(gentle music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, California for our live stage performance. Supercloud 2 is our second Supercloud event. We're going to get these out as fast as we can every couple months. It's our second one, you'll see two and three this year. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante. A panel here to break down the Supercloud momentum, the wave, and the developer impact that we bringing back Vittorio Viarengo, who's a VP for Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Sarbjeet Johal, industry influencer and Analyst at StackPayne, his company, Cube alumni and Influencer. Sarbjeet, great to see you. Vittorio, thanks for coming back. >> Nice to be here. >> My pleasure. >> Vittorio, you just gave a keynote where we unpacked the cross-cloud services, what VMware is doing, how you guys see it, not just from VMware's perspective, but VMware looking out broadly at the industry and developers came up and you were like, "Developers, developer, developers", kind of a goof on the Steve Ballmer famous meme that everyone's seen. This is a huge star, sorry, I mean a big piece of it. The developers are the canary in the coal mines. They're the ones who are being asked to code the digital transformation, which is fully business transformation and with the market the way it is right now in terms of the accelerated technology, every enterprise grade business model's changing. The technology is evolving, the builders are kind of, they want go faster. I'm saying they're stuck in a way, but that's my opinion, but there's a lot of growth. >> Yeah. >> The impact, they got to get released up and let it go. Those developers need to accelerate faster. It's been a big part of productivity, and the conversations we've had. So developer impact is huge in Supercloud. What's your, what do you guys think about this? We'll start with you, Sarbjeet. >> Yeah, actually, developers are the masons of the digital empires I call 'em, right? They lay every brick and build all these big empires. On the left side of the SDLC, or the, you know, when you look at the system operations, developer is number one cost from economic side of things, and from technology side of things, they are tech hungry people. They are developers for that reason because developer nights are long, hours are long, they forget about when to eat, you know, like, I've been a developer, I still code. So you want to keep them happy, you want to hug your developers. We always say that, right? Vittorio said that right earlier. The key is to, in this context, in the Supercloud context, is that developers don't mind mucking around with platforms or APIs or new languages, but they hate the infrastructure part. That's a fact. They don't want to muck around with servers. It's friction for them, it is like they don't want to muck around even with the VMs. So they want the programmability to the nth degree. They want to automate everything, so that's how they think and cloud is the programmable infrastructure, industrialization of infrastructure in many ways. So they are happy with where we are going, and we need more abstraction layers for some developers. By the way, I have this sort of thinking frame for last year or so, not all developers are same, right? So if you are a developer at an ISV, you behave differently. If you are a developer at a typical enterprise, you behave differently or you are forced to behave differently because you're not writing software.- >> Well, developers, developers have changed, I mean, Vittorio, you and I were talking earlier on the keynote, and this is kind of the key point is what is a developer these days? If everything is software enabled, I mean, even hardware interviews we do with Nvidia, and Amazon and other people building silicon, they all say the same thing, "It's software on a chip." So you're seeing the role of software up and down the stack and the role of the stack is changing. The old days of full stack developer, what does that even mean? I mean, the cloud is a half a stack kind of right there. So, you know, developers are certainly more agile, but cloud native, I mean VMware is epitome of operations, IT operations, and the Tan Zoo initiative, you guys started, you went after the developers to look at them, and ask them questions, "What do you need?", "How do you transform the Ops from virtualization?" Again, back to your point, so this hardware abstraction, what is software, what is cloud native? It's kind of messy equation these days. How do you guys grokel with that? >> I would argue that developers don't want the Supercloud. I dropped that up there, so, >> Dave: Why not? >> Because developers, they, once they get comfortable in AWS or Google, because they're doing some AI stuff, which is, you know, very trendy right now, or they are in IBM, any of the IPA scaler, professional developers, system developers, they love that stuff, right? Yeah, they don't, the infrastructure gets in the way, but they're just, the problem is, and I think the Supercloud should be driven by the operators because as we discussed, the operators have been left behind because they're busy with day-to-day jobs, and in most cases IT is centralized, developers are in the business units. >> John: Yeah. >> Right? So they get the mandate from the top, say, "Our bank, they're competing against". They gave teenagers or like young people the ability to do all these new things online, and Venmo and all this integration, where are we? "Oh yeah, we can do it", and then build it, and then deploy it, "Okay, we caught up." but now the operators are back in the private cloud trying to keep the backend system running and so I think the Supercloud is needed for the primarily, initially, for the operators to get in front of the developers, fit in the workflow, but lay the foundation so it is secure.- >> So, so I love this thinking because I love the rift, because the rift points to what is the target audience for the value proposition and if you're a developer, Supercloud enables you so you shouldn't have to deal with Supercloud. >> Exactly. >> What you're saying is get the operating environment or operating system done properly, whether it's architecture, building the platform, this comes back to architecture platform conversations. What is the future platform? Is it a vendor supplied or is it customer created platform? >> Dave: So developers want best to breed, is what you just said. >> Vittorio: Yeah. >> Right and operators, they, 'cause developers don't want to deal with governance, they don't want to deal with security, >> No. >> They don't want to deal with spinning up infrastructure. That's the role of the operator, but that's where Supercloud enables, to John's point, the developer, so to your question, is it a platform where the platform vendor is responsible for the architecture, or there is it an architectural standard that spans multiple clouds that has to emerge? Based on what you just presented earlier, Vittorio, you are the determinant of the architecture. It's got to be open, but you guys determine that, whereas the nirvana is, "Oh no, it's all open, and it just kind of works." >> Yeah, so first of all, let's all level set on one thing. You cannot tell developers what to do. >> Dave: Right, great >> At least great developers, right? Cannot tell them what to do. >> Dave: So that's what, that's the way I want to sort of, >> You can tell 'em what's possible. >> There's a bottle on that >> If you tell 'em what's possible, they'll test it, they'll look at it, but if you try to jam it down their throat, >> Yeah. >> Dave: You can't tell 'em how to do it, just like your point >> Let me answer your answer the question. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So I think we need to build an architect, help them build an architecture, but it cannot be proprietary, has to be built on what works in the cloud and so what works in the cloud today is Kubernetes, is you know, number of different open source project that you need to enable and then provide, use this, but when I first got exposed to Kubernetes, I said, "Hallelujah!" We had a runtime that works the same everywhere only to realize there are 12 different distributions. So that's where we come in, right? And other vendors come in to say, "Hey, no, we can make them all look the same. So you still use Kubernetes, but we give you a place to build, to set those operation policy once so that you don't create friction for the developers because that's the last thing you want to do." >> Yeah, actually, coming back to the same point, not all developers are same, right? So if you're ISV developer, you want to go to the lowest sort of level of the infrastructure and you want to shave off the milliseconds from to get that performance, right? If you're working at AWS, you are doing that. If you're working at scale at Facebook, you're doing that. At Twitter, you're doing that, but when you go to DMV and Kansas City, you're not doing that, right? So your developers are different in nature. They are given certain parameters to work with, certain sort of constraints on the budget side. They are educated at a different level as well. Like they don't go to that end of the degree of sort of automation, if you will. So you cannot have the broad stroking of developers. We are talking about a citizen developer these days. That's a extreme low, >> You mean Low-Code. >> Yeah, Low-Code, No-code, yeah, on the extreme side. On one side, that's citizen developers. On the left side is the professional developers, when you say developers, your mind goes to the professional developers, like the hardcore developers, they love the flexibility, you know, >> John: Well app, developers too, I mean. >> App developers, yeah. >> You're right a lot of, >> Sarbjeet: Infrastructure platform developers, app developers, yes. >> But there are a lot of customers, its a spectrum, you're saying. >> Yes, it's a spectrum >> There's a lot of customers don't want deal with that muck. >> Yeah. >> You know, like you said, AWS, Twitter, the sophisticated developers do, but there's a whole suite of developers out there >> Yeah >> That just want tools that are abstracted. >> Within a company, within a company. Like how I see the Supercloud is there shouldn't be anything which blocks the developers, like their view of the world, of the future. Like if you're blocked as a developer, like something comes in front of you, you are not developer anymore, believe me, (John laughing) so you'll go somewhere else >> John: First of all, I'm, >> You'll leave the company by the way. >> Dave: Yeah, you got to quit >> Yeah, you will quit, you will go where the action is, where there's no sort of blockage there. So like if you put in front of them like a huge amount of a distraction, they don't like it, so they don't, >> Well, the idea of a developer, >> Coming back to that >> Let's get into 'cause you mentioned platform. Get year in the term platform engineering now. >> Yeah. >> Platform developer. You know, I remember back in, and I think there's still a term used today, but when I graduated my computer science degree, we were called "Software engineers," right? Do people use that term "Software engineering", or is it "Software development", or they the same, are they different? >> Well, >> I think there's a, >> So, who's engineering what? Are they engineering or are they developing? Or both? Well, I think it the, you made a great point. There is a factor of, I had the, I was blessed to work with Adam Bosworth, that is the guy that created some of the abstraction layer, like Visual Basic and Microsoft Access and he had so, he made his whole career thinking about this layer, and he always talk about the professional developers, the developers that, you know, give him a user manual, maybe just go at the APIs, he'll build anything, right, from system engine, go down there, and then through obstruction, you get the more the procedural logic type of engineers, the people that used to be able to write procedural logic and visual basic and so on and so forth. I think those developers right now are a little cut out of the picture. There's some No-code, Low-Code environment that are maybe gain some traction, I caught up with Adam Bosworth two weeks ago in New York and I asked him "What's happening to this higher level developers?" and you know what he is told me, and he is always a little bit out there, so I'm going to use his thought process here. He says, "ChapGPT", I mean, they will get to a point where this high level procedural logic will be written by, >> John: Computers. >> Computers, and so we may not need as many at the high level, but we still need the engineers down there. The point is the operation needs to get in front of them >> But, wait, wait, you seen the ChatGPT meme, I dunno if it's a Dilbert thing where it's like, "Time to tic" >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did that >> "Time to develop the code >> Five minutes, time to decode", you know, to debug the codes like five hours. So you know, the whole equation >> Well, this ChatGPT is a hot wave, everyone's been talking about it because I think it illustrates something that's NextGen, feels NextGen, and it's just getting started so it's going to get better. I mean people are throwing stones at it, but I think it's amazing. It's the equivalent of me seeing the browser for the first time, you know, like, "Wow, this is really compelling." This is game-changing, it's not just keyword chat bots. It's like this is real, this is next level, and I think the Supercloud wave that people are getting behind points to that and I think the question of Ops and Dev comes up because I think if you limit the infrastructure opportunity for a developer, I think they're going to be handicapped. I mean that's a general, my opinion, the thesis is you give more aperture to developers, more choice, more capabilities, more good things could happen, policy, and that's why you're seeing the convergence of networking people, virtualization talent, operational talent, get into the conversation because I think it's an infrastructure engineering opportunity. I think this is a seminal moment in a new stack that's emerging from an infrastructure, software virtualization, low-code, no-code layer that will be completely programmable by things like the next Chat GPT or something different, but yet still the mechanics and the plumbing will still need engineering. >> Sarbjeet: Oh yeah. >> So there's still going to be more stuff coming on. >> Yeah, we have, with the cloud, we have made the infrastructure programmable and you give the programmability to the programmer, they will be very creative with that and so we are being very creative with our infrastructure now and on top of that, we are being very creative with the silicone now, right? So we talk about that. That's part of it, by the way. So you write the code to the particle's silicone now, and on the flip side, the silicone is built for certain use cases for AI Inference and all that. >> You saw this at CES? >> Yeah, I saw at CES, the scenario is this, the Bosch, I spoke to Bosch, I spoke to John Deere, I spoke to AWS guys, >> Yeah. >> They were showcasing their technology there and I was spoke to Azure guys as well. So the Bosch is a good example. So they are building, they are right now using AWS. I have that interview on camera, I will put it some sometime later on there online. So they're using AWS on the back end now, but Bosch is the number one, number one or number two depending on what day it is of the year, supplier of the componentry to the auto industry, and they are creating a platform for our auto industry, so is Qualcomm actually by the way, with the Snapdragon. So they told me that customers, their customers, BMW, Audi, all the manufacturers, they demand the diversity of the backend. Like they don't want all, they, all of them don't want to go to AWS. So they want the choice on the backend. So whatever they cook in the middle has to work, they have to sprinkle the data for the data sovereign side because they have Chinese car makers as well, and for, you know, for other reasons, competitive reasons and like use. >> People don't go to, aw, people don't go to AWS either for political reasons or like competitive reasons or specific use cases, but for the most part, generally, I haven't met anyone who hasn't gone first choice with either, but that's me personally. >> No, but they're building. >> Point is the developer wants choice at the back end is what I'm hearing, but then finish that thought. >> Their developers want the choice, they want the choice on the back end, number one, because the customers are asking for, in this case, the customers are asking for it, right? But the customers requirements actually drive, their economics drives that decision making, right? So in the middle they have to, they're forced to cook up some solution which is vendor neutral on the backend or multicloud in nature. So >> Yeah, >> Every >> I mean I think that's nirvana. I don't think, I personally don't see that happening right now. I mean, I don't see the parody with clouds. So I think that's a challenge. I mean, >> Yeah, true. >> I mean the fact of the matter is if the development teams get fragmented, we had this chat with Kit Colbert last time, I think he's going to come on and I think he's going to talk about his keynote in a few, in an hour or so, development teams is this, the cloud is heterogenous, which is great. It's complex, which is challenging. You need skilled engineering to manage these clouds. So if you're a CIO and you go all in on AWS, it's hard. Then to then go out and say, "I want to be completely multi-vendor neutral" that's a tall order on many levels and this is the multicloud challenge, right? So, the question is, what's the strategy for me, the CIO or CISO, what do I do? I mean, to me, I would go all in on one and start getting hedges and start playing and then look at some >> Crystal clear. Crystal clear to me. >> Go ahead. >> If you're a CIO today, you have to build a platform engineering team, no question. 