>>The cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Good morning. Live from the MGM Grand. It's the cube at Palo Alto Networks Ignite 2022. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante, day two, Dave of our coverage, or last live day of the year, which I can't believe, lots of good news coming out from Palo Alto Networks. We're gonna sit down with its Chief product officer next and dissect all of that. >>Yeah. You know, oftentimes in, in events like this, day two is product day. And look, it's all about products and sales. Yeah, I mean those, that's the, the, the golden rule. Get the product right, get the sales right, and everything else will take care of itself. So let's talk product. >>Yeah, let's talk product. Lee Claridge joins us, the Chief Product Officer at Palo Alto Networks. Welcome Lee. Great to have >>You. Thank you so much. >>So we didn't get to see your keynote yesterday, but we heard one of the things, you know, we've been talking about the threat landscape, the challenges. We had Unit 42, Wendy on yesterday. We had Nash on and near talking about the massive challenges in the threat landscape. But we understand, despite that you are optimistic. I am. Talk about your optimism given the massive challenges that every organization is facing today. >>Look, cybersecurity's hard and often in cybersecurity in the industry, a lot of people get sort of really focused on what the threat actors are doing, why they're successful. We investigate breaches and we think of it, it just starts to feel somewhat overwhelming for a lot of folks. And I just happen to think a little bit differently. I, I look at it and I think it's actually a solvable problem. >>Talk about cyber resilience. How does Palo Alto Networks define that and how does it help customers achieve that? Cuz that's the, that's the holy grail these days. >>Yes. Look, the, the way I think about cyber resilience is basically in two pieces. One, it's all about how do we prevent the threat actors from actually being successful in the first place. Second, we also have to be prepared for what happens if they happen to find a way to get through, and how do we make sure that that happens? The blast radius is, is as narrowly contained as possible. And so the, the way that we approach this is, you know, I, I kind of think in terms of like threes three core principles. Number one, we have to have amazing technology and we have to constantly be, keep keeping up with and ideally ahead of what attackers are doing. It's a big part of my job as the chief product officer, right? Second is we, you know, one of the, the big transformations that's happened is the advent of, of AI and the opportunity, as long as we can do it, a great job of collecting great data, we can drive AI and machine learning models that can start to be used for our advantage as defenders, and then further use that to drive automation. >>So we take the human out of the response as much as possible. What that allows us to do is actually to start using AI and automation to disrupt attackers as it's happening. The third piece then becomes natively integrating these capabilities into a platform. And when we do that, what allows us to do is to make sure that we are consistently delivering cybersecurity everywhere that it needs to happen. That we don't have gaps. Yeah. So great tech AI and automation deliver natively integrated through platforms. This is how we achieve cyber resilience. >>So I like the positivity. In fact, Steven Schmidt, who's now the CSO of, of Amazon, you know, Steven, and it was the CSO at AWS at the time, the first reinforced, he stood up on stage and said, listen, this narrative that's all gloom and doom is not the right approach. We actually are doing a good job and we have the capability. So I was like, yeah, you know, okay. I'm, I'm down with that. Now when I, my question is around the, the portfolio. I, I was looking at, you know, some of your alternatives and options and the website. I mean, you got network security, cloud security, you got sassy, you got capp, you got endpoint, pretty much everything. You got cider security, which you just recently acquired for, you know, this whole shift left stuff, you know, nothing in there on identity yet. That's good. You partner for that, but, so could you describe sort of how you think about the portfolio from a product standpoint? How you continue to evolve it and what's the direction? Yes. >>So the, the, the cybersecurity industry has long had this, I'm gonna call it a major flaw. And the major flaw of the cybersecurity industry has been that every time there is a problem to be solved, there's another 10 or 20 startups that get funded to solve that problem. And so pretty soon what you have is you're, if you're a customer of this is you have 50, a hundred, the, the record is over 400 different cybersecurity products that as a customer you're trying to operationalize. >>It's not a good record to have. >>No, it's not a good record. No. This is, this is the opposite of Yes. Not a good personal best. So the, so the reason I start there in answering your question is the, the way that, so that's one end of the extreme, the other end of the extreme view to say, is there such a thing as a single platform that does everything? No, there's not. That would be nice. That was, that sounds nice. But the reality is that cybersecurity has to be much broader than any one single thing can do. And so the, the way that we approach this is, is three fundamental areas that, that we, Palo Alto Networks are going to be the best at. One is network security within network security. This includes hardware, NextGen, firewalls, software NextGen, firewalls, sassy, all the different security services that tie into that. All of that makes up our network security platforms. >>So everything to do with network security is integrated in that one place. Second is around cloud security. The shift to the cloud is happening is very real. That's where Prisma Cloud takes center stage. C a P is the industry acronym. If if five letters thrown together can be called an acronym. The, so cloud native application protection platform, right? So this is where we bring all of the different cloud security capabilities integrated together, delivered through one platform. And then security, security operations is the third for us. This is Cortex. And this is where we bring together endpoint security, edr, ndr, attack, surface management automation, all of this. And what we had, what we announced earlier this year is x Im, which is a Cortex product for actually integrating all of that together into one SOC transformation platform. So those are the three platforms, and that's how we deliver much, much, much greater levels of native integration of capabilities, but in a logical way where we're not trying to overdo it. >>And cider will fit into two or three >>Into Prisma cloud into the second cloud to two. Yeah. As part of the shift left strategy of how we secure makes sense applications in the cloud >>When you're in customer conversations. You mentioned the record of 400 different product. That's crazy. Nash was saying yesterday between 30 and 50 and we talked with him and near about what's realistic in terms of getting organizations to, to be able to consolidate. I'd love to understand what does cybersecurity transformation look like for the average organization that's running 30 to 50 point >>Solutions? Yeah, look, 30 to 50 is probably, maybe normal. A hundred is not unusual. Obviously 400 is the extreme example. But all of those are, those numbers are too big right now. I think, I think realistic is high. Single digits, low double digits is probably somewhat realistic for most organizations, the most complex organizations that might go a bit above that if we're really doing a good job. That's, that's what I think. Now second, I do really want to point out on, on the product guy. So, so maybe this is just my way of thinking, consolidation is an outcome of having more tightly and natively integrated capabilities. Got you. And the reason I flip that around is if I just went to you and say, Hey, would you like to consolidate? That just means maybe fewer vendors that that helps the procurement person. Yes. You know, have to negotiate with fewer companies. Yeah. Integration is actually a technology statement. It's delivering better outcomes because we've designed multiple capabilities to work together natively ourselves as the developers so that the customer doesn't have to figure out how to do it. It just happens that by, by doing that, the customer gets all this wonderful technical benefit. And then there's this outcome sitting there called, you've just consolidated your complexity. How >>Specialized is the customer? I think a data pipelines, and I think I have a data engineer, have a data scientists, a data analyst, but hyper specialized roles. If, if, let's say I have, you know, 30 or 40, and one of 'em is an SD wan, you know, security product. Yeah. I'm best of breed an SD wan. Okay, great. Palo Alto comes in as you, you pointed out, I'm gonna help you with your procurement side. Are there hyper specialized individuals that are aligned to that? And how that's kind of part A and B, how, assuming that's the case, how does that integration, you know, carry through to the business case? So >>Obviously there are specializations, this is the, and, and cybersecurity is really important. And so there, this is why there had, there's this tendency in the past to head toward, well I have this problem, so who's the best at solving this one problem? And if you only had one problem to solve, you would go find the specialist. The, the, the, the challenge becomes, well, what do you have a hundred problems to solve? I is the right answer, a hundred specialized solutions for your a hundred problems. And what what I think is missing in this approach is, is understanding that almost every problem that needs to be solved is interconnected with other problems to be solved. It's that interconnectedness of the problems where all of a sudden, so, so you mentioned SD wan. Okay, great. I have Estee wan, I need it. Well what are you connecting SD WAN to? >>Well, ideally our view is you would connect SD WAN and branch to the cloud. Well, would you run in the cloud? Well, in our case, we can take our SD wan, connect it to Prisma access, which is our cloud security solution, and we can natively integrate those two things together such that when you use 'em together, way easier. Right? All of a sudden we took what seemed like two separate problems. We said, no, actually these problems are related and we can deliver a solution where those, those things are actually brought together. And that's just one simple example, but you could, you could extend that across a lot of these other areas. And so that's the difference. And that's how the, the, the mindset shift that is happening. And, and I I was gonna say needs to happen, but it's starting to happen. I'm talking to customers where they're telling me this as opposed to me telling them. >>So when you walk around the floor here, there's a visual, it's called a day in the life of a fuel member. And basically what it has, it's got like, I dunno, six or seven different roles or personas, you know, one is management, one is a network engineer, one's a coder, and it gives you an X and an O. And it says, okay, put the X on things that you spend your time doing, put the o on things that you wanna spend your time doing a across all different sort of activities that a SecOps pro would do. There's Xs and O's in every one of 'em. You know, to your point, there's so much overlap going on. This was really difficult to discern, you know, any kind of consistent pattern because it, it, it, unlike the hyper specialization and data pipelines that I just described, it, it's, it's not, it, it, there's way more overlap between those, those specialization roles. >>And there's a, there's a second challenge that, that I've observed and that we are, we've, we've been trying to solve this and now I'd say we've become, started to become a lot more purposeful in, in, in trying to solve this, which is, I believe cybersecurity, in order for cyber security vendors to become partners, we actually have to start to become more opinionated. We actually have to start, guys >>Are pretty opinionated. >>Well, yes, but, but the industry large. So yes, we're opinionated. We build these products, but that have, that have our, I'll call our opinions built into it, and then we, we sell the, the product and then, and then what happens? Customer says, great, thank you for the product. I'm going to deploy it however I want to, which is fine. Obviously it's their choice at the end of the day, but we actually should start to exert an opinion to say, well, here's what we would recommend, here's why we would recommend that. Here's how we envisioned it providing the most value to you. And actually starting to build that into the products themselves so that they start to guide the customer toward these outcomes as opposed to just saying, here's a product, good luck. >>What's, what's the customer lifecycle, not lifecycle, but really kind of that, that collaboration, like it's one thing to, to have products that you're saying that have opinions to be able to inform customers how to deploy, how to use, but where is their feedback in this cycle of product development? >>Oh, look, my, this, this is, this is my life. I'm, this is, this is why I'm here. This is like, you know, all day long I'm meeting with customers and, and I share what we're doing. But, but it's, it's a, it's a 50 50, I'm half the time I'm listening as well to understand what they're trying to do, what they're trying to accomplish, and how, what they need us to do better in order to help them solve the problem. So the, the, and, and so my entire organization is oriented around not just telling customers, here's what we did, but listening and understanding and bringing that feedback in and constantly making the products better. That's, that's the, the main way in which we do this. Now there's a second way, which is we also allow our products to be customized. You know, I can say, here's our best practices, we see it, but then allowing our customer to, to customize that and tailor it to their environment, because there are going to be uniquenesses for different customers in parti, we need more complex environments. Explain >>Why fire firewalls won't go away >>From your perspective. Oh, Nikesh actually did a great job of explaining this yesterday, and although he gave me credit for it, so this is like a, a circular kind of reference here. But if you think about the firewalls slightly more abstract, and you basically say a NextGen firewalls job is to inspect every connection in order to make sure the connection should be allowed. And then if it is allowed to make sure that it's secure, >>Which that is the definition of an NextGen firewall, by the way, exactly what I just said. Now what you noticed is, I didn't describe it as a hardware device, right? It can be delivered in hardware because there are environments where you need super high throughput, low latency, guess what? Hardware is the best way of delivering that functionality. There's other use cases cloud where you can't, you, you can't ship hardware to a cloud provider and say, can you install this hardware in front of my cloud? No, no, no. You deployed in a software. So you take that same functionality, you instantly in a software, then you have other use cases, branch offices, remote workforce, et cetera, where you say, actually, I just want it delivered from the cloud. This is what sassy is. So when I, when I look at and say, the firewall's not going away, what, what, what I see is the functionality needed is not only not going away, it's actually expanding. But how we deliver it is going to be across these three form factors. And then the customer's going to decide how they need to intermix these form factors for their environment. >>We put forth this notion of super cloud a while about a year ago. And the idea being you're gonna leverage the hyperscale infrastructure and you're gonna build a, a, you're gonna solve a common problem across clouds and even on-prem, super cloud above the cloud. Not Superman, but super as in Latin. But it turned into this sort of, you know, superlative, which is fun. But the, my, my question to you is, is, is, is Palo Alto essentially building a common cross-cloud on-prem, presumably out to the edge consistent experience that we would call a super cloud? >>Yeah, I don't know that we've ever used the term surfer cloud to describe it. Oh, you don't have to, but yeah. But yes, based on how you describe it, absolutely. And it has three main benefits that I describe to customers all the time. The first is the end user experience. So imagine your employee, and you might work from the office, you might work from home, you might work while from, from traveling and hotels and conferences. And, and by the way, in one day you might actually work from all of those places. So, so the first part is the end user experience becomes way better when it doesn't matter where they're working from. They always get the same experience, huge benefit from productivity perspective, no second benefit security operations. You think about the, the people who are actually administering these policies and analyzing the security events. >>Imagine how much better it is for them when it's all common and consistent across everywhere that has to happen. Cloud, on-prem branch, remote workforce, et cetera. So there's a operational benefit that is super valuable. Third, security benefit. Imagine if in this, this platform-based approach, if we come out with some new amazing innovation that is able to detect and block, you know, new types of attacks, guess what, we can deliver that across hardware, software, and sassi uniformly and keep it all up to date. So from a security perspective, way better than trying to figure out, okay, there's some new technology, you know, does my hardware provider have that technology or not? Does my soft provider? So it's bringing that in to one place. >>From a developer perspective, is there a, a, a PAs layer, forgive me super PAs, that a allows the developers to have a common experience across irrespective of physical location with the explicit purpose of serving the objective of your platform. >>So normally when I think of the context of developers, I'm thinking of the context of, of the people who are building the applications that are being deployed. And those applications may be deployed in a data center, increasing the data centers, depending private clouds might be deployed into, into public cloud. It might even be hybrid in nature. And so if you think about what the developer wants, the developer actually wants to not have to think about security, quite frankly. Yeah. They want to think about how do I develop the functionality I need as quickly as possible with the highest quality >>Possible, but they are being forced to think about it more and more. Well, but anyway, I didn't mean to >>Interrupt you. No, it's a, it is a good, it's a, it's, it's a great point. The >>Well we're trying to do is we're trying to enable our security capabilities to work in a way that actually enables what the developer wants that actually allows them to develop faster that actually allows them to focus on the things they want to focus. And, and the way we do that is by actually surfacing the security information that they need to know in the tools that they use as opposed to trying to bring them to our tools. So you think about this, so our customer is a security customer. Yet in the application development lifecycle, the developer is often the user. So we, we we're selling, we're so providing a solution to security and then we're enabling them to surface it in the developer tools. And by, by doing this, we actually make life easier for the developers such that they're not actually thinking about security so much as they're just saying, oh, I pulled down the wrong open source package, it's outdated, it has vulnerabilities. I was notified the second I did it, and I was told which one I should pull down. So I pulled down the right one. Now, if you're a developer, do you think that's security getting your way? Not at all. No. If you're a developer, you're thinking, thank god, thank you, thank, thank you. Yeah. You told me at a point where it was easy as opposed to waiting a week or two and then telling me where it's gonna be really hard to fix it. Yeah. Nothing >>More than, so maybe be talking to Terraform or some other hash corp, you know, environment. I got it. Okay. >>Absolutely. >>We're 30 seconds. We're almost out of time. Sure. But I'd love to get your snapshot. Here we are at the end of calendar 2022. What are you, we know you're optimistic in this threat landscape, which we're gonna see obviously more dynamics next year. What kind of nuggets can you drop about what we might hear and see in 23? >>You're gonna see across everything. We do a lot more focus on the use of AI and machine learning to drive automated outcomes for our customers. And you're gonna see us across everything we do. And that's going to be the big transformation. It'll be a multi-year transformation, but you're gonna see significant progress in the next 12 months. All >>Right, well >>What will be the sign of that progress? If I had to make a prediction, which >>I'm better security with less effort. >>Okay, great. I feel like that's, we can measure that. I >>Feel, I feel like that's a mic drop moment. Lee, it's been great having you on the program. Thank you for walking us through such great detail. What's going on in the organization, what you're doing for customers, where you're meeting, how you're meeting the developers, where they are. We'll have to have you back. There's just, just too much to unpack. Thank you both so much. Actually, our pleasure for Lee Cler and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22, the Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

>>Good afternoon everybody. I'm John Walls and welcome back to our coverage here on the cube of AWS Reinvent 22. We are bringing you another segment with the Global Startup Program, which is part of the AWS Start Showcase, and it's a pleasure to welcome two new guests here to the showcase. First, immediately to my right Han w lre. Good to see you Han. Good to see you. The leader of the Enterprise Solutions Architecture at aws. And on the far right, Rolin Lee, who is the co-founder and CEO of Heim Doll Data. Roland, good to see you. Great >>To be here. >>All right, good. Thanks for joining us. Well first off, for those at home, I may not be familiar with Heim Doll. What do you do? Why are you here? But I'll let you take it from there. >>Well, we're one of the sponsors here at AWS and great to be here. We offer a data access layer in the form of a proxy, and what it does is it provides complete visibility and the capability to enhance the interaction between the application and one's current database. And as a result, you'll, the customer will improve database scale, database security and availability. And all these features don't require any application changes. So that's sort of our marketing pitch, if you will, all these types of features to improve the experience of managing a database without any application >>Changes. And, and where's the cloud come into play then, for you then, where, where did it come into play for you? >>So we started out actually helping out customers on premise, and a lot of enterprise customers are moving over to the cloud, and it was just a natural progression to do that. And so aws, which is a key part of ours, partners with us to help solve customer problems, especially on the database side, as the application being application performance tends to have issues between the interaction between the application database and we're solving that issue. >>Right. Sohan, I mean, Roan just touched on it about OnPrem, right? There's still some kickers and screamers out there that, that don't, haven't bought in or, or they're about to, but you're about to get 'em. I, I'm sure. But talk about that, that conversion or that transition, if you would, from going OnPrem into a hybrid environment or to into the, the bigger cloud environment and and how difficult that is sometimes. Yes. Maybe to get people to, to make that kind of a leap. >>Well, I would say that a lot of customers are wanting to focus more on product innovation experimentation, and also in terms of having to manage servers and patching, you know, it's to take away from that initiative that they're trying to do. So with aws, we provide undifferentiated heavy lifting so that they can focus on product innovation. And one of the areas talking about Heim is that from the database side, we do provide Amazon rds, which is database and also Aurora, to give them that lift so they don't have to worry about patching servers and setting up provisioning servers as well. >>Right. So Roland, can you get the idea across to people very simply, let us take care of the, the hard stuff and, and that will free you up to do your product innovations, to do your experimentations to, to really free up your team, basically to do the fun stuff and, and let us sweat over the, the, the details basically. Right? >>Exactly. Our, our motto is not only why build when, when you can buy. So a lot of it has to do with offering the, the value in terms of price and the features such as it's gonna benefit a team. Large companies like amazon.com, Google, they have huge teams that can build data access layers and proxies. And what we're trying to do here is commercialize those cuz those are built in house and it's not readily available for customers to use. And you'd need some type of interface between the application and the database. And we provide that sort of why build when you can buy. >>Well, I was gonna say why h right? I mean what's your special sauce? Because everybody's got something, obviously a market differentiator that you're bringing into place here. So you started to touch on a little bit there for me, but, but dive a little deeper there. I mean, what, what is it that, that you're bringing to the table with AWS that you think puts you above the crowd? >>Well, lemme give you a use case here. In typical events like let's say Black Friday where there's a surge traffic that can overwhelm the database, the Heim doll data access layer database proxy provides an auto scaling distributed architecture such that it can absorb those surges and traffic and help scale the database while keeping the data fresh and up to date. And so basically traffic based on season time of day, we can, we can adjust automatically and all these types of features that we offer, most notably automated query caching, ReadWrite split for asset compliance don't require any code changes, which typically requires the application developer to make those changes. So we're saving months, maybe years of development and maintenance. >>Yeah, a lot of gray hairs too, right? Yeah, you're, you're solving a lot of problems there. What about database trends in just in general Hunt, if you will. I mean, this is your space, right? I mean, what we're hearing about from Heindel, you know, in terms of solutions they're providing, but what are you seeing just from the macro level in terms of what people are doing and thinking about the database and how it relates to the cloud? Right. >>And some of the things that we're seeing is that we're seeing an explosion of data, relevant data that customers need to be able to consume and also process as well. So with the explosion of data, there's also, we see customers trying to modernize their application as well through microservices, which does change the design patterns of like the applications we call the access data patterns as well. So again, going back to that, a differentiated heavy lifting, we do have something called purpose built databases, right? It's the right tool for the right purpose. And so it depends on what their like rpo, rto their access to data pattern. Is it a base, is it an acid? So we want to be able to provide them the options to build and also innovate. So with that, that's why we have the Amazon rds, the also the, we also have Redshift, we also have Aurora and et cetera. The Rediff is more of the BI side, but usually when you ingest the data, you have some level of processing to get more insight. So with that, that's why customers are moving more of towards the managed service so that they can give that lift and then focusing on that product and innovation. Yeah. >>Have we kind of caught up or are we catching up to this just the tsunami of data to begin with, right? Because I mean, that was it, you know, what, seven, eight years ago when, when that data became kind of, or becoming king and, and reams and reams and reams and all, you know, can't handle it, right? And, and are we now able to manage that process and manage that flow and get the right data into the right hands at the right time? We're doing better with that. >>I would say that it, it definitely has grown in size of the amount of data that we're ingesting. And so with the scalability and agility of the cloud, we're able to, I would say, adapt to the rapid changes and ingestions of the data. So, so that's why we have things like Aurora servers to have that or auto scale so they can do like MySQL or Postgres and then they can still, like what you know, I'm trying to do is basically don't have to co do like any code changes. It would be a data migration. They still use the same underlying database on also mechanisms, but here we're providing them at scale on the cloud. >>Yeah. Our