(gentle music) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we're back at Cube on Cloud, and with me is Muddu Sudhakar. He's a long time alum of theCube, a technologist and executive, a serial entrepreneur and an investor. Welcome my friend, good to see you. >> Good to see you, Dave. Pleasure to be with you. Happy elections, I guess. >> Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to start, this work from home, pivot's been amazing, and you've seen the enterprise collaboration explode. I wrote a piece a couple months ago, looking at valuations of various companies, right around the snowflake IPO, I want to ask you about that, but I was looking at the valuations of various companies, at Spotify, and Shopify, and of course Zoom was there. And I was looking at just simple revenue multiples, and I said, geez, Zoom actually looks, might look undervalued, which is crazy, right? And of course the stock went up after that, and you see teams, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft doing a great job across the board, we've written about that, you're seeing Webex is exploding, I mean, what do you make of this whole enterprise collaboration play? >> No, I think the look there is a trend here, right? So I think this probably trend started before COVID, but COVID is going to probably accelerate this whole digital transformation, right? People are going to work remotely a lot more, not everybody's going to come back to the offices even after COVID, so I think this whole collaboration through Slack, and Zoom, and Microsoft Teams and Webex, it's going to be the new game now, right? Both the video, audio and chat solutions, that's really going to help people like eyeballs. You're not going to spend time on all four of them, right? It's like everyday from a consumer side, you're going to spend time on your Gmail, Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Instagram, so like in the consumer side, on your personal life, you have something on the enterprise. The eyeballs are going to be in these platforms. >> Yeah. Well. >> But we're not going to take everything. >> Well, So you are right, there's a permanence to this, and I got a lot of ground to cover with you. And I always like our conversations mood because you tell it like it is, I'm going to stay on that work from home pivot. You know a lot about security, but you've seen three big trends, like mega trends in security, Endpoint, Identity Access Management, and Cloud Security, you're seeing this in the stock prices of companies like CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Okta- >> Right >> Sailpoint- >> Right, I mean, they exploded, as a result of the pandemic, and I think I'm inferring from your comment that you see that as permanent, but that's a real challenge from a security standpoint. What's the impact of Cloud there? >> No, it isn't impact but look, first is all the services required to be Cloud, right? See, the whole ideas for it to collaborate and do these things. So you cannot be running an application, like you can't be running conference and SharePoint oN-Prem, and try to on a Zoom and MS teams. So that's why, if you look at Microsoft is very clever, they went with Office 365, SharePoint 365, now they have MS Teams, so I think that Cloud is going to drive all these workloads that you have been talking about a lot, right? You and John have been saying this for years now. The eruption of Cloud and SAS services are the vehicle to drive this next-generation collaboration. >> You know what's so cool? So Cloud obviously is the topic, I wonder how you look at the last 10 years of Cloud, and maybe we could project forward, I mean the big three Cloud vendors, they're running it like $20 billion a quarter, and they're growing collectively, 35, 40% clips, so we're really approaching a hundred billion dollars for these three. And you hear stats like only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, so it feels like we're just getting started. How do you look at the impact of Cloud on the market, as you say, the last 10 years, and what do you expect going forward? >> No, I think it's very fascinating, right? So I remember when theCube, you guys are talking about 10 years back, now it's been what? More than 10 years, 15 years, since AWS came out with their first S3 service back in 2006. >> Right. >> Right? so I think look, Cloud is going to accelerate even more further. The areas is going to accelerate is for different reasons. I think now you're seeing the initial days, it's all about startups, initial workloads, Dev test and QA test, now you're talking about real production workloads are moving towards Cloud, right? Initially it was backup, we really didn't care for backup they really put there. Now you're going to have Cloud health primary services, your primary storage will be there, it's not going to be an EMC, It's not going to be a NetApp storage, right? So workloads are going to shift from the business applications, and these business applications, will be running on the Cloud, and I'll make another prediction, make customer service and support. Customer service and support, again, we should be running on the Cloud. You're not want to run the thing on a Dell server, or an IBM server, or an HP server, with your own hosted environment. That model is not because there's no economies of scale. So to your point, what will drive Cloud for the next 10 years, will be economies of scale. Where can you take the cost? How can I save money? If you don't move to the Cloud, you won't save money. So all those workloads are going to go to the Cloud are people who really want to save, like global gradual custom, right? If you stay on the ASP model, a hosted, you're not going to save your costs, your costs will constantly go up from a SaaS perspective. >> So that doesn't bode well for all the On-prem guys, and you hear a lot of the vendors that don't own a Cloud that talk about repatriation, but the numbers don't support that. So what do those guys do? I mean, they're talking multi-Cloud, of course they're talking hybrid, that's IBM's big play, how do you see it? >> I think, look, see there, to me, multi-Cloud makes sense, right? You don't want one vendor that you never want to get, so having Amazon, Microsoft, Google, it gives them a multi-Cloud. Even hybrid Cloud does make sense, right? There'll be some workloads. It's like, we are still running On-prem environment, we still have mainframe, so it's never going to be a hundred percent, but I would say the majority, your question is, can we get to 60, 70, 80% workers in the next 10 years? I think you will. I think by 2025, more than 78% of the Cloud Migration by the next five years, 70% of workload for enterprise will be on the Cloud. The remaining 25, maybe Hybrid, maybe On-prem, but I get panics, really doesn't matter. You have saved and part of your business is running on the Cloud. That's your cost saving, that's where you'll see the economies of scale, and that's where all the growth will happen. >> So square the circle for me, because again, you hear the stat on the IDC stat, IBM Ginni Rometty puts it out there a lot that only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, everything else is On-prem, but it's not a zero sum game, right? I mean the Cloud native stuff is growing like crazy, the On-prem stuff is flat to down, so what's going to happen? When you talk about 70% of the workloads will be in the Cloud, do you see those mission critical apps and moving into the car, I mean the insurance companies going to put their claims apps in the Cloud, or the financial services companies going to put their mission critical workloads in the Cloud, or they just going to develop new stuff that's Cloud native that is sort of interacts with the On-prem. How do you see that playing out? >> Yeah, no, I think absolutely, I think a very good question. So two things will happen. I think if you take an enterprise, right? Most businesses what they'll do is the workloads that they should not be running On-prem, they'll move it up. So obviously things like take, as I said, I use the word SharePoint, right? SharePoint and conference, all the knowledge stuff is still running on people's data centers. There's no reason. I understand, I've seen statistics that 70, 80% of the On-prem for SharePoint will move to SharePoint on the Cloud. So Microsoft is going to make tons of money on that, right? Same thing, databases, right? Whether it's CQL server, whether there is Oracle database, things that you are running as a database, as a Cloud, we move to the Cloud. Whether that is posted in Oracle Cloud, or you're running Oracle or Mongo DB, or Dynamo DB on AWS or SQL server Microsoft, that's going to happen. Then what you're talking about is really the App concept, the applications themselves, the App server. Is the App server is going to run On-prem, how much it's going to laureate