to put yourself in the CFO shoes these days, um, we're talking about this digital transformation and all that's occurring, particularly in finance and, and what are the, I guess, uh, issues or the challenges you think that are kind of keeping them up at night, and then we're gonna transition over to how you at IBM are trying to solve those problems for them. But first let's look at the CFO role. >>Sure, sure. Great question. And, and you know, if you'd asked us two years ago, we'd have a different answer in some ways, right? Uh, COVID has, has put a tremendous amount of pressure on businesses and CFOs in particular, especially when it comes to managing cash. Managing logistics, supply chain has been, has been pushed pretty hard to its limits. I think cash is, has always been King, but even more so now and their preservation of cash. Um, I think as well, we're now seeing in the last year or two, this push towards digitization, like you said, there was a long time in a lot of CFO's minds, a lot of reluctance around how fast they can move towards digitization, how, how quickly they could get people working remotely or using technology better move away from paper, invoices and things like that. And what we're finding is when people didn't have a choice, it happened relatively effortlessly. And so we've now seen a much broader appetite towards digitization leveraging tools, again, in pursuit of managing cash and creating efficiencies, reducing costs. So it's the same, it's the same benefits they've always looked at maybe a little bit more focused on cost and cash, but now the tools that they're able to use to, to, to make that happen are, are much more prevalent. They're much more open to their use. >>Yeah. So, so you're talking about, uh, making a decision voluntarily and then maybe external forces pushing you into and to, you know, try having decisions. So is that kind of where we are right now, where there is, there's really no option, uh, you gotta go, you have to make this kind of move. And so, um, you've got to answer to those external pressures and, and, and so this is not a voluntary mission. It's a must have in today's finance world. >>Yeah, I think so in the it's it's always been something that CFOs have wanted to move towards. Like no CFO will tell you that they love manual processes and they want stuff on paper, but there was always this ability to defer the decision and punt it a bit. And, and what's happened with the pandemic and changing the ways of working. It's forced that decision to happen again, I don't think it's created a citizen. It wouldn't have happened eventually, but it's certainly accelerated it and caused them to take it quicker. >>So you've conducted and it just released, you know, study the CFO study where you've looked at and categorized, I think interestingly enough of three kind of stacks of CFOs, uh, one's the star side, right. Uh, the other two are, are lagging a bit, uh, tell us a little bit about that, about the study and those categories. And then we'll break down a little bit into why that one group is the star side of this equation kind of what they're doing and then what you're suggesting the other two do. >>Gotcha, sure. Yeah. So, so what we do is when we, when we go and we do these surveys, we ask hundreds of CFOs, uh, how they think about their business, where they put their priorities in the business and compare that to the performance of their business. And what we find is that when you look at these, these different categorizations of, of, of CFOs and organizations, you have one that clearly stands above the rest in terms of performance. And what we find is there's a direct correlation between things like the usage of AI, things like agile methodologies, lots of different kind of almost cutting edge techniques in business, but also in technology that they're using to differentiate their businesses. And they're again, directly correlated with their performance in the market. >>So in terms of, of, um, I guess the lesson learned or how another CEO, CFO rather could learn from those, you know, this group that that's ahead of the game, what do you think is maybe the, some of the key takeaways that if I was on the outside looking in or observing someone who you think is doing it, you know, better than I am, right. Or, or maybe has a little more vision than what you're suggesting I have, what, what should I be looking at if I'm, if I realize I am in a deficit and there are people who are doing things perhaps in a more advanced state. Yeah, >>Yeah. Maybe, maybe a couple things. So one, we talked a little bit about digitization already ready, right? Leveraging technology more and more. Uh, and when we talk about technology, you can think about technology in a couple different ways. You can think about this concept of a next gen ERP, or you can think about this tech technology is more of a, like what's called an exponential technology. And our position would be that you, as a CFO or as a business, you want to get as much of an off the shelf ERP as you can, and then build your exponential technology around it. So your, your AI, your machine learning, your automation set that on top of, and around your ERP because it's inside the exponential technologies, you're going to create differentiation. So that's one thing that we're seeing is just the adoption of next gen DRPs and exponential tech. >>I think the other thing that we're seeing is a fundamental rethinking of the way that we're doing working, uh, in this it's agile, but it's so much more than that. We have a lot of discussions today with CFOs about agile. And we make this distinction that says, listen, you can be a CFO in a finance organization that practices agile, or you can be an agile organization. And there's a very big gap between them. And what we're seeing as our best CFOs are adopting this new agile. And they're saying, we're redefining the ways that we're doing work. We're, we're removing duplication. We're removing finance to finance the finance discussions, which is a tremendous waste, right. We're really trying to align our finance team, even though they're an internal team, we're trying to align them with value to the customer. Uh, so that's maybe the second one. And then, and then I'd say, you know, the third one is really focused on, uh, preservation of cash and using analytics to, to drive a better understanding of cash and how cash flows for the business. So whether it's, um, improving your inventory, turn, whether it's improving your payment term terms, um, any number of different ways to manage your cash and preserve it. And again, using technology to do that. So then ERP exponential tech, agile, and then leveraging tech to really drive value in the business. >>Is there, can you, you raised kind of an interesting point about that definition, difference or deficient definitional difference in, in agility? Is there a difference in perception and reality then I may do some people think that, you know, because they're employing certain philosophies or concepts in one respect that we're good across the board and that maybe they're not, I mean, is there, is there a gap there? >>Yeah. There absolutely is. You'd be surprised the conversation we have you, well, they say, well we're Oh yeah, we're doing stand-ups, we're doing retrospectives. We're doing mood marbles. That's those are agile practices. What we're talking about is are you, are you eliminating huge amounts of part of your work because it's no longer needed and it's no longer driving value. Are you tracking, uh, how agile, what kind of agile maturity your organization has and how you're driving towards a leaner more efficient organization? There's, that's a very big difference in, yeah. We have daily meetings with our team versus this concept of being able to create an organization that is itself agile and is itself lean and aligned with the business. Uh, a lot of folks think by doing the former they're accomplishing the ladder and the, the true measure, is it productivity when you do this step change to an agile organization, big, big numbers talking 40 50% in a matter of orders, not years, it really can be significant because again, because of the way you're fundamentally rethinking the way that work gets done >>Well, that'll get your attention in a hurry. Won't it. It's talking about those kinds of gains in those kinds of timeframes. That's significant. Yeah. >>Um, we, we, you know, when you look at it, we're, we're seeing the same kind of gains with agile in, let's say a year and a half that we saw with labor arbitrage in five or 10 years, it's really changing the way it works. And again, you have to, you have to have an open culture to accept like that you're not going to do things or that you're maybe not going to support the business and the way you have for the last three decades. But once you had come to accept that the productivity gains and the value that you're able to create, and again, we don't think about productivity in terms of reducing head count. We think about it reinvesting. So what can finance now do the, to higher value, add how can they make their seat at the table, bigger to better support decisions, to better drive the businesses concept of, of driving the top line versus controlling. The bottom line is very important. >>And obviously AI has got a big role in that, right. Um, I mean, so let's talk about the function of AI in terms of finance and, and what you see or what you're talking to your clients about in terms of, of how artificial intelligence can be better incorporated into their systems and processes. >>Yeah. Yeah, sure. Look with, with AI, you've got a lot of different ways that you can apply it, of course, but, um, where we see it really helping is, uh, traditionally when you look at the lower end of, of finance processes, you, you were able to apply automation relatively well. But what you're finding is, as you move up that complexity stack, you now start needing AI to give you a better opportunity to automate. It really allows you to help create the decision support. So we're seeing in things like, um, being able to read contracts and use AI to suggest accounting treatment where Segun and being able to, um, suggest best action. So when a problem is encountered in a business, any kind of business, right, it could be finance, it could be the core processes. It says, how have we dealt with this in the past? What is that successful or not? And using machine learning and AI, it's suggesting maybe you should take this action. And here's why, so it's, it's we, you know, artificial intelligence or augmented intelligence, we prefer the ladder, right? It's this, it's this technology that's designed to assist in decision-making and provides you with more data and analysis, and you could physically do on your own to make a better decision. >>You know, when you're talking about these, uh, these really grand strategic transformations, right. That are occurring and, and, and, and B people have big decisions to make. Um, but they're taking on big problems. So if you would just talk about some of those problems in terms of, you know, new platforms, new technologies, you know, these, these, you know, real life of conundrum, sometimes people run into and how they are dealing with that, how you're helping them deal with these big time challenges, especially like on the platform level. >>Sure. Yeah. There's so many where to start. Um, you know, you look at things around, uh, financial forecasting and, and it used to be when you would do financial forecasting, as an example, you'd have your financial analyst and they're looking at three years of history and they're trying to figure out, all right, where's your revenue gland for the quarter of the month, a year, whatever it is, whatever period it is. And what we're finding very, very quickly is three years is irrelevant. You have to be looking at what happened last week. What happened the week before that, especially the economy is changing so rapidly and AI can help with that. AI can help you because what it's doing is when you, when you now have to change your focus from years to weeks, you've got to start looking at different data sources to give you insight into what that means, strange things, right? >>Like if you're in retail, you've got to start looking at weather, you've got to start looking at sentiments. We look at where, uh, you know, previous months where lockdowns were happening to help you understand whether you should be doing more business online, or whether you're going to have more in-store retail as an example. So all of these different, external data sources that finance people may not have traditionally been using, we're now having to incorporate, because we don't have that, that Corpus of three years of business information that's reliable. Um, so financial planning is a good one. Um, what else is we is we think about how to, uh, leverage AI audit and controls are near and dear to my heart. I used to be an audit director and do investigations, things like that. And one of the things that we always struggled with was how do we, how do we leverage experience of the auditors or the investigators have gone before us? So we've implemented natural language processing and natural language search. So you can say, tell me about the most significant risks that we've found in China in the last two years and the AI and the machine learning is going through our database of documents and using, understanding what you asked and giving you a meaningful answer. It's not a Google search, right? It's giving you a meaningful answer, understands what significant is and understands the tone of the language and how it's being presented. Just a few examples around that. >>Yeah. I mean, to me, context is everything right? And that's where we were making this huge shift in terms of having a much greater awareness and a sensitivity to the real context of, of a data point that you're looking for. So you make a great point. Um, so before we close out, I always like to hear about a practical application. So if you could, um, you know, I don't know how comfortable you are with naming names or not naming names, but can you just give us an idea of maybe how you've worked with a CFO or CFOs in terms of identifying, uh, areas where they can improve or they can implement, uh, some of your, uh, of your, uh, uh, advice, some of your, uh, solutions and where it's worked, you know, where they've had great success and, and, uh, has inspired perhaps more success within their organizations? >>Yeah, sure, sure. I think my, and I, I won't name names, but I'll, I'll give you an idea because we do this a lot in different CFOs, but it's this, I like to think of it as sizing the appetite and then serving what they want to eat. So when we, when we meet with the CFO, we, we have a discussion with them about where their pain points are and talk about advisory. And then instead of serving them this banquet meal, let's start with the dishes they really like, and it's really important to them. So we create this bite size proposal, and we use that to, because again, the days of a hundred, 200, $300 million transformations, why would anybody do that anymore? You know, don't, don't tell my bosses that, but I like to start with a smaller bit, right? Let's prove the value. And then let's create a self-funded transformation where the value that you're creating, whether it's in working capital, whether it's, you know, D day sales outstanding, or an actual productivity, you create that value with a small pilot proof of concept, MVP, whatever you want to call it. >>And then you use that in a portion of those savings to then fund the next phase. And you can, you can build to a very large transformation project very quickly, but again, for the CFO, it's critical to demonstrate value at every step of the way. So we like to do what we call a POC MVPs. We do this through a garage. We may come together, uh, do some co-creation. We might leverage one of our partnerships like Solonus to bring this fact-based approach to the table, to help them understand where their problems are. We co-create the solution with them. And it's typically finance it, developers all in the room, building something unique. And we're not talking months, we're talking in the morning. We talk about what the problem is. The developers build it in the afternoon. And we show the CFO the next morning, what we're thinking and what it actually looks like. >>And it's this concept of the days of a paper deliverable are done because of the way that we've, that society as a whole has democratized technology and made it so accessible. You can, you can listen to the requirements in the morning and build it in the afternoon, iterate the next couple of weeks. So that by the end of a four to six week period, you've got this incredible minimum viable product that is actually creating value for the business. And then you scale it out. Uh, that's the way I liked the transform of CFOs. You, listen, you learn, you help them build, create, solve their problems and self-fund transformation. >>Uh, that's where the cherry on top that's dessert right there. You satisfy the appetite. So, uh, all the way through, right. Scott, thanks for the insights. I appreciate it. And I love the analogy too. It's really a really clear, I appreciate that. Thanks for the time. >>Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Have a good day. >>Yeah, you bet the same to you, Scott Layton, joining us here on, on IBM thing. Talk to you about the appetite and trying to satisfy the CFO needs today, providing a little more than the appetizer, but very significant main course. You're watching the cube and IBM thing.

>>from around the >>Globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome here to the cube as we continue our series of IBM Thank on john wall's your host here on the cube for our discussion with scott. Layton who is the senior partner and global finance transformation practice at IBM scott. Thanks for joining us here on the cube. Good to see you today. >>Great to see you john, thanks for having me. >>You bet. Absolutely. Looking forward to it. Um first off, I want you just to put yourself in the CFO shoes these days, we're talking about this digital transformation and all that's occurring, particularly in finance and and what are the, I guess uh issues or the challenges you think that are kind of keeping them up at night and then we're going to transition over to how you at IBM. We're trying to solve those problems for him. But first let's let the CFO role. >>Sure, sure. Great question. And and you know, if you had asked this two years ago, we have a different answer in some ways, right? Uh Covid has has put a tremendous amount of pressure on businesses and CFOs in particular, especially when it comes to managing cash, managing logistics, supply chain has been has been pushed pretty pretty hard to its limits. I think cash has always been king, but even more so now in their preservation of cash. Um I think as well, we're now seeing in the last year to this push towards digitization, like you said, there was a long time in a lot of CFOs minds, a lot of reluctance around how fast they can move towards digitization. How how quickly they could get people working remotely or using technology better and move away from paper invoices and things like that. And what we're finding is when people didn't have a choice, it happened relatively effortlessly. And so we've now seen a much broader appetite towards digitization leveraging tools, again, in pursuit of managing cash and creating efficiencies, reducing costs. So it's the same, it's the same benefits. They've always looked at maybe a little bit more focused on cost and cash, but now the tools that they are able to use to to make that happen are are much more prevalent. They're much more open to their use. >>Yeah. So, so you're talking about making a decision voluntarily and then maybe external forces pushing you into into, you know, driving decisions. So is that kind of where we are right now, where there is, there's really no option. Uh you gotta go, you have to make this kind of move. And so you've got to answer to those external pressures. And and so this is not a voluntary mission. It's a must have in today's finance world. >>Yeah, I think so. And look, it's it's always been something that Cfos who wanted to move towards, like no CFO will tell you that they love manual processes and they want stuff on paper. But there was always this ability to defer the decision and punted a bit and and what's happened with the pandemic and changing the ways of working? It's forced that decision to happen again. I don't think it's created decision that wouldn't have happened eventually, but it's certainly accelerated it and cause them to take it quicker. >>All right. So you've conducted and just released study the CFO study where you've looked at and categorized. I think interestingly enough of three kind of stacks of Cfos ones the star side, right? Uh The other two are lagging a bit uh Tell us a little bit about that about the study and and those categories. And then we'll break down a little bit into why that one group is the star side of this equation. Kind of what they're doing and then what you're suggesting the other to do to catch up. >>Sure. Yeah. So so what we do is when we when we go and we do these surveys, we asked hundreds of cfos how they think about their business, where they put their priorities in the business and compare that to the performance of their business. And what we find is that when you look at these these different categorizations of of of cfos and organizations, you have one that clearly stands above the rest in terms of performance. And what we find is there's a direct correlation between things like the the usage of ai things like agile methodologies, lots of different kind of almost cutting edge techniques in business, but also in technology that they're using to differentiate their businesses and their again directly correlated with their performance in the market. >>So in terms of I guess the lesson learned or how another ceo CFO rather could learn from those, you know, this group that that's ahead of the game. What do you think is maybe some of the key takeaways if I was on the outside looking in or observing someone who you think is doing it better than I am or maybe has a little more vision than what you're suggesting, I have. What what should I be looking at if I'm if I realize I am in a deficit and there are people who are doing things perhaps in a more advanced state than I am, >>maybe maybe a couple of things. So one we we talked a little bit about digitization already ready, Right, leveraging technology more and more. Uh and when we talk about technology, you can think about technology in a couple different ways. You can think about this concept of a next gen er P or you can think about this technology is more of like what's called an exponential technology and our position would be that you as a as a CFO or as a business, you want to get as much of an off the shelf prp as you can and then build your exponential technology around it. So you're you're a i your machine learning, your automation set that on top of and around your E R P. Because it's inside the exponential technologies, you're going to create differentiation. So that's one thing that we're seeing is this adoption of next gen er PS an exponential tech. I think the other thing that we're seeing is a fundamental rethinking of the way that we're doing working. Uh it's agile, but it's so much more than that. We have a lot of discussions today with Cfos about agile and we make this distinction and says, listen, you can be a CFO and finance organization that practices agile or you can be an agile organization and there's a very big gap between them and what we're seeing is our best CFOs are adopting this new agile or methodology. And they're saying, we're redefining the ways that we're doing work. We're removing duplication, we're removing finance to finance the finance discussions, which is a tremendous waste, right? We're really trying to align our finance team, even though they're an internal team, we're trying to align them with value to the customer. uh so that's maybe the 2nd 1. And then, and then I'd say, you know, the third one is really focused on uh preservation of cash and using analytics to to drive a better understanding of cash and how cash flows through the business. So whether it's um improving your inventory turn whether it's improving your payment term terms, um any number of different ways to manage your cash and preserve it. And again using technology to do that. So again E. R. P. Exponential tech, agile and then leveraging tech to really drive value in the business. >>Is there can you raise a kind of an interesting point about that definition difference or deficient? Definitional difference in agility? Is there a difference in perception and reality? Then I may do some people think that you know because they're employing certain philosophies and concepts in one respect that were good across the board and and that maybe they're not. I mean is there is there a gap there? >>Yeah, there absolutely is. You'd be surprised the conversation we have you. Well, they say, well, we're, oh yeah, we're doing stand ups, were doing retrospectives, were doing mood marbles, that those are actual practices. What we're talking about is are you, are you eliminating huge amounts of part of your work because it's no longer needed and it's no longer driving value? Are you tracking uh, how agile, what kind of agile maturity your organization has and how you're driving towards a leaner, more efficient organization. There's, that's a very big difference. And yeah, we have daily meetings with our team versus this concept of being able to create an organization that is itself agile and is itself lean in align with the business. Uh, a lot of folks think by doing the former, they're accomplishing the ladder. And the true measure is productivity when you do this, step change soon. And I'll organization Big big numbers starting 40 50 in a matter of quarters, not years. It really can be significant because again, because the way you're fundamentally rethinking the way that work gets done >>well, that'll get your attention in a hurry, won't it? You're talking about those kinds of gains in those kinds of timeframes, that's significant. >>When you look at it, we're seeing the same kind of gains with agile in, let's say, a year and a half that we saw with labor arbitrage in five or 10 years, it's really changing the way where and again, you have to, you have to have an open culture to accept like that you're not going to do things or that you're maybe not going to support the business and the way you have for the last three decades. But once you have come to accept that the productivity gains and the value that you're able to create and again, we don't think about productivity in terms of reducing headcount, we think about it reinvesting. So what can finance now due to higher value add? How can they make their seat at the table bigger to better support decisions, better drive the business. This concept of of driving the top line versus controlling the bottom line is very important, >>and obviously AI has got a big role in that. Right? I mean, so let's talk about the function of A I in terms of finance and and what you see or what you're talking to your clients about in terms of how artificial intelligence can be better incorporated into their systems and processes. >>Yeah. Yeah, sure. Look with with Ai you've got a lot of different ways that you can apply it of course. But um where we see it really helping is traditionally when you look at the lower end of finance processes, you you were able to apply automation relatively well, but what you're finding is is you move up that complexity stack, you now start needing a i to give you a better opportunity to automate. It really allows you to help create the decision support. So we're seeing it in things like um being able to read contracts and use ai to suggest accounting treatment. We're seeing it and being able to um suggest best action. So when a problem is encountered in a business, any kind of business, right. It could be financed, it could be the core processes, it says, how have we dealt with this in the past? Was that successful or not? And using machine learning and ai it's suggesting maybe you should take this action and here's why. So it's it's we, you know, artificial intelligence or augmented intelligence, we prefer the latter, Right? It's this it's this technology that's designed to assist in decision making and provide you with more data and analysis and you could physically do on your own to make a better decision. >>You know what you're talking about these uh these really grand strategic transformations right, that are occurring and and and people have big decisions to make, but they're taking on big problems. So if you would just talk about some of those problems in terms of new platforms, new technologies, you know, these, you know, real life uh conundrums, sometimes people run into and and how they are dealing with that. How you're helping them deal with these big time challenges, especially like on the platform level. >>Sure, yeah, there's so many where to start. Uh you know, you look at things around uh financial forecasting and and it used to be and when you would do financial forecasting is an example, you'd have your financial analyst and they're looking at three years of history and they're trying to figure out all right, where's your revenue? The land for the court of the month, year, whatever it is, whatever period it is. And what we're finding very, very quickly is three years is irrelevant. You have to be looking at what happened last week, what happened the week before that, especially as the economy is changing so rapidly. And a I can help with that Ai can help you because what it's doing is when you when you now have to change your focus from years to weeks, you've got to start looking at different data sources to give you insight into what that means. Strange things right? Like if you're in retail, you've got to start looking at whether you've got to start looking at sentiment. We look at where uh you know previous months where lockdowns were having to help you understand whether you should be doing more business online or whether you're gonna have more in store retail as an example. So all of these different external data sources that finance people may not have traditionally been using. We're now having to incorporate because we don't have that that corpus of three years of business information is reliable. Um So financial planning is a good one. Um What else is we as we think about how to uh leverage ai audit and controls are near and dear to my heart. I used to be an audit director and do investigations, things like that. And one of the things that we always struggled with was how do we how do we leverage experience of the auditors or the investigators have gone before us. So we've implemented natural language processing and natural language search. So you can say tell me about the most significant risks that we found in china in the last two years and the Ai and machine learning is going through our database of documents and using understanding what you asked and giving the meaningful answer. It's not a google search, right? It's giving you a meaningful answer, understands what's significant is and understands the tone of the language and how it's being presented. Just a few examples around them. >>Yeah. I mean to me context is everything right And and that's where we were making this huge shift in terms of having a much greater awareness and and a sensitivity to the real context of of a data point that you're looking for. so you make a great point. Um So before we close that always like kind of like to hear about a practical application, so if you could um I don't know how comfortable you are with naming names are not naming names, but can you give us an idea of maybe how you've worked with a CFO or cfos in terms of identifying areas where they can improve or they can implement uh some of your of your advice, some of your solutions and where it's worked, you know, where they've had great success and and has inspired perhaps more success within organizations. >>Yeah, sure, sure. I think my and I won't name names but I'll give you an idea because of that. We do this a lot of different cfos but it's just I like to think of it as sizing the appetite and then serving what they want to eat. So when we when we meet with the CFO we we have a discussion with them about where their pain points are and talk about advisory and then instead of serving them this banquet meal let's start with the dishes they really like and it's really important to them. So we create this bite sized proposal and we use that because the days of 102 103 $100 million transformations, why would anybody do that anymore? You know, don't don't tell my bosses that but I like to start with you know a smaller bit right let's prove the value and then let's created self funded transformation where the value that you're creating, whether it's in working capital, whether it's you know day to day sales outstanding or an actual productivity. You create that value with a small pilot proof of concept, M. V. P. Whatever you want to call it and then you use that in a portion of those savings to then fund the next phase. And you can you can build to a very large transformation project very quickly. But again for the CFO it's critical to demonstrate value at every step of the way. So we like to do what we call um P O C M E P S, we do this through a garage, we may come together do some co creation, we might leverage one of our partnerships like Solonius to bring this fact based approach the table to help them understand where their problems are. We co create the solution with them and it's typically financed I. T. Developers all in the room building something unique and we're not talking months, we're talking in the morning, we talk about what the problem is. The developers build it in the afternoon and we show the CFO the next morning what we're thinking and what it actually looks like. And it's this concept of the days of a paper deliverable are done Because of the way that we've the society as a whole is democratized technology and made it so accessible. You can, you can listen to the requirements in the morning and build it in the afternoon. Iterate the next couple of weeks so that by the end of a 4-6 week period, you've got this incredible minimum viable product that is actually creating value for the business and then you scale it out. Uh that's the way I like to transform with CFOs. You listen, you learn, you help them build, create solve their problems in self fund transformation. >>That's for the cherry on top. That's dessert right there. You satisfied the appetite so >>all the way through. Right scott. >>Thanks for the insights. I appreciate it. And I love the analogy to it's really, really clear. I appreciate that. Thanks for the time today. >>Thanks john, appreciate it. Have a good day. You >>bet the same to you scott. Layton joining us here on IBM thing, talking about the appetite and trying to satisfy the CFO needs today, providing a little more than the appetizer but very significant. Main course. You're watching a cube and IBM thing. >>Yeah, yeah.