proxies, they must have for all databases. I mean, is that, is that essential these days? >>Well, good question John. I would say yes. And this is often built in house, as I mentioned, for large companies, they do build some type of data access layer or proxy and, or some utilize some orm, some object relational map to do it. And what again, what we're trying to do is offer this, put this out into the market commercially speaking, such that it can be readily used for, for all the customers to use rather than building it from scratch all the time. >>You know what I didn't ask you was Roy, how does AWS come into play for you then? And, and as in the startup mode, the focus that they've had in startups in general, but in you in particular, I mean, talk about that partnership or that relationship and the value that you're extracting from that. >>The ad AWS partnership has been absolutely wonderful. The collaboration, they have one of the best managed service databases. The value that it that adds in terms of the durability, the manageability, what the Heim doll data does is it compliments Amazon rds, Amazon Redshift very well in the sense that we're not replacing the database. What we're doing is we are allowing the customer to get the most out of the managed service database, whether it be Redshift or Aurora Serverless, rds, all without code changes. And or the analogy that I would give John is a car, a race car may be very fast, but it takes a driver to get to those fast speeds. We're the driver, the Hyundai proxy provides that intelligence so that you can get the most out of that database engine. >>And, and Hfi would then touch on, first off AWS and the emphasis that you have put on startups and are obviously, you know, kind of putting your money where your mouth is, right? With, with the way you've encouraged and nurtured that environment. And they would be about Heim doll in general about where you see this going or what you would like to have, where you want to take this in the next say 12 months, 18 months. >>I think it's more of a better together story of how we can basically coil with our partners, right? And, and basically focusing on helping our customers drive that innovation and be collaboration. So as Heim, as a independent service vendor isv, most customers can leverage that through a marketplace where basically it integrates very nicely with aws. So that gives 'em that lift and it goes back to the undifferentiated heavy lifting on the Hein proxy side, if you will, because then you have this proxy in the middle where then it helps them with their SQL performance. And I've seen use cases where customers were, have some legacy system that they may not have time to modernize the application. So they use this as a lift to keep, keep going as they try to modernize. But also I've seen customers who use are trying to use it as a, a way to give that performance lift because they may have a third party software that they cannot change the code by putting this in there that helps optimize their lines of business or whatever that is, and maybe can be online store or whatever. So I would say it was a better together type of story. >>Yeah. Which is, there's gotta be a song in there somewhere. So peek around the corner and if you wanna be headlights here right now in terms of 12, 18 months, I mean, what, you know, what what next to solve, right? You've already taken, you've slayed a few dragons along the way, but there are others I'm sure is it always happens in innovation in this space. Just when you solve a problem you've just dealt or you have to deal with others that pop up as maybe unintended consequences or at least a new challenge. So what would that be in your world right now? What, what do you see, you know, occupying your sleepless nights here for the next year or so? >>Well, for, for HOMEDALE data, it's all about improving database performance and scale. And those workloads change. We have O ltp, we have OLA with artificial intelligence ml. There's different type of traffic profiles and we're focused on improving those data profiles. It could be unstructured structured. Right now we're focused on structured data, which is relational databases, but there's a lot of opportunity to improve the performance of data. >>Well, you're driving the car, you got a good navigator. I think the GPS is working. So keep up the good work and thank you for sharing the time today. Thank you. Thank you, joy. Do appreciate it. All right, you are watching the cube. We continue our coverage here from AWS Reinvent 22, the Cube, of course, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE and Horizon3.ai special presentation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Jennifer Lee head of channel sales Horizon3.ai, Jennifer, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Great, well thank you for having me >> So big news around Horizon3.ai driving channel, first commitment you guys are expanding the channel partner program to include all kinds of new rewards, incentives, training programs to help educate, you know, partners, really drive more recurring revenue, certainly cloud and cloud scale has done that. You got a great product that fits into that kind of channel model, great services you can wrap around it, good stuff. So let's get into it. What are you guys doing? What are you guys doing with this news? Why is this so important? >> Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, we, like you said, we recently expanded our channel partner program. The driving force behind it was really just to align our, like you said, our channel first commitment and creating awareness around the importance of our partner ecosystems. So that's, it's really how we go to market, is through the channel. >> And a great international focus. I've talked with the CEO, you know, about the solution and he broke down all the action on why it's important on the product side, but why now on the go to market change? What's the why behind this big, this news on the channel? >> Yeah, for sure. So we are doing this now, really to align our business strategy, which is built on the concept of enabling our partners to create a high value, high margin business on top of our platform. And so we offer a solution called node zero. It provides autonomous pen testing as a service and it allows organizations to continuously verify their security posture. So our, we, our company vision, we have this tagline that states that our pen testing enables organizations to see themselves through the eyes of an attacker. And we use the, like the attacker's perspective to identify exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities. So we created this partner program from a perspective of the partner. So the partner's perspective and we've built it through the eyes of our partner, right? So we're prioritizing really what the partner is looking for and will ensure like mutual success for us. >> Yeah, the partners always want to get in front of the customers and bring new stuff to them. Pen tests have traditionally been really expensive. And so bringing it down and in one, to a service level that's, one, affordable and has flexibility to it allows a lot of capabilities. So I imagine people are going to get excited by it. So I have to ask you about the program. What specifically are you guys doing? Can you share any details around what it means for the partners, what they get, what's in it for them? Can you just break down some of the mechanics and mechanisms or details? >> Yeah. Yep, so, you know, we're really looking to create business alignment. And like I said, established mutual success with our partners, so we've got 2 key elements that we were really focused on that we bring to the partners. So the opportunity, the profit margin expansion is one of 'em and a way for our partners to really differentiate themselves and stay relevant in the market. So we've restructured our discount model, really, you know, highlighting profitability and maximizing profitability. And this includes our deal registration. We've created a deal registration program. We've increased discount for partners who take part in our partner certification trainings, and we've, we have some other partner incentives that we've created that's going to help out there. We've put this all, so we've recently gone live with our partner portal, it's a consolidated experience for our partners where they can access our sales tools. And we really view our partners as an extension of our sales and technical teams. And so we've extended all of our training material that we use internally, we've made it available to our partners through our partner portal. We've, I'm trying, I'm thinking now back, what else is in that partner portal here? We've got our partner certification information. So all the content that's delivered during that training can be found in the portal. We've got deal registration, co-branded marketing materials, pipeline management. And so this portal gives our partners a one stop place to go to final event information. And then just really quickly on the second part of that, that I mentioned is our technology really is really disruptive to the market. So, you know, like you said, autonomous pen testing, it's still, it's, well, it's still a relatively new topic for security practitioners and it's proving to be really disruptive. So that on top of just, well, recently we found an article that mentioned by markets to markets that reports that the global pen testing market's really expanding. And so it's expected to grow to like 2.7 billion by 2027. So the market's there, right? The market's expanding, it's growing. And so for our partners, it just really allows them to grow their revenue across their customer base, expand their customer base and offering this high profit margin while, you know, getting in early to market on this disruptive technology. >> Big market, a lot of opportunities to make some money. People love to put more margin on those deals, especially when you can bring a great solution that everyone knows is hard to do. So I think that's going to provide a lot of value. Is there a type of partner that you guys see emerging or you aligning with, you mentioned the alignment with the partners. I can see how that, the training and the incentives are all there. Sounds like it's all going well. Is there a type of partner that's resonating the most or is there categories of partners that can take advantage of this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with all different kinds of partners. We work with our traditional resale partners. We're working with systems integrators. We have a really strong MSP, MSSP program. We've got consulting partners and the consulting partners especially with the ones that offer pen test services. So we, they use us as a, we act as a force multiplier, just really offering them profit margin expansion opportunity there. We've got some technology partners that we really work with for co-sell opportunities. And then we've got our cloud partners. You had mentioned that earlier and so we are in AWS marketplace, our CCPO partners, we're part of the ISV accelerate program. So we're doing a lot there with our cloud partners. And of course we go to market with distribution partners as well. >> Got to love the opportunity for more margin expansion. Every kind of partner wants to put more gross profit on their deals. Is there a certification involved, I have to ask? Is there like, do you get, do people get certified or is it just, you get train? Is it self-paced training? Is it in person? How are you guys doing the whole training, certification thing? Is that a requirement, or not? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we do offer a certification program and it's been very popular. This includes a seller's portion and an operator portion. And so this is at no cost to our partners and we offer it both virtually, it's live, it's virtually, but live, it's not self-paced. And we also have in person, you know, sessions as well. And we also can customize these to any partners that have a large group of people. And we can just, we can do one in person or virtual just specifically for that partner. >> Well, any kind of incentive opportunities and marketing opportunities? Everyone loves to get the deals just kind of rolling in leads, from what we can see, out early reportings, this looks like a hot product, price wise, service level wise. What incentives do you guys start thinking about and joint marketing, you mentioned co-sell earlier in pipeline, so I was kind of owning in on that piece. >> Sure and yes, and then to follow along with our partner certification program, we do incentivize our partners there. If they have a certain number certified, their discount increases. So that's part of it. We have our deal registration program that increases discount as well. And then we do have some partner incentives that are wrapped around meeting setting, and moving opportunities along to proof of value. >> Got to love the education driving value. I have to ask you, so you do, you've been around the industry, you've seen the channel relationships out there. You've seen companies, old school, new school, you know, Horizon3.ai is kind of like that new school, very cloud specific, a lot of leverage with, well, you mentioned AWS and all the clouds. Why is the company so hot right now? Why did you join them? And what's, why are people attracted to this company? What's the attraction, what's the vibe? What do you see and what do you, what did you see in this company? >> Well, this is just, you know, like I said, it's very disruptive. It's really in high demand right now. And just because it's new to market and a newer technology, so we are, we can collaborate with a manual pen tester. We can, you know, we can allow our customers to run their pen test with no specialty teams. And then, so we, and like, you know, like I said, we can allow, our partners can actually build businesses, profitable businesses, so we can, they can use our product to increase their services revenue and build their business model, you know, around, around our services. >> What's interesting about the pen testing is that it's very expensive and time consuming. And the people who do them are very talented people that could be working on really bigger things in the- >> Absolutely. >> In the customers. So bringing this into the channel allows them, if you look at the price dealt between a pen test and then what you guys are offering. I mean, that's a huge margin gap between street price of say today's pen test and what you guys offer. When you show people that, do they fall, do they say too good to be true? I mean, what are some of the things that people say when you kind of show 'em that? Are they like scratch their head, like, come on, what's the catch here? >> Right, so the cost savings is a huge, is huge for us. And then also, you know, like I said, working as a force multiplier with a pen testing company that offers the services and so they can do their annual manual pen test that may be required around compliance regulations. And then we can act as the continuous verification of their security, you know, that they can run weekly. And so it's just, you know, it's just an addition to what they're offering already and an expansion. >> So, Jennifer, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate you coming on, sharing the insights on the channel. What's next? What can we expect from the channel group? What are you thinking, what's going on? >> Right, so we're really looking to expand our channel footprint and very strategically, we've got some big plans for Horizon3.ai. >> Awesome, well, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome everyone to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios. We've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome one of our alumni to the program. Rob Lee, the CTO of pure storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >>Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for, thanks for having me. >>Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations on your appointment as a CTO >>Now, thank you very much. Very excited, very excited to be taking the reins and uh, for all the, all the great stuff that's ahead of >>A lot of great stuff. I'm sure. I also saw that once again, cure has been named a leader in several Gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid, seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age? Are they looking to solve? >>Yeah, absolutely. I think all in all, I think, um, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their, uh, understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, uh, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their it tools and, and what that means is, you know, not just, um, looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, uh, but really being able to make use of, uh, and, and make the most use out of each, uh, you know, each of the services and, uh, capabilities in the environments that they're operating in. And, uh, so a lot of times that means, um, you know, commonality in, in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, uh, it means the flexibility, uh, that, that commonality allows them, uh, in, in terms of planning and optionality to move, uh, parts of their application or environments, uh, between premise and cloud. >>Um, you know, and, and I think overall, you know, we, we look at this as, um, you know, really a couple, uh, specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, um, you know, I think they're, they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to, uh, in the cloud, into their own data center. Uh, and at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge, um, more of how they operate, uh, the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today, uh, and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. Uh, and then lastly, I'd say that, um, you know, as customers, I think, um, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot, uh, largely planted in, uh, developing and building, uh, some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures, uh, driven by containers and Kubernetes, um, you know, a, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or, or increasingly hybrid is, um, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. >>And that's certainly an area that, uh, you've seen pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. Um, one is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud, uh, model, uh, into their data center. Uh, two is, uh, being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today. Uh, and then three is building their new stuff, uh, and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem cloud, and across clouds. >>Um, talk to me about where cure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just started regulated. And so, uh, this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model, uh, into customer's data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, um, you know, uh, automation, um, simplicity of management, uh, delivering infrastructure as code. A lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment in many ways, as you know, um, this is a natural evolution of where pure has been a long road. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer likes simplicity into our products and, uh, enterprise data centers. And now we're just kind of expanding that, uh, to bring more of the cloud simplicity. And, um, you know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our, um, uh, our public cloud partners, such as AWS in embracing, um, their management models. >>And so you saw, um, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS outposts. Um, and, and that activity is certainly continuing on. So, so customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs, or whether they want, whether they want to, uh, simply use cloud providers, management plans and extend those onto their premise, um, have both options, uh, to do that. Um, you know, we're also as, you know, um, you know, uh, very committed to helping customers, uh, be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from other data center into the public cloud environments, uh, through products like cloud block store. Uh, this is, uh, an area where we've helped, uh, numerous customers, um, you know, take the existing applications, uh, and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run, uh, that they're used to in their data center, um, production environments, rich those now into public cloud environments, and whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. >>Um, and then thirdly, uh, with port works, right, this is where, you know, we're, we're really focused on helping customers, not just, uh, by providing them with the infrastructure, they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on. Uh, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, um, the data flow, um, operations such as backup tr migration, uh, that go along with that storage infrastructure, uh, as well as now application management capabilities, uh, which we recently announced, uh, during our launch event in September with quirks data services. Uh, so really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers, um, really, really looking, uh, to crack as they, um, I would say balance, uh, the cloud environments in their data center environments in this hybrid world. >>And I'm curious what you're seeing, you know, the focus being on data, >>Uh, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is, is kind of, um, you know, contains a lot of the, um, you know, the, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding of their customers, uh, you know, and or whether it's in product development faster time to market. Um, I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated, um, uh, realization appreciation of, for not just how valuable the data is, but, um, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? Uh, you know, customers that are realizing, Hey, if I'm collecting all this data, uh, in my on-prem location, um, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Um, maybe I need to kind of, uh, look at how I, how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services, uh, living over here and how do I bridge those two, um, uh, you know, two locations. I think you add on top of that, um, you know, newer, I would say realization of, uh, security and data governance, data, privacy concerns, and that certainly has customers. I think, um, you know, thinking a lot more thinking a lot more intently about, um, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data management, uh, governance and security strategies. >>Yeah. We've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in the threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word, and it's a matter of when versus if, as customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to persist for probably quite some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think, um, I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when not if right. And I, and I think, um, you know, we're, we're really focused on helping customers, um, uh, plan for, and, uh, have, you know, planned for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security and have focused on preventing an attack and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, Hey, if something happens where, you know, as, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? Uh, and so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, um, you know, form a robust strategies for, um, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware sense. >>Um, we do this by, uh, through our safe mode, um, uh, features which are available across, uh, all of our products and, you know, quite simply this is, uh, our capability to take, um, read only snapshots and then couple them with, uh, a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down. And it takes the control of the snapshots away from, uh, not just customer admins, but potential, uh, ransomware or malware. Right. Um, you know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have, uh, hit the industry, um, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware, um, uh, pieces of software taking are going after the backups, they go off to the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stop that chain or in the security world world, what's called the kill chain. Uh, we stopped that chain, uh, right at, right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, um, you know, no customer admin, whether, uh, it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, um, has the, has the ability to remove that backup. And you know, that that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular, uh, and most, uh, quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >>That's key. I saw that, um, some was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it to becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators. And of course, a source of driving revenue ensuring that the data, the backups are protected and the ability to recover, um, quickly is there is that is table stakes. I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >>Absolutely. And I think, um, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's, um, protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, um, you know, infrastructure failures or, or, or whatnot, um, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back five, 10 years and people are really fixated on, Hey, how quickly can I back? You know, how quickly can I back this environment up and how can I do it in the most cost-effective manner. Now, people are much more focused on, Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is, uh, when, when something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online? Because, um, chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online servants, right? >>Chances are, you've got customers waiting for a, you've got SLS, you've got transactions that can't complete. If you don't get this environment back up. Uh, and we've seen this, uh, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think, um, that maturing understanding of what true data protection is, is something that, um, has a driven, you know, a new approach, uh, from customers to, and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. Uh, and B I think it is also, um, you know, uh, found a new place for, um, you know, performance and reliability and really all of the properties of, um, you know, Pierce products, uh, in, in this space. >>Last question about, for you, give me an example, and you can just mention it by industry, or even by use case of, of a joint AWS pure customer, where you're really helping them create a very successful, uh, enterprise grade hybrid cloud environment. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. Um, you know, so, so we've got, uh, we've got countless customers that, um, you know, uh, I could point to, you know, I, I think, um, you know, I think one that I would, uh, or one space that were particularly successful in, uh, that I would highlight are, um, you know, SAS companies, right? So, so companies that are, um, you know, are building, um, you know, are building modern SAS applications. Uh, and in one, in one particular example I can think of is, um, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, um, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And, uh, certainly is looking to AWS looking to the public cloud environments, um, you know, as, as a, um, you know, as a great place to scale, but at the same time, um, you know, needs, um, more capabilities than, um, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, uh, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. >>They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, um, you know, uh, really provide the 24 by seven by 365, uh, around the world, uh, service that they have, especially dealing with, um, high load bursts in different geos and, and just a very, very dynamic global environment. Um, and so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, um, you know, help the customer, uh, with port works, uh, be able to provide these capabilities, um, by augmenting the compute that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer. Um, you know, with me, uh, the storage level, um, uh, uh, replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities and auto scaling performance management, um, all the capabilities that they need, uh, to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, um, you know, uh, on-premise on-premise data center locations as well. >>Um, so that's just one, uh, one of many examples, um, you know, but, but I think that's a, a great example where, you know, as, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. Uh, but then as you scale, uh, whether it's, uh, because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute, um, volume and capacity, um, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, um, you know, more, uh, connectivity, uh, to other sites other potentially, uh, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. Um, and that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic, uh, infrastructure layer such as port works, uh, is able to provide, uh, comes in very handy. >>Got it, Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re-invent talking about the pure AWS relationship what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then very fast paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >>Thanks for having me. >>Likewise. Good to see you too. Probably I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021.