'Cause if we agree that we cannot tell the great developers what to do, we have to create a platform engineering team that using pieces of the Supercloud can build, and let's make this very pragmatic and give examples. First you need to be able to lay down the run time, okay? So you need a way to deploy multiple different Kubernetes environment in depending on the cloud. Okay, now we got that. The second part >> That's like table stakes. >> That are table stake, right? But now what is the advantage of having a Supercloud service to do that is that now you can put a policy in one place and it gets distributed everywhere consistently. So for example, you want to say, "If anybody in this organization across all these different buildings, all these developers don't even know, build a PCI compliant microservice, They can only talk to PCI compliant microservice." Now, I sleep tight. The developers still do that. Of course they're going to get their hands slapped if they don't encrypt some messages and say, "Oh, that should have been encrypted." So number one. The second thing I want to be able to say, "This service that this developer built over there better satisfy this SLA." So if the SLA is not satisfied, boom, I automatically spin up multiple instances to certify the SLA. Developers unencumbered, they don't even know. So this for me is like, CIO build a platform engineering team using one of the many Supercloud services that allow you to do that and lay down. >> And part of that is that the vendor behavior is such, 'cause the incentive is that they don't necessarily always work together. (John chuckling) I'll give you an example, we're going to hear today from Western Union. They're AWS shop, but they want to go to Google, they want to use some of Google's AI tools 'cause they're good and maybe they're even arguably better, but they're also a Snowflake customer and what you'll hear from them is Amazon and Snowflake are working together so that SageMaker can be integrated with Snowflake but Google said, "No, you want to use our AI tools, you got to use BigQuery." >> Yeah. >> Okay. So they say, "Ah, forget it." So if you have a platform engineering team, you can maybe solve some of that vendor friction and get competitive advantage. >> I think that the future proximity concept that I talk about is like, when you're doing one thing, you want to do another thing. Where do you go to get that thing, right? So that is very important. Like your question, John, is that your point is that AWS is ahead of the pack, which is true, right? They have the >> breadth of >> Infrastructure by a lot >> infrastructure service, right? They breadth of services, right? So, how do you, When do you bring in other cloud providers, right? So I believe that you should standardize on one cloud provider, like that's your primary, and for others, bring them in on as needed basis, in the subsection or sub portfolio of your applications or your platforms, what ever you can. >> So yeah, the Google AI example >> Yeah, I mean, >> Or the Microsoft collaboration software example. I mean there's always or the M and A. >> Yeah, but- >> You're going to get to run Windows, you can run Windows on Amazon, so. >> By the way, Supercloud doesn't mean that you cannot do that. So the perfect example is say that you're using Azure because you have a SQL server intensive workload. >> Yep >> And you're using Google for ML, great. If you are using some differentiated feature of this cloud, you'll have to go somewhere and configure this widget, but what you can abstract with the Supercloud is the lifecycle manage of the service that runs on top, right? So how does the service get deployed, right? How do you monitor performance? How do you lifecycle it? How you secure it that you can abstract and that's the value and eventually value will win. So the customers will find what is the values, obstructing in making it uniform or going deeper? >> How about identity? Like take identity for instance, you know, that's an opportunity to abstract. Whether I use Microsoft Identity or Okta, and I can abstract that. >> Yeah, and then we have APIs and standards that we can use so eventually I think where there is enough pain, the right open source will emerge to solve that problem. >> Dave: Yeah, I can use abstract things like object store, right? That's pretty simple. >> But back to the engineering question though, is that developers, developers, developers, one thing about developers psychology is if something's not right, they say, "Go get fixing. I'm not touching it until you fix it." They're very sticky about, if something's not working, they're not going to do it again, right? So you got to get it right for developers. I mean, they'll maybe tolerate something new, but is the "juice worth the squeeze" as they say, right? So you can't go to direct say, "Hey, it's, what's a work in progress? We're going to get our infrastructure together and the world's going to be great for you, but just hang tight." They're going to be like, "Get your shit together then talk to me." So I think that to me is the question. It's an Ops question, but where's that value for the developer in Supercloud where the capabilities are there, there's less friction, it's simpler, it solves the complexity problem. I don't need these high skilled labor to manage Amazon. I got services exposed. >> That's what we talked about earlier. It's like the Walmart example. They basically, they took away from the developer the need to spin up infrastructure and worry about all the governance. I mean, it's not completely there yet. So the developer could focus on what he or she wanted to do. >> But there's a big, like in our industry, there's a big sort of flaw or the contention between developers and operators. Developers want to be on the cutting edge, right? And operators want to be on the stability, you know, like we want governance. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right, so they want to control, developers are like these little bratty kids, right? And they want Legos, like they want toys, right? Some of them want toys by way. They want Legos, they want to build there and they want make a mess out of it. So you got to make sure. My number one advice in this context is that do it up your application portfolio and, or your platform portfolio if you are an ISV, right? So if you are ISV you most probably, you're building a platform these days, do it up in a way that you can say this portion of our applications and our platform will adhere to what you are saying, standardization, you know, like Kubernetes, like slam dunk, you know, it works across clouds and in your data center hybrid, you know, whole nine yards, but there is some subset on the next door systems of innovation. Everybody has, it doesn't matter if you're DMV of Kansas or you are, you know, metaverse, right? Or Meta company, right, which is Facebook, they have it, they are building something new. For that, give them some freedom to choose different things like play with non-standard things. So that is the mantra for moving forward, for any enterprise. >> Do you think developers are happy with the infrastructure now or are they wanting people to get their act together? I mean, what's your reaction, or you think. >> Developers are happy as long as they can do their stuff, which is running code. They want to write code and innovate. So to me, when Ballmer said, "Developer, develop, Developer, what he meant was, all you other people get your act together so these developers can do their thing, and to me the Supercloud is the way for IT to get there and let developer be creative and go fast. Why not, without getting in trouble. >> Okay, let's wrap up this segment with a super clip. Okay, we're going to do a sound bite that we're going to make into a short video for each of you >> All right >> On you guys summarizing why Supercloud's important, why this next wave is relevant for the practitioners, for the industry and we'll turn this into an Instagram reel, YouTube short. So we'll call it a "Super clip. >> Alright, >> Sarbjeet, you want, you want some time to think about it? You want to go first? Vittorio, you want. >> I just didn't mind. (all laughing) >> No, okay, okay. >> I'll do it again. >> Go back. No, we got a fresh one. We'll going to already got that one in the can. >> I'll go. >> Sarbjeet, you go first. >> I'll go >> What's your super clip? >> In software systems, abstraction is your friend. I always say that. Abstraction is your friend, even if you're super professional developer, abstraction is your friend. We saw from the MFC library from C++ days till today. Abstract, use abstraction. Do not try to reinvent what's already being invented. Leverage cloud, leverage the platform side of the cloud. Not just infrastructure service, but platform as a service side of the cloud as well, and Supercloud is a meta platform built on top of these infrastructure services from three or four or five cloud providers. So use that and embrace the programmability, embrace the abstraction layer. That's the key actually, and developers who are true developers or professional developers as you said, they know that. >> Awesome. Great super clip. Vittorio, another shot at the plate here for super clip. Go. >> Multicloud is awesome. There's a reason why multicloud happened, is because gave our developers the ability to innovate fast and ever before. So if you are embarking on a digital transformation journey, which I call a survival journey, if you're not innovating and transforming, you're not going to be around in business three, five years from now. You have to adopt the Supercloud so the developer can be developer and keep building great, innovating digital experiences for your customers and IT can get in front of it and not get in trouble together. >> Building those super apps with Supercloud. That was a great super clip. Vittorio, thank you for sharing. >> Thanks guys. >> Sarbjeet, thanks for coming on talking about the developer impact Supercloud 2. On our next segment, coming up right now, we're going to hear from Walmart enterprise architect, how they are building and they are continuing to innovate, to build their own Supercloud. Really informative, instructive from a practitioner doing it in real time. Be right back with Walmart here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(lively music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Supercloud presentation here. I'm theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host. What a great segment here. We're going to unpack the networking aspect of the cloud, how that translates into what Supercloud architecture and platform deployment scenarios look like. And demystify multi-cloud, hybridcloud. We've got two great experts. Amir Khan, the Co-Founder and CEO of Alkira, Atif Khan, Co-Founder and CTO of Alkira. These guys been around since 2018 with the startup, but before that story, history in the tech industry. I mean, routing early days, multiple waves, multiple cycles. >> Welcome three decades. >> Welcome to Supercloud. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> So, let's get your take on Supercloud because it's been one of those conversations that really galvanized the industry because it kind of highlights almost this next wave, this next side of the street that everyone's going to be on that's going to be successful. The laggards on the legacy seem to be stuck on the old model. SaaS is growing up, it's ISVs, it's ecosystems, hyperscale, full hybrid. And then multi-cloud around the corners cause all this confusion, everyone's hand waving. You know, this is a solution, that solution, where are we? What do you guys see as this supercloud dynamic? >> So where we start from is always focusing on the customer problem. And in 2018 when we identified the problem, we saw that there were multiple clouds with many diverse ways of doing things from the network perspective, and customers were struggling with that. So we delved deeper into that and looked at each one of the cloud architectures completely independent. And there was no common solution and customers were struggling with that from the perspective. They wanted to be in multiple clouds, either through mergers and acquisitions or running an application which may be more cost effective to run in something or maybe optimized for certain reasons to run in a different cloud. But from the networking perspective, everything needed to come together. So that's, we are starting to define it as a supercloud now, but basically, it's a common infrastructure across all clouds. And then integration of high lift services like, you know, security or IPAM services or many other types of services like inter-partner routing and stuff like that. So, Amir, you agree then that multi-cloud is simply a default result of having whatever outcomes, either M&A, some productivity software, maybe Azure. >> Yes. >> Amazon has this and then I've got on-premise application, so it's kinds mishmash. >> So, I would qualify it with hybrid multi-cloud because everything is going to be interconnected. >> John: Got it. >> Whether it's on-premise, remote users or clouds. >> But have CTO perspective, obviously, you got developers, multiple stacks, got AWS, Azure and GCP, other. Not everyone wants to kind of like go all in, but yet they don't want to hedge too much because it's a resource issue. And I got to learn this stack, I got to learn that stack. So then now, you have this default multi-cloud, hybrid multi-cloud, then it's like, okay, what do I do? How do you spread that around? Is it dangerous? What's the the approach technically? What's some of the challenges there? >> Yeah, certainly. John, first, thanks for having us here. So, before I get to that, I'll just add a little bit to what Amir was saying, like how we started, what we were seeing and how it, you know, correlates with the supercloud. So, as you know, before this company, Alkira, we were doing, we did the SD-WAN company, which was Viptela. So there, we started seeing when people started deploying SD-WAN at like a larger scale. We started like, you know, customers coming to us and saying they needed connectivity into the cloud from the SD-WAN. They wanted to extend the SD-WAN fabric to the cloud. So we came up with an architecture, which was like later we started calling them Cloud onRamps, where we built, you know, a transit VPC and put like the virtual instances of SD-WAN appliances extended from there to the cloud. But before we knew, like it started becoming very complicated for the customers because it wasn't just connectivity, it also required, you know, other use cases. You had to instantiate or bring in security appliances in there. You had to secure all of that stuff. There were requirements for, you know, different regions. So you had to bring up the same thing in different regions. Then multiple clouds, what did you do? You had to replicate the same thing in multiple clouds. And now if there was was requirement between clouds, how were you going to do it? You had to route traffic from somewhere, and come up with all those routing controls and stuff. So, it was very complicated. >> Like spaghetti code, but on network. >> The games begin, in fact, one of our customers called it spaghetti mess. And so, that's where like we thought about where was the industry going and which direction the industry was going into? And we came up with the Alkira where what we are doing is building a common infrastructure across multiple clouds, across in, you know, on-prem locations, be it data centers or physical sites, branches sites, et cetera, with integrated security and network networking services inside. And, you know, nowadays, networking is not only about connectivity, you have to secure everything. So, security has to be built in. Redundancy, high availability, disaster recovery. So all of that needs to be built in. So that's like, you know, kind of a definition of like what we thought at that time, what is turning into supercloud now. >> Yeah. It's interesting too, you mentioned, you know, VPCs is not, configuration of loans a hassle. Nevermind the manual mistakes could be made, but as you decide to do something you got to, "Oh, we got to get these other things." A lot of the hyper scales and a lot of the alpha cloud players now, and cloud native folks, they're kind of in that mode of, "Wow, look at what we've built." Now, they're got to maintain, how do I refresh it? Like, how do I keep the talent? So they got this similar chaotic environment where it's like, okay, now they're already already through, so I think they're going to be okay. But then some people want to bypass it completely. So there's a lot of customers that we see out there that fit the makeup of, I'm cloud first, I've lifted and shifted, I move some stuff to the cloud. But I want to bypass all that learnings from all the people that are gone through the past three years. Can I just skip that and go to a multi-cloud or coherent infrastructure? What do you think about that? What's your view? >> So yeah, so if you look at these enterprises, you know, many of them just to find like the talent, which for one cloud as far as the IT staff is concerned, it's hard enough. And now, when you have multiple clouds, it's hard to find people the talent which is, you know, which has expertise across different clouds. So that's where we come into the picture. So our vision was always to simplify all of this stuff. And simplification, it cannot be just simplification because you cannot just automate the workflows of the cloud providers underneath. So you have to, you know, provide your full data plane on top of it, fed full control plane, management plane, policy and management on top of it. And coming back to like your question, so these nowadays, those people who are working on networking, you know, before it used to be like CLI. You used to learn about Cisco CLI or Juniper CLI, and you used to work on it. Nowadays, it's very different. So automation, programmability, all of that stuff is the key. So now, you know, Ops guys, the DevOps guys, so these are the people who are in high demand. >> So what do you think about the folks out there that are saying, okay, you got a lot of fragmentation. I got the stacks, I got a lot of stove pipes, if you will, out there on the stack. I got to learn this from Azure. Can you guys have with your product abstract the way that's so developers don't need to know the ins and outs of stack's, almost like a gateway, if you will, the old days. But like I'm a developer or team develop, why should I have to learn the management layer of Azure? >> That's exactly what we started, you know, out with to solve. So it's, what we have built is a platform and the platform sits inside the cloud. And customers are able to build their own network or a virtual network on top using that platform. So the platform has its own data plane, own control plane and management plane with a policy layer on top of it. So now, it's the platform which is sitting in different clouds, but from a customer's point of view, it's one way of doing networking. One way of instantiating or bringing in services or security services in the middle. Whether those are our security services or whether those are like services from our partners, like Palo Alto or Checkpoint or Cisco. >> So you guys brought the SD-WAN mojo and refactored it for the cloud it sounds like. >> No. >> No? (chuckles) >> We cannot said. >> All right, explain. >> It's way more than that. >> I mean, SD-WAN was wan. I mean, you're talking about wide area networks, talking about connected, so explain the difference. >> SD-WAN was primarily done for one major reason. MPLS was expensive, very strong SLAs, but very low speed. Internet, on the other hand, you sat at home and you could access your applications much faster. No SLA, very low cost, right? So we wanted to marry the two together so you could have a purely private infrastructure and a public infrastructure and secure both of them by creating a common secure fabric across all those environments. And then seamlessly tying it into your internal branch and data center and cloud network. So, it merely brought you to the edge of the cloud. It didn't do anything inside the cloud. Now, the major problem resides inside the clouds where you have to optimize the clouds themselves. Take a step back. How were the clouds built? Basically, the cloud providers went to the Ciscos and Junipers and the rest of the world, built the network in the data centers or across wide area infrastructure, and brought it all together and tried to create a virtualized layer on top of that. But there were many limitations of this underlying infrastructure that they had built. So number of routes per region, how inter region connectivity worked, or how many routes you could carry to the VPCs of V nets? That all those were becoming no common policy across, you know, these environments, no segmentation across these environments, right? So the networking constructs that the enterprise customers were used to as enterprise class carry class capabilities, they did not exist in the cloud. So what did the customer do? They ended up stitching it together all manually. And that's why Atif was alluding to earlier that it became a spaghetti mess for the customers. And then what happens is, as a result, day two operations, you know, troubleshooting, everything becomes a nightmare. So what do you do? You have to build an infrastructure inside the cloud. Cloud has enough raw capabilities to build the solutions inside there. Netflix's of the world. And many different companies have been born in the cloud and evolved from there. So why could we not take the raw capabilities of the clouds and build a network cloud or a supercloud on top of these clouds to optimize the whole infrastructure and seamlessly connecting it into the on-premise and remote user locations, right? So that's your, you know, hybrid multi-cloud solution. >> Well, great call out on the SD-WAN in common versus cloud. 'Cause I think this is important because you're building a network layer in the cloud that spans out so the customers don't have to get into the, there's a gap in the system that I'm used to, my operating environment, of having lockdown security and network. >> So yeah. So what you do is you use the raw capabilities like bandwidth or virtual machines, or you know, containers, or, you know, different types of serverless capabilities. And you bring it all together in a way to solve the networking problems, thereby creating a supercloud, which is an abstraction layer which hides all the complexity of the underlying clouds from the customer, right? And it provides a common infrastructure across all environments to that customer, right? That's the beauty of it. And it does it in a way that it looks like, if they have the networking knowledge, they can apply it to this new environment and carry it forward. One way of doing security across all clouds and hybrid environments. One way of doing routing. One way of doing large-scale network address translation. One way of doing IPAM services. So people are tired of doing individual things and individual clouds and on-premise locations, right? So now they're getting something common. >> You guys brought that, you brought all that to bear and flexible for the customer to essentially self-serve their network cloud. >> Yes, yeah. Is that the wave? >> And nowadays, from business perspective, agility is the key, right? You have to move at the pace of the business. If you don't, you are losing. >> So, would it be safe to say that you guys have a network supercloud? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> We, pretty much, yeah. Absolutely. >> What does that mean to our customer? What's in it for them? What's the benefit to the customer? I got a network supercloud, it connects, provides SLA, all the capabilities I need. What do they get? What's the end point for them? What's the end? >> Atif, maybe you can talk some examples. >> The IT infrastructure is all like distributed now, right? So you have applications running in data centers. You have applications running in one cloud. Other cloud, public clouds, enterprises are depending on so many SaaS applications. So now, these are, you can call these endpoints. So a supercloud or a network cloud, from our perspective, it's a cloud in the middle or a network in the middle, which provides connectivity from any endpoint to any endpoint. So, you are able to connect to the supercloud or network cloud in one way no matter where you are. So now, whichever cloud you are in, whichever cloud you need to connect to. And also, it's not just connecting to the cloud. So you need to do a lot of stuff, a lot of networking inside the cloud also. So now, as Amir was saying, every cloud has its own from a networking, you know, the concept perspective or the construct, they are different. There are limitations in there also. So this supercloud, which is sitting on top, basically, your platform is sitting into the cloud, but the supercloud is built on top of using your platform. So that abstracts all those complexities, all those limitations. So now your limitations are whatever the limitations of that platform are. So now your platform, that platform is in our control. So we can keep building it, we can keep scaling it horizontally. Because one of the things is that, you know, in this cloud era, one of the things is autoscaling these services. So why can't the network now autoscale also, just like your other services. >> Network autoscaling is a genius idea, and I think that's a killer. I want to ask the the follow on question because I think, first of all, I love what you guys are doing. So, I think it's a great example of this new innovation. It's not obvious until you see it, right? Geographical is huge. So, you know, single instance, global instances, multiple instances, you're seeing global. How do you guys look at that global equation? Because as companies expand their clouds into geos, and then ultimately, you know, it's obviously continent, region and locales. You're going to have geographic issues. So, this is an extension of your network cloud? >> Amir: It is the extension of the network cloud because if you look at this hyperscalers, they're sitting pretty much everywhere in the globe. So, wherever their regions are, the beauty of building a supercloud is that you can by definition, be available in those regions. It literally takes a day or two of testing for our stack to run in those regions, to make sure there are no nuances that we run into, you know, for that region. The moment we bring it up in that region, all customers can onboard into that solution. So literally, what used to take months or years to build a global infrastructure, now, you can configure it in 10 minutes basically, and bring it up in less than one hour. Since when did we see any solution- >> And by the way, >> that can come up with. >> when the edge comes out too, you're going to start to see more clouds get bolted on. >> Exactly. And you can expand to the edge of the network. That's why we call cloud the new edge, right? >> John: Yeah, it is. Now, I think you guys got a good solutions, network clouds, superclouds, good. So the question on the premise side, so I get the cloud play. It's very cool. You can expand out. It's a nice layer. I'm sure you manage the SLAs between latency and all kinds of things. Knowing when not to do things. Physics or physics. Okay. Now, you've got the on-premise. What's the on-premise equation look like? >> So on-premise, the kind of customers, we are working with large enterprises, mid-size enterprises. So they have on-prem networks, they have deployed, in many cases, they have deployed SD-WAN. In many cases, they have MPLS. They have data centers also. And a lot of these companies are, you know, moving the applications from the data center into the cloud. But we still have large enterprise- >> But for you guys, you can sit there too with non server or is it a box or what is it? >> It's a software stack, right? So, we are a software company. >> Okay, so no box. >> No box. >> Okay, got it. >> No box. >> It's even better. So, we can connect any, as I mentioned, any endpoint, whether it's data centers. So, what happens is usually these enterprises from the data centers- >> John: It's a cloud endpoint for you. >> Cloud endpoint for us. And they need highspeed connectivity into the cloud. And our network cloud is sitting inside the or supercloud is sitting inside the cloud. So we need highspeed connectivity from the data centers. This is like multi-gig type of connectivity. So we enable that connectivity as a service. And as Amir was saying, you are able to bring it up in minutes, pretty much. >> John: Well, you guys have a great handle on supercloud. I really appreciate you guys coming on. I have to ask you guys, since you have so much experience in the industry, multiple inflection points you've guys lived through and we're all old, and we can remember those glory days. What's the big deal going on right now? Because you can connect the dots and you can imagine, okay, like a Lambda function spinning up some connectivity. I need instant access to a new route, throw some, I need to send compute to an edge point for process data. A lot of these kind of ad hoc services are going to start flying around, which used to be manually configured as you guys remember. >> Amir: And that's been the problem, right? The shadow IT, that was the biggest problem in the enterprise environment. So that's what we are trying to get the customers away from. Cloud teams came in, individuals or small groups of people spun up instances in the cloud. It was completely disconnected from the on-premise environment or the existing IT environment that the customer had. So, how do you bring it together? And that's what we are trying to solve for, right? At a large scale, in a carrier cloud center (indistinct). >> What do you call that? Shift right or shift left? Shift left is in the cloud native world security. >> Amir: Yes. >> Networking and security, the two hottest areas. What are you shifting? Up or down? I mean, the network's moving up the stack. I mean, you're seeing the run times at Kubernetes later' >> Amir: Right, right. It's true we're end-to-end virtualization. So you have plumbing, which is the physical infrastructure. Then on top of that, now for the first time, you have true end-to-end virtualization, which the cloud-like constructs are providing to us. We tried to virtualize the routers, we try to virtualize instances at the server level. Now, we are bringing it all together in a truly end-to-end virtualized manner to connect any endpoint anywhere across the globe. Whether it's on-premise, home, multiple clouds, or SaaS type environments. >> Yeah. If you talk about the technical benefits beyond virtualizations, you kind of see in virtualization be abstracted away. So you got end-to-end virtualization, but you don't need to know virtualization to take advantage of it. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> What are some of the tech involved where, what's the trend around on top of virtual? What's the easy button for that? >> So there are many, many use cases from the customers and they're, you know, some of those use cases, they used to deliver out of their data centers before. So now, because you, know, it takes a long time to spend something up in the data center and stuff. So the trend is and what enterprises are looking for is agility. And to achieve that agility, they are moving those services or those use cases into the cloud. So another technical benefit of like something like a supercloud and what we are doing is we allow customers to, you know, move their services from existing data centers into the cloud as well. And I'll give you some examples. You know, these enterprises have, you know, tons of partners. They provide connectivity to their partners, to select resources. It used to happen inside the data center. You would bring in connectivity into the data center and apply like tons of ACLs and whatnot to make sure that you are able to only connect. And now those use cases are, they need to be enabled inside the cloud. And the customer's customers are also, it's not just coming from the on-prem, they're coming from the cloud as well. So, if they're coming from the cloud as well as from on-prem, so you need like an infrastructure like supercloud, which is sitting inside the cloud and is able to handle all these use cases. So all of these use cases have to be, so that requires like moving those services from the data center into the cloud or into the supercloud. So, they're, oh, as we started building this service over the last four years, we have come across so many use cases. And to deliver those use cases, you have to have a platform. So you have to have your own platform because otherwise you are depending on somebody else's, you know, capabilities. And every time their capabilities change, you have to change. >> John: I'm glad you brought up the platform 'cause I want to get your both reaction to this. So Bob Muglia just said on theCUBE here at Supercloud, that supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question is, is supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> That's an interesting view on things, you know? I mean, if you think of it, you have to design or architect a solution before we turn it into a platform. >> John: It's a trick question actually. >> So it's a, you know, so we look at it as that you have to have an architectural approach end to end, right? And then you build a solution based on that approach. So, I don't think that they are mutually exclusive. I think they go hand in hand. It's an architecture that you turn into a solution and provide that agility and high availability and disaster recovery capability that it built into that. >> It's interesting that these definitions might be actually redefined with this new configuration. >> Amir: Yes. >> Because architecture and platform used to mean something, like, aight here's a platform, you buy this platform. >> And then you architecture solution. >> Architect it via vendor. >> Right, right, right. >> Okay. And they have to deal with that architecture in the place of multiple superclouds. If you have too many stove pipes, then what's the purpose of supercloud? >> Right, right, right. And because, you know, historically, you built a router and you sold it to the customer. And the poor customer was supposed to install it all, you know, and interconnect all those things. And if you have 40, 50,000 router network, which we saw in our lifetime, 'cause there used to be many more branches when we were growing up in the networking industry, right? You had to create hierarchy and all kinds of things to figure out how to solve that problem. We are no longer living in that world anymore. You cannot deploy individual virtual instances. And that's what approach a lot of people are taking, which is a pure overly network. You cannot take that approach anymore. You have to evolve the architecture and then build the solution based on that architecture so that it becomes a platform which is readily available, highly scalable, and available. And at the same time, it's very, very easy to deploy. It's a SaaS type solution, right? >> So you're saying, do the architecture to get the solution for the platform that the customer has. >> Amir: Yes. >> They're not buying a platform, they end up with a platform- >> With the platform. >> as a result of Supercloud path. All right. So that's what's, so you mentioned, that's a great point. I want to double click on what you just said. 'Cause I like that what you said. What's the deployment strategy in your mind for supercloud? I'm an architect. I'm at an enterprise in the Midwest. I'm an insurance company, got some cloud action going on. I'm mostly on-premise. I've got the mandate to transform the company. We have apps. We'll be fully transformed in five years. What's my strategy? What do I do? >> Amir: The resources. >> What's the deployment strategy? Single global instance, code in every region, on every cloud? >> It needs to be a solution which is available as a SaaS service, right? So from the customer's perspective, they are onboarding into the supercloud. And then the supercloud is allowing them to do whatever they used to do, you know, historically and in the new world, right? That needs to come together. And that's what we have built is that, we have brought everything together in a way that what used to take months or years, and now taking an hour or two hours, and then people test it for a week or so and deploy it in production. >> I want to bring up something we were talking about before we were on camera about the TCP/IP, the OSI model. That was a concept that destroyed the proprietary narcissist. Work operating systems of the mini computers, which brought in an era of tech prosperity for generations. TCP/IP was kind of the magical moment that allowed for that kind of super networking connection. Inter networking is what's called as a category. It feels like something's going on here with supercloud. The way you describe it, it feels like there's this unification idea. Like the reality is we've got multiple stuff sitting around by default, you either clean it up or get rid of it, right? Or it's almost a, it's either a nuance, a new nuisance or chaos. >> Yeah. And we live in the new world now. We don't have the luxury of time. So we need to move as fast as possible to solve the business problems. And that's what we are running into. If we don't have automated solutions which scale, which solve our problems, then it's going to be a problem. And that's why SaaS is so important in today's world. Why should we have to deploy the network piecemeal? Why can't we have a solution? We solve our problem as we move forward and we accomplish what we need to accomplish and move forward. >> And we don't really need standards here, dude. It's not that we need a standards body if you have unification. >> So because things move so fast, there's no time to create a standards body. And that's why you see companies like ours popping up, which are trying to create a common infrastructure across all clouds. Otherwise if we vent the standardization path may take long. Eventually, we should be going in that direction. But we don't have the luxury of time. That's what I was trying to get to. >> Well, what's interesting is, is that to your point about standards and ratification, what ratifies a defacto anything? In the old days there was some technical bodies involved, but here, I think developers drive everything. So if you look at the developers and how they're voting with their code. They're instantly, organically defining everything as a collective intelligence. >> And just like you're putting out the paper and making it available, everybody's contributing to that. That's why you need to have APIs and terra form type constructs, which are available so that the customers can continue to improve upon that. And that's the Net DevOps, right? So that you need to have. >> What was once sacrilege, just sayin', in business school, back in the days when I got my business degree after my CS degree was, you know, no one wants to have a better mousetrap, a bad business model to have a better mouse trap. In this case, the better mouse trap, the better solution actually could be that thing. >> It is that thing. >> I mean, that can trigger, tips over the industry. >> And that that's where we are seeing our customers. You know, I mean, we have some publicly referenceable customers like Coke or Warner Music Group or, you know, multiple others and chart industries. The way we are solving the problem. They have some of the largest environments in the industry from the cloud perspective. And their whole network infrastructure is running on the Alkira infrastructure. And they're able to adopt new clouds within days rather than waiting for months to architect and then deploy and then figure out how to manage it and operate it. It's available as a service. >> John: And we've heard from your customer, Warner, they were just on the program. >> Amir: Yes. Okay, okay. >> So they're building a supercloud. So superclouds aren't just for tech companies. >> Amir: No. >> You guys build a supercloud for networking. >> Amir: It is. >> But people are building their own superclouds on top of all this new stuff. Talk about that dynamic. >> Healthcare providers, financials, high-tech companies, even startups. One of our startup customers, Tekion, right? They have these dealerships that they provide sales and support services to across the globe. And for them to be able to onboard those dealerships, it is 80% less time to production. That is real money, right? So, maybe Atif can give you a lot more examples of customers who are deploying. >> Talk about some of the customer activity. What are they like? Are they laggards, they innovators? Are they trying to hit the easy button? Are they coming in late or are you got some high customers? >> Actually most of our customers, all of our customers or customers in general. I don't think they have a choice but to move in this direction because, you know, the cloud has, like everything is quick now. So the cloud teams are moving faster in these enterprises. So now that they cannot afford the network nor to keep up pace with the cloud teams. So, they don't have a choice but to go with something similar where you can, you know, build your network on demand and bring up your network as quickly as possible to meet all those use cases. So, I'll give you an example. >> John: So the demand's high for what you guys do. >> Demand is very high because the cloud teams have- >> John: Yeah. They're going fast. >> They're going fast and there's no stopping. And then network teams, they have to keep up with them. And you cannot keep deploying, you know, networks the way you used to deploy back in the day. And as far as the use cases are concerned, there are so many use cases which our customers are using our platform for. One of the use cases, I'll give you an example of these financial customers. Some of the financial customers, they have their customers who they provide data, like stock exchanges, that provide like market data information to their customers out of data centers part. But now, their customers are moving into the cloud as well. So they need to come in from the cloud. So when they're coming in from the cloud, you cannot be giving them data from your data center because that takes time, and your hair pinning everything back. >> Moving data is like moving, moving money, someone said. >> Exactly. >> Exactly. And the other thing is like you have to optimize your traffic flows in the cloud as well because every time you leave the cloud, you get charged a lot. So, you don't want to leave the cloud unless you have to leave the cloud, your traffic. So, you have to come up or use a service which allows you to optimize all those traffic flows as well, you know? >> My final question to you guys, first of all, thanks for coming on Supercloud Program. Really appreciate it. Congratulations on your success. And you guys have a great positioning and I'm a big fan. And I have to ask, you guys are agile, nimble startup, smart on the cutting edge. Supercloud concept seems to