outside? There may be a hybrid Cloud, like for example, Kafka. I may use a Purse running on a Kafka as a service, or I may be using Elasticsearch for my indexing on AWS or Google Cloud, but I may be running my App locally. So there'll be some hybrid place, but what I would say is for every application, 75% of your Comprende will be on the Cloud. So think of it like the Dev. So even for the On-prem app, you're not going to be a 100 percent On-prem. The competent, the billing materials will move to the Cloud, your Purse, your storage, because if you put it On-prem, you need to add all this, you need to have all the whole things to buy it and hire the people, so that's what is going to happen. So from a competent perspective, 70% of your bill of materials will move to the Cloud, even for an On-prem application. >> So, Of course, the susification of the industry in the last decade and in my three favorite companies last decade, you've worked for two of them, Tableau, ServiceNow, and Splunk. I want to ask you about those, but I'm interested in the potential disruption there. I mean, you've got these SAS companies, Salesforce of course is another one, but they can't get started in 1999. What do you see happening with those? I mean, we're basically building these sort of large SAS, platforms, now. Do you think that the Cloud native world that developers can come at this from an angle where they can disrupt those companies, or are they too entrenched? I mean, look at service now, I mean, I don't know, $80 billion market capital where they are, they bigger than Workday, I mean, just amazing how much they've grown and you feel like, okay, nothing can stop them, but there's always disruption in this industry, what are your thoughts on that. >> Not very good with, I think there'll be disrupted. So to me actually to your point, ServiceNow is now close to a 100 billion now, 95 billion market coverage, crazy. So from evaluation perspective, so I think the reason they'll be disrupted is that the SAS vendors that you talked about, ServiceNow, and all this plan, most of these services, they're truly not a multi-tenant or what do you call the Cloud Native. And that is the Accenture. So because of that, they will not be able to pass the savings back to the enterprises. So the cost economics, the economics that the Cloud provides because of the multi tenancy ability will not. The second reason there'll be disrupted is AI. So far, we talked about Cloud, but AI is the core. So it's not really Cloud Native, Dave, I look at the AI in a two-piece. AI is going to change, see all the SAS vendors were created 20 years back, if you remember, was an operator typing it, I don't respond administered we'll type a Splunk query. I don't need a human to type a query anymore, system will actually find it, that's what the whole security game has changed, right? So what's going to happen is if you believe in that, that AI, your score will disrupt all the SAS vendors, so one angle SAS is going to have is a Cloud. That's where you make the Cloud will take up because a SAS application will be Cloudified. Being SAS is not Cloud, right? Second thing is SAS will be also, I call it, will be AI-fied. So AI and machine learning will be trying to drive at the core so that I don't need that many licenses. I don't need that many humans. I don't need that many administrators to manage, I call them the tuners. Once you get a driverless car, you don't need a thousand tuners to tune your Tesla, or Google Waymo car. So the same philosophy will happen is your Dev Apps, your administrators, your service management, people that you need for service now, and these products, Zendesk with AI, will tremendously will disrupt. >> So you're saying, okay, so yeah, I was going to ask you, won't the SAS vendors, won't they be able to just put, inject AI into their platforms, and I guess I'm inferring saying, yeah, but a lot of the problems that they're solving, are going to go away because of AI, is that right? And automation and RPA and things of that nature, is that right? >> Yes and no. So I'll tell you what, sorry, you have asked a very good question, let's answer, let me rephrase that question. What you're saying is, "Why can't the existing SAS vendors do the AI?" >> Yes, right. >> Right, >> And there's a reason they can't do it is their pricing model is by number of seats. So I'm not going to come to Dave, and say, come on, come pay me less money. It's the same reason why a board and general lover build an electric car. They're selling 10 million gasoline cars. There's no incentive for me, I'm not going to do any AI, I'm going to put, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, buy me a hundred less license next year from it. So that is one reason why AI, even though these guys do any AI, it's going to be just so I call it, they're going to, what do you call it, a whitewash, kind of like you put some paint brush on it, trying to show you some AI you did from a marketing dynamics. But at the core, if you really implement the AI with you take the driver out, how are you going to change the pricing model? And being a public company, you got to take a hit on the pricing model and the price, and it's going to have a stocking part. So that, to your earlier question, will somebody disrupt them? The person who is going to disrupt them, will disrupt them on the pricing model. >> Right. So I want to ask you about that, because we saw a Snowflake, and it's IPO, we were able to pour through its S-1, and they have a different pricing model. It's a true Cloud consumption model, Whereas of course, most SAS companies, they're going to lock you in for at least one year term, maybe more, and then, you buy the license, you got to pay X. If you, don't use it, you still got to pay for it. Snowflake's different, actually they have a different problem, that people are using it too much and the sea is driving the CFO crazy because the bill is going up and up and up, but to me, that's the right model, It's just like the Amazon model, if you can justify it, so how do you see the pricing, that consumption model is actually, you're seeing some of the On-prem guys at HPE, Dell, they're doing as a service. They're kind of taking a page out of the last decade SAS model, so I think pricing is a real tricky one, isn't it? >> No, you nailed it, you nailed it. So I think the way in which the Snowflake there, how the disruptors are data warehouse, that disrupted the open source vendors too. Snowflake distributed, imagine the playbook, you disrupted something as the $ 0, right? It's an open source with Cloudera, Hortonworks, Mapper, that whole big data that you want me to, or that market is this, that disrupting data warehouses like Netezza, Teradata, and the charging more money, they're making more money and disrupting at $0, because the pricing models by consumption that you talked about. CMT is going to happen in the service now, Zen Desk, well, 'cause their pricing one is by number of seats. People are going to say, "How are my users are going to ask?" right? If you're an employee help desk, you're back to your original health collaborative. I may be on Slack, I could be on zoom, I'll maybe on MS Teams, I'm going to ask by using usage model on Slack, tools by employees to service now is the pricing model that people want to pay for. The more my employees use it, the more value I get. But I don't want to pay by number of seats, so the vendor, who's going to figure that out, and that's where I look, if you know me, I'm right over as I started, that's what I've tried to push that model look, I love that because that's the core of how you want to change the new game. >> I agree. I say, kill me with that problem, I mean, some people are trying to make it a criticism, but you hit on the point. If you pay more, it's only because you're getting more value out of it. So I wanted to flip the switch here a little bit and take a customer angle. Something that you've been on all sides. And I want to talk a little bit about strategies, you've been a strategist, I guess, once a strategist, always a strategist. How should organizations be thinking about their approach to Cloud, it's cost different for different industries, but, back when the cube started, financial services Cloud was a four-letter word. But of course the age of company is going to matter, but what's the framework for figuring out your Cloud strategy to get to your 70% and really take advantage of the economics? Should I be Mono Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Multi-vendor, what would you advise? >> Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, I actually call it the tech stack. Actually you and John taught me that what was the tech stack, like the lamp stack, I think there is a new Cloud stack needs to come, and that I think the bottomline there should be... First of all, anything with storage should be in the