>> From the Silicon Angle media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. Happy to welcome back to the program Trey Layton who's the SVP of engineering with Dell EMC. Trey, great to see you. >> Hi Stu, how are you? >> I'm doing fantastic, thank you. So there's the devil technology summit happening in Austin, Texas. Let's not hide the lead, there's some news around things you've been working on for a while. Why don't you share the update with our audience? >> Well, myself and my team have been working on a new product that we are announcing at Dell technology summit called PowerOne and we are positioning in the market is autonomous infrastructure. It's a great combination of all the wonderful products in the Dell technologies portfolio combined with some very innovative automation that makes integrating the product an autonomous outcome. >> All right, first of all with the name power in it, we know that that's the branding that Dell likes. Something that's going to be with us for a while. You talk about all-in-one. You've got some history, we have some history back pulling various solution together, talk about compute, network and storage, what back in the day we called converged infrastructure. Explain how all-in-one you know, what what is the all in the all in one? >> So first of all, it's a system where you can get all of Dell technologies in one package. The next thing is about building on that decade's worth of experience of building converged products and learning about the different intricacies of integrating those products and instead of relying upon humans to integrate those technologies together to deliver an outcome for a customer, embedding that intelligence and software to make it easy for an operator to drive a configuration, to deliver an outcome for a customer to operate a modern data center environment. >> So it's exciting stuff Trey 'cause you know, the design principle before was let's simplify as much as we can, let's that entire rack if you will, be the unitive infrastructure that people manage, but what I hear you talking about, the automation and software and even you know, we're not replacing the humans, we're augmenting what they're doing by having automation take over. That's powerful stuff. We've talked about intelligence and automation for I'd say all of our careers. So explain a little bit do you know, this autonomous, what really you know, where is that automation and how come it is different today than it might have been five or 10 years ago? >> Well, you think about all the things that we've learned in 10 years of building a packaged product to actually deliver an outcome for a customer. Requiring some degree of manual intervention, but a significant amount of simplicity that we've built in those products to deliver an outcome. One of the things that's true about today is that as organizations are on a digital transformation journey, they are struggling with a high degree of intake of technology, while also maintaining the products that they manage on a daily basis to, quote-unquote keep the lights on. What we have done is say how can we take the innovations that we've built in our products that our infrastructure is code and how can we build software intelligence that understands based on the the operators desired outcome for an integration, we employ Dell engineering best practices to deliver that outcome. So a key element of the product is housing this intelligence and software that drives this automated outcome through best practices for how we engineer products together. >> All right Trey, you've got engineering. Bring us in a little aside of the team you know, building now in 2019. What are the pieces that you had? What's different about the team that you had to build this and is there a unique IP that your team and this product brings beyond what was already available in the marketplace? >> Yes, so first of all the team is a global team that we've actually been in the process of hiring in the last year plus, a year and a half plus and it's a very young team, different skill set. We learned very early on that if we're going to build a product with embedded automation, you needed to have experience and understanding, what are the best practices for integrating the technologies in the product, but simultaneously you needed people who understood how to write code that made that outcome possible and so really bringing and building a global team of DevOps minded individuals that understood open source technologies, that understood our VMware ecosystem, that understood the Dell EMC ecosystem and more importantly, the larger Dell technologies ecosystem for bringing those products together and I'll tell you, it's a diverse culture of individuals. What I'm most excited about is while we're very much focused on delivering VMware outcomes in this first release, the product that we've built is capable of delivering any type of outcome. Whether it be another type of virtualization environment or another type of application outcome. The software is designed to deliver an integration that is designed to support a customer's production operation. The intelligence or the product that we built to do that is called the PowerOne controller and embedded in that is software that a customer can drive either through a user interface or they can use automation technologies that they have in-house to call on this controller programmatically to execute those outcomes as opposed to being chained to a user interface that an operator has to learn as a new element of their environment. >> Yeah Trey, really reminds me of the conversations I've been having with customers over the last decade or more is that core understanding and building my computer infrastructure, my storage infrastructure, my networking infrastructure. I still need to understand some of those pieces, but it is much more about the software, the operating model and it's, as soon as we know, we're living in a software world. >> Well, it's interesting that you say that because you and I both know based on our history that there are complexities that we've worked to make simpler to operate, but a customer today struggles to have expertise dedicated to how do I build an underlying network fabric, how do I deploy a software virtualization layer on top of that Network fabric, how do I deploy storage arrays in a manner where the i/o is optimized not only for performance, but also for survivability. How do I carve up my computer sources in a manner that most efficiently supports the virtualization or container outcome that I'm deploying. There's a tremendous amount of skill that you need to have to employ the best practices to integrate all those technologies together and what we are doing is merely bringing those capabilities in software, so that an operator can say, I want to deploy this many cores with this much memory and associated to this much capacity of external storage and all the underlying in order configuration dependencies happen through the intelligence that we've built in automation to drive the right outcome for the customer. >> Okay, so Trey, when I've been digging into the software world and you talk to the people that are building applications, observability something that's been coming up a bunch. It's not just understanding what I have, but with the flows of information, Ansible, New Relic, that all talking about in a containerized micro-services world, there are different ways that I need to look at the entire system. How does that the kind of mindset and thinking fit into the design of PowerOne? >> Well, it's actually an age-old problem that we've had as we've began to have shared infrastructure to run, whether they be containerized services or virtualized services or contain running in virtualized services. It's how do we associate what's running to the underlying infrastructure so that if we have a problem in the underlying infrastructure that we're managing, that we target a resolution and that resolution could be increased performance so that that service can run better or it could be some type of underlying failure that we want to ensure that as survivability is kicked in, that we employ more resource to support expansion or just a continuation and burst of capability that's needed. When we build PowerOne, we thought about, it is a system. How do we give observability of that system in the context of a system to understand the associated dependencies so that we could quickly guide the operator to identifying the area that they needed to look at from an infrastructure perspective and either influence or simply respond to, instead of a more traditional mode of on-premises management is let me go find where the problem is and see if this fixes it. We have given observability to specifically identify where the issue is and enable the operator to go target that. >> All right, so Trey, you mentioned the traditional model of doing things. What does PowerOne mean for, say for example the X block is something you know, over a decade out there on the market, there's been lots of discussions forever. The Cisco stack, the Dell stack and VMware, you know, all those challenges. So tell us what this means for VX block? >> So first of all, I couldn't say enough good things about the V block team. It's a part of the organization that I'm in. We are very much committed to VxBlock engineering going forward and PowerOne is an expansion of our portfolio as opposed to a replacement of. We value our partnership with Cisco significantly, customers are committed to acquiring Cisco technologies in concert with our storage and data production products and Vxblock is all about giving customers an ability to have a converged experience with our storage technologies and a very unique experience that surrounds the offers that we deliver in that space. I will tell you that the automation that we're building in PowerOne is also something that we're targeting at our entire portfolio as opposed to just isolating into this one product. The dawn of autonomous infrastructure in our minds is not about isolating that technology to one product, but it's about bringing it to our entire portfolio of products to make our customers experiences better in managing and consuming the technologies they buy from us. >> Well, definitely something we've heard from Jeff Clark, Jeff Boudreau and the the team is the portfolio inside Dell EMC is going through a lot of simplification. So the whole autonomous infrastructure, PowerOne, how should we be thinking about where this fits kind of in the overall market? >> So it's very much includes our purpose-built storage portfolio technologies, our data protection, it includes our networking technologies and some unique automation capabilities that we've built in it to enable the IT operator to not have to worry about programming the fabric that we actually sense and understand the changes in the virtualization environment and deploy those configurations to the underlying network infrastructure and it's all about using our power edge portfolio of servers. So PowerOne is very much about consuming our data center technologies all in one package. That positioning in the market is complementary to customers who want to acquire VX block and are looking to pair Cisco technologies with Dell storage and more importantly, our HCI portfolio is a key element of our total offer to customers, where customers are looking to deploy infrastructure with software-defined storage characteristics and a very unique management experience and simplified operations, the HCI portfolio is there as well. So I often engage, specifically as we talk about the exclusively Dell portfolio. It's not an or conversation, it's an and. It's which applications are you deploying in your data center environment? What use cases are you deploying? How is the underlying infrastructure optimized to best address the goals that you have for that deployment? And so that's why we've taken a portfolio approach as opposed to one product to address every use case that's in the market. >> All right so Trey, we've talked a lot about operations and the way we design things. We haven't talked about cloud you know, and very much we believe cloud is as much an operating model as it is a place. It's a journey, not a destination, hybrid cloud is what most customers have today. They have multiple clouds, but we think one of the challenges of the day is is helping to get more value out of the some of what you have then, the individual pieces would be on their own. So where does PowerOne fit into the Dell Tech cloud story and we'd love to also hear just where it fits into the kind of the broader cloud discussions that we have when we're at a Dell show, a VMware show or beyond. >> Yeah, so it's an interesting discussion 'cause I think we begin to drift into saying a thing is cloud and I think more outcomes are cloud and it's a combination of software and infrastructure. PowerOne is an infrastructure element that is very much a part of the Dell technologies cloud strategy, but Dell technologies cloud is more about our entire portfolio of software and infrastructure participating in a common ecosystem to deliver that cloud outcome for customers and so Dell Tech, so PowerOne is absolutely a part of the Dell technologies cloud and we're excited about continuing down the automation enhancements path to make those outcomes more possible for customers as we go throughout time. So initially, PowerOne is very much an infrastructure resource in Dell technologies cloud. Over time, you're going to see even greater enhancements as you will see enhancements across our entire portfolio of technologies in participating in the larger Dell technologies cloud ecosystem story. >> Okay, and just to connect the dots 'cause when I look at those pieces and we talked about, as customers are doing hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, if they're VMware shop VCF is an important piece of that and that is part of VMware cloud on AWS, what they're doing with Azure, with Google. So this plugs in if you, you know, my words into that broader multi cloud, hybrid cloud discussion that customers are having. >> Absolutely, you think about it in layers. We are building an infrastructure layer at Dell EMC that enables that Dell technologies cloud layer to be possible through the VMware ecosystem of technologies, making that multi-cloud, that private cloud functionality realized. The VMware ecosystem is robust in its approach to supporting multi cloud environments as well as deploying the virtualization and container technologies that are critical for building in a modern enterprise and so we are an element of that strategy as opposed to the exclusive pinpoint resource in the strategy. All of the infrastructure products in the portfolio will participate in the Dell technologies cloud and we're excited about the innovation that we can bring and making the Dell technology strategy and vision more easily realized by our customers. >> Okay and Trey, when I think of PowerOne, what market segments do we think are going to kind of be the first customer for this and any specific rules or inside a customer that should be the ones looking at this? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So as we look at markets, you look at organizations who are looking to deploy a data center resource. We go as small as four servers, but candidly, if you're deploying a data center with four servers, there are other items in our portfolio that are better positioned like hyper-converged to start in that place, but if you're looking to deploy data center where you're looking to go 10s, 20s, hundreds of servers and you want external storage in the offer, then PowerOne is a great starting point. If you think about the scalability and we haven't touched on it, that we've built in PowerOne, at launch, we're going to support 270 servers in the architecture. Very quickly, we will expand into supporting what's described as a multi pod architecture where we will get beyond 700 servers and then move into thousands of servers where the architecture is actually designed to support over 7,600 servers. In concert with that, at day one, we will support multiple storage arrays as well. So deploying multiple Power Mac storage raised as a storage domain to support this. So when we talk about markets, we talk about the ability to address medium sized organizations data center use cases all the way up to the largest enterprises or service providers in the world data center deployments in an all Dell technology stack. >> All right, Trey, give us the final word on this. One or two things you want people to understand and know about PowerOne as they walk away. >> So I think the most important thing to take away is that this is a way to acquire Dell technologies products all in one place, in one package, in a incredible user experience. The way we're going to sustain that user experience and maintain that value proposition to customers is around the autonomous infrastructure packaging that we've built in the software that we're delivering. Utilizing some of the most advanced automation characteristics that are out there on the market, combined with some of the brightest minds to integrate these technologies together. Customers just need to get to production operations and when you can acquire a product that houses the intelligence to get to that outcome faster, there's a greater return on your invested capital when you're buying this product and that's the most important thing I think to walk away from. We are committed to helping get our our customers get to operational outcomes faster and these technologies that we've built in this product are delivering on that promise. >> Well Trey, congratulations to you and the team. We always love to see when you go behind the scenes, we kind of rebuild from a clean sheet of paper building on the history that you have, listening to your customer strongly and having somethings ready for today's modern era. Thanks so much. >> Thanks Stu. >> All right, be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all our coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (light electronic music)

>> We're back with Trey Layton, who's the senior vice president and CTO of Converged at Dell EMC. Trey, it's always a pleasure, good to see you. >> Dave, good to see you as well. >> We're at eight years into Vblock. Take us back to the converged infrastructure early days. What problems were you trying to solve with CI? >> Well, one of the problems with IT in general is it's been hard, and one of the reasons why it's been hard is all the variability that customers consume, and how do you integrate all that variability in a sustaining manner to maintain the assets so it can support the business? The thing that we've learned is, the original recipe that we had for Vblock was to go at and solve that very problem. We have referred to that as lifecycle. Manage the lifecycle services of the data center assets that you're deploying. We have created some great intellectual property, some great innovation around helping minimize the complexity associated with managing the lifecycle of a very complex integration by way of one of the largest data center assets that people operate in their environments. >> So, yeah, thousands and thousands of customers. They're telling you lifecycle management is critical, but what are they doing? They're shifting their labor resource to more strategic activities? Is that what's going on? >> Well, there's so much variation and complexity in just maintaining the different integration points that they're spending an inordinate amount of their time, a lot of nights and weekends, on understanding and figuring out which software combinations, which configuration combinations that need to operate. What we do as an organization and have done since inception is, we manage that complexity for them. We deliver them an outcome-based architecture that is pre-integrated, and we sustain that integration over its life, so they spend less time doing that and letting the experts who actually build the components focus on maintaining those integrations. >> As an analyst, I always looked at converged infrastructure as an evolutionary trend, bringing together storage servers, networking, bespoke components. My question is, where's the innovation underneath converged infrastructure? >> I would say innovation is in two areas. We're blessed with a lot of technology innovations that come from our partner and our own companies, Dell EMC and Cisco. Cisco produces wonderful innovations in the space of networking compute in the context of Vblock. Dell EMC, storage innovations, data protection, et cetera. We harmonize all of these very complex integration in a manner where an organization can put those advanced integrations into solving business problems immediately. There's two vectors of innovation. There are the technology components that we're acquiring to solve business problems, and there's the method in which we integrate them to get to the business of solving problems. >> Okay, let's get into the announcement. What are you announcing, what's new, why should we care? >> The announcement is, we are announcing the VxBlock 1000. The interesting thing about Vblocks over the years is they have been individual systems architectures. A compute technology integrated with a particular storage architecture would produce a model of Vblock. With VxBlock 1000, we're actually introducing an architecture that provides a full gamut of array optionality for customers. Both blade and rack server options for customers on the UCS compute side, and before, we would integrate data protection technologies as an extension or an add-on into the architecture. Data protection is native to the offer. In addition to that, unstructured data storage. So, being able to include unstructured data into the architecture as one singular architecture, as opposed to buying individualized systems. >> Okay, so you're just further simplifying the underlying infrastructure, which is going to save me even more time, is that right? >> Producing a standard which can adapt to virtually any use case that a customer has in a data center environment, giving them the ability to expand and grow that architecture as their workload dictates in their environment, as opposed to buying a system to accommodate one workload, buying another system to accommodate another workload. This is breaking the barriers of traditional CI and moving it forward so that we can create an adaptive architecture that can accommodate not only the technologies available today, but the technologies on the horizon tomorrow. >> Okay, so it's workload diversity, which means greater asset leverage from that underlying infrastructure. >> Trey: Absolutely. >> Can you give us some examples? How do you envision customers using this? >> I would talk specifically about customers that we have today, and when they deploy, have deployed Vblocks in the past. We've done wonderful by building architectures that accommodate, or they're tailor-made for certain types of workloads. A customer environment would end up acquiring a Vblock model 700 to accommodate an SAP workload, for example. They would acquire a Vblock 300 or 500 to accommodate a VI workload. And then, as those workloads would grow, they would grow those individualized systems. What it did was, it created islands of stranded resource and capacity. Vblock 1000 is about bringing all those capabilities into a singular architecture where you can grow the resources based on pools. As your workload shifts in your environment, you can reallocate resources to accommodate the needs of that workload, as opposed to worrying about stranded capacity in the architecture. >> Where do you go from here with the architecture? Can you share with us, to the extent that you can, a little roadmap? Give us a vision as to how you see this playing out over the next several years. >> Well, one of the reasons why we did this was to simplify and make it easier to operate these very complex architectures that everyone's consuming around the world. Vblock has always been about simplifying complex technologies in the data center. There are a lot of innovations on the horizon. NVMe, for example. Next-generation compute platforms. There are new-generation fabric services that are merging. VxBlock 1000 is the place at which you will see all of these technologies introduce, and our customers won't have to wait on new models of Vblock to consume those technologies. They will be resident in them upon their availability to the market. >> The buzzword from the vendor community is "Futureproof," but you're saying you'll be able to, if you buy today, you'll be able to bring in things like NVMe and these new technologies down the road? >> The architecture inherently supports the idea of adapting to new technologies as they emerge, and will consume those integrations as a part of the architectural standard footprint for the life of the architecture. >> All right, excellent. Trey, thanks very much for that overview. Cisco, obviously, a huge partner of yours, with this whole initiative, many, many years. A lot of people have questioned where that goes, so we have a segment from Cisco Live. Stu Miniman's out there. Let's break to Stu, and then we'll come back and pick it up from there. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah. Welcome to the cubes. Virtual coverage of 80 was reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host. We are the Cube virtual not there in person, but we're doing remote, as is a W s. Although there there on stage live. And we're here with Dave Brown, Vice President of the Sea, to compute. Great to see you again. Great keynote last night, kicking off everything for the opening night. Great stuff. >>Yeah, well, John, it's always good to be on the Cuban. Thanks for having me back. >>You know, you're in the hot seat these days in the sense of there's so much going on. I mean, Andy, that could do a three week announcement. Keynote. It was like in three hours of nonstop you take a break to go The bathroom. You missed two announcements, right? So, so much going on. You opened up reinvent 2020 with your announcement ec2 of mac instances. And there was a ton of compute. And the theme was really you know, reinventing and reimagining compute both. I want to get into that. But let's start with the hard news. Tell me about the Mac instances. Um, you had a great use case there, That kind of illustrated in your talk. But where is this coming from? It's obviously Mac developers are big, but is this market something that you guys saw from customers or was a necessity? Take us through the thinking around the Mac instance. Easy to for Mac instances, um are going for >>absolutely absolutely So I mean me personally Matthews, a longtime Matthews that we've often thought about. Could we ever bring Mac OS to AWS? Right This thing we've spoken about on and off for many, many years and, you know, it was about a year and a half about two years ago. You know, we're always hearing new use cases from customers, and that's kind of what we're doing. So we're saying what a customer is trying to do that we don't support today, and how would we support them in that? And we started a year from customers that they have been able to successfully migrate all of the AWS workloads to AWS. So most of the server workloads to AWS and then they've got this Mac bold workload that they just weren't able to bring to us. We just didn't support Max into. It was a great example who I had on stage with me last night where you know, they over the last couple of years have been moving Ah, lot of their workloads to AWS. And and then they had these Mac money sitting around that they had to manage themselves. And so we said, could we actually do this? And so that was the one thing the customer ask. And the other thing that we realized was with the nitro system in the work that we've been doing there over the last, you know, six years, seven years since 2012, Really? And just where we are from the From nitro system point of view, we were able to wrap a Mac money without making any changes to it with nitro cards plugging a FireWire to the thunderbolt port and and and actually control that device. And so it means that you get the best of Apple hardware, which is what Apple's all about is the hard way that they make and the way that their software works with it. together with the nitric system and the cards around that inte integrating with the rest of AWS. So we're giving you, you know, high speed secure networking. We're giving you great access to elastic block store Was just integrates natively into the magma Nias? Well, a So we realized that the technology was there, the customer asked, was there and then obviously went to Apple and worked with them very closely to make it happen. And so that's kind of how it all came together. And I was incredibly excited to announce it last night. And the feedback today has just been amazing. A lot of excitement. >>Yeah, take me through the use case because, you know, obviously there's two trends going on. There's custom chips and server list kind of thing happening where you guys, I mean, really doing a good job of the eye as layer, innovating there and then platform as a service. All that software on top. I totally get that. You could see that happening. Chips custom ships to Intel, A, M, D. And others. Now you got Mac hardware. Where's the innovation use case because one would start would say, Hey, why don't you care about whether it's Mac hardware or not. Because I'm server lists. I should be programming the infrastructure actually be getting compute generically. Where does the Mac tying come in? Because that's the first question I was thinking of was, I'm a Mac user. I love Mac, but I'm also got some windows actually going on now. And ultimately, do I really care if it's compute? What's your reaction to that? Yeah, >>absolutely. I mean, if you look at Apple's ecosystem today, right, they have millions of applications in the APP store. They have 28 million developers worldwide, actually building those applications just incredible. And many of those applications, all these millions in the In the APP store itself, there's many more applications that are both by enterprises and companies, right? We have an application that we use internally at Amazon is available on my phone. That's not in the APP store, and you know, many companies are doing that and to build applications for the ecosystem, they have to be built on Mac hardware. And that's just how Apple works, right? So if you wanna build for iPad or iPhone or even Apple TV and Apple watch, you have to build those applications on a Mac. And so what we see companies doing is, you know, the old develop a meme off. Well, it works on my computer, right when you build something, you don't wanna be bullied on your local laptop for production. So they typically have a fleet of machines that they either under somebody's desk or in a data center somewhere that they use for for building these Mac applications. And so it's not possible to build a Mac application on anything other than a Mac itself. And we when we looked at it, we really didn't feel that virtualization made sense, right? Apple? I mean, they have some some virtualization that they're able to do within Mac OS itself. But if you think about how do we solve the customer use case, it's really bringing apple hardware too easy to to solve the problem and giving customers that exactly same exact same experience that they have on prep. And if you look into it like that, models just worked right. We gave them better access. Uh, you know, they've been using that data which you normally say, Hey, don't don't run production workloads on a beta. But you know, I found out if I interview with the BPS at Intuit critique that they've actually moved 80% of their production pulled wear clothes too easy to already to run on the Mac instances. And so that, and that's in the space of two months. And so, just as seamless ability to move because it's the same hardware is kind of what we were going >>after. Great, thanks for sharing that and say, one thing I wanna point out is Mac does have their own chips as well. They're going custom chips. Amazon's going custom chips. And I think I think you nailed what I was trying to understand, which is this developer community for Mac. And there's some things that are purpose built for Mac devices. So on Mac ecosystem, get the marketplace as well as you know, that that was the hardware PCs and devices, and they're only doing more and more. So this brings me to the i o t. Um, piece of it, because Apple does make devices that people wear and I watch is, um, iPhones. I mean, they're not computers anymore. They're everything. So this kind of brings up the edge conversation. So whether it's an iPhone or a five G in a Metro or I'm a stadium watching a football game and there's some sensor camera vision industrial thing there, this is the new normal. This is where you guys are kind of eating, eating up the software side that that business, because there's new capabilities here. Can you explain how compute he's, particularly C two gets to the edges because no one wants to move data around. They wanna move, compute, not data, because data is expensive and it's and it's fat. So we we talked about that we keep on years ago, but you gotta move. Compute. So how does that work Take us through your vision? >>Absolutely. And this is This is a massively growing area for us. I mean, you mentioned Apple's new M one silicon Apple silicon that they just launched a swell, and we're super excited about Apple's been doing there. We've been doing the same thing with our grab. It's on two processor and really saving customers. An incredible amount on price performance. Tried customers moving and getting 40% improvement and price performance just by moving to grab it on too. It's just incredible. Um, in terms of the edge, you know, we started this journey. We started this journey quite some time ago and bringing, you know, Lambda functions to cloudwatch and things like that. How do we bring compute to the edge? We took a look at five G, which I think it's gonna feel a lot of this right if if we look at our cell phones today was actually just talking to the Apple team yesterday with the iPhone, only came out, you know, 13 years ago. It's kind of amazing to think just how much progress we've had and what four g did for the device that's in our pocket in terms of, you know, just how much we rely on that today and what we get. Well, five g is just a step function in both in terms of latency, but also in terms of throughput. And so, you know, one of the projects we announced last year with Verizon and we now Andy announced this morning we're also gonna be rolling out with Katy D I and SK Telecom and Vodafone next year. Um is a project always like that brings aws compute to the edge of the telco network. And so with Verizon, we now have eight locations around the U. S. Where we have AWS compute capacity. And what I mean by that is literally C five instances uh, G four GPU instances for customers that want to do influence and graphics processing on the edge. And that's embedded into the five G network on DSO customers. You know, we've got a number of customers that are doing a lot of interesting things with five G in the sports area, where they have five G cameras that are, you know, submitted directly to wavelength. We no longer need to drive a truck to a stadium to record a game. You just have five G cameras, um, to, you know, automated factories where they doing robotics in factories and yet really low latency. And they don't want the computer, the factory they wanted in five G and so just exciting area for us. That's growing really, really quickly. Thea Other thing we did is obviously with local zones. We launched our first local zones in L a X last year, Los Angeles on that's being used by the movie industry, so you know right now is a lot of exciting up and running off the covert and shut down for a period of time and filming the next release of all of our favorite episodes and across all of these various streaming platforms. And a lot of that work is actually the post production is being done on on AWS on G four instances within the Los Angeles region. So, you know, very low agency for colorization animation, special effects, all that sort of things happening there. What we heard from a lot of customers was they loved outposts as well, which is our offering to put a server into a data center. And you heard from riot games in Andy's Keynote, where they actually bought a number of outposts and put them all over the U. S. And also other places of the world to really lower the Leighton see for their latest game. And so what Andy also just announced is the availability off three additional local zones. So Atlanta, Miami and Houston Sorry, Boston Miami in Houston available today, and then additional 12 available local zones next year, and what that does is that sort of spreads AWS capacity compute capacity at the edge in all of our major metropolitan hubs all of their capacities on the AWS backbone as well, but brings customers that low latency connectivity that they're looking for. Gaming developers were, you know, every every millisecond counts in terms of gameplay on so super excited to be going after that use case, which I think, you know, it's difficult to tell what the next 10 years is gonna be like. But I think Layton's he's gonna have a big part to play in the types of applications we see on our phones going forward. >>Great stuff, final question for you as we wrap up, obviously with virtualization with virtualization. But you know, the cove it is. And he pointed out, People are gonna change, is gonna be winners and losers. He kind of clearly pointed out, But the people who do lean into the cloud who have been on the cloud or taking advantage of the tail winds of cove in because of the capabilities there are two bills air higher, and you should be happy for that. But they're also gonna have more demand for you to say, Hey, I need more services. So How do you speak to those people who are leaning in who are leveraging, more, compute? What should they be looking at? What kinds of services should be connecting into compute? How should they be thinking about the future of compute so that they can take advantage of those capabilities? The lower costs, higher performance? What things are complementary for these customers as they come in, not toe dip in the water kind of things against really driving. And what do they need? >>Yeah, absolutely. And this has been a big focus on us. You know, things has bean, as I cover in my keynote, which leadership session that I'm doing tomorrow Wednesday. You know, a lot of this year has been helping customers through covert and what covert is meant for their business. Whether that is cost savings for many of them or whether it's just demand, you know that they've never experienced are expected before. I mean, we've been incredibly hard at work in servicing those customers, right? I actually catch up with Scott Sikora. In my keynote. He leads our capacity team. We talked through what it meant and how we actually provided the capacity that our customers needed during Colbert Times. But for a customer moving to us, the first thing is obviously we wanna find ways to make them very successful in the cloud, but more importantly, lower price performance for them. So what we wanted to do is give them the best possible performance that's available at the lowest possible cost. And if you look at a number of the announcements that Andy made today, you know whether it's our latest graviton processor where you can, you know, when you move to arm. I think customers often overestimate how much work it will be to move to arm. And when I talked to them after they have moved, that's ahead. Wasn't actually that much work. We actually got it up and running relatively quickly. So what's simpler than people expect? But that's an opportunity to save 40% on price performance. You know these new newer workloads like our graphics. We just launched a new G four a D, which is an AMG based GPU solution, the first time we have had an AMG GPU on the EEC too. And that's also looking to say, if you know upwards of 40% price performance of other GPU offering so just incredibly exciting for graphics, work, clothes and then in the machine learning space. Like I think, if you know, machine learning is just become the new normal, like everybody is doing it. And you know, just three years ago, everybody was thinking about whether they should do it. How would how they would use it Now that it's a lot of companies are doing it. It's really How do you How do I use it more? And that comes down to again saving costs. And so what we know with without Inferential Chip and then the new Habbaniya chip we just announced it with with the work with Intel that we're doing and then a new trainee, um, ship for training, training. We're really working to lower the cost of machine learning. And so, like we've seen many customers like Alexa was a great use case the other day. Being able to lower the cost of inference for Alexa by 35% again just helps customers, you know, move to the cloud. But I mean, just generally, you know, we're trying to support customers everywhere where there were, you know, if there are many customers are in their own data centers looking to move to AWS. You know, we have great models that can support them with our existing compute. A new savings plan offering we announced last year just great for saving costs on getting the price down So a lot. You can look at it. You know, I could go on forever. Really. It >>Certainly it's certainly is MAWR. We'll we'll do a deeper dive follow up after reinvent, but it is a wake up call. As I wrote in my post, um, for a cloud on Finally, I've been saying this for years. Horizontal scalability is a disruption on the infrastructure side, but you've got vertical specialization with data to create great modern apse of machine learning. And I actually playing out in full display here is Andy said, um, net right now. So all this benefits and all these opportunities to disrupt horizontally and then leverage the data all tied together, all coming together. You're clear. Leading the team. Great Brown, vice president of E C. Two in charge of the team that's driving the future. Compute. Thanks for coming on The Cube Cube Live coverage. Thanks. >>Thanks for having me. >>Okay. I'm John for the Q back for more live coverage after this short break

>>from around the globe. It's the Q with digital coverage of exa scale day made possible by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome, everyone to the Cube celebration of Exa Scale Day. Shaheen Khan is here. He's the founding partner, an analyst at Orion X And, among other things, he is the co host of Radio free HPC Shaheen. Welcome. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for being here, Dave. Great to be here. How are you >>doing? Well, thanks. Crazy with doing these things, Cove in remote interviews. I wish we were face to face at us at a supercomputer show, but, hey, this thing is working. We can still have great conversations. And And I love talking to analysts like you because you bring an independent perspective. You're very wide observation space. So So let me, Like many analysts, you probably have sort of a mental model or a market model that you look at. So maybe talk about your your work, how you look at the market, and we could get into some of the mega trends that you see >>very well. Very well. Let me just quickly set the scene. We fundamentally track the megatrends of the Information Age And, of course, because we're in the information age, digital transformation falls out of that. And the megatrends that drive that in our mind is Ayotte, because that's the fountain of data five G. Because that's how it's gonna get communicated ai and HBC because that's how we're gonna make sense of it Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies because that's how it's gonna get transacted on. That's how value is going to get transferred from the place took place and then finally, quantum computing, because that exemplifies how things are gonna get accelerated. >>So let me ask you So I spent a lot of time, but I D. C and I had the pleasure of of the High Performance computing group reported into me. I wasn't an HPC analyst, but over time you listen to those guys, you learning. And as I recall, it was HPC was everywhere, and it sounds like we're still seeing that trend where, whether it was, you know, the Internet itself were certainly big data, you know, coming into play. Uh, you know, defense, obviously. But is your background mawr HPC or so that these other technologies that you're talking about it sounds like it's your high performance computing expert market watcher. And then you see it permeating into all these trends. Is that a fair statement? >>That's a fair statement. I did grow up in HPC. My first job out of school was working for an IBM fellow doing payroll processing in the old days on and and And it went from there, I worked for Cray Research. I worked for floating point systems, so I grew up in HPC. But then, over time, uh, we had experiences outside of HPC. So for a number of years, I had to go do commercial enterprise computing and learn about transaction processing and business intelligence and, you know, data warehousing and things like that, and then e commerce and then Web technology. So over time it's sort of expanded. But HPC is a like a bug. You get it and you can't get rid of because it's just so inspiring. So supercomputing has always been my home, so to say >>well and so the reason I ask is I wanted to touch on a little history of the industry is there was kind of a renaissance in many, many years ago, and you had all these startups you had Kendall Square Research Danny Hillis thinking machines. You had convex trying to make many supercomputers. And it was just this This is, you know, tons of money flowing in and and then, you know, things kind of consolidate a little bit and, uh, things got very, very specialized. And then with the big data craze, you know, we've seen HPC really at the heart of all that. So what's your take on on the ebb and flow of the HPC business and how it's evolved? >>Well, HBC was always trying to make sense of the world, was trying to make sense of nature. And of course, as much as we do know about nature, there's a lot we don't know about nature and problems in nature are you can classify those problems into basically linear and nonlinear problems. The linear ones are easy. They've already been solved. The nonlinear wants. Some of them are easy. Many of them are hard, the nonlinear, hard, chaotic. All of those problems are the ones that you really need to solve. The closer you get. So HBC was basically marching along trying to solve these things. It had a whole process, you know, with the scientific method going way back to Galileo, the experimentation that was part of it. And then between theory, you got to look at the experiment and the data. You kind of theorize things. And then you experimented to prove the theories and then simulation and using the computers to validate some things eventually became a third pillar of off science. On you had theory, experiment and simulation. So all of that was going on until the rest of the world, thanks to digitization, started needing some of those same techniques. Why? Because you've got too much data. Simply, there's too much data to ship to the cloud. There's too much data to, uh, make sense of without math and science. So now enterprise computing problems are starting to look like scientific problems. Enterprise data centers are starting to look like national lab data centers, and there is that sort of a convergence that has been taking place gradually, really over the past 34 decades. And it's starting to look really, really now >>interesting, I want I want to ask you about. I was like to talk to analysts about, you know, competition. The competitive landscape is the competition in HPC. Is it between vendors or countries? >>Well, this is a very interesting thing you're saying, because our other thesis is that we are moving a little bit beyond geopolitics to techno politics. And there are now, uh, imperatives at the political level that are driving some of these decisions. Obviously, five G is very visible as as as a piece of technology that is now in the middle of political discussions. Covert 19 as you mentioned itself, is a challenge that is a global challenge that needs to be solved at that level. Ai, who has access to how much data and what sort of algorithms. And it turns out as we all know that for a I, you need a lot more data than you thought. You do so suddenly. Data superiority is more important perhaps than even. It can lead to information superiority. So, yeah, that's really all happening. But the actors, of course, continue to be the vendors that are the embodiment of the algorithms and the data and the systems and infrastructure that feed the applications. So to say >>so let's get into some of these mega trends, and maybe I'll ask you some Colombo questions and weaken geek out a little bit. Let's start with a you know, again, it was one of this when I started the industry. It's all it was a i expert systems. It was all the rage. And then we should have had this long ai winter, even though, you know, the technology never went away. But But there were at least two things that happened. You had all this data on then the cost of computing. You know, declines came down so so rapidly over the years. So now a eyes back, we're seeing all kinds of applications getting infused into virtually every part of our lives. People trying to advertise to us, etcetera. Eso So talk about the intersection of AI and HPC. What are you seeing there? >>Yeah, definitely. Like you said, I has a long history. I mean, you know, it came out of MIT Media Lab and the AI Lab that they had back then and it was really, as you mentioned, all focused on expert systems. It was about logical processing. It was a lot of if then else. And then it morphed into search. How do I search for the right answer, you know, needle in the haystack. But then, at some point, it became computational. Neural nets are not a new idea. I remember you know, we had we had a We had a researcher in our lab who was doing neural networks, you know, years ago. And he was just saying how he was running out of computational power and we couldn't. We were wondering, you know what? What's taking all this difficult, You know, time. And it turns out that it is computational. So when deep neural nets showed up about a decade ago, arm or it finally started working and it was a confluence of a few things. Thalib rhythms were there, the data sets were there, and the technology was there in the form of GPS and accelerators that finally made distractible. So you really could say, as in I do say that a I was kind of languishing for decades before HPC Technologies reignited it. And when you look at deep learning, which is really the only part of a I that has been prominent and has made all this stuff work, it's all HPC. It's all matrix algebra. It's all signal processing algorithms. are computational. The infrastructure is similar to H B. C. The skill set that you need is the skill set of HPC. I see a lot of interest in HBC talent right now in part motivated by a I >>mhm awesome. Thank you on. Then I wanna talk about Blockchain and I can't talk about Blockchain without talking about crypto you've written. You've written about that? I think, you know, obviously supercomputers play a role. I think you had written that 50 of the top crypto supercomputers actually reside in in China A lot of times the vendor community doesn't like to talk about crypto because you know that you know the fraud and everything else. But it's one of the more interesting use cases is actually the primary use case for Blockchain even though Blockchain has so much other potential. But what do you see in Blockchain? The potential of that technology And maybe we can work in a little crypto talk as well. >>Yeah, I think 11 simple way to think of Blockchain is in terms off so called permission and permission less the permission block chains or when everybody kind of knows everybody and you don't really get to participate without people knowing who you are and as a result, have some basis to trust your behavior and your transactions. So things are a lot calmer. It's a lot easier. You don't really need all the supercomputing activity. Whereas for AI the assertion was that intelligence is computer herbal. And with some of these exa scale technologies, we're trying to, you know, we're getting to that point for permission. Less Blockchain. The assertion is that trust is computer ble and, it turns out for trust to be computer ble. It's really computational intensive because you want to provide an incentive based such that good actors are rewarded and back actors. Bad actors are punished, and it is worth their while to actually put all their effort towards good behavior. And that's really what you see, embodied in like a Bitcoin system where the chain has been safe over the many years. It's been no attacks, no breeches. Now people have lost money because they forgot the password or some other. You know, custody of the accounts have not been trustable, but the chain itself has managed to produce that, So that's an example of computational intensity yielding trust. So that suddenly becomes really interesting intelligence trust. What else is computer ble that we could do if we if we had enough power? >>Well, that's really interesting the way you described it, essentially the the confluence of crypto graphics software engineering and, uh, game theory, Really? Where the bad actors air Incentive Thio mined Bitcoin versus rip people off because it's because because there are lives better eso eso so that so So Okay, so make it make the connection. I mean, you sort of did. But But I want to better understand the connection between, you know, supercomputing and HPC and Blockchain. We know we get a crypto for sure, like in mind a Bitcoin which gets harder and harder and harder. Um and you mentioned there's other things that we can potentially compute on trust. Like what? What else? What do you thinking there? >>Well, I think that, you know, the next big thing that we are really seeing is in communication. And it turns out, as I was saying earlier, that these highly computational intensive algorithms and models show up in all sorts of places like, you know, in five g communication, there's something called the memo multi and multi out and to optimally manage that traffic such that you know exactly what beam it's going to and worth Antenna is coming from that turns out to be a non trivial, you know, partial differential equation. So next thing you know, you've got HPC in there as and he didn't expect it because there's so much data to be sent, you really have to do some data reduction and data processing almost at the point of inception, if not at the point of aggregation. So that has led to edge computing and edge data centers. And that, too, is now. People want some level of computational capability at that place like you're building a microcontroller, which traditionally would just be a, you know, small, low power, low cost thing. And people want victor instructions. There. People want matrix algebra there because it makes sense to process the data before you have to ship it. So HPCs cropping up really everywhere. And then finally, when you're trying to accelerate things that obviously GP use have been a great example of that mixed signal technologies air coming to do analog and digital at the same time, quantum technologies coming so you could do the you know, the usual analysts to buy to where you have analog, digital, classical quantum and then see which, you know, with what lies where all of that is coming. And all of that is essentially resting on HBC. >>That's interesting. I didn't realize that HBC had that position in five G with multi and multi out. That's great example and then I o t. I want to ask you about that because there's a lot of discussion about real time influencing AI influencing at the edge on you're seeing sort of new computing architectures, potentially emerging, uh, video. The acquisition of arm Perhaps, you know, amore efficient way, maybe a lower cost way of doing specialized computing at the edge it, But it sounds like you're envisioning, actually, supercomputing at the edge. Of course, we've talked to Dr Mark Fernandez about space born computers. That's like the ultimate edge you got. You have supercomputers hanging on the ceiling of the International space station, but But how far away are we from this sort of edge? Maybe not. Space is an extreme example, but you think factories and windmills and all kinds of edge examples where supercomputing is is playing a local role. >>Well, I think initially you're going to see it on base stations, Antenna towers, where you're aggregating data from a large number of endpoints and sensors that are gathering the data, maybe do some level of local processing and then ship it to the local antenna because it's no more than 100 m away sort of a thing. But there is enough there that that thing can now do the processing and do some level of learning and decide what data to ship back to the cloud and what data to get rid of and what data to just hold. Or now those edge data centers sitting on top of an antenna. They could have a half a dozen GPS in them. They're pretty powerful things. They could have, you know, one they could have to, but but it could be depending on what you do. A good a good case study. There is like surveillance cameras. You don't really need to ship every image back to the cloud. And if you ever need it, the guy who needs it is gonna be on the scene, not back at the cloud. So there is really no sense in sending it, Not certainly not every frame. So maybe you can do some processing and send an image every five seconds or every 10 seconds, and that way you can have a record of it. But you've reduced your bandwidth by orders of magnitude. So things like that are happening. And toe make sense of all of that is to recognize when things changed. Did somebody come into the scene or is it just you know that you know, they became night, So that's sort of a decision. Cannot be automated and fundamentally what is making it happen? It may not be supercomputing exa scale class, but it's definitely HPCs, definitely numerically oriented technologies. >>Shane, what do you see happening in chip architectures? Because, you see, you know the classical intel they're trying to put as much function on the real estate as possible. We've seen the emergence of alternative processors, particularly, uh, GP use. But even if f b g A s, I mentioned the arm acquisition, so you're seeing these alternative processors really gain momentum and you're seeing data processing units emerge and kind of interesting trends going on there. What do you see? And what's the relationship to HPC? >>Well, I think a few things are going on there. Of course, one is, uh, essentially the end of Moore's law, where you cannot make the cycle time be any faster, so you have to do architectural adjustments. And then if you have a killer app that lends itself to large volume, you can build silicon. That is especially good for that now. Graphics and gaming was an example of that, and people said, Oh my God, I've got all these cores in there. Why can't I use it for computation? So everybody got busy making it 64 bit capable and some grass capability, And then people say, Oh, I know I can use that for a I And you know, now you move it to a I say, Well, I don't really need 64 but maybe I can do it in 32 or 16. So now you do it for that, and then tens, of course, come about. And so there's that sort of a progression of architecture, er trumping, basically cycle time. That's one thing. The second thing is scale out and decentralization and distributed computing. And that means that the inter communication and intra communication among all these notes now becomes an issue big enough issue that maybe it makes sense to go to a DPU. Maybe it makes sense to go do some level of, you know, edge data centers like we were talking about on then. The third thing, really is that in many of these cases you have data streaming. What is really coming from I o t, especially an edge, is that data is streaming and when data streaming suddenly new architectures like F B G. A s become really interesting and and and hold promise. So I do see, I do see FPG's becoming more prominent just for that reason, but then finally got a program all of these things on. That's really a difficulty, because what happens now is that you need to get three different ecosystems together mobile programming, embedded programming and cloud programming. And those are really three different developer types. You can't hire somebody who's good at all three. I mean, maybe you can, but not many. So all of that is challenges that are driving this this this this industry, >>you kind of referred to this distributed network and a lot of people you know, they refer to this. The next generation cloud is this hyper distributed system. When you include the edge and multiple clouds that etcetera space, maybe that's too extreme. But to your point, at least I inferred there's a There's an issue of Leighton. See, there's the speed of light s So what? What? What is the implication then for HBC? Does that mean I have tow Have all the data in one place? Can I move the compute to the data architecturally, What are you seeing there? >>Well, you fundamentally want to optimize when to move data and when to move, Compute. Right. So is it better to move data to compute? Or is it better to bring compute to data and under what conditions? And the dancer is gonna be different for different use cases. It's like, really, is it worth my while to make the trip, get my processing done and then come back? Or should I just developed processing capability right here? Moving data is really expensive and relatively speaking. It has become even more expensive, while the price of everything has dropped down its price has dropped less than than than like processing. So it is now starting to make sense to do a lot of local processing because processing is cheap and moving data is expensive Deep Use an example of that, Uh, you know, we call this in C two processing like, you know, let's not move data. If you don't have to accept that we live in the age of big data, so data is huge and wants to be moved. And that optimization, I think, is part of what you're what you're referring to. >>Yeah, So a couple examples might be autonomous vehicles. You gotta have to make decisions in real time. You can't send data back to the cloud flip side of that is we talk about space borne computers. You're collecting all this data You can at some point. You know, maybe it's a year or two after the lived out its purpose. You ship that data back and a bunch of disk drives or flash drives, and then load it up into some kind of HPC system and then have at it and then you doom or modeling and learn from that data corpus, right? I mean those air, >>right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, driverless vehicles is a great example, because it is obviously coming fast and furious, no pun intended. And also, it dovetails nicely with the smart city, which dovetails nicely with I o. T. Because it is in an urban area. Mostly, you can afford to have a lot of antenna, so you can give it the five g density that you want. And it requires the Layton sees. There's a notion of how about if my fleet could communicate with each other. What if the car in front of me could let me know what it sees, That sort of a thing. So, you know, vehicle fleets is going to be in a non opportunity. All of that can bring all of what we talked about. 21 place. >>Well, that's interesting. Okay, so yeah, the fleets talking to each other. So kind of a Byzantine fault. Tolerance. That problem that you talk about that z kind of cool. I wanna I wanna sort of clothes on quantum. It's hard to get your head around. Sometimes You see the demonstrations of quantum. It's not a one or zero. It could be both. And you go, What? How did come that being so? And And of course, there it's not stable. Uh, looks like it's quite a ways off, but the potential is enormous. It's of course, it's scary because we think all of our, you know, passwords are already, you know, not secure. And every password we know it's gonna get broken. But give us the give us the quantum 101 And let's talk about what the implications. >>All right, very well. So first off, we don't need to worry about our passwords quite yet. That that that's that's still ways off. It is true that analgesic DM came up that showed how quantum computers can fact arise numbers relatively fast and prime factory ization is at the core of a lot of cryptology algorithms. So if you can fact arise, you know, if you get you know, number 21 you say, Well, that's three times seven, and those three, you know, three and seven or prime numbers. Uh, that's an example of a problem that has been solved with quantum computing, but if you have an actual number, would like, you know, 2000 digits in it. That's really harder to do. It's impossible to do for existing computers and even for quantum computers. Ways off, however. So as you mentioned, cubits can be somewhere between zero and one, and you're trying to create cubits Now there are many different ways of building cubits. You can do trapped ions, trapped ion trapped atoms, photons, uh, sometimes with super cool, sometimes not super cool. But fundamentally, you're trying to get these quantum level elements or particles into a superimposed entanglement state. And there are different ways of doing that, which is why quantum computers out there are pursuing a lot of different ways. The whole somebody said it's really nice that quantum computing is simultaneously overhyped and underestimated on. And that is that is true because there's a lot of effort that is like ways off. On the other hand, it is so exciting that you don't want to miss out if it's going to get somewhere. So it is rapidly progressing, and it has now morphed into three different segments. Quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum sensing. Quantum sensing is when you can measure really precise my new things because when you perturb them the quantum effects can allow you to measure them. Quantum communication is working its way, especially in financial services, initially with quantum key distribution, where the key to your cryptography is sent in a quantum way. And the data sent a traditional way that our efforts to do quantum Internet, where you actually have a quantum photon going down the fiber optic lines and Brookhaven National Labs just now demonstrated a couple of weeks ago going pretty much across the, you know, Long Island and, like 87 miles or something. So it's really coming, and and fundamentally, it's going to be brand new algorithms. >>So these examples that you're giving these air all in the lab right there lab projects are actually >>some of them are in the lab projects. Some of them are out there. Of course, even traditional WiFi has benefited from quantum computing or quantum analysis and, you know, algorithms. But some of them are really like quantum key distribution. If you're a bank in New York City, you very well could go to a company and by quantum key distribution services and ship it across the you know, the waters to New Jersey on that is happening right now. Some researchers in China and Austria showed a quantum connection from, like somewhere in China, to Vienna, even as far away as that. When you then put the satellite and the nano satellites and you know, the bent pipe networks that are being talked about out there, that brings another flavor to it. So, yes, some of it is like real. Some of it is still kind of in the last. >>How about I said I would end the quantum? I just e wanna ask you mentioned earlier that sort of the geopolitical battles that are going on, who's who are the ones to watch in the Who? The horses on the track, obviously United States, China, Japan. Still pretty prominent. How is that shaping up in your >>view? Well, without a doubt, it's the US is to lose because it's got the density and the breadth and depth of all the technologies across the board. On the other hand, information age is a new eyes. Their revolution information revolution is is not trivial. And when revolutions happen, unpredictable things happen, so you gotta get it right and and one of the things that these technologies enforce one of these. These revolutions enforce is not just kind of technological and social and governance, but also culture, right? The example I give is that if you're a farmer, it takes you maybe a couple of seasons before you realize that you better get up at the crack of dawn and you better do it in this particular season. You're gonna starve six months later. So you do that to three years in a row. A culture has now been enforced on you because that's how it needs. And then when you go to industrialization, you realize that Gosh, I need these factories. And then, you know I need workers. And then next thing you know, you got 9 to 5 jobs and you didn't have that before. You don't have a command and control system. You had it in military, but not in business. And and some of those cultural shifts take place on and change. So I think the winner is going to be whoever shows the most agility in terms off cultural norms and governance and and and pursuit of actual knowledge and not being distracted by what you think. But what actually happens and Gosh, I think these exa scale technologies can make the difference. >>Shaheen Khan. Great cast. Thank you so much for joining us to celebrate the extra scale day, which is, uh, on 10. 18 on dso. Really? Appreciate your insights. >>Likewise. Thank you so much. >>All right. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right here in the Cube. We're celebrating Exa scale day right back.