resonate with people who are kind of on the front range of this major wave. While all the incumbents like Cisco, Microsoft, even AWS, they're like, I think they're looking at it, like what is that? I think it's coming up really fast, this trend. Because I know people talk about multi-cloud, I get that. But like, this whole supercloud is not just SaaS, it's more going on there. What do you think is going on between the folks who get it, supercloud, get the concept, and some are who are scratching their heads, whether it's the Ciscos or someone, like I don't get it. Why is supercloud important for the folks that aren't really seeing it? >> So first of all, I mean, the customers, what we saw about six months, 12 months ago, were a little slower to adopt the supercloud kind of concept. And there were leading edge customers who were coming and adopting it. Now, all of a sudden, over the last six to nine months, we've seen a flurry of customers coming in and they are from all disciplines or all very diverse set of customers. And they're starting to see the value of that because of the practical implications of what they're doing. You know, these shadow IT type environments are no longer working and there's a lot of pressure from the management to move faster. And then that's where they're coming in. And perhaps, Atif, if you can give a few examples of. >> Yeah. And I'll also just add to your point earlier about the network needing to be there 'cause the cloud teams are like, let's go faster. And the network's always been slow because, but now, it's been almost turbocharged. >> Atif: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And as I said, like there was no choice here. You had to move in this industry. And the other thing I would add a little bit is now if you look at all these enterprises, most of their traffic is from, even from which is coming from the on-prem, it's going to the cloud SaaS applications or public clouds. And it's more than 50% of traffic, which is leaving your, you know, what you used to call, your network or the private network. So now it's like, you know, before it used to just connect sites to data centers and sites together. Now, it's a cloud as well as the SaaS application. So it's either internet bound or the public cloud bound. So now you have to build a network quickly, which caters to all these use cases. And that's where like something- >> And you guys, your solution to me is you eliminate all that work for the customer. Now, they can treat the cloud like a bag of Legos. And do their thing. Well, I oversimplify. Well, you know I'm talking about. >> Atif: Right, exactly. >> And to answer your question earlier about what about the big companies coming in and, you know, now they slow to adopt? And, you know, what normally happens is when Cisco came up, right? There used to be 16 different protocols suites. And then we finally settled on TCP/IP and DECnet or AppleTalk or X&S or, you know, you name it, right? Those companies did not adapt to the networking the way it was supposed to be done. And guess what happened, right? So if the companies in the networking space do not adopt this new concept or new way of doing things, I think some of them will become extinct over time. >> Well, I think the force and function too is the cloud teams as well. So you got two evolutions. You got architectural relevance. That's real as impact. >> It's very important. >> Cost, speed. >> And I look at it as a very similar disruption to what Cisco's the world, very early days did to, you know, bring the networking out, right? And it became the internet. But now we are going through the cloud. It's the cloud era, right? How does the cloud evolve over the next 10, 15, 20 years? Everything's is going to be offered as a service, right? So slowly data centers go away, the network becomes a plumbing thing. Very, you know, simple to deploy. And everything on top of that is virtualized in the cloud-like manners. >> And that makes the networks hardened and more secure. >> More secure. >> It's a great way to be secure. You remember the glory days, we'll go back 15 years. The Cisco conversation was, we got to move up to stack. All the manager would fight each other. Now, what does that actually mean? Stay where we are. Stay in your lane. This is kind of like the network's version of moving up the stack because not so much up the stack, but the cloud is everywhere. It's almost horizontally scaled. >> It's extending into the on-premise. It is already moving towards the edge, right? So, you will see a lot- >> So, programmability is a big program. So you guys are hitting programmability, compatibility, getting people into an environment they're comfortable operating. So the Ops people love it. >> Exactly. >> Spans the clouds to a level of SLA management. It might not be perfectly spanning applications, but you can actually know latencies between clouds, measure that. And then so you're basically managing your network now as the overall infrastructure. >> Right. And it needs to be a very intelligent infrastructure going forward, right? Because customers do not want to wait to be able to troubleshoot. They don't want to be able to wait to deploy something, right? So, it needs to be a level of automation. >> Okay. So the question for you guys both on we'll end on is what is the enablement that, because you guys are a disruptive enabler, right? You create this fabric. You're going to enable companies to do stuff. What are some of the things that you see and your customers might be seeing as things that they're going to do as a result of having this enablement? So what are some of those things? >> Amir: Atif, perhaps you can talk through the some of the customer experience on that. >> It's agility. And we are allowing these customers to move very, very quickly and build these networks which meet all these requirements inside the cloud. Because as Amir was saying, in the cloud era, networking is changing. And if you look at, you know, going back to your comment about the existing networking vendors. Some of them still think that, you know, just connecting to the cloud using some concepts like Cloud OnRamp is cloud networking, but it's changing now. >> John: 'Cause there's apps that are depending upon. >> Exactly. And it's all distributed. Like IT infrastructure, as I said earlier, is all distributed. And at the end of the day, you have to make sure that wherever your user is, wherever your app is, you are able to connect them securely. >> Historically, it used to be about building a router bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, and then interconnecting those routers. Now, it's all about horizontal scale. You don't need to build big, you need to scale it, right? And that's what cloud brings to the customer. >> It's a cultural change for Cisco and Juniper because they have to understand that they're still could be in the game and still win. >> Exactly. >> The question I have for you, what are your customers telling you that, what's some of the anecdotal, like, 'cause you guys have a good solution, is it, "Oh my god, you guys saved my butt." Or what are some of the commentary that you hear from the customers in terms of praise and and glory from your solution? >> Oh, some even say, when we do our demo and stuff, they say it's too hard to believe. >> Believe. >> Like, too hard. It's hard, you know, it's >> I dont believe you. They're skeptics. >> I don't believe you that because now you're able to bring up a global network within minutes. With networking services, like let's say you have APAC, you know, on-prem users, cloud also there, cloud here, users here, you can bring up a global network with full routed connectivity between all these endpoints with security services. You can bring up like a firewall from a third party or our services in the middle. This is a matter of minutes now. And this is all high speed connectivity with SLAs. Imagine like before connecting, you know, Singapore to U.S. East or Hong Kong to Frankfurt, you know, if you were putting your infrastructure in columns like E-connects, you would have to go, you know, figure out like, how am I going to- >> Seal line In, connect to it? Yeah. A lot of hassles, >> If you had to put like firewalls in the middle, segmentation, you had to, you know, isolate different entities. >> That's called heavy lifting. >> So what you're seeing is, you know, it's like customer comes in, there's a disbelief, can you really do that? And then they try it out, they go, "Wow, this works." Right? It's deployed in a small environment. And then all of a sudden they start taking off, right? And literally we have seen customers go from few thousand dollars a month or year type deployments to multi-million dollars a year type deployments in very, very short amount of time, in a few months. >> And you guys are pay as you go? >> Pay as you go. >> Pay as go usage cloud-based compatibility. >> Exactly. And it's amazing once they get to deploy the solution. >> What's the variable on the cost? >> On the cost? >> Is it traffic or is it. >> It's multiple different things. It's packaged into the overall solution. And as a matter of fact, we end up saving a lot of money to the customers. And not only in one way, in multiple different ways. And we do a complete TOI analysis for the customers. So it's bandwidth, it's number of connections, it's the amount of compute power that we are using. >> John: Similar things that they're used to. >> Just like the cloud constructs. Yeah. >> All right. Networking supercloud. Great. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for coming on Supercloud. >> Atif: Thank you. >> And looking forward to seeing more of the demand. Translate, instant networking. I'm sure it's going to be huge with the edge exploding. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. So this is Supercloud 2 event here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. The network Supercloud is here. Checkout Alkira. I'm John Furry, the host. Thanks for watching. (lively music)

>>Hey, welcome back everyone. Day three of eight of us Reinvent 2022. I'm John Farmer with Dave Volante, co-host the q Dave. 10 years for us, the leader in high tech coverage is our slogan. Now 10 years of reinvent day. We've been to every single one except with the original, which we would've come to if Amazon actually marketed the event, but they didn't. It's more of a customer event. This is day three. Is the machine learning ai keynote sws up there. A lot of announcements. We're gonna break this down. We got, we got Andy Thra here, vice President, prince Constellation Research. Andy, great to see you've been on the cube before one of our analysts bringing the, bringing the, the analysis, commentary to the keynote. This is your wheelhouse. Ai. What do you think about Swami up there? I mean, he's awesome. We love him. Big fan Oh yeah. Of of the Cuban we're fans of him, but he got 13 announcements. >>A lot. A lot, >>A lot. >>So, well some of them are, first of all, thanks for having me here and I'm glad to have both of you on the same show attacking me. I'm just kidding. But some of the announcement really sort of like a game changer announcements and some of them are like, meh, you know, just to plug in the holes what they have and a lot of golf claps. Yeah. Meeting today. And you could have also noticed that by, when he was making the announcements, you know, the, the, the clapping volume difference, you could say, which is better, right? But some of the announcements are, are really, really good. You know, particularly we talked about, one of that was Microsoft took that out of, you know, having the open AI in there, doing the large language models. And then they were going after that, you know, having the transformer available to them. And Amazon was a little bit weak in the area, so they couldn't, they don't have a large language model. So, you know, they, they are taking a different route saying that, you know what, I'll help you train the large language model by yourself, customized models. So I can provide the necessary instance. I can provide the instant volume, memory, the whole thing. Yeah. So you can train the model by yourself without depending on them kind >>Of thing. So Dave and Andy, I wanna get your thoughts cuz first of all, we've been following Amazon's deep bench on the, on the infrastructure pass. They've been doing a lot of machine learning and ai, a lot of data. It just seems that the sentiment is that there's other competitors doing a good job too. Like Google, Dave. And I've heard folks in the hallway, even here, ex Amazonians saying, Hey, they're train their models on Google than they bring up the SageMaker cuz it's better interface. So you got, Google's making a play for being that data cloud. Microsoft's obviously putting in a, a great kind of package to kind of make it turnkey. How do they really stand versus the competition guys? >>Good question. So they, you know, each have their own uniqueness and the we variation that take it to the field, right? So for example, if you were to look at it, Microsoft is known for as industry or later things that they are been going after, you know, industry verticals and whatnot. So that's one of the things I looked here, you know, they, they had this omic announcement, particularly towards that healthcare genomics space. That's a huge space for hpz related AIML applications. And they have put a lot of things in together in here in the SageMaker and in the, in their models saying that, you know, how do you, how do you use this transmit to do things like that? Like for example, drug discovery, for genomics analysis, for cancer treatment, the whole, right? That's a few volumes of data do. So they're going in that healthcare area. Google has taken a different route. I mean they want to make everything simple. All I have to do is I gotta call an api, give what I need and then get it done. But Amazon wants to go at a much deeper level saying that, you know what? I wanna provide everything you need. You can customize the whole thing for what you need. >>So to me, the big picture here is, and and Swami references, Hey, we are a data company. We started, he talked about books and how that informed them as to, you know, what books to place front and center. Here's the, here's the big picture. In my view, companies need to put data at the core of their business and they haven't, they've generally put humans at the core of their business and data. And now machine learning are at the, at the outside and the periphery. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook have put data at their core. So the question is how do incumbent companies, and you mentioned some Toyota Capital One, Bristol Myers Squibb, I don't know, are those data companies, you know, we'll see, but the challenge is most companies don't have the resources as you well know, Andy, to actually implement what Google and Facebook and others have. >>So how are they gonna do that? Well, they're gonna buy it, right? So are they gonna build it with tools that's kind of like you said the Amazon approach or are they gonna buy it from Microsoft and Google, I pulled some ETR data to say, okay, who are the top companies that are showing up in terms of spending? Who's spending with whom? AWS number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three, data bricks. Number four, just in terms of, you know, presence. And then it falls down DataRobot, Anaconda data icu, Oracle popped up actually cuz they're embedding a lot of AI into their products and, and of course IBM and then a lot of smaller companies. But do companies generally customers have the resources to do what it takes to implement AI into applications and into workflows? >>So a couple of things on that. One is when it comes to, I mean it's, it's no surprise that the, the top three or the hyperscalers, because they all want to bring their business to them to run the specific workloads on the next biggest workload. As you was saying, his keynote are two things. One is the A AIML workloads and the other one is the, the heavy unstructured workloads that he was talking about. 80%, 90% of the data that's coming off is unstructured. So how do you analyze that? Such as the geospatial data. He was talking about the volumes of data you need to analyze the, the neural deep neural net drug you ought to use, only hyperscale can do it, right? So that's no wonder all of them on top for the data, one of the things they announced, which not many people paid attention, there was a zero eight L that that they talked about. >>What that does is a little bit of a game changing moment in a sense that you don't have to, for example, if you were to train the data, data, if the data is distributed everywhere, if you have to bring them all together to integrate it, to do that, it's a lot of work to doing the dl. So by taking Amazon, Aurora, and then Rich combine them as zero or no ETL and then have Apaches Apaches Spark applications run on top of analytical applications, ML workloads. That's huge. So you don't have to move around the data, use the data where it is, >>I, I think you said it, they're basically filling holes, right? Yeah. They created this, you know, suite of tools, let's call it. You might say it's a mess. It's not a mess because it's, they're really powerful but they're not well integrated and now they're starting to take the seams as I say. >>Well yeah, it's a great point. And I would double down and say, look it, I think that boring is good. You know, we had that phase in Kubernetes hype cycle where it got boring and that was kind of like, boring is good. Boring means we're getting better, we're invisible. That's infrastructure that's in the weeds, that's in between the toes details. It's the stuff that, you know, people we have to get done. So, you know, you look at their 40 new data sources with data Wrangler 50, new app flow connectors, Redshift Auto Cog, this is boring. Good important shit Dave. The governance, you gotta get it and the governance is gonna be key. So, so to me, this may not jump off the page. Adam's keynote also felt a little bit of, we gotta get these gaps done in a good way. So I think that's a very positive sign. >>Now going back to the bigger picture, I think the real question is can there be another independent cloud data cloud? And that's the, to me, what I try to get at my story and you're breaking analysis kind of hit a home run on this, is there's interesting opportunity for an independent data cloud. Meaning something that isn't aws, that isn't, Google isn't one of the big three that could sit in. And so let me give you an example. I had a conversation last night with a bunch of ex Amazonian engineering teams that left the conversation was interesting, Dave. They were like talking, well data bricks and Snowflake are basically batch, okay, not transactional. And you look at Aerospike, I can see their booth here. Transactional data bases are hot right now. Streaming data is different. Confluence different than data bricks. Is data bricks good at hosting? >>No, Amazon's better. So you start to see these kinds of questions come up where, you know, data bricks is great, but maybe not good for this, that and the other thing. So you start to see the formation of swim lanes or visibility into where people might sit in the ecosystem, but what came out was transactional. Yep. And batch the relationship there and streaming real time and versus you know, the transactional data. So you're starting to see these new things emerge. Andy, what do you, what's your take on this? You're following this closely. This seems to be the alpha nerd conversation and it all points to who's gonna have the best data cloud, say data, super clouds, I call it. What's your take? >>Yes, data cloud is important as well. But also the computational that goes on top of it too, right? Because when, when the data is like unstructured data, it's that much of a huge data, it's going to be hard to do that with a low model, you know, compute power. But going back to your data point, the training of the AIML models required the batch data, right? That's when you need all the, the historical data to train your models. And then after that, when you do inference of it, that's where you need the streaming real time data that's available to you too. You can make an inference. One of the things, what, what they also announced, which is somewhat interesting, is you saw that they have like 700 different instances geared