Cloud. I mean, if you want to start, whether you are, financial, doesn't matter, there's no way. I come from cybersecurity side, I've seen it. Your attackers will be more with insiders than being on the Cloud, so storage has to be in the Cloud then come compute, Kubernetes. If you really want to use containers and Kubernetes, it has to be in the public Cloud, leverage that have the computer on their databases. That's where it can be like if your data is so strong, maybe run it On-prem, maybe have it on a hosted model for when it comes to database, but there you have a choice between hybrid Cloud and public Cloud choice. Then on top when it comes to App, the app itself, you can run locally or anywhere, the App and database. Now the areas that you really want to go after to migrate is look at anything that's an enterprise workload that you don't need people to manage it. You want your own team to move up in the career. You don't want thousand people looking at... you don't want to have a, for example, IT administrators to call central people to the people to manage your compute storage. That workload should be more, right? You already saw Sierra moved out to Salesforce. We saw collaboration already moved out. Zoom is not running locally. You already saw SharePoint with knowledge management mode up, right? With a box, drawbacks, you name anything. The next global mode is a SAS workloads, right? I think Workday service running there, but work data will go into the Cloud. I bet at some point Zendesk, ServiceNow, then either they put it on the public Cloud, or they have to create a product and public Cloud. To your point, these public Cloud vendors are at $2 trillion market cap. They're they're bigger than the... I call them nation States. >> Yeah, >> So I'm servicing though. I mean, there's a 2 trillion market gap between Amazon and Azure, I'm not going to compete with them. So I want to take this workload to run it there. So all these vendors, if you see that's where Shandra from Adobe is pushing this right, Adobe, Workday, Anaplan, all the SAS vendors we'll move them into the public Cloud within these vendors. So those workloads need to move out, right? So that all those things will start, then you'll start migrating, but I call your procurement. That's where the RPA comes in. The other thing that we didn't talk about, back to your first question, what is the next 10 years of Cloud will be RPA? That third piece to Cloud is RPA because if you have your systems On-prem, I can't automate them. I have to do a VPN into your house there and then try to automate your systems, or your procurement, et cetera. So all these RPA vendors are still running On-prem, most of them, whether it's UI path automation anywhere. So the Cloud should be where the brain should be. That's what I call them like the octopus analogy, the brain is in the Cloud, the tentacles are everywhere, they should manage it. But if my tentacles have to do a VPN with your house to manage it, I'm always will have failures. So if you look at the why RPA did not have the growth, like the Snowflake, like the Cloud, because they are running it On-prem, most of them still. 80% of the RP revenue is On-prem, running On-prem, that needs to be called clarified. So AI, RPA and the SAS, are the three reasons Cloud will take off. >> Awesome. Thank you for that. Now I want to flip the switch again. You're an investor or a multi-tool player here, but so if you're, let's say you're an ecosystem player, and you're kind of looking at the landscape as you're in an investor, of course you've invested in the Cloud, because the Cloud is where it's at, but you got to be careful as an ecosystem player to pick a spot that both provides growth, but allows you to have a moat as, I mean, that's why I'm really curious to see how Snowflake's going to compete because they're competing with AWS, Microsoft, and Google, unlike, Frank, when he was at service now, he was competing with BMC and with on-prem and he crushed it, but the competitors are much more capable here, but it seems like they've got, maybe they've got a moat with MultiCloud, and that whole data sharing thing, we'll see. But, what about that? Where are the opportunities? Where's that white space? And I know there's a lot of white space, but what's the framework to look at, from an investor standpoint, or even a CEO standpoint, where you want to put place your bets. >> No, very good question, so look, I did something. We talk as an investor in the board with many companies, right? So one thing that says as an investor, if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Docker or a computer, there's no way nobody's going to invest. So that we can motor off, even if you want to do object storage or a block storage, I mean, I've been an investor board member of so many storage companies, there's no way as an industry, I'll write a check for a compute or storage, right? If you want to create a next generation network, like either NetSuite, or restart Juniper, Cisco, there is no way. But if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Viper for remote working environments, where AI is at the core, I'm interested in that, right? So if you look at how the packets are dropped, there's no intelligence in either not switching today. The packets come, I do it. The intelligence is not built into the network with AI level. So if somebody comes with an AI, what good is all this NVD, our GPS, et cetera, if you cannot do wire speed, packet inspection, looking at the content and then route the traffic. If I see if it's a video package, but in UN Boston, there's high interview day of they should be loading our package faster, because you are a premium ISP. That intelligence has not gone there. So you will see, and that will be a bad people will happen in the network, switching, et cetera, right? So that is still an angle. But if you work and it comes to platform services, remember when I was at Pivotal and VMware, all models was my boss, that would, yes, as a platform, service is a game already won by the Cloud guys. >> Right. (indistinct) >> Silicon Valley Investors, I don't think you want to invest in past services, right? I mean, you might come with some lecture edition database to do some updates, there could be some game, let's say we want to do a time series database, or some metrics database, there's always some small angle, but the opportunity to go create a national database there it's very few. So I'm kind of eliminating all the black spaces, right? >> Yeah. >> We have the white spaces that comes in is the SAS level. Now to your point, if I'm Amazon, I'm going to compete with Snowflake, I have Redshift. So this is where at some point, these Cloud platforms, I call them aircraft carriers. They're not going to stay on the aircraft carriers, they're going to own the land as well. So they're going to move up to the SAS space. The question is you want to create a SAS service like CRM. They are not going to create a CRM like service, they may not create a sales force and service now, but if you're going to add a data warehouse, I can very well see Azure, Google, and AWS, going to create something to compute a Snowflake. Why would I not? It's so close to my database and data warehouse, I already have Redshift. So that's going to be nightlights, same reason, If you look at Netflix, you have a Netflix and you have Amazon prime. Netflix runs on Amazon, but you have Amazon prime. So you have the same model, you have Snowflake, and you'll have Redshift. The both will help each other, there'll be a... What do you call it? Coexistence will happen. But if you really want to invest, you want to invest in SAS companies. You do not want to be investing in a compliment players. You don't want to a feature. >> Yeah, that's great, I appreciate that perspective. And I wonder, so obviously Microsoft play in SAS, Google's got G suite. And I wonder if people often ask the Andy Jassy, you're going to move up the stack, you got to be an application, a SAS vendor, and you never say never with Atavist, But I wonder, and we were talking to Jerry Chen about this, years ago on theCube, and his angle was that Amazon will play, but they'll play through developers. They'll enable developers, and they'll participate, they'll take their, lick off the cone. So it's going to be interesting to see how directly Amazon plays, but at some point you got Tam expansion, you got to play in that space. >> Yeah, I'll give you an example of knowing, I got acquired by a couple of times by EMC. So I learned a lot from Joe Tucci and Paul Merage over the years. see Paul and Joe, what they did is to look at how 20 years, and they are very close to Boston in your area, Joe, what games did is they used to sell storage, but you know what he did, he went and bought the Apps to drive them. He bought like Legato, he bought Documentum, he bought Captiva, if you remember