>>from around the globe. It's the queue >>with coverage of the global dot Next digital experience brought to you by Nutanix I'm stew Minuteman. And this is the Cube's coverage of the Nutanix dot next conference This year it is the global dot next digital experience pulling together the events that they had had dispersed across the globe, bringing to you online and happy to welcome to the program. First time guest but a long time Nutanix engineering person, Nanosys Bhattacharya. He's the senior vice president of engineering at Nutanix. Mono is everyone calls him. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right. So, you know, you know, we've been doing the Cube since, you know, over 10 years now, I remember the early days of talking to Dheeraj and the team when we first bring him on the Cube. It was about taking some of the things that the hyper scale hours did. And bringing that to the enterprise was actually you know, one of the interesting components there dial back a bunch of flash was new to the enterprise, and we've looked at one of the suppliers that was supplying to some of the very largest companies in the world. Um, and also some of the companies in the enterprise, like fusion io. It was a new flash package. And that was something that in the early days Nutanix used before it kind of went to more, I guess commodity flash. But, you know, develop a lead developer, engineers that I talked to came from, you know, Facebook and Oracle and others. Because understanding that database in that underlying substrate to be able to create what is hyper converged infrastructure that people know, is there. So maybe we could start, Just give the audience a little bit. You know, you've been with Nutanix long time, your background and what it is that you and your team work on into inside the company. >>Yeah. Thank you. So, uh, so I think I come from a distributed systems for a long time. I've been working in Oracle for seven years, building parts of the exit data system, some off the convergence that databases have done with beauty in storage. You could see the same hyper convergence in other platforms like I do where computed storage was brought together. I think the Nutanix story was all about Can we get this hyper convergence work for all types of applications. And that was the vision of the company that whatever black home that these hyper scaler to build this big database companies and built, can this be provided for everybody? For all types of applications? I think that was the main goal. And I think we're inching our way, but surely and safely, I think we will be there pretty much. Every application will run on Nutanix states yet. >>Alright, well, and if you look at kind of the underlying code that enables your capability, one of the challenges always out there is, you know, I build a code base with the technology and the skill sets I have. But things changed. I was talking about flash adoption before a lot of changes that happened in the storage world. Compute has gone through a lot of architect role changes, software and location with clouds and the like. So it's just talk about that code base. You talk about building distributed systems. How does Nutanix make sure that that underlying code doesn't kind of, you know, the window doesn't close on how long it's going to be able to take advantage of new features and functionality. >>Yeah, I think Nutanix from the beginning. One thing that we have made sure is that you know, we could always give continuous innovation the choices that we make get like we actually separated the, you know, the concerns between storage and compute. We always had a controller vm running the storage. We actually made sure we could run all of the storage and user space. And over time, what has happened is, every time we abraded us off where people got, you know, faster performance, they get more secure, They've got more scalable. And that, I think, is the key sauce. It's all software. It's all software defined infrastructure on commodity hardware and in the commodity hardware can be anywhere. I mean, you could pretty much build it on a brand. And now that we see, you know, with the hyper scaler is coming on with bare metal is a service. We see hyper convergence as the platform of the infrastructure on which enterprises are willing to run their applications in the public club. I mean, look at new being vmc Nutanix clusters is getting a lot of traction. Even before I mean, we have just gone out a lot of customer excitement there on that is what I think is the is the true nature of Nutanix being a pure software play and cheating every hardware you know uniform and whether this is available in the public cloud or it's available in your own data center, the black at the storage or the hyper visor or the entire infrastructure software that we have that doesn't cheat. So I think in some ways we're talking about this new eight. See, I call the hybrid Cloud Infrastructure to 88. The hyper converge infrastructure becomes the substrate for the new hybrid cloud infrastructure. >>Yeah, definitely. It was a misconception for a number of years. Is people looked at the Nutanix solution and they thought appliance. So if I got a new generation of hardware, if I needed to choose a different harbor vendor? Nutanix is a software company. As you describe you, got some news announced here at the dot next show. When it comes to some of those underlying storage pieces, bring us through. You know, we always we go around to the events and, you know, companies like Intel and NVIDIA always standing up with next generation. I teased up a little bit that we talked about Flash. What's happening with envy me? Storage class memories. So what is it that's new for the Nutanix platform? >>Yeah, let me start a little bit, you know, on what we have done for the last maybe a year or so before, you know, important details off why we did it. And, you know, what are the advantages that customers might tap? So one thing that was happening, particularly for the last decade or so, is flash was moving on to faster and faster devices. I mean, three d cross point came in memory glass storage was coming in, so one thing that was very apparent Waas You know, this is something that we need to get ready for now. At this point, what has happened is that the price point that you know, these high end devices can be a pain has come where mass consumption can happen. I mean, anybody can actually get a bunch of these obtained drives at a pretty good price point and then put it in their servers and expected performance. I think the important thing is we build some of the architectural pieces that can enable they, uh the, uh enable us to leverage the performance that these devices get. And for that, I think let's start with one of the beginning. Things that we did was make sure that we have things like fine grain metadata so that, you know, you could get things like data locality. So the data that the compute would need but stay in the server that was very important part or one of the key tenets of our platform. And now, as these devices come on, we want to actually access them without going over the next. You know, in the in the very last year, we released a Construct Autonomous Extent store. So which is not only making data local, but also make sure metadata as well, having the ability to actually have hyper convergence where we can actually get data and metadata from the same server. It benefits all of these newer class storage devices because the faster the devices, you wanted to be closer to the compute because the cost of getting to the device actually adds up to the Layton's. He adds up to the application with for the storage in the latest. I would say this the dot Next, What we're announcing is two technologies. One is awful lot store, which is our own user file system. It's a completely user space file system that is available. We're replacing gets before we're all our You know, this drives which will then be in me and beyond on. And we're also announcing SPD K, which is basically a way for accessing these devices from user space. So now, with both of these combine, what we can do is we can actually make an Iot from start to finish all in user space without crossing the Colonel without doing a bunch of memory copies. And that gives us the performance that we need to really get the value out of these. You know, the high end devices and the performance is what our high end applications are looking for. And that is, I think, what the true value that we can add your customs. >>Yes. Oh man, if I If I understand that right, it's really that deconstruction, if you will, of how storage interacts with the application it used to be. It was the scuzzy stack when I used to think about the interface and how far I had to go. And you mentioned that performance and latency is so important here. So I was removing from, you know, what traditionally was disc either externally or internally, moving up to flash, moving up to things like Envy me. I really need to re architect things internally. And therefore, this is this is how you're solving it, creating higher io. Maybe if you could bring us inside. You know, I think high performance Iot and low latency s ap hana was one of the early use cases that that that everyone talked about that we had to re architect. What does this mean for those solutions? Any other kind of key applications that this is especially useful for? >>Yeah, I think all the high end demanding applications talk about smp, Hana allow the healthcare applications. Look at epic meditate. Look at the high end data basis because we already run a bunch of databases, but the highest and databases still are not running on a C. I. I think this technology will enable you know the most demanding oracle or Sequels. Of course, Chris, you know all the analytics applications they will now be running on a CSO. The dream that we had every application, whatever it is, they can run on the C I. A platform that can become a reality. And that is what we're really looking forward to it. So our customers don't have to go to three year for anything. If if if. If it is an application that you want to run a CEO is the best platform for your application that is working what you want. >>Alright, So let me make sure I understand this because while this is a software update, this is leveraging underlying new hardware components that are there. I'm not taking a three year old server on to do this. Can you help understand? You know, what do they need to buy to be able to enable this type of solution? >>So I think the best thing is we already came up with the all envy. Any platform and everything beyond that is software change. Everything that we are is just available on an upgrade. So of course you need a basic platform which actually has the high end devices themselves, which we have hard for a year or so But the good thing about Nutanix is once you upgrade, it's like a Tesla you know you have. But once you get that software upgrade, you get that boosted performance. So you don't need to go and buy new hardware again. As long as you have the required devices, you get the performance just by upgrading it to the new the new version of the air soft. I think that is one of the things that we have done forever. I mean, every time we have upgraded, you will see. Over the years, our performance is increased and very seldom has a pastoral required to change. You know their internal hardware to get the performance. Now, another thing that we have is we support heterogeneous clusters. So on your existing cluster, let's say that you're running on flash and you want to get you all. And maybe you can add nodes, you know, which are all envy me and get the performance on those notes. While these flash can take the non critical pieces which is not requiring you to understand performance but still give you the density off water. VD I are maybe a general server virtualization. While these notes can take into account the highest on databases or highest analytic applications, so the same cluster and slowly expand to actually take this opportunity of applications on >>Yeah, thats this is such an important point We had identified very early on. When you move to HV I. Hopefully, that should be the last time that you need to do a migration any time. Anybody that has dealt with storage moving from one generation to the next or even moving frames can be so challenging. Once you're in that cool, you can upgrade code. You can add new nodes. You can balance things out. So it's such an important point there. UH, you stated earlier. The underlying A OS is now built very much for that hybrid cloud world. You talk about things like clusters that you have now have the announcement with AWS now that they have their bare metal certain service. So do we feel we're getting a balancing out of what's available for customers, whether it's in their own data center in a hosted environment where they have it, or the public cloud to take capabilities like you were talking about with the new storage class? >>Yeah, I think I see most of these public clouds are already providing you, uh, hardware which hasn't being built in which I'm sure in the future we have storage class memory building. So all the enterprise applications that were running on prim with the latency guarantees, you know, with the performance and throughput guarantees can be available in the public cloud, too. And I think that is a very critical thing. Because today, when you lift and shift, one of the biggest problems that all their customers face is when you're in the cloud, you find that enterprise applications are not built for it, so they have to either really protect it or they have to make, you know, using a new cloud native constructs. And in this model, you can use the bare metal service and run the enterprise applications in exactly the same way as you would run in your private data center. And that is a key tell, because now, with this 100 our data mobility framework where we can actually take both storage and applications, you know do lose them a trust public and the private cloud we now have the ability to actually control on application end to end. A customer can choose Now that they want to run it, they don't have to think. Oh, yeah? I have to move to that. Have to be architected. You can choose the cloud and run it in the panel service exactly as you were honoring your private data center. You've been utilizing things like Nutanix clusters. >>Great, well mannered. Last last question I have for you. You know, we really dug down into some of the architectural underpinnings in some of the pieces inside the box. Bring it back up high level, if you would, from a customer standpoint, key things that they should be understanding that Nutanix is giving them with all of these new capabilities. You mentioned the block store and the SPK. >>Yeah, I think for the customer, the biggest advantage is that the platform that they chose for you know, you see, some of virtualization can be used for the most demanding workloads. They're free to use, you know, Nutanix for smp, Hana for high end Oracle databases, Big data validates they can actually use it for all the healthcare apps that I mentioned epic and meditate and at the same time, keep the investment and hardware that they already have. So I think the fact about this Tesla kernel analogy that we always think is so act with Nutanix. I think with the same hardware, uh, investment that they have done with this new architecture. They can actually start leveraging that and utilize it for more and more, you know, demanding workloads. I think that is the key advantages. Without changing your you know, the appliances or your san or your servers, you get the benefit of running the most demanding applications. >>Well, congratulations to you and the team. Thanks so much for sharing all the updates here. Alright. And stay tuned for more coverage from the Nutanix global dot Next digital experience. I'm stew minimum. And as always, Thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> You know, businesses have a staggering number of options today to support mission-critical applications. And much of the world's mission-critical data happens to live on converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure is really designed to support the most demanding workloads. Words like resilience, performance, scalability, recoverability, et cetera. Those are the attributes that define converged infrastructure. Now with COVID-19 the digital transformation mandate, as we all know has been accelerated and buyers are demanding more from their infrastructure, and in particular converged infrastructure. Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this power panel where we're going to explore converged infrastructure, look at its past, its present and its future. And we're going to explore several things. The origins of converged infrastructure, why CI even came about. And what's its historic role been in terms of supporting mission-critical applications. We're going to look at modernizing workloads. What are the opportunities and the risks and what's converged infrastructures role in that regard. How has converged infrastructure evolved? And how will it support cloud and multicloud? And ultimately what's the future of converged infrastructure look like? And to examine these issues, we have three great guests, Trey Layton is here. He is the senior vice president for converged infrastructure and software engineering and architecture at Dell Technologies. And he's joined by Joakim Zetterblad. Who's the director of the SAP practice for EMEA at Dell technologies. And our very own Stu Miniman. Stu is a senior analyst at Wikibon. Guys, great to see you all welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great. >> Trey, I'm going to start with you. Take us back to the early days of converged infrastructure. Why was it even formed? Why was it created? >> Well, if you look back just over a decade ago, a lot of organizations were deploying virtualized environments. Everyone was consolidated on virtualization. A lot of technologies were emerging to enhance that virtualization outcome, meaning acceleration capabilities and storage arrays, networking. And there was a lot of complexity in integrating all of those underlying infrastructure technologies into a solution that would work reliably. You almost had to have a PhD and all of the best practices of many different companies integrations. And so we decided as Dell EMC, Dell Technologies to invest heavily in this area of manufacturing best practices and packaging them so that customers could acquire those technologies and already integrated fully regression tested architecture that could sustain virtually any type of workload that a company would run. And candidly that packaging, that rigor around testing produced a highly reliable product that customers now rely on heavily to operationalize greater efficiencies and run their most critical applications that power their business and ultimately the world economy. >> Now Stu, cause you were there. I was as well at the early days of the original announcement of CI. Looking back and sort of bringing it forward Stu, what was the business impact of converged infrastructure? >> Well, Dave as Trey was talking about it was that wave of virtualization had gone from, you know, just supporting many applications to being able to support all of your applications. And especially if you talk about those high value, you know business mission, critical applications, you want to make sure that you've got a reliable foundation. What the Dell tech team has done for years is make sure that they fully understand, you know the life cycle of testing that needs to happen. And you don't need to worry about, you know, what integration testing you need to do, looking at support major CS and doing a lot of your own sandbox testing, which for the most part was what enterprises needed to do. You said, okay, you know, I get the gear, I load the virtualization and then I have to see, you know, tweak everything to figure out how my application works. The business impact Dave, is you want to spend more time focusing on the business, not having to turn all the dials and worry about, do I get the performance I need? Does it have the reliability uptime that we need? And especially if we're talking about those business critical applications, of course, these are the ones that are running 24 by seven and if they go down, my business goes down with it. >> Yeah, and of course, you know, one of the other major themes we saw with conversion infrastructure was really attacking the IT labor problem. You had separate compute or server teams, storage teams, networking teams, they oftentimes weren't talking together. So there was a lot of inefficiency that converged infrastructure was designed to attack. But I want to come to the SAP expert. Joakim, that's really your wheelhouse. What is it about converged infrastructure that makes it suitable for SAP application specifically? >> You know, if you look at a classic SAP client today, there's really three major transformational waves that all SAP customers are faced with today, it's the move to S/4HANA, the introduction of this new platform, which needs to happen before 2027. It's the introduction of a multicloud cloud or operating model. And last but not least, it is the introduction of new digitization or intelligent technologies such as IOT, machine learning or artificial intelligence. And that drove to the need of a platform that could address all these three transformational waves. It came with a lot of complexity, increased costs, increased risk. And what CI did so uniquely was to provide that Edge to Core to Cloud strategy. Fully certified for both HANA, non HANA workloads for the classical analytical and transactional workloads, as well as the new modernization technologies such as IOT, machine learning, big data and analytics. And that created a huge momentum for converged in our SAP accounts. >> So Trey, I want to go to you cause you're the deep technical expert here. Joakim just mentioned uniqueness. So what are the unique characteristics of converged infrastructure that really make it suitable for handling the most demanding workloads? >> Well, converged infrastructure by definition is the integration of an external storage array with a highly optimized compute platform. And when we build best practices around integrating those technologies together, we essentially package optimizations that allow a customer to increase the quantity of users that are accessing those workloads or the applications that are driving database access in such a way where you can predictably understand consumption and utilization in your environment. Those packaged integrations are kind of like. You know, I have a friend that owns a race car shop and he has all kinds of expertise to build cars, but he has a vehicle that he buys is his daily driver. The customization that they've created to build race cars are great for the race cars that go on the track, but he's building a car on his own, it didn't make any sense. And so what customers found was the ability to acquire a packaged infrastructure with all these infrastructure optimizations, where we package these best practices that gave customers a reliable, predictable, and fully supported integration, so they didn't have to spend 20 hour support calls trying to discover and figure out what particular customization that they had employed for their application, that had some issue that they needed to troubleshoot and solve. This became a standard out of the box integration that the best and the brightest package so that customers can consume it at scale. >> So Joakim, I want to ask you let's take the sort of application view. Let's sort of flip the picture a little bit and come at it from that prism. How, if you think about like core business applications, how have they evolved over the better part of the last decade and specifically with regard to the mission-critical processes? >> So what we're seeing in the process industry and in the industry of mission-critical applications is that they have gone from being very monolithic systems where we literally saw a single ERP components such as all three or UCC. Whereas today customers are faced with a landscape of multiple components. Many of them working both on and off premise, there are multicloud strategies in place. And as we mentioned before, with the introduction of new IOT technologies, we see that there is a flow of information of data that requires a whole new set of infrastructure of components of tools to make these new processes happen. And of course, the focus in the end of the day is all on business outcomes. So what industries and companies doesn't want to do is to focus all their time in making sure that these new technologies are working together, but really focusing on how can I make an impact? How can I start to work in a better way with my clients? So the focus on business outcome, the focus on integrating multiple systems into a single consolidated approach has become so much more important, which is why the modernization of the underlying infrastructure is absolutely key. Without consolidation, without a simplification of the management and orchestration. And without the cloud enabled platform, you won't get there. >> So Stu that's key, what Joakim just said in terms of modernizing the application as being able to manage them, not as one big monolith, but integration with other key systems. So what are the options? Wikibon has done some research on this, but what are the options for modernizing workloads, whether it's on-Prem or off-prem and what are some of the trade offs there? >> Yeah, so Dave, first of all, you know, one of the biggest challenges out there is you don't just want to, you know, lift and shift. If anybody's read research for it from Wikibon, Dave, for a day, for the 10 years, I've been part of it talks about the challenges, if you just talk about migrating, because while it sounds simple, we understand that there are individual customizations that every customer's made. So you might get part of the way there, but there's often the challenges that will get in the way that could cause failure. And as we talked about for you, especially your mission-critical applications, those are the ones that you can't have downtime. So absolutely customers are reevaluating their application portfolio. You know, there are a lot of things to look at. First of all, if you can, certain things can be moved to SaaS. You've seen certain segments of the market. Absolutely SaaS can be preferred methodology, if you can go there. One of the biggest hurdles for SaaS of course, is there's retraining of the workforce. Certain applications they will embracing of that because they can take advantage of new features, get to be able to use that wherever they are. But in other cases, there are the SaaS doesn't have the capability or it doesn't fit into the workflow of the business. The cloud operating model is something we've been talking about it with you Dave, for many years. When you've seen rapid maturation of what originally was called "private cloud", but really was just virtualization plus with a little bit of a management layer on top. But now much of the automation that you build in AI technologies, you know, Trey's got a whole team working on things that if you talk to his team, it sounds very similar to what you had the same conversation should have with cloud providers. So "cloud" as an operating model, not a destination is what we're going for and being able to take advantage of automation and the like. So where your application sits, absolutely some consideration. And what we've talked about Dave, you know, the governance, the security, the reliability, the performance are all reasons why being able to keep things, you know, under my environment with an infrastructure that I have control over is absolutely one of the reasons why I might keep things more along a converged infrastructure, rather than just saying to go through the challenge of migration and optimizing and changing to something in a more of a cloud native methodology. >> What about technical debt? Trey, people talk about technical debt as a bad thing, what is technical debt? Why do I want to avoid it? And how can I avoid it? And specifically, I know, Trey, I've thrown a lot of questions at you yet, but what is it about converged infrastructure and its capabilities that helped me avoid that technical debt? >> Well, it's an interesting thing, when you deploy an environment to support a mission-critical application, you have to make a lot of implementation decisions. Some of those decisions may take you down a path that may have a finite life. And that once you reached the life expectancy of that particular configuration, you now have debt that you have to reconcile. You have to change that architecture, that configuration. And so what we do with converged infrastructure is we dedicate a team of product management, an entire product management organization, a team of engineers that treat the integrations of the architecture as a releases. And we think long range about how do we avoid not having to change the underlying architecture. And one of the greatest testaments to this is in our conversion infrastructure products over the last 11 years, we've only saw two major architectural changes while supporting generational changes in underlying infrastructure capabilities well beyond when we first started. So converged infrastructure approach is about how do we build an architecture that allows you to avoid those dead-end pathways in those integration decisions that you would normally have to make on your own. >> Joakim, I wanted to ask you, you've mentioned monolithic applications before. That's sort of, we're evolving beyond that with application architectures, but there's still a lot of monoliths out there so. And a lot of customers want to modernize those application and workloads. What, in your view, what are you seeing as the best path and the best practice for modernizing some of those monolithic workloads? >> Yeah, so Dave, as clients today are trying to build a new intelligent enterprise, which is one of SAP's leading a guidance today. They needed to start to look at how to integrate all these different systems and applications that we talked about before into the common business process framework that they have. So consolidating workloads from big data to HANA, non HANA systems, cloud, non-cloud applications into a single framework is an absolute key to that modernization strategy. The second thing which I also mentioned before is to take a new grip around orchestration and management. We know that as customers seek this intelligent approach with both analytical data, as well as experience and transactional data, we must look for new ways to orchestrate and manage those application workloads and data flows. And this is where we slowly, slowly enter into the world of a enterprise data strategy. And that's again, where converged as a very important part to play in order to build these next generation platforms that can both consolidate, simplify. And at the same time enable us to work in a cloud enabled fashion with our cloud operating model that most of our clients seek today. >> So Stu, why can't I just shove all this stuff into the public cloud and call it a day? >> Yeah, well, Dave, we've seen some people that, you know, I have a cloud first strategy and often those are the same companies that are quickly doing what we call "repatriation". I bristle a little bit when I hear these, because often it's, I've gone to the cloud without understanding how I take advantage of it, not understanding the full financial ramifications what I'm going to need to do. And therefore they quickly go back to a world that they understand. So, cloud is not a silver bullet. We understand in technology, Dave, you know, things are complicated. There's all the organizational operational pieces they do. There are excellent cloud services and it's really it's innovation. You know, how do I take advantage of the data that I have, how I allow my application to move forward and respond to the business. And really that is not something that only happens in the public clouds. If I can take advantage of infrastructure that gets me along that journey to more of a cloud model, I get the business results. So, you know, automation and APIs and everything and the Ops movement are not something that are only in the public clouds, but something that we should be embracing holistically. And absolutely, that ties into where today and tomorrow's converge infrastructure are going. >> Yeah, and to me, it comes down to the business case too. I mean, you have to look at the risk-reward. The risk of changing something that's actually working for your business versus what the payback is going to be. You know, if it ain't broken, don't fix it, but you may want to update it, change the oil every now and then, you know, maybe prune some deadwood and modernize it. But Trey, I want to come back to you. Let's take a look at some of the options that customers have. And there are a lot of options, as I said at the top. You've got do it yourself, you got a hyper-converged infrastructure, of course, converged infrastructure. What are you seeing as the use case for each of these deployment options? >> So, build your own. We're really talking about an organization that has the expertise in-house to understand the integration standards that they need to deploy to support their environment. And candidly, there are a lot of customers that have very unique application requirements that have very much customized to their environment. And they've invested in the expertise to be able to sustain that on an ongoing basis. And build your own is great for those folks. The next in converged infrastructure, where we're really talking about an external storage array with applications that need to use data services native to a storage array. And self-select compute for scaling that compute for their particular need, and owning that three tiers architecture and its associated integration, but not having to sustain it because it's converged. There are enormous number of applications out there that benefit from that. I think the third one was, you talked about hyper-converged. I'll go back to when we first introduced our hyper-converged product to the market. Which is now leading the industry for quite some time, VxRail. We had always said that customers will consume hyper-converged and converged for different use cases and different applications. The maturity of hyper-converged has come to the point where you can run virtually any application that you would like on it. And this comes down to really two vectors of consideration. One, am I going to run hyper-converged versus converged based on my operational preference? You know, hyper-converged incorporates software defined storage, predominantly a compute operating plane. Converge as mentioned previously uses that external storage array has some type of systems fabric and dedicated compute resources with access into those your operational preference is one aspect of it. And then having applications that need the data services of an external storage, primary storage array are the other aspect of deciding whether those two things are needed in your particular environment. We find more and more customers out there that have an investment of both, not one versus the other. That's not to say that there aren't customers that only have one, they exist, but a majority of customers have both. >> So Joakim, I want to come back to the sort of attributes from the application requirements perspective. When you think about mission-critical, you think about availability, scale, recoverability, data protection. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those attributes. And again, what is it about converged infrastructure that that is the best fit and the right strategic fit for supporting those demanding applications and workloads? >> Now, when it comes to SAP, we're talking about clients and customers, most mission-critical data and information and applications. And hence the requirements on the underlying infrastructure is absolutely on the very top of what the IT organization needs to deliver. This is why, when we talk about SAP, the requirements for high availability protection disaster recovery is very, very high. And it doesn't only involve a single system. As mentioned before, SAP is not a standalone application, but rather a landscape of systems that needs to be kept consistent. And that's what a CI platform does so well. It can consolidate workloads, whether it's big data or the transactional standard workloads of SAP, ERP or UCC. The converged platforms are able to put the very highest of availability protection standards into this whole landscape and making a really unique platform for CI workloads. And at the same time, it enables our customers to accelerate those modernization journeys into things such as ML, AI, IOT, even blockchain scenarios, where we've built out our capabilities to accelerate these implementations with the help of the underlying CI platforms and the rest of the SAP environment. >> Got it. Stu, I want to go to you. You had mentioned before the cloud operating model and something that we've been talking about for a long time and Wikibon. So can converged infrastructure substantially mimic that cloud operating model and how so? What are the key ingredients of being able to create that experience on-prem? >> Yeah, well, Dave as, we've watched for more than the last decade, the cloud has looked more and more like some of the traditional enterprise things that we would look for and the infrastructure in private clouds have gone more and more cloud-like and embrace that model. So, you know, I got, I think back to the early days, Dave, we talked about how cloud was supposed to just be, you know, "simple". If you look at deploying in the cloud today, it is not simple at all that. There are so many choices out there, you know, way more than I had an initial data center. In the same way, you know, I think, you know, the original converged infrastructure from Dell, if you look at the feedback, the criticism was, you know, oh, you can have it in any color you want, as long as black, just like the Ford model T. But it was that simplicity and consistency that helped build out most of what we were talking about the cloud models I wanted to know that I had a reliable substrate platform to build on top of it. But if you talk about Dave today and in the future, what do we want? First of all, I need that operating model in a multicloud world. So, you know, we look at the environments that can spread, but beyond just a single cloud, because customers today have multiple environments, absolutely hybrid is a big piece of that. We look at what VMware's doing, look at Microsoft, Red Hat, even Amazon are extended beyond just a cloud and going into hybrid and multicloud models. Automation, a critical piece of that. And we've seen, you know, great leaps and bounds in the last couple of generations of what's happening in CI to take advantage of automation. Because we know we've gone beyond what humans can just manage themselves and therefore, you know, true automation is helping along those environments. So yes, absolutely, Dave. You know, that the lines are blurred between what the private cloud and the public cloud. And it's just that overall cloud operating model and helping customers to deal with their data and their applications, regardless of where it lives. >> Well, you know, Trey in the early days of cloud and conversion infrastructure, that homogeneity that Stu was talking about any color, as long as it's black. That was actually an advantage to removing labor costs, that consistency and that standardization. But I'm interested in how CI has evolved, its, you know, added in optionality. I mean Joakim was just talking about blockchain, so all kinds of new services. But how has CCI evolved in the better part of the last decade and what are some of the most recent innovations that people should be thinking about or aware of? >> So I think the underlying experience of CI has remained relatively constant. And we talk about the experience that customers get. So if you just look at the data that we've analyzed for over a decade now, you know, one of the data points that I love is 99% of our customers who buy CI say they have virtually no downtime anymore. And, that's a great testament. 84% of our customers say that they have that their IT operations run more efficiently. The reality around how we delivered that in the past was through services and humans performing these integrations and the upkeep associated with the sustaining of the architecture. What we've focused on at Dell Technologies is really bringing technologies that allow us to automate those human integrations and best practices. In such a way where they can become more repeatable and consumable by more customers. We don't have to have as many services folks deploying these systems as we did in the past. Because we're using software intelligence to embed that human knowledge that we used to rely on individuals exclusively for. So that's one of the aspects of the architecture. And then just taking advantage of all the new technologies that we've seen introduce over the last several years from all flash architectures and NVMe on the horizon, NVMe over fabric. All of these things as we orchestrate them in software will enable them to be more consumable by the average everyday customer. Therefore it becomes more economical for them to deploy infrastructure on premises to support mission-critical applications. >> So Stu, what about cloud and multicloud, how does CI support that? Where do those fit in? Are they relevant? >> Yeah, Dave, so absolutely. As I was talking about before, you know, customers have hybrid and multicloud environments and managing across these environments are pretty important. If I look at the Dell family, obviously they're leveraging heavily VMware as the virtualization layer. And VMware has been moving heavily as to how support containerized and incubates these environments and extend their management to not only what's happening in the data center, but into the cloud environment with VMware cloud. So, you know, management in a multicloud world Dave, is one of those areas that we definitely have some work to do. Something we've looked at Wikibon for the last few years. Is how will multicloud be different than multi-vendor? Because that was not something that the industry had done a great job of solving in the past. But you know, customers are looking to take advantage of the innovation, where it is in the services. And you know, the data first architecture is something that we see and therefore that will bring them to many services and many places. >> Oh yeah, I was talking before about in the early days of CI and even a lot of organizations, some organizations, anyway, there's still these sort of silos of, you know, storage, networking, compute resources. And you think about DevOps, where does DevOps fit into this whole equation? Maybe Stu you could take a stab at it and anybody else who wants to chime in. >> Yeah, so Dave, great, great point there. So, you know, when we talk about those silos, DevOps is one of those movements to really help the unifying force to help customers move faster. And so therefore the development team and the operations team are working together. Things like security are not a bolt-in but something that can happen along the entire path. A more recent addition to the DevOps movement also is something like FinOps. So, you know, how do we make sure that we're not just having finance sign off on things and look back every quarter, but in real time, understand how we're architecting things, especially in the cloud so that we remain responsible for that model. So, you know, speed is, you know, one of the most important pieces for business and therefore the DevOps movement, helping customers move faster and, you know, leverage and get value out of their infrastructure, their applications and their data. >> Yeah, I would add to this that I think the big transition for organizations, cause I've seen it in developing my own organization, is getting IT operators to think programmatically instead of configuration based. Use the tool to configure a device. Think about how do we create programmatic instruction to interacts with all of the devices that creates that cloud-like adaptation. Feeds in application level signaling to adapt and change the underlying configuration about that infrastructure to better run the application without relying upon an IT operator, a human to make a change. This, sort of thinking programmatically is I think one of the biggest obstacles that the industry face. And I feel really good about how we've attacked it, but there is a transformation within that dialogue that every organization is going to navigate through at their own pace. >> Yeah, infrastructure is code automation, this a fundamental to digital transformation. Joakim, I wonder if you could give us some insight as you talk to SAP customers, you know, in Europe, across the EMEA, how does the pandemic change this? >> I think the pandemic has accelerated some of the movements that we already saw in the SAP world. There is obviously a force for making sure that we get our financial budgets in shape and that we don't over spend on our cost levels. And therefore it's going to be very important to see how we can manage all these new revenue generating projects that IT organizations and business organizations have planned around new customer experience initiatives, new supply chain optimization. They know that they need to invest in these projects to stay competitive and to gain new competitive edge. And where CI plays an important part is in order to, first of all, keep costs down in all of these projects, make sure to deliver a standardized common platform upon which all these projects can be introduced. And then of course, making sure that availability and risks are kept high versus at a minimum, right? Risk low and availability at a record high, because we need to stay on with our clients and their demands. So I think again, CI is going to play a very important role. As we see customers go through this pandemic situation and needing to put pressure on both innovation and cost control at the same time. And this is where also our new upcoming data strategies will play a really important part as we need to leverage the data we have better, smarter and more efficient way. >> Got it. Okay guys, we're running out of time, but Trey, I wonder if you could, you know break out your telescope or your crystal ball, give us some visibility into the futures of converged infrastructure. What should we be expecting? >> So if you look at the last release of this last technology that we released in power one, it was all about automation. We'll build on that platform to integrate other converged capability. So if you look at the converged systems market hyper-converged is very much an element of that. And I think that we're trending to is recognizing that we can deliver an architecture that has hyper-converged and converged attributes all in a single architecture and then dial up the degrees of automation to create more adaptations for different type of application workloads, not just your traditional three tier application workloads, but also those microservices based applications that one may historically think, maybe it's best to that off premises. We feel very confident that we are delivering platforms out there today that can run more economically on premises, provide better security, better data governance, and a lot of the adaptations, the enhancements, the optimizations that we'll deliver in our converged platforms of the future about colliding new infrastructure models together, and introducing more levels of automation to have greater adaptations for applications that are running on it. >> Got it. Trey, we're going to give you the last word. You know, if you're an architect of a large organization, you've got some mission-critical workloads that, you know, you're really trying to protect. What's the takeaway? What's really the advice that you would give those folks thinking about the sort of near and midterm and even longterm? >> My advice is to understand that there are many options. We sell a lot of independent component technologies and data centers that run every organization's environment around the world. We sell packaged outcomes and hyper-converged and converged. And a lot of companies buy a little bit of build your own, they buy some converged, they buy some hyper-converged. I would employ everyone, especially in this climate to really evaluate the packaged offerings and understand how they can benefit their environment. And we recognize that everything that there's not one hammer and everything is a nail. That's why we have this broad portfolio of products that are designed to be utilized in the most efficient manners for those customers who are consuming our technologies. And converged and hyper-converge are merely another way to simplify the ongoing challenges that organizations have in managing their data estate and all of the technologies they're consuming at a rapid pace in concert with the investments that they're also making off premises. So this is very much the technologies that we talked today are very much things that organizations should research, investigate and utilize where they best fit in their organization. >> Awesome guys, and of course there's a lot of information at dell.com about that. Wikibon.com has written a lot about this and the many, many sources of information out there. Trey, Joakim, Stu thanks so much for the conversation. Really meaty, a lot of substance, really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> You know, businesses have a staggering number of options today to support mission-critical applications. And much of the world's mission-critical data happens to live on converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure is really designed to support the most demanding workloads. Words like resilience, performance, scalability, recoverability, et cetera. Those are the attributes that define converged infrastructure. Now with COVID-19 the digital transformation mandate, as we all know has been accelerated and buyers are demanding more from their infrastructure, and in particular converged infrastructure. Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this power panel where we're going to explore converged infrastructure, look at its past, its present and its future. And we're going to explore several things. The origins of converged infrastructure, why CI even came about. And what's its historic role been in terms of supporting mission-critical applications. We're going to look at modernizing workloads. What are the opportunities and the risks and what's converged infrastructures role in that regard. How has converged infrastructure evolved? And how will it support cloud and multicloud? And ultimately what's the future of converged infrastructure look like? And to examine these issues, we have three great guests, Trey Layton is here. He is the senior vice president for converged infrastructure and software engineering and architecture at Dell Technologies. And he's joined by Joakim Zetterblad. Who's the director of the SAP practice for EMEA at Dell technologies. And our very own Stu Miniman. Stu is a senior analyst at Wikibon. Guys, great to see you all welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great. >> Trey, I'm going to start with you. Take us back to the early days of converged infrastructure. Why was it even formed? Why was it created? >> Well, if you look back just over a decade ago, a lot of organizations were deploying virtualized environments. Everyone was consolidated on virtualization. A lot of technologies were emerging to enhance that virtualization outcome, meaning acceleration capabilities and storage arrays, networking. And there was a lot of complexity in integrating all of those underlying infrastructure technologies into a solution that would work reliably. You almost had to have a PhD and all of the best practices of many different companies integrations. And so we decided as Dell EMC, Dell Technologies to invest heavily in this area of manufacturing best practices and packaging them so that customers could acquire those technologies and already integrated fully regression tested architecture that could sustain virtually any type of workload that a company would run. And candidly that packaging, that rigor around testing produced a highly reliable product that customers now rely on heavily to operationalize greater efficiencies and run their most critical applications that power their business and ultimately the world economy. >> Now Stu, cause you were there. I was as well at the early days of the original announcement of CI. Looking back and sort of bringing it forward Stu, what was the business impact of converged infrastructure? >> Well, Dave as Trey was talking about it was that wave of virtualization had gone from, you know, just supporting many applications to being able to support all of your applications. And especially if you talk about those high value, you know business mission, critical applications, you want to make sure that you've got a reliable foundation. What the Dell tech team has done for years is make sure that they fully understand, you know the life cycle of testing that needs to happen. And you don't need to worry about, you know, what integration testing you need to do, looking at support major CS and doing a lot of your own sandbox testing, which for the most part was what enterprises needed to do. You said, okay, you know, I get the gear, I load the virtualization and then I have to see, you know, tweak everything to figure out how my application works. The business impact Dave, is you want to spend more time focusing on the business, not having to turn all the dials and worry about, do I get the performance I need? Does it have the reliability uptime that we need? And especially if we're talking about those business critical applications, of course, these are the ones that are running 24 by seven and if they go down, my business goes down with it. >> Yeah, and of course, you know, one of the other major themes we saw with conversion infrastructure was really attacking the IT labor problem. You had separate compute or server teams, storage teams, networking teams, they oftentimes weren't talking together. So there was a lot of inefficiency that converged infrastructure was designed to attack. But I want to come to the SAP expert. Joakim, that's really your wheelhouse. What is it about converged infrastructure that makes it suitable for SAP application specifically? >> You know, if you look at a classic SAP client today, there's really three major transformational waves that all SAP customers are faced with today, it's the move to S/4HANA, the introduction of this new platform, which needs to happen before 2027. It's the introduction of a multicloud cloud or operating model. And last but not least, it is the introduction of new digitization or intelligent technologies such as IOT, machine learning or artificial intelligence. And that drove to the need of a platform that could address all these three transformational waves. It came with a lot of complexity, increased costs, increased risk. And what CI did so uniquely was to provide that Edge to Core to Cloud strategy. Fully certified for both HANA, non HANA workloads for the classical analytical and transactional workloads, as well as the new modernization technologies such as IOT, machine learning, big data and analytics. And that created a huge momentum for converged in our SAP accounts. >> So Trey, I want to go to you cause you're the deep technical expert here. Joakim just mentioned uniqueness. So what are the unique characteristics of converged infrastructure that really make it suitable for handling the most demanding workloads? >> Well, converged infrastructure by definition is the integration of an external storage array with a highly optimized compute platform. And when we build best practices around integrating those technologies together, we essentially package optimizations that allow a customer to increase the quantity of users that are accessing those workloads or the applications that are driving database access in such a way where you can predictably understand consumption and utilization in your environment. Those packaged integrations are kind of like. You know, I have a friend that owns a race car shop and he has all kinds of expertise to build cars, but he has a vehicle that he buys is his daily driver. The customization that they've created to build race cars are great for the race cars that go on the track, but he's building a car on his own, it didn't make any sense. And so what customers found was the ability to acquire a packaged infrastructure with all these infrastructure optimizations, where we package these best practices that gave customers a reliable, predictable, and fully supported integration, so they didn't have to spend 20 hour support calls trying to discover and figure out what particular customization that they had employed for their application, that had some issue that they needed to troubleshoot and solve. This became a standard out of the box integration that the best and the brightest package so that customers can consume it at scale. >> So Joakim, I want to ask you let's take the sort of application view. Let's sort of flip the picture a little bit and come at it from that prism. How, if you think about like core business applications, how have they evolved over the better part of the last decade and specifically with regard to the mission-critical processes? >> So what we're seeing in the process industry and in the industry of mission-critical applications is that they have gone from being very monolithic systems where we literally saw a single ERP components such as all three or UCC. Whereas today customers are faced with a landscape of multiple components. Many of them working both on and off premise, there are multicloud strategies in place. And as we mentioned before, with the introduction of new IOT technologies, we see that there is a flow of information of data that requires a whole new set of infrastructure of components of tools to make these new processes happen. And of course, the focus in the end of the day is all on business outcomes. So what industries and companies doesn't want to do is to focus all their time in making sure that these new technologies are working together, but really focusing on how can I make an impact? How can I start to work in a better way with my clients? So the focus on business outcome, the focus on integrating multiple systems into a single consolidated approach has become so much more important, which is why the modernization of the underlying infrastructure is absolutely key. Without consolidation, without a simplification of the management and orchestration. And without the cloud enabled platform, you won't get there. >> So Stu that's key, what Joakim just said in terms of modernizing the application as being able to manage them, not as one big monolith, but integration with other key systems. So what are the options? Wikibon has done some research on this, but what are the options for modernizing workloads, whether it's on-Prem or off-prem and what are some of the trade offs there? >> Yeah, so Dave, first of all, you know, one of the biggest challenges out there is you don't just want to, you know, lift and shift. If anybody's read research for it from Wikibon, Dave, for a day, for the 10 years, I've been part of it talks about the challenges, if you just talk about migrating, because while it sounds simple, we understand that there are individual customizations that every customer's made. So you might get part of the way there, but there's often the challenges that will get in the way that could cause failure. And as we talked about for you, especially your mission-critical applications, those are the ones that you can't have downtime. So absolutely customers are reevaluating their application portfolio. You know, there are a lot of things to look at. First of all, if you can, certain things can be moved to SAS. You've seen certain segments of the market. Absolutely SAS can be preferred methodology, if you can go there. One of the biggest hurdles for SAS of course, is there's retraining of the workforce. Certain applications they will embracing of that because they can take advantage of new features, get to be able to use that wherever they are. But in other cases, there are the SAS doesn't have the capability or it doesn't fit into the workflow of the business. The cloud operating model is something we've been talking about it with you Dave, for many years. When you've seen rapid maturation of what originally was called "private cloud", but really was just virtualization plus with a little bit of a management layer on top. But now much of the automation that you build in AI technologies, you know, Trey's got a whole team working on things that if you talk to his team, it sounds very similar to what you had the same conversation should have with cloud providers. So "cloud" as an operating model, not a destination is what we're going for and being able to take advantage of automation and the like. So where your application sits, absolutely some consideration. And what we've talked about Dave, you know, the governance, the security, the reliability, the performance are all reasons why being able to keep things, you know, under my environment with an infrastructure that I have control over is absolutely one of the reasons why am I keep things more along a converged infrastructure, rather than just saying to go through the challenge of migration and optimizing and changing to something in a more of a cloud native methodology. >> What about technical debt? Trey, people talk about technical debt as a bad thing, what is technical debt? Why do I want to avoid it? And how can I avoid it? And specifically, I know, Trey, I've thrown a lot of questions at you yet, but what is it about converged infrastructure and its capabilities that helped me avoid that technical debt? >> Well, it's an interesting thing, when you deploy an environment to support a mission-critical application, you have to make a lot of implementation decisions. Some of those decisions may take you down a path that may have a finite life. And that once you reached the life expectancy of that particular configuration, you now have debt that you have to reconcile. You have to change that architecture, that configuration. And so what we do with converged infrastructure is we dedicate a team of product management, an entire product management organization, a team of engineers that treat the integrations of the architecture as a releases. And we think long range about how do we avoid not having to change the underlying architecture. And one of the greatest testaments to this is in our conversion infrastructure products over the last 11 years, we've only saw two major architectural changes while supporting generational changes in underlying infrastructure capabilities well beyond when we first started. So converged infrastructure approach is about how do we build an architecture that allows you to avoid those dead-end pathways in those integration decisions that you would normally have to make on your own. >> Joakim, I wanted to ask you, you've mentioned monolithic applications before. That's sort of, we're evolving beyond that with application architectures, but there's still a lot of monoliths out there so. And a lot of customers want to modernize those application and workloads. What, in your view, what are you seeing as the best path and the best practice for modernizing some of those monolithic workloads? >> Yeah, so Dave, as clients today are trying to build a new intelligent enterprise, which is one of SAP's leading a guidance today. They needed to start to look at how to integrate all these different systems and applications that we talked about before into the common business process framework that they have. So consolidating workloads from big data to HANA, non HANA systems, cloud, non-cloud applications into a single framework is an absolute key to that modernization strategy. The second thing which I also mentioned before is to take a new grip around orchestration and management. We know that as customers seek this intelligent approach with both analytical data, as well as experience and transactional data, we must look for new ways to orchestrate and manage those application workloads and data flows. And this is where we slowly, slowly enter into the world of a enterprise data strategy. And that's again, where converged as a very important part to play in order to build these next generation platforms that can both consolidate, simplify. And at the same time enable us to work in a cloud enabled fashion with our cloud operating model that most of our clients seek today. >> So Stu, why can't I just shove all this stuff into the public cloud and call it a day? >> Yeah, well, Dave, we've seen some people that, you know, I have a cloud first strategy and often those are the same companies that are quickly doing what we call "repatriation". I bristle a little bit when I hear these, because often it's, I've gone to the cloud without understanding how I take advantage of it, not understanding the full financial ramifications what I'm going to need to do. And therefore they quickly go back to a world that they understand. So, cloud is not a silver bullet. We understand in technology, Dave, you know, things are complicated. There's all the organizational operational pieces they do. There are excellent cloud services and it's really it's innovation. You know, how do I take advantage of the data that I have, how I allow my application to move forward and respond to the business. And really that is not something that only happens in the public clouds. If I can take advantage of infrastructure that gets me along that journey to more of a cloud model, I get the business results. So, you know, automation and APIs and everything and the Ops movement are not something that are only in the public clouds, but something that we should be embracing holistically. And absolutely, that ties into where today and tomorrow's converge infrastructure are going. >> Yeah, and to me, it comes down to the business case too. I mean, you have to look at the risk-reward. The risk of changing something that's actually working for your business versus what the payback is going to be. You know, if it ain't broken, don't fix it, but you may want to update it, change the oil every now and then, you know, maybe prune some deadwood and modernize it. But Trey, I want to come back to you. Let's take a look at some of the options that customers have. And there are a lot of options, as I said at the top. You've got do it yourself, you got a hyper-converged infrastructure, of course, converged infrastructure. What are you seeing as the use case for each of these deployment options? >> So, build your own. We're really talking about an organization that has the expertise in-house to understand the integration standards that they need to deploy to support their environment. And candidly, there are a lot of customers that have very unique application requirements that have very much customized to their environment. And they've invested in the expertise to be able to sustain that on an ongoing basis. And build your own is great for those folks. The next in converged infrastructure, where we're really talking about an external storage array with applications that need to use data services native to a storage array. And self-select compute for scaling that compute for their particular need, and owning that three tiers architecture and its associated integration, but not having to sustain it because it's converged. There are enormous number of applications out there that benefit from that. I think the third one was, you talked about hyper-converged. I'll go back to when we first introduced our hyper-converged product to the market. Which is now leading the industry for quite some time, VxRail. We had always said that customers will consume hyper-converged and converged for different use cases and different applications. The maturity of hyper-converged has come to the point where you can run virtually any application that you would like on it. And this comes down to really two vectors of consideration. One, am I going to run hyper-converged versus converged based on my operational preference? You know, hyper-converged incorporates software defined storage, predominantly a compute operating plane. Converge as mentioned previously uses that external storage array has some type of systems fabric and dedicated compute resources with access into those your operational preference is one aspect of it. And then having applications that need the data services of an external storage, primary storage array are the other aspect of deciding whether those two things are needed in your particular environment. We find more and more customers out there that have an investment of both, not one versus the other. That's not to say that there aren't customers that only have one, they exist, but a majority of customers have both. >> So Joakim, I want to come back to the sort of attributes from the application requirements perspective. When you think about mission-critical, you think about availability, scale, recoverability, data protection. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those attributes. And again, what is it about converged infrastructure that that is the best fit and the right strategic fit for supporting those demanding applications and workloads? >> Now, when it comes to SAP, we're talking about clients and customers, most mission-critical data and information and applications. And hence the requirements on the underlying infrastructure is absolutely on the very top of what the IT organization needs to deliver. This is why, when we talk about SAP, the requirements for high availability protection disaster recovery is very, very high. And it doesn't only involve a single system. As mentioned before, SAP is not a standalone application, but rather a landscape of systems that needs to be kept consistent. And that's what a CI platform does so well. It can consolidate workloads, whether it's big data or the transactional standard workloads of SAP, ERP or UCC. The converged platforms are able to put the very highest of availability protection standards into this whole landscape and making a really unique platform for CI workloads. And at the same time, it enables our customers to accelerate those modernization journeys into things such as ML, AI, IOT, even blockchain scenarios, where we've built out our capabilities to accelerate these implementations with the help of the underlying CI platforms and the rest of the SAP environment. >> Got it. Stu, I want to go to you. You had mentioned before the cloud operating model and something that we've been talking about for a long time and Wikibon. So can converged infrastructure substantially mimic that cloud operating model and how so? What are the key ingredients of being able to create that experience on-prem? >> Yeah, well, Dave is, we've watched for more than the last decade, the cloud has looked more and more like some of the traditional enterprise things that we would look for and the infrastructure in private clouds have gone more and more cloud-like and embrace that model. So, you know, I got, I think back to the early days, Dave, we talked about how cloud was supposed to just be, you know, "simple". If you look at deploying in the cloud today, it is not simple at all that. There are so many choices out there, you know, way more than I had an initial data center. In the same way, you know, I think, you know, the original converged infrastructure from Dell, if you look at the feedback, the criticism was, you know, oh, you can have it in any color you want, as long as black, just like the Ford model T. But it was that simplicity and consistency that helped build out most of what we were talking about the cloud models I wanted to know that I had a reliable substrate platform to build on top of it. But if you talk about Dave today and in the future, what do we want? First of all, I need that operating model in a multicloud world. So, you know, we look at the environments that can spread, but beyond just a single cloud, because customers today have multiple environments, absolutely hybrid is a big piece of that. We look at what VMware's doing, look at Microsoft, Red Hat, even Amazon are extended beyond just a cloud and going into hybrid and multicloud models. Automation, a critical piece of that. And we've seen, you know, great leaps and bounds in the last couple of generations of what's happening in CI to take advantage of automation. Because we know we've gone beyond what humans can just manage themselves and therefore, you know, true automation is helping along those environments. So yes, absolutely, Dave. You know, that the lines are blurred between what the private cloud and the public cloud. And it's just that overall cloud operating model and helping customers to deal with their data and their applications, regardless of where it is. >> Well, you know, Trey in the early days of cloud and conversion infrastructure, that homogeneity that Stu was talking about any color, as long as it's black. That was actually an advantage to removing labor costs, that consistency and that standardization. But I'm interested in how CI has evolved, its, you know, added in optionality. I mean Joakim was just talking about blockchain, so all kinds of new services. But how has CCI evolved in the better part of the last decade and what are some of the most recent innovations that people should be thinking about or aware of? >> So I think the underlying experience of CI has remained relatively constant. And we talk about the experience that customers get. So if you just look at the data that we've analyzed for over a decade now, you know, one of the data points that I love is 99% of our customers who buy CI say they have virtually no downtime anymore. And, that's a great testament. 84% of our customers say that they have that their IT operations run more efficiently. The reality around how we delivered that in the past was through services and humans performing these integrations and the upkeep associated with the sustaining of the architecture. What we've focused on at Dell Technologies is really bringing technologies that allow us to automate those human integrations and best practices. In such a way where they can become more repeatable and consumable by more customers. We don't have to have as many services folks deploying these systems as we did in the past. Because we're using software intelligence to embed that human knowledge that we used to rely on individuals exclusively for. So that's one of the aspects of the architecture. And then just taking advantage of all the new technologies that we've seen introduce over the last several years from all flash architectures and NVMe on the horizon, NVMe over fabric. All of these things as we orchestrate them in software will enable them to be more consumable by the average everyday customer. Therefore it becomes more economical for them to deploy infrastructure on premises to support mission-critical applications. >> So Stu, what about cloud and multicloud, how does CI support that? Where do those fit in? Are they relevant? >> Yeah, Dave, so absolutely. As I was talking about before, you know, customers have hybrid and multicloud environments and managing across these environments are pretty important. If I look at the Dell family, obviously they're leveraging heavily VMware as the virtualization layer. And VMware has been moving heavily as to how support containerized and incubates these environments and extend their management to not only what's happening in the data center, but into the cloud environment with VMware cloud. So, you know, management in a multicloud world Dave, is one of those areas that we definitely have some work to do. Something we've looked at Wikibon for the last few years. Is how will multicloud be different than multi-vendor? Because that was not something that the industry had done a great job of solving in the past. But you know, customers are looking to take advantage of the innovation, where it is in the services. And you know, the data first architecture is something that we see and therefore that will bring them to many services and many places. >> Oh yeah, I was talking before about in the early days of CI and even a lot of organizations, some organizations, anyway, there's still these sort of silos of, you know, storage, networking, compute resources. And you think about DevOps, where does DevOps fit into this whole equation? Maybe Stu you could take a stab at it and anybody else who wants to chime in. >> Yeah, so Dave, great, great point there. So, you know, when we talk about those silos, DevOps is one of those movements to really help the unifying force to help customers move faster. And so therefore the development team and the operations team are working together. Things like security are not a built-in but something that can happen along the entire path. A more recent addition to the DevOps movement also is something like FinOps. So, you know, how do we make sure that we're not just having finance sign off on things and look back every quarter, but in real time, understand how we're architecting things, especially in the cloud so that we remain responsible for that model. So, you know, speed is, you know, one of the most important pieces for business and therefore the DevOps movement, helping customers move faster and, you know, leverage and get value out of their infrastructure, their applications and their data. >> Yeah, I would add to this that I think the big transition for organizations, cause I've seen it in developing my own organization, is getting IT operators to think programmatically instead of configuration based. Use the tool to configure a device. Think about how do we create programmatic instruction to interacts with all of the devices that creates that cloud-like adaptation. Feeds in application level signaling to adapt and change the underlying configuration about that infrastructure to better run the application without relying upon an IT operator, a human to make a change. This, sort of thinking programmatically is I think one of the biggest obstacles that the industry face. And I feel really good about how we've attacked it, but there is a transformation within that dialogue that every organization is going to navigate through at their own pace. >> Yeah, infrastructure is code automation, this a fundamental to digital transformation. Joakim, I wonder if you could give us some insight as you talk to SAP customers, you know, in Europe, across the EMEA, how does the pandemic change this? >> I think the pandemic has accelerated some of the movements that we already saw in the SAP world. There is obviously a force for making sure that we get our financial budgets in shape and that we don't over spend on our cost levels. And therefore it's going to be very important to see how we can manage all these new revenue generating projects that IT organizations and business organizations have planned around new customer experience initiatives, new supply chain optimization. They know that they need to invest in these projects to stay competitive and to gain new competitive edge. And where CI plays an important part is in order to, first of all, keep costs down in all of these projects, make sure to deliver a standardized common platform upon which all these projects can be introduced. And then of course, making sure that availability and risks are kept high versus at a minimum, right? Risk low and availability at a record high, because we need to stay on with our clients and their demands. So I think again, CI is going to play a very important role. As we see customers go through this pandemic situation and needing to put pressure on both innovation and cost control at the same time. And this is where also our new upcoming data strategies will play a really important part as we need to leverage the data we have better, smarter and more efficient way. >> Got it. Okay guys, we're running out of time, but Trey, I wonder if you could, you know break out your telescope or your crystal ball, give us some visibility into the futures of converged infrastructure. What should we be expecting? So if you look at the last release of this last technology that we released in power one, it was all about automation. We'll build on that platform to integrate other converged capability. So if you look at the converged systems market hyper-converged is very much an element of that. And I think that we're trending to is recognizing that we can deliver an architecture that has hyper-converged and converged attributes all in a single architecture and then dial up the degrees of automation to create more adaptations for different type of application workloads, not just your traditional three tier application workloads, but also those microservices based applications that one may historically think, maybe it's best to that off premises. We feel very confident that we are delivering platforms out there today that can run more economically on premises, provide better security, better data governance, and a lot of the adaptations, the enhancements, the optimizations that we'll deliver in our converged platforms of the future about colliding new infrastructure models together, and introducing more levels of automation to have greater adaptations for applications that are running on it. >> Got it. Trey, we're going to give you the last word. You know, if you're an architect of a large organization, you've got some mission-critical workloads that, you know, you're really trying to protect. What's the takeaway? What's really the advice that you would give those folks thinking about the sort of near and midterm and even longterm? >> My advice is to understand that there are many options. We sell a lot of independent component technologies and data centers that run every organization's environment around the world. We sell packaged outcomes and hyper-converged and converged. And a lot of companies buy a little bit of build your own, they buy some converged, they buy some hyper-converged. I would employ everyone, especially in this climate to really evaluate the packaged offerings and understand how they can benefit their environment. And we recognize that everything that there's not one hammer and everything is a nail. That's why we have this broad portfolio of products that are designed to be utilized in the most efficient manners for those customers who are consuming our technologies. And converged and hyper-converge are merely another way to simplify the ongoing challenges that organizations have in managing their data estate and all of the technologies they're consuming at a rapid pace in concert with the investments that they're also making off premises. So this is very much the technologies that we talked today are very much things that organizations should research, investigate and utilize where they best fit in their organization. >> Awesome guys, and of course there's a lot of information at dell.com about that. Wikibon.com has written a lot about this and the many, many sources of information out there. Trey, Joakim, Stu thanks so much for the conversation. Really meaty, a lot of substance, really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of you. I path live the release show brought to you by you. I path everyone. Welcome back. This is Dave Vellante for the human. We've been covering the r P a market now for quite some time. Yeah, I pastor said this huge announcement. Then we're gonna update you on the space. As you know, we've been quantifying this with our partners at ET are one of the areas that you I path is obviously focused on talking about scaling. If you wanna win in r p. A. You got a scale you want to scale. You gotta have cloud, though. Eric Metaphor is here. He's the director of product management. That you either path, We're gonna talk Cloud. Tara. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Didn't get to see you as well. >>Yes. So you know, you guys have this huge announcement. Um, there are really four major components, if you will. That you extended the core platform. You talked about more automation? More ai smarter robots. The whole end to end. When you guys talk about the what? Sometimes it gets a little buzz, wordy, but that hyper automation, it's got to be end end. You've got to take a systems view, and then you got to put the tools in the hands of regular people. If you want to have a robot for every person, it's got to be simple. You've got to democratize uh, R p A. So my question is, where does the cloud fit into all this? >>You know, the cloud is the one that wraps it all up together. So for us, it's very important to make it easy for people to start instantly. You when you when you start to decide that you want to do in investment in r P A. And you really want to get started very quickly. And the second thing is, you eventually want to grow that are being investment, and the cloud makes it super easy for you to scale out of it. So Cloud makes it easy for you to start instantly and scaling. >>You think about the cloud you know, kind of started with. I guess it's sort of started with Salesforce back in 1999 kind of pre cloud. But certainly, you know so many functions and software areas have been cloud ified. You saw it with the email. You certainly where you start with I t s m. Which was kind of a heavy lift. You certainly see it with With HR. You seen it with data protection and backup. You see, do you see r p A. Is kind of the next big wave of cloud ification. >>Well, I absolutely think that cloud is gonna be very big in our be a. So from our perspective, when you start thinking about are you really thinking about automation? You want your automation is the light up and to save you money and to cut time for you and the investment thing that's going to remind what's going through your mind is not setting up infrastructure and, you know, configuring machines and selling software to make our p possible that the cloud makes it super easy for you to just cut down that I t infrastructure investment and go right ahead into what you really care about, which is the automation. So I think it's gonna be big that we allow you to just go directly to automation. I want RB start thinking about automation for good infrastructure lead that blood. >>So there's obviously you hear a lot of narrative in the marketplace about Cloud Cloud native. You see some companies or dogmatic will never do on had Frank's loop in a little while ago. So we're not doing our friend. That's Ah, that's a halfway house. You guys have taken a different approach, obviously started on Prem and now you're moving to the cloud. What? What's your philosophy on that? You know, Why wouldn't everybody do Cloud >>makes sense. So for us, we're very pragmatic about We believe that customers are different stages in their cloud adoption. Some people are extremely cloud friendly and have already put in place at plans for making sure that everything is already in the cloud. There are companies that are cloud native. They were born in the cloud that if you go a nascent install a piece of software in the local server, they would just laugh at you. So that's on one end of the spectrum and you want to make sure that those people can take full capability of our. On the other hand, there are people who are still, you know, coming from on Prem servers who are trying to move to the cloud to have plans to move to the cloud who would like to try some components in the CLI. But they still have some legacy systems that exist on Prem or a lot of systems that exist, and we want to make sure that those people are also able to take care of our key. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are industries or some companies and some industries that just are not ready for the cloud at all. And from our perspective, we want to democratize our key. We want our P available for everyone. So it is our philosophy that we're going to give you a multitude of the women options. If you want on Prem all the way, we got it. If you want cloud all the way we got, you want the hybrid assistant, We got it. We're just going to make it possible for you. And the deployment choice is your choice >>and the experience on Prem and Cloud. It's substantially identical. Would you say it's completely identical? What? What's the Delta? >>That is absolutely one of our goals. It is absolutely a gore for Google for you. I have to make sure that if you are an on Prem customer and you are starting to use some cloud, that your experiences seamless between on premises and in the cloud if you are a cloud customer and you have some components that still exist on Prem, if you want to use them, is very important for us that you have that common experience between both. So our software is designed with a common experience of the core, and it's actually the same software that runs from a user experience perspective in the cloud and on premises. Now, obviously, a lot of the infrastructure is different than a lot of the security aspects are different. But the user experience itself is, you know, consistently the same and intentionally that way. >>So when people talk about cloud or not, this is often site, you know, several things. Clearly, Layton sees a factor. If your data lives on, you know, on Prem, maybe you want to do things on Prem. There's local laws, data sovereignty. Uh, there's there's corporate edicts. Okay, we're not going to the cloud now. Maybe with Covad, that's that's changing somewhat, but so what are you hearing from customers just in terms of the rationale on Prem versus Cloud Hybrid. What are some of the decision points? >>Those are all good points, Dave. That's exactly the kind of stuff that we hear from our customers. So I think the main things that we hear in terms of cloud is about security people rightfully. So. When you start talking about cloud that they start asking, Can I really trust you as a vendor? With my data, I'm giving you my sales data. I'm giving you my HR data. I mean, this is some confidential information. Can I really trust you with that data? So that's one thing we absolutely, I start taking care off with large focus on security, and I can definitely dive deeper into that if you want. In addition to that, privacy and data sovereignty and where data lives is a big deal. So from our perspective, we host your data as an enterprise customer in three different locations. We host demand. We have servers in the United States. We have servers in Europe. We have servers in Japan, and as a customer you get to choose where data lives and we keep it the way you thoughts s so that kind of helps with data sovereignty because some countries, as you mentioned or some cos there's mentioned really have strict rules about that. Also, that helps with the legacy aspect. So if you're a customer in Japan, you would really prefer to use our Japan Data Center as opposed to a You know, your it's simple. >>The customers care, like where your cloud infrastructure lives. Are they asking you about that? They did they? Did they probe you on that? I mean specifically in terms of your cloud partner, like maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Absolutely. People definitely care about who we use and where the data is going to lie. And so from our perspective, for example, we're partnered with Microsoft and all our infrastructures. They don't Microsoft Azure, and, uh, we use data centers from Microsoft Azure through the whole start stuff, and that's a really good for multiple reads as it provides some very good uptime and reliability guarantees. In addition to that, they have service around the world that we can utilize so that we can expect, for example, for a next frontier becomes for example, in Australia, New Zealand. Then we want to create a reason they're being on top of Azure really allows us to go and spend that off pretty quickly and help customers that way. >>So we don't want things about Cloud is you can you can experiment very cheaply and you can fail fast and then iterating. So one of the things that struck me about your announcement was your community edition. I always look for, you know, Is there a community edition? Is that in addition, free for life? Is it neutered? In other words, can I actually do anything with it? Um, so I was happy to see that you guys had that. And also happy to see I mean, you've got I think it's early days for you, but I think that you have 200 enterprise customers, two orders of magnitude greater than that from the community edition. Did I get that right? >>That's great. Yes, absolutely. So when you think about the automation, cloud comes into play. But we have a community, the one for community, and that is the free version. And it's as you said, it's not like a pretrial or three limited time or something. It was just free as in free, free forever. We're gonna keep it to you. That's all you need. Just use it. No questions asked. You know, be happy with it. And the community edition actually is, is a fully functional product, and it allows you to do to get to attended robots one unattended robot and you get the option of connecting up the studio to two studios for designing animations. Work with those s so it's it's it allows it. That's all your automation needs, like small automation needs. Just go ahead and use it. If you're a small company or an individual or a small team, just use the community edition and you want to use that production. That's fine. No problem. That's all you need to go for it, then the and we have tens of thousands of community customers that are actively using the product. I'm not talking about the people that have ever signed up on left. Those are a lot more than that, but I'm talking about actually actively using the product. We've got tens of thousands of users as they're using it every month and built on that same infrastructure comes our Enterprise Edition, and the Enterprise edition is a basically the same infrastructure. But it adds a number of capabilities that are useful for a larger enterprise, of course, the most important of which is an uptime guarantee. So, you know, with the community edition, obviously we keep the service. Often we have very good response times, but with enterprise, you actually get enough time guarantee. In addition to that, you get access to our sport. They have a dedicated support team that works 24 7 around the clock and multiple reasons, and you get guaranteed response times with the mass away. On top of that, you get to be able to purchase is many robots as you want, and the list goes on and on and on. And it's very easy to go. Like you said, from playing with community, working with community, using that doing a trial, it's instinct as well. You just click a button, and all of a sudden, now you have five robots that each night that you can use for 60 days, and from there you can just go ahead and buy. >>We'll talk more about the uptime guarantee is that basically Azure s l A. So the data layer on top of that, you know, what are we measuring there? You could add some color. >>Absolutely. A startup and guarantee is built on top of azure, obviously. But we provide our own uptime guarantee regardless of what happens in the underlying system. Eso From our perspective, we guarantee that the service is going to be out at a specific amount of time. So we measure the number of minutes every month that the service should actually be up. And we measure the number of ministers service experiences, any kind of downtime. And we measure down. I'm in multiple ways. So we do outside in testing. Or, you know, if you're a customer, are you able to reach our service or not that we do incredible detail the monitoring and reporting on the life off our service itself from inside and And we look at any minute, any of those the services that we use underlying services are not responding to customers, and we count those down as well. So and we guarantee that there's a specific number of minutes that the service will be down, and that's >>it. And So if I understand it, you're really taking an application. You It's not the light on the server. It's It's the it's Can I get to you as a customer? Yeah. My state, my service, your >>perspective. Are you able to reach our service and do what you're expected to do with it? That's what you as a customer, really care about and in turn, that's the right way for us to be measuring up. >>And if I don't? If you don't hit, that s L. A. What? I get re credit. So how does that >>work? Absolutely, we have in our agreements and provision for penalties on the outside, we don't hit that escalate. And similarly for support. You know, if you call support, you're guaranteed depending on the severity of the issue on the back of contract that sport. Uh, you know how many minutes it takes us for somebody to be engaged with you on that issue? And we have very good numbers and hitting. That s L. A. And if we don't? They're also penalties on the outside for that. I think this is a real enterprise services you'd expect. >>Yeah, Great. I want to get to take some examples. You've got a couple 100 customers I think you mentioned should hopefully was up and running very quickly. I think you had some other examples, but but what can you share with us in terms of actual experience that your customers have seen? >>Absolutely. So we were thinking a very measured and careful approach, actually launching our service. So even though our service literally just launched last week fully to the world, we have actually been enabling enterprise customers we've been. We started a private preview with four customers and back in April of last year. And then we extended that to a public preview for any customer to try our service, as is no payment but also no guarantees. Back in the day, I want to say June of last year and then it took us all the way to December to feel comfortable that the services of the place where when we launch it, customers are going to get an excellent quality. And that's when we did a what we call a limited availability where we started on boarding enterprise customers step by step. We started with 10. We went to 50. We went to 100 now we have a couple 100 customers that already signed up, using the enterprise product every day as a guaranteed service and getting that Sele's that we've promised. So this was the time when we said, You know what? I think we've definitely been meeting our SL A's for five months running. Now we feel very comfortable lunch the rest, >>even if it's anecdotal. Have you discerned appreciable change in people's attitude toward cloud as a result of over? >>Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's just the aspect of working from home and having a lot of people just not available either demand infrastructure or demand servers made. A lot of people think about what is the best way to continue to run on information while they're at it. And obviously there's nothing easier than granting access to someone in the cloud to access a service from home. Then, if you were to bring them access to an on premise service with BP and all that stuff, and then if you want the provisioning new robots and machines and you have to do that again on premises, you know it's it's it's a lot more complicated. So a lot of customers are really starting to look at the cloud so many of the conversations that we would have, obviously we come in and they would ask us about the capabilities of our system. They would ask about security that ask a lot of things and those discussions, you know, anywhere between, you know, a few days to sometimes a few months. You know, some customers is just a great for those. The volume of customers that's asking about cloud is definitely increasing good for us. Obviously the number of deals were signed exalts increasing. But most importantly, I think that the number of customers that are benefiting from the value of starting instantly like cloud scale easily in the cloud. And you mentioned the example of Chipotle. And while that was engagement that we had obviously for the core of it, you know, they were very impressed with what they were able to do with The came in and falling and team had budgeted about two weeks to get started and set up everything so that they can build on top of that in their automation. And they, they chose wisely, do start in the cloud and As a result, they were done and all set up in one day. So it is definitely a huge difference between what you're able to get in the cloud person. So what you're doing? >>Well, you have passed all about automation. And and so is the cloud. The superpowers of this decade Cloud data A You guys were, you know, at the heart of all those Eric. Thanks so much for coming on the cube in explaining sort of your cloud angle. Really Appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Alright? And thank you for watching everybody. More coverage on the r p. A market analysis digging into your past recent announcement stable people want to have right back right after this short break. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>Yeah, >>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back, everybody. This is Dave Vellante of the Cube, and you're watching our continuous coverage of the IBM think Digital 2020 experience. And we're really pleased to have Rob High here. He's not only an IBM fellow bodies. He runs the vice president CTO of the IBM Edge Computing Initiative. Rob, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Good to see you. Which we're face to face, but yeah, that time to be safe and healthy, I guess. And did so edge obviously hot topic. Everybody has this sort of point of view would be interested in how IBM looks at edge. You define it and what your thoughts are on. It's evolution. >>Yeah, well, you know, there's ah really kind of two fairly distinct ways of thinking about the edge of the telcos. Our, ah, you know, they're creating edge capabilities in their own network facilities. We call that the network edge on the other side of the edge they that I think matters a lot to our enterprise businesses is there's remote on premise locations where they actually perform the work that they do, where the majority of people are, where the data that actually gets created is first formed and where the actions that they need to operate on are being taken. That is a lot of interest, because if we can move work workloads, Iot workloads to where that data is being created, where those actions are being taken Uh, not only can we dramatically reduce the late and see to those decisions, uh, but we can also ensure continuous operations and the failed in the presence of perhaps network failures. We can manage the growth of increasing demand for network bandwidth as Maura born data gets created and we can optimize the efficiency of both the business operations as well as the I t operations before that. So for us edge computing at the end of the day is about movie work where the data and the actions are being taken >>well, so this work from home, you know, gives a result of this pandemic is kind of creating a new stresses on networks and people are putting, you know, pouring money actually into beefing up that infrastructure is sort of an extension of what we used to think about edge. But I wonder if you could talk about some of the industries and the use cases that you guys we are seeing and notwithstanding, though assay that >>work from home pivot. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, look, we have seen ah, the need for placing workloads close to where it is being created and where actions have been picking in virtually every industry, the ones that are probably easier for us to think about and more common in terms of our mindset. Our is manufacturing. If you think about all the things that go on in a factory floor that need to be able to perform analytic in, uh, in the equipment and the processes that are performing in the affection for, If you think, for example, production quality. Uh, you know, if you've got a machine that's putting out parts and maybe it's welding seams on metal boxes, uh, you know, you want to be able to look at the quality of that seem at the moment that is being performed, so that if there are any problems, you can remediate that immediately rather than having that box move on down the line and find that you know the quality issues they were created earlier on now have exacerbated in other ways. Um, you know, so quality, productive quality. Ah, inspection production optimization in our world of Covic Cover 19 and worker safety and getting workers back to work and ensuring that you know people wearing the masks and are exercising social distancing. This is on the factory floor. Worker Insight is another major use case that we're seeing surface of lake with a lot of interest in using whether that's infrared cameras or Bluetooth beacons or infrared cameras. Any variety of devices that could be employed in the work area to help ensure that factories are operating efficiently, that workers are safe. Ah, and whether that's in a factor situation or even in an office situation or e a r in a warehouse or distribution center. And all these scenarios the the utility, the edge computing to bring to those use cases is tremendous. >>And a lot of these devices are unattended or infrequently attended. I always use the windmill example. Um, you know, you don't want to have to do a truck roll to figure out you know what the dynamics are going on, that at the windmill s, so I can instrument that. But what about the management of those devices you know from an autonomous standpoint? And and are you? What are you doing? Or are you doing anything in the autonomous managed space? >>Yeah. In fact, that's really kind of key here, because when you think about the scale, the diversity and the dynamic dynamism of equipment in these environments And as you point out, Dave, you know the lack of I t resource lack of skills on the factory floor, or even in the retail store or hotel or distribution center or any of these environments. The situation is very similar. You can't simply manage getting the right workloads to the right place at the right time. In sort of the traditional approach is, you have to really think about another autonomous approach to management and, you know, let the system the side for you. What software needs to be placed out there? Which software to put their If it's an analytic algorithm, what models to be associated with that software and getting to the right place at the right place at the right Time is a key Part of what we do in this thing that we call IBM Edge application manager is that product that we're really kind of bringing to market right now in the context of edge computing that facilitates this idea of autonomous management. >>You know, I wonder if you could comment Robb on just sort of the approach that you're taking with regard to providing products and services. I mean, we've seen a lot of, uh, situations where people are just essentially packing, packaging traditional, you know, compute and storage devices and sort of throwing it over the fence at the edge. Uh, and saying, Hey, here's our edge computing solution and another saying there's not a place for that. Maybe that will help flatten the network and, you know, provide Ah, gateway for storing on maybe processing information. But it seems to us that that that a bottoms up approach is going to be more appropriate. In other words, you've got engineers, you know who really understand operations, technology, people, maybe a new breed of developers emerging. How do you see the evolution you know of products and services and architectures at >>the edge? Yeah, so First of all, let me say IBM is taking a really pretty broad approach to edge computing we have. What I just described is IBM Edge Application Manager, which is the if you will the platform or the infrastructure on which we can manage the appointment of workloads out to the edge. But then add to that we do have a whole variety of edge and Nevil enabled applications that are being created are global service of practices and our AI applications business all are creating, um, variations of their product specific to address and exploit edge computing and to bring that advantage to the business. And of course, then we also have global services Consulting, which is a set of skilled resource, is who know we understand the transformations that business need to go through when they went, take advantage of edge computing and how to think about that in the context of both their journey to the cloud as well as now in this case, the edge. But also then how to go about implementing and delivering that, uh and then firmly further managing that now you know, coupled out then with at the end of the day you're also going to need the equipment, the devices, whether that is an intelligent automobile or other vehicle, whether that is an appellate, a robot or a camera, Um, or if those things are not intelligent. But you want to bring intelligence to them that how you augment that with servers and other forms of cluster computing that resides resident with the device. All of those are going to require participation from a very broad ecosystem. So we've been working with partners of whether that is vendors who create hardware and enabling that hardware in certifying that hardware to work with our management infrastructure or whether those are people who bring higher order services to the table that provide support for, let's, say, data cashing and facilitating the creation of applications, or whether those are device manufacturers that are embedding compute in their device equipment. All of that is part of our partnership ecosystem, Um, and then finally, you know, I need to emphasize that, you know, the world that we operate in is so vast and so large. There are so many edge devices in the marketplace, and that's growing so rapidly, and so many participants in that likewise There are a lot of other contributors to this ecosystem that we call edge computing. And so for all of those reasons, we have grounded IBM education manager on open source. We created an open source project called Open Rise, and we've been developing that, actually now, for about 4.5 years just recently, the Linux Foundation has adopted Stage one adoption of Open arising as part of its Lennox Foundation edge LF edge, uh, Reg X Foundry project. And so we think this is key to building out, Um, a ecosystem of partners who want to both contribute as well consumed value and create ecosystems around this common idea of how we manage the edge. >>Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the ecosystem, and it's too big for any one company toe to go it alone. But I want to tap your brain on just sort of architectures. And there's so many diverse use cases, you know, we don't necessarily see one uber architecture emerging, but there are some characteristics that we think are important at the edge you mentioned sort of real time or near real time. In many cases, it has to be real time you think about autonomous vehicles? Um, yeah. A lot of the data today is analog, and maybe it doesn't have to be digitized, but much of it will be, um, it's not all gonna be sent back to the cloud. It may not all have to be persisted. So we've envisioned this sort of purpose built, you know, architecture for certain use cases that can support real time. That maybe have, you know, arm based processors. Ah, or other alternative processors there that can do real time analytics at the edge and maybe sending portions of the data back. How do you see the architectures evolving from a technologist? >>Well, so certainly one of the things that we see at the edge is a tremendous premium being placed on things like energy consumption. So architectures they're able to operate efficiently with less power is ah is certainly an advantage to any of those architectures that are being brought aboard. Um, clearly, you know x 86 is a dominant architecture in any information technology endeavor. More specifically at the edge. We're seeing the emergence of lot of arm based architecture chips out there. In fact, I would guess that the majority of the edge devices today are not being created with, um, arm architectures, but it's the you know, but some of this is about the underlying architecture of the compute. But also then the augmentation of that compute the the compute Thea the CP use with other types of processing units. Whether those GPS, of course, we're seeing, you know, a number of deep use being created that are designed to be low power consuming, um, and have a tremendous amount of utility at the edge. There are alternate processing units, architectures that have been designed specifically for AI model based analytics. Uh, things like TP use and infuse and and, uh, and set around, which are very purpose built for certain kinds of intellect. And we think that those are starting to surface and become increasingly important. And then on the flip side of this is both the memory storage in network architectures which are sort of exotically different. But at least in terms of capacity, um have quite variability. Specifically, five G, though, is emerging and five g. While it's not necessarily the same computing, there is a lot of symbolism between edge and five G and the kinds of use cases that five G envisions are very similar to those that we've been talking about in the edge world as well. >>Rob, I want to ask you about sort of this notion of program ability at the edge. I mean, we've seen the success of infrastructure as code. Um, how do you see program ability occurring at the edge in terms of fostering innovation and maybe new developer bottles or maybe existing developer models at the edge? Yeah, >>we found a lot of utility in sort of leveraging what we now think of as cloud computing or cloud computing models. Uh, you know, the idea of continue ization extends itself very easily into the edge. Whether that is running a container in a docker runtime, let's say on an edge device which is, you know, resource constrained and purpose built and needs to focus on sort of a very small footprint or even edge clusters edge servers where we might be running a cluster of containers using our kubernetes platform called open shift. Um, you know the course of practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery. What we write a Otherwise think of his Dev ops. Ah, and, of course, the benefits they continue. Realization brings to the idea of component architectures. Three. Idea of loose coupling. The separation of concerns, the ability to mix and match different service implementations to be opposed. Your application are all ideas that were matured in the cloud world but have a lot of utility in the edge world. Now we actually call it edge native programming. But you can think of that as being mostly cloud native programming, with a further extension that there are certain things you have to be aware of what you're building for the edge. You have to recognize that resource is air limited. Unlike the cloud where we have this notion of infinite resource, you don't have that at the edge. Find and constrained resources. Be worried about, you know, Layton sees and the fact that there is a network that separates the different services and that network can be and reliable. It can introduce his own forms of Layton sees it, maybe bandwidth constrained and those air issues that you now have to factor into your thinking as you build out the logic of your application components. But I think by building on the cloud native programming about me paradigm. You know, we get to exercise sort of all of the skills that have been developing and maturing in the cloud world. Now, for the edge >>that makes sense. My last question is around security. I mean, I've often sort of tongue in cheek said, you know, building a moat around the castle doesn't work anymore. The queen i e. The data has left the castle. She's everywhere. So what about the security model? I mean, I feel like the edge is moving so fast you feel confident or what gives you confidence >>that we can secure the edge. You know, the edges does introduce some very interesting and challenging concerns with respect to security because, frankly, the compute is out there in the wild. You know, you've got computers in the store you've got, you know, people walking around the kiosks you have in the manufacturing site, you know, workers that are, you know, in the midst of all of this compute capability and so the attack surface is substantially bigger. And that's been a big focus for us, is how to the only way validate in 30 of the software that was But it also takes advantage of one of the key characters with edge computing to bring to the table, which is, if you think about it. You know, when you've got personal and private information being entered into quote system, the more often you move that personal private data around, and certainly the more that you move it to a central location and aggregate that with other data, the more of a target becomes more vulnerable, exposed that data becomes and by using edge computing, which moves the workloads out to the edge where that did has been created in some sense, you can process on it there and then move it back. They need central location, you don't have to aggregate it. And that actually in itself is a counterbalance of all of the other issues that we also describe about security by essentially not moving the personal privacy and in protecting by keeping it exactly where it began. >>You know, Rob, this is an exciting topic. Is a huge opportunity for IBM and Ginny in and talk about the trillion dollar opportunity and hybrid cloud and the Edge is a multi $1,000,000,000 opportunity for IBM and, uh So you just got to go get her done. But I really appreciate you coming on the Cube and sharing your insights. That awesome topic in the best interest of the David. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the thank you. Stay safe and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. This is our coverage of IBM. Think 2020 the digital. Think >>we'll be right back after this short break? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking we will soon be taking off on our way to altitude please keep your seatbelts fastened and remain in your seats we will be experiencing turbulence until we are above the clouds ladies and gentlemen we are now cruising at altitude sit back and enjoy the ride [Music] altitude is a community of thought leaders and pioneers cloud architects and enlightened network engineers who have individually and are now collectively leading their own IT teams and the industry on a path to lift cloud networking above the clouds empowering Enterprise IT to architect design and control their own cloud network regardless of the turbulent clouds beneath them it's time to gain altitude ladies and gentlemen Steve Mulaney president and CEO of aviatrix the leader of multi cloud networking [Music] [Applause] all right good morning everybody here in Santa Clara as well as to the what millions of people watching the livestream worldwide welcome to altitude 2020 alright so we've got a fantastic event today really excited about the speakers that we have today and the experts that we have and really excited to get started so one of the things I wanted to just share was this is not a one-time event this is not a one-time thing that we're gonna do sorry for the aviation analogy but you know sherry way aviatrix means female pilot so everything we do as an aviation theme this is a take-off for a movement this isn't an event this is a take-off of a movement a multi-cloud networking movement and community that we're inviting all of you to become part of and-and-and why we're doing that is we want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds so to speak and build their network architecture regardless of which public cloud they're using whether it's one or more of these public clouds so the good news for today there's lots of good news but this is one good news is we don't have any powerpoint presentations no marketing speak we know that marketing people have their own language we're not using any of that in those sales pitches right so instead what are we doing we're going to have expert panels we've got Simone Rashard Gartner here we've got 10 different network architects cloud architects real practitioners they're going to share their best practices and there are real-world experiences on their journey to the multi cloud so before we start and everybody know what today is in the u.s. it's Super Tuesday I'm not gonna get political but Super Tuesday there was a bigger Super Tuesday that happened 18 months ago and maybe eight six employees know what I'm talking about 18 months ago on a Tuesday every enterprise said I'm gonna go to the cloud and so what that was was the Cambrian explosion for cloud for the price so Frank kibrit you know what a Cambrian explosion is he had to look it up on Google 500 million years ago what happened there was an explosion of life where it went from very simple single-cell organisms to very complex multi-celled organisms guess what happened 18 months ago on a Tuesday I don't really know why but every enterprise like I said all woke up that day and said now I'm really gonna go to cloud and that Cambrian explosion of cloud went meant that I'm moving from very simple single cloud single use case simple environment to a very complex multi cloud complex use case environment and what we're here today is we're gonna go and dress that and how do you handle those those those complexities and when you look at what's happening with customers right now this is a business transformation right people like to talk about transitions this is a transformation and it's actually not just the technology transformation it's a business transformation it started from the CEO and the boards of enterprise customers where they said I have an existential threat to the survival of my company if you look at every industry who they're worried about is not the other 30 year old enterprise what they're worried about is the three year old enterprise that's leveraging cloud that's leveraging AI and that's where they fear that they're going to actually get wiped out right and so because of this existential threat this is CEO lead this is board led this is not technology led it is mandated in the organization's we are going to digitally transform our enterprise because of this existential threat and the movement to cloud is going to enable us to go do that and so IT is now put back in charge if you think back just a few years ago in cloud it was led by DevOps it was led by the applications and it was like I said before their Cambrian explosion is very simple now with this Cambrian explosion and enterprises getting very serious and mission critical they care about visibility they care about control they care about compliance conformance everything governance IT is in charge and and and that's why we're here today to discuss that so what we're going to do today is much of things but we're gonna validate this journey with customers did they see the same thing we're gonna validate the requirements for multi-cloud because honestly I've never met an enterprise that is not going to be multi-cloud many are one cloud today but they all say I need to architect my network for multiple clouds because that's just what the network is there to support the applications and the applications will run and whatever cloud it runs best in and you have to be prepared for that the second thing is is architecture again with IT in charge you architecture matters whether it's your career whether it's how you build your house it doesn't matter horrible architecture your life is horrible forever good architecture your life is pretty good so we're gonna talk about architecture and how the most fundamental and critical part of that architecture and that basic infrastructure is the network if you don't get that right nothing works right way more important and compute way more important than storm dense storage network is the foundational element of your infrastructure then we're going to talk about day 2 operations what does that mean well day 1 is one day of your life that's who you wire things up they do and beyond I tell everyone in networking and IT it's every day of your life and if you don't get that right your life is bad forever and so things like operations visibility security things like that how do I get my operations team to be able to handle this in an automated way because it's not just about configuring it in the cloud it's actually about how do I operationalize it and that's a huge benefit that we bring as aviatrix and then the last thing we're going to talk and it's the last panel we have I always say you can't forget about the humans right so all this technology all these things that we're doing it's always enabled by the humans at the end of the day if the humans fight it it won't get deployed and we have a massive skills gap in cloud and we also have a massive skill shortage you have everyone in the world trying to hire cloud network architects right there's just not enough of them going around so at aviatrix we as leaders do we're gonna help address that issue and try to create more people we created a program and we call the ACE program again an aviation theme it stands for aviatrix certified engineer very similar to what Cisco did with CCI ease where Cisco taught you about IP networking a little bit of Cisco we're doing the same thing we're gonna teach network architects about multi-cloud networking and architecture and yeah you'll get a little bit of aviatrix training in there but this is the missing element for people's careers and also within their organization so we're gonna we're gonna go talk about that so great great event great show when to try to keep it moving I'd next want to introduce my my host he's the best in the business you guys have probably seen him multiple million times he's the co CEO and co-founder of tube Jon Fourier okay awesome great great speech they're awesome I'd totally agree with everything you said about the explosion happening and I'm excited here at the heart of Silicon Valley to have this event it's a special digital event with the cube and aviatrix were we live streaming to millions of people as you said maybe not a million maybe not really take this program to the world this is a little special for me because multi-cloud is the hottest wave and cloud and cloud native networking is fast becoming the key engine of the innovation so we got an hour and a half of action-packed programming we have a customer panel two customer panels before that Gartner is going to come on talk about the industry we have a global system integrators we talk about how they're advising and building these networks and cloud native networking and then finally the Aces the aviatrix certified engineer is gonna talk more about their certifications and the expertise needed so let's jump right in and let's ask someone rashard to come on stage from Gartner check it all up [Applause] okay so kicking things off sitting started gartner the industry experts on cloud really kind of more to your background talk about your background before you got the gardener yeah before because gardener was a chief network architect of a fortune five companies with thousands of sites over the world and I've been doing everything and IT from a C programmer in a 92 a security architect to a network engineer to finally becoming a network analyst so you rode the wave now you're covering at the marketplace with hybrid cloud and now moving quickly to multi cloud is really was talking about cloud natives been discussed but the networking piece is super important how do you see that evolving well the way we see Enterprise adapt in cloud first thing you do about networking the initial phases they either go in a very ad hoc way is usually led by non non IT like a shadow I to your application people are some kind of DevOps team and it's it just goes as it's completely unplanned decreed VP sees left and right with different account and they create mesh to manage them and their direct connect or Express route to any of them so that's what that's a first approach and on the other side again it within our first approach you see what I call the lift and shift way we see like enterprise IT trying to basically replicate what they have in a data center in the cloud so they spend a lot of time planning doing Direct Connect putting Cisco routers and f5 and Citrix and any checkpoint Palo Alto divides that the audinate that are sent removing that to that cloud and I ask you the aha moments gonna come up a lot of our panels is where people realize that it's a multi cloud world I mean they either inherit clouds certainly they're using public cloud and on-premises is now more relevant than ever when's that aha moment that you're seeing where people go well I got to get my act together and get on this well the first but even before multi-cloud so these two approach the first one like the ad hoc way doesn't scale at some point idea has to save them because they don't think about the two they don't think about operations they have a bunch of VPC and multiple clouds the other way that if you do the left and shift wake they cannot take any advantages of the cloud they lose elasticity auto-scaling pay by the drink these feature of agility features so they both realize okay neither of these ways are good so I have to optimize that so I have to have a mix of what I call the cloud native services within each cloud so they start adapting like other AWS constructor is your construct or Google construct then that's what I call the optimal phase but even that they realize after that they are very different all these approaches different the cloud are different identities is completely difficult to manage across clouds I mean for example AWS has accounts there's subscription and in adarand GCP their projects it's a real mess so they realize well I can't really like concentrate use the cloud the cloud product and every cloud that doesn't work so I have I'm doing multi cloud I like to abstract all of that I still wanna manage the cloud from an API to interview I don't necessarily want to bring my incumbent data center products but I have to do that in a more API driven cloud they're not they're not scaling piece and you were mentioning that's because there's too many different clouds yes that's the piece there so what are they doing whether they really building different development teams as its software what's the solution well this the solution is to start architecting the cloud that's the third phase I call that the multi cloud architect phase where they have to think about abstraction that works across cloud fact even across one cloud it might not scale as well if you start having like 10,000 security group in AWS that doesn't scale you have to manage that if you have multiple VPC it doesn't scale you need a third party identity provider so it barely scales within one cloud if you go multiple cloud it gets worse and worse see way in here what's your thoughts I thought we said this wasn't gonna be a sales pitch for aviatrix you just said exactly what we do so anyway I'm just a joke what do you see in terms of where people are in that multi-cloud so a lot of people you know everyone I talked to started in one cloud right but then they look and they say okay but I'm now gonna move to adjourn I'm gonna move do you see a similar thing well yes they are moving but they're not there's not a lot of application that use a tree cloud at once they move one app in deserve one app in individuals one get happen Google that's what we see so far okay yeah I mean one of the mistakes that people think is they think multi-cloud no one is ever gonna go multi-cloud for arbitrage they're not gonna go and say well today I might go into Azure because I got a better rate of my instance that's never do you agree with that's never going to happen what I've seen with enterprise is I'm gonna put the workload in the app the app decides where it runs best that may be a sure maybe Google and for different reasons and they're gonna stick there and they're not gonna move let me ask you infrastructure has to be able to support from a networking team be able to do that do you agree with that yes I agree and one thing is also very important is connecting to that cloud is kind of the easiest thing so though while their network part of the cloud connectivity to the cloud is kind of simple I agree IPSec VP and I reckon Express that's a simple part what's difficult and even a provisioning part is easy you can use terraform and create v pieces and v nets across which free cloud providers right what's difficult is the day-to-day operations so it's what to find a to operations what is that what does that actually mean this is the day-to-day operations after you know the natural let's add an app let's add a server let's troubleshoot a problem so so your life something changes how would he do so what's the big concerns I want to just get back to this cloud native networking because everyone kind of knows with cloud native apps are that's been a hot trend what is cloud native networking how do you how do you guys define that because that seems to be the oddest part of the multi cloud wave that's coming as cloud native networking well there's no you know official garner definition but I can create one on and if another spot is do it I just want to leverage the cloud construct and a cloud epi I don't want to have to install like like for example the first version was let's put a virtual router that doesn't even understand and then the cloud environment right if I have if I have to install a virtual machine it has to be cloud aware it has to understand the security group if it's a router it has to be programmable to the cloud API and and understand the cloud environment you know one things I hear a lot from either see Saussure CIOs or CXOs in general is this idea of I'm definitely on going API so it's been an API economy so API is key on that point but then they say okay I need to essentially have the right relationship with my suppliers aka clouds you call it above the clouds so the question is what do i do from an architecture standpoint do I just hire more developers and have different teams because you mentioned that's a scale point how do you solve this this problem of okay I got AWS I got GCP or Azure or whatever do I just have different teams or just expose api's where is that optimization where's the focus well I take what you need from an android point of view is a way a control plane across the three clouds and be able to use the api of the cloud to build networks but also to troubleshoot them and do they to operation so you need a view across a three cloud that takes care of routing connectivity that's you know that's the aviatrix plug of you right there so so how do you see so again your Gartner you you you you see the industry you've been a network architect how do you see this this plane out what are the what are the legacy incumbent client-server on-prem networking people gonna do well these versus people like aviatrix well how do you see that plane out well obviously all the incumbent like Arista cisco juniper NSX right they want to basically do the lift and ship or they want to bring and you know VM I want to bring in a section that cloud they call that NSX everywhere and cisco monks bring you star and the cloud recall that each guy anywhere right so everyone what and and then there's cloud vision for my red star and contrail is in the cloud so they just want to bring the management plane in the cloud but it's still based most of them it's still based on putting a VM them in controlling them right you you extend your management console to the cloud that's not truly cloud native right cloud native you almost have to build it from scratch we like to call that cloud naive clown that so close one letter yeah so that was a big con surgeon reinvent take the tea out of cloud native it's cloud naive that went super viral you guys got t-shirts now I know you love but yeah but that really ultimately is kind of double edged sword you got to be you can be naive on the on the architecture side and rolling out but also suppliers are can be naive so how would you define who's naive and who's not well in fact they're evolving as well so for example in Cisco you it's a little bit more native than other ones because they're really scr in the cloud you can't you you really like configure API so the cloud and NSX is going that way and so is Arista but they're incumbent they have their own tools is difficult for them they're moving slowly so it's much easier to start from scratch Avenue like and you know a network happiness started a few years ago there's only really two aviatrix was the first one they've been there for at least three or four years and there's other ones like al kira for example that just started now that doing more connectivity but they wanna create an overlay network across the cloud and start doing policies and trying abstracting all the clouds within one platform so I gotta ask you I interviewed an executive at VMware Sanjay Pune and he said to me at RSA last week oh the only b2 networking vendors left Cisco and VMware what's your respect what's your response to that obviously I mean when you have these waves as new brands that emerge like aviation others though I think there'll be a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork how do you respond to that comment well there's still a data center there's still like a lot of action on campus and there's the one but from the cloud provisioning and clown networking in general I mean they're behind I think you know in fact you don't even need them to start to it you can if you're small enough you can just keep if you're in AWS you can user it with us construct they have to insert themselves I mean they're running behind they're all certainly incumbents I love the term Andy Jesse's that Amazon Web Services uses old guard new guard to talk about the industry what does the new guard have to do the new and new brands that emerge in is it be more DevOps oriented neck Nets a cops is that net ops is the programmability these are some of the key discussions we've been having what's your view on how you this programmability their most important part is they have to make the network's simple for the dev teams and from you cannot have that you cannot make a phone call and get every line in two weeks anymore so if you move to that cloud you have to make the cloud construct as simple enough so that for example a dev team could say okay I'm going to create this VP see but this VP see automatically being associate to your account you cannot go out on the internet you have to go to the transit VP see so there's a lot of action in terms of the I am part and you have to put the control around them too so to make it as simple as possible you guys both I mean you're the COC aviatrix but also you guys a lot of experience going back to networking going back to I call the OSI mace which for us old folks know what that means but you guys know what this means I want to ask you the question as you look at the future of networking here a couple of objectives oh the cloud guys they got networking we're all set with them how do you respond to the fact that networking is changing and the cloud guys have their own networking what some of the pain points that's going on premises and these enterprises so are they good with the clouds what needs what are the key things that's going on in networking that makes it more than just the cloud networking what's your take on well as I said earlier that once you you could easily provision in the cloud you can easily connect to that cloud is when you start troubleshooting application in the cloud and try to scale so this that's where the problem occurs see what you're taking on it and you'll hear from the from the customers that that we have on stage and I think what happens is all the cloud the clouds by definition designed to the 80/20 rule which means they'll design 80% of the basic functionality and they'll lead to 20% extra functionality that of course every Enterprise needs they'll leave that to ISVs like aviatrix because why because they have to make money they have a service and they can't have huge instances for functionality that not everybody needs so they have to design to the common and that's they all do it right they have to and then the extra the problem is that Cambrian explosion that I talked about with enterprises that's holy that's what they need that they're the ones who need that extra 20% so that's that's what I see is is there's always gonna be that extra functionality the in in an automated and simple way that you talked about but yet powerful with up with the visible in control that they expect of on prep that that's that kind of combination that yin and the yang that people like us are providing some I want to ask you were gonna ask some of the cloud architect customer panels it's the same question this pioneers doing some work here and there's also the laggers who come in behind the early adopters what's gonna be the tipping point what are some of those conversations that the cloud architects are having out there or what's the signs that they need to be on this multi cloud or cloud native networking trend what are some the signals that are going on in their environment what are some of the thresholds or things that are going on that there can pay attention to well well once they have application and multiple cloud and they have they get wake up at 2:00 in the morning to troubleshoot them they don't know it's important so I think that's the that's where the robber will hit the road but as I said it's easier to prove it it's ok it's 80s it's easy use a transit gateway put a few V PCs and you're done and use create some presents like equinox and do Direct Connect and Express route with Azure that looks simple is the operations that's when they'll realize ok now I need to understand our car networking works I also need a tool that give me visibility and control not button tell me that I need to understand the basic underneath it as well what are some of the day in the life scenarios that you envision happening with multi Bob because you think