(bright music) (logo whooshing) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, we've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, Rob Lee, the CTO of Pure Storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for having me. >> Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you've got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations >> Thank you. >> on your appointment as a CTO. >> No, thank you very much. Very excited to be taking the reins and for all the great stuff that's ahead of us. >> Lot of great stuff, I'm sure. I also saw that once again, Pure has been named a leader in several gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage, and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid. I've seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age are they looking to solve? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, all in all, I think, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their IT tools. And what that means is, you know, not just looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, but really being able to make use of and make the most use out of each, you know, each of the services and capabilities of the environments that they're operating in. And so a lot of times that means, you know, commonality in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, it means the flexibility that that commonality allows them in terms of planning and optionality to move parts of their application or environments between premise and cloud. You know, and I think overall, you know, we look at this as, you know, really a couple specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, you know, I think they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to in the cloud, into their own data center. And at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge more of how they operate the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. And then lastly, I'd say that, you know, as customers, I think, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot largely planted in developing and building some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures driven by containers and Kubernetes, you know, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or increasingly hybrid is, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. And that's certainly an area that you've seen Pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. One is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud model into their data center, two is being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today, and then three is building their new stuff and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem, cloud, and across clouds. >> So, Rob, talk to me about where Pure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just articulated and so this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model into customers' data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, you know, automation, simplicity of management, delivering infrastructure as code, a lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment. In many ways, as you know, this is a natural evolution of where Pure has been all along. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer-like simplicity into our products and enterprise data centers. And now, we're just kind of expanding that to bring more of the cloud simplicity in. You know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our public cloud partners such as AWS in embracing their management models. And so you saw, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS Outposts and that activity is certainly continuing on. So customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs or whether they want to simply use cloud providers management plans and extend those onto their premise, have both options to do that. You know, we're also, as you know, very committed to helping customers be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from their data center into the public cloud environments through products like Cloud Block Store. This is an area where we've helped numerous customers, you know, take the existing applications and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run that they're used to running in their data center production environments bridge those now into public cloud environments. And whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. And then thirdly with Portworx, right? This is where, you know, we're really focused on helping customers, not just by providing them with the infrastructure they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, the data flow operations such as backup, TR, migration that go along with that storage infrastructure, as well as now application management capabilities, which we recently announced during our launch event in September with Portworx Data Services. So really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers really looking to crack as they, I would say balance the cloud environments and their data center environments in this hybrid world. >> And I'm curious what you're saying, you know, the focus being on data. >> Customers, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is kind of, you know, contains a lot of the, you know, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding their customers, you know, and or whether it's in product development, faster time to market. I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated realization and appreciation for not just how valuable that it is, but, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? You know, customers that are realizing, "Hey, if I'm collecting all this data in my on-prem location, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Maybe I need to kind of look at how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services living over here, and how do I bridge those two, you know, two locations." I think you add on top of that, you know, newer, I would say realization of security and data governance, data privacy concerns. And that certainly has customers, I think, you know, thinking a lot more intently about, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data managements, governance, and security strategies. >> Yeah, we've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in. The threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word and it's a matter of when versus if. As customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to process for probably some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when, not if, right? And I think, you know, we're really focused on helping customers plan for and have, you know, plan for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security have focused on preventing an attack, and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, hey, if something happens where, you know, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? And so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, you know, form robust strategies for, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware since. We do this by through our safe mode features, which are available across all of our products. And, you know, quite simply, this is our capability to take read-only snapshots and then couple them with a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down and takes the control of the snapshots away from not just customer admins, but potential ransomware or malware, right? You know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have hit the industry, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware pieces of software taking are going after the backups. They go after the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stopped that chain or in the security world what's called the kill chain, we stopped that chain right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, you know, no customer admin, whether it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, has the ability to remove that backup. And, you know, that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular and most quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >> That's key. I saw that. I was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it, it's becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators and, of course, a source of driving revenue, ensuring that the backups are protected, and the ability to recover quickly is there is that is table stakes, I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >> Absolutely, and I think, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, you know, infrastructure failures or whatnot, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back 5, 10 years and people are really fixated on, "Hey, how quickly can I back here? How quickly can I back this environment up, and how can I do it in a most cost-effective manner?" Now people are much more focused on, "Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is." When something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online because chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online service, right? Chances are, you've got customers waiting for you. You've got SLAs, you've got transactions that can't complete if you don't get this environment back up. And we've seen this, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think that maturing understanding of what true data protection is is something that has A, driven, you know, a new approach from customers to and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. And B I think it is also, you know, found a new place for, you know, performance and reliability, but really all of it, the properties of, you know, Pures products in this space. >> Last question, Rob, for you, give me an example, you can just mention it by industry or even by use case of a joint AWS Pure customer where you're really helping them create a very successful enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, so we've got countless customers that, you know, I could point to. You know, I think one that I would or one space that we're particularly successful in that I would highlight are, you know, SAS companies, right? So companies that are, you know, are building modern SAS applications. And in one particular example I can think of is, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And certainly is looking to AWS, looking to the public cloud environments, you know, as a great place to scale. But at the same time, you know, needs more capabilities than, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, you know, really provide the 24 by 7 by 365 around the world service that they have, especially dealing with high load bursts in different GEOS and just a very, very dynamic global environment. And so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, you know, help the customer with Portworx. Be able to provide these capabilities by augmenting that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer, you know, with the storage level replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities, autoscaling, performance management, all the capabilities that they need to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, you know, on-premise data center locations as well. So that's just one of many examples, you know, but I think that's a great example where, you know, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. But then as you scale, whether it's because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute volume and capacity, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, you know, more connectivity to other sites, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. And that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic infrastructure layer such as Portworx is able to provide comes in very handy. >> Got it. Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re:Invent, talking about the Pure AWS relationship, what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then a very fast-paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >> Great, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Likewise. Good to see you too. Per Rob Lee, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (calm music)

>>the cloud is evolving, you know, it's no longer just a set of remote services access through a public cloud Rather it's expanding to on premises to multiple premises across clouds and eventually out to the edge. The challenge for customers is how to treat these locations as one the opportunity for technology companies is to make that as simple as possible from an operational perspective. Welcome to this cube program. We're featuring pure storage and its latest innovations and bringing infrastructure and applications more closely together, fusing them if you will. And today we have a two part program. First we're gonna hear from rob leaves the CTO of pure storage and then my colleague john Walls is gonna talk to scott. Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group Scott will provide his expert analysis on infrastructure modernization and what to expect in today's changing world. So joining me right now is rob lee CTO pure storage. Welcome rob. Good to see you. >>Good to see you again to dave >>Okay, so take us through the announcements from today at a high level what's most exciting about what you're delivering? Yeah, >>absolutely. So as you know, many announcements today, many things to discuss. But overall, uh you know, I think what's most exciting is it's the expansion of our ability to help customers along the modern data journey. Right. We've always thought of the journey to modern data is being formed by by three pillars if you will. Certainly modernizing infrastructure modernizing operations uh and applications, uh today's announcements are really uh in that in that kind of middle category if like you said, bringing infrastructures and applications a lot more closely together. Right. We've been modernizing infrastructure since day one. Probably people best know us for that. Today's announcements are really about uh tackling that operations, peace bring infrastructure and code and applications more closely together. So when we think about pure fusion, for example, um you know that that's really a huge step forward in how we're enabling our customers to manage large fleets of infrastructure, uh products and components to deliver those services in a more automated, more tightly integrated, seamlessly transparently delivered way to the application actions that they serve. Whether these services are being delivered by many different arrays in one location, many different arrays in different data center locations or between the premise on premise environment, in the cloud environment. Um likewise, uh the application front, um you know, when we think about today's announcements uh in port works data services, that's really all about how do we make the run and operate uh steps of a lot of the application building blocks that cloud native developers are using and relying on the database applications that are most popular and open source CAssandra Mongo so on and so forth. How do we make the run and operate pieces of those applications, a lot more intuitive, a lot more easily deployed, scaled, managed monitored for those app developers and so a ton of a ton of momentum is a big step forward on that front. And then right in the middle, when we think about today's announcements in pure one, um that's really all about how do we create more visibility, connecting the monitoring and management of the infrastructure, running the apps and bring those closer together. So when we think about um, you know, the visibility, we're now able to deliver for port works to apologies, allowing developers and devops teams to look at the entire uh tech stack, if you will of a container environment from the application to the containers to the kubernetes cluster, to the compute nodes all the way down to the storage and be able to see everything that's going on root cause any sort of problems that come up again, that's all in service of bringing infrastructure and applications a lot more closely together. Um so that's really how I view it, uh and and like I said, it's really the next step in our journey of of helping customers modernize between infrastructure operations and and their applications. >>Okay, So, so you've got the control plane piece, which is all about the operating model. You've got pure one, you mentioned that which is for monitoring, you've got the port works piece, which brings sort of development and deployment together and both infrastructure as a code is code and better understanding that full stack of like you say, from applications through the clusters, the containers all the way down. So the story says, I feel like it's not even storage anymore. I mean it's cloud, >>It is and you know, I talk a little bit because, you know, at the end of the day we deliver storage, but what customers are looking for is in what they value and what they care about is their data. Now, obviously the storage is in service of the data. Um what we're, what we're doing with today's announcements is again just making it extending, extending our reach, helping customers work over their data. Uh you know, a couple more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of the storage. But now getting into how do we connect the data that's sitting on our storage more quickly? Get it, you know, in the hands of developers and the applications more seamlessly and more fluidly across these different environments. How >>does this news fit into pure evolution as a company? I mean I don't see it as a pivot because of pivots like, okay, we're gonna go from here and now we're >>doing this right? So >>it's it's more like a reinvention or progression of the vision and the strategy. Can you talk to that? >>Absolutely. Um you know, I think between those two words, I would say it's a progression, it's the next step in the journey as opposed to a reinvention. Right? You know, and again, I go back to um you know, I go back to the difference between storage and data and how customers are using data. We've been on a long, long term hath long term journey to continue to help customers modernize how they work with data, the results they're able to drive from the data we got our starting infrastructure um and and just uh you know, if you want to do, if you want to do bleeding edge things with data, you're not gonna do it on decades old infrastructure. So let's fix that component first. That's how we got our start. Um you know, today's announcements are really the next couple of steps along that journey. Um how do we make, how do we make the core infrastructure more easily delivered, more flexible to operate more automated in the hands of not just the devops teams, the I. T. Teams but the application developers, how do we, how do we deliver infrastructure more seamlessly as code? Well, why why is that important? Um It's important because what customers are looking for out of their data is both speeds and feeds the traditional kind of measures bandwidth i obsolete and see that sort of thing. But they're looking for a speed of agility. Right? You look at the modern application space around how data is being processed. It's a very, very fast moving application space. Uh you know, the databases that are being used today may be different than the ones using being used three months from now or six months from now And so um developers, application teams are looking for, you know, a ton more flexibility, ton more agility than they were 35, 10, 15 years ago. Um The other aspect is simplicity and reliability, right? As you know, um that's a core component of uh you know of everything. We do our core products uh you know, uh you know, our arrays are storage appliances, um you know, we're very well known for the simplicity and reliability. We drive at the individual product level. Well as we scale and look at um you know, larger environments as we look at uh customers expectations for what they expect from a cloud like service. There is the next level of scale and how we deliver that simplicity and reliability. Right. And what do I mean by that? Well, a large enterprise customer who wants to operate like a cloud wants to be able to manage large fleets of uh infrastructure resources, be able to package them up, deliver uh infrastructure services to their internal customers, want they want to be able to do it in a self service, policy driven, easy to control, easy to manage way. Um and that's the next level of fleet level simplicity and that's really what what pure fusion is about, right, is allowing operators that control plane to specify those um those attributes and how that service should be delivered. Um Same thing with poor works, right. If we think about simplicity and reliability, uh containers, collaborative applications, microservices, a lot of benefits. They're very fast moving space, you can mix and match components put them together very easily. Um, but what goes hand in hand with that is now a need for a greater degree of simplicity because you have more moving parts and a greater need for reliability because well now you're not just serving one application, but You know, 30 or 40 working in unison and that's really what we're after with port works and port works data services in the evolution of that family. So getting back to your original question um, I really look at today's announcements as not a pivot, not a reinvention, but the next logical steps in our long-term journey to help customers modernize everything they do around data. >>Right. Thanks for that rob. Hey, I want to switch topics. Virtually every infrastructure player now has an as a service offering and there are lots of claims out there about who was first, who is the best etcetera. What's up yours position on this topic? You claim you're ahead of the pack and delivering subscription and, and as a service offerings in the storage industry? You certainly refers to with Evergreen. That was sort of a real change in how folks delivered. What about as a service and Pure as a service. What gives you confidence that you have the right approach and you're leading the industry in this regard? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think first and foremost we think of everything we do, uh, you know, pure as a service and whether that's delivering products and helping customers to run and operate uh in an average service model internally or whether it's pure taking on more of that run and operate uh as a service ourselves with pure as a service. Um and so, you know, the second part of your question, which is uh you know, what is it that that sets us apart, What are we doing differently? What gives us confidence that um you know, this is the right path? Well, you know, fundamentally, I think the difference is obviously this is a uh you know, a hotter topic in the industry um you know, of late, but I think the difference is between us and the competitive set is we really look at this as a product and technology led philosophy and strategy and we have since day one. Right. And I think that's different than a lot of others in the industry. Um you know, who look at it as a little bit more of a, you know, a packaging exercise between financial services, professional services, wrap it up in T and CS and call it a service. Um what do I mean by that? Right. So, you know, if you look internally a pure everything we do, we think of as a service, we have a business unit organized around it, we have an engineering team, significant resources dedicated to it uh in building out service offerings. Um, you know, when we think about why this is technology led, uh you know, I think of a service for something to be thought of as a service. Right. It's got to be flexible, it's got to be adaptable. I've got to be able to grow as a customer and evolve as I need uh whether that's, you know, changing needs in terms of performance and capacity, I've got to be able to do that without being locked into day one rigid kind of static swim lanes of Having the capacity plan or plan out what my use is gonna look like 18 months from now. Right. Um I've got to be able to move and evolve and grow without disruption. Right? Uh you know, it's it's not it's not a service if you're gonna make me do a data migration or take a downtown. Uh and so when I net all that out Right, what are the things that you need? The attributes you need to be able to deliver a service? Well, you need a product that that is going to be able to be highly malleable, highly flexible, highly evolved able. Um you need something that's going to be able to cover the entire gamut of, of needs, whether it's price performance, uh tears, uh you know, high performance capacity, lower cost price points. Um you need something that's got a rich set of capabilities, whether it's access protocols, file block object, whether it's data protection properties, you know, replication snapshots, uh ransomware protection, so you need that full suite of capabilities um but in order to deliver this to service and enable me as a customer to seamlessly grow and change, you know, that's got to be delivered in a very tight set of technology that can be repurposed and and configured in different ways. You can't do this on 17 different products uh and expect me to change and and move every every single time I have a a service to need change. And so when I net that out that puts us in a absolutely differentiated position to be able to deliver this because again, everything we do is based on to core product families, port works adds a third. We're able to deliver all of the major storage protocols, all of the data protection capabilities across all of the price, performance and service tiers. And we're able to do this on a very tight code base and and as you know, uh everything we do is completely not disruptive. So all of the elements really add up in our favor. And like I said, this is a huge area of strategic focus for us. >>So these offerings are all part of the services. Service driven component of your portfolio, is that correct? >>Absolutely great. >>Um you talk all the time about modern data experiences, modern applications, modern data changing the way customers think about infrastructure, what exactly does that mean? And how are you driving that? >>Well, I think um I think it means a couple different things, but if I had to let it out, it's it's a greater demand for agility, a greater demand for flexibility and optionality. Um and if we look at why that is uh you know, when I talk to customers As they think about infrastructure largely they think about their existing application demands and needs, what they're spending 90% of their time and budget dealing with today and then the new stuff that they're getting more and more pressured to go off and build and support, which is often times the more strategic initiatives that they have to serve. So they're kind of balancing both worlds um and in the new world of modern applications, it's much more dynamic meaning, you know, the application sets that are being deployed are changing all the time. Um the environments and what the infrastructure needs to deliver uh has to change more quickly in terms of scaling up down, growing has to be a lot more elastic um and has much higher variance. Right? And what I mean by that is um you know, you look at a modern cloud, native microservices architecture type application, it's really, you know, 2030 40 different applications, all working in concert with one another under the hood, This is a very different infrastructure demand than your more traditional application set right back in the day, um you know, you have an oracle application, you go design in an environment for that, right? It's a big exercise, but once you put it in place, it has its own life cycle. Um these days with modern applications, uh you know, it's not just one application, it's 20 or 30, you've got to support all of them, uh you know, working in unison, you don't want to build separate infrastructures for each piece. Um and that set of 20 or 30 applications is changing very rapidly as open source ecosystem moves forward as the application space moves forward. And so when customers think about the changing events and infrastructure, this is kind of what they're thinking about and having to juggle and so that at the end of the day drives them to demand much more flexibility in their infrastructure, being able to use it for many different purposes, um much more agility, being able to adapt very, very quickly. Uh and much more variants are dynamic range, right? The ability to support many different needs on the same set of infrastructure and this is where we see very, very strong demand indicators and we're very invested in meeting these needs because they fit very well with our core product principles. >>Great, thank you for that. I really liked that answer because it's not just a bunch of, you know, slide wear mumbo jumbo, you actually put some substance on rob, we're gonna have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. >>Thank you and >>look forward to having you back soon. Now in a moment, scott Sinclair, who's a senior analyst at enterprise Strategy Group, speaks with the cubes john walls to give you the independent analysts take you're watching the cube, your global leader in high tech coverage. >>Mhm.

>>Okay. Okay. We're back on the cube here in cloud city. I'm John Farah, David latte. Thanks Adam. And guys in the studio. Awesome stuff. Dave mobile world Congress is happening. It's basically a hybrid show. Mostly virtual. Actually the physical action is a lot of booths. Cloud city is tricked out, big time made for TV. The cubes, obviously here, we've got the main stage with Adam and crew, Chloe and team, and it's pretty, pretty cool. Cloud cities, thematic John, we're going to see the next decade be about the cloudification of telco and major, major portions of telco. We're going to move to the cloud. It's very clear. And especially the front end stuff, a lot of the business support systems, some of the operational systems are going to go. When you're seeing that, you're seeing that with Amazon, you're seeing Microsoft, you're seeing Google. They're all moving in that direction. >>So it's inevitable. And I just love the fact that events are back. That's a game changing statement. Mobile world. Congress is not going to go away. There's no way they're going to let this event slide by. Even though we're coming out of the pandemic, clearly Bon Jovi was here. He said, quote, we met him last night, face to face. He's like, go Patriots. Hope they have a good season. This year. He's a big Patriots fan. He said, it's going to be better. This could be better. But he also said he it's the first time he's performed in a year and a half in front of all excited. He wasn't calm, small little intimate crowd. Again, look behind this. You can see the cloud city. This is really built out extremely well. A lot of executives here, but the content has been awesome here, but also remote. We've been bringing people in live remotes and we also had some prerecorded assets that we have. And we've got one here from Booz Allen, who I had a conversation with earlier in the month and grab some time to talk about the impact of 5g telecom and how it relates to national security for cover mints and society. And so let's take a look at that video right now. >>Hi, welcome to the cube conversation here in the cube studios in Palo Alto, California, I'm John for a, your host had a great conversation with two great guests gonna explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have the deep dive conversation around, um, how it's all transforming. We've got Kate Lee, vice president Booz Allen's digital business. Kate. Great to have you, uh, John Paisano principal at Booz Allen's digital cloud solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing, having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale, and that's really modern applications, um, and consumer, and then here, uh, for national security and for governments here in the U S is in the military impact. >>And as digital transformation starts to go to the next level, you starting to see the architectures emerge, where the edge, the IOT edge, the industrial IOT edge, or any kind of edge concept 5g is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You've got Amazon with snowballs, snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology. That's it like and operational technologies it's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption. So I want to get into it. Let's key. Let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture, that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast and this new architecture of digital, >>Which I think is a great question. And, um, if I could just, uh, share our observation on why we even started investing in edge, um, you mentioned cloud, um, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of it on you to take a look from mainframes to desktops, to servers, to a cloud, to mobile, and now I have a T what we observed was that, um, industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of, uh, uh, of it, right? So as you mentioned with industry spending billions on IOT and edge, um, we've just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. Um, if you've take a look at, um, you mentioned 5g, I think 5g will be certainly, um, an accelerator to edge, um, because of the, the resilience, the lower latency and so forth, but, um, taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right. >>Um, and, uh, what, uh, Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into the space. Um, we're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows stores to be ubiquitous. We think that, you know, the next generation internet will be space-based. Um, so when you think about it, um, connected, it won't be connected servers per se. It will be connected devices. Um, so, uh, that's kind of, you know, some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in, in edge. >>Awesome. I'd love to sh to, uh, continue the conversation on space and the edge, um, and super great conversation to have you guys on and really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities, uh, this new shift that's happening is the next big thing is coming quickly and it's here on us and that's cloud. I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment, uh, edge with 5g changing the game. I key, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and repivoting, or refactoring their, their, uh, existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers as a pattern emerge, right? You gotta be in the cloud, you gotta be leveraging data. You gotta be, uh, horizontally scalable, but you've gotta have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. >>That's the playbook. Some people are it, some people are not getting there. So I got to ask you guys, you know, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco. Now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance, uh, launching a satellite couple of hundred K you're going to launch a cube set. Um, that could be good and bad, right? So, so, you know, the telco business is changing radically cloud telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5g, certainly business commercial benefits, more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? >>Um, you know, as we think through, um, cloud to edge, um, one thing that we realized, because our definition of edge, John was actually at the point of data collection, right on the sensor themselves, others definition of edge is we're a little bit further back when we call it the edge of the it enterprise. Um, but you know, as we look at this, we realize that you need, you needed this kind of multi echelon environment, right? From your cloud to your tactical clouds, right. Where you can do some processing and then at the edge themselves, really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about is still all about the data, right? The AI needs to Dane, the telco is transporting the data. Right. And so, um, I think if you think about it from a data perspective, in relationship to telcos, right, one edge will actually enable a very different paradigm in a distributed paradigm for data processing. Right. So instead of bringing the data to some central cloud, right. Um, which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the products to the data, right. So mitigate, what's actually being sent over to those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them. Right. Um, so I think, you know, at the end of the day, uh, the telcos are gonna have a pretty big, uh, component to this, um, even from space down to ground station, right. How that works. Um, so, um, the, the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand >>John, what's your perspective. I mean, startups are coming out. The scalability speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days had like, I mean, you know, months and years, new towers go up and now you've got backbone. You've got, you know, it's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. >>Yeah. So, um, I definitely echo the sentiments that Q would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, um, faster speeds being available, you know, in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about basing an adversary, that's a near peer threat. The first thing they're going to do is make it contested congested, and you have to be able to survive. I, while yes, the, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms. The places we've not had it before. Um, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over rely on it, assuming it will always be there because I know in my experience wearing the uniform and even if I'm up against it adversary, that's the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, you know, continued some survivable and lethal. And so that's something I think, as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that so low. And I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How could, how do I continue to mission? >>Yeah. It's interesting. Mean if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology key, it's been like siloed. Okay. We've got a workplace workforce project, uh, and we have the tactical edge and we have the, you know, siloed it solution when really work in play, whether it's work here. And John's example is the war fighter. And so his concern is safety is his life. Right. And, and protection, the department has to manage the coms. And so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go. Right. So all this is integrate integrated. Now it's not like one department it's like, it's it's together. >>Yeah. Do you, I mean, you're, you're, uh, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this siloed siloed banking. Um, not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise. Right. Um, you know, from a digital battlefield perspective, you know, I, you know, it's a joint fight, right. So even across these enterprise of enterprises, right. So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally, uh, we have to integrate, we have to inter-operate. Um, and, and by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated too. Right. Not reinventing the wheel. >>Yeah. You know, I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. Five GLC has much more, more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the, of the spectrum. Uh, it's more dense. It's gonna create more connectivity options. Um, how do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like, obviously not, not the centralized tower from a backhaul standpoint, but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless, uh, uh, uh, transit is key. Um, that's the real edge here. How does, how do you guys see that evolving? >>So, um, you know, we're seeing, uh, we're seeing a lot of, um, innovations actually through small companies. We're really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point, um, because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible, right. Um, because again, we're in a different environment now there's different rules, there's different capabilities now, but then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, um, uh, some of the larger companies, Amazon and Microsoft also investing, um, as well. Right. So, um, I think the merge of the, you know, are the unconstrained are the possible right by these small companies that are, you know, just kind of driving, you know, uh, innovations, uh, supported by the, the, the maturity and the, the, the heft of these large companies who are building out kind of these, um, pardoned kind of, uh, capabilities. Um, they're going to converge at some point, right. Um, and, and that's where I think they want to get further innovation. >>Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys, as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies, as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scale role of data. We've got them, we hit out all the key points. I think here, as they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. You know, the developers are now going to be on the front lines. Um, mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning, architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and, and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? >>Um, this is a quick question. Um, so I think, um, you, you touched upon it. Um, one is take the holistic approach. Uh, you mentioned orchestras a couple of times, and I think that's, that's critical understanding, um, how your edge architectures will let you connect with your cloud architecture. So they're, they're not disjointed, right? They're not siloed, right. They're interoperable, they integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. Um, I think the second thing is be patient. Uh, it took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for, uh, about three years now. Um, and we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were, you know, um, discussing around edge, um, and kind of pulling that all together, but it took us some time to even figure it out, kind of, Hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value, um, out for our clients? Right. So being a little bit patient, um, in thinking through kind of how you can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor, >>John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, in addition to the points, the key res I would, number one, amplified the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking, you know, open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques, and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that, that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, you know, patients open all that, that I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of, you know, upskilling it, this is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. Like, how do you go through this lifecycle? How's security embedded. So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation >>Back day, this is a great interview. We just had with Kaley for Booz Allen reason, why I wanted to bring that into the cube programming this week was because you heard him saying ivory cloud. You heard him say public cloud innovation, edge, all elements of the architecture. And he says, we are learning and it takes patience. And the other thing that he was hyper focused on was the horizontal scalability, not silos. And this is an architectural shift. Who's Alan again, premier firm, and they're doing like killer work. Those guys are amazing. So this brings up the whole theme here, which is you got to nail the architecture. If you don't know what checkmate looks like, don't play chess. That's what I always say. Well, you don't know what the game is, don't play it. And I think the telco story that we hear from Dr is that these guys don't know the game. >>Now I would question that Amazon and others think they do because as they're all partnering with them, yeah, Amazon's got great partnerships. Google just announced a partnership with Ericsson goes on and on. I think anything that can move into the hybrid cloud, Ken should and will that'll happen, but there's some stuff that's going to take some time. Maybe we'll never move. You see that with mainframes. But what they'll do is they'll put an abstraction layer around it and it's got to communicate. And I think the big question is, okay, is it going to be the cloud stack coming on prem, which I think is going to happen, or is it going to be the reverse? And I would bet on the former, well, you know, we've been covering the cloud from day one. We've been part of that wave. We've had all the top conversations with Andy Jassy when, and he was just breaking through the growth. All the cloud players we've been there. We talked to all their customers. We have our finger on the pulse of cloud and we are in cloud city. Main street of cloud city is where all the action is. And the main stage is up there. Adam and team take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great conversation with two great guests, going to explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have that deep dive conversation around how it's all transforming. We've got Ki Lee, Vice President of Booz Allen's Digital Business. Ki, great to have you. John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen's Digital Cloud Solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. >> And thanks for having us, John. >> So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale, and that's really modern applications and consumer, and then here for national security and for governments here in the U.S. is military impact. And as digital transformation starts to go to the next level, you're starting to see the architectures emerge where the edge, the IoT edge, the industrial IoT edge, or any kind of edge concept, 5G is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You got Amazon with Snowball, Snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology, that's IT like and operational technologies. It's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption, so I want to get into it. Ki, let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast in this new architecture of digital? >> Yeah, John, I think it's a great question. And if I could just share our observation on why we even started investing in edge. You mentioned the cloud, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of IT, then you take a look from mainframes to desktops to servers to cloud to mobile and now IoT, what we observed was that industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of IT, right? So as you mentioned, with industry spending billions on IoT and edge, we just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. If you take a look at, you mentioned 5G, I think 5G will be certainly an accelerator to edge because of the resilience, the lower latency and so forth. But taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right, and what Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into the space, we're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows storage to be ubiquitous. We think that the next generation internet will be space-based. So when you think about it, connected, it won't be connected servers per se, it will be connected devices. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> That's kind of some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in edge. >> I want to come back to that piece around space and edge and bring it from a commercial and then also tactical architecture in a minute 'cause there's a lot to unpack there, role of open source, modern application development, software and hardware supply chains, all are core issues that are going to emerge. But I want to get with John real quick on cloud impact, because you think about 5G and the future of work or future of play, you've got people, right? So whether you're at a large concert like Coachella or a 49ers or Patriots game or Redskins game if you're in the D.C. area, you got people there, of congestion, and now you got devices now serving those people. And that's their play, people at work, whether it's a military operation, and you've got work, play, tactical edge things. How is cloud connecting? 'Cause this is like the edge has never been kind of an IT thing. It's been more of a bandwidth or either telco or something else operationally. What's the cloud at scale, cloud operations impact? >> Yeah, so if you think about how these systems are architected and you think about those considerations that Ki kind of touched on, a lot of what you have to think about now is what aspects of the application reside in the cloud, where you tend to be less constrained. And then how do you architect that application to move out towards the edge, right? So how do I tier my application? Ultimately, how do I move data and applications around the ecosystem? How do I need to evolve where my application stages things and how that data and those apps are moved to each of those different tiers? So when we build a lot of applications, especially if they're in the cloud, they're built with some of those common considerations of elasticity, scalability, all those things; whereas when you talk about congestion and disconnected operations, you lose a lot of those characteristics, and you have to kind of rethink that. >> Ki, let's get into the aspect you brought up, which is space. And then I was mentioning the tactical edge from a military standpoint. These are use cases of deployments, and in fact, this is how people have to work now. So you've got the future of work or play, and now you've got the situational deployments, whether it's a new tower of next to a stadium. We've all been at a game or somewhere or a concert where we only got five bars and no connectivity. So we know what that means. So now you have people congregating in work or play, and now you have a tactical deployment. What's the key things that you're seeing that it's going to help make that better? Are there any breakthroughs that you see that are possible? What's going on in your view? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what's enabling all of this, again, one is transport, right? So whether it's 5G to increase the speed and decrease the latency, whether it's things like Starlink with making transport and comms ubiquitous, that tied with the fact that ships continue to get smaller and faster, right? And when you're thinking about tactical edge, those devices have limited size, weight, power conditions and constraints. And so the software that goes on them has to be just as lightweight. And that's why we've actually partnered with SUSE and what they've done with K3s to do that. So I think those are some of the enabling technologies out there. John, as you've kind of alluded to it, there are additional challenges as we think about it. We're not, it's not a simple transition and monetization here, but again, we think that this will be the next major disruption. >> What do you guys think, John, if you don't mind weighing in too on this as modern application development happens, we just were covering CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, DockerCon, containers are very popular. Kubernetes is becoming super great. As you look at the telco landscape where we're kind of converging this edge, it has to be commercially enterprise grade. It has to have that transit and transport that's intelligent and all these new things. How does open source fit into all this? Because we're seeing open source becoming very reliable, more people are contributing to open source. How does that impact the edge in your opinion? >> So from my perspective, I think it's helping accelerate things that traditionally maybe may have been stuck in the traditional proprietary software confines. So within our mindset at Booz Allen, we were very focused on open architecture, open based systems, which open source obviously is an aspect of that. So how do you create systems that can easily interface with each other to exchange data, and how do you leverage tools that are available in the open source community to do that? So containerization is a big drive that is really going throughout the open source community. And there's just a number of other tools, whether it's tools that are used to provide basic services like how do I move code through a pipeline all the way through? How do I do just basic hardening and security checking of my capabilities? Historically, those have tend to be closed source type apps, whereas today you've got a very broad community that's able to very quickly provide and develop capabilities and push it out to a community that then continues to adapt and add to it or grow that library of stuff. >> Yeah, and then we've got trends like Open RAN. I saw some Ground Station for the AWS. You're starting to see Starlink, you mentioned. You're bringing connectivity to the masses. What is that going to do for operators? Because remember, security is a huge issue. We talk about security all the time. Where does that kind of come in? Because now you're really OT, which has been very purpose-built kind devices in the old IoT world. As the new IoT and the edge develop, you're going to need to have intelligence. You're going to be data-driven. There is an open source impact key. So, how, if I'm a senior executive, how do I get my arms around this? I really need to think this through because the security risks alone could be more penetration areas, more surface area. >> Right. That's a great question. And let me just address kind of the value to the clients and the end users in the digital battlefield as our warriors to increase survivability and lethality. At the end of the day from a mission perspective, we know we believe that time's a weapon. So reducing any latency in that kind of observe, orient, decide, act OODA loop is value to the war fighter. In terms of your question on how to think about this, John, you're spot on. I mean, as I've mentioned before, there are various different challenges, one, being the cyber aspect of it. We are absolutely going to be increasing our attack surface when you think about putting processing on edge devices. There are other factors too, non-technical that we've been thinking about s we've tried to kind of engender and kind of move to this kind of edge open ecosystem where we can kind of plug and play, reuse, all kind of taking the same concepts of the open-source community and open architectures. But other things that we've considered, one, workforce. As you mentioned before, when you think about these embedded systems and so forth, there aren't that many embedded engineers out there. But there is a workforce that are digital and software engineers that are trained. So how do we actually create an abstraction layer that we can leverage that workforce and not be limited by some of the constraints of the embedded engineers out there? The other thing is what we've, in talking with several colleagues, clients, partners, what people aren't thinking about is actually when you start putting software on these edge devices in the billions, the total cost of ownership. How do you maintain an enterprise that potentially consists of billions of devices? So extending the standard kind of DevSecOps that we move to automate CI/CD to a cloud, how do we move it from cloud to jet? That's kind of what we say. How do we move DevSecOps to automate secure containers all the way to the edge devices to mitigate some of those total cost of ownership challenges. >> It's interesting, as you have software defined, this embedded system discussion is hugely relevant and important because when you have software defined, you've got to be faster in the deployment of these devices. You need security, 'cause remember, supply chain on the hardware side and software in that too. >> Absolutely. >> So if you're going to have a serviceability model where you have to shift left, as they say, you got to be at the point of CI/CD flows, you need to be having security at the time of coding. So all these paradigms are new in Day-2 operations. I call it Day-0 operations 'cause it should be in everyday too. >> Yep. Absolutely. >> But you've got to service these things. So software supply chain becomes a very interesting conversation. It's a new one that we're having on theCUBE and in the industry Software supply chain is a superly relevant important topic because now you've got to interface it, not just with other software, but hardware. How do you service devices in space? You can't send a break/fix person in space. (chuckles) Maybe you will soon, but again, this brings up a whole set of issues. >> No, so I think it's certainly, I don't think anyone has the answers. We sure don't have all the answers but we're very optimistic. If you take a look at what's going on within the U.S. Air Force and what the Chief Software Officer Nic Chaillan and his team, and we're a supporter of this and a plankowner of Platform One. They were ahead of the curve in kind of commoditizing some of these DevSecOps principles in partnership with the DoD CIO and that shift left concept. They've got a certified and accredited platform that provides that DevSecOps. They have an entire repository in the Iron Bank that allows for hardened containers and reciprocity. All those things are value to the mission and around the edge because those are all accelerators. I think there's an opportunity to leverage industry kind of best practices as well and patterns there. You kind of touched upon this, John, but these devices honestly just become firmware. The software is just, if the devices themselves just become firmware , you can just put over the wire updates onto them. So I'm optimistic. I think all the piece parts are taking place across industry and in the government. And I think we're primed to kind of move into this next evolution. >> Yeah. And it's also some collaboration. What I like about, why I'm bringing up the open source angle and I think this is where I think the major focus will shift to, and I want to get your reaction to it is because open source is seeing a lot more collaboration. You mentioned some of the embedded devices. Some people are saying, this is the weakest link in the supply chain, and it can be shored up pretty quickly. But there's other data, other collective intelligence that you can get from sharing data, for instance, which hasn't really been a best practice in the cybersecurity industry. So now open source, it's all been about sharing, right? So you got the confluence of these worlds colliding, all aspects of culture and Dev and Sec and Ops and engineering all coming together. John, what's your reaction to that? Because this is a big topic. >> Yeah, so it's providing a level of transparency that historically we've not seen, right? So in that community, having those pipelines, the results of what's coming out of it, it's allowing anyone in that life cycle or that supply chain to look at it, see the state of it, and make a decision on, is this a risk I'm willing to take or not? Or am I willing to invest and personally contribute back to the community to address that because it's important to me and it's likely going to be important to some of the others that are using it? So I think it's critical, and it's enabling that acceleration and shift that I talked about, that now that everybody can see it, look inside of it, understand the state of it, contribute to it, it's allowing us to break down some of the barriers that Ki talked about. And it reinforces that excitement that we're seeing now. That community is enabling us to move faster and do things that maybe historically we've not been able to do. >> Ki, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned battlefield, and I've been covering a lot of the tactical edge around the DOD's work. You mentioned about the military on the Air Force side, Platform One, I believe, was from the Air Force work that they've done, all cloud native kind of directions. But when you talk about a war field, you talk about connectivity. I mean, who controls the DNS in Taiwan, or who controls the DNS in Korea? I mean, we have to deploy, you've got to stand up infrastructure. How about agility? I mean, tactical command and control operations, this has got to be really well done. So this is not a trivial thing. >> No. >> How are you seeing this translate into the edge innovation area? (laughs) >> It's certainly not a trivial thing, but I think, again, I'm encouraged by how government and industry are partnering up. There's a vision set around this joint all domain command control, JADC2. And then all the services are getting behind that, are looking into that, and this vision of this military, internet of military things. And I think the key thing there, John, as you mentioned, it's not just the connected of the sensors, which requires the transport again, but also they have to be interoperable. So you can have a bunch of sensors and platforms out there, they may be connected, but if they can't speak to one another in a common language, that kind of defeats the purpose and the mission value of that sensor or shooter kind of paradigm that we've been striving for for ages. So you're right on. I mean, this is not a trivial thing, but I think over history we've learned quite a bit. Technology and innovation is happening at just an amazing rate where things are coming out in months as opposed to decades as before. I agree, not trivial, but again, I think there are all the piece parts in place and being put into place. >> I think you mentioned earlier that the personnel, the people, the engineers that are out there, not enough, more of them coming in. I think now the appetite and the provocative nature of this shift in tech is going to attract a lot of people because the old adage is these are hard problems attracts great people. You got in new engineering, SRE like scale engineering. You have software development, that's changing, becoming much more robust and more science-driven. You don't have to be just a coder as a software engineer. You could be coming at it from any angle. So there's a lot more opportunities from a personnel standpoint now to attract great people, and there's real hard problems to solve, not just security. >> Absolutely. Definitely. I agree with that 100%. I would also contest that it's an opportunity for innovators. We've been thinking about this for some time, and we think there's absolute value from various different use cases that we've identified, digital battlefield, force protection, disaster recovery, and so forth. But there are use cases that we probably haven't even thought about, even from a commercial perspective. So I think there's going to be an opportunity just like the internet back in the mid '90s for us to kind of innovate based on this new kind of edge environment. >> It's a revolution. New leadership, new brands are going to emerge, new paradigms, new workflows, new operations, clearly great stuff. I want to thank you guys for coming on. I also want to thank Rancher Labs for sponsoring this conversation. Without their support, we wouldn't be here. And now they were acquired by SUSE. We've covered their event with theCUBE virtual last year. What's the connection with those guys? Can you guys take a minute to explain the relationship with SUSE and Rancher? >> Yeah. So it's actually it's fortuitous. And I think we just, we got lucky. There's two overall aspects of it. First of all, we are both, we partner on the Platform One basic ordering agreement. So just there we had a common mentality of DevSecOps. And so there was a good partnership there, but then when we thought about we're engaging it from an edge perspective, the K3s, right? I mean, they're a leader from a container perspective obviously, but the fact that they are innovators around K3s to reduce that software footprint, which is required on these edge devices, we kind of got a twofer there in that partnership. >> John, any comment on your end? >> Yeah, I would just amplify, the K3s aspects in leveraging the containers, a lot of what we've seen success in when you look at what's going on, especially on that tactical edge around enabling capabilities, containers, and the portability it provides makes it very easy for us to interface and integrate a lot of different sensors to close the OODA loop to whoever is wearing or operating that a piece of equipment that the software is running on. >> Awesome, I'd love to continue the conversation on space and the edge and super great conversation to have you guys on. Really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities of this new shift that's happening as the next big thing is coming quickly. And it's here on us and that's cloud, I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment, edge with 5G changing the game. Ki, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and re-pivoting or refactoring their existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers. There's a pattern emerging. You got to be in the cloud, you got to be leveraging data, you got to be horizontally scalable, but you got to have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. That's the playbook. Some people are making it. Some people are not getting there. So I'd ask you guys, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance. Launching a satellite, a couple of hundred K, you can launch a CubeSat. That could be good and bad. So the telco business is changing radically. Cloud, telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5G, certainly business commercial benefits more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? >> As we think through cloud to edge, one thing that we realize, because our definition of edge, John, was actually at the point of data collection on the sensor themselves. Others' definition of edge is we're a little bit further back, what we call it the edge of the IT enterprise. But as we look at this, we realize that you needed this kind of multi echelon environment from your cloud to your tactical clouds where you can do some processing and then at the edge of themselves. Really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about, it's still all about the data, right? The AI needs the data, the telco is transporting the data. And so I think if you think about it from a data perspective in relationship to the telcos, one, edge will actually enable a very different paradigm and a distributed paradigm for data processing. So, hey, instead of bringing the data to some central cloud which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the products to the data. So mitigate what's actually being sent over those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them. So I think at the end of the day, the telcos are going to have a pretty big component to this, even from space down to ground station, how that works. So the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand. >> John, what's your perspective? I mean, startups are coming out. The scalability, speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days had, I mean, months and years, new towers go up and now you got a backbone. It's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. >> Yeah, so I definitely echo the sentiments that Ki would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, faster speeds being available in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about facing an adversary that's a near-peer threat, the first thing they're going to do is make it contested, congested, and you have to be able to survive. While yes, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms to places we've not had it before, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over-rely on it, assuming it'll always be there. 'Cause I know in my experience wearing the uniform, and even if I'm up against an adversary, that's the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, continue survivable and lethal. So that's something I think, as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that. So when I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How do I continue the mission? >> Yeah, it's interesting. And if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology, Ki, it's been like siloed. "Okay, we've got a workplace workforce project, and we have the tactical edge, and we have the siloed IT solution," when really work and play, whether it's work here in John's example, is the war fighter. And so his concern is safety, his life and protection. >> Yeah. >> The other department has to manage the comms, (laughs) and so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go. So all this is, they all integrate it now. It's not like one department. It's like it's together. >> Yeah. John, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this siloed thinking not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise. From a digital battlefield perspective, it's a joint fight, so even across these enterprise of enterprises, So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally. We have to integrate, we have to inter-operate, and by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated too, not reinventing the wheel. >> Yeah, and I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. 5G obviously, that's more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the spectrum. It's more dense. It's going to create more connectivity options. How do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like obviously not the centralized tower, from a backhaul standpoint but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless transit is key. That's the real edge here. How do you guys see that evolving? >> We're seeing a lot of innovations actually through small companies who are really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible. Because again, we're in a different environment now. There's different rules. There's different capabilities. But then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, some of the larger companies, the Amazons, the Microsofts, also investing as well. So I think the merge of the, you know, or the unconstrained or the possible by these small companies that are just kind of driving innovations supported by the maturity and the heft of these large companies who are building out these hardened kind of capabilities, they're going to converge at some point. And that's where I think we're going to get further innovation. >> Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys, as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scale, role of data. We hit out all the key points I think here. As they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. The developers are now going to be on the front lines. Mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? >> It's such a great question. So I think you touched upon it. One is take the holistic approach. You mentioned architectures a couple of times, and I think that's critical. Understanding how your edge architectures will let you connect with your cloud architecture so that they're not disjointed, they're not siloed. They're interoperable, they integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. I think the second thing is be patient. It took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for about three years now. And we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were discussing around edge and kind of pulling that all together. But it took us some time to even figure it out, hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value out for our clients? So being a little bit patient in thinking through kind of how we can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor. >> John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the points that Ki raised, I would, number one, amplify the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, patience, open, all that, that I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of upskilling. This is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. How do you go through this lifecycle? How's security embedded? So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation I think is key. >> John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen Digital Cloud Solutions, thanks for sharing that great insight. Ki Lee, Vice President at Booz Allen Digital Business. Gentlemen, great conversation. Thanks for that insight. And I think people watching are going to probably learn a lot on how to evaluate startups to how they put their architecture together. So I really appreciate the insight and commentary. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching. 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>>10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called Infinidat. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai, who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability, and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now, as Infinidat evolved, landed on a fourth vector, that has been a key differentiator and its value proposition, and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone. And welcome to this Qube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two longtime friends of theCube. Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of Infinidat and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of Marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents, welcome. >>Great to be here. Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary mark. Congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >>You know I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and, and enjoying many of the opportunities, you know, through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the Infinidat opportunity and it immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happened to be customers of Infinidat, , they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from, from the sidelines, I've always had a lot of respect for the Infinidat platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along, it really captured my interest in of course behind a great product is almost always a great team. >>And as I got to know the company and the board, and, you know, some of the leaders, and learned about the momentum and the business, it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just, you know, 60 days into the job. Everything I hoped for is here, not only a warm welcome to the company, but an exciting opportunity with respect to where Infinidat is at today with the growth of the business. The company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020, cashflow positive, EBITDA positive. And now it's a matter of scaling, scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with several times in my career and really, really enjoying the opportunity here at Infinidat to do that. >>That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course, Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem, but the data center's evolving the cloud is evolving, and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >>No, I think Satya recently said, right, that, that we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right. You know, we believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and you know, the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in, in the real thinking about it, because we're going to have distributed environments and, you know, one of the things that we're doing with Infinidat here today, right, is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that, uh, an interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element, but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale, you know, because storage is going to exist... We have very powerful storage value propositions, and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing Infinidat lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and vVols actually as a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >>These trends, I mean, building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work, especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, you know, that's a, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >>Yeah. You know, we're, we're in the middle of this every day as, as you know, Dave, uh, and certainly Lee, uh, data center architectures ebb and flow from centralized to decentralized, but clearly data locality, I think, is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers, but core is still very significant for, for most enterprise. Uh, and it's, it's, it has, it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud. You know, when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud, they don't want to talk about, you know, the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud. And almost always, these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. >>Uh, the reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal, uh, among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control of the security, the, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These, these are the things that are just fundamentally important, uh, to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic. It has to be a transparent, seamless scalability. I think the days of, of CIO's  you know, even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with, with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is, is over. Um, they want to seamlessly add capacity. They want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar. >>Now it has to be a consolidation. Massive consolidation is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. You know, the, the very characteristics that you talked about upfront, Dave, that make Infinidat unique, I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. Uh, I, I think our architecture also really does provide a, a set it and forget it, uh, kind of experience. Um, when we install a new Infinidat frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're, we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back, uh, to, to help fiddle with the bits or, uh, you know, tweak the configuration as applications and, and multitenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted, but you really, really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the CapEx rail and the OpEx rail and every, uh, every step in between. And importantly, when a customer, when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity, they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right. They're already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >>Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer, that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. Right. Let's talk about the VMware and Infinidat relationship. I mean, every, every year at VMworld, up until last year, thank you COVID, Infinidat would host this awesome dinner. You'd have the top customers there. Very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I, of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years, Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, but, you know, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to Infinidat? And I guess the question there is, is, is petabyte scale that really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >>It's a, it's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing Alliance partner of Infinidat. It goes back to really, almost the foundation of the company, certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of Infinidat VMware and a very tight integration with the VMware was a core part of that. Uh, we, we have a capability. We call the Host PowerTools, which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our, our VMware, uh, integration and, and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration. And, um, our customers typically are, are at scale petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up, um, and over 90% of our customers use VMware. So you would say, I, I think I can safely say we're we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints, uh, in the market. >>I know it's like children, you got, you love all your partners, but is there anything about Infinidat that, that stands out to you a particular area where, where they shine that from your perspective? >>Yeah, I think so. You know, the, the best partnerships, one are ones that are customer driven. It turns out right. And the idea that we have joint customers at large scale and listen storage is a tough business to get, right, right. It takes time to go and mature to harden a code base. Right. And particularly when you're talking about petabyte scale, right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements, makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right. It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications, this is one of the things we're seeing, right. Is new applications, which could be container-based Kubernetes orchestrated our Tanzu portfolio helps with that. >>Right. If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example, we announced some AI work, right. Uh, this week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers save us. And I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing. And particularly with the vVols integration at scale, that we just haven't seen before, uh, and Infinidat has set the bar and is really setting a new, a new record for that. >>Yeah. Let me, let me comment on that a little bit, Dave, we've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very, very exciting engaging, investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry, but in the, in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, we recently demonstrated on a single Infinidat frame over 200,000 vVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar, I think it completely redefines what, what scale means when you're talking about a vVols implementation. >>So not to geek out here, but vVols, they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins, having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers. An array, that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware, or actually vStorage API for, for storage awareness, VASA, anyway, with vVols, you can dynamically provision storage that matches the way I say it as a match as device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil,  it seems like so much in VMware land hearkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way. Right. And vVols is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of storage. So, so how do you guys see it? I, I presume you're, you're sort of vVols certified based on what you just said in the lab. >>Yeah. We recently announced our vVols release and we're not the first to market with the vVols, but from, from the start of the engineering project, we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do, and our customers were very prescriptive about the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in vVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. Uh, as I said, we, we redefined the bar for vVols scalability. We support on a single array now, um, a thousand storage containers. Uh, and I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So, uh, our customers are, again at scale, they said, if you're going to do vVols, we want it... We want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your, of your platform. We really liked vVols because it, it helps, it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the VI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put a majority of your most critical bits on Infinidat in your data center, you're going to want to, you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, but yet the vVols mplementation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration, give the VI, the VI administrator, all of the flexibility they need to manage applications. And vVols of course gives the VI administrator the native use of our snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure, but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's, it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >>Yeah. Storage has come a long way. Hasn't it, Lee? I'm wondering if you could add some color here, it seems in talking to ... Uh, so that's interesting. You've had, you had a hand in the growth of vSAN and it was very successful product, but he chose Infinidat for that higher end application. It seems like vVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the vVols uptake going from your perspective. >>Yeah, I think we you know, we're in the second phase of vVols adoption, right? First phase was, Hey, technically interesting, intriguing. Um, but adoption was relatively low, I think because, you know, up until five years ago, um, applications, weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business, when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now, it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors? Right? Can you go and get your labs? Right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years, and then the past 40 years of computing combined. >>And so when you think about that, what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure today. That's the application. So what vVols has helped you do is it allows the vSphere administrator, who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace, and be able to basically select storage attributes, including QoS, capacity, IOPS, and do that from the vCenter console, and then be able to rectify things and manage them right from the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction, like what we're talking about today, or, you know, integration, um, that the Infinidat has provided now, you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And, you know, consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs yes. VMs across HCI. Sure. Plus now, plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers. It's that consolidated management, which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >>Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago, you launched this, this via the VMware. I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. What, explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go into more detail about what your participation is, but Lee, why don't you explain it? >>Yeah. You know, we don't take just any products that, because listen, there's a mixing. What we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with Infinidat was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many, many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right. To go and bring in, not just vVols support, of course, all the things we do for just a normal interaction with vSphere. But, uh, bringing vVols in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly, as we expanded the VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, to include storagee systems for a customer, for example, right, who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important. Now, as we expand a multicloud experience, that's different from the hyperscalers. Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect or from some right around the ongoing, underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI, and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >>Yeah. To Lee's point of, it's not like there's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like, you know, 10 or 12 from what I saw and Infinidat is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's I, we liked the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything eye candy it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore, you know, some of the most contemporary, workloads in that environment, as well as solutions to what I considered some of the most contemporary industry problems. We're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the Cloud Solutions Lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform.  