towards every single workload. And there are some of them very specifically run on the Amazon's new chip. The, the inference in two and theran tr one chips that basically not only has a specific instances but also is run on a high powered chip. And then if you have that data to support that, both the training as well as towards the inference, the efficiency, again, those numbers have to be proven. They claim that it could be anywhere between 40 to 60% faster. >>Well, so a couple things. You're definitely right. I mean Snowflake started out as a data warehouse that was simpler and it's not architected, you know, in and it's first wave to do real time inference, which is not now how, how could they, the other second point is snowflake's two or three years ahead when it comes to governance, data sharing. I mean, Amazon's doing what always does. It's copying, you know, it's customer driven. Cuz they probably walk into an account and they say, Hey look, what's Snowflake's doing for us? This stuff's kicking ass. And they go, oh, that's a good idea, let's do that too. You saw that with separating compute from storage, which is their tiering. You saw it today with extending data, sharing Redshift, data sharing. So how does Snowflake and data bricks approach this? They deal with ecosystem. They bring in ecosystem partners, they bring in open source tooling and that's how they compete. I think there's unquestionably an opportunity for a data cloud. >>Yeah, I think, I think the super cloud conversation and then, you know, sky Cloud with Berkeley Paper and other folks talking about this kind of pre, multi-cloud era. I mean that's what I would call us right now. We are, we're kind of in the pre era of multi-cloud, which by the way is not even yet defined. I think people use that term, Dave, to say, you know, some sort of magical thing that's happening. Yeah. People have multiple clouds. They got, they, they end up by default, not by design as Dell likes to say. Right? And they gotta deal with it. So it's more of they're inheriting multiple cloud environments. It's not necessarily what they want in the situation. So to me that is a big, big issue. >>Yeah, I mean, again, going back to your snowflake and data breaks announcements, they're a data company. So they, that's how they made their mark in the market saying that, you know, I do all those things, therefore you have, I had to have your data because it's a seamless data. And, and Amazon is catching up with that with a lot of that announcements they made, how far it's gonna get traction, you know, to change when I to say, >>Yeah, I mean to me, to me there's no doubt about Dave. I think, I think what Swamee is doing, if Amazon can get corner the market on out of the box ML and AI capabilities so that people can make it easier, that's gonna be the end of the day tell sign can they fill in the gaps. Again, boring is good competition. I don't know mean, mean I'm not following the competition. Andy, this is a real question mark for me. I don't know where they stand. Are they more comprehensive? Are they more deeper? Are they have deeper services? I mean, obviously shows to all the, the different, you know, capabilities. Where, where, where does Amazon stand? What's the process? >>So what, particularly when it comes to the models. So they're going at, at a different angle that, you know, I will help you create the models we talked about the zero and the whole data. We'll get the data sources in, we'll create the model. We'll move the, the whole model. We are talking about the ML ops teams here, right? And they have the whole functionality that, that they built ind over the year. So essentially they want to become the platform that I, when you come in, I'm the only platform you would use from the model training to deployment to inference, to model versioning to management, the old s and that's angle they're trying to take. So it's, it's a one source platform. >>What about this idea of technical debt? Adrian Carro was on yesterday. John, I know you talked to him as well. He said, look, Amazon's Legos, you wanna buy a toy for Christmas, you can go out and buy a toy or do you wanna build a, to, if you buy a toy in a couple years, you could break and what are you gonna do? You're gonna throw it out. But if you, if you, if part of your Lego needs to be extended, you extend it. So, you know, George Gilbert was saying, well, there's a lot of technical debt. Adrian was countering that. Does Amazon have technical debt or is that Lego blocks analogy the right one? >>Well, I talked to him about the debt and one of the things we talked about was what do you optimize for E two APIs or Kubernetes APIs? It depends on what team you're on. If you're on the runtime gene, you're gonna optimize for Kubernetes, but E two is the resources you want to use. So I think the idea of the 15 years of technical debt, I, I don't believe that. I think the APIs are still hardened. The issue that he brings up that I think is relevant is it's an end situation, not an or. You can have the bag of Legos, which is the primitives and build a durable application platform, monitor it, customize it, work with it, build it. It's harder, but the outcome is durability and sustainability. Building a toy, having a toy with those Legos glued together for you, you can get the play with, but it'll break over time. Then you gotta replace it. So there's gonna be a toy business and there's gonna be a Legos business. Make your own. >>So who, who are the toys in ai? >>Well, out of >>The box and who's outta Legos? >>The, so you asking about what what toys Amazon building >>Or, yeah, I mean Amazon clearly is Lego blocks. >>If people gonna have out the box, >>What about Google? What about Microsoft? Are they basically more, more building toys, more solutions? >>So Google is more of, you know, building solutions angle like, you know, I give you an API kind of thing. But, but if it comes to vertical industry solutions, Microsoft is, is is ahead, right? Because they have, they have had years of indu industry experience. I mean there are other smaller cloud are trying to do that too. IBM being an example, but you know, the, now they are starting to go after the specific industry use cases. They think that through, for example, you know the medical one we talked about, right? So they want to build the, the health lake, security health lake that they're trying to build, which will HIPPA and it'll provide all the, the European regulations, the whole line yard, and it'll help you, you know, personalize things as you need as well. For example, you know, if you go for a certain treatment, it could analyze you based on your genome profile saying that, you know, the treatment for this particular person has to be individualized this way, but doing that requires a anomalous power, right? So if you do applications like that, you could bring in a lot of the, whether healthcare, finance or what have you, and then easy for them to use. >>What's the biggest mistake customers make when it comes to machine intelligence, ai, machine learning, >>So many things, right? I could start out with even the, the model. Basically when you build a model, you, you should be able to figure out how long that model is effective. Because as good as creating a model and, and going to the business and doing things the right way, there are people that they leave the model much longer than it's needed. It's hurting your business more than it is, you know, it could be things like that. Or you are, you are not building a responsibly or later things. You are, you are having a bias and you model and are so many issues. I, I don't know if I can pinpoint one, but there are many, many issues. Responsible ai, ethical ai. All >>Right, well, we'll leave it there. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage here at J three at reinvent. I'm Jeff, Dave Ante. Andy joining us here for the critical analysis and breaking down the commentary. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.

>>Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's Live coverage. I'm John Fur, host of the Cube. We got two sets here, three sets total. Another one in the executive center. It's our 10th year covering AWS Reinvent. I remember 2013 like it was yesterday. You know, now it's a massive of people buying out restaurants. 35,000 people now it's 55,000, soon to be 70,000 back. Great event. Continuing to set the standard in the industry. We had an amazing guest here, Leah Bibo, vice President of Product Marketing. She's in charge of the messaging, the product, overseeing how these products gonna market. Leah, great to see you. Thanks for joining me on the Cube today. >>Absolutely. It's great to be here. It's also my 10 reinvent, so it's, it's been a wild ride. >>Absolutely. Yeah. You and I were talking before we came on camera, how much we love products and yes, this is a product-centric company, has been from day one and you know, over the years watching the announcements, the tsunami of announcements, just all the innovation that's come out from AWS over the years has been staggering to say the least. Everyone always jokes about, oh my God, 5,000 new announcements, over 200 services you're managing and you're marketing them. It's pretty crazy right now. And Adam, as he comes on, as I called them, the solutions CEO on my piece I wrote on Friday, we're in an era where solutions, the products are enabling more solutions. Unpack the messaging around this cuz this is really big moment for aws. >>Absolutely. Well, I'll say first of all that we are a customer focused company that happens to be really good at innovating incredible products and services for our customers. So today the, the energy in the room and what Adam talked about, I think is focused on a few great things for customers that are really important for transformation. So we talked a lot about best price performance for workloads and we talked about extreme workloads, but if you think about the work that we've been doing to innovate on the silicon side, we're really talking about with Graviton all your workloads and getting really great price performance for all of them. You know, we came out with graviton three 25% faster than graviton two, also 60% more energy efficient. We talked about something that is emerging that I think is gonna be really big, which is simulation and really the ability to model these complex worlds and all the little interactions, which I think, you know, in the future as we have more complex environments like 3D simulation is gonna be a bigger part of every, every business's >>Business. You know, just as an aside, we were talking on the analyst segment that speeds and feeds are back and the old days and the data center days was like, we don't wanna talk about speeds and feeds about solutions and you know, the outcomes when you get the cloud, it was like, okay, get the workloads over there, but people want faster and lower cost performance workloads gotta be running at at high performance. And, and there's a real discussion around those. Let's unpack security data performance. What, what does that mean for customers? Because again, I get the workloads run fast. That's great. What else is behind the curtain, so to speak from a customer standpoint? >>Absolutely. Well I think if you're gonna move all your workloads to the cloud, you know, security is a really big area that's important. It's important to every one of our enterprise companies customers. Actually it's important to all of our customers and we've been working, you know, since the beginning of AWS to really create and build the most secure global infrastructure. And you know, as our customers have moved mission critical workloads, we've built out a lot more capabilities and now we have a whole portfolio of security services. And what we announced today is kind of game changing. The service called Security Lake, which brings together, you know, an ecosystem of security data in a format that's open. So you can share data between all of these sources and it's gonna give folks the opportunity to really be able to analyze data, find threats faster, and just kind of know their security posture. And I think, you know, as we talked about today, you don't wanna think about the cloud as unfathomable, the unfathomable, you really need to know that security. And I think that like a lot of things we discussed, security is a data opportunity, right? And I think we, we had a section on on data, but really if you look at the keynote across security, across solutions, across the purpose built things we made, it's all, it all comes down to data and it's really the, the transformational element that our customers >>Are. I mean the data secured is very integral part good call out there. And I, I wanna just double down on that real quick because I remember in 2014 I interviewed Steven Schmidt when he was the CSOs and back then in 2014, if you remember the conversation was this, the clouds not secure, gotta be on premises. Now in today's keynote, Adam says, and he laid out the whole global security footprint. There's a lot going on that Amazon has now become more secure than on-prem. He actually made that statement. So, and then plus you got thousands of security partners, third party partners, you got the open cyber security framework which you guys co-found with all the other, so you got securities not as a team sport, this is what they, they said yes, yes. What does that mean for customers? Because now this is a big deal. >>Well I think for customers, I mean it means nothing but goodness, right? But all of these thousands of security partners have really innovated and created solutions that our customers are using. But they all have different types of data in different silos. And to really get a full picture bringing all that data together is really important. And it's not easy today. You know, log data from different sources, data from detection services and really what customers want is an easier way to get it all together. Which is why we have the open OCS F and really analyze using the tools of their choice. And whether that's AWS tools for analytics or it's tools from our partners, customers need to be able to make that choice so that they can feel like their applications and their workloads are the most secure on aws. >>You know, I've been very impressed with guard duty and I've been following Merit Bear's blogs on online. She's in the security team, she's amazing. Shout out to her. She's been pushing guard duty for a long time now there's big news around guard duty. So you got EKS protection, you know, at Coan this was the biggest cloud native issue, the runtime of Kubernetes and inside the container and outside the container detection of threats, right? As a real software supply chain concern. How are you guys marketing that? This is a huge announcement. EKS protection I know is very nuanced but it's pretty big deal. >>It is a big deal. It is a big deal. And guard duty has been kind of like a quiet service that maybe you don't hear a lot about, but has been really, really popular with our customers. Adam mentioned that 85% of, you know, our top 2000 customers are using guard duty today. And it was a big moment. We launched EKS protection, you know, a little bit earlier and the customer uptake on that has been really incredible. And it is because you can protect your Kubernetes cluster, which is really important because so many customers are, you know, part of their migration to the cloud is containers. Yeah. And so we're pretty excited that now we can answer that question of what's going on inside the container. And so you have both, yeah, right. You know that your Kubernetes pluses are good and you know what's going on inside the container and it's just more threats that you can detect and protect >>Yourself from. You know, as an aside, I'm sure you're watching this, but you know, we go to a lot of events, you know, the C I C D pipeline as developers are getting higher velocity coding, it has moved in because of DevOps on the cloud into the C I C D pipeline. So you're seeing that developer takes some of those IT roles in the coding workflow, hence the, the shift left and or container security, which you guys now, now and are driving towards. But the security and the data teams are emerging as a very key element inside the organizational structure. When I sat down with Adam, one of the things he was very adamant about in my conversation was not just digital transformation, business transformation, structural organizational moves are making where it's not a department anymore, it is the company, a technology is the company when you transform. Absolutely. So digital is the process, business is the outcome. This is a really huge message. What's your reaction to that? What's, what can you share extra cuz that's, this is a big part of the thing. He hit it right outta the gate on the front end of the keynote. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean I think, you know, companies have been migrating to the cloud for a while, but I think that this time that we're going through has really accelerated that migration And as part of that, you know, digital transformation has become real for a lot of companies. And it is true what Adam said there is technology transformation involved, there's data transformation involved, but it, it is transforming businesses. And I think if you look at some of the things that Adam talked about, you know, aws, supply chain, security Lake, aws clean rooms, and Omic, aws, omic, you know, those are all examples of data and the ability to work with data transforming different lines of business within a company, transforming horizontal processes like contact centers and like supply chain and also, you know, going into vertical specific solutions. So what it means is that as technology becomes more pervasive, as data becomes more pervasive, businesses are transforming and that means that a lot more people are going to use the cloud and interact with the cloud and they might not want to or be able to kind of use our building blocks. And so what's really exciting that what we're able to do is make cloud more accessible to lines of business folks to analysts, to security folks. So >>It's, yeah, and that's, and that's why I was calling my this this new trend I see as Amazon Classic, my words, not your words, I call the, hey there was classic cloud and then you got the next gen clown, the new next generation. And I was talking with Adrian Cockcroft, former aws, so he's now retired, he's gonna come on later today. He and I were talking, he use this thing of you got a bag of Legos aka primitives or a toy that's been assembled for you glued together, ones out of the box, but they're not mutually exclusive. You can build a durable application and foundation with the building blocks more durable. You can manage it, refine it, but you got the solution that breaks. You don't have as much flexibility but you gotta replace it. That's okay too. So like this is now kind of a new portfolio approach to the cloud. It's very interesting and I think, I think, I think that's what I took away from the keynote is that you can have both. >>Yes, absolutely. You can do both. I mean, we're gonna go full throttle on releasing innovations and pushing the envelope on compute and storage and databases and our core services because they matter. And having, you know, the choice to choose from a wide range of options. I mean that's what, that's what customers need. You know, if you're gonna run hpc, you're gonna run machine learning and you're gonna run your SAP applications or your Windows applications, you need choice of what you know, specific type of instance and compute capabilities. You need to get the price performance. It's, it's definitely not a one size fits all. It's a 600 instance type. Size fits all maybe. >>Exactly. And you got a lot of instance and we'll get to that in a second. Yeah, I love the themes. I love this keynote themes you had like at first space, but I get the whole data, then you look at it, you can look at it differently. Really good metaphor, the ocean one I love with the security because he mentioned you can have the confidence to explore go deep snorkeling versus scuba and knowing how much oxygen you have. I mean, so really cool metaphor made me think very provocative. So again, this is kind of why people go to AWS because you now have these, these abilities to do things differently, depend on the context of what products