how he acquired all these companies as a services, he bought VMware to drive that. So I think the good angle that Microsoft has is, I'm a SAS player, I have dynamics, I have CRM, I have SharePoint, I have Collaboration, I have Office 365, MS Teams for users, and then I have the platform as Azure. So I think if I'm Amazon, (indistinct). I got to own the apps so that I can drive this workforce on my platform. >> Interesting. >> Just going to developers, like I know Jerry Chan, he was my peer a BMF. I don't think just literally to developers and that model works in open source, but the open source game is pretty much gone, and not too many companies made money. >> Well, >> Most companies pretty much gone. >> Yeah, he's right. Red hats not bad idea. But it's very interesting what you're saying there. And so, hey, its why Oracle wants to have Tiktok, running on their platform, right? I mean, it's going to. (laughing) It's going to drive that further integration. I wanted to ask you something, you were talking about, you wouldn't invest in storage or compute, but I wonder, and you mentioned some commentary about GPU's. Of course the videos has been going crazy, but they're now saying, okay, how do we expand our Team, they make the acquisition of arm, et cetera. What about this DPU thing, if you follow that, that data processing unit where they're like hyper dis-aggregation and then they reaggregate, and as an offload and really to drive data centric workloads. Have you looked at that at all? >> I did, I think, and that's a good angle. So I think, look, it's like, it goes through it. I don't know if you remember in your career, we have seen it. I used to get Silicon graphics. I saw the first graphic GPU, right? That time GPU was more graphic processor unit, >> Right, yeah, work stations. >> So then become NPUs at work processing units, right? There was a TCP/IP office offloading, if you remember right, there was like vector processing unit. So I think every once in a while the industry, recreated this separate unit, as a co-processor to the main CPU, because main CPU's inefficient, and it makes sense. And then Google created TPU's and then we have the new world of the media GPU's, now we have DPS all these are good, but what's happening is, all these are driving for machine learning, AI for the training period there. Training period Sometimes it's so long with the workloads, if you can cut down, it makes sense. >> Yeah. >> Because, but the question is, these aren't so specialized in nature. I can't use it for everything. >> Yup. >> I want Ideally, algorithms to be paralyzed, I want the training to be paralyzed, I want so having deep use and GPS are important, I think where I want to see them as more, the algorithm, there should be more investment from the NVIDIA's and these guys, taking the algorithm to be highly paralyzed them. (indistinct) And I think that still has not happened in industry yet. >> All right, so we're pretty much out of time, but what are you doing these days? Where are you spending your time, are you still in Stealth, give us a little glimpse. >> Yeah, no, I'm out of the Stealth, I'm actually the CEO of Aisera now, Aisera, obviously I invested with them, but I'm the CEO of Aisero. It's funded by Menlo ventures, Norwest, True, along with Khosla ventures and Ram Shriram is a big investor. Robin's on the board of Google, so these guys, look, we are going out to the collaboration game. How do you automate customer service and support for employees and then users, right? In this whole game, we talked about the Zoom, Slack and MS Teams, that's what I'm spending time, I want to create next generation service now. >> Fantastic. Muddu, I always love having you on you, pull punches, you tell it like it is, that you're a great visionary technologist. Thanks so much for coming on theCube, and participating in our program. >> Dave, it's always a pleasure speaking to you sir. Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there, there's more coming from Cuba and Cloud right after this break. (slow music)

(gentle music) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we're back at Cube on Cloud, and with me is Muddu Sudhakar. He's a long time alum of theCube, a technologist and executive, a serial entrepreneur and an investor. Welcome my friend, good to see you. >> Good to see you, Dave. Pleasure to be with you. Happy elections, I guess. >> Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to start, this work from home, pivot's been amazing, and you've seen the enterprise collaboration explode. I wrote a piece a couple months ago, looking at valuations of various companies, right around the snowflake IPO, I want to ask you about that, but I was looking at the valuations of various companies, at Spotify, and Shopify, and of course Zoom was there. And I was looking at just simple revenue multiples, and I said, geez, Zoom actually looks, might look undervalued, which is crazy, right? And of course the stock went up after that, and you see teams, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft doing a great job across the board, we've written about that, you're seeing Webex is exploding, I mean, what do you make of this whole enterprise collaboration play? >> No, I think the look there is a trend here, right? So I think this probably trend started before COVID, but COVID is going to probably accelerate this whole digital transformation, right? People are going to work remotely a lot more, not everybody's going to come back to the offices even after COVID, so I think this whole collaboration through Slack, and Zoom, and Microsoft Teams and Webex, it's going to be the new game now, right? Both the video, audio and chat solutions, that's really going to help people like eyeballs. You're not going to spend time on all four of them, right? It's like everyday from a consumer side, you're going to spend time on your Gmail, Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Instagram, so like in the consumer side, on your personal life, you have something on the enterprise. The eyeballs are going to be in these platforms. >> Yeah. Well. >> But we're not going to take everything. >> Well, So you are right, there's a permanence to this, and I got a lot of ground to cover with you. And I always like our conversations mood because you tell it like it is, I'm going to stay on that work from home pivot. You know a lot about security, but you've seen three big trends, like mega trends in security, Endpoint, Identity Access Management, and Cloud Security, you're seeing this in the stock prices of companies like CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Okta- >> Right >> Sailpoint- >> Right, I mean, they exploded, as a result of the pandemic, and I think I'm inferring from your comment that you see that as permanent, but that's a real challenge from a security standpoint. What's the impact of Cloud there? >> No, it isn't impact but look, first is all the services required to be Cloud, right? See, the whole ideas for it to collaborate and do these things. So you cannot be running an application, like you can't be running conference and SharePoint oN-Prem, and try to on a Zoom and MS teams. So that's why, if you look at Microsoft is very clever, they went with Office 365, SharePoint 365, now they have MS Teams, so I think that Cloud is going to drive all these workloads that you have been talking about a lot, right? You and John have been saying this for years now. The eruption of Cloud and SAS services are the vehicle to drive this next-generation collaboration. >> You know what's so cool? So Cloud obviously is the topic, I wonder how you look at the last 10 years of Cloud, and maybe we could project forward, I mean the big three Cloud vendors, they're running it like $20 billion a quarter, and they're growing collectively, 35, 40% clips, so we're really approaching a hundred billion dollars for these three. And you hear stats like only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, so it feels like we're just getting started. How do you look at the impact of Cloud on the market, as you say, the last 10 years, and what do you expect going forward? >> No, I think it's very fascinating, right? So I remember when theCube, you guys are talking about 10 years back, now it's been what? More than 10 years, 15 years, since AWS came out with their first S3 service back in 2006. >> Right. >> Right? so I think look, Cloud is going to accelerate even more further. The areas is going to accelerate is for different reasons. I think now you're seeing the initial days, it's all about startups, initial workloads, Dev test and QA test, now you're talking about real production workloads are moving towards Cloud, right? Initially it was backup, we really didn't care for backup they really put there. Now you're going to have Cloud health primary services, your primary storage will be there, it's not going