That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on at Infinidat. And we're also a core part of, of what VMware is driving from a data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in, in the cloud solutions lab with, the VMware cloud foundation layers, as well as, their Tanzu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >>Yeah. So, yeah, it was just the other day I was on the VMware analyst meeting virtually of course in Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were giving the update. And, and just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here, this expansion of on-prem the cloud experience, the data from, especially from our survey data, we have a partner UTR that did great surveys on a regular quarterly basis, the VMware cloud on AWS, doing great for sure, but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together >>Well on the VMware Cloud Foundation right now with, uh, you know, over a thousand customers, but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, it's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and Infinidat right, you know, this large scale, actually the, you know, interesting crossover, right. And, you know, listen for customers to go and take on a new store system. We always know that it's a high bar, right. So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help? Right. And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together. Right. And how vVols fits into that, you know, with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's the hype that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing right. And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >>Right. Well, let's close with a, kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you see as the future of the data center specifically, and also your, your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >>I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, you know, if you've looked at the, you know, what's happening in the cloud, not everything is migrating in the cloud, but the public cloud, for example, and I'm talking about public cloud there. The public cloud offers some really interesting, unique value and VMware is doing really interesting things about like DR as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time. Right. We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations. Right. And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so, you know, partnering with  leaders on, in storage, right, is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more right with Infinidat, as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications, including container based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right. As the pace of application change, you know, doesn't slow down. >>So what do you see for the next 10 years for Infinidat? >>Yeah, well, um, we, I appreciated your introduction because of this speak to sort of the core characteristics of Infinidat. And I think a company like us and at our, at our juncture of evolution, it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. And, uh, the partnership with VMware, uh, we talked about the Venn diagram. I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential Alliance partner for our business going forward. Um, I'm excited about, about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth in distributed architectures. We'll see growth at the edge in the core data center. >>I think the, the old, the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, um, those days are over, it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that, you have to be really good at, uh, at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our, our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves, but never stray far from what has made Infinidat unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing and in Kubernetes >>Is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about, um, uh, you know, not only staying relevant, but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, you know, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal, but predominantly as I said, 90% or above is VMware infrastructure. Uh, but we also see, uh, Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. Uh, so that, that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as, as the application environment evolves. Great, thank you. You know, many years ago when I attended my first, uh, VMworld, the practitioners that were there, you talked to them, half the conversations, they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And, you know, VMware really has done a great job, publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in how vVols and Infinidat and VMware were kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale, there's some good blogs out there. Check out the Virtual Blocks blog for more information, guys. Thanks so much great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you for watching this Cube conversation, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> 10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called INFINIDAT. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now as INFINIDAT evolved it landed on a fourth vector that has been a key differentiator in its value proposition and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two long time friends of the cube, Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of INFINIDAT and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents welcome. >> Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to be here Dave. >> Yeah. Great to be here Dave. Thanks. >> Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary, Mark, congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >> Yeah that's a great question Dave. I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and enjoyed many of the opportunities through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the INFINIDAT opportunity and immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product. Through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happen to be customers of INFINIDAT they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from the sidelines I have always had a lot of respect for the INFINIDAT platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along it really captured my interest and of course behind a great product is almost always a great team and as I got to know the company and the board and some of the leaders and learned about the momentum and the business it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just 60 days into the job everything I hoped for is here not only a warm welcome to the company but an exciting opportunity with respect to where INFINIDAT is at today with growth of the business, the company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020 cashflow, positive, even thought positive and now it's a matter of scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with at several times in my career and I'm really, really enjoying the opportunity here at INFINIDAT to do that. >> That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem but the data centers evolving, the cloud is evolving and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >> I think Satya recently said, right? That we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right? We believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in the real thinking about it because we're going to have distributed environments. And one of the things that we're doing with INFINIDAT here today, right? Is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that... And interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale. Because storage is going to exist we have very powerful storage value propositions and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing INFINIDAT lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and VVol has actually a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >> Yes, so Phil you see these trends, I mean building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >> We're in the middle of this every day and as you know Dave and certainly Lee, data center architecture is urban flow from centralized to decentralized but clearly data locality I think is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers but core is still very significant for most enterprise. And it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or a Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud they don't want to talk about the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud and almost always these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. The reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control, the security, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These are the things that are just fundamentally important to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on-prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic, it has to be a transparent seamless scalability. I think the days of CIOs even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is over. They want to seamlessly add capacity, they want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar now it has to be a consolidation, massive consolidation, is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. The very characteristics that you talked about upfront Dave, that make INFINIDAT unique I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. I think our architecture also really does provide a set it and forget it kind of experience when we install a new INFINIDAT frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back to help fiddle with the bits or tweak the configuration and as applications and multi tenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted but you really really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the cap X rail and the objects rail and every step in between. And importantly when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right there already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >> Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. >> Right? >> Let's talk about VMware and INFINIDAT their relationship, I mean, every year at VMworld up until last year, thank you COVID, INFINIDAT would host this awesome dinner, you'd have his top customers there, very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to INFINIDAT? And I guess the question there is, is petabyte scale really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >> It's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing alliance partner of INFINIDAT. It goes back to really almost the foundation of the company certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of INFINIDAT, VMware and a very tight integration where VMware was a core part of that. We have a capability we call the host power tools which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our VMware integration and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration and our customers typically are at scale, petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up and over 90% of our customers use VMware. I think I can safely say we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints in the market. >> So Lee It's like children, you love all your partners but is there anything about INFINIDAT that stands out to you, a particular area where they shine from your perspective? >> Yeah, I think so. The best partnerships won are ones that are customer driven it turns out, right? And the idea that we have joint customers at large-scale, I must say storage is a tough business to go, right? Right, it takes time to go and mature to harden a code base, right? And particularly when you talk about petabyte scale right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements. Makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right? It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications and this is one of the things we're seeing, right? Is new applications which could be container-based, Kubernetes orchestrated, our Tansu portfolio helps with that, right? If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example we announced some AI work, right? This week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers say, listen I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing and particularly with the VVol'sintegration at scale that we just haven't seen before, INFINIDAT is setting the bar and really setting a new record for that. >> Yeah. Let me comment on that a little bit, Dave. We've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very very exciting engaging investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry but in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab we recently demonstrated on a single INFINIDAT frame over 200,000 VVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar I think it completely redefines what scale means when you're talking about a VVol implementation >> So lets talk about both those things. Not to geek out here but VVols they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers, an array that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware or actually the storage API for storage awareness, VASA, anyway with VVols you can dynamically provision storage that matches, the way I say it as matches device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil, it seems like so much in VMware land harkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way, right? And VVol is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of simplifying storage. So how do you guys see it? I presume you're sort of VVol certified based on what you just said in the lab. >> Yeah. We recently announced our VVols release and we're not the first to market with VVols but from the start of the engineering project we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do and our customers were very prescriptive and the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in VVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. As I said, we redefined the bar for VVol scalability. We support on a single array now a thousand storage containers. And I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So our customers are again at scale, they said if you're going to do VVols we want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your platform. We really liked VVols because it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the BI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put the majority of your most critical bits on INFINIDAT in your data center you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, the at the VVols in rotation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration give the BI administrator all of the flexibility they need to manage applications and VVols of course gives the BI administrator the native use of our in minute snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >> Yeah. Storage has come a long way hasn't it Lee? If you could add some color here it seems in talking needs so VASA that's interesting you had a hand in the growth of VASA and very successful product but he chose INFINIDAT for that higher end application. It seemed like VVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the VVol uptake going from your perspective. >> Yeah, I think we're in the second phase of VVol adoption, right? First phase was, hey, it technically interesting, intriguing but adoption was relatively low I think because you know up until five years ago applications weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors, right? Can you go and get your labs, right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years and then the past 40 years of computing combined. And so when you think about that what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure, today that's the application. So what VVOls helps you do is it allows the vSphere administrator who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace and be able to basically select storage attributes including QoS, capacity, IOPS and do that from the V center console and then be able to rectify things and manage them, right? From the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction like what we're talking about today or integration that the INFINIDAT has provided now you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs, yes, VMs across HI sure put now plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers, it's that consolidated management which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >> Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago you launched this, the VMware, I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. Explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go in more detail about what your participation has been but Lee why don't you explain it? >> Yeah. We don't take just any products that because listen there's a mixing, what we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with INFINIDAT was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right? To go and bring in not just VVol support, of course all the things we do for just normal interaction with vSphere but bringing VVOls in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly as we expanded the vSphere or cloud foundation to include store systems, fair customer for example, right? Who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important now as we expand a multi-cloud experience that's different from the hyperscalers, right? Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect from some right around the ongoing underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >> Yeah. Phil to Lee's point, it's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like 10 or 12 from what I saw and INFINIDAT is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's, we like the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything I can do it, it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore some of the most contemporary workloads in that environment as well as solutions to what I centered as some of the most contemporary industry problems we're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the cloud solutions lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform. That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on with INFINIDAT. And we're also a core part of what VMware is driving from at but we call it data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in the cloud solutions lab with the VMware Cloud Foundation layers as well as the Tansu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >> Yeah. So Lee, I was just the other day I was under VMware analyst meeting virtually of course and Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were given the update. And just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here this expansion of on-prem, the cloud experience, the data especially from our survey data we have a partner at ETR they do great surveys on quarterly basis. The VMware cloud on AWS do great for sure but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together. >> Well, VMware Cloud Foundation right now with over a thousand customers but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, right? It's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and INFINIDAT, right? This large scale actually the interesting crossover, right? And listen for customers to go and take on a new storage system we always know that it's a high bar, right? So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help, right? And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together, right? And how VVols fits into that with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing, right? And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >> Right. Well, let's close with a kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you two see as the future of the data center specifically and also your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >> So I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, if you've looked at what's happening in the cloud not everything is migrating in the cloud but the public cloud for example and I'm talking about public cloud there, the public cloud offers some really interesting unique value. And VMware is doing really interesting things about like Dr as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time, right? We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations, right? And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so partnering with leaders in storage, right? Is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more, right? With INFINIDAT as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications including container-based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right? As the pace of application change doesn't slow down. >> So Phil, what do you see for the next 10 years for INFINIDAT? >> Yeah, well, I appreciated your introduction because it does speak to sort of the core characteristics of INFINIDAT. And I think a company like us and at our juncture of evolution it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. The partnership with VMware we talked about the Venn diagram, I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential alliance partner for our business going forward. I'm excited about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth and distributed architectures, we'll see growth at the edge. In the core data center I think the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, those days are over it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that you have to be really good at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves but never stray far from what has made INFINIDAT unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing in Kubernetes is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about not only staying relevant but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal but predominantly as I said 90% or above is a VMware infrastructure. But we also see Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. So that that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as the application environment evolves. >> It's great. Thank you. Many years ago when I attended my first VMworld the practitioners that were there you talked to them, half the conversations they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And VMware really has done a great job publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in in how VVols and INFINIDAT and VMware, we're kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale there's some good blogs out there. Check out the virtual blocks blog for more information. Guys thanks so much. Great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much, Dave. >> All right. Thank you for watching this cute conversation, Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies Everyone welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience I'm John for your host of the Cube Cube. Virtual. We're not in person this year were remote We're doing The interviews were not face to face. So thanks for watching two great guests to talk about the Dell Technology Storage and data protection for the VM Ware environments got Caitlin Gordon, vice President, product management, Dale Technologies and Leak as well. Vice president of Cloud Platform Business Unit, also known as CPB. You for VM where Lee and Cable in Great to see you both. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me >>s So what? What a crazy year. We're not in person. Usually the the events Awesome. VM world recently went on and then you guys have the same situation role online now and it's >>really kind >>of highlighted the customer environments of cloud needed. But I've been saying this on all my reports and all the Cube interviews that the executives who are in charge and now saying, Look at our modern APS have to be cloud native because the obvious benefits are there and container ization has become mainstream. But yet I d c still forecast about 15% of enterprises are still fully containing rise, with a huge amount of growth coming around the corner. So you're seeing this mature market where containers are validated, they're being put into production. People are now moving hard core with containers. And you have the kubernetes. I gotta ask you, Li, I'm Caitlin. What does this mean for the customers? Are they getting harder pressure points to do things faster? What does it all mean for the customer? >>Yeah, I'll start. Only you can add to it. I mean, I think what we see is the trends that were already happening of now. Accelerated and modern APs were kind of the top of the priority list, but now it has is really expedited. But at the same time, traditional applications haven't gone anywhere. So there's this dichotomy that a lot of I t is dealing with of head Oh, accelerate those modern APs while also streamlining and simplifying my environment for my traditional laps. And not only do I need to the right infrastructure to have that for production workloads, modern, traditional, but also form a data protection standpoint. How to ensure that those are all secure and do all of that in a way that simplifies life for whether it's the data protection admin, the BM admin or even the developer right, all of the different folks involved and needing to make all of their lives simpler has just really exacerbated a challenge and really given us a lot of opportunity to try to solve that for customers together. >>Lee, What's your take on the landscape out there? >>Yeah, I'd emphasized that speed really matters today, right? That we're really looking at. How do you go and deploy new applications faster, right? New ways to get engaged with customers. I mean, it's not happening physically anymore. So how is it happening while it's happening largely through applications? And so as you now basically develop new applications more quickly, containers are a way to speed the pace of applications, and the theme that you know we continue to drive home is that that means infrastructure has to respond more quickly, and it means that for the teams that are managing infrastructure, it really helps if you have a consistent model where you can get mawr done with the same teams and leverage all the experience you have, as well as the security and infrastructure resiliency model that we're bringing together to our customers. >>This brings up the real question, and if this comes up, kind of you see more of the executive level like we need to have a modern application direction. They'll go. Everyone goes, Yeah, of course. Thumbs up. Then they go Try to make that a reality because even though Dev ops and Infrastructures Code is still the viable path, it's hard. It's like Caitlin, we're talking about EJ to core Data center hybrid the multi cloud. There's a lot going on under the hood there. So you guys are doing a lot of stuff together. VM Ware and Dell Technologies. What's the solution for customers? They gotta move faster. As lead pointed out, Caitlin, how are you guys working together to make that infrastructure more modern, faster, programmable and reliable, >>and make it simpler for the customers right? I think it really comes down to one of the most powerful things about the partnership is that from the dull technology standpoint, we have really a plethora of different solutions to support your VM or environment. Whether it's a three tier architecture with Power Edge power store or leveraging the X rail. Or very commonly, it's gonna be both of those. You have the right infrastructure to support the production workloads and have a consistent operating model between them leveraging devils and primary storage side and all the integrations we have with the ex rail. And then we have with power, protect data manager Great integrations in some recent enhancements that make that even better and are now able to protect Tan Xue, protect the VCF management domain and not only have the storage, but also the protection for that environment. But do it in a way that supports what the V A madman needs and also gives that consistent protection, consistent storage, consistent operating model for the rest of I T. And at the same time you're enabling the developers to move faster. >>Lee, You guys have been doing a lot of joint development, and we've been covering a lot of the news VM world. Ah, lot of joint engineering, a lot of joint integrations. You guys have been collaborating with Dell Technologies for a long time. Also, the relationship. Where is that Today? Can you expand on that a little bit and take a minute to explain the joint >>collaboration? I'll start with the fact that you know, good marketing is really easy when you have great engineering. And so the work that we're doing together, like between our companies. Now we have a lot to talk about, right? E mean the work scaling mentioned right around Devil's integration, for example, on power Max right on da npower store, right? I mean, you start looking at the integration work that we're doing together. It means that customers are getting the benefits of the joint integration work and testing right that comes and so you're guaranteed out of the box toe work. Also, you know, don't forget that contain owners and all of the things we're doing around containers. It's basically designed thio accommodate the fact that containers air spun up more quickly or destroyed more quickly, their shared across the hybrid cloud more frequently and without an inherent security model and built in data protection. It's really hard to go and see how you can deploy these with the enterprise resilience that's demanded at enterprise scale. And so that's what we're doing together, right? And, you know, we build great software, Uh, but without great hardware partnerships, it's one hand clapping, right. It's about getting our teams together, right? That really makes it sing at the customer level. >>You know, I think that's a really example of the business. Performance results have come in Vienna, where you guys were doing a great job. Go way back to the years ago when Pat and Raghu we're talking with from Amazon and all. Since then, it's been joint development, join integrations, and that's a great business model for you. And so, Caitlyn, I wanna get back to you. Because at VMRO we covered Project Monterey, the new initiative for the anywhere but a year before they had Project Pacific that came toe life with product results. Tan Xue specifically, you guys have the power protect data manager that we talked about in the summer, but now for Tan Xue supported and Tan Xue environments that super relevant, can you share any updates on your end on the power protect Data Manager and Tan Xue? >>Yeah, I li I couldn't agree more that great engineering mix our jobs a lot more fun and a whole lot easier. So we've been really lucky. And the partnership we've had has really never been stronger. So yeah, but the most recent release of power protect Data Manager introduces the support for that tan xue protection. It also introduces really important things like storage, storage based policy management. So in in biosphere, when you set up a storage policy, you have data protection as part of that and you have the integration with power protect data Manager. So you're able to automatically protect new VM that are created by that storage policy of being applied. >>But >>at the same time, it's also being tracked in power. Protect Data Manager. So you have that consistency across enabling your vitamins and enabling your data protection your i t. Team. To keep track of that, we also have ah tech preview that we did at VM World about how we're working as from Dell technology standpoint to innovate around. How do you protect some of these VMS that are so large and so mission critical that you need to be able to protect them in a new and innovative way that doesn't disrupt the business. And we did a tech preview of that, and it's something you'll hear more about from us, too. But it's PM traditionally would be in this category of unprotected ble because of the impact it could have on the environment and how we're really looking to do that in a more efficient and intelligent way. So we can actually protect those be EMS. And there's there's really a whole lot more. When you talk about objects, scale and everything else that we've done, it's really exciting. And you don't think Lee and I have ever talked as much as we do now. Ah, and it's been a lot of a lot of fun. >>It's been great following both of you guys on the keep interviews over the years. The success in the vision We had early conversations about what the plans where it's kind of all playing out. So I want to congratulate both of you of VM Ware Adele Technology. So good job going forward. The collaboration. I want to get to that in a second, you'll into it. But Caitlin Lee, I want to get your thoughts because one of the big themes this year besides covert and all the issues that that's highlighting. But in the cloud world, automation has been the number one conversation we've been hearing, and with that you got machine learning all the tech around that as you abstract away. The complexity of the infrastructure to make the modern APS automation has been great. The business cross connect is everything is a service we're seeing. This is the big wave coming. Could you guys share your vision on how all this stuff you mentioned V balls and all objects scale all these things? There's a >>lot of >>plumbing underneath and a lot of tooling, a lot of part piece parts. If that gets programmable, >>automation >>kicks in, which then enables everything is the service because you guys both share your vision of what that means in terms of what's going to change and what would it impact the customer? >>Yeah, and it's very relevant for this week, right? Dell Technologies world. That's a big part of what we've announced this week in our commitment to really bringing our portfolio as a service, and it's really interesting, especially for folks like Lee and I, who have been doing kind of mawr product marking and talking about speeds and feeds and thinking about how you make the product life simpler. And how do you automate that? Have the intelligence built in things like Biaro have been such an important part of that, especially with power store coming to market. But if you think about where that leads us, actually changes everything, which is when you have everything as a service and we're really delivering outcomes to our customers and no longer products. That automation is actually just a important and maybe even more important. But it's not the end user that cares about it directly is actually us, because as Dell Technologies, we become the ones managing that infrastructure, owning that infrastructure and the more automation we can bring in, the more intelligence we can build them for ourselves. The more insights we can give to our customers, the better that service can become. And it's really a flip from how we've always been thinking about and really rolling out automation. It's not actually about enabling our end users to do anything. It's actually about enabling them to not worry about any of it, but enable our own organization to support their outcomes better. So it really changes everything. >>Lee, what's your thoughts on this? Everything you've got, V Sphere V Center. You've got all the storage you got all the back up. All this stuff has to be automated. Makes sense. But as a service, how does that impact your world? >>You know, it really does. When you think about the VMRO Cloud Foundation, right, which is the integration of all of our V sphere with Visa. And with these, you know, our NSX products that will be realized. Management suite. Tom Zoo now, right, All of this pulled together. One of things that's interesting is when you go to the public cloud, we have some experience now where we always deliver that full stack together. And what that does is it frees up customers. Thio, go on, focus on the applications, I think and stop looking down the infrastructure. Start looking up at the APS. And so we're offering and bringing that same level of experience to the on premises data centers. And now bridging that across the hybrid cloud that all of a sudden gives you this sense that Hey, I'm future ready. No, matter where I am today. If I'm thinking about the hybrid cloud, I could go on move there, right. And with our partnership with Dell Technologies, there's such a great opportunity to bridge that uniquely, by the way across all of my on premises infrastructure, including common policy based management, back into storage through RV Valls efforts, right and then back in through objects scale right into objects based, uh, applications and through our DP efforts to data protection efforts, then back into, like, date full data protection. And so what you get now is we're helping customers realize that I got this. I could take new Cooper navies orchestrated applications and I could make them work and do it with the same operational model that I have today. Start spending more time on the applications, less time, basically configuring and managing underlying infrastructure. >>Caitlin you mentioned that earlier at the top of the segment, ease of use, making it easier, simpler, great stuff on the on on the future. Lee, I gotta ask you about Project Monterey. We did a lot of coverage on VM World on silicon angle in the Cube. I love how this comes out. It's always, You know, the brain trust that VM Ware lays out the future, they fill it in throughout the year, expect to see some meat on the bone there. But what is that gonna do from for new capabilities and how with Dell Technologies? Because, um, it's end to end, right this Michael Dell and I talked, I think, two years ago, a Dell Tech world. And then last year, he hit the point home hard and to end with Dell Technologies. It kind of feels like it's gonna be a good fit. Could you share how that Monterey project fits in with Dell Technologies? >>Yeah. We're so pleased to be showing this together with Dell Technologies at the VM World to showcase this new idea that you could basically go on, start offloading CPUs and using smart knicks as a way to basically now provide, um or let's call it a, You know, a architecture that allows you to, uh, be responsive to new application needs. So let me talk a little bit about that. So when we opened up Tansu, right, we got this complete inflow pouring of new container base kubernetes orchestrated APS. So what? We found was, Hey, they're driving a lot of CPU needs their driving a lot of scale out security needs for things like distributed firewalls. And so we started looking at this, and what's clear is we need to basically use the CPU very judiciously, So it's basically reserved for the APS. And so what we're doing now is we're basically saying there's an opportunity for us to go in, offload the CPU for things that look more like infrastructure, including S X, I and other things. And at the same time, then we could go and work together with Dell Technologies to be the deployment vehicle. And so, just like Project Pacific, which was going broad, if you will, this project moderate, which is going deep like the canyon, John not far from here, um is, you know, a source of all new discovery right where we'll be working together and over time, just like the Project Pacific name faded to black and became product Tan Xue vcf with Tom juvie sphere. With Hangzhou, we'll see that Project Monterey will evolve into new products coming together with Dell Technologies. >>Caitlin, can you elaborate on Take a min, explain the product how this renders into products because I can also imagine just the benefits just from a security standpoint. Efficiency. If the platform, um, there's a range of things, could you take a minute to >>explain the >>impact on products? >>Yeah, I think you'll hear a lot more about it, but we're obviously excited to be partners on this is Well, and I think it's It's just another example of the more intelligent the infrastructure can become than the rest of the entire I T organization can run more efficiently and that that can come in the form of the A. I built into power, Max, that can come in the form of the evils that we have both in Power Max and Power Store that can come in the form of even just the fact that we have now built a fully containerized S three compatible objects or platform called objects scale which we have no in early access. Um, that can run on the V sand data persistence platform, and it just gives you the ability to leverage this all of the right technology. And we can continue to really partner on that. I think Project Monterey really opens up even more opportunities to do that, and you'll certainly hear more from us on that in the future. >>I >>mean, you got compression, you got encryption. A lot of benefits across the board. Great to have you guys both on and your graduation. The great event. Final question for both of you, talk about this has been a crazy year. We're not face to face, so everything will be online. What should customers and partners and people watching know about the relationship between VM Ware and Dell Technologies this year? What's the big message to take away? What should people walk away with and and think about? >>I think it's It's never been stronger than ever, uh, than it's been than it is right now. We have never had >>more >>breath and more depth of integration. I think that the partnership on the engineering level, on the product management level on the marketing level, we have really never been in a better place. And you know what? What? My team is really enjoyed with VM world season and you're coming up on Deltek. World season is we've really enjoyed the fact that we've had so much richness >>of >>that integration to talk >>about, and >>we also know there's even more coming. So I, you know, from from my standpoint, if we really feel it and probably the best and most rewarding time we hear about that, is when we bring new things into market, we hear that back. And when Power Store came into the market and over the past few right kind of first months in market, one of the most resounding feedback that has come out as one of the most differentiated parts is that it? It's so incredibly integrated with VM ware. But we've even gotten questions from analysts asking, you know, did you purposely make it feel like you are really working similarly to a B M or environment? And you know what? That just shows how closely we have been working as organizations is that it comes a very seamless experience for our customers. >>Lee Final Word. >>What >>should people walk away with this year on the relationship between Be and we're in Dell Technologies? >>Well, I think the best partnerships right are ones that are customer driven. And what you're finding here is customers. They're actually encouraging us, right? We're doing a lot of three way meetings now, right where customers like, Hey, tell me how you're going to go involved this. How do I How do I basically modernized right and preserve my existing investment, perhaps Or, you know, update here, Or how do I grow like customers have really complex individual situations. And what you confined right is that we're helping jointly not, you know, just simply with the engineering side, which is awesome, but also with the idea that we're helping customers go on deploy responsibly in a time where it's very difficult to plan. And so if you come to us, we can help you jointly plan for the future in uncertain times and make sure that you're gonna be successful. And that's just a great feeling when you're a customer looking at, How do you deploy going forward in this? You know, with the amount of pace of change that we've got, >>I want to congratulate. Both of you have been following you guys. Success has been proven out on the business results and also the products and the enablement that you guys are providing customers been great. Thanks for coming on. Great to see both of you have a great event. Thanks for. Come on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>Okay, I'm John for your here with the Cube. Covering Del Technology Worlds Digital experience 2020 The Cube Virtual. >>Thanks for watching.