about what's happening it kind of has that same vibe of interoperability choice multi-vendor because you have multi clouds essentially multi vendor these are kind of old paradigms that we've lived through the client server and internet working wave what are some of those scenarios of success and that might be possible it would be possible with multi cloud and cloud native networking well I think once you have good enough visibility to satisfy your customers you know not only like to keep the service running an application running but to be able to provision fast enough I think that's what you want to achieve small final question advice for folks watching on the live stream if they're sitting there as a cloud architect or a CXO what's your advice to them right now in this more because honestly public cloud check hybrid cloud they're working on that that gets on-premise is done now multi clouds right behind it what's your advice the first thing they should do is really try to understand cloud networking for each of their cloud providers and then understand the limitation and is what there's cloud service provider offers enough or you need to look to a third party but you don't look at a third party to start with especially an incumbent one so it's tempting to say on and I have a bunch of f5 experts nothing against that five I'm going to bring my five in the cloud when you can use a needle be that automatically understand Easy's and auto scaling and so on and you understand that's much simpler but sometimes you need you have five because you have requirements you have like AI rules and that kind of stuff that you use for years you cannot do it's okay I have requirement and that met I'm going to use legacy stuff and then you have to start thinking okay what about visibility control about the tree cloud but before you do that you have to understand the limitation of the existing cloud providers so first try to be as native as possible until things don't work after that you can start taking multi-cloud great insight somewhat thank you for coming someone in charge with Gardner thanks for sharing informatica is known as the leading enterprise cloud data management company we are known for being the top in our industry in at least five different products over the last few years especially we've been transforming into a cloud model which allows us to work better with the trends of our customers in order to see agile and effective in the business you need to make sure that your products and your offerings are just as relevant in all these different clouds than what you're used to and what you're comfortable with one of the most difficult challenges we've always had is that because we're a data company we're talking about data that a customer owns some of that data may be in the cloud some of that data may be on Prem some of that data may be actually in their data center in another region or even another country and having that data connect back to our systems that are located in the cloud has always been a challenge when we first started our engagement with aviatrix we only had one plan that was Amazon it wasn't till later that a jerk came up and all of a sudden we found hey the solution we already had in place for her aviatrix already working in Amazon and now works in Missouri as well before we knew what GCP came up but it really wasn't a big deal for us because we already had the same solution in Amazon and integer now just working in GCP by having a multi cloud approach we have access to all three of them but more commonly it's not just one it's actually integrations between multiple we have some data and ensure that we want to integrate with Amazon we have some data in GCP that we want to bring over to a data Lake assure one of the nice things about aviatrix is that it gives a very simple interface that my staff can understand and use and manage literally hundreds of VPNs around the world and while talking to and working with our customers who are literally around the world now that we've been using aviatrix for a couple years we're actually finding that even problems that we didn't realize we had were actually solved even before we came across the problem and it just worked cloud companies as a whole are based on reputation we need to be able to protect our reputation and part of that reputation is being able to protect our customers and being able to protect more importantly our customers data aviatrix has been helpful for us in that we only have one system that can manage this whole huge system in a simple easy direct model aviatrix is directly responsible for helping us secure and manage our customers not only across the world but across multiple clouds users don't have to be VPN or networking experts in order to be able to use the system all the members on my team can manage it all the members regardless of their experience can do different levels of it one of the unexpected advantages of aviatrix is that I don't have to sell it to my management the fact that we're not in the news at 3 o'clock in the morning or that we don't have to get calls in the middle of the night no news is good news especially in networking things that used to take weeks to build or done in hours I think the most important thing about a matrix is it provides me a Beatrix gives me a consistent model that I can use across multiple regions multiple clouds multiple customers okay welcome back to altitude 2020 for the folks on the livestream I'm John for Steve Mulaney with CEO of aviatrix for our first of two customer panels on cloud with cloud network architects we got Bobby Willoughby they gone Luis Castillo of National Instruments David should Nick with fact set guys welcome to the stage for this digital event come on up [Applause] [Music] hey good to see you thank you okay okay customer panelist is my favorite part we get to hear the real scoop gets a gardener given this the industry overview certainly multi clouds very relevant and cloud native networking is the hot trend with a live stream out there and the digital event so guys let's get into it the journey is you guys are pioneering this journey of multi cloud and cloud native networking and is soon gonna be a lot more coming so we want to get into the journey what's it been like is it real you got a lot of scar tissue and what are some of the learnings yeah absolutely so multi cloud is whether or not we we accepted as a network engineers is is a reality like Steve said about two years ago companies really decided to to just to just bite the bullet and and and move there whether or not whether or not we we accept that fact we need to now create a consistent architecture across across multiple clouds and that that is challenging without orchestration layers as you start managing different different tool sets and different languages across different clouds so that's it's really important that to start thinking about that guys on the other panelists here there's different phases of this journey some come at it from a networking perspective some come in from a problem troubleshooting which what's your experiences yeah so from a networking perspective it's been incredibly exciting it's kind of a once-in-a-generation 'el opportunity to look at how you're building out your network you can start to embrace things like infrastructure as code that maybe your peers on the systems teams have been doing for years but it just never really worked on bram so it's really it's really exciting to look at all the opportunities that we have and then all the interesting challenges that come up that you that you get to tackle an effect said you guys are mostly AWS right yep right now though we're we are looking at multiple clouds we have production workloads running in multiple clouds today but a lot of the initial work has been with Amazon and you've seen it from a networking perspective that's where you guys are coming at it from yep we evolved more from a customer requirement perspective started out primarily as AWS but as the customer needed more resources from Azure like HPC you know as your ad things like that even recently Google Google Analytics our journey has evolved into more of a multi cloud environment Steve weigh in on the architecture because this has been the big conversation I want you to lead this second yeah so I mean I think you guys agree the journey you know it seems like the journey started a couple years ago got real serious the need for multi cloud whether you're there today of course it's gonna be there in the future so that's really important I think the next thing is just architecture I'd love to hear what you you know had some comments about architecture matters it all starts I mean every Enterprise I talk to maybe talk about architecture and the importance of architecture maybe Bobby it's a fun architecture perspective we sorted a journey five years ago Wow okay and we're just now starting our fourth evolution of our network marketer and we call it networking security net SEC yeah versus Justice Network yeah and that fourth generation architectures be based primarily upon Palo Alto Networks an aviatrix I have Atrix doing the orchestration piece of it but that journey came because of the need for simplicity ok the need for a multi cloud orchestration without us having to go and do reprogramming efforts across every cloud as it comes along right I guess the other question I also had around architectures also Louis maybe just talk about I know we've talked a little bit about you know scripting right and some of your thoughts on that yeah absolutely so so for us we started we started creating the network constructs with cloud formation and we've we've stuck with that for the most part what's interesting about that is today on premise we have a lot of a lot of automation around around how we provision networks but cloud formation has become a little bit like the new manual for us so we we're now having issues with having the to automate that component and making it consistent with our on premise architecture making it consistent with Azure architecture and Google cloud so it's really interesting to see to see companies now bring that layer of abstraction that SEO and brought to the to the web side now it's going up into into the into the cloud networking architecture so on the fourth generation of you mentioned you're in the fourth gen architecture what do you guys what have you learned is there any lessons scar tissue what to avoid what worked what was some of the that's probably the biggest list and there is that when you think you finally figured it out you have it right Amazon will change something as you or change something you know transit gateways a game changer so in listening to the business requirements is probably the biggest thing we need to do up front but I think from a simplicity perspective we like I said we don't want to do things four times we want to do things one time we won't be able to write to an API which aviatrix has and have them do the orchestration for us so that we don't have to do it four times how important is architecture in the progression is it you guys get thrown in the deep end to solve these problems or you guys zooming out and looking at it it's that I mean how are you guys looking at the architecture I mean you can't get off the ground if you don't have the network there so all of those that we've gone through similar evolutions we're on our fourth or fifth evolution I think about what we started off with Amazon without a direct connect gate without a trans a gateway without a lot of the things that are available today kind of the 80/20 that Steve was talking about just because it wasn't there doesn't mean we didn't need it so we needed to figure out a way to do it we couldn't say oh you need to come back to the network team in a year and maybe Amazon will have a solution for it right you need to do it now and in evolve later and maybe optimize or change the way you're doing things in the future but don't sit around and wait you can't I'd love to have you guys each individually answer this question for the live stream because it comes up a lot a lot of cloud architects out in the community what should they be thinking about the folks that are coming into this proactively and/or realizing the business benefits are there what advice would you guys give them an architecture what should be they be thinking about and what are some guiding principles you could share so I would start with looking at an architecture model that that can that can spread and and give consistency they're different to different cloud vendors that you will absolutely have to support cloud vendors tend to want to pull you into using their native toolset and that's good if only it was realistic to talk about only one cloud but because it doesn't it's it's it's super important to talk about and have a conversation with the business and with your technology teams about a consistent model how do I do my day one work so that I'm not you know spending 80 percent of my time troubleshooting or managing my network because I'm doing that then I'm missing out on ways that I can make improvements or embrace new technologies so it's really important early on to figure out how do I make this as low maintenance as possible so that I can focus on the things that the team really should be focusing on Bobby your advice the architect I don't know what else I can do that simplicity operations is key right all right so the holistic view of j2 operation you mentioned let's can jump in day one is your your your getting stuff set up day two is your life after all right this is kind of what you're getting at David so what does that look like what are you envisioning as you look at that 20 mile stare at post multi-cloud world what are some of the things that you want in a day to operations yeah infrastructure is code is really important to us so how do we how do we design it so that we can fit start making network changes and fitting them into like a release pipeline and start looking at it like that rather than somebody logging into a router seoi and troubleshooting things on in an ad hoc nature so moving more towards the DevOps model yes anything on that day - yeah I would love to add something so in terms of day 2 operations you can you can either sort of ignore the day 2 operations for a little while where you get well you get your feet wet or you can start approaching it from the beginning the fact is that the the cloud native tools don't have a lot of maturity in that space and when you run into an issue you're gonna end up having a bad day going through millions and millions of logs just to try to understand what's going on so that's something that that the industry just now is beginning to realize it's it's such as such a big gap I think that's key because for us we're moving to more of an event-driven operations in the past monitoring got the job done it's impossible to modern monitor something there's nothing there when the event happens all right so the event-driven application and then detection is important yeah I think Gardiner was all about the cloud native wave coming into networking that's going to be here thing I want to get your guys perspectives I know you have different views of how you came on into the journey and how you're executing and I always say the beauties in the eye of the beholder and that kind of applies the network's laid out so Bobby you guys do a lot of high-performance encryption both on AWS and Azure that's kind of a unique thing for you how are you seeing that impact with multi cloud yeah and that's a new requirement for us to where we we have a requirement to encrypt and they never get the question should I encryption or not encrypt the answer is always yes you should encrypt when you can encrypt for our perspective we we need to migrate a bunch of data from our data centers we have some huge data centers and then getting that data to the cloud is the timely expense in some cases so we have been mandated that we have to encrypt everything leave from the data center so we're looking at using the aviatrix insane mode appliances to be able to encrypt you know 10 20 gigabits of data as it moves to the cloud itself David you're using terraform you got fire Ned you've got a lot of complexity in your network what do you guys look at the future for yours environment yeah so something exciting that or yeah now is fire net so for our security team they obviously have a lot of a lot of knowledge base around Palo Alto and with our commitments to our clients you know it's it's it's not very easy to shift your security model to a specific cloud vendor right so there's a lot of stuck to compliance of things like that where being able to take some of what you've you know you've worked on for years on Bram and put it in the cloud and have the same type of assurance that things are gonna work and be secured in the same way that they are on prem helps make that journey into the cloud a lot easier and Louis you guys got scripting and get a lot of things going on what's your what's your unique angle on this yeah no absolutely so full disclosure I'm not a not not an aviatrix customer yet it's okay we want to hear the truth that's good Ellis what are you thinking about what's on your mind no really when you when you talk about implementing the tool like this it's really just really important to talk about automation and focus on on value so when you talk about things like encryption and things like so you're encrypting tunnels and crypting the path and those things are it should it should should be second nature really when you when you look at building those back ends and managing them with your team it becomes really painful so tools like a Beatrix that that add a lot of automation it's out of out of sight out of mind you can focus on the value and you don't have to focus on so I gotta ask you guys I'll see aviatrix is here they're their supplier to this sector but you guys are customers everyone's pitching you stuff people are not going to buy my stuff how do you guys have that conversation with the suppliers like the cloud vendors and other folks what's that what's it like we're API all the way you got to support this what are some of the what are some of your requirements how do you talk to and evaluate people that walk in and want to knock on your door and pitch you something what's the conversation like it's definitely it's definitely API driven we we definitely look at the at the PAP i structure of the vendors provide before we select anything that that is always first in mind and also what a problem are we really trying to solve usually people try to sell or try to give us something that isn't really valuable like implementing a solution on the on the on the cloud isn't really it doesn't really add a lot of value that's where we go David what's your conversation like with suppliers you have a certain new way to do things as as becomes more agile and essentially the networking and more dynamic what are some of the conversation is with the either incumbents or new new vendors that you're having what do what do you require yeah so ease of use is definitely definitely high up there we've had some vendors come in and say you know hey you know when you go to set this up we're gonna want to send somebody on site and they're gonna sit with you for your day to configure it and that's kind of a red flag what wait a minute you know do we really if one of my really talented engineers can't figure it out on his own what's going on there and why is that so I you know having having some ease-of-use and the team being comfortable with it and understanding it is really important Bobby how about you I mean the old days was do a bake-off and you know the winner takes all I mean is it like that anymore but what's the Volvic a bake-off last year for us do you win so but that's different now because now when you when you get the product you can install the product and they double your energy or have it in a matter of minutes and so the key is is they can you be operational you know within hours or days instead of weeks but but do we also have the flexibility to customize it to meet your needs could you want to be you want to be put into a box with the other customers when you have needs that your pastor cut their needs yeah almost see the challenge that you guys are living where you've got the cloud immediate value depending how you can roll up any solutions but then you have might have other needs so you got to be careful not to buy into stuff that's not shipping so you're trying to be proactive at the same time deal with what you got I mean how do you guys see that evolving because multi-cloud to me is definitely relevant but it's not yet clear how to implement across how do you guys look at this baked versus you know future solutions coming how do you balance that so again so right now we we're we're taking the the ad hoc approach and experimenting with the different concepts of cloud and and really leveraging the the native constructs of each cloud but but there's a there's a breaking point for sure you don't you don't get to scale this like Alexa mom said and you have to focus on being able to deliver a developer they're their sandbox or they're their play area for the for the things that they're trying to build quickly and the only way to do that is with the with with some sort of consistent orchestration layer that allows you to so use a lot more stuff to be coming pretty quickly hides area I do expect things to start to start maturing quite quite quickly this year and you guys see similar trend new stuff coming fast yeah part of the biggest challenge we've got now is being able to segment within the network being able to provide segmentation between production on production workloads even businesses because we support many businesses worldwide and and isolation between those is a key criteria there so the ability to identify and quickly isolate those workloads is key so the CIOs that are watching or that are saying hey take that he'll do multi cloud and then you know the bottoms-up organization Nick pops you're kind of like off a little bit it's not how it works I mean what is the reality in terms of implementing you know in as fast as possible because the business benefits are but it's not always clear in the technology how to move that fast yeah what are some of the barriers one of the blockers what are the enablers I think the reality is is that you may not think you're multi-cloud but your business is right so I think the biggest barriers there is understanding what the requirements are and how best to meet those requirements and then secure manner because you need to make sure that things are working from a latency perspective that things work the way they did and get out of the mind shift that you know it was a cheery application in the data center it doesn't have to be a Tier three application in the cloud so lift and shift is is not the way to go yeah scale is a big part of what I see is the competitive advantage to a lot these clouds and needs to be proprietary network stacks in the old days and then open systems came that was a good thing but as clouds become bigger there's kind of an inherent lock in there with the scale how do you guys keep the choice open how're you guys thinking about interoperability what are some of the conversations and you guys are having around those key concepts well when we look at when we look at the upfront from a networking perspective it it's really key for you to just enable enable all the all the clouds to be to be able to communicate between them developers will will find a way to use the cloud that best suits their their business need and and like like you said it's whether whether you're in denial or not of the multi cloud fact that then your company is in already that's it becomes really important for you to move quickly yeah and I a lot of it also hinges on how well is the provider embracing what that specific cloud is doing so are they are they swimming with Amazon or Azure and just helping facilitate things they're doing the you know the heavy lifting API work for you or are they swimming upstream and they're trying to hack it all together in a messy way and so that helps you you know stay out of the lock-in because they're you know if they're doing if they're using Amazon native tools to help you get where you need to be it's not like Amazon's gonna release something in the future that completely you know makes you have designed yourself into a corner so the closer they're more than cloud native they are the more the easier it is to to deploy but you also need to be aligned in such a way that you can take advantage of those cloud native technologies will it make sense tgw is a game changer in terms of cost and performance right so to completely ignore that would be wrong but you know if you needed to have encryption you know teach Adobe's not encrypted so you need to have some type of a gateway to do the VPN encryption you know so the aviatrix tool give you the beauty of both worlds you can use tgw with a gateway Wow real quick in the last minute we have I want to just get a quick feedback from you guys I hear a lot of people say to me hey the I picked the best cloud for the workload you got and then figure out multi cloud behind the scenes so that seems to be do you guys agree with that I mean is it do I go Mull one cloud across the whole company or this workload works great on AWS that work was great on this from a cloud standpoint do you agree with that premise and then witness multi-cloud stitch them all together yeah from from an application perspective it it can be per workload but it can also be an economical decision certain enterprise contracts will will pull you in one direction that value but the the network problem is still the same doesn't go away yeah yeah yeah I mean you don't want to be trying to fit a square into a round Hall right so if it works better on that cloud provider then it's our job to make sure that that service is there and people can use it agree you just need to stay ahead of the game make sure that the network infrastructure is there secure is available and is multi cloud capable yeah I'm at the end of the day you guys just validating that it's the networking game now cloud storage compute check networking is where the action is awesome thanks for your insights guys appreciate you coming on the panel appreciate it thanks thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay welcome back on the live feed I'm John fritz T Blaney my co-host with aviatrix I'm with the cube for the special digital event our next customer panel got great another set of cloud network architects Justin Smith was aura Justin broadly with Ellie Mae and Amit Oh tree job with Koopa welcome to stage [Applause] all right thank you thank you okay he's got all the the cliff notes from the last session welcome back rinse and repeat yeah yeah we're going to go under the hood a little bit I think I think they nailed the what we've been reporting and we've been having this conversation around networking is where the action is because that's the end of the day you got a move a pack from A to B and you get workloads exchanging data so it's really killer so let's get started Amit what are you seeing as the journey of multi cloud as you go under the hood and say okay I got to implement this I have to engineer the network make it enabling make it programmable make it interoperable across clouds and that's like I mean almost sounds impossible to me what's your take yeah I mean it it seems impossible but if you are running an organization which is running infrastructure as a cordon all right it is easily doable like you can use tools out there that's available today you can use third-party products that can do a better job but but put your architecture first don't wait architecture may not be perfect put the best architecture that's available today and be agile to iterate and make improvements over the time we get to Justin's over here so I have to be careful when I point a question in Justin they both have the answer but okay journeys what's the journey been like I mean is there phases we heard that from Gartner people come in to multi cloud and cloud native networking from different perspectives what's your take on the journey Justin yeah I mean from our perspective we started out very much focused on one cloud and as we started doing errands we started doing new products the market the need for multi cloud comes very apparent very quickly for us and so you know having an architecture that we can plug in play into and be able to add and change things as it changes is super important for what we're doing in the space just in your journey yes for us we were very ad hoc oriented and the idea is that we were reinventing all the time trying to move into these new things and coming up with great new ideas and so rather than it being some iterative approach with our deployments that became a number of different deployments and so we shifted that tore in the network has been a real enabler of this is that it there's one network and it touches whatever cloud we want it to touch and it touches the data centers that we need it to touch and it touches the customers that we need it to touch our job is to make sure that the services that are available and one of those locations are available in all of the locations so the idea is not that we need to come up with this new solution every time it's that we're just iterating on what we've already decided to do before we get the architecture section I want to ask you guys a question I'm a big fan of you know let the app developers have infrastructure as code so check but having the right cloud run that workload I'm a big fan of that if it works great but we just heard from the other panel you can't change the network so I want to get your thoughts what is cloud native networking and is that the engine really that's the enabler for this multi cloud trend but you guys taken we'll start with Amit what do you think about that yeah so you are gonna have workloads running in different clouds and the workloads would have affinity to one cloud over other but how you expose that it matter of how you are going to build your networks how we are gonna run security how we are going to do egress ingress out of it so it's a big problem how do you split says what's the solution what's the end the key pain points and problem statement I mean the key pain point for most companies is how do you take your traditionally on-premise network and then blow that out to the cloud in a way that makes sense you know IP conflicts you have IP space you pub public eye peas and premise as well as in the cloud and how do you kind of make a sense of all of that and I think that's where tools like a v8 ryx make a lot of sense in that space from our site it's it's really simple its latency its bandwidth and availability these don't change whether we're talking about cloud or data center or even corporate IT networking so our job when when these all of these things are simplified into like s3 for instance and our developers want to use those we have to be able to deliver that and for a particular group or another group that wants to use just just GCP resources these aren't we have to support these requirements and these wants as opposed to saying hey that's not a good idea our job is to enable them not to disable them do you think you guys think infrastructure is code which I love that I think it's that's the future it is we saw that with DevOps but I do start getting the networking is it getting down to the network portion where it's network is code because storage and compute working really well is seeing all kubernetes and service master and network as code reality is it there is got work to do it's absolutely there I mean you mentioned net DevOps and it's it's very real I mean in Cooper we build our networks through terraform and on not only just out of fun build an API so that we can consistently build V nets and VPC all across in the same unit yeah and even security groups and then on top an aviatrix comes in we can peer the networks bridge bridge all the different regions through code same with you guys but yeah everything we deploy is done with automation and then we also run things like lambda on top to make changes in real time we don't make manual changes on our network in the data center funny enough it's still manual but the cloud has enabled us to move into this automation mindset and and all my guys that's what they focus on is bringing what now what they're doing in the cloud into the data center which is kind of opposite of what it should be that's full or what it used to be it's full DevOps then yes yeah I mean for us was similar on-premise still somewhat very manual although we're moving more Norton ninja and terraform concepts but everything in the production environment is colored Confirmation terraform code and now coming into the datacenter same I just wanted to jump in on a Justin Smith one of the comment that you made because it's something that we always talk about a lot is that the center of gravity of architecture used to be an on-prem and now it's shifted in the cloud and once you have your strategic architecture what you--what do you do you push that everywhere so what you used to see at the beginning of cloud was pushing the architecture on prem into cloud now I want to pick up on what you said to you others agree that the center of architect of gravity is here I'm now pushing what I do in the cloud back into on pram and and then so first that and then also in the journey where are you at from 0 to 100 of actually in the journey to cloud DUI you 50% there are you 10% yes I mean are you evacuating data centers next year I mean were you guys at yeah so there's there's two types of gravity that you typically are dealing with no migration first is data gravity and your data set and where that data lives and then the second is the network platform that interrupts all that together right in our case the data gravity sold mostly on Prem but our network is now extending out to the app tier that's going to be in cloud right eventually that data gravity will also move to cloud as we start getting more sophisticated but you know in our journey we're about halfway there about halfway through the process we're taking a handle of you know lift and shift and when did that start and we started about three years ago okay okay go by it's a very different story it started from a garage and one hundred percent on the clock it's a business spend management platform as a software-as-a-service one hundred percent on the cloud it was like ten years ago right yes yeah you guys are riding the wave love that architecture Justin I want to ask user you guys mentioned DevOps I mean obviously we saw the huge observability wave which is essentially network management for the cloud in my opinion right yeah it's more dynamic but this isn't about visibility we heard from the last panel you don't know what's being turned on or turned off from a services standpoint at any given time how is all this playing out when you start getting into the DevOps down well this this is the big challenge for all of us as visibility when you talk transport within a cloud you know we very interesting we we have moved from having a backbone that we bought that we own that would be data center connectivity we now I work for as or as a subscription billing company so we want to support the subscription mindset so rather than going and buying circuits and having to wait three months to install and then coming up with some way to get things connected and resiliency and redundancy I my backbone is in the cloud I use the cloud providers interconnections between regions to transport data across and and so if you do that with their native solutions you you do lose visibility there are areas in that that you don't get which is why controlling you know controllers and having some type of management plane is a requirement for us to do what we're supposed to do and provide consistency while doing it a great conversation I loved when you said earlier latency bandwidth I think availability with your sim pop3 things guys SLA I mean you just do ping times between clouds it's like you don't know what you're getting for round-trip times this becomes a huge kind of risk management black hole whatever you want to call blind spot how are you guys looking at the interconnects between clouds because you know I can see that working from you know ground to cloud I'm per cloud but when you start doing with multi clouds workload I mean SL leis will be all over the map won't they just inherently but how do you guys view that yeah I think we talked about workload and we know that the workloads are going to be different in different clouds but they are going to be calling each other so it's very important to have that visibility that you can see how data is flowing at what latency and what our ability is hour is there and our authority needs to operate on that so it's solely use the software dashboard look at the times and look at the latency in the old days strong so on open so on you try to figure it out and then your day is you have to figure out just and what's your answer to that because you're in the middle of it yeah I mean I think the the key thing there is that we have to plan for that failure we have to plan for that latency and our applications it's starting start tracking in your SLI something you start planning for and you loosely couple these services and a much more micro services approach so you actually can handle that kind of failure or that type of unknown latency and unfortunately the cloud has made us much better at handling exceptions a much better way you guys are all great examples of cloud native from day one and you guys had when did you have the tipping point moment or the Epiphany of saying a multi clouds real I can't ignore it I got to factor it into all my design design principles and and everything you're doing what's it was there a moment or was it was it from day one now there are two divisions one was the business so in business there was some affinity to not be in one cloud or to be in one cloud and that drove from the business side so it has a cloud architect our responsibility was to support that business and other is the technology some things are really running better in like if you are running dot network load or you are going to run machine learning or AI so that you have you would have that preference of one cloud over other so it was the bill that we got from AWS I mean that's that's what drives a lot of these conversations is the financial viability of what you're building on top of it which is so we this failure domain idea which is which is fairly interesting is how do I solve or guarantee against a failure domain you have methodologies with you know back-end direct connects or interconnect with GCP all of these ideas are something that you have to take into account but that transport layer should not matter to whoever we're building this for our job is to deliver the frames in the packets what that flows across how you get there we want to make that seamless and so whether it's a public internet API call or it's a back-end connectivity through Direct Connect it doesn't matter it just has to meet a contract that you signed with your application folks yeah that's the availability piece just on your thoughts on that I think any comment on that so actually multi clouds become something much more recent in the last six to eight months I'd say we always kind of had a very much an attitude of like moving to Amazon from our private cloud is hard enough why complicate it further but the realities of the business and as we start seeing you know improvements in Google and Asia and different technology spaces the need for multi cloud becomes much more important as well as those are acquisition strategies I matured we're seeing that companies that used to be on premise that we typically acquire are now very much already on a cloud and if they're on a cloud I need to plug them into our ecosystem and so that's really change our multi cloud story in a big way I'd love to get your thoughts on the clouds versus the clouds because you know you compare them Amazon's got more features they're rich with features I see the bills are haiku people using them but Google's got a great Network Google's networks pretty damn good and then you got a sure what's the difference between the clouds who where they've evolved something whether they peak in certain areas better than others what what are the characteristics which makes one cloud better do they have a unique feature that makes Azure better than Google and vice versa what do you guys think about the different clouds yeah to my experience I think there is the approach is different in many places Google has a different approach very devops friendly and you can run your workload like your network can spend regions time I mean but our application ready to accept that MS one is evolving I mean I remember ten years back Amazon's network was a flat network we will be launching servers and 10.0.0.0 mode multi-account came out so they are evolving as you are at a late start but because they have a late start they saw the pattern and they they have some mature set up on the I mean I think they're all trying to say they're equal in their own ways I think they all have very specific design philosophies that allow them to be successful in different ways and you have to kind of that in mine is your architectural and solution for example Amazon has a very much a very regional affinity they don't like to go cross region in their architecture whereas Google is very much it's a global network we're gonna think about as a global solution I think Google also has advantages there to market and so it has seen what asier did wrong it's seen what AWS did wrong and it's made those improvements and I think that's one of their big advantage at great scale to Justin thoughts on the cloud so yeah Amazon built from the system up and Google built from the network down so their ideas and approaches are from a global versus or regional I agree with you completely that that is the big number one thing but the if you look at it from the outset interestingly the the inability or the ability for Amazon to limit layer 2 broadcasting and and what that really means from a VPC perspective changed all the routing protocols you can use all the things that we have built inside of a data center to provide resiliency and and and make things seamless to users all of that disappeared and so because we had to accept that at the VPC level now we have to accept it at the LAN level Google's done a better job of being able to overcome those things and provide those traditional Network facilities to us it's just great panel can go all day here's awesome so I heard we could we'll get to the cloud native naive question so kind of think about what's not even what's cloud is that next but I got to ask you had a conversation with a friend he's like when is the new land so if you think about what the land was at a data center when is the new link you get talking about the cloud impact so that means st when the old st was kind of changing into the new land how do you guys look at that because if you think about it what lands were for inside a premises was all about networking high speed but now when you take the win and make essentially a land do you agree with that and how do you view this trend and is it good or bad or is it ugly and what's what you guys take on this yeah I think it's the it's a thing that you have to work with your application architect so if you are managing networks and if you're a sorry engineer you need to work with them to expose the unreliability that would bring in so the application has to hand a lot of this the difference in the Layton sees and and the reliability has to be worked through the application there land when same concept as it be yesterday I think we've been talking about for a long time the erosion of the edge and so is this is just a continuation of that journey we've been on for the last several years as we get more and more cloud native when we start about API is the ability to lock my data in place and not be able to access it really goes away and so I think this is just continuation that thing I think it has challenges we start talking about weighing scale versus land scale the tooling doesn't work the same the scale of that tooling is much larger and the need to automation is much much higher in a way than it was in a land that's what we're seeing so much infrastructure as code yeah yeah so for me I'll go back again to this its bandwidth and its latency right that bet define those two land versus win but the other thing that's comes up more and more with cloud deployments is where is our security boundary and where can I extend this secure aware appliance or set of rules to protect what's inside of it so for us we're able to deliver VRS or route forwarding tables for different segments wherever we're at in the world and so they're they're trusted to talk to each other but if they're gonna go to someplace that's outside of their their network then they have to cross a security boundary and where we enforce policy very heavily so for me there's it's not just land when it's it's how does environment get to environment more importantly that's a great point and security we haven't talked to yet but that's got to be baked in from the beginning that's architecture thoughts on security are you guys are dealing with it yeah start from the base have app to have security built in have TLS have encryption on the data I transit data at rest but as you bring the application to the cloud and they are going to go multi-cloud talking to over the Internet in some places well have apt web security I mean I mean our principals day Security's day zero every day and so we we always build it into our design we load entire architecture into our applications it's encrypt everything it's TLS everywhere it's make sure that that data is secured at all times yeah one of the cool trends at RSA just as a side note was the data in use encryption piece which is a homomorphic stuff was interesting all right guys final question you know we heard on the earlier panel was also trending at reinvent we take the tea out of cloud native it spells cloud naive okay they got shirts now he being sure he's gonna got this trend going what does that mean to be naive so if you're to your peers out there watching a live stream and also the suppliers that are trying to you know supply you guys with technology and services what's naive look like and what's native look like when is someone naive about implementing all this stuff so for me it's because we are in hundred-percent cloud for us its main thing is ready for the change and you will you will find new building blocks coming in and the network design will evolve and change so don't be naive and think that it's static you wall with the change I think the big naivety that people have is that well I've been doing it this way for twenty years and been successful it's going to be successful in cloud the reality is that's not the case you have to think some of the stuff a little bit differently and you need to think about it early enough so that you can become cloud native and really enable your business on cloud yeah for me it's it's being open minded right the the our industry the network industry as a whole has been very much I am smarter than everybody else and we're gonna tell everybody how it's going to