to be an EMC, It's not going to be a ETAP storage, right? So workloads are going to shift from the business applications, and this business App again, will be running on the Cloud, and I'll make another prediction, make customer service and support. Customer service and support, again, we should be running on the Cloud. You're not want to run the thing on a Dell server, or an IBM server, or an HP server, with your own hosted environment. That model is not because there's no economies of scale. So to your point, what will drive Cloud for the next 10 years, will be economies of scale. Where can you take the cost? How can I save money? If you don't move to the Cloud, you won't save money. So all those workloads are going to go to the Cloud are people who really want to save, like global gradual custom, right? If you stay on the ASP model, a hosted, you're not going to save your costs, your costs will constantly go up from a SAS perspective. >> So that doesn't bode well for all the On-prem guys, and you hear a lot of the vendors that don't own a Cloud that talk about repatriation, but the numbers don't support that. So what do those guys do? I mean, they're talking multi-Cloud, of course they're talking hybrid, that's IBM's big play, how do you see it? >> I think, look, see there, to me, multi-Cloud makes sense, right? You don't want one vendor that you never want to get, so having Amazon, Microsoft, Google, it gives them a multi-Cloud. Even hybrid Cloud does make sense, right? There'll be some workloads. It's like, we are still running On-prem environment, we still have mainframe, so it's never going to be a hundred percent, but I would say the majority, your question is, can we get to 60, 70, 80% workers in the next 10 years? I think you will. I think by 2025, more than 78% of the Cloud Migration by the next five years, 70% of workload for enterprise will be on the Cloud. The remaining 25, maybe Hybrid, maybe On-prem, but I get panics, really doesn't matter. You have saved and part of your business is running on the Cloud. That's your cost saving, that's where you'll see the economies of scale, and that's where all the growth will happen. >> So square the circle for me, because again, you hear the stat on the IDC stat, IBM Ginni Rometty puts it out there a lot that only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, everything else is On-prem, but it's not a zero sum game, right? I mean the Cloud native stuff is growing like crazy, the On-prem stuff is flat to down, so what's going to happen? When you talk about 70% of the workloads will be in the Cloud, do you see those mission critical apps and moving into the car, I mean the insurance companies going to put their claims apps in the Cloud, or the financial services companies going to put their mission critical workloads in the Cloud, or they just going to develop new stuff that's Cloud native that is sort of interacts with the On-prem. How do you see that playing out? >> Yeah, no, I think absolutely, I think a very good question. So two things will happen. I think if you take an enterprise, right? Most businesses what they'll do is the workloads that they should not be running On-prem, they'll move it up. So obviously things like take, as I said, I use the word SharePoint, right? SharePoint and conference, all the knowledge stuff is still running on people's data centers. There's no reason. I understand, I've seen statistics that 70, 80% of the On-prem for SharePoint will move to SharePoint on the Cloud. So Microsoft is going to make tons of money on that, right? Same thing, databases, right? Whether it's CQL server, whether there is Oracle database, things that you are running as a database, as a Cloud, we move to the Cloud. Whether that is posted in Oracle Cloud, or you're running Oracle or Mongo DB, or Dynamo DB on AWS or SQL server Microsoft, that's going to happen. Then what you're talking about is really the App concept, the applications themselves, the App server. Is the App server is going to run On-prem, how much it's going to laureate outside? There may be a hybrid Cloud, like for example, Kafka. I may use a Purse running on a Kafka as a service, or I may be using Elasticsearch for my indexing on AWS or Google Cloud, but I may be running my App locally. So there'll be some hybrid place, but what I would say is for every application, 75% of your Comprende will be on the Cloud. So think of it like the Dev. So even for the On-prem app, you're not going to be a 100 percent On-prem. The competent, the billing materials will move to the Cloud, your Purse, your storage, because if you put it On-prem, you need to add all this, you need to have all the whole things to buy it and hire the people, so that's what is going to happen. So from a competent perspective, 70% of your bill of materials will move to the Cloud, even for an On-prem application. >> So, Of course, the susification of the industry in the last decade and in my three favorite companies last decade, you've worked for two of them, Tableau, ServiceNow, and Splunk. I want to ask you about those, but I'm interested in the potential disruption there. I mean, you've got these SAS companies, Salesforce of course is another one, but they can't get started in 1999. What do you see happening with those? I mean, we're basically building these sort of large SAS, platforms, now. Do you think that the Cloud native world that developers can come at this from an angle where they can disrupt those companies, or are they too entrenched? I mean, look at service now, I mean, I don't know, $80 billion market capital where they are, they bigger than Workday, I mean, just amazing how much they've grown and you feel like, okay, nothing can stop them, but there's always disruption in this industry, what are your thoughts on that. >> Not very good with, I think there'll be disrupted. So to me actually to your point, ServiceNow is now close to a 100 billion now, 95 billion market coverage, crazy. So from evaluation perspective, so I think the reason they'll be disrupted is that the SAS vendors that you talked about, ServiceNow, and all this plan, most of these services, they're truly not a multi-tenant or what do you call the Cloud Native. And that is the Accenture. So because of that, they will not be able to pass the savings back to the enterprises. So the cost economics, the economics that the Cloud provides because of the multi tenancy ability will not. The second reason there'll be disrupted is AI. So far, we talked about Cloud, but AI is the core. So it's not really Cloud Native, Dave, I look at the AI in a two-piece. AI is going to change, see all the SAS vendors were created 20 years back, if you remember, was an operator typing it, I don't respond administered we'll type a Splunk query. I don't need a human to type a query anymore, system will actually find it, that's what the whole security game has changed, right? So what's going to happen is if you believe in that, that AI, your score will disrupt all the SAS vendors, so one angle SAS is going to have is a Cloud. That's where you make the Cloud will take up because a SAS application will be Cloudified. Being SAS is not Cloud, right? Second thing is SAS will be also, I call it, will be AI-fied. So AI and machine learning will be trying to drive at the core so that I don't need that many licenses. I don't need that many humans. I don't need that many administrators to manage, I call them the tuners. Once you get a driverless car, you don't need a thousand tuners to tune your Tesla, or Google Waymo car. So the same philosophy will happen is your Dev Apps, your administrators, your service management, people that you need for service now, and these products, Zendesk with AI, will tremendously will disrupt. >> So you're saying, okay, so yeah, I was going to ask you, won't the SAS vendors, won't they be able to just put, inject AI into their platforms, and I guess I'm inferring saying, yeah, but a lot of the problems that they're solving, are going to go away because of AI, is that right? And automation and RPA and things of that nature, is that right? >> Yes and no. So I'll tell you what, sorry, you have asked a very good question, let's answer, let me rephrase that question. What you're saying is, "Why can't the existing SAS vendors do the AI?" >> Yes, right. >> Right, >> And there's a reason they can't do it is their pricing model is by number of seats. So I'm not going to come to Dave, and say, come on, come pay me less money. It's the same reason why a board and general lover build an electric car. They're selling 10 million gasoline cars. There's no incentive for me, I'm not going to do any AI, I'm going to put, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, buy me a hundred less license next year from it. So that is one reason why AI, even though these guys do any AI, it's going to be just so I call it, they're going to, what do you call