>> Okay listen, we're gearing up for the start of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit. And we want to go back to the early roots of Snowflake. We got some of the founding engineers here, Abdul Munir, Ashish Motivala and Allison Lee. They're three individuals that were at Snowflake, in the early years and participated in many of the technical decisions. That led to the platform and is making Snowflake famous today. Folks great to see you. Thanks so much for taking some time out of your busy schedules. >> Thank you for having us- >> Same. >> It's got to be really gratifying to see this platform that you've built, taking off and changing businesses. So I'm sure it was always smooth sailing, right? There were no debates, where there ever? >> I've never seen an engineer get into a debate. >> Yeah alright, so seriously. So take us back to the early days, you guys choose whoever wants to start, but what was it like, early on we're talking 2013 here, right? >> That's right. >> When I think back to the early days of Snowflake. I just think of all of us sitting in one room at the time, we just had an office that was one room with 12 or 13 engineers sitting there, clacking away at our keyboards, working really hard, churning out code punctuated by somebody asking a question about hey, what should we do about this? Or what should we do about that? And then everyone kind of looking up from their keyboards and getting into discussions and debates about the work that we were doing. >> So, Abdul was it just kind of heads down, headphones on just coding or? >> I think there was a lot of talking and followed by a lot of typing. And I think there were periods of time where anyone could just walk in into the office and probably out of the office and all they'd hear is probably people typing away their keyboards. And one of my most vivid memory is actually I used to sit right across from Allison and there was these two huge monitors between us. And I would just hear her typing away at her keyboard. And sometimes I was thinking and all that typing got me nervous because it seemed like Allison knew exactly what she needed to do. And I was just still thinking about it. >> So Ashish was this like bliss for you as a developer or an engineer? Or was it a stressful time? What was the mood? >> Then when you don't have a whole lot of customers, there's a lot of bliss, but at the same time, there's a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we build the product. There was a timeline ahead of us. We knew we had to build this in a certain timeframe. So one thing I'll add to what Allison and Abdul said is, we did a lot of whiteboarding as well. There were a lot of discussions and those discussions were a lot of fun. They actually cemented what we wanted to build. They made sure everyone was in tune and there we have it. >> Yeah, it is a really exciting time. We can do it any start-up. When you have to make decisions in development and variably you come to a fork in the road. So I'm curious as to what some of those forks might've been, how you guys decided which fork to take. Was there a Yoda in the room that served as the Jedi Master? How are those decisions made? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> That's an interesting question. And as I think back one of the memories that sticks out in my mind is this epic meeting in one of our conference rooms called Northstar and many of our conference rooms are named after ski resorts because the founders are really into skiing. And that's where the Snowflake name comes from. So there was this epic meeting and I'm not even sure exactly what topic we were discussing. I think it was the sign up flow and there were a few different options on the table. And one of the options that people were gravitating to, one of the founders didn't like it. And they said a few times that this makes no sense. There's no other system in the world that does it this way. And I think one of the other founders said, that's exactly why we should do it this way or at least seriously consider this option. So, I think there was always this tendency and this impulse that we needed to think big and think differently and not see the world the way it is, but the way we wanted it to be and then work our way backwards and try to make it happen. >> Allison, any fork in the road moments that you remember? >> Well, I'm just thinking back to a really early meeting with Ashish and a few of our founders where we're debating something probably not super exciting to a lot of people outside of hardcore database people, which was how to represent our column metadata. And I think it's funny that you that you mentioned Yoda, because we often make jokes about one of our founders Thierry and referred to him as Yoda, because he has this tendency to say very concise things that kind of make you scratch your head and say, wow, why didn't I think of that? Or what exactly does that mean? I never thought about it that way. So, when I think of the Yoda in the room, it was definitely Thierry, >> Ashish is there anything you can add to this conversation? >> I'll agree with Allison on the Yoda comment for sure. Another big fork in the road I recall was when we changed one of our meadow store, where we store and are willing to try and metadata. We used to use a tool called my SQL and we changed it to another database called foundation DV. I think that was a big game changer for us. And it was a tough decision. It took us a long time, for the longest time we even had our own little branch it was called foundation DV and everybody was developing on that branch, it's a little embarrassing but those are the kinds of decisions that have altered the shape of Snowflake. >> Yeah, these are really down in the weeds hardcore stuff that a lot of people might not be exposed to. What would you say was the least obvious technical decision that you had to make at the time? And I want to ask you about the most obvious too, but what was the one that was so out of the box? You kind of maybe mentioned it a little bit before, but I wonder if we could double click on that? >> Well, I think one of the core decisions in our architecture is the separation of compute and storage that is really core to our architecture. And there's so many features that we have today, for instance data sharing, zero-copy cloning, that we couldn't have without that architecture. And I think it was both not obvious. And when we told people about it in the early days, there was definitely skepticism about being able to make that work and being able to have that architecture and still get great performance. >> Exactly- >> Yeah, anything that was like clearly obvious, maybe that was the least and the most that separation from compute and store, 'cause it allowed you to actually take advantage of cloud native, but was there an obvious one that is it sort of dogma that you philosophically live behind to this day? >> I think one really obvious thing is the sort of no tuning, no knobs, ease of use story behind Snowflake. And I say it's really obvious because everybody wants their system to be easy to use. But then I would say there were tons of decisions behind that, that it's not always obvious the implications of such a choice, right? And really sticking to that. And I think that that's really like a core principle behind Snowflake that led to a lot of non-obvious decisions as a result of sticking to that principle. >> To wrap to that now you've gotten us thinking, I think another really interesting one was really, should we start from scratch or should we use something that already exists and build on top of that. And I think that was one of these almost philosophical kind of stances that we took, that a lot of the systems that were out there were the way they were because they weren't built for the platforms that they were running on. And the big thing that we were targeting was the cloud. And so one of the big stances we took was that we were going to build it from scratch and we weren't going to borrow a single line of code from any other database out there. And this was something that really shocked a lot of people and many times that this was pretty crazy. And it was, but this is how you build great products. >> That's awesome, all right, Ashish give your last word, we got like just 30 seconds left take, bring us home. >> Till date actually one of those that shocks people when you talk to them and they say, wow, you're not really using any other database? And you build this entirely yourself? The number of people who actually can build a database from scratch are fairly limited. The group is fairly small. And so it was really a humongous task. And as you've mentioned, it really changed the direction of how we designed the database. What does the database really mean to us, right? The way Snowflake has built a database, it's really a number of organs that come together and form the body. And that's also a concept that's novel to the database industry. >> Guys congratulations, you must be so proud and it's going to be awesome watching the next decade. So thank you so much for sharing your stories. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you- >> Thank you.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of Vmworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCube's 11th year of VMworld. Here we are in 2020 of course, rather than being together at the moscone or at the sand. We're coming to you in your place of work or home when you're watching video, happy to welcome back. We have two of our long time guests on the program. First we have Travis Vigil. He is the Senior Vice President of Product Management with Dell Technologies and joining him is Lee Caswell who's the Vice President of Product Storage and Availability Business unit at VMware, Lee and Travis, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Steve, it's good to see you again. >> All right, so we love kind of the maturation of what's happened. I mentioned 11 years, I get to usually sit down and talk with both of you, we talk about strategy we talk about how customers, and at the end of the day, we know things are changing. Like 2020 things are changing more every day, but one of the big transitions here is talking about that, how applications are changing. In the old days it was hey, I have an application, let me just stick it in a VM and it's going to be good there forever. We know that today I need to be able to react fast, I need to move things forward. And that impacts what VMware and Dell are doing together. So hey Lee, if maybe we come with you give the VMware perspective on that application changing and what that means to there and Travis feel free to chime in when Lee's done. >> Sure. >> Yeah thanks so much Steve and great to have to be back here on theCube. And VMworld is always a great opportunity to talk about how the industry is changing. What's really happening here and so one of the things that we're all finding is that the pace of application change is speeding up. And you know what, I mean you think about infrastructure. We want to think about how you can organize around the fastest changing element. This is one of the things we kicked off with project Pacific and our Tanzu portfolio a year ago. And you're starting to see all the products come roaring through right now as we're integrating Kubernetes. So that container based applications can be managed, secured, protected, just the same way with all the same tools that we have with our traditional VM applications. >> Yeah it's an excellent point. I mean, we are seeing the adoption of the modern applications in VMware environments, just accelerate beyond belief. And we're getting increasing requests from our customers to protect, to manage production workloads in Kubernetes environments and with our power protect data manager. Yeah we're actually announcing that we have all support for the Tanzu portfolio. So that includes TKG TKGI, Kubernetes Clusters, Kubernetes Clusters, and vSphere. So we're really excited to be able to offer this capability to our joint customers. And I think one thing that we're seeing is that the roles in IT are oftentimes blending together. So one of the things we're excited about with our solution is that with our direct data protection integration and vSphere environments. It's actually the be admin that can provision, monitor, manage, and protect the Kubernetes workloads, give unified experience and provide that peace of mind in this next generation world. >> Yeah Travis I'm glad you brought up some of those changing roles. I mean, that was such a big theme for so many years as the Virtualization Admin taking on more responsibility. And Lee teed up the changing application, you've got other roles coming together. You've got the application development team, which often times is disconnected from the infrastructure team. So, from either of you just what are you seeing from your customers? How are they sorting through that? I need to move agile, I need to move faster and that's not traditionally how the infrastructure team has worked. >> Things that we've been working on for example is how we've integrated SRM with vVols and PowerMax. And when you think about that, and we've talked for years right about the vVols for example. What we're responding to now is that customers are coming back and saying, listen, I have HCI, but I also have storage system and I need your help to go and be able to manage these with a consistent operating model and the same team. And that career path for the Virtualization Administrator just continues to grow. They're adding now five native applications, Kubernetes Orchestrated Applications, and being able to manage those across traditional storage and newer HCI systems. This is a really interesting blend of where the companies are working together to make sure that customer responses are being addressed really quickly. >> Yeah, it's a great example Lee. I mean, if you think about Three-tier architecture and PowerMax being the flagship of the heart of a lot of data centers that have been in operation for decades, the fact that we're seeing from our customers, hey, can you take a SRM and vVols, Can you integrate it with PowerMax and SRDF and be able to provide me a step along the way on my modernization journey? Such that I can utilize what I've built up my IT operations about around over the last couple of decades along with the newer deployment models like Hyper-converged infrastructure. And we're seeing that kind of that step forward and a blurring of the lines in terms of roles all over the place. I think another good example Lee is Cloud Native App Dev, right? And customers looking object, S3 object storage capability to provide a simple dev apps friendly way of, developing applications and hybrid cloud environments. And that's why we're really happy that we're able to provide early access for what we refer to as object scale, which works in conjunction with the vSAN Data persistence Platform to allow our customers to deliver modern applications. But at the same time use infrastructure that the IT organization is deploying, for other standard applications. I think that's another good example. >> It's a good point we had blocks through VSand of course right? And added files, what was missing well objects. (laughing) And so... >> Exactly >> We're already together with this persistent storage platform. We've got a way to go on basically supply object scale, object scale storage that can be used for Cloud Native Development. And I think this is a good example, right? This isn't just one hand clapping, right? This is both companies working together to make sure that customers have a seamless experience. That's really important. It doesn't come for granted, right? I mean it really takes co-engineering, joint testing and developing and go-to market together between our companies. I've never seen it working better. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Go ahead Stuart. >> I know Travis I was just saying, we saw how fast VMware went from announcing project Pacific to the GA of the base solution where you needed the cloud foundation to update one already allowing everything to move open. That's going to be a little bit challenging to keep up with that pace of innovation. We've been talking for years on the queue, but we went from the 18 month release cycle to now, most things are like a six week release cycle. So, give us through any other pieces that were portfolio we need to understand the fitting with Tanzu and yeah. How do you move things along and where are the customers with their adoption? Are they sitting there waiting for it, or is this something that is going to be a more traditional enterprise slow roll? >> No I think you hit it spot on Stu the adoption and the deployments of these new architectures are coming very, very quickly, right? Traditional IT is trying to and in many cases successfully moving to a more cloud-like delivery CI/CD approach to how they run their shops and the speed of innovation and the speed and the dynamics of new technologies within the data centers are just, accelerating at a really fast pace. And in order to continue to keep up with these changes, it's I'll reflect back on a little bit on what Lee was talking about. It's understanding where customers are going and jointly working together to target those pain points. And I'll give a very specific example. And then I think maybe Lee, we should start to talk a little bit about Monterey as well, but I'll say a very specific example on joint innovation is, as customers have deployed VMware more broadly and they put more mission, critical large applications on VM, there's been sort of this persistent issue that some of those VMs just were so large or required such high availability, that they were what some IT professionals would refer to as unprotectable. And so we're actually demonstrating with VMware innovation that allows those VMs, those large mission critical Vms that can take zero downtime or even a pause in availability or performance, the ability to take backups without impacting the performance on those VMs. So, that's a very specific thing we're doing, a very specific pin point, but I think it's an example of us working together to target customer customer needs. And then I think more broadly, there's a big trend in composability that part talked a little bit about this morning Project Monterey I'll let Lee kick it off and then kind of talk a little bit about what we're doing to partner with VMware on this initiative. >> Yeah, well great. I definitely want to hear Monterey obviously, edge computing has everybody excited. Travis we've been hearing from the Dell team the last couple of years is that strategy's muttering some of the investment pieces that Dell's doing. So Lee, we hear edge computing. What does that mean? VMware has got a strong telco play that we've watched, for many years. So, just as you said Project Pacific rolled out pretty fast, help us understand a bit more of this Monterey and how fast will this turn into that cascade of products that you talked about for that we sell the last year. >> Yeah thanks, and it's exciting at VMware, right? We're willing to go and share a projects. Overtime project to become products, it's the way it works. And so the project is really a directional vision that says, if you think about what we did with Project Pacific a year ago, and Pacific being like going broad. The idea was applications are changing, we needed to go and basically make Kubernetes integrated with these sphere, with our full VMware Cloud Foundation, and then basically simplify it for customer consumption, and we did that together with the Tanzu brand. Now, Project Monterey, if you think of the Monterey Canyon is now going deep. And what it says is that not only the software architecture has to change, but also hardware, new hardware capabilities, particularly through the use of Smart NICs are a new way for us to think about re-architecting, how compute is basically optimized within a server and then across clusters and even across the hybrid cloud. And so Monterey will be a new way to look at how we go in efficiently offload CPUs and use these new Smart NIC offload engines as a way to think about where hypervisors run, where let's call it software defined, whether it's storage or compute. And most importantly and probably is security. 'Cause one of the things we're finding that applications new applications are demanding is encryption for example or distributed firewalls thinking about like how do we do that secure boot or how do we think about air gapping applications from the infrastructure? And so we're really thinking about how to re-architect the world of security. So the security is integrally distributed throughout an architecture. And so you'll be seeing with Project Monterey our ability to go and drive new products out of that and we're working very closely on an engineering to engineering level with Dell Technologies to make sure this new technology becomes available for customers and fully integrated in the VMware Cloud Foundation. So we have an easy way for customers to digest it which I think that's the thing Stuart right now is there's a lot of new technologies coming so fast, really their partnership means that we're able to consume those more quick. >> Wonderful, yeah Monterey so we're going to go deeper than the grand canyon is deep, but I guess we need to all a breathe under water too. So Travis, as I mentioned, Dell's had for a couple of years, some of these analysts sessions that I've had the opportunity to go through, been watching out that growth of the edge strategy, obviously Dell has everything from some of the hardened pieces on the consumer side, through tying into broad ecosystems. So the software obviously is going to be a huge component of what edges we saw in the keynote stage and video, a big partnership they're obviously a huge important partner for both Dell and VMware. So Travis, from the Dell side, what does this vision of Monterey mean? >> It's extremely important, I'd say transformational potentially for IT going forward and Lee did a really good job of describing the trends, whether that be cloud native Telco 5G, machine learning and data-centric applications, multicloud, and hybrid cloud and that security concern that Lee was talking about. Those are our real trends, and if we can offer infrastructure that is more composable into these dis-aggregated resources, across the edge, across the cloud, across the core, all software defined and seamlessly managed. I mean, that's a powerful vision. And we're just really excited to be partnering with VMware, jointly engineering this future focusing first on those Smartnecks that Lee was talking about because you need that higher compute, you need that increased bandwidth. You need easier manageability of a distributed infrastructure, and you need that ability to provide easier and more distributed security. So lots more to come, we will be incorporating these technologies specifically in the form of Smartnecks into our HCI and our server portfolio. But this like Lee said, this is a trend that will move from initiative to project to products very quickly. >> Wonderful, well we covered that breadth in that depth as you said Lee. Want to give you both just final takeaways, what you want people to take from Vmworld 2020 Lee we'll start with you and then Travis you get the final word. >> Yeah, we're really looking at a changing world in terms of applications. And so for customers around the globe, look for the partnerships that will bring those new capabilities and make it easy to go and deploy as fast as possible. We started off making sure that people weren't looking down at the infrastructure and started looking up at the apps. We're continuing that process with what we're doing around Tanzu, around our Kubernetes portfolio and stay tuned there'll be more to come, much more as we work together on Project Monterey, lots of exciting news and glad that you were here from VMworld to go and see it all of the light. >> Yeah, I think I obviously agree with everything that Lee just said. I think for me the this VMworld is just, another step forward in a great partnership across Dell technologies and VMware. And I mentioned several things, all of the things that we're doing together I forgot to mention actually that we're the first company to be, to offer a certified solution to protect VMworld Cloud Foundations which I use that specific example again expect more first, expect more joint in engineering and integrations. And I think the power of these two organizations coming together is what's going to be needed to help drive forward into this next generation of modern applications and dynamic workloads and dis-aggregated resources. And so we're just really excited about the innovation, the ability to address customer issues and the strong partnership that we have across Dell technologies and VMworld. >> Well, one of the measurements six that we have today is how fast everyone can respond and move fast. Congratulations on all the progress you've both made in your teams in the last year. And absolutely look forward to hearing more about Project Monterey as that matures. Travis and Lee, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks to you. >> Thanks to you. >> All right, and stay tuned for more coverage of VMworld 2020, I'm Stuart Miniman and as always. Thank you for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover Virtual Experience Brought to You by HP >>I Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover. 2020. The virtual experience I'm Stew Minimum course This year we're getting to talk to HP, their customers and their partners where they are around the globe. We said many times these were, you know, together, even while we're art happy to dig into a really important partnership with HP and VM Ware. Welcome to the program. First time guest on the program Christmas Satterthwaite. She is the vice president of product management for Compute with Packard Enterprise and welcome back to the program Lee Caswell. He is the vice president, product marketing for hyper converged infrastructure, her at VM Ware talking about V sphere and how that gets bundled into everything else. Chris Stanley, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks for having us. >>Alright, So, Chris, let's start with you. So you know, like a little bit about your background? The HP and HP relationship with VM Ware, you know, goes back to you know, the earliest days, but, you know, give us a little bit about you know where in the portfolio you focus on and and how VM Ware fit, then >>Oh, sure, sure. So I've been with H P E for 23 years now, and I'm leading the business for Alliance and Synergy and talking a little bit about the relationship with VM Ware. So we've been partnering for 19 years and we have over 200,000 joint customers together. And I'm actually often asked about the partnership and how we partner and we really partner across all fronts. So it's from the innovation for the co engineering, the working with specific customers on what solutions are good for them to servicing our customers. So we're really working across the board, and a lot of customers we work with closely are really impressed with how closely we're working together, because that's what they look for. >>Yeah, and we it's it's It's an interesting relationship to watch. Obviously, you know, long history Chris talked about on the it side, but the VM partnership is more than just the compute. Maybe gives a little bit of a view inside. You know, the joint engineering go to market efforts that you do. >>Yeah. I mean, customers always sit up straight when we talk together, because both hard companies or just raw engines of innovation and they look forward to not just the capabilities or bringing, but also the seamless way that we integrate that and make that seamless and easy for customers to digest. So certainly on the server front through V sphere, that's been a longstanding, uh, participation the VM Ware Cloud Foundation. Then this fully software defined stack became a really interesting way for us to go in partner and show joint value to customers who are trying to basically get more speed the speed. We're gonna talk about a lot that today and then finally, the confirmation that we've opened up into storage systems, right? So there's certainly a hyper converged element of it. But now what we do with Nimble three Par and now I'm Era is a really interesting way for us to take the vehicle technology that we have and extend the common operating model. So really just interesting innovation for customers that take advantage of as they look to innovate themselves. >>Krista, from from a research standpoint, you know, we were really early in watching, you know, new models of building out storage. And we said, You know, the pendulum has swung back to pull it much closer to the compute you talked about. You've got a broad portfolio and compute. You know, synergy has some really interesting, you know, ways to be able to compose things and leverage software capabilities. So maybe give >>us a >>little bit of how HP differentiates in the market cause, you know, VM Ware does partner with lots of people. But you know what separates the's point solution? Everything else out in the market? >>Sure, and synergy is a great example, because what we're seeing is really, really high interest on on synergy with VCF. And the reason for that is because customers want a software to find infrastructure that they can compose, compute storage and networking as they need to to address any workload they have. And they want to do that with a partner like VM Ware and VCF. So what we see is customers choosing those two things together and building their hybrid cloud environments on those two. When I think of some of the customers that we have, I'll give you a specific example. So Banco Santander's one of the largest banking groups in the world. And they are really trying to drive innovation across all of their, um, locations there in North America, South America, Europe, Asia. They're trying to drive innovation across. They have a big project, and they selected Synergy and VCF and as a service green lake bottle to help them transform their business. And they're really excited because what they think this is providing to them is a reduced a data center space, reduced power consumption and reduce costs. And all of that with automation, more automation than they've had in the past. More flexibility than they've had in the past. >>Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the Green Lake because you know, those as a service models. You know, Cloud obviously has been a big discussion