be done and we have we fell into a lull when it came to producing infrastructure and and and so embracing this idea that we can deploy a new solution or a new environment in minutes as opposed to hours or weeks or four months in some cases is really important and and so you know it's are you being closed-minded native being open-minded exactly and and it took a for me it was that was a transformative kind of where I was looking to solve problems in a cloud way as opposed to looking to solve problems in this traditional old-school way all right I know we're out of time but I ask one more question so you guys so good it could be a quick answer what's the BS language when you the BS meter goes off when people talk to you about solutions what's the kind of jargon that you hear that's the BS meter going off what are people talking about that in your opinion you here you go that's total B yes what what triggers use it so that I have two lines out of movies that are really I can if the if I say them without actually thinking them it's like 1.21 jigowatts how you're out of your mind from Back to the Future right somebody's gonna be a bank and then and then Martin ball and and Michael Keaton and mr. mom when he goes to 22 21 whatever it takes yeah those two right there if those go off in my mind somebody's talking to me I know they're full of baloney so a lot of speeds would be a lot of speeds and feeds a lot of data did it instead of talking about what you're actually doing and solutioning for you're talking about well I does this this this and okay 220 221 anytime I start seeing the cloud vendor start benchmarking against each other it's your workload is your workload you need to benchmark yourself don't don't listen to the marketing on that that's that's all I'm a what triggers you and the bsp I think if somebody explains you a not simple they cannot explain you in simplicity then that's a good one all right guys thanks for the great insight great panel how about a round of applause practitioners DX easy solutions integrating company than we service customers from all industry verticals and we're helping them to move to the digital world so as a solutions integrator we interface with many many customers that have many different types of needs and they're on their IT journey to modernize their applications into the cloud so we encounter many different scenarios many different reasons for those migrations all of them seeking to optimize their IT solutions to better enable their business we have our CPS organization it's cloud platform services we support AWS does your Google Alibaba corkle will help move those workloads to wherever it's most appropriate no one buys the house for the plumbing equally no one buys the solution for the networking but if the plumbing doesn't work no one likes the house and if this network doesn't work no one likes a solution so network is ubiquitous it is a key component of every solution we do the network connectivity is the lifeblood of any architecture without network connectivity nothing works properly planning and building a scalable robust network that's gonna be able to adapt with the application needs its when encountering some network design and talking about speed the deployment aviatrix came up in discussion and we then further pursued an area DHT products that incorporated aviatrix is part of a new offering that we are in the process of developing that really enhances our ability to provide cloud connectivity for the lance cloud connectivity there's a new line of networking services that we're getting into as our clients move into hybrid cloud networking it is much different than our traditional based services an aviatrix provides a key component in that service before we found aviatrix we were using just native peering connections but there wasn't a way to visualize all those peering connections and with multiple accounts multiple contacts for security with a v8 church we were able to visualize those different peering connections of security groups it helped a lot especially in areas of early deployment scenarios were quickly able to then take those deployment scenarios and turn them into scripts that we can then deploy repeatedly their solutions were designed for work with the cloud native capabilities first and where those cloud native capabilities fall short they then have solution sets that augment those capabilities I was pleasantly surprised number one with the aviatrix team as a whole in their level of engagement with us you know we weren't only buying the product we were buying a team that came on board to help us implement and solution that was really good to work together to learn both what aviatrix had to offer as well as enhancements that we had to bring that aviatrix was able to put into their product and meet our needs even better aviatrix was a joy to find because they really provided us the technology that we needed in order to provide multi cloud connectivity that really added to the functionality that you can't get from the basic law providing services we're taking our customers on a journey to simplify and optimize their IT infrastructure aviatrix certainly has made my job much easier okay welcome back to altitude 2020 for the digital event for the live feed welcome back I'm John Ford with the cube with Steve Mulaney CEO aviatrix for the next panel from global system integrators the folks who are building and working with folks on their journey to multi cloud and cloud native networking we've got a great panel George Buckman with dxc and Derek Monahan with wwt welcome to the stage [Applause] [Music] okay you guys are the ones out there advising building and getting down and dirty with multi cloud and cloud native networking we heard from the customer panel you can see the diversity of where people come into the journey of cloud it kind of depends upon where you are but the trends are all clear cloud native networking DevOps up and down the stack this has been the main engine what's your guys take of the disk journey to multi cloud what do you guys seeing yeah it's it's critical I mean we're seeing all of our enterprise customers enter into this they've been through the migrations of the easy stuff you know now they're trying to optimize and get more improvement so now the tough stuffs coming on right and you know they need their data processing near where their data is so that's driving them to a multi cloud environment okay we heard some of the edge stuff I mean you guys are exactly you've seen this movie before but now it's a whole new ballgame what's your take yeah so I'll give you a hint so our practice it's not called the cloud practice it's the multi cloud practice and so if that gives you a hint of how we approach things it's very consultative and so when we look at what the trends are let's look a little year ago about a year ago we were having conversations with customers let's build a data center in the cloud let's put some VP C's let's throw some firewalls with some DNS and other infrastructure out there and let's hope it works this isn't a science project so what we're trying we're starting to see is customers are starting to have more of a vision and we're helping with that consultative nature but it's totally based on the business and you got to start understanding how the lines of business are using the apps and then we evolved into that next journey which is a foundational approach to what are some of the problem statement customers are solving when they come to you what are the top things that are on their my house or the ease of use of jelly all that stuff but what specifically they did digging into yeah some complexity I think when you look at multi cloud approach in my view is network requirements are complex you know I think they are but I think the approach can be let's simplify that so one thing that we try to do and this is how we talk to customers is let's just like you simplify an aviatrix simplifies the automation orchestration of cloud networking we're trying to simplify the design the planning implementation of infrastructure across multiple workloads across multiple platforms and so the way we do it is we sit down we look at not just use cases and not just the questions in common we anticipate we actually build out based on the business and function requirements we build out a strategy and then create a set of documents and guess what we actually build in the lab and that lab that we platform we built proves out this reference architecture actually works absolutely we implement similar concepts I mean we they're proven practices they work great so well George you mentioned that the hard part is now upon us are you referring to networking what is specifically were you getting at Tara so the easy parts done now so for the enterprises themselves migrating their more critical apps or more difficult apps into the environments you know they've just we've just scratched the surface I believe on what enterprises that are doing to move into the cloud to optimize their environments to take advantage of the scale and speed to deployment and to be able to better enable their businesses so they're just now really starting the >> so do you get you guys see what I talked about them in terms of their Cambrian explosion I mean you're both monster system integrators with you know top fortune enterprise customers you know really rely on you for for guidance and consulting and so forth and boy they're networks is that something that you you've seen I mean does that resonate did you notice a year and a half ago and all of a sudden the importance of cloud for enterprise shoot up yeah I mean we're seeing it okay in our internal environment as yeah you know we're a huge company or right customer zero or an IT so we're experiencing that internal okay and every one of our other customers so I have another question oh I don't know the answer to this and the lawyer never asks a question that you don't know the answer to but I'm gonna ask it anyway d XE @ wwt massive system integrators why aviatrix yep so great question Steve so I think the way we approach things I think we have a similar vision a similar strategy how you approach things how we approach things that it worldwide technology number one we want to simplify the complexity and so that's your number one priorities let's take the networking but simplify it and I think part of the other point I'm making is we have we see this automation piece as not just an afterthought anymore if you look at what customers care about visibility and automation is probably the at the top three maybe the third on the list and I think that's where we see the value and I think the partnership that we're building and what I what I get excited about is not just putting yours in our lab and showing customers how it works it's Co developing a solution with you figuring out hey how can we make this better right mr. piller is a huge thing Jenna insecurity alone Network everything's around visibility what automation do you see happening in terms of progression order of operations if you will it's the low-hanging fruit what are people working on now and what are what are some of the aspirational goals around when you start thinking about multi cloud and automation yep so I wanted to get back to answer that question I want to answer your question you know what led us there and why aviatrix you know in working some large internal IT projects and and looking at how we were going to integrate those solutions you know we like to build everything with recipes where Network is probably playing catch-up in the DevOps world but with a DevOps mindset looking to speed to deploy support all those things so when you start building your recipes you take a little of this a little of that and you mix it all together well when you look around you say wow look there's this big bag of a VHS let me plop that in that solves a big part of my problems that I have to speed to integrate speed to deploy and the operational views that I need to run this so that was 11 years about reference architectures yeah absolutely so you know they came with a full slate of reference architectures already the out there and ready to go that fit our needs so it's very very easy for us to integrate those into our recipes what do you guys think about all the multi vendor interoperability conversations that have been going on choice has been a big part of multi cloud in terms of you know customers want choice didn't you know they'll put a workload in the cloud that works but this notion of choice and interoperability is become a big conversation it is and I think our approach and that's why we talk to customers is let's let's speed and be risk of that decision making process and how do we do that because the interoperability is key you're not just putting it's not just a single vendor we're talking you know many many vendors I mean think about the average number of cloud applications a customer uses a business and enterprise business today you know it's it's above 30 it's it's skyrocketing and so what we do and we look at it from an Billy approaches how do things interoperate we test it out we validate it we build a reference architecture it says these are the critical design elements now let's build one with aviatrix and show how this works with aviatrix and I think the the important part there though is the automation piece that we add to it invisibility so I think the visibility is what's what I see lacking across the industry today and the cloud needed that's been a big topic yep okay in terms of aviatrix that you guys see them coming in there one of the ones that are emerging and the new brands emerging with multi cloud you still got the old guard incumbents with huge footprints how our customers dealing with that that kind of component in dealing with both of them yeah I mean where we have customers that are ingrained with a particular vendor and you know we have partnerships with many vendors so our objective is to provide the solution that meets that client and you they all want multi vendor they all want interoperability correct all right so I got to ask you guys a question while we were defining de to operations what does that mean I mean you guys are looking at the big business and technical components of architecture what does de two operations mean what's the definition of that yeah so I think from our perspective my experience we you know de to operations whether it's it's not just the you know the orchestration piece and setting up and let it a lot of automate and have some you know change control you're looking at this from a data perspective how do I support this ongoing and make it easy to make changes as we evolve that the the cloud is very dynamic the the nature of how that fast is expanding the number of features is astonishing trying to keep up to date with a number of just networking capabilities and services that are added so I think day to operation starts with a fundable understanding of you know building out supporting a customer's environments and making it the automation piece easy from from you know a distance I think yeah and you know taking that to the next level of being able to enable customers to have catalog items that they can pick and choose hey I need this network connectivity from this cloud location back to this on pram and being able to have that automated and provisioned just simply by ordering it for the folks watching out there guys take a minute to explain as you guys are in the trenches doing a lot of good work what are some of the engagement that you guys get into how does that progress what is that what's what happens there they call you up and say hey I need multi-cloud or you're already in there I mean take us through why how someone can engage to use a global si to come in and make this thing happen what's looks like typical engagement look like yeah so from our perspective we typically have a series of workshops in a methodology that we kind of go along the journey number one we have a foundational approach and I don't mean foundation meaning the network foundation that's a very critical element we got a factor in security we got a factor in automation so we think about foundation we do a workshop that starts with education a lot of times we'll go in and we'll just educate the customer what does VPC sharing you know what is a private link and Azure how does that impact your business you know customers I want to share services out in an ecosystem with other customers and partners well there's many ways to accomplish that so our goal is to you know understand those requirements and then build that strategy with them thoughts George oh yeah I mean I'm one of the guys that's down in the weeds making things happen so I'm not the guy on the front line interfacing with the customers every day but we have a similar approach you know we have a consulting practice that will go out and and apply their practices to see what those and when do you parachute in yeah when I then is I'm on the back end working with our offering development leads for the networking so we understand or seeing what customers are asking for and we're on the back end developing the solutions that integrate with our own offerings as well as enable other customers to just deploy quickly to meet their connectivity needs it so the patterns are similar great final question for you guys I want to ask you to paint a picture of what success looks like and you know for name customers you don't forget in reveal of kind of who they are but what does success look like in multi-cloud as you as you paint a picture for the folks here and watching on the live stream it's if someone says hey I want to be multi-cloud I got to have my operations agile I want full DevOps I want programmability security built in from day zero what does success look like yeah I think success looks like this so when you're building out a network the network is a harder thing to change than some other aspects of cloud so what we think is even if you're thinking about that second cloud which we have most of our customers are on to public clouds today they might be dabbling in that is you build that network foundation an architecture that takes in consideration where you're going and so once we start building that reference architecture out that shows this is how to sit from a multi-cloud perspective not a single cloud and let's not forget our branches let's not forget our data centers let's not forget how all this connects together because that's how we define multi-cloud it's not just in the cloud it's on Prem and it's off Prem and so collectively I think the key is also is that we provide them an hld you got to start with in a high-level design that can be tweaked as you go through the journey but you got to give a solid structural foundation and that networking which we think most customers think as not not the network engineers but as an afterthought we want to make that the most critical element before you start the journey Jorge from your seed had a success look for you so you know it starts out on these journeys often start out people not even thinking about what is gonna happen what what their network needs are when they start their migration journey to the cloud so I want this success to me looks like them being able to end up not worrying about what's happening in the network when they move to the cloud good guys great insight thanks for coming on share and pen I've got a round of applause the global system integrators [Applause] [Music] okay welcome back from the live feed I'm shuffle with the cube Steve Eleni CEO of aviatrix my co-host our next panel is the aviatrix certified engineers also known as aces this is the folks that are certified their engineering they're building these new solutions please welcome Toby Foster min from Attica Stacy linear from Terra data and Jennifer Reid with Victor Davis to the stage I was just gonna I was just gonna rip you guys and say where's your jackets and Jen's got the jacket on okay good love the aviatrix aces pile of gear there above the clouds soaring to new heights that's right so guys aviatrix aces love the name I think it's great certified this is all about getting things engineered so there's a level of certification I want to get into that but first take us through the day in the life of an ace and just to point out Stacey's a squad leader so he's like a squadron leader Roger and leader yeah squadron leader so he's got a bunch of aces underneath him but share your perspective day-in-the-life Jeff we'll start with you sure so I have actually a whole team that works for me both in the in the North America both in the US and in Mexico and so I'm eagerly working to get them certified as well so I can become a squad leader myself but it's important because one of the the critical gaps that we've found is people having the networking background because they're you graduate from college and you have a lot of computer science background you can program you've got Python but networking in packets they just don't get and so just taking them through all the processes that it's really necessary to understand when you're troubleshooting is really critical mm-hmm and because you're gonna get an issue where you need to figure out where exactly is that happening on the network you know is my my issue just in the V PCs and on the instant side is a security group or is it going on print and this is something actually embedded within Amazon itself I mean I should troubleshot an issue for about six months going back and forth with Amazon and it was the vgw VPN because they were auto-scaling on two sides and we ended up having to pull out the Cisco's and put in aviatrix so I could just say okay it's fixed and actually actually helped the application teams get to that and get it solved yeah but I'm taking a lot of junior people and getting them through that certification process so they can understand and see the network the way I see the network I mean look I've been doing this such for 25 years but I got out when I went in the Marine Corps that's what I did and coming out the network is still the network but people don't get the same training they get they got in the 90s it's just so easy just write some software and they work takes care of itself yes I'll be will get I'll come back to that I want to come back to that that problem solved with Amazon but Toby I think the only thing I have to add to that is that it's always the network fault as long as I've been in network have always been the network's fault and I'm even to this day you know it's still the network's fault and part of being a network guy is that you need to prove when it is and when it's not your fault and that means you need to know a little bit about a hundred different things to make that and now you got a full stack DevOps you gotta know a lot more times another hundred and these times are changing yeah they say you're a squadron leader I get that right what is what does a squadron leader first can you describe what it is I think probably just leading all the network components of it but not they from my perspective when to think about what you asked them was it's about no issues and no escalation soft my day is a good that's a good day yes it's a good day Jennifer you mentioned the Amazon thing this brings up a good point you know when you have these new waves come in you have a lot of new things newly use cases a lot of the finger-pointing it's that guy's problem that girl's problem so what is how do you solve that and how do you get the young guns up to speed is there training is that this is where the certification comes in well is where the certification is really going to come in I know when we we got together at reinvent one of the the questions that that we had with Stephen the team was what what should our certification look like you know she would just be teaching about what aviatrix troubleshooting brings to bear but what should that be like and I think Toby and I were like no no no that's going a little too high we need to get really low because the the better someone can get at actually understanding what actually happening in the network and and where to actually troubleshoot the problem how to step back each of those processes because without that it's just a big black box and they don't know you know because everything is abstracted in Amazon Internet and Azure and Google is substracted and they have these virtual gateways they have VPNs that you just don't have the logs on it's you just don't know and so then what tools can you put in front of them of where they can look because there are full logs well as long as we turned on the flow logs when they built it you know and there's like each one of those little things that well if they had decided to do that when they built it it's there but if you can come in later to really supplement that with training to actual troubleshoot and do a packet capture here as it's going through then teaching them how to read that even yeah Toby we were talking before we came on up on stage about your career you've been networking all your time and then you know you're now entering a lot of younger people how is that going because the people who come in fresh they don't have all the old war stories they don't know you talk about you know that's dimmer fault I walk in bare feet in the snow when I was your age I mean it's so easy now right they say what's your take on how you train the young P so I've noticed two things one is that they are up to speed a lot faster in generalities of networking they can tell you what a network is in high school level now where I didn't learn that too midway through my career and they're learning it faster but they don't necessarily understand why it's that way or you know everybody thinks that it's always slash 24 for a subnet and they don't understand why you can break it down smaller why it's really necessary so the the ramp up speed is much faster for these guys that are coming in but they don't understand why and they need some of that background knowledge to see where it's coming from and why is it important and old guys that's where we thrive Jennifer you mentioned you you got in from the Marines health spa when you got into networking how what was it like then and compared it now almost like we heard earlier static versus dynamic don't be static cuz then you just set the network you got a perimeter yeah no there was no such thing ya know so back in the day I mean I mean we had banyan vines for email and you know we had token ring and I had to set up token ring networks and figure out why that didn't work because how many of things were actually sharing it but then actually just cutting fiber and running fiber cables and dropping them over you know shelters to plug them in and oh crap they swung it too hard and shattered it now I gotta be great polished this thing and actually shoot like to see if it works I mean that was the network crimped five cat5 cables to run an Ethernet you know and then from that just said network switches dumb switches like those were the most common ones you had then actually configuring routers and you know logging into a Cisco router and actually knowing how to configure that and it was funny because I had gone all the way up and was a software product manager for a while so I've gone all the way up the stack and then two and a half three years ago I came across to to work with entity group that it became Victor Davis but we went to help one of our customers Davis and it was like okay so we need to fix the network okay I haven't done this in 20 years but all right let's get to it you know because it really fundamentally does not change it's still the network I mean I've had people tell me well you know when we go to containers we will not have to worry about the network and I'm like yeah you don't I do and then with this were the program abilities it really interesting so I think this brings up the certification what are some of the new things that people should be aware of that come in with the aviatrix ace certification what are some of the highlights can you guys share some of the some of the highlights around the certifications I think some of the importance is that it's it doesn't need to be vendor specific for network generality or basic networking knowledge and instead of learning how Cisco does something or how Palo Alto does something we need to understand how and why it works as a basic model and then understand how each vendor has gone about that problem and solved it in a general that's true in multi cloud as well you can't learn how cloud networking works without understanding how a double u.s. senator and GCP are all slightly the same but slightly different and some things work and some things don't I think that's probably the number one take I think having a certification across clouds is really valuable cuz we heard the global si help the business issues what does it mean to do that is it code is that networking is it configuration is that aviatrix what is the I mean op C aviatrix is the ASA certification but what is it about the multi cloud that makes it multi networking and multi vendor easy answer is yes so you got to be a generalist getting your hands and all you have to be right it takes experience because it's every every cloud vendor has their own certification whether that's hops and advanced networking and advanced security or whatever it might be yeah they can take the test but they have no idea how to figure out what's wrong with that system and the same thing with any certification but it's really getting your hands in there and actually having to troubleshoot the problems you know actually work the problem you know and calm down it's going to be okay I mean because I don't know how many calls I've been on or even had aviatrix join me on it's like okay so everyone calm down let's figure out what's happening it's like we've looked at that screen three times looking at it again it's not gonna solve that problem right but at the same time you know remaining calm but knowing that it really is I'm getting a packet from here to go over here it's not working so what could be the problem you know and actually stepping them through with those scenarios but that's like you only get that by having to do it you know and seeing it and going through it and then I have a question so we you know I just see it we started this program maybe months ago we're seeing a huge amount of interest I mean we're oversubscribed on all the training sessions we've got people flying from around the country even with coronavirus flying to go to Seattle to go to these events were oversubscribed good is that watching leader would put there yeah is that something that you see in your organization's are you recommending that to people do you see I mean I'm just I guess I'm surprised I'm not surprised but I'm really surprised by the demand if you would of this multi cloud network certification because it really isn't anything like that is that something you guys can comment on or do you see the same things in your organization's I say from my side because we operate in the multi cloud environment so it really helps and it's beneficial for us yeah I think I would add that uh networking guys have always needed to use certifications to prove that they know what they know right it's not good enough to say yeah I know IP addresses or I know how a network works and a couple little check marks or a little letters buying helps give you validity um so even in our team we can say hey you know we're using these certifications to know that you know enough of the basics and enough of the understandings that you have the tools necessary right so I guess my final question for you guys is why an eighth certification is relevant and then second part is share what the livestream folks who aren't yet a certified or might want to jump in to be AVH or certified engineers why is it important so why is it relevant and why shouldn't someone want to be an ace-certified I'm uses the right engineer I think my views a little different I think certification comes from proving that you have the knowledge not proving that you get a certification to get no I mean they're backwards so when you've got the training and the understanding and the you use that to prove and you can like grow your certification list with it versus studying for a test to get a certification and have no understanding of ok so that who is the right person that look at this is saying I'm qualified is it a network engineer is it a DevOps person what's your view you know is it a certain you know I think cloud is really the answer it's the as we talked like the edge is getting eroded so is the network definitions eating eroded we're getting more and more of some network some DevOps some security lots and lots of security because network is so involved in so many of them that's just the next progression there I would say I expand that to more automation engineers because we have those now probably extended as well well I think that the training classes themselves are helpful especially the entry-level ones for people who may be quote-unquote cloud architects but I've never done anything and networking for them to understand why we need those things to really work whether or not they go through to eventually get a certification is something different but I really think fundamentally understanding how these things work it makes them a better architect makes them better application developer but even more so as you deploy more of your applications into the cloud really getting an understanding even from our people who have tradition down on Prem networking they can understand how that's going to work in the cloud - well I know we've got just under 30 seconds left I want to get one more question than just one more for the folks watching that are maybe younger that don't have that networking training from your experiences each of you can answer why is it should they know about networking what's the benefit what's in it for them motivate them share some insights and why they should go a little bit deeper in networking Stacey we'll start with you we'll go down I'd say it's probably fundamental right if you don't deliver solutions networking use the very top I would say if you fundamental of an operating system running on a machine how those machines talk together as a fundamental change is something that starts from the base and work your way up right well I think it's a challenge because you you've come from top down now you're gonna start looking from bottom up and you want those different systems to cross communicate and say you built something and you're overlapping IP space not that that doesn't happen but how can I actually make that still operate without having to reappear e-platform it's like those challenges like those younger developers or sis engineers can really start to get their hands around and understand those complexities and bring that forward in their career they got to know the how the pipes are working and because know what's going some plumbing that's right and the works a how to code it that's right awesome thank you guys for great insights ace certified engineers also known as aces give a round of applause thank you okay all right that concludes my portion thank you Steve thanks for have Don thank you very much that was fantastic everybody round of applause for John Currier yeah so great event great event I'm not going to take long we've got we've got lunch outside for that for the people here just a couple of things just call to action right so we saw the Aces you know for those of you out on the stream here become a certified right it's great for your career it's great for knowledge is is fantastic it's not just an aviatrix thing it's gonna teach you about cloud networking multi-cloud networking with a little bit of aviatrix exactly what the Cisco CCIE program was for IP network that type of the thing that's number one second thing is is is is learn right so so there's a there's a link up there for the four to join the community again like I started this this is a community this is the kickoff to this community and it's a movement so go to what a v8 community bh6 comm starting a community at multi cloud so you know get get trained learn I'd say the next thing is we're doing over a hundred seminars in across the United States and also starting into Europe soon will come out and will actually spend a couple hours and talk about architecture and talk about those beginning things for those of you on the you know on the livestream in here as well you know we're coming to a city near you go to one of those events it's a great way to network with other people that are in the industry as well as to start to learn and get on that multi-cloud journey and then I'd say the last thing is you know we haven't talked a lot about what aviatrix does here and that's intentional we want you you know leaving with wanting to know more and schedule get with us in schedule a multi our architecture workshop session so we we sit out with customers and we talk about where they're at in that journey and more importantly where they're going in that in-state architecture from networking compute storage everything and everything you heard today every panel kept talking about architecture talking about operations those are the types of things that we saw we help you cook define that canonical architecture that system architecture that's yours so for so many of our customers they have three by five plotted lucid charts architecture drawings and it's the customer name slash aviatrix arc network architecture and they put it on their whiteboard that's what what we and that's the most valuable thing they get from us so this becomes their twenty-year network architecture drawing that they don't do anything without talking to us and look at that architecture that's what we do in these multi hour workshop sessions with customers and that's super super powerful so if you're interested definitely call us and let's schedule that with our team so anyway I just want to thank everybody on the livestream thank everybody here hopefully it was it was very useful I think it was and joined the movement and for those of you here join us for lunch and thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

>>live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube covering Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Live on Welcome to the Cube. 2020 is the first Cube segment and session for 2020 next 10 years. This is the 10th year the Cube has been in operation. We're here in Barcelona for Cisco Live, but we're going to spend the next few minutes talking about the Enterprise Tech trends for 2020 and beyond. Really looking back at the past 10 years and then forward 10 years, I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube with Dave Vellante, Stew Minimum and The Cube team. The analysts want to analyze Enterprise tech. You know we love to do that day, but I think more notable is this is our first interview in 2020 for the year. We're kicking off our 10th year as we close down the Cube for 10 year anniversary in May. Quite an evolution. A lot of things we got right with Wiki bond research and the Cuban sites. Ah, lot of things we saw early, and that's the benefit of the Cube. And now, more than ever, it's more complex. It's a lot of noise. A lot of people talking about value propositions here. They're a lot of cloud. I think the reality is set in Cloud is here. It's not a question of why and when it's now. And the impact is just hitting mainstream Tech and Enterprises now leading the category in investments, venture capital, private equity M and A over consumer companies seeing much more focused emphasis on what's going on in the enterprise, which is business. Incredible opportunity ahead. 2020. What's in store? >>Well, you know, the last decade we obviously saw the consumer ization of i t. There was all that social media hype, and I think you're right, John. The enterprises now where the action is. But the last 10 years have been all about Cloud. What got us here to 2020 is not what's going to power through the next 10 years. I think it's not only Cloud, it's cloud plus data, which we definitely bet on it, right. But now the injection of machine intelligence on that data, which, of course, is running in the cloud for scale. So the real big question now is what's gonna happen in the cloud guys Amazon and Azure and clearly have momentum. Google actually beginning to pick it up a little bit, but particularly the case of Amazon who dominated the last decade. Yeah, it's gonna be not as easy for them going forward, You know, everybody now realizes. Wow, they got it right. You said many times they were misunderstood. Well, I think now people are beginning to realize how powerful they are. And the enterprise players have really begun to respond. And they don't like to give up their position to be really interesting to see how that goes. And, of course, you know we're going to talk more about Cisco, but still what? Your thoughts? >>Yeah. So, John, I think some of the things that we looked at as bleeding edge over the last 10 years are becoming a bit more mainstream. The role of the developer. We know the developers, the new king maker. You look where we are in the DEV Net zone. Definite zone. A couple years ago was small and there was people were kind of exciting everything. You look at it today, it looks much more like the regular show. It has really become mainstream. Dave said Cloud Cloud is mainstream developers mainstream that connection between the business enterprise, tech talk about and these other pieces really coming together. That's where the data really is the next fly wheel for what's happening and obviously machine learning the application developer. And still, it's about moving faster that companies are looking to do, and that is what all of the last 10 years has been building for. And now it's the new normal >>great, and I want to get into some of the ways I think when you look at this, because we can always rattle into any kind of technology. But you know, one things that we love to do is look at the ways what waves are going to come where you get your thoughts on that. But I think just let's reflect on what's going on around us right now. The Cube is the 10th year finishing up its 10th year. We're in the media business had a comment from someone here, a distinguished engineer at Cisco said. I can't believe you guys are a technology company. I had tweeted out yesterday on Barcelona about our Cube alumni list. It's turning into an expert network If you look at what's going on with Facebook and with Trump and the impeachment, you're seeing a changing of the guard in the media business. So we as media with Cube, it's looking angle has become interesting, and I think I bring this up because that's kind of out our new model that we've been doing for 10 years. But if you look at how people share information, misinformation, quality information, you're starting to see a paradigm where you don't know what the trust vendor A says they could do this vendor b so they could do that. Amazon says. This Azure says that. So I think the practitioners and consumers of I t in Enterprise Tech, the buyer's Where's the truth day? I mean, the models are completely changing. I've heard comments in the analyst firms are struggling to get modern press outlets are being dwindled down to a handful in the enterprise that new networks are being formed. The expert APS are out there. So this is a tell sign, Yeah, that the world more complex and different than ever before. >>The authentic community doesn't lie right, And your peers at the other day when you have private conversations. That's where the truth comes out. To the extent that you can like to bring that to the Cuban sessions like this, that's really where you say, extract the signal from the noise. We try to do that. We try to do it for 10 years, and I think that's part of the reason why we've been so successful. But at the same time, Look way no were funded by sponsors, which is great. We really appreciate their support, but at the end of the day, we've always gotta put forth what we think is actually happening out there. >>Let's get into some of the ways because it sets the context. So as you have these networks forming, you have cloud technology. You know, Os, I model looks, but I look back at the nineties, and I think this is a proposed to the Cisco show at that time. Dave, During the mini computer wave that set the stage for what became the PC revolution and then ultimately inter networking category, you had proprietary network operating systems, IBM s and a digital equipment corporation deck net, etcetera, etcetera and incomes. The open systems interconnect seven layer stack that changed the industry. In today's world, we have open source, but people are chirping about open core. There seems to be a trend towards proprietary now. Amazon is the big proprietary cloud. >>I don't >>mean proprietary in the sense of you can work with it, but scale is the new proprietary. So you almost have this revert back to old tactics of differentiation, and I think that's not good for customers. I think you look at the customer situation, it creates more complexity. And so I think that's why we're seeing multi Cloud really be a trend, because whoever can connect all the clouds and do that seamlessly is going to win big. And I think that's a TCP I peed like Dynamic >>John. It's a really interesting point because open source in general is more important than ever before. Enterprise companies are contributing. The big vendor community is spending more time on open source than they are on standards anymore. Over. If you look at the big projects out there limits kubernetes like more than half of the contributors have full time jobs. They work for big companies, but as you said, how am I consuming that get hub is a company at the core of open source. But get the platform itself is a proprietary, that open core model that you talked about. And of course, Microsoft built them for a big number. And some people have a little bit concerned >>when might get Lab is there >>and get lab right. Of course, similar they deliver their application itself. Is that open core model so open source is there. Open core is the model that they're doing. Absolutely. It is interesting because, as you said, open source is more pervasive than ever. But I'm consuming it more as >>a service >>from Amazon or from these >>providers face to the bitching and moaning that's going on the open source because there is kind of a lot of chirping going on around. Well, you know, if I build this in the open, is it truly open being co opted by? So the big clouds and you got Microsoft Microsoft Open Office 3 65 That's not gonna go away for the next 10 years. They've SAS ified, their core offering almost like a lock in. I mean, so so it seems to be just >>it smells >>like that old nasty >>habit. Everything we're entering this decade with four trillion years of Amazon hit Trillionaire Club in 2018. Drop town lost Akamas, Russ Hanneman would say, But but Apple, Google, Microsoft and an Amazon they looking vulnerable, don't in the trillions club. But I mean, I would point out, You're saying John, there will be a backlash. Open source Open, open distributed computing tier networks. I don't think I mean history would suggest that these big whales, they're not invulnerable. They can be taken down and open. Source is is one way out? >>Well, it's interesting. One of the things you look at one of the big threat for Cisco for a long time was like, Oh, STN is going