it, a whitewash, kind of like you put some paint brush on it, trying to show you some AI you did from a marketing dynamics. But at the core, if you really implement the AI with you take the driver out, how are you going to change the pricing model? And being a public company, you got to take a hit on the pricing model and the price, and it's going to have a stocking part. So that, to your earlier question, will somebody disrupt them? The person who is going to disrupt them, will disrupt them on the pricing model. >> Right. So I want to ask you about that, because we saw a Snowflake, and it's IPO, we were able to pour through its S-1, and they have a different pricing model. It's a true Cloud consumption model, Whereas of course, most SAS companies, they're going to lock you in for at least one year term, maybe more, and then, you buy the license, you got to pay X. If you, don't use it, you still got to pay for it. Snowflake's different, actually they have a different problem, that people are using it too much and the sea is driving the CFO crazy because the bill is going up and up and up, but to me, that's the right model, It's just like the Amazon model, if you can justify it, so how do you see the pricing, that consumption model is actually, you're seeing some of the On-prem guys at HPE, Dell, they're doing as a service. They're kind of taking a page out of the last decade SAS model, so I think pricing is a real tricky one, isn't it? >> No, you nailed it, you nailed it. So I think the way in which the Snowflake there, how the disruptors are data warehouse, that disrupted the open source vendors too. Snowflake distributed, imagine the playbook, you disrupted something as the $ 0, right? It's an open source with Cloudera, Hortonworks, Mapper, that whole big data that you want me to, or that market is this, that disrupting data warehouses like Netezza, Teradata, and the charging more money, they're making more money and disrupting at $0, because the pricing models by consumption that you talked about. CMT is going to happen in the service now, Zen Desk, well, 'cause their pricing one is by number of seats. People are going to say, "How are my users are going to ask?" right? If you're an employee help desk, you're back to your original health collaborative. I may be on Slack, I could be on zoom, I'll maybe on MS Teams, I'm going to ask by using usage model on Slack, tools by employees to service now is the pricing model that people want to pay for. The more my employees use it, the more value I get. But I don't want to pay by number of seats, so the vendor, who's going to figure that out, and that's where I look, if you know me, I'm right over as I started, that's what I've tried to push that model look, I love that because that's the core of how you want to change the new game. >> I agree. I say, kill me with that problem, I mean, some people are trying to make it a criticism, but you hit on the point. If you pay more, it's only because you're getting more value out of it. So I wanted to flip the switch here a little bit and take a customer angle. Something that you've been on all sides. And I want to talk a little bit about strategies, you've been a strategist, I guess, once a strategist, always a strategist. How should organizations be thinking about their approach to Cloud, it's cost different for different industries, but, back when the cube started, financial services Cloud was a four-letter word. But of course the age of company is going to matter, but what's the framework for figuring out your Cloud strategy to get to your 70% and really take advantage of the economics? Should I be Mono Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Multi-vendor, what would you advise? >> Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, I actually call it the tech stack. Actually you and John taught me that what was the tech stack, like the lamp stack, I think there is a new Cloud stack needs to come, and that I think the bottomline there should be... First of all, anything with storage should be in the Cloud. I mean, if you want to start, whether you are, financial, doesn't matter, there's no way. I come from cybersecurity side, I've seen it. Your attackers will be more with insiders than being on the Cloud, so storage has to be in the Cloud and encompass compute whoever it is. If you really want to use containers and Kubernetes, it has to be in the public Cloud, leverage that have the computer on their databases. That's where it can be like if your data is so strong, maybe run it On-prem, maybe have it on a hosted model for when it comes to database, but there you have a choice between hybrid Cloud and public Cloud choice. Then on top when it comes to App, the app itself, you can run locally or anywhere, the App and database. Now the areas that you really want to go after to migrate is look at anything that's an enterprise workload that you don't need people to manage it. You want your own team to move up in the career. You don't want thousand people looking at... you don't want to have a, for example, IT administrators to call central people to the people to manage your compute storage. That workload should be more, right? You already saw Sierra moved out to Salesforce. We saw collaboration already moved out. Zoom is not running locally. You already saw SharePoint with knowledge management mode up, right? With a box, drawbacks, you name anything. The next global mode is a SAS workloads, right? I think Workday service running there, but work data will go into the Cloud. I bet at some point Zendesk, ServiceNow, then either they put it on the public Cloud, or they have to create a product and public Cloud. To your point, these public Cloud vendors are at $2 trillion market cap. They're they're bigger than the... I call them nation States. >> Yeah, >> So I'm servicing though. I mean, there's a 2 trillion market gap between Amazon and Azure, I'm not going to compete with them. So I want to take this workload to run it there. So all these vendors, if you see that's where Shandra from Adobe is pushing this right, Adobe, Workday, Anaplan, all the SAS vendors we'll move them into the public Cloud within these vendors. So those workloads need to move out, right? So that all those things will start, then you'll start migrating, but I call your procurement. That's where the RPA comes in. The other thing that we didn't talk about, back to your first question, what is the next 10 years of Cloud will be RPA? That third piece to Cloud is RPA because if you have your systems On-prem, I can't automate them. I have to do a VPN into your house there and then try to automate your systems, or your procurement, et cetera. So all these RPA vendors are still running On-prem, most of them, whether it's UI path automation anywhere. So the Cloud should be where the brain should be. That's what I call them like the octopus analogy, the brain is in the Cloud, the tentacles are everywhere, they should manage it. But if my tentacles have to do a VPN with your house to manage it, I'm always will have failures. So if you look at the why RPA did not have the growth, like the Snowflake, like the Cloud, because they are running it On-prem, most of them still. 80% of the RP revenue is On-prem, running On-prem, that needs to be called clarified. So AI, RPA and the SAS, are the three reasons Cloud will take off. >> Awesome. Thank you for that. Now I want to flip the switch again. You're an investor or a multi-tool player here, but so if you're, let's say you're an ecosystem player, and you're kind of looking at the landscape as you're in an investor, of course you've invested in the Cloud, because the Cloud is where it's at, but you got to be careful as an ecosystem player to pick a spot that both provides growth, but allows you to have a moat as, I mean, that's why I'm really curious to see how Snowflake's going to compete because they're competing with AWS, Microsoft, and Google, unlike, Frank, when he was at service now, he was competing with BMC and with on-prem and he crushed it, but the competitors are much more capable here, but it seems like they've got, maybe they've got a moat with MultiCloud, and that whole data sharing thing, we'll see. But, what about that? Where are the opportunities? Where's that white space? And I know there's a lot of white space, but what's the framework to look at, from an investor standpoint, or even a CEO standpoint, where you want to put place your bets. >> No, very good question, so look, I did something. We talk as an investor in the board with many companies, right? So one thing that says as an investor, if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Docker or a computer, there's no way nobody's going to invest. So that we can motor off, even if you want to do object storage or a block storage, I mean, I've been an investor board member of so many storage companies, there's no way as an