for the last two years, Lee, Um, you know, VM Ware is no stranger to, you know, working in multi and hybrid environments. It gives a little bit about you know what you're hearing from your customers. You know, if you meant Green Lake, how does that fit in the overall? You know, VM Ware multi cloud offering. >>Well, you know, we all know these air uncertain times, right? and customers and uncertain times. We're looking for flexibility. How do they go? And basically, you know, invest smartly, right? Look to come out of uncertain times stronger. And what we're finding is that the flexibility, you know, starting it. You know, we're really impressed with this energy platform, by the way, the idea of being able to flexibly, configure, compute and storage to tie into external arrays from that end, to have the VM Ware Cloud Foundation is a unifying, software defined data center concept that's available on Prem and then extends into the hybrid cloud. This basic gives investment protection to customers who are looking for how to invest in. You know, you mentioned Green Lake as well, and I just mentioned that innovation on Green Lake is about true consumption based purchasing miles, if you will. And that's different than just a financial engineering aspect. I mean, that's real innovation and real technical innovation in terms of how customers can go in a why infrastructure at the time that they needed relative to that compelling business models, >>and I'll chime in their Teoh, I'll tell you a little story about when I first presented the green like model. At that time, it wasn't called Green Lake, but I presented it to a bunch of customers, about 100 customers in an advisory council. And I have never had so many people come up to me afterwards trying to figure out how they can get that for themselves as I did when I had that presentation. What really resonated with people is that they wanted to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies, but they didn't have big budgets. And when they did take advantage of those technologies, one of the challenges has been growth. So when they need to expand, that's another procurement cycle. You have a way to have the standard all love with Green Lake. You actually have that added capacity on sites and then also painful what you use s so they were attracted to all of those things. And I feel like right now and the environment were in many people had big, big projects, things they want to do, and they may have planned those ah, a capital expenditure for that. But that money may not be there, So Green Lake is one of those things that can help overcome that challenge. And what we found is when people use green like we don't see many people. Um, go back. So what? I was talking to the green like team, and I said, You know what happens if they decide not to do Green Lake and they're kind of pause, and they're like, Well, we really haven't run into that very often. So it's very, very popular, and customers were really happy with it. >>Yeah. Talking about innovation and helping customers take advantage of new technologies. You know, maybe we'll start with you and Krista. Definitely want your but been a lot of feedback about V. Sphere seven. Of course, One of the big pieces of that is how, you know, cloud native container ization kubernetes It can be pulled into the, you know, the virtualization platform. So we're talking a lot about vcf Lee. That's the you know. Wait. Get it. The community's piece today. Tell us a little bit about that and what you hear from customers. And then Chris, I'd like to understand how that fits into the HP offering. >>Yeah, you know, the data we have shows that 95% of new applications are being developed on containers. Why? Because it's the speed of ill. And so at VM Ware, we've re architected V sphere for the first time that, you know in the last five years. And you look carefully at what the EMR integrates into the hyper visor because that's what we believe is going to be really benefiting from performance efficiency and management. And so we've integrated kubernetes directly into the hyper visor itself and then to our Tom's, a portfolio. Introduce an upstream compatible kubernetes development environment so that we have developer ready infrastructure. And that's really important because at the speed of new applications, basically you need to be able to respond quickly to those and what VM Ware has always offered right, which is a resilient underlying infrastructure with an intrinsic security model built in conceptually important when containers are being spun up more quickly. All right, mark quickly. They're being portable and portable across the hybrid cloud. Those models right mean that you need and convince you get value right from this integrated model that leverages all of the experience and knowledge that people have around how to run V Center and V Sphere so really exciting, and it's available in VCF for with >>I actually see the interest. I see customers asking about an enquiring about it. Vikan, you know, definitely second everything that we just said. I think you're really you're going to see a really fast transition over because there's so much value. Add it in. >>Excellent. Okay, Crystal, while I've got you on the compute piece, you know, legally said that 95% of application new applications are being built on container ization. How has that impacted architecture, er and how you're working with? >>Yeah. So what I find is that customers are very interested in containers. What we're doing is we're helping them from a services standpoint. A consulting standpoint of many of these customers are adopting for the first time trying to figure out how they could they could leverage containers in their environment. From our standpoint, it's making sure that we have the right platforms and we're advising and consulting and helping customers get there. >>Excellent, Lee. You know, Kristen talked about a sense and under one wondering if you've got any customer examples you like to share? >>Yeah. Great. One is ah, portion. I love the portion example. Just because portion, just the epitome of speed. And so the idea of this flexibility well, you're finding rate is the flexibility, right? Starting from, let's say, from a synergy, I'm flexible on the part of their allocation, right? And then, with VCF right now being able to be flexible across the hybrid cloud and now with VCF or with ponzu, the flexibility of introducing new modern applications support on Finally Layer and Green Lake On top of that which which is also using it, gives you this idea that you know, especially in uncertain times. But, you know, regardless, the changing business environment where everyone's responding, toe app, development rushers, timelines and innovation. We've got a really interesting model now for customers to invest responsibly and be able to respond quickly. >>Hm. Excellent. Crystal, I guess. Said the other pieces were at discover any updates on the portfolio expanding the VM solution. That >>Yeah. Yeah. So I'd like to talk a little bit about our pre validated synergy vcf solution stack with built in automation. So we literally got rid of hundreds of that's pre and post employment so we could speed deployment by five times. We were talking to point in hours instead of weeks. So we're really, really excited about that. We're working together to make sure we're making things easier for customers making that journey to a hybrid cloud very, very simple. So we're really happy to have, you know, offer that to customers. >>Great Lee, Any any final words you can share on the partnership? You >>know what I might say? It's right that the pace of innovation from our companies right is so great, Right? That really v vm Ware Cloud Foundation is a way, you know, in our joint effort and joint delivery rate is a way for customers to assimilate all of this innovation. So that day zero, it's guaranteed the work. And that day two, you can lifecycle manage all the individual components from a common sec manager interface. That's the value that we're bringing together today. Is that Listen, you know, putting all this in place conceived, daunting until the VM Ware Cloud Foundation, with synergy with all of the joint value we have basically makes it manageable so that you can go and basically stop looking down it infrastructure. Look up the ass. >>All right. Christine will let you have the final word and final takeaways from HP Discover. >>Okay, sure. Thanks. Together. What we're trying to do is simplify that journey to hybrid cloud. Make sure that customers can innovate faster, provide stable operations and reduce their costs. >>Well, Chris Stanley, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the progress. Looking forward. Toa watching down the road. >>All right, thanks. >>Alright, Stay tuned for lots more coverage from the Cube, HP Discover 2020. Virtual experience on stew Minimum. Thanks for watching. Yeah, >>yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Voiceover: Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at AWS re:Invent, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Justin Warren. This is day one of AWS re:Invent. Rob Lee is here, he's the Vice President and Chief Architect at Pure Storage. And he's joined by Rob Walters, who is the Vice President, General Manager of Storage as a Service at Pure. Robs, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us back. >> Yep, thank you. >> Dave: You're welcome. Rob, we'll start with, Rob Lee we'll start with you. So re:Invent, this is the eighth re:Invent, I think the seventh for theCUBE, what's happened at the show, any key takeaways? >> Yeah, absolutely it's great to be back. We were here last year obviously big launch of cloud data services, so it's great to be back a year in. And just kind of reflect back on how the year's gone for uptick at cloud data services, our native US. And it's been a banner year. So we saw over the last year CloudSnap go GA Cloud Block Store go GA and you know just really good customer uptake, adoption and kind of interest out of the gate. So it's kind of great to be back. Great to kind of share what we've down over the last year as well as just get some feedback and more interest from future customers and prospects as well. >> So Rob W, with your background in the cloud what's you take on this notion of storage as a service? How do you guys think about that and how do you look at that? >> Sure, well this is an ever more increasingly important way to consume storage. I mean we're seeing customers who've been you know got used to the model, the economic model, the as a service model in the cloud, now looking to get those benefits on-prem and in the hybrid cloud too. Which if you know, you look at our portfolio we have both there, as part of the Pure as a service. >> Right okay, and then so Pure Accelerate you guys announced Cloud Block Store. >> Yeah, that's when we took it GA. Right so we've been working with customers in a protracted beta process over the last year to really refine the fit and use cases for tier one block workloads and so we took that GA in Accelerate. >> So this is an interesting, you're a partner obviously with Amazon I would think many parts of Amazon love Cloud Block Store 'cause you're using EC2, you're front-ending S3 like you're helping Amazon sell services and you're delivering a higher level of availability and performance in certain workloads, relative to EVS. So there's probably certain guys at Amazon that aren't so friendly with you. So that's an interesting dynamic, but talk about the positioning of Cloud Block Store. Any sort of updates on uptake? What are customers excited about? What can you share? >> Yeah, no absolutely You know I'd say primarily we're most pleased with the variety of workloads and use cases that customers are bringing us into. I think when we started out on this journey we saw tremendous promise for the technology to really improve the AWS Echo system and customer experience for people that wanted to consume block storage in the cloud. What we learned as we started working with customers is that because of the way we've architected the product brought a lot of the same capabilities we deliver on our flash arrays today into AWS, it's allowed customers to take us into all the same types of workloads that they put flash arrays into. So that's their tier one mission critical environments, their VMware workloads, their Oracle workloads, their SAP workloads. They're also looking at us from everything from to do lift and shift, test and dev in the cloud, as well as DR right, and that again I think speaks to a couple things. It speaks to the durability, the higher level of service that we're able to deliver in AWS, but also the compatibility with which we're able to deliver the same sets of features and have it operate in exactly the same way on-prem and in the cloud. 'Cause look, if you're going to DR the last time, the last point in time you want to discover that there's a caveat, hey this feature doesn't quite work the way you expect is when you have a DR failover. And so the fact that we set out with this mission in mind to create that exact level of sameness, you know it's really paying dividends in the types of use cases that customers are bringing us into. >> So you guys obviously a big partner of VMware, you're done very well in that community. So VMware cloud on AWS, is that a tailwind for you guys or can you take advantage of that at this point? >> Yeah no, so I think the way I look at it is both VMware, Pure, AWS, I think we're all responding to the same market demands and customer needs. Which at the end of the day is, look if I'm an enterprise customer the reality is, I'm going to have some of my workloads running on-premise, I'm going to have some of my workloads running in the cloud, I expect you the vendors to help me manage this diverse, hybrid environment. And what I'd say is, there are puts and takes how the different vendors are going about it but at the end of the day that's the customer need. And so you know we're going about this through a very targeted storage-centric approach because that's where we provide service today. You know and you see VMware going after it from the kind of application, hypervisor kind of virtualization end of things. Over time we've had a great partnership with VMware on-premise, and as both Cloud Block Store and VMware Cloud mature, we'd look to replicate the same motion with them in that offering. >> Yeah, I mean to to extent I mean you think about VMware moving workloads with their customers into the cloud, more mission critical stuff comes into the cloud, it's been hard to get a lot of those workloads in to date and that's maybe the next wave of cloud. Rob W., I have a question for you. You know Amazon's been kind of sleepy in storage over the, S3, EBS, okay great. They dropped a bunch of announcements this year and so it seems like there's more action now in the cloud. What's your sort of point of view as to how you make that an opportunity for Pure? >> The way I've always looked at it is, there's been a way of getting your storage done and delivered on AWS and there's been the way that enterprises have done things on-premise. And I think that was a sort of a longer term bet from AWS that that was the way things will tend to fall towards into the public cloud. And now we see, all of the hyperscalers quite honestly with on-prem, hybrid opportunities. With the like Outpost today, et cetera. The hybrid is a real things, it's not just something people said that couldn't get to the cloud, you know it's a real thing. So I think that actually opens up opportunity from both sides. True enterprise class features that our enterprise class customers are looking for in the cloud through something like CBS are now available. But I think you know at Amazon and other hyperscale are reaching back down into the on-prem environments to help with the onboarding of enterprises up into the cloud >> So the as a service side of things makes life a little bit interesting from my perspective, because that's kind of new for Pure to provide that storage as a service, but also for enterprises as you say, they're used to running things in a particular way so as they move to cloud they're kind of having to adapt and change and yet they don't fully want to. Hybrid is a real thing, there are real workloads that need to perform in a hybrid fashion. So what does that mean for you providing storage as a service, and still to Rob Lee's point, still providing that consistency of experience across the entire product portfolio. 'Cause that's quite an achievement and many other as storage providers haven't actually been able to pull that off. So how do you keep all of those components working coherently together and still provide what customers are actually looking for? >> I think you have to go back to what the basics of what customers are actually looking for. You know they're looking to make smart use of their finances capex potentially moving towards opex, that kind of consumption model is growing in popularity. And I think a lot of enterprises are seeing less and less value in the sort of nuts and bolts storage management of old. And we can provide a lot of that through the as a service offering. So had to look past the management and monitoring. We've always done the Evergreen service subscription, so with software and hardware upgrades. So we're letting their sort of shrinking capex budget and perhaps their limited resources work on the more strategically important elements of their IT strategies, including hybrid-cloud. >> Rob Lee, one of the things we've talked about in the past is AI. I'm interested in sort of the update on the AI workloads . We heard a lot obviously today on the main stage about machine learning, machine intelligence, AI, transformations, how is that going, the whole AI push? You guys were first, really the first storage company to sort of partner up and deliver solutions in that area. Give us the update there. Wow's it going, what are you learning? >> Yeah, so it's going really well. So it continues to be a very strong driver of our flash play business, and again it's really driven by it's a workload that succeeds with very large sums of data, it succeeds when you can push those large sums of data at high speed into modern compute, and rinse and repeat very frequently. And the fourth piece which I think is really helping to propel some of the business there, is you know, as enterprises, as customers get further on into the AI deployment journeys what they're finding is the application space evolves very quickly there. And the ability for infrastructure in general, but storage in particular, because that's where so much data gravity exists to be flexible to adapt to different applications and changing application requirements really helps speed them up. So said another way, if the application set that your data scientists are using today are going to change in six months, you can't really be building your storage infrastructure around a thesis of what that application looks like and then go an replace it in six months. And so that message as customers have been through now the first, first and a half iterations of that and really sort of internalize, hey AI is a space that's rapidly evolving we need infrastructure that can evolve and grow with us, that's helping drive a lot of second looks and a lot of business back to us. And I would actually tie this back to your previous question which is the direction that Amazon have taken with some of their new storage offerings and how that ties into storage as a service. If I step back as a whole, what I'd say is both Amazon and Pure, what we see is there's now a demand really for multiple classes of service for storage, right. Fast is important, it's going to continue to get more and more important, whether it's AI, whether it's low latency transactional databases, or some other workload. So fast always matters, cost always matters. And so you're going to have this stratification, whether it's in the cloud, whether its on flash with SCM, TLC, QLC, you want the benefits of all of those. What you don't want is to have to manage the complexity of tying and stitching all those pieces together yourself, and what you certainly don't want is a procurement model that locks you out or in to one of these tiers, or in one of these locations. And so if you think about it in the long term, and not to put words in the other Rob's mouth, where I think you see us going with Pure as a service is moving to a model that really shifts the conversation with customers to say, look the way you should be transacting with storage vendors, and we're going to lead the charge is class of service, maybe protocol, and that's about it. It's like where do you want this data to exist? How fast do you want it? Where on the price performance curve do you want to be? How do you want it to be protected? And give us room to take care of it from there. >> That's right, that's right. This isn't about the storage array anymore. You know you look at the modern data experience message this is about what do you need from your storage, from a storage attribute perspective rather than a physical hardware perspective and let us worry about the rest. >> Yeah you have to abstract that complexity. You guys have, I mean simple is the reason why you were able to achieve escape velocity along with obviously great product and pretty good management as well. But you'll never sub optimize simplicity to try to turn some knobs. I mean I've learned that following you guys over the years. I mean that's your philosophy. >> No absolutely, and what I'd say is as technology evolves, as the components evolve into this world of multis, multi-protocol, multi-tier, multi-class of service, you know the focus on that simplicity and taking even more if it on becomes ever more important. And that's a place where, getting to your question about AI we help customers implement AI, we also do a lot of AI within our own products in our fleet. That's a place where our AI driven ops really have a place to shine in delivering that kind of best optimization of price, performance, tiers of service, so on, so forth, within the product lines. >> What are you guys seeing at the macro? I mean that to say, you've achieved escape velocity, check. Now you're sort of entering the next chapter of Pure. You're the big share gainer, but obviously growing slower than you had in previous years. Part of that we think is this, part of your fault. You put so much flash into the marketplace. It's given people a lot of headroom. Obviously NaN pricing has been an issue, you guys have addressed that on your calls, but still gaining share much, much more quickly than most. Most folks are shrinking. So what are you seeing at the macro, what are customers telling you in terms of their long term strategy with regard to storage? >> Well, so I'll start, I'll let Rob add in. What I'd say is we see in the macro a shift, a clear shift to flash. We've called the shots since day one, but what I'd say is that's accelerating. And that's accelerating with pricing dynamics, with and you know we talked about a lot of the NaN pricing and all that kind of stuff, but in the macro I think there's a clear realization now that customers want to be on flash. It's just a matter of what's the sensible rate? What's the price kind of curve to get there? And we see a couple meaningful steps. We saw it originally with our flash array line taking out 15K spinning drives, 10K's really falling. With QLC coming online and what we're doing in FlashArray//C the 7200 RPM drive kind of in the enterprise, you know those days are numbered, right. And I think for many customers at this point it's really a matter of, okay how quickly can we get there and when does it make sense to move, as opposed to, does it make sense. In many ways it's really exciting. Because if you think about it, the focus for so long has been in those tier one environments, but in many ways the tier two environments are the ones that could most benefit from a move to flash because a couple things happen there. Because they're considered lower tier, lower cost they tend to spread like bunnies, they tend to be kind of more neglected parts of the environment and so having customers now be able to take a second look at modernizing, consolidating those environments is both helpful from a operational point of view, it's also helpful from the point of view of getting them to be able to make that data useful again. >> I would also say that those exact use cases are perfect candidates for an as a service consumption model because we can actually raise the utilization, actually helping customers manage to a much more utilized set of arrays than the over consumption, under consumption game they're trying to play right now with their annual capex cycles. >> And so how aggressive do you see customers wanting to take advantage of that as a service consumption model? Is it mixed or is it like, we want this? >> There's a lot of customers who are just like we want this and we want it now. We've seen a very good traction and adoption so yeah, it's a surprisingly large, complex enterprise customer adoption as well. >> A lot of enterprise, they've gotten used to the idea of cloud from AWS. They like that model of dealing with things and they want to bring that model of operating on site, because they want cloud everywhere. They don't actually want to transform the cloud into enterprise. >> No, exactly, I mean if I go back 20 plus years to when I was doing hands on IT, the idea that we as a team would let go of any of the widgetry that we are responsible for, never would have happened. But then you've had this parallel path of public cloud experience, and people are like well I don't even need to be doing that anymore. And we get better results. Oh and it's secure as well? And that list just goes on. And so now as you say, the enterprise wants to bring it back on-prem for all of those benefits. >> One of the other things that we've been tracking, and maybe it falls in the category of cloud 2.0 is the sort of new workload forming. And I'll preface it this way, you know the early days, the past decade of cloud infrastructures of service have been about, yeah I'm going to spin up some EC2, I'm going to need some S3, whatever, I need some storage, but today it seems like, there's all this data now and then you're seeing new workloads driven by platforms like Snowflake, Redshift, you know clearly throw in some ML tools like Databricks and it's driving a lot of compute now but it's also driving insights. People are really pulling insights out of that data. I just gave you cloud examples, are you seeing on-prem examples as well, or hybrid examples, and how do you guys fit into that? >> Yeah, no absolutely. I think this is a secular trend that was kicked off by open source and the public cloud. But it certainly affects, I would say, the entire tech landscape. You know a lot of it is just about how applications are built. If you about, think back to the late '80s, early '90s you had large monoliths, you had Oracle, and it did everything, soup to nuts. Your transactional system, your data warehouse, ERP, cool, we got it all. That's not how applications are built anymore. They're built with multiple applications working together. You've got, whether it's Kafka connecting into some scale out analytics database, connected into Cassandra, connected right. It's just the modern way of how applications are built. And so whether that's connecting data between SaaS services in the cloud, whether it's connecting data between multiple different application sets that are running on-prem, we definitely see that trend. And so when you peel back the covers of that, what we see, what we hear from customers as they make that shift, as they try to stand up infrastructure to meet those need, is again the need for flexibility. As multiple applications are sharing data, are handing off data as part of a pipeline or as part of a workflow, it becomes ever more important for the underlying infrastructure, the storage array if you will, to be able to deliver high performance to multiple applications. And so the era of saying, hey look I'm going to design a storage array to be super optimized for Oracle and nothing else like you're only going to solve part of the problem now. And so this is why you see us taking, within Pure the approach that we do with how we optimize performance, whether it's across FlashArray, FlashBlade, or Cloud Block Store. >> Excellent, well guys we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your thoughts with us. And have a good rest of re:Invent. >> Thanks for having us back >> Dave: All right, pleasure >> Thank you >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap day one. Dave Vellante for Justin Warren. You're watching theCUBE from AWS re:Invent 2019. Right back (electronic music)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with the Cube. Dave Ilan Taste. My co host were at pure Accelerate 2019 in Austin, Texas. One of our Cube alumni is back with us. We have probably the VP and chief architect at Pier Storage. Rob. Welcome back. >> Thanks for having. >> We're glad you have a voice. We know how challenging these events are with about 3000 partners, customers press everybody wanting to talk to one of the men that was on the keynote stage yesterday for announcements came out really enjoyed yesterday's keynote. But let's talk about one of those announcements in particular Piers Bridge to the hybrid cloud. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's been a really exciting conference for us so far. Like you said, a lot of payload coming out, you know, as faras the building, the bridge of the hybrid cloud. This has been, you know, this has been I would say a long time coming, right? We've been working down this path for for a couple of years. We started by bringing some of the cloud like capabilities that customers really wanted and were able to achieve into the cloud back into the data center. Right. So you saw us do this in terms of making our own prem products easier to manage, easier to use, easier to automate, you know. But what? Working with customers of the last couple of years, you know, we realized, is that, uh as the cloud hype kind of subsided and people were taking a more measured view of where the cloud fits into their strategies, what tools it brings. You know, we realized that we could add value in the public cloud environment, the same types of enterprise capabilities, the same type of features rich data service is feature sets things like that that we do on premise in the cloud. And so what we're looking to achieve is actually quite simple, all right. We want to give customers the choice whether whether customers want to run on premise or in the cloud. That's just a choice of we wanted. We wanted to make an environmental choice. We don't want it. We don't wanna put customers in a position where they have to make that choice and feel trapped in one location another because of lack of features, lack of capabilities. You know, our economics on DSO the way that we do that is by building the same types of capabilities that we do on Prem in the cloud giving customers the freedom and flexibility to be agile. >> But, you know, you mentioned economics and you were talking from a customer standpoint. I wanna flip it from a from a technology supplier standpoint, the economics of a vendor who traditionally cells on Prem. You would think would be better than one in the cloud. Because you gotta you pay an Amazon for all their service is or I guess, the customers paying for it. But you kind of saw your way through that. A lot of companies would be defensive on. I wonder if you could add any comment. Yeah. No, I mean so So, look, I think >> the >> hardware is only one piece of it, right? At the end of the day, you know, even our products on Prem are really they're really priced for value. Right? There were delivering value to customers in our capabilities are ease of use or simplicity. The types of applications and work close to being able. Um, and basically, everything I just said is pretty much driven by software features by bringing those same capabilities into the cloud, you know, naturally, we you know, naturally that most of that work is really in software, you know, And then, as faras comparing the economics directly of on Prem versus Cloud. You know, it's it's really no secret as the industry's gotten Maur. Understanding that, you know the cloud isn't isn't the low cost option in a lot of use cases, right? And so, rather than comparing apples to apples on premises cloud either on performance or economics, our goal is really to build the best products in either environment. So if a customer wants to run on Prem wanna build the best darn products in that environment, the customer wants to run in the public cloud. We want to build the best darn product for them in that environment on dhe. Increasingly, as customers want Thio use, both environments hand in hand, want to build the right capabilities to allow them. TOC mostly do that >> Well, I think it makes sense because, as you know, we're talking to some customers. Last night he asking what they have in their data center. And they got a lot of stuff in the data center. To the extent that a company like pure can say, OK, you've got simple, fast et cetera on prim. And we've now extended that to the cloud. Your choice. They're going to spend Maur with you than they are with the guys that fight that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think if you look at our approach and how we've built the products and how were, you know, taking them to market? We've taken a very different approach than some of the competitive set. You know, in some ways, we've really just extended the same way that we think about innovation and product engineering from our existing on prime portfolio into the cloud, which is we look for heart problems to solve way take the hard road, we build differentiated products. Even if it takes us a little bit longer, you can see that, you know, in the product offerings, right? We've really focused on enabling tier one mission critical applications. If you look at the competitive, said they haven't started their their reason why we did that. All right, is we knew that you know, we had customers telling us, like if if you're a customer and you want to use the cloud and you want to think about the cloud is a D R site well, when something goes wrong and you two fell over duty, our site, you you need to be sure that it works exactly the same way there as it did on problem. That's everything from data service is data path features to all of the work flows. An orchestration to go around it because when your primary site goes down is not the time when you want to be discovering that. Oh, there's a footnote on that future and it's that's not supported in the cloud version, that sort of thing on dso you know that, Like I said, you know, the focus that we've put on the product development we've done towards Cloud Block stores really been around creating the same level of enterprise grade features on enabling those applications in the cloud as we do in private. >> You know, we don't make the Amazon storage. We make the Amazon storage better. What's that commercial? Essentially what? That's essentially >> what we've done You know, the great thing about that is that we've done it in close partnership with Amazon, right? You know, we had Amazon on stage yesterday on day, were talking a little bit about that partnership process. And ultimately, I think why that partnership has been so successful is we're both ultimately driven by the same thing, which is customer success. All right. In the early days of working with Amazon as we started coming up with the concept of club block store and consulting them on, we're thinking about building it this way. What do you think? What service is should be, You know, should we leverage and m in eight of us to make this happen? It became pretty clear to them that we were setting out to build a differentiated product and not just tick off check boxes on dhe. That's when they their eyes really okay, way. We really would like you to do a differentiated product here. >> Hey, if this takes off, we're gonna sell all the C two at three. >> What are some of the things Sorry day that you've been with here about six years? What are some of the things that have surprised you pleasantly that the customers have catalysed from an architecture perspective that customer feedback coming back t your team and the and the guys and girls engineering the product. Customers are demanding a certain thing that maybe wasn't something that was an internal idea but really was catalyzed by customers anything that just really I think it's very cool. Very surprising. >> Yeah. No, I mean, I think I think a >> couple of things. I think personally one of the things that surprised me was, you know, when I joined Pure in 2013 you know, we're all we're all about simplicity, right? You talk to cause who I think you had on the show earlier. You know, in the early days who tell you our differentiators gonna be simplicity and I got to say when I first joined the company is a little skeptical is like All right, I get it. Simplicity is a thing. Is it really a differentiator? I very quickly was surprised based on customer feedback that no, it really is very, very meaningful on. And that's something that we take all the way through Engineering. Write everything down, Thio how we design features and put them in the user interfaces. If there's, you know, there's an engineer that wants to put a configuration hook or a knob or ah on option in the user interface way kind of stop and say, Well, G, how would you document that? How would you suggest the user make a decision? Tea set that value will describe and say, Okay, well, g, we can make that decision, can't we? Right? Like, why don't we just want we just make it simpler And so that's been That's been a big surprise, I think, from a customer catalyzed, uh, point of view. What I'd say is we've been really surprised at a lot of the use cases that the flash blade product has been put into play for. And, you know, I think a I was one of them when we when we first set out, we had really targeted Flash played at addressing a segment of the commercial HPC Chip Design Hardware Design software development market. Andi is actually a set of customers, very large Web property customer that came to us with an A I use case. They said, Hey, you know, we've got a ton of data video images, uh, text postings. And we want to do a lot of analysis of this. All right, I want to do a facial recognition. We want to do content and sentiment analysis. We've got the Jeep use. We think you guys have the right storage product for that, and that's really that's really taken off. And that was very much a customer driven area. We >> talked a little bit about that within video yesterday. About some of the customer catalyzed innovation where a is concerned. >> Absolutely. What do you see is the critical technical skills that pure needs in the next decade. I mean, you're five. Correct? Remember, you can't have a networking background. Internal networking, I guess of you got guys from Veritas, right? Obviously strong software file system. What do you What do you see is the critical skill. Yeah, that's >> a good question. You know, we have a very diverse team, all right? We we in engineering typically higher and look for people with strong systems, backgrounds that are willing to learn and want to solve her problems. We, you know, typically haven't hired very specific domain areas myself, my doctor, and is in language run times and compilers, Oh, distributed systems so a bit all over the map, You know, What I'd say is that the first phase of pure the first kind of decade was really about reinventing the storage experience on for me. I look at it as taking lessons from the consumer experience, bringing him into the storage on Enterprise World. Three iPhones, example. That's used a lot. There's a couple of examples you can think of. I think the next phase of what we're trying to do and you heard Charlie talk about this on stage with a modern date experience is take some lessons from the cloud experience and bring them into the enterprise. Right? So the first phase is about consumer simplicity for a human think the next phase is really about bring in some more of the cloud experience for enabling automation and dev ops and management orchestration. >> So what kind of work? A long, long, lot of work to do to get we envisioned this massively scalable distributed system where you have that cloud experience no matter where your data lives, that's not there today, Um, and you don't want to ship your date around, it'd be too much data. So you're on a ship metadata and have the intelligence tow. Bring the compute to that. That data. >> What do you >> got to do? What's the work that you have to do to actually make that seamless? That there's that over word overuse word again. It's not seamless today. Yeah, >> so? So, look, I mean, I think there's there's a lot of angles to it right on. And we're gonna We're gonna work our way there to your point. You know, it's not there today, but, you know, you're you're starting to see us lay the groundwork with all the announcements that came out today, right under the umbrella of Hey, we want to end up creating more portable, more seamless, more agile experience for customers. You can see where, as we bring Maur storage media's into play different classes of service, different balances of performance and cost, bringing those together in a way so that an application can use them income in the right combinations, you know, bring a I into play to help customers do that seamlessly and transparently eyes a big part of it. You can see multiple location kind of agility that we're bringing into play with Claude Block >> store >> enabled, like loud snap and snap shot mobility. Things like that on Dhe. Then you know, I think, as we move beyond the block world and way look att, what we can able with applications that sit on top of file on object protocols. There's a lot of, ah, a lot of greenfield there, right? So you know, we think object storage is very attractive, and we're starting to see that as the application vendors, right, as the applications that sit on top of the storage layer are really embracing object storage as the cloud native storage interface, if you will, that's creating a lot of, ah, a lot of, uh, you know, a lot of ways to share data, right? We're starting to see it, even within the data center, where multiple applications now are able to share data because object storage is being used. And so, like I said, there's a lot of angles to this right. There's there's bringing multiple discreet A raise together under the same management plane. There's bringing multiple different types of storage media a little bit closer together from a seamless application mobility perspective. There's bring multiple locations, data centers, clouds together from a migration a d R perspective. And then there's, you know, there's bringing a global name space type of capability to the table, so it's a long journey. But you know, we think it's the right one. And you know what we ultimately want to do is, you know, have customers be able to think about, be ableto provisioned, be able to manage to not just an array, but really more of like an A Z, right. I want a pool. I want it to be about a fast. But you know, I'm willing to pay about yea much for it, and I need this types of data protection policies for it. Please make it happen >> and anywhere do you So you see, it is technically feasible to be able to run any app, any workload on any cloud or on Prem without having a re compile the application, make changes to the application. That's what I really kind of meant by Seamus that you see that as technically feasible in the next called 5 to 10 years, I'll give you I think >> I think it'll take a long wait a long time we'll get there. And I think, you know, I think it'll depend on the application. All right. I think there are gonna be some combinations that look. I mean, if if you have a high, high frequency, low latent see trading database, there's physical limitations, you're not going to run the application here and put the storage in the cloud. But if we if we step back from it, right, the concept, Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of a lot of things are becoming possible to make this happen, right? Fastener networking is everywhere. It's getting faster application architectures and making it more feasible. You know, the media costs and what we're able to drive out of the media are bringing a lot a lot more than work leads to flash A eyes is coming into play. So, like I said, it's gonna be different on the on the application. But, you know, I think we're entering a phase where, you know, the modern software developer doesn't wanna have to think too hard about where is you know where physically what six sides of sheet metal is. My dad is sitting on. They want to think about what I need from it. What do we need from in terms of capacity, what we need from it in terms of performance, what we need from it in terms of data service capabilities. All right, ends, you know, And I need to be able to control that elastic Lee. I need to be able to control that through my application through software, and that's kind of what we're building towards. >> Last question, Rob, as we wrap up here, feedback that you've heard the last day and 1/2 on some of the news that came out yesterday from customers, analysts, partners. >> Yeah, you know, I'd say if I were to net it out. I think the one piece of you, Doc, we've gotten this. Wow, you guys have a lot of stuff on. It's really nice to see you guys talking about stuff. It's available today, right? That >> that's a >> lot of eyes on that screen. And, you know, I think I had a KN analysts say to me, You know, this is it's really refreshing. Thio kind of See you guys take a both you know, the viewpoint of the customer. What you're delivering the customer, what you're enabling on then be, You know, I got a lot of tech conferences and I hear a lot about, like, way off in the future. Envisioned Andi feedback we got was you guys had a really good balance of reality today. What, You're helping customers today? What's available today to do that? And enough of the hay. And here's where we're headed. So >> we actually heard the same thing. So good stuff, right? Well, congrats on the 10th anniversary, and we appreciate you joining us on the Cube. We look forward to next year already in whatever city. You're gonna take us to >> two. Thanks a lot. >> All right. For day, Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching.

(energetic technological music) >> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019 brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. We're in Atlanta, Georgia welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Lee Doyle, Principal Analyst at Doyle Research. Lee, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Thanks, for having me. >> So we were chatting away all day yesterday with Citrix execs and analysts. We talked to one of their customers from the Miami Marlins. Excited about day two today. We talked a lot about some of the key tenets that Citrix addressed yesterday: digital workspace, the intelligent experience, analytics, security. We want to talk about networking with you. I was looking at a stat the other day that said over 80% of businesses believe the ability to migrate apps to the cloud is hindered by network infrastructure complexity. Talk to us about that and what Citrix is doing to help reduce that complexity. >> Sure. So we're now in an environment where data is everywhere, employees are everywhere, partners are everywhere, data is flowing. You're going to be using in-house applications. You're using SaaS-based applications. You're using applications on AWS or Azure or Google, and there's no good control of that information, but there also isn't a good way necessarily to deliver the appropriate quality of user experience or quality of service that those applications need. So the network, that's where the network sits. It's handling all the traffic. It sees the traffic. It can help with security. So that's why the network becomes so important here. >> So, Lee, SD-WAN has come so far. I remember back when I managed networks and trying to come up with policy-based routing to send voice traffic one way, send, you know, FTP traffic another way, and now we have a robust market. I thought the market would collapse. It's 20 plus, last time I looked, 20 plus significant SD-WAN solutions out in the market. Where is Citrix and the customer mindsets when it comes to SD-WAN? >> Right. So I'll start with SD-WAN and the broad picture which is, you know, SD-WAN is a great technology at the right place, at the right time. It's the example of SDN, broadly, that's had very good adoption. And it solves a real problem, which is that you need to link the user and the application with each other. And that application can be in a variety of places. So you're not, no longer just simply going from the branch via MPLS to the data center. Great, now you're going to Amazon. Now you're going to Salesforce. Now you're going to Microsoft. And the idea of having a hybrid WAN with internet connections, MPLS, 4G LTE, cable, like, whatever you want. So SD-WAN technology sits at that nexus and providing the intelligence and the management and the ease of use to enable the remote workforce in the remote branches. >> So, can you go on a really interesting combination? Identity, Citrix is really into identity management. SD-WAN. What's possible? Talk to us about the "what's possible" when you can tie identity to your network. >> Right. Yeah, so Citrix is a solid SD-WAN supplier. They're able to identify the traffic. They have partnerships with all the major cloud guys. And, one of the critical aspects of SD-WAN is how you tie in the security aspect. So you have network security and partnerships, maybe with a Palo Alto or Zscaler or some other folks, but then you also have the identity because there is no fixed perimeter anymore, right? >> Right. There is no more four walls. >> So, the bad, the bad guys can get access at any different point. So authentication and understanding, you know, that identity is a critical aspect. And Citrix has some excellent partnerships and programs to help that out. >> Especially, >> So, >> I'm sorry. Go ahead. >> Go ahead. >> Especially when you think of Office 365 and these services where, you know, when I think of Office 365 I think about my consumer version of Office 365. I can share data with anyone in the organization. I can access it from anywhere in the world. Right before we started recording, you know, we talked a little bit about the ability of Citrix, with the partnership with Microsoft and Office 365, to improve access to Office 365. When we think about that from a consumer perspective that kind of, you know, it doesn't, it kind of doesn't register. "Wait, I need to. When I use Office 365 it just works." >> Right. >> What are some of the challenges enterprises are facing as they adopt solutions like O 6, O365 and SaaS in general? >> Right. So, you've got the quality of experience, quality of service issue, right? Making sure that the remote user or remote office is hitting the right path on the internet to the right on-ramp, is sort of one aspect of it, right? >> Right. >> So identify that as 0365, get me to the right on-ramp, but have a nice, you know, seamless, quick experience. The other is, from a security standpoint, understanding that, you know, who the user is. What data are they accessing? What data are they sending around? Is that part of the normal behavior or is that something that looks a little strange and maybe we should flag that. I mean, clearly, people do do a lot of sensitive things on Office 365. >> When you're out in the field, Lee, talking with customers, you have to transform digitally. There's so many steps involved in that. We, you know, we talk about cultural transformation and security transformation. Network transformation. How do you advise, especially like, we'll say, legacy organizations. Maybe like a peer of Citrix's whose been around for decades. How do you advise them to start that network transformation process so that they can deliver, for example, you know, facilitate collaboration via 0365 globally, what is that process like to transform a network? >> Right. It's obviously very complex and highly dependent on where you are and where you're starting, but there's no question that these organization are not going to throw the network that they have today. They've got switches and routers, wifi, and applications over controllers and all sorts of different things. So, one of the reasons why SD-WAN has been successful is it's able to slide into the network relatively seamlessly as an overlay. So you don't have to rip and replace. And then, gradually, as you bring up new sites or small locations or temporary sites, you may find that the actual router isn't as important over time. And then you can start to evolve that to a more simplified branch network operation. Instead of having five different boxes at a given branch you can move to two or three and, you know, ultimately I think we're going to a more unified SD branch type solution, but that might be a few years out still. >> So, and as we talk, you know, kind of the few years out, one of the great benefits, productivity wise, from using the SaaS services, destroying the walls, so to speak, the perimeter, is that we can get frictionless transactions. The, Citrix is, you know, touting the employee experience. If I need to share a document with you that shouldn't there shouldn't be a ton of friction in that. But in that comes the, the scare of employees. We've been talking all week, or both days, about employees are the weak link in security. If I can't trust my employee to not have their post-it note with the password on their, on their monitor then all the security in the world can't, won't help. How is Citrix making security easier and frictionless so that, one, we're ensuring all Dr. Albright talked about, "We need to be able to trust who we're talking to." >> Right. >> So, at the beginning we need to be able to trust who we're talking to is actually who we intend to talk to. How is Citrix going about enabling that? >> Right. So, it goes back to, you know, identity and end-point management. Is that the device that we expect it to be? Is it the person that we expect it to be? Are they doing the things that they normally do, right? And then, you have the network can analyze, "Well, is that a strange traffic? Is there something being inserted? Is there malware? Is there an attack?" So you have, security can not only degrade the performance of the network, but it also can be used to take out data that you don't want to have leaving the premises as it were. So, >> Or even if the data hasn't been opened and peeked at. >> Right. >> So, you know, the SSL security keys that when it left the premises the same as the when it was received on the other end. Are those things still in tact? >> Right. Very complex, though. But, it's not a, >> Yeah. >> Now, we haven't solved the security problem yet. But, Citrix is certainly making some good headway. >> I wanted to get your opinion, speaking of Citrix and headway. As I mentioned, 30-year-old company, maybe they consider themselves 30-years-young. I noticed last year at Synergy 2018 rebranding, messaging changes, positioning. One of the first things David Henshall showed the audience yesterday in his keynote was a big, great eye chart that just showed how much they've been focused on delivering. And they've delivered new solutions faster than they ever have before. We're hearing now about, they've really elevated their technologies to not be for power users, but for the general user which is most of us. I'd love to get your, your perspective on, not just the last year of Citrix's evolution, but over the last few years and how you think their, where they are now, is a competitive advantage to their business. >> Right. So, I focus mostly on the networking side of what Citrix is doing. And they've rebranded the networking. They've made some very significant enhancements both in SD-WAN and the ADC and intelligent traffic management. And I think the next evolution for Citrix is really integrating these solutions together and, you know, moving even to, to easier to consume bundles. They, what they've done in the last, in this cycle of announcement is given a lot of different options in terms of ways to consume. You can consume it on the major cloud platforms. You can consume it as a box. You can consume it as a license or as a usage-based. Over time I'm interested to see how Citrix migrates to more network-as-a-service offerings which would make it even easier to consume. And, you know, as a workspace user you, that, those tools might be in the background. You might not even know that they exist. And in some cases that's already here today, but there's a lot more that the industry and Citrix can do there. >> Do they have the foundation to eventually get to network-as-a-service? Maybe the right ecosystem of partners to do that, in your opinion? >> Yeah. I mean, I think that's the, that's where they're headed and I think they have some good technology, and good partners, and obviously always more work to do. But, >> So as you talk to combine Citrix and your own customers, I would like to get some insights. That, we, we've heard several times over the past couple days, me and Lisa, that there's five generations of workforce in the workforce. Which also means there's five generations of leadership. So when I saw the stat in yesterday's show, when all the changes that happened in a year at Citrix, one part of me was like, "Oh, that's great. That's the consumerization of IT, enterprise IT." Then another part of me was like, "Whoa, that's a lot of change." You know, if I set up a, if I spent a year and a half, two years deploying a network, I want that network to be very stable for the next five to seven years. How have customers embraced the consumerization, or the pace of change inside of Citrix and in the industry as well? >> Sure. So, I think the network issue a little bit separate because it's not at really consumerization of the network, right? >> Right. >> And so that's still, you know, you still need network professionals and, that being said, you know, Citrix SD-WAN is very easy to install and, you know, has good operational tools and, you know, improved management. So you're network management is now back in vogue and making it, you know, making life easier for IT administrators. You know, the whole consumerization, I mean, that's just like there's so many tools and so many channels. And, you know, the the issue of being overwhelmed by the seven different ways that we might communicate with each other is a very real, you know, challenge. And I'm glad to see Citrix, you know, addressing that because each generation or types of will have their own favorite, you know, ways to go about it. >> Oh, yes. Even, you can think about it in your family. Somebody might be an email person. Somebody might be a text person. Somebody might be a WhatsApp person. It's hard enough to manage, to try to meet everybody. So somebody might be a phone person? >> I know, like, real-time >> Who talks on the phone? Voicemail? >> Real-time communication. >> Right. Creepy. But in terms of, you're saying you know that we talked about consumerization, and not consumerization of the network. But those network expert that you talked about are influenced as consumers at home. And we all as consumers have these expectations of everything on-demand. I want to be able to use the tools that I'm most familiar with to become the most productive. So, how are the network engineers and their own consent of consumerization potentially going to impact consumerization of the network? >> Right. I mean I really look at the, you know, the two things of, you know, is the network, is my application available and is it responsive, right? Obviously the first one's a deal breaker. The second one is incredibly frustrating. And then of course the third area from an IT or SecOps standpoint is, you know, is it secure? Right? And then, you know, from an IT or network professional I need to enable those things so give me more tools. So, I mean I think that the buzzwords of, you know, machine learning and artificial intelligence as applied to networking are still a little early for that. But there are, you know, Citrix is using, you know, its vast intelligence that it gathers through its traffic management system to to look at, you know, where where to best route the traffic. It's deploying new tools to make things easier to deploy and easier to troubleshoot. So anything that the industry and Citrix can do there makes the life easier for the network guy and the IT guys. >> Making life easier. I think that's what we all want, right? >> Right. >> Well, Lee, thank you so much for coming back to theCUBE and talking with Keith and me at Citrix Synergy. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Atlanta, Georgia, Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (energetic technological music)