you're working with. Yes. Explain why that was the core theme. Was there any rationale behind that? Was it just how you guys saw it? I mean that was pretty clever. >>Well, I think that, you know, we're, we're talking about environments and I think in this world, you know, there's uncertainty in a lot of places and we really feel like all of us need to be prepared for different types of environments. And so we wanted to explore what that could look like. And I think, you know, we're fascinated by space and the vastness and it is very much like the world of data. I don't know about you, but I actually scuba dive. So I love the depths of the ocean. I loved working on that part. There's extremes, extreme workloads like hpc, extreme workloads like machine learning with the growing models and there's an imagination, which is also one of my favorite areas to explore. >>Yeah. And you use the Antarctica one for about the whole environment and extreme conditions. That's good in the performance. And I love that piece of it. And I want to get into the, some of the things I love the speeds and fee. I think the, the big innovation with the silicon we've been covering as, you know, like a blanket. The, he's got the GRAVITON three 25% faster than GRAVITON two, the C seven GN network intense workloads. This is kind of a big deal. I mean this is one of those things where it might not get picked up in the major press, but the network use cases are significant. Nira has been successful. Share your thoughts on these kinds of innovations because they look kind of small, but they're not, they're >>Big, they're not small for sure, especially at the scale that our customers are, are, are running their applications. Like every little optimization that you can get really makes a huge difference. And I think it's exciting. I mean you hit on, you kind of hit on it when we've been working on silicon for a while now we know that, you know, if we're gonna keep pushing the element, the envelope in these areas, we had to, we had to go down to the silicon. And I think that Nitro has really been what's kind of been a breakthrough for us. You know, reinventing that virtualization layer, offloading security and storage and networking to special purpose chips. And I think that it's not just in the area of network optimization, right? You saw training optimized instances and inference optimized instances and HPC optimized instances. So yeah, we are kind of looking at all the extremes of, of what customers want to do. >>I know you can't talk about the future, but I can almost connect the dots as you're talking. It's like, hmm, specialized instances, specialized chips, maybe programmability of workload, smart intelligence, generative AI, weaving in there. A lot of kind of cool things I can see around the corner around generative AI automation. Hey, go to this instance with that go here. This is kind of what I see kind of coming around the corner. >>And we have some of that with our instance optimizers, our cost optimizer products where, you know, we wanna help customers find the best instance for their workload, get the best utilization they possibly can, you know, cut costs, but still have the great performance. So I don't, I don't know about your future, John, it sounds great, but we have, you know, we're taking steps in that direction today. >>Still look in this code that's gonna be on this code. Okay. Any, okay, I wanna give you one final question. Well, well two questions. One was a comment Adam made, I'd love to get your reaction if you want to tighten your bell, come to the cloud. I thought that was a very interesting nuance. A lot of economic pressure. Cloud is an opportunity to get agile, time to value faster. We had Zs carve cube analyst who's with us earlier said, the more you spend on the cloud, the more you save. That was his line, which I thought was very smart. Spending more doesn't mean you're gonna lose money, means you can save money too. So a lot of cost optimization discussions. Absolutely. Hey, your belt come to the cloud. What does he mean by that? >>Well I think that in, in times where, you know, there's uncertainty and economic conditions, it is, it's really, you know, you sometimes wanna pull back kind of, you know, batten down the hatches. But the cloud really, and we saw this with C you know, if you, if you move to the cloud, not only can you cut costs, but you put yourself in this position where you can continue to innovate and you can be agile and you can be prepared for whatever environment you're in so that you know when things go back or you have a customer needs that and innovation that goes off like you, you can accelerate back up really, really quickly. And I think we talked about Airbnb, that example of how, you know, in, in that really tough time of covid when travel industry wasn't happening so much, you know, they were able to scale back and save money. And then at the same time when, you know, Airbnb's kind of once again travel came back, they were in a position to really, really quickly change with the, the customer needs. >>You know, Lee, it's always great talking with you. You got a lot of energy, you're so smart and we both love products and you're leading the product marketing. We have an Instagram challenge here on the cube. I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Oh my gosh. It's called Instagram. We called a bumper sticker section. We used to call it what's the bumper sticker for reinvent. But we kind of modernized that. If you were gonna do an Instagram reel right now, what would be the Instagram reel for reinvent Keynote day one. As we look for, we got Verner, we'll probably talk about productivity with developers. What's the Instagram reel for reinvent? >>Wow. That means I have to get short with it, right? I am, I'm not always, that's still wrong answer. Yeah, well I think, you know, this is really big day one, so it's excitement, it's, we're glad to be here. We have a lot coming for you. We're super excited. And if you think about it, it's price, performance, it's data, it's security and it's solutions for purpose-built use cases. >>Great job. Congratulations. I love the message. I love how you guys had the theme. I thought it was great. And it's great to see Amazon continue to innovate with, with the, with the, with the innovation on the product side. But as we get into transformation, starting to see these solutions and the ecosystem is thriving and looking forward to hearing the, the new partner, chief Aruba tomorrow. Absolutely. See what she's got a new plan apparently unveiling. So exciting. Everyone's pretty excited. Thanks for coming >>On. Great. Great. Thanks for having >>Me. All right. Leah, here in the cube. You are the cube, the leader in tech coverage. I'm John Fur, your host. More live coverage after the short break. We'll be right back here. Day two of the cube, day one of reinvent. Lot of great action. Three, four days of wall to wall coverage. We'll be right back.

(bright music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to live coverage day two or day one, day two for theCUBE, day one for the event. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. It's the keynote analysis segment. Adam just finished coming off stage. I'm here with Dave Vellante and Zeus Kerravala, with principal analyst at ZK Research, Zeus, it's great to see you. Dave. Guys, the analysis is clear. AWS is going NextGen. You guys had a multi-day analyst sessions in on the pre-briefs. We heard the keynote, it's out there. Adam's getting his sea legs, so to speak, a lot of metaphors around ocean. >> Yeah. >> Space. He's got these thematic exploration as he chunked his keynote out into sections. Zeus, a lot of networking in there in terms of some of the price performance, specialized instances around compute, this end-to-end data services. Dave, you were all over this data aspect going into the keynote and obviously, we had visibility into this business transformation theme. What's your analysis? Zeus, we'll start with you. What's your take on what Amazon web service is doing this year and the keynote? What's your analysis? >> Well, I think, there was a few key themes here. The first one is I do think we're seeing better integration across the AWS portfolio. Historically, AWS makes a lot of stuff and it's not always been easy to use say, Aurora and Redshift together, although most customers buy them together. So, they announce the integration of that. It's a lot tighter now. It's almost like it could be one product, but I know they like to keep the product development separately. Also, I think, we're seeing a real legitimization of AWS in a bunch of areas where people said it wasn't possible before. Last year, Nasdaq said they're running in the cloud. The Options Exchange today announced that they're going to be moving to the cloud. Contact centers running the cloud for a lot of real time voice. And so, things that we looked at before and said those will never move to the cloud have now moved to the cloud. And I think, my third takeaway is just AWS is changing and they're now getting into areas to allow customers to do things they couldn't do before. So, if you look at what they're doing in the area of AI, a lot of their AI and ML services before were prediction. And I'm not saying you need an AI, ML to do prediction, was certainly a lot more accurate, but now they're getting into generative data. So, being able to create data where data didn't exist before and that's a whole new use case for 'em. So, AWS, I think, is actually for all the might and power they've had, it's actually stepping up and becoming a much different company now. >> Yeah, I had wrote that post. I had a one-on-one day, got used of the transcript with Adam Selipsky. He went down that route of hey, we going to change NextGen. Oh, that's my word. AWS Classic my word. The AWS Classic, the old school cloud, which a bunch of Lego blocks, and you got this new NextGen cloud with the ecosystems emerging. So, clearly, it's Amazon shifting. >> Yeah. >> But Dave, your breaking analysis teed out the keynote. You went into the whole cost recovery. We heard Adam talk about macro at the beginning of his keynote. He talked about economic impact, sustainability, big macro issues. >> Yeah. >> And then, he went into data and spent most of the time on the keynote on data. Tools, integration, governance, insights. You're all over that. You had that, almost your breaking analysis almost matched the keynote, >> Yeah. >> thematically, macro, cost savings right-sizing with the cloud. And last night, I was talking to some of the marketplace people, we think that the marketplace might be the center where people start managing their cost better. This could have an impact on the ecosystem if they're not in in the marketplace. So, again, so much is going on. >> What's your analogy? >> Yeah, there's so much to unpack, a couple things. One is we get so much insight from theCUBE community plus your sit down 101 with Adam Selipsky allowed us to gather some nuggets, and really, I think, predict pretty accurately. But the number one question I get, if I could hit the escape key a bit, is what's going to be different in the Adam Selipsky era that was different from the Jassy era. Jassy was all about the primitives. The best cloud. And Selipsky's got to double down on that. So, he's got to keep that going. Plus, he's got to do that end-to-end integration and he's got to do the deeper business integration, up the stack, if you will. And so, when you're thinking about the keynote and the spirit of keynote analysis, we definitely heard, hey, more primitives, more database features, more Graviton, the network stuff, the HPC, Graviton for HPC. So, okay, check on that. We heard some better end-to-end integration between the elimination of ETL between Aurora and Redshift. Zeus and I were sitting next to each other. Okay, it's about time. >> Yeah. >> Okay, finally we got that. So, that's good. Check. And then, they called it this thing, the Amazon data zones, which was basically extending Redshift data sharing within your organization. So, you can now do that. Now, I don't know if it works across regions. >> Well, they mentioned APIs and they have the data zone. >> Yep. And so, I don't know if it works across regions, but the interesting thing there is he specifically mentioned integration with Snowflake and Tableau. And so, that gets me to your point, at the end of the day, in order for Amazon, and this is why they win, to succeed, they've got to have this ecosystem really cranking. And that's something that is just the secret sauce of the business model. >> Yeah. And it's their integration into that ecosystem. I think, it's an interesting trend that I've seen for customers where everybody wanted best of breed, everybody wanted disaggregated, and their customers are having trouble now putting those building blocks together. And then, nobody created more building blocks than AWS. And so, I think, under Adam, what we're seeing is much more concerted effort to make it easier for customers to consume those building blocks in an easy way. And the AWS execs >> Yeah. >> I talked to yesterday all committed to that. It's easy, easy, easy. And I think that's why. (Dave laughing) Yeah, there's no question they've had a lead in cloud for a long time. But if they're going to keep that, that needs to be upfront. >> Well, you're close to this, how easy is it? >> Yeah. >> But we're going to have Adrian Cockcroft (Dave laughing) on at the end of the day today, go into one analysis. Now, that- >> Well, less difficult. >> How's that? (indistinct) (group laughing) >> There you go. >> Adrian retired from Amazon. He's a CUBE analyst retiree, but he had a good point. You can buy the bag of Lego blocks if you want primitives >> Yeah. >> or you can buy the toy that's glued together. And it works, but it breaks. And you can't really manage it, and you buy a new one. So, his metaphor was, okay, if the primitives allow you to construct a durable solutions, a lot harder relative to rolling your own, not like that, but also the simplest out-of-the box capability is what people want. They want solutions. We call Adam the solutions CEO. So, I think, you're going to start to see this purpose built specialized services allow the ecosystem to build those toys, so that the customers can have an out-of-the box experience while having the option for the AWS Classic, which is if you want durability, you want to tune it, you want to manage it, that's the way to go for the hardcore. Now, can be foundational, but I just see the solutions things being very much like an out-of-the-box. Okay, throw away, >> Yeah. >> buy a new toy. >> More and more, I'm saying less customers want to be that hardcore assembler of building blocks. And obviously, the really big companies do, but that line is moving >> Yeah. >> and more companies, I think, just want to run their business and they want those prebuilt solutions. >> We had to cut out of the keynote early. But I didn't hear a lot about... The example that they often use is Amazon Connect, the call center solution. >> Yeah. >> I didn't hear a lot to that in the keynote. Maybe it's happening right now, but look, at the end of the day, suites always win. The best of breed does well, (John laughing) takes off, generate a couple billion, Snowflake will grow, they'll get to 10 billion. But you look at Oracle, suites work. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> What I found interesting about the keynote is that he had this thematic exploration themes. First one was space that was like connect the dot, the nebula, different (mumbles) lens, >> Ocean. >> ask the right questions. (Dave laughing) >> Ocean was security which bears more, >> Yeah. >> a lot more needed to manage that oxygen going deep. Are you snorkeling? Are you scuba diving? Barely interesting amount of work. >> In Antarctica. >> Antarctica was the performance around how you handle tough conditions and you've got to get that performance. >> Dave: We're laughing, but it was good. >> But the day, the Ocean Day- >> Those are very poetic. >> I tweeted you, Dave, (Dave laughing) because I sit on theCUBE in 2011. I hate hail. (Dave laughing) It's the worst term ever. It's the day the ocean's more dynamic. It's a lot more flowing. Maybe 10 years too soon, Dave. But he announces the ocean theme and then says we have a Security Lake. So, like lake, ocean, little fun on words- >> I actually think the Security Lake is pretty meaningful, because we were listening to talk, coming over here talking about it, where I think, if you look at a lot of the existing solutions, security solutions there, I describe 'em as a collection of data ponds that you can view through one map, but they're not really connected. And the amount of data that AWS holds now, arguably more than any other company, if they're not going to provide the Security Lake, who is? >> Well, but staying >> Yeah. >> on security for a second. To me, the big difference between Azure and Amazon is the ecosystem. So, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, name it, CyberArk, Rapid7, they're all part of this ecosystem. Whereas Microsoft competes with all of those guys. >> Yes. Yeah. >> So it's a lot more white space than the Amazon ecosystem. >> Well, I want to get you guys to take on, so in your reaction, because I think, my vision of what what's happening here is that I think that whole data portion's going to be data as code. And I think, the ecosystem harvests the data play. If you look at AWS' key announcements here, Security Lake, price performance, they're going to optimize for those kinds of services. Look at security, okay, Security Lake, GuardDuty, EKS, that's a Docker. Docker has security problems. They're going inside the container and looking at threat detection inside containers with Kubernetes as the runtime. That's a little nuance point, but that's pretty significant, Dave. And they're now getting into, we're talking in the weeds on the security piece, adding that to their large scale security footprint. Security is going to be one of those things where if you're not on the inside of their security play, you're probably going to be on the outside. And of course, the price performance is going to be the killer. The networking piece surprise me. Their continuing to innovate on the network. What does that mean for Cisco? So many questions. >> We had Ajay Patel on yesterday for VMware. He's an awesome middleware guy. And I was asking about serverless and architectures. And he said, "Look, basically, serverless' great for stateless, but if you want to run state, you got to have control over the run time." But the point he made was that people used to think of running containers with straight VMs versus Fargate or Knative, if you choose, or serverless. They used to think of those as different architectures. And his point was they're all coming together. And it's now you're architecting and calling, which service you need. And that's how people are thinking about future architectures, which I think, makes a lot of sense. >> If you are running managed Kubernetes, which everyone's doing, 'cause no one's really building it in-house themselves. >> No. >> They're running it as managed service, skills gaps and a variety of other reasons. This EKS protection is very interesting. They're managing inside and outside the container, which means that gives 'em visibility on both sides, under the hood and inside the application layer. So, very nuanced point, Zeus. What's your reaction to this? And obviously, the networking piece, I'd love to get your thought. >> Well, security, obviously, it's becoming a... It's less about signatures and more of an analytics. And so, things happen inside the container and outside the container. And so, their ability to look on both sides of that allows you to happen threats in time, but then also predict threats that could happen when you spin the container up. And the difficulty with the containers is they are ephemeral. It's not like a VM where it's a persistent workload that you can do analysis on. You need to know what's going on with the container almost before it spins up. >> Yeah. >> And that's a much different task. So, I do think the amount of work they're doing with the containers gives them that entry into that and I think, it's a good offering for them. On the network side, they provide a lot of basic connectivity. I do think there's a role still for the Ciscos and the Aristas and companies like that to provide a layer of enhanced network services that connects multicloud. 