to take over what Cisco's doing Well, Cisco still doing just fine with software defined networking and what that having the open compute model for networking is also a threat. If I look at Microsoft, Azure is leveraging their model that the big hyper scaler aren't necessarily coming to Cisco for gear. They're shifting as to where Cisco will be involved. When we talk about cloud models, they're spending much more time up the stack. John in the layer four through seven, they are down in their traditional Vera to three. >>The pressure on these monopolies, historically to continue to perform as public companies, has been enormous, and they get more proprietary to your point, John. And eventually the open markets has hold on. You know that opens up new opportunities. It takes a while, but it's always happened. >>I don't think I think your point about the big incumbent. Players are not going to yield to just being rolled over by the incumbent growing cloud companies. But you cannot deny the fact that, say, Amazon. Dave, I want to get your thoughts on this because what Amazon did to compute change the game in my mind, they completely changed the capabilities. The consumption models, the cost structures. All the economics were changed with compute looking outpost wavelengths. When things are getting in, they have their own networking. So the question is, if you have the cloud ification of the Holy Trinity of infrastructure, which is storage, compute networking. Okay, you can see almost the cloud guys almost changing radically. All three of them computes Already done. Stories is already done. Networking is left, so you have networking battleground because you got to move the packets around. You don't need Mpls route routes because you just go through the cloud. How things are stored data, backup recovery. The list goes on and on. Ultimately, that's the infrastructure as code ethos that's going to change the application environment. So it will. Amazon will Google Will azure commoditized or change networking? >>Yeah. I mean, John, we already see that happening when we came two years ago. One of the challenges for most network engineers is what I need to manage. A large part of it I can't actually touch. I have to rely on third party. It's outside. I don't control it. But if something goes wrong, I'm on the hook for it. And if you go look forward a little bit, you know, if I'm deploying serverless architectures, is their networking involved? Yes. So I know what it is. I know my platform underneath it is going to take care of it, you know, sitting here talking about that transformation of the workforce, Dave, you wrote about it in your piece. That future of work is if you're you know, really, you know, putting together, You know, I'm a CCP my job is being a Cisco certified engineer, and my role will be racking, stacking, configuring and changing and managing those boxes today, it's well, I better get involved in the security side or the application side, because that's where I'm actually connected to the business and the data of things. Because if I'm just concerned about the moving packets around, yeah, there's gonna be either automation or clarification or combination of those things. They take that away from a >>couple thoughts on this. John, you were the very first to report trillion dollar opportunity for Andy Jassy and Amazon, and there was a 35 billion, so they have a long way to go. So I think a big theme for Amazon is gonna be tam. Expansion in one of those areas is, of course, networking, and you've seen the cloud slowly eat away reported this in my Wiki Bond post from the data because slowly eating away over the last 10 years. It's the networking share, and one practitioner said, as we put our data into the cloud, we're going to spend less on traditional networking, so it's clearly a threat. So Cisco, obviously diversifying its portfolio, we're gonna talk about that this week. But but more focused, as we've said do under the leadership of Chuck Robbins than it was. >>Well, Dave, here's a question for you because if you look at enterprise spend, they're increasing their spend on public cloud. But their data center stuff. It has stayed relatively solid. We haven't yet seen the erosion there. So are you saying networking is going to road before the rest of it? Because you know the story of data gravity? What? >>I think you're seeing the networking road not necessarily in terms of shrinking Cisco, although there guiding to a flat to down quarter. But you've certainly seen their growth slowdown, and especially in their core networking space. I mean, they've tried to double down on their switching and routing, and they just made new announcements in that space that John, you know well, but unquestionably the cloud is that it had an impact on Cisco's business. >>Well, 20 point, let's look ahead to the next 10 years. We've got a lot going on, so I think wait and see the big wave. So, to me, the big wave will start David on the ways I think the big wave is value proposition. Is the business model evolution? I think that's going to be a way that will constantly be the North Star or transformation. If whatever people are buying or operating, whether it's their infrastructure or their operating model, it has to have direct contribution to the business model, the company. So I think that's 12 I think AI and data will continue to power a lot of the value. And I think networking is going to be cloud ified. And the impact of that is going to be that as cloud and hybrid computing becomes a technical solution that achieves cheese, the operation model of companies you're going to start to see Multi Cloud emerged as a solution of that meaning Multi cloud isn't a technology. It's an outcome of hybrid combination of cloud. And that's going to change how packets are routed, how packets are networked. I think data ai and a complete transformation of the of the engine of business is gonna happen the next 10 years more than we've ever seen before. And I call this Dev Ops 234 point. Oh, do this. Is it a complete new engine of innovation. Technically, with storage, compute networking, where the application focus is going to be business driven, almost dynamic, almost real time. I think that will be a 10 year horizon. I wrote a Twitter post on this just a few minutes ago, and the lead architect for Azure tweeted back and said late, See, Layton sees never changes >>John. The innovation cocktail, as you said, is, What's the driver going forward, Right? >>Yes, exactly The speed of light. You can't solve that problem without putting points of presence all over, but >>the network architecture is what defines. It's, too, and I've been talking about network automation. We talked about Dev ops. But if you think of hybrid as a technical solution, how you work with public and private premises, Edge is just now a new network configuration that is going to be a very instrumental engineering task, which will actually impact how the software engineers, >>to your point, the latency that's physics and that's the plumbing and the plumbing is going to be there. But I do feel like we're exiting the cloud era into a new era of this innovation cocktail that you talk about the sandwich, which is cloud data plus AI plus digital services. And that's really what we're gonna be talking about 8 to 10 years from now is how organizations are applying those digital services and which companies, whether they're cloud native companies or guys like Cisco and IBM, HP Deli, EMC, how they're leveraging those waves and applying them >>to their business. And I'd be curious. See how the standards evolve around, whether it's de facto standards around interoperability around data, >>and you could look at what's >>happening with data privacy. You start to see the tell signs that data is going to be starting managed, just like packets are managed. It's like a whole interesting dynamic. >>But really what? This is the payoff for what company has been working on to be able to move faster. It was before was okay, used to take 18 months, and now I could do it a few months. But now I can react to that business between the automation, the machine learning, you know, putting together cloud, and you're gonna be able to refocus your workforce to be able to respond to the business and drive new value. >>All right, guys, we got to wrap up guest coming up. Appreciate the commentary. I'll just say that Dave Tesla. You mentioned one of your bringing analysis what Tesla did to the automobile company. I think there's going to be someone in the enterprise that comes out of the woodwork that changes the game on everybody. I think opportunity for that kind of new entrant >>in the same way Amazon. >>Did you think? >>I think Amazon is now an incumbent. I mean, look at the size and scale of it is always an opportunity for that bowl start up company. So it takes a kind of new dynamic electricity with cars, so we'll see. Okay, that's a wrap up. This is a cube conversation here in Barcelona for Cisco Live. I'm John. First Minutemen. Dave Vellante breaking down the Enterprise for the next 10 >>years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube covering your storage accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Q. We are wrapping up day two of two days of coverage. We're getting some applause. I'm pretty sure that's for us. At pure accelerate. 2019. Lisa Martin flanked by two gents Day Volante and Justin Warren. You probably know Justin, who's been on the Cube many times and less. Chief analyst. A pivot. Nine. Justin. You have been covering this event and well as an independent, so we want to get your take on this two days. We've had our 1st 2 day for the Cube covering pier storage. We've spoken with lots of people, cause Charlie kicks. I'm sure there's more nicknames that I'm forgetting customers. Partners. Dave. Let's do a quick recap of some of the trends and the themes that we've heard the last couple days. And then we'll get some independent analysis. Justin on Not just what you've heard the last three days, starting with a tech field day, but also just your history of covering and working with here. >> Well, so for my sample, its story of growth they even started pure starts all the press releases with the only company that's growing on the growth storage company. The growth in the first. So so this growth is a financial story there. Um pure is going for growth, the markets rewarding growth right now. So it's smart, double down on growth. That might change at some point on. We talked about Charlie Jean Carlo about this, and they'll decide what what they do at that point time. But But from a financial standpoint, growing fast, uh, like their balance sheet, be interesting to see if they can leverage it. Maur. But maybe they're using it for Optionality. They'll do 1.7 this fiscal year. 1.7 billion. That's good. They got 70% gross margins. It a little bit of free cash flow. Not much because they pour it back into the business. So story a growth that's number 12 was differentiation. Um, I think it it's pretty clear that their products are differentiated from the sort of big portfolio companies. I mean, it's it shows up in the numbers and the income statement, and it shows up when you talk to customers simplicity, the whole A P I thing. I guess the third is products. I mean, they're embracing the cloud, which is kind of interesting. I don't think they're gonna do a ton of business with block storage for AWS, but it's an interesting hedge, and I think it's really cool from an engineering standpoint on, I think you know, two other things. Culture but orange. They're different, They're cool. They're hip and customers, which at the end of the day, that's where the rubber meets the road. Customers happy you talk to companies are customers of companies like pure service now Splunk Nutanix >> Uh uh, >> and some others. And they're happy. They love it. It's transforming their business. Snowflake is another one. Really? How come you AI path is another one? These are the hottest companies in the business right now, and you can tell when you talk to their customers is good story >> and their customers articulate their differentiation for them pretty darn while what? You know, we've spoken to a number. I think four or five customers the last couple of days, and they're not talking about Flash Ray flash blade X M flashback. They're talking about their business and how the I T is benefiting from that and how the business is benefiting from that. You also see piers very vibrant culture being embraced organically by their customers. There's plenty of customers walking around and the brightest orange I think I've even seen here. So there they're differentiation. Their culture, their customer experience and their ability to really differentiate three that are were loud and clear for what I heard through the voice of the customer and the partners, Frankly, as well. >> So I guess, Justin, I mean, the other pieces Tam expansion 1st 10 years, Cloud New Way I workloads partnerships with backup companies growing. The Tim I've said the 1st 10 years is probably gonna be easier, and I know that's a terrible thing to say, but don't hate me for saying it pure. But then the next 10 because they're up against the flat footed E. M. C. That was getting pounded by Elliott management with pressures to go private, trying to hang on to its legacy business and then got acquired and distracted by Del. So that was a really tailwind for Pierre. Now it's like Cloud guys got their act together, you know? Aye, aye. Everybody's doing A s. Oh, so they get some challenges. But what's your take? I think I've >> still got an advantage. Talking to some customers, 11 in particular was quite clear. That they saw pure is having at least a 2 to 3 lead through 2 to 3 year lead on the technology from some of their competitors. So they shopped around and they had a look at some of his competitors, and they thought that actually they were trying to sell me technology that's 234 years old and they quite from them, was that this is something that I could do myself, so they clearly see that pure provides them with something that they can't do themselves. So pure has an advantage there. I also think that the way that the market is changing advantage is pure, a little bit as well. So you mentioned Cloud there, Dave and I think that we've all seen that people have realized that multi cloud is a thing and that not every workload is going to go to the cloud. A lot of it is going to stay on Prem, so now that that's kind of allowed, people are allowed to talk about that, That there are CEOs who would have been being pressured by boards and so on to say we have to go all in on the cloud. Now they can come back to them and say, Well, actually, weaken, stay on side. That means that we should be looking at some of these onside products, like pure so that we can go on put in storage. A race in a data center may not be our Dana Senate might be in Coehlo, but we have this on site method of doing things. Not everything has to go to the cloud. So I think that will help them with some of the growth. >> So I'm left thinking, What would Andy say? Okay to >> be >> It's the number one hottest company, you know, notwithstanding some smaller companies right now, cos moving the market is a W s obviously Microsoft with the trillion dollar valuation. But Amazon, to me, is the benchmark it. So I feel like Jassy would say, Well, so Hey, Andy, you've acknowledged hybrid, you know? Actually, yeah, I guess he uses that word. Um, and you're doing some stuff one prim, but I think he would say we still believe that the vast majority of workloads are gonna land in the public cloud. And what you just said is what everybody else believes. And to me, they're in conflict and I don't necessarily have the answer. But you got the big gorilla. Now the big claw gorilla is moving. The markets say with one philosophy and they've made some good calls and the entire i t industry. Yeah, the other the inspector. >> Except that AWS has outpost have a product that actually sits on site. And they did. And Jesse last year said that he did say that the boat inward, multi cloud, >> you know, So, uh, sorry. Used the word multi cloud used hybrid hybrid cloud. They don't say that. That's for Boden, but no. But my point is they've acknowledged hybrid, which they never used to talk about hybrid. So they capitulated there The end where capitulated on their claws on its cloud strategy. But he has not capitulated on the belief the firm belief that most workloads are gonna be in the club. I'm not sure he's wrong. >> That may be true, but on what Time horizon? So that's not going to happen next year. But I >> think for sure, >> I pointed out that the agile manifesto came out in 2001. That's 18 years ago. Not every shop is doing software in agile, so enterprises take a long time to change, so there's plenty of room for pure to grow. While that changes going on, even if it if it does go all their own cloud, it's gonna take a long time to get there. And people can make plenty of money in the meantime. >> But I believe you're sorry. I believe pure is growing in what is a crappy market. Yeah, I think the storage market is a crap market right now. It's one that's very difficult. The leader Deli emcees growing at 0%. And that's a goodness because they're gaining share. Ned ABS down last quarter, not minus 16% IBM, minus 21% hp thrilled with whatever 3% or whatever. They're at a minus three. I can't remember now. Here is the only one that showing any substantive growth on my premises there, doing that by having a superior product and business model, and they're stealing share. So and then I ask you this. I I believe in hybrid, by the way. But I'm just playing kind of devil's advocate here. Cloud is growing and it's consistently growing and everybody talks about repatriation. You don't see it in the numbers. Every talks about the large of the law of large numbers like in other words, they hit a wall. You don't see that in the numbers. What you see is the traditional IittIe spaces flattish. The new stuff that they're all developing is not growing fast enough to offset the old stuff. You see that? Certainly. See that IBM. You see that now? Adele, even though they had good bounce back last year. But now you're seeing that Adele Oracle ekes out 1% growth. So the big, uh, legacy companies are growing there, hanging on there, throwing off tons of cash. They got good, strong balance sheets, maybe taking on some cheap debt. But the cloud continues to grow at a pace that I think it's stealing share from traditional I t. >> That's that's a reasonable sort of announcing something. Yeah, whether or not we'll see an increase in growth of onsite, particularly things like EJ computing way, maybe you need Thio redefine what we think of as a data center, and maybe we're not thinking about a broad enough market. I actually think that a lot of those workloads that we would traditionally have said would go on site and cola. I don't think Cola Data Center is actually growing all that much, but I think we are going to see growth in things like EJ. >> So that's a really great point I want. I want to come back to that. But the big question is, then okay. Can cloud be before we get ahead, you can cloud be a tail wind for pure. They've embraced it. 20 years ago, the leaders of a company would say, Oh, no, it's cloud his crap about a peace Caesar of toys You remember that pure embracing cloud, I think, is impressive only from an engineering perspective but business model. So can they make in your opinion cloud a tail wind and an opportunity? Maybe that's where Multi Cloud comes in. >> Yeah, it's tricky. I think it will become more of an advantage once good things like kubernetes and containers matures a bit further and people are used to being able to deploy things in that way, both in Cloud and on site. I think that that's the portability play, and it's more about making onsite more cloudy rather than making the cloud more enterprising, which I think was one of the messages that we had here. Because enterprises a lot of what yours messaging so far. And it's product development, particularly around cloud block stories, to make the cloud look more like an enterprise. Where's what we actually needed it to go the other way. Pure is doing things in that in that regard with pure storage optimizer, which which takes a lot of the decision making a way that from the way you would normally do things on side the way we've gotten used to it, manually configuring things, it's actually turning it into software on just letting computers handle it. That integration with things like the M, where is making things operate a lot more like cloud? So once enterprises become used to operating on a lot more like clouds, I think that's going to be an advantage for pure. To be ableto have that operations be in cloud and then they'll bring in products into in time for that to happen. >> You have the opportunity just in a couple days ago to tend the technical field day, the TFT that pure dead. So you got that double click the day before all the press releases broke about. Some of you know, we talked about the expansion into cloud with aws Maur, their portfolio delivered as a service. The aye aye data hub. But if we look at one of the things that stuck out today was differentiation. We've talked about that a number of levels in the last minutes. But talk to us about the technical differentiation that you've not only heard this week from pure, but that you've been engaging with them for years. You have an interesting story of Of John Cosgrove caused their CEO and founder really describing something very unique. That seems to be quite a technical level of differentiation that you even said We don't see this from a lot of their competitors. Give us a little snapshot of that. >> Yeah, you don't sort of get that level of detail in some of the briefings as well. So it was another tech Field day event some years ago on was talking about flash array and we sat in a room, and they had a flash array in front of us, and I think they were talking about the newest kind of flash they were putting into this. But they described some of the technical decisions they made about the architecture inside the blade. So at that time, and I hope I'm getting all these details correct, they had designed and asic, so to go in front, off the flash so that they could essentially create a layer above above the flash that they could speak to within their software. That meant that it didn't matter which flash foundry they bought it from, because it's slut. There are certain differences around the way that flash works, and they do address the flash directly, unlike buying SS D's and putting them inside the box. So that gives them a performance advantage because you don't have a whole bunch of software translation going on to get into the flash. But that decision meant that they could then change flash foundry without changing the experience off the awful. The software developers up the stack inside their array, so that meant that there cadence of being able to bring out new products and gradually dropped down the cost of the supply of flash, which makes up a large amount of the calls on these particular devices. It provided them with better options so they could maintain, maintain optionality essentially and be very, very flexible and react to the things that they can't predict. So Charlie mentioned in the briefing yesterday that you know, in this industry, you might get a 20% drop in the cost of flash in one month, which will then affect them their revenues in coming months after that, because clearly they want to pass on some of those cost drops to customers. But it needs to be done a certain, more manage way. When you have that kind of dynamic behavior happening in the market, being able to react to that well in something where the hardware design time can be 18 months to two years, building that into your product so that it then provides you with business options as a technology, that's a really impressive way of thinking about how all the different pieces of your company have to interact with each other. So it's not just about the technology, it's about the business and the technology working hand in hand, >> and those lower flash prices should open up new markets for them. Flash a racy I think they call it, is still not at the price of hybrid, I wouldn't think, although they saying it will be. Hybrid arrays are priced around 70 60 70 cents a gigabyte today is according Thio Gardner analysis. Big >> Challenge with hybrid of rays Which flat, which flash around flash or a C wouldn't actually wouldn't have? This problem is the reliability of the Leighton see and predictability. So with an old flash array, you don't get Layton. See sparks if you suddenly exhaust the amount of flash that you have in a hybrid of rain that has to go back to the disk. So if you need that predictable performance, that's why people have gone with flesh arrayed very beginning, absolutely getting that as a capacity tear. I think that provides a lot of reliability, for particularly when you've got large amounts of data need to write flesh >> and the price is coming down and it's maybe it's double now on a per gigabyte basis, that'll come down further. But I welcome back to EJ because I think you bring up a good point And we didn't Thankfully, here a ton about EJ. I think we heard anything about EJ at this show. We didn't get inundated with edge, which we always do with these big shows. And I'm happy about that because I think that that a lot of the companies that we re attend I think they got it wrong. They're taking a box and they're throwing over the fence to trying to do a top down model to the edge. Hey, here's a server or here's a storage device and we're gonna put it at the edge. It's like, OK, well, I think the edge is going to evolve as a software development. You know, play not isn't over. The top is gonna be bottoms up innovation. Now, I don't know question about you know, whether Amazon at the edge vm wear at the edge. Um, but I don't see any traditional i t companies crushing it at the edge there talking about it. They're trying to build out ecosystems, and but nobody's has meaningful revenue today at the edge. But it's a new way to think about this. Distributed massive compute engine >> on. I think we'll start to see that mature as people start to bring out products that actually do operated the way heard from Nvidia about some of their ideas that they have about doing a I processing at the edge for things like image recognition systems, where you train your model on leg large data sets in a cloud or in a data center. And then you shoot those models out two devices that operate on a smaller data set. But for a lot of these things, you need to do data collection at the edge. So Formula One is a classic example based given for the F one racing team is an I. O. T. Company that is connected to a nail and analytics company. Really? >> Yeah, that's right. We did hear about EJ and that an actual use case is in college edge, so there's going to be >> a lot more of that. We have things like sensors are just all over the place, so you know, in anything in retail, if you have fridges in retail and you need to monitor the sensors in those to find out whether or not is the temperature going out out of control or outside of your control limits because that will affect the food that's in that. There's a whole bunch of kind of boring examples that are actually all I OT. So I think some of those will start to push more data into into devices at the edge. And as people's understanding of how to use machine learning and I matures away from the hype, I think we're pretty peak hype at the moment. Once we do actually drop that back a notch and we see that people they're doing really use riel riel world use cases with real world business value that will start to drive a lot more of the growth of practical. And that will drive growth in data, which will need to get close throughout the weather's device. >> I think you're right. I think that date is gonna be at the edge of a lot of that data. I would say most of that date is going to stay at the edge. It's probably it's not gonna says it. Probably it's definitely not going to sit in a million dollar storage array, and it's gonna comprise a lot of alternative processing arm, Uh, GP use versus conventional microprocessors. So >> and that's where I think he was thinking about, like the white pure One works, for example, pure. One works the same no matter what products you have from pure, and they have been very clear in stating that they want to make sure that when they bring out a new array or a new product, it works with pure one. So it's that consistency of experience for their customers, which I think is fairly unique in the industry, is a lot of other products that will come out. And they only partly supported, not full support for their entire race tagging. AMC struggle with that for a long time simply because it has so many products and needed to kill a whole bunch of them first. So when when you have that kind of engineering discipline built built into your company, when you go out and you have customers who have edge devices or you have stuff in the cloud and they have devices on their phones which they used to showing off a conference and say, Hey, come and have a look at my array, it runs on software on my phone that's pure one that software ability that pure has of being able to address this data wherever it is. I think >> there's >> a real opportunity for pure that put that kind of intelligence on to age things. Even if they don't actually sell any flash a raise to those people, they could start to sell them software. >> All right, guys. So 15 seconds each since arose at a time. Computers competitive. Positioning your thoughts in a quick summary about what you've heard the last few days and what Justin has >> to me if I would expect continued growth, forgetting about the macro for a moment, even in gonna grow faster than the market place. Um and yeah, they said they don't throw off as much cash as the big guys. So it's gonna be a game of the big guys do in stock buybacks, free cash flow and pure storage. Investing in growth. >> Excellent. Justin. >> Yes, I agree. I think they're going to double down on the R and D spend to make sure that they maintain a technological advantage over their competitors. The biggest risk of pure is if the other players, you know, the deal emcee other plays in that big online storage market. If they actually get their act together and start bringing out competitive products, that's the biggest threat to fuel. But pure has a big lead on them. I would say, >> Yeah, I think the last thing cloud, you know, kind of a question Mark. And I think the m where to me, Del. Of course I care about storage is huge business for them. They're all above the M where and to the extent that they can leverage VM where, you know, as a competitive weapon, they'll use it against anybody you know. Damn the ecosystem. >> Excellent. Well, thanks, guys, for a great wrap up to our two days here for Justin Warren and Day Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the cubes. Coverage of pure accelerate 2019.

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services Intel and their ecosystem partners everyone welcome back to the cube day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon Web Services reinvent 2018 start sixth year covering I was only meeting to all the reinvents except for the original one I'm John for a mykos David Lunz we got two sets here and set one we got another set over there's so much content set upstairs total of four sets here covering all the video covers and right now we're coming off the keynote with Andy Jesse full of action packed analysis Dave a pretty amazing set of keynotes they had so many announcements here at ABS they had to basically start releasing them they did media alerts before the show midnight madness just a lot of front-end releases that would be notable releases for any other other conference they're letting out early Andy Jesse only has two hours on stage he's giving the keynote finishing up huge amounts of news announcements Dave so you know you went to the analyst session I met with any Jesse last Monday night for the preview we've been following Amazon a lot of the stuff that we've been saying for the past multiple years is actually happening our original predictions and impact of a toes of business on the IT landscape is happened and happening and now new areas that they're focused on that extends their a leadership both technology and the business and on the business model side continue to come on they well yesterday launched as a preview satellites as a service you actually stand up some satellites which is the power of the IOT has so many implications so many things to talk about through the course of today a lot of interviews we're gonna have again day two let's analyze Andy's keynote and the company what's your take their business is strong their lead a lot of analysts are fooled by the numbers you're not we've been watching it huge number of lead in the cloud I think the first thing I want to say is I go to Silicon angle calm I read you're both of your pieces that are up there your piece on Forbes this is a preview and then the the number of announcements here is just overwhelming last two days at the analyst event they gave us previews of sixty-two announcements and that's only a partial list of the announcement 62 that they took us through it was like rapid-fire kool-aid injection unbelievable so silicon Hangul comm is covering as much of that as physically possible any chassis made a big point this morning and at the private analyst meeting of talking about the context of the cloud market he's very sensitive to people misinterpreting growth there are 26 27 billion dollar business exclusively focused on infrastructure as a service and they're totally transparent about the size of that business everybody else throws in SAS I mean you've made this point a bunch of times and all these other things they mix in hosting and you really can't tell what's what despite that Amazon is by far the leader infrastructure as a service with over 50% of the marketplace now they're only growing at 46% but there are 26 27 billion-dollar run rate business growing at 46% so you see sometimes like Microsoft growing it whatever 70% but they're much much smaller so the absolute number in terms of revenue growth is much much higher for Amazon so that's sort of point number one the thing that Jesse doesn't talk about is the profitability of the business they're transparent about it in their financials Amazon has 28 percent operating margins now just to put that in the context software companies like Oracle have 37 percent operating margins Microsoft 32 percent AWS I just mentioned 28 percent Cisco 25 percent VMware as a software companies with 22 percent operating margins IBM 15 percent Dell eight point seven percent HPE seven percent this underscores the power of the AWS model at scale where they're driving the marginal cost of new services and deploying new services down to zero and it just keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger and as a great point as a flywheel effect totally Amazon like but it's a great point ago we've been saying it for a long time the competitive advantage is scale and speed and jessee's now adopting that into his rhetoric into his into his narrative totally true and the other thing to point out on that margin and the profitability is that they're plowing it back in so what what you have at scale I wrote this in my Forbes post and in space at all in Silicon angle transcripts are my my exclusive interview with Andy is that not only are they profitable so they have software like margins for what is what is a hardware business basically in the cloud the stack and in Iraq on their own servers they're making their own chips as they start getting the scale up Dave they are getting a competitive advantage I'm following the profitability back in to launch new services so as the trajectory and I kind of tease this out in my Forbes article I wrote which is as you have a trajectory of growth they're building on that trajectory and the competition is trying to copy Amazon and you can't you can't get the trajectory value by trying to meet Amazon's current trajectory that's called diseconomies of scale I teach you that in business school this economies of scales it's the unsub optimized execution model where you run you don't have the learning experience that you don't have the scale Amazon has that trajectory and as people try to match them they will lose and they're at risk of losing because the risk so the only play for the competition in my opinion like Google like Microsoft like others is to change the goalposts they got to change the playing field on Amazon this is the number one thing that the industry is looking at Amazon is making the market they continue to make the market as market makers that's gonna attract an ecosystem that's gonna attract value and and more companies the only competitive strike that I think one could make is to change the playing field they got to change the game on Amazon that is extremely difficult to do when you're operating at scale you got the profitability numbers you talked about so again that is the new bar and as Amazon I'm we've said this every year ever and every year they've done it they've doubled their aurora customers on the database lied every year they introduced more services last year they in 2018 they'll have introduced significantly new services and the number of eighteen hundred plus okay the year before is like fourteen hundred next year we're probably higher by introducing new services faster that keeps the pace and that's what's hard to copy it's hard for competition to try to match that and as they try to match it they have the diseconomies of scale this is a major advantage this is going to give Amazon customers a comfort because they know that that's that scale becomes more stable products becomes stable the flywheel kicks in and as data gets into the cloud it gets sticky so there's no real lock in spec you can move every in and out of Amazon all you want but why would you because the benefits of being in Amazon far outweigh benefits of actually doing anything else so again the lock-in spec doesn't exist anymore from a technology feature standpoint it's a lock in spec on business model oh it's better well and I want to add something some color to what you said about the the new services and the pace of innovation their services of substance and we know this because our developers you know they talked to us about Amazon Andy Jesse told the story about one of his his executives that was on a plane leaving Seattle he didn't mention Microsoft but clearly he was talking about Microsoft that somebody's laptop was up the PowerPoint presentation it said their strategies explicitly said just announce what Amazon announces don't worry about the functionality and and what so what Amazon what Microsoft is doing presumably it was Microsoft is basically saying check the box freeze the market we have that too so to your point competitors cannot compete with Amazon on pace of innovation no way what they have to do is in the case of Microsoft they have to rely on their software estate in the case of Google you know they've got their innovations ok fine but nobody can match Amazon head-to-head don't just lose every time I like Google's position I love I love Google's got the technology power but you're exactly right that competitive strategy of checking the boxes is an old way of competing and I think what's interesting is the competition has not yet woke up to the fact that the game has already changed on them look at the public sector work that Teresa Collins done the CIA deal really made Amazon a business model because people said hey the CIA could do it we could do it that's been that's come up in all my conversations across all Amazon executives but what's happening now the DoD isn't the only soul source or that's Oracle's business they try to compete I'm checking the boxes but because it's so easy to use the cloud and Andy talked about this as keynote is that you can't fake it till you make it hey you can't you got it you have the surge it's gotta be up and running so it's very easy to do a bake off so you know that it's so that whole way of competing of checking the boxes over the only way to compete is have value and that is a new flywheel that's what's happening right now and that's key so so let me set it up so when you get to reinvent I mean I'm so psyched to be here with you John it's been a while but but try that you try to absorb all the innovation so you so try to boil it down you got to look at it it to simplify it two dimensions one is the data exploiting data better use out of data and the other is developers and developer tools and making it simpler for developers their announcements the 60-plus announcement that they made I break them down into five categories storage and database services compute networking and security third is ease of use and abstractions making things simpler fourth is machine learning and developer tools and the fifth is these new growth frontiers like you mentioned satellite as a service and some other things like in hybrid that we're going to talk about so the announcements kind of fit into that framework but let's maybe highlight some of the announcement a lot of time at least just run down the announcements real quick to meet the main main ones at the place he started the bottom of the stack and move it has moved up storage deep glacier FX Windows file systems lustre for high-performance workloads the new persona developer he call it the Builder the right tool for the right job this is a constant refrain he's been saying control tower blueprints and guardrails template based approach to stand up new use cases for compliance all the kind of detailed manual things that they're automating signal from the noise I love that phrase he put on this put on the big screen that's our motto here it's looking angle security hub lake formation instant data lakes he kind of was pooh-poohing data Lake which I love them like oh shit it'll is just one piece of freedom around databases so one storage was a huge part of the innovation and they're expanding that front and compute and storage it's gonna be critical the database war is definitely happening open engines Aurora doubling customers DynamoDB runtime capacity on demand sensors and time series dais they have timestream block chaining address that straight up look at weekly we'd love blockchain if the customers wanted we're gonna look at and understand it then announce that they announced the quantum ledger database ql DB amazon manage blockchain service so you want etherium or hyper ledger got it and then he moved on to Mitch from databases to machine learning this is where sage maker comes in so you got s3 and ec2 that the pillars you got Aurora that's the key product and then sage making the other key product at the top of stack sets the tone for all these abstractions the machine learning trends tensorflow if you want to use it no problem we'll optimize it Amazon inference engine so elastic inferences blatant see they got a chip inference chip in inferential inferential so you put it the chip and the elasticity service together you have a powerful combination that comes out of the Annapurna acquisition from 2015 building and tuning and managing machine learning apps is gonna be a control area they're gonna add value on and the insights coming from this and marketplace capability so and then on and on and finally the Amazon on premise stack which is gonna be called outpost is the final nail of the coffin behind the strategy because think about it you're gonna put Amazon on premise with a hardware device that's gonna connect with the cloud with all the innovation and this is what amy jazzy talked about we're not just a software company we're hardware we're networking we're compute we're storage and we're software abstractions we're gonna bring that and put it in a device so we're gonna basically create a Amazon Cloud in a box search solution on premise to allow people to manage those Layton sees where network traffic is there this is not just a software only he's not gonna let people run their databases on their clouds it's the Amazon footprints I wanna make a comment about that I came in to reinvent with the with the statement that Amazon actually is winning in hybrid now they used to not talk about hybrid as you well know how can I make that statement when they don't really deliberately go after hybrid well the reason I made the statements cuz the entire ecosystem is connecting to Amazon s3 targets Direct Connect you've seen Amazon do things like snowball and VPC so now what Amazon is doing without post is they're putting the exact same hardware that Amazon uses in its data centers allowing customers to put that in their data centers the identical configuration control plane hardware etc that move is going to really even further extend yeah Amazon's lead and hybrid yeah and we're gonna have eme Jesse on Thursday day of coverage here we have Teresa Carlson on Andy Jessie all the topics David gave McCann you name all the AIG folks coming on as well we're gonna get into all this and extract the signal from all this signal out here of course RTS on VMware I forgot it the other way so there's so much this noise omus iot there IOT strategy is bottoms up and very very impressive gonna have Jerry Chen come on former VMware cloud guy now great little cray lakh venture capital partners over there he's gonna come on and analyze what's the only announcements we're gonna continue to tease out the announcement of course but a silicon angle comm check out all the news it's a tsunami of content coming out of reinvent totally game-changing days we're gonna wrap it up here we're gonna do more analysis so you'll see a bunch of videos on on our YouTube channel and stay tuned watching all week here for live coverage I'm chef Devaux want a stay with us we'll be right back [Music]

Phil McDermott always say data's now the currency well today he was saying now Trust is the currency which is completely truth - but from the data being the country currency perspective it's now the endgame for both of us we've kind of pulled in all companies have gone into the middle that that's kind of not only the Mint messaging but kind of central thing we're trying to develop to deliver a value on speaking with a customer early it's like you have an accountability to help me be innovative right and that's a very important responsibility a lot of that revolves around enterprise class security right a lot of that revolves around uptime right with Layton sees between those environments cuts my performance attribute and are you gonna be there with me forever right amazing thing that's going on it thinking about using drones for first responders they actually can know what's going on in the scene and when the other people are showing up they know what kind of area they're going into or for search and rescue drones can cover a lot of territory and detect a human faster than a human can right and if you can actually find someone within the first 24 hours chance of survival so much higher invest more heavily in the cloud in the second thing they want to do is enable digital transformation real digital transformation how did they monetize the wealth of the data that they've acquired through their relationships with their customers and then how do they leverage that for their customer benefit [Music]