industry, I'll write a check for a compute or storage, right? If you want to create a next generation network, like either NetSuite, or restart Juniper, Cisco, there is no way. But if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Viper for remote working environments, where AI is at the core, I'm interested in that, right? So if you look at how the packets are dropped, there's no intelligence in either not switching today. The packets come, I do it. The intelligence is not built into the network with AI level. So if somebody comes with an AI, what good is all this NVD, our GPS, et cetera, if you cannot do wire speed, packet inspection, looking at the content and then route the traffic. If I see if it's a video package, but in UN Boston, there's high interview day of they should be loading our package faster, because you are a premium ISP. That intelligence has not gone there. So you will see, and that will be a bad people will happen in the network, switching, et cetera, right? So that is still an angle. But if you work and it comes to platform services, remember when I was at Pivotal and VMware, all models was my boss, that would, yes, as a platform, service is a game already won by the Cloud guys. >> Right. (indistinct) >> Silicon Valley Investors, I don't think you want to invest in past services, right? I mean, you might come with some lecture edition database to do some updates, there could be some game, let's say we want to do a time series database, or some metrics database, there's always some small angle, but the opportunity to go create a national database there it's very few. So I'm kind of eliminating all the black spaces, right? >> Yeah. >> We have the white spaces that comes in is the SAS level. Now to your point, if I'm Amazon, I'm going to compete with Snowflake, I have Redshift. So this is where at some point, these Cloud platforms, I call them aircraft carriers. They're not going to stay on the aircraft carriers, they're going to own the land as well. So they're going to move up to the SAS space. The question is you want to create a SAS service like CRM. They are not going to create a CRM like service, they may not create a sales force and service now, but if you're going to add a data warehouse, I can very well see Azure, Google, and AWS, going to create something to compute a Snowflake. Why would I not? It's so close to my database and data warehouse, I already have Redshift. So that's going to be nightlights, same reason, If you look at Netflix, you have a Netflix and you have Amazon prime. Netflix runs on Amazon, but you have Amazon prime. So you have the same model, you have Snowflake, and you'll have Redshift. The both will help each other, there'll be a... What do you call it? Coexistence will happen. But if you really want to invest, you want to invest in SAS companies. You do not want to be investing in a compliment players. You don't want to a feature. >> Yeah, that's great, I appreciate that perspective. And I wonder, so obviously Microsoft play in SAS, Google's got G suite. And I wonder if people often ask the Andy Jassy, you're going to move up the stack, you got to be an application, a SAS vendor, and you never say never with Atavist, But I wonder, and we were talking to Jerry Chen about this, years ago on theCube, and his angle was that Amazon will play, but they'll play through developers. They'll enable developers, and they'll participate, they'll take their, lick off the cone. So it's going to be interesting to see how directly Amazon plays, but at some point you got Tam expansion, you got to play in that space. >> Yeah, I'll give you an example of knowing, I got acquired by a couple of times by EMC. So I learned a lot from Joe Tucci and Paul Merage over the years. see Paul and Joe, what they did is to look at how 20 years, and they are very close to Boston in your area, Joe, what games did is they used to sell storage, but you know what he did, he went and bought the Apps to drive them. He bought like Legato, he bought Documentum, he bought Captiva, if you remember how he acquired all these companies as a services, he bought VMware to drive that. So I think the good angle that Microsoft has is, I'm a SAS player, I have dynamics, I have CRM, I have SharePoint, I have Collaboration, I have Office 365, MS Teams for users, and then I have the platform as Azure. So I think if I'm Amazon, (indistinct). I got to own the apps so that I can drive this workforce on my platform. >> Interesting. >> Just going to developers, like I know Jerry Chan, he was my peer a BMF. I don't think just literally to developers and that model works in open source, but the open source game is pretty much gone, and not too many companies made money. >> Well, >> Most companies pretty much gone. >> Yeah, he's right. Red hats not bad idea. But it's very interesting what you're saying there. And so, hey, its why Oracle wants to have Tiktok, running on their platform, right? I mean, it's going to. (laughing) It's going to drive that further integration. I wanted to ask you something, you were talking about, you wouldn't invest in storage or compute, but I wonder, and you mentioned some commentary about GPU's. Of course the videos has been going crazy, but they're now saying, okay, how do we expand our Team, they make the acquisition of arm, et cetera. What about this DPU thing, if you follow that, that data processing unit where they're like hyper dis-aggregation and then they reaggregate, and as an offload and really to drive data centric workloads. Have you looked at that at all? >> I did, I think, and that's a good angle. So I think, look, it's like, it goes through it. I don't know if you remember in your career, we have seen it. I used to get Silicon graphics. I saw the first graphic GPU, right? That time GPU was more graphic processor unit, >> Right, yeah, work stations. >> So then become NPUs at work processing units, right? There was a TCP/IP office offloading, if you remember right, there was like vector processing unit. So I think every once in a while the industry, recreated this separate unit, as a co-processor to the main CPU, because main CPU's inefficient, and it makes sense. And then Google created TPU's and then we have the new world of the media GPU's, now we have DPS all these are good, but what's happening is, all these are driving for machine learning, AI for the training period there. Training period Sometimes it's so long with the workloads, if you can cut down, it makes sense. >> Yeah. >> Because, but the question is, these aren't so specialized in nature. I can't use it for everything. >> Yup. >> I want Ideally, algorithms to be paralyzed, I want the training to be paralyzed, I want so having deep use and GPS are important, I think where I want to see them as more, the algorithm, there should be more investment from the NVIDIA's and these guys, taking the algorithm to be highly paralyzed them. (indistinct) And I think that still has not happened in industry yet. >> All right, so we're pretty much out of time, but what are you doing these days? Where are you spending your time, are you still in Stealth, give us a little glimpse. >> Yeah, no, I'm out of the Stealth, I'm actually the CEO of Aisera now, Aisera, obviously I invested with them, but I'm the CEO of Aisero. It's funded by Menlo ventures, Norwest, True, along with Khosla ventures and Ram Shriram is a big investor. Robin's on the board of Google, so these guys, look, we are going out to the collaboration game. How do you automate customer service and support for employees and then users, right? In this whole game, we talked about the Zoom, Slack and MS Teams, that's what I'm spending time, I want to create next generation service now. >> Fantastic. Muddu, I always love having you on you, pull punches, you tell it like it is, that you're a great visionary technologist. Thanks so much for coming on theCube, and participating in our program. >> Dave, it's always a pleasure speaking to you sir. Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there, there's more coming from Cuba and Cloud right after this break. (slow music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is Day One wrap of the Veritas Vision conference. Veritas, as we said earlier, is a company that has gone through a number of changes, Stu. I mean, I remember when the company launched in 1983. It was sort of, you know, it was focused on backup. It was Veritas and Legato. And they kind of grew through the PC era and the client server era, really started to take off. And then they exploded in the internet era. Their evaluation went through the roof. They ended up buying C8's backup business. They really drove that and then got purchased by Symantec for a big number. I mean, I think the number was 15 billion. I mean, it was in the teens as I recall. Really never did much under Symantec, or, Symantec never did much with Veritas. I think they had a vision of information management and that never really panned out. Spun the company back out, devested it, sale to Carlyle and some other investors for, I thought the number was 8 billion, somebody told me 7 billion today. That must be net of cash. 2.3 billion dollars in revenue. My understanding from sources is that valuation is way, way up, nearly double from 2015. Now, maybe that's an inflated number, but I'm not surprised. The market's been booming. So that's sort of the inside organizational issues. We're here at The Aria, what do you say, Stu, a couple thousand people, 2500? >> Yeah, it's about 2000, Dave, and it's interesting, I talked to some people that had gone to the old Veritas Vision, years ago, and gotten up to about 4000 or 5000 people. But, grown since last year, good energy at the show. We got to talk to the Vox community people. They've got 10,000 people online contributing to their forums, participating, launched the VIP program for some of the super users they have here. Definitely good crowd in the keynote. Good people clapping and participating, getting excited. It surprised me a little bit the number one topic of conversation is GDPR. As you said in our last interview, we're going down the deep abyss of how you're going to get litigated out of all of your money if you don't follow this. It's like way worse than Y2K, ah, some stuff's going to break and maybe turn off for a bit. >> Well, you know what I liked about the GDPR discussions though, they had answers. >> Yeah. >> Other events where I've gone to GDPR, it's been scary, scary, scary, scare you, scare you, scare you, and then call us. >> Yeah. >> And we'll give you some services. What I liked about, what I'm hearing from Veritas is, they've got at least a quasi-prescription as to what to do. So that's good. But the more interesting part to me Stu is you've got this enterprise backup legacy, I'll say it, legacy backup install base, enormous. A leader, they've mentioned many times, 15 years in a row leader in the magic quadrant. And I believe it, you talk to customers, what are you running, NetBackup, everybody's running NetBackup. But how they're transitioning into this vision of multi-cloud, data protection resilience across the Enterprise, across clouds, hyper scale. What I'm not fully clear on yet is how they get customers from point A to point B. And we heard from the keynotes this morning and Bill Campbell. We invested a bunch of dough in R&D, we're writing stuff that's cloud-native, container-based, micro services. So sort of all the right application development buzzwords and I believe that they're developing there. But I don't understand how they migrate that install base. Is there some kind of abstraction layer? Is there some kind of new UI? We heard them jokingly say today in the keynotes that, we hear you, customers, we know our UI sucked, we're working on that. I didn't see any announcements on that, but, that's something that, presumably, is a promise they're putting forth. But, I wasn't clear, maybe you could help clear it up, on how you get from point A of legacy install backup software to this nirvana of multi-cloud hyper scale micro services. >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, when we talked to Bill Coleman, his three Vs, value, vision, and that values of the company itself, clearly has got a compelling vision. He said not only ten years from now, but probably five years from now, every product I'm selling is going to be obsolete. And it's an interesting thing to hear because 15 years of experience, we're trusted, but we know that every product that you bought from Veritas in the past is going to be replaced by new things. And, right, how do we get, say okay, I've been buying that backup for a decade, do I get this visualization product, and if I'm looking at AWS, is Veritas the company I turn to? So really it gets down to, Dave, that blocking and tackling. Talked about the consultants, the partners, both on the go to market side as well as the technology side. Can Veritas get in there, can they have compelling differentiated products that solve a need in the market? We've talked to a number of companies this last year where I've looked at is this hybrid multi-cloud world. If you're software, how do you play in this market? Because isn't Microsoft, Google, Amazon, aren't they going to just do this? Information governance invisibility, absolutely. Amazon has a solution for you. Google has a solution for you. Microsoft has solutions. But, if I'm going to be across those environments, we haven't had a solution that goes across all of those environments. So, there's a hole in the ecosystem, and Veritas, along with many other companies, are trying to put that big elephant on the table and eat pieces out of it, so, it's interesting. >> And Coleman's background, from BEA, started at BEA, I think he took the thing up to half a billion dollars, sold it to Oracle for a big number. But you look at what BEA did, they were sort of the application integration glue. And that's a lot of, you hear a lot of similar messaging modernized around multi-cloud, around hyper scale, around micro services and the like. So, Coleman obviously has experience doing that. I thought he's a very clear thinker. I had not met him before. Furrier knows him pretty well, from his VC days. But I thought he laid out a pretty clear direction. So he's got street cred on this. SEEP com, done it before, I think this company has a decent balance sheet. They seem to have some patient capital in Carlyle. It doesn't appear that Carlyle's trying to suck all the money out. They don't have the 90-day shot clock. He basically, Bill Coleman basically said, look, we're fine shrinking to grow. We're shifting from a upfront license model, perpetual license model, to a ratable model. We could never do that as a public company. So it's going to be very interesting to see if and when they emerge as a public company, what that looks like and where they come from. >> Yeah, and Dave, one of the things I've been poking at is where do they sell to? If this was the backup administrator, that's not somebody that's going to help them with the transformation. It's digital transformation, it's my cloud strategy. It's things like GDPR where I'm going to need to get up the stack to the CIO, to the C-suite, prove the value that Veritas has, and therefore they can then get all these new products in where everything, the 360 data management, really at the core of what they're doing, and whole lots of other products. I mean, Dave, we didn't even dig into some of the object and file storage pieces that are in here. I know we've got their chief product officer on the Cube tomorrow. But a lot of products, pretty broad software suite. And for an infrastructure company, it's always interesting to hear them say, really, infrastructure doesn't matter. The no hardware agenda, but it's your data that matters, and we've got a vision here at Veritas Vision to bring you forward and lots of plays on the name of the company. Veritas, the show is the truth in information. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about the lineup tomorrow. A lot of product stuff tomorrow. Mike Palmer's coming on, he gave a great keynote this morning. Very funny, he gave a scenario of the world ending because basically people didn't have their data act together. They had these images of Las Vegas hotels in chaos and waterfalls running through the hotels and drones attacking and just total chaos. So we're going to get into a lot of the portfolio stuff and I think try to answer, Stu, some of those questions that I raised about how do you get customers from point A, where they are today, to point B. Are you going to, how are you going to transition them. Are there financial incentives? Is there some kind of abstraction layer that you're developing? What is that framework that brings us to that nirvana? So, give you the last word here, Stu. >> Yeah, so looking forward to digging in more with some of the customers, some of the partners. Good energy at the show. It's exciting to be here for the first time. And looking forward to Day Two. >> All right, good, good wrap, Stu. Thank you, and thank you for watching. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. We saw some Oracle news today. Hitachi changed its name or Pentaho changed its name, we're not really sure about that. But all the news on siliconangle.com, go to wikibon.com for all the research. And of course, thecube.net to see this show, replays, youtube.com/siliconangle is where we archive all this stuff. Lot of websites. >> Yeah, and make sure to subscribe on our YouTube channel. >> Yeah, please do subscribe on that YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, @thecube, @stuminiman, @dvellante. That's a wrap Day One, this is The Cube, we'll see you tomorrow from Veritas Vision from Vegas, take care. (techno music)