'Cause AWS is never going to do that. But they've certainly, they're as legitimate network vendor as there is today. >> We had NetApp on yesterday. They were talking about latency in their- >> I'll tell you this, the analyst session, Steven Armstrong said, "You are going to hear us talk about multicloud." Yes. We're not going to necessarily lead with it. >> Without a mention. >> Yeah. >> But you said it before, never say never with Amazon. >> Yeah. >> We talk about supercloud and you're like, Dave, ultimately, the cloud guys are going to get into supercloud. They have to. >> Look, they will do multicloud. I predict that they will do multicloud. I'll tell you why. Just like in networking- >> Well, customers are asking for it. >> Well, one, they have the, not by design, but by defaulter and multiple clouds are in their environment. They got to deal with that. I think, the supercloud and sky cloud visions, there will be common services. Remember networking back in the old days when Cisco broke in as a startup. There was no real shortest path, first thinking. Policy came in after you connected all the routers together. So, right now, it's going to be best of breed, low latency, high performance. But I think, there's going to be a need in the future saying, hey, I want to run my compute on the slower lower cost compute. They already got segmentation by their announcements today. So, I think, you're going to see policy-based AI coming in where developers can look at common services across clouds and saying, I want to lock in an SLA on latency and compute services. It won't be super fast compared to say, on AWS, with the next Graviton 10 or whatever comes out. >> Yeah. >> So, I think, you're going to start to see that come in. >> Actually, I'm glad you brought Graviton up too, because the work they're doing in Silicon, actually I think, is... 'Cause I think, the one thing AWS now understands is some things are best optimized in Silicon, some at software layers, some in cloud. And they're doing work on all those layers. And Graviton to me is- >> John: Is a home run. >> Yeah. >> Well- >> Dave, they've got more instances, it's going to be... They already have Gravitons that's slower than the other versions. So, what they going to do, sunset them? >> They don't deprecate anything ever. So, (John laughing) Amazon paid $350 million. People believe that it's a number for Annapurna, which is like one of the best acquisitions in history. (group laughing) And it's given them, it's put them on an arm curve for Silicon that is blowing away Intel. Intel's finally going to get Sapphire Rapids out in January. Meanwhile, Amazon just keeps spinning out new Gravitons and Trainiums. >> Yeah. >> And so, they are on a price performance curve. And like you say, no developer ever wants to run on slower hardware, ever. >> Today, if there's a common need for multicloud, they might say, hey, I got the trade off latency and performance on common services if that's what gets me there. >> Sure. >> If there's maybe a business case to do that. >> Well, that's what they're- >> Which by the way, I want to.... Selipsky had strong quote I thought was, "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place >> Yeah. >> to do it." I thought >> I tweeted that. >> that was very strong. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And I think, he's right. And then, the other point I want to make on that is, I think, I don't have any data on this, but I believe believe just based on some of the discussions I've had that most of Amazon's revenue is on demand. Paid by the drink. Those on demand customers are at risk, 'cause they can go somewhere else. So, they're trying to get you into optimized pricing, whether it's reserved instances or one year or three-year subscriptions. And so, they're working really hard at doing that. >> My prediction on that is that's a great point you brought up. My prediction is that the cost belt tightening is going to come in the marketplace, is going to be a major factor as companies want to get their belts tighten. How they going to do that, Dave? They're going to go in the marketplace saying, hey, I already overpaid a three-year commitment. Can I get some cohesively in there? Can I get some of this or that and the other thing? >> Yep. >> You're going to start to see the vendors and the ecosystem. If they're not in the marketplace, that's where I think, the customers will go. There are other choices to either cut their supplier base or renegotiate. I think, it's going to happen in the marketplace. Let's watch. I think, we're going to watch that grow. >> I actually think the optimization services that AWS has to help customers lower spend is a secret sauce for them that they... Customers tell me all the time, AWS comes in, they'll bring their costs down and they wind up spending more with them. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And the other cloud providers don't do that. And that has been almost a silver bullet for them to get customers to stay with them. >> Okay. And this is always the way. You drop the price of storage, you drop the price of memory, you drop the price of compute, people buy more. And in the question, long term is okay. And does AWS get commoditized? Is that where they're going? Or do they continue to thrive up the stack? John, you're always asking people about the bumper sticker. >> Hold on. (John drowns out Dave) Before we get the bumper sticker, I want to get into what we missed, what they missed on the keynote. >> Yeah, there are some blind spots. >> I think- >> That's good call. >> Let's go around the horn and think what did they miss? I'll start, I think, they missed the developer productivity angle. Supply chain software was not talked about at all. We see that at all the other conferences. I thought that could have been weaved in. >> Dave: You mean security in the supply chain? >> Just overall developer productivity has been one of the most constant themes I've seen at events. Who are building the apps? Who are the builders? What are they actually doing? Maybe Werner will bring that up on his last day, but I didn't hear Adam talk about it all, developer productivity. What's your take in this? >> Yeah, I think, on the security side, they announced security data lake. I think, the other cloud providers do a better job of providing insights on how they do security. With AWS, it's almost a black hole. And I know there's a careful line they walk between what they do, what their partners do. But I do think they could be a little clearer on how they operate, much like Azure and GCP. They announce a lot of stuff on how their operations works and things like that. >> I think, platform across cloud is definitely a blind spot for these guys. >> Yeah. >> I think, look at- >> But none of the cloud providers have embraced that, right? >> It's true. >> Yeah. >> Maybe Google a little bit >> Yeah. >> and Microsoft a little bit. Certainly, AWS hasn't at this point in time, but I think, they perceive the likes of Mongo and Snowflake and Databricks, and others as ISVs and they're not. They're platform players that are building across clouds. They're leveraging, they're building superclouds. So, I think that's an opportunity for the ecosystem. And very curious to see how Amazon plays there down the stream. So, John, what do you think is the bumper sticker? We're only in day one and a half here. What do you think so far the bumper sticker is for re:Invent 2022? >> Well, to me, the day one is about infrastructure performance with the whole what's in the data center? What's at the chip level? Today was about data, specialized services, and security. I think that was the key theme here. And then, that's going to sequence into how they're going to reorganize their ecosystem. They have a new leader, Ruba Borno, who's going to be leading the charge. They've integrated all their bespoke fragmented partner network pieces into one leadership. That's going to be really important to hear that. And then, finally, Werner for developers and event-based services, micro services. What that world's going on, because that's where the developers are. And ultimately, they build the app. So, you got infrastructure, data, specialized services, and security. Machine learning with Swami is going to be huge. And again, how do developers code it all up is going to be key. And is it the bag of Legos or the glued toy? (Dave chuckles) So, what do you want? Out-of-the-box or you want to build your own? >> And that's the bottom line is connecting those dots. All they got to be is good enough. I think, Zeus, to your point, >> Yep. >> if they're just good enough, less complicated, the will keep people on the base. >> Yeah. I think, the bumper stickers, the more you buy, the more you're saving. (John laughing) Because from an operational perspective, they are trying to bring down the complexity level. And with their optimization services and the way their credit model works, I do think they're trending down that path. >> And my bumper sticker's ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. This company has 100,000 partners and that is a business model secret weapon. >> All right, there it is. The keynote announced. More analysis coming up. We're going to have the leader of (indistinct) coming up next, here on to break down their perspective, you got theCUBE's analyst perspective here. Thanks for watching. Day two, more live coverage for the next two more days, so stay with us. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and Zeus Kerravala here on theCUBE. Be right back. (bright music)

(soft music) >> Welcome back everyone, is Supercloud 22 live in the Palo Alto office. Our stage performance we're streaming virtually it's our pilot event, our inaugural event, Supercloud 22. I'm John fury, with my coach Dave Vellante. Got a featured Keynote conversation with Kit Colbert. Who's the CTO of VMware, got to delay it all out. Break it down, Kit, great to see you. Thanks for joining us for Supercloud 22 our inaugural event. >> Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So we had great distinguished panels coming up through. We heard Victoria earlier to the Keynote. There's a shift happening. The shift has happened that's called cloud. You just published a white paper that kind of brings out these new challenges around the complexity of how companies want to run their business. >> Yep. >> It's not born in the cloud, it's cloud everywhere. Seems to be the theme. What's your take on Supercloud? what's the roadmap for multicloud? >> Yeah, well, the reason that we got interested in this was just talking to our customers and the reality is everybody is using multiple clouds today, multiple public clouds, they got things on-prem, they got stuff at the edge. And so their applications are essentially distributed everywhere. And the challenges they start running into there is that there's just a lot of heterogeneity there. There's like different APIs, different capabilities, inconsistencies, incompatibility, in terms of workload, placement, data, migration, security, as we just heard about, et cetera. And so I think everyone's struggling with trying to figure out how do I drive consistency across all that diversity and what sort of consistency do I want? And one of the things that became really interesting in our conversations with customers is that there is no one size fits all that different folks are in different places. And the types of consistency that they want to prioritize will be different based on their individual business requirements. And so this started forming a picture for us saying, okay, what we need are a set of capabilities of multi-cloud cross cloud services that deliver that consistency across all the different environments where applications may be running. And that is what formed the early thinking and sort of the paper that we wrote on it, as well as some of the work and that I think eventually leads to this vision of Supercloud, right? 'Cause I think you guys have the right idea, which is, hey, how does all this stuff come together? And what does that bigger picture look like? And so I think between the sort of the native services that are there individually for each cloud that offer great value by the way, and people definitely should be taking advantage of in addition to another set of services, which are multi-cloud that go across clouds and provide that consistency, looking at that together. That's my picture where super cloud is. >> So the paper's called, the era of multi-cloud services arrive, VMware executive outlook for IT, leaders and decision makers, I'm sure you can get on your website. >> Yep. >> And in there, you talked about, well, first of all, I think you would agree that multicloud has fundamentally been a symptom of multi-vendor or M&A, I mean, you talked about that in the paper, right? >> Yeah. >> It was never really a strategy. It was just like, hey, we woke up in the 2020s and here we are with multiple clouds, right? >> Yeah, it was one of those situations where most folks that we talked to didn't plan to be multi-cloud now that's changed a little bit in the past year or two. >> Sure. >> But certainly in the earlier days of cloud, people would go all in saying, hey, I'm going to go all in on one, one of the major hyperscalers and go for it there. And that's great and offers a lot of advantages, right? There is internal consistency there. There's usually pretty good integration between their services so on and so forth. The problem though that you start facing is that to your point, acquisitions, you acquire companies using a different cloud. Okay, now I got two different clouds or sometimes you have the phenomenon of shadow IT, still happening where some random line of business is going to go off and use a different cloud for whatever reason. The other thing that we've seen is that over time that you may have standardized on one, but then over time technology changes, another cloud makes major advancements in the state of the art, or let's say in machine learning and you say, hey, I want to go to this other cloud for that. So what we start to see is that people now are choosing public clouds based on best of breed service capabilities, and that they're going to make those decisions that fairly fine grained manner, right? Sometimes down to the team, the line of business, et cetera. And so this is where customers and companies find themselves. Now it's like, oh boy, now have all these clouds. And what's happened is that they kind of dealt with it in an ad hoc manner. They would spin up individual operations teams, security teams, et cetera, that specialized in each of the clouds. They had knowledge about how to do that. But now people found that, okay, I'm duplicating all this. There's not really consistency in my approach here. Is there a better way? And I think this is, again, the advent of a lot of the thinking of multi-cloud services and Supercloud. >> And I think one of the things too, in listening to you talk is that the old model used to be, solve complexity with more complexity. Okay, and customers don't want that from what we're observing. And what you're saying is they've seen the benefits of DevOps, DevSecOps. So they know the value. >> Yep. >> 'Cause they've been on, say one native cloud. Now they say, okay, I'm on premise and we heard from Victoria said, there's a lot of private cloud going on, but essentially makes that another cloud, out by default as well. So hybrid is multicloud. >> Hybrid is a subset, yeah. Hybrid is like, we kind of had this evolution of thinking, right? Where you kind of had all the sort of different locations. And then I think hybrid was attempt to say, okay, let's try to connect one location or a set of locations on premises with a public cloud and have some level of consistency there. But really what we look at here with multicloud or Supercloud is that that's really a generalization of that. And we're not talking about one or two locations on prem in one cloud. We're talking about everything now. And moreover, I think hybrid cloud tended to focus a lot on sort of core infrastructure and management. This looks across the board, we're talking about security, we're talking about application development, talking about end user experience. Things like Zero Trust. We're talking about infrastructure, data. So it goes much, much broader, I think than when we talked about hybrid cloud a few years ago. >> So in your paper you've essentially, Kit, laid out an early framework. >> Yep. >> Let's call it for what we call Supercloud, what you call cross cloud services. So what do you see as the technical enablers that are, the salient aspects of again multi-cloud or Supercloud? >> Yep. Well, so for me it comes down to, so, okay, taking a step back. So we have this problem, right? Where you have a lot of diversity across different clouds and customers are looking for some levels of consistency. But as I said, rarely do I see two customers that want exactly the same types of consistency. And so what we're trying to do is step back. And first of all, establish a taxonomy and by that I mean, one of the different types of consistency that you might want. And so there's things around infrastructure consistency, security consistency, software supply chain security is probably the top of mind one that I hear from customers. Application and application services of things like databases, messaging streaming services, AIML services, et cetera, and user capabilities and then of course, data as well. And so in the paper we say, okay, here's these kind of five areas of consistency. And that's the first piece, the second one then turns more to an architectural question of what exactly is a multi-cloud service. What does that mean for a cloud service to be multi-cloud and what are the properties there? So essentially we said, okay, we see three different types of those. There's one where that service could run on a single cloud, but could support multiple clouds. So think about for instance, a service that does cost analysis. Now it may have maybe executing on AWS let's say, but it could do cost analysis for Azure or Google or AWS or anybody, right? So that's the first type. The second type is a bit more advanced where now you're saying, I can actually instantiate that same service into multiple clouds. And we see that oftentimes with things like databases that have a lot of performance latency, et cetera, requirements, and that you can't be accessing that database remotely, that doesn't, from a different cloud, that's going to be too slow. You have it on the same cloud that you're in. And so again, you see various vendors out there, implementing that, where that database can be instantiated wherever you'd like. And then the third one would be going even further. And this is where we really get into some of the much more difficult use cases where customers want a workload to be on prem. And sometimes, especially for those that are very regulatory compliant, they may need even in an air gap or disconnected environment. So there, can you take that same service, but now run it without your operators, being able to manage it 24/7. So those are the three categories. So are a single cloud supporting, single cloud instance supporting multiple clouds, multi-cloud instance, multi-cloud instance disconnected. >> So you're abstracting you as the the R&D arm you're abstracting that complexity. How do you handle this problem where you've got one cloud maybe has a better service than the other clouds? Do you have to devolve to the lowest common denominator or? How do you mask that? >> Well, so that's a really good question and we've debated it and there's been a lot of thought on it. Our current point of view is that we really want to leave it, up to the company themselves to make that decision. Again, cause we see different use cases. So for instance, I talk to customers in the defense sector and they are like, hey, if a foreign adversary is attacking one of these public cloud that we're in, we got to be able to evacuate our applications from there, sometimes in minutes, right? In order to maintain our operational capabilities. And so there, there does need to be at least common denominator approach just because of that requirement. I see other folks, you look at the financial banking industries they're also regulated. I think for them, it's oftentimes 90 days to get out of the cloud, so they can do a little bit of re-architecture. You got times rolled the sleeves and change some things. So maybe it's not quite as strict. Whereas other companies say, you know what? I want to take advantage of these best of breed services native to the clouds. So we don't try to prescribe a certain approach there, but we say, you got to align it with what your business requirements are. >> How about the APIs layer? So one of the things we've said is that we felt like a super pass was a requirement of the Supercloud because it's a purpose built pass that helps you with that objective, whatever that is. And you say in the paper for developers each cloud provider has unique infrastructure interfaces and APIs that add work and slow the pace of their releases for operators. Each additional cloud increases the complexity of their architecture, fragmenting security, performance optimization and cost management. So are you building a super pass? What's your philosophy? Victoria said, we want to have our cake, we want to eat at two and we want to lose weight. So how do you do that? >> Yeah, so I think it's, so first things first, what the paper is trying to present in the end is really sort of an architectural point of view on how to approach this, right? And then, yeah, we at VMware, we've got a lot of solutions, towards some of those things, but we also realize we can't do everything ourselves, right? The space is too large. So it's very much a partner strategy there. Now that being said, on things like on the past side, we are doing a lot for instance around Tanzu, which is our modern apps portfolio products. And the focus there really is to, yes, provide some of that consistency across different clouds, enabling customers to take advantage of either cross cloud paths type services or cloud native or native cloud services, I should say. And so we really give customers that choice. And I think that's for us where it's at, because again, we don't see it as a one size fits for all. >> So there's your cake at edit to too. So you're saying the developer experience can be identical across clouds. >> Yep. >> Unless the developers don't want it to be. >> Yeah, and maybe the team makes that decision. Look there's a lot of reasons why you may want to make that or may not. The reality is that these native cloud services do add a lot of value and oftentimes are very easy to consume, to get started with, to get going. And so trade off you got to think about, and I don't think there's a right answer. >> So Kit, I got to ask on you. You said you can't do it alone. >> Yeah. >> VMware, I know for a fact, you guys have been working on this for many, many years. >> Yep. >> (indistinct) remember, I interviewed him in 2016 when he did the deal with AWS with Andy Jassy that really moved the needle. Things got really great from there with VMware. So would you be open to a consortium to oversee cause you guys have a lot of investment in this as a company, but I also don't hear you trying to do the lock in thing. So yeah, would you guys be open to a consortium to kind of try to figure out what these buildings blocks look like? Or is it a bag of Legos what people want? >> Absolutely, and you know what we offer in the paper is really just a starting point. It's pretty simple, we're trying to define a few basic of the taxonomy and some outlines sketches if you will, of what that architectural picture might look like. But it's very much that like just a starting point, and this is not something we can do alone. This is something that we really need the entire industry to rally around. Cause again, I think what's important here are standards. >> Yeah. >> That there's got to be, this sort of decomposition of functionality, breakdown in the different, sort of logical layers of functionality. What do those APIs or interfaces look like? How do we ensure interoperability? Because we do want people to be able to get the best of breed, to be able to bring together different vendor solutions to enable that. >> And I was watching, it was had a Silicon a day just last week, talking about their advances in Silicon. What's you guys position on that because you're seeing the (indistinct) as players, almost getting more niche and more better at the hardware matters more, Silicon speed, latency GPUs, So that seems to me be an enabler opportunity for the ecosystem to innovate at the past and SAS relationship. Where do you guys see? Where are you guys strong and where do you need work to do on? If you had to say there was some white space at VMware like say, hey, we own this area. We we're solid here. Here's some white spaces that VMware could use some help with. >> Yeah, well I think the infrastructure space, you just mentioned is clearly one that we've been focused on for a long time. We're expanding into the modern app space, expanding into security. We've been strong and end user for a while. So a lot of the different multi-cloud capabilities we've actually been to your point developing for a while. And I think that's exactly, again, what went into this like what we started noticing was all of our different product teams were reacting to the same thing and we weren't necessarily talking about it together yet. >> Like what? >> Well, this whole challenge of multiple clouds of dealing with that heterogeneity of wanting choice and flexibility into where to place a workload or where to place a virtual desktop or whatever it might be. And so each of the teams was responding individually to that customer feedback. And so I think what we recognized was like, hey, let's up level this, and what's the bigger picture. And what's the sort of common architecture across all of it, right? So I think that's what the really interesting aspect here was is that this is very much driven by what we're hearing directly from customers. >> You kind of implied just recently that the paper was pretty straightforward, pretty basic, early days, but it's well thought out. And one of the things you talked about was the type of multi-cloud services. >> Yep. >> You had data plan and user services, security infrastructure, which is your wheelhouse and application services. >> Yep. >> And you sort of went to detail defining those where is management and all that. So these are the ones you're going after. What about management? What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question we debated this for a long time. Does management actually get a separate sort of layer that we could add a six one perhaps, or is it sort of baked in to the different ones? And we kind of went with the ladder where it sort of baked in there's infrastructure management, there's modern app management, there's management and users. It's kind of management for each security obviously. So we see a lot of different management plans, control plans across each of those different layers. Now does there need to be a separate one that has its own layer? Arguably yes, I mean, I think there are good arguments for that, and this is exactly why we put this out there though, is to like get people to read it, people to give give us feedback. And going back to the consortium idea, let's come together as a group of practitioners across the industry to really figure out an industry viewpoint on this. >> So what are the trade offs there? So what would be the benefit of having that separate layer? I presume it's simpler to do it the way you've done it, but what would be the benefit of having a separate. >> Yeah, I think it was probably more about simplicity to start with, like you could imagine like 20 different layers. and maybe that's where it's going to go, but also I think it's how do you define the layer? And for us it was more around sort of some of these functional aspects as an infrastructure versus application level versus end user and management is more of a commonality across those. But again, I could see our arguments be made. >> Logical place to start. >> Yeah. >> The other thing you said in here multi-cloud application services can route request for a particular service such as a database and deploy the service on the correct individual cloud, using the most appropriate technology for the use case, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yep. >> That to me, sounds like a metadata problem. And so can you talk about how you you've approach that? You mentioned AWS RDS, great examples as your sequel on Oracle Database, et cetera, et cetera and multiple endpoint. How do you approach that? >> Yeah, well, I think there's a bunch of different approaches there. And so again, so the idea is that, and I know there's been reference to sort of like the operating system for Supercloud. What does that look like, right? But I think it totally, we don't actually use that term, but I do like the concept of an operating system. 'Cause a lot of things you just talk about there, these are things operating systems. Do you got to have a scheduler? And so you look across many different clouds and you got to figure out, okay, where do I actually want in this case, let's say a database instance to go and be provisioned. And then really it's up to, I think the vendor or in this case, the multi-cloud service creator to define how they want to want to do that. They could leverage the native cloud services or they could build their own technology. Which a lot of the vendors are doing. And so the point though, is that really you get this night from a end user standpoint, it goes back to your complexity, simplicity question, you get the simplicity of a single API that the implementation you don't really need to deal with. 'Cause you're like, I'm getting a service and I need the database and has certain properties and I want it here versus there versus wherever. But it's up to that multi-cloud service to figure out a lot of those implementation specifics. >> So are you the Supercloud OS? >> I think it is VMware's goal to become the Supercloud OS for sure. But like any good operating system, as we said, like it's all about applications, right? So you have a platform point of view, but you got to partner widely. >> And you got to get the hardware relationship. >> Yes. >> The Silicon chips. >> Yep. >> Right. >> Yeah, and actually that was a good point. I want to go back to that one. 'Cause you mentioned that earlier, the innovation that we're seeing, things like arm processors and like graviton and a lot of these things happening. And so I think that's another really interesting area where you're seeing tremendous innovation there in the public cloud. One of the challenges though for public cloud is actually at scale and that it takes longer to release newer hardware at that scale. So in some cases, if you want bleeding edge stuff, you can't go with public cloud 'cause it's just not there yet, right? So that's again, another interesting thing where you... >> Well, some will say that they launch 5,000 new services, every year at AWS. >> No, but I'm talking, >> They have some bleeding edge stuff. >> Well, no, no, no, sorry, sorry, let me clarify, let me clarify. I'm not talking about the software, I'm talking about the hardware side. >> Okay, got it, okay. >> Like the Silicon? >> Yeah, like the latest and greatest GPU, FBGA. >> Why can't they? >> 'Cause cause they do like tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them. >> Oh just because it's just so many. >> It's a scale. Yeah, that's the point, right? >> Right. >> And it's fundamental to the model in terms of how big they are. And so that's why we do see some customers who need, who have very specialized hardware requirements, need to do it in the private cloud, right on prem or possibly a colo. >> Or edge. >> Or edge. >> Edge is a great example of... >> But we often see, again, people like the latest bleeding edge GPUs, whatever they are, even something a bit more experimental that they're going to go on on prem for that. >> Yeah. >> And so look, do not want to disparage the public cloud, please don't take that away. It's just an artifact when it gets to heart, like software they can scale and they do (indistinct). >> Well it's context of the OS conversation, OS has to right to hardware and enable applications. >> Where I was getting caught up in that is Kit, is they're all developing their own Silicon and they're developing it, most of it's arm based and they're developing at a much, much faster cycle. They can go from design to tape out much faster than Intel historically has. And you're seeing it. >> Intel just posted along. >> Yeah, I think if you look at the overall system, you're absolutely right. >> Yeah, but it's the deployment because of the scale 'cause at one availability zone and another and another region and that's. >> Well, yeah, but so counter point to what I just said would be, hey, like they have very well controlled environments, very well controled system. So they don't need to support a million different configuration settings or whatever they've got theirs that they use, right? So from a system standpoint and so forth. Yeah, I agree that there's a lot they can do there. I was speaking specifically, to different types of hardware accelerators being a bit of a (indistinct). >> If it's not in the 5,000 services that they offer, you can't get it, whereas on-prem you can say, I want that, here it is. >> I'm not saying that on-prem is necessarily fundamentally better in any way. I'm just saying for this particular area >> It's use case driven. >> It is use, and that's the whole point of all this, right? Like and I know a lot of people in their heads associate VMware with on-prem, but we are not dogmatic at all. And you know, as you guys know, but many people may not like we partner with all the public cloud hyperscalers. And so our point of view is very much, much more nuance saying, look, we're happy to run workloads wherever you want to. In fact, that's what we hear from customers. They want to run them everywhere, but it's about finding the right tool for the right job. And that's what really what this multi-cloud approach. >> Yeah, and I think the structural change of the virtualization hypervisor this new shift to V2 Supercloud, this something happening fundamentally that's use case driven, it's not about dogma, whatever. I mean, cloud's great. But native clouds have the pros and cons. >> And I would say that Supercloud, prerequisite for Supercloud has got to be running in a public cloud. But I'd say it also has to be inclusive of on-prem data. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And you're not going to just move all that data into prem, maybe in the fullness of time, but I don't personally believe that, but you look at what Goldman Sachs has done with AWS they've got their on-prem data and they're connecting to the AWS cloud. >> Yep. >> What Walmart's doing with Azure and that's going to happen in a lot of different industries. >> Yeah. >> Well I think security will drive that too. We had that conversation because no one wants to increase the surface area. Number one, they want complexity to be reduced and they want economic benefits. That's the super cloud kind of (indistinct). >> It's a security but it's also differentiatable advantage that you actually have on prem that you don't necessarily. >> Right, well, we're going to debate this now, Kit, thank you for coming on and giving that Keynote, we're going to have a panel to debate and discuss the blockers that enablers to Supercloud. And there are some enablers and potentially blockers. >> Yep, absolutely. >> So we'll get, into that, okay, up next, the panel to discuss, blockers and enablers are Supercloud after this quick break. (soft music)

>>Good afternoon. Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We are live in San Francisco at Moscone west for VMware Explorer, 2022. We're excited to welcome a new cube guest to the program. Steve Bravo joins us the SVP of edge technology at Luman. Great to have you on the program. Thank >>You very much for having me. Appreciate it. Welcome. >>Talk to us a little bit about, we've had several conversations with Luman folks over the last day and a half, but talk to us a little bit about it from your perspective, the VMware relationship with Luman. Okay. >>So it's actually, you know, we have been partners for the last 20 years. Okay. When, when VMware was really cutting its teeth in the, the virtualized space Luman, and one of its, you know, companies that acquired through time was really a, a cutting edge user of VMware technologies. And as, as time has evolved and VMware's technologies have evolved, we have grown with VMware. So much of the software they write is embedded not only within our network, but on our edge platforms and extended out to the, the, the hyperscalers as well as in the client pre. So it's an ever growing partnership and, and one that we're continually innovating and creating better outcomes for, for really the, the enterprise space. >>Talk about those enterprise customers and some of the outcomes that you are helping to deliver. What's the joint value prop that Luman and BM bring to the enterprise. >>So really stronger together, right? If you think about the strengths that Luman has, it's really our, our, our network. We call that our central nervous system, our, our, our platform. Okay. So all of our edge technologies and compute capabilities that we're able to deploy in our edge centers, data centers globally, as well as out to prem, we lay the software technologies that VMware creates not only from a hyper virtualized sense, but also through sassy through security and also out to workspace one. So it's their entire suite, we're able to support it. So with those, we create amazing technology solutions to serve the enterprise, whether it's healthcare, whether it's manufacturing, retail space, the customers are plenty in the use cases are endless. >>You talked about your history and, and at the foundation of what you do this sort of idea of a central nervous system. Yeah. The network, if we wanted to completely geek out, we could just talk about that. Yeah. For an hour. Sure. We could, but we're not going to, we were talking just, you know, before we came live, came on, live about lumens philosophy and how you're taking that foundation, that network, that central nervous system, and you have a philosophy about what you want to achieve with it. And the other things you layer on top of it. Yeah. Tell, tell us about that. Cause I thought was >>Interesting it's so it it's really all about furthering human progress with technology. Okay. We're very lucky that we have the global network that we do, but the workloads, right? The applications that make really life kind of, you know, go round in today's world lives in, in forms and factors of compute that hang off of the network. We're very lucky that we can bring that all together. So over the years, you know, every enterprise has a different need, right? They're trying to solve a problem. We want to help them solve that problem. Right. We bring our technology, our capabilities, our experience, and, and experts to really cater to and, and be that partner that can, that can build the entire stack for them to allow them to be very, very efficient in their place of competition. So >>I wanna hear, I wanna hear a concrete example of that in action. Sure. But, but I think it's interesting, not just from a, what is happening on the outside perspective, but it's also very interesting culturally yes. From a, an organizational perspective when you wake up in the morning and you have that mindset, that that's what your mission is. Sure. That's a lot different than waking up in the morning, thinking I'm going to deploy 50 terabytes of storage. Absolutely. I'm going to install nine ports and yellow cables and blue cables in my switch. That's right. Thinking you're toiling and obscurity. So everybody, everybody illumined then is waking up with this mission in mind. Yes. Which makes the day a lot easier to get through when you're, when you're having to work hard. But give me, give a, gimme a concrete example of that in, in motion. >>Sure. So it's actually, it's, it's about those outcomes and those use cases, right. I, I explain to my kids, sometimes they're like, dad tell me, you know, like tell me what you do. And if you start talking about the cables and the compute, they, their eyes gloss over. But if I say to him, you know, remember when you were sick and it was during COVID and you couldn't go to the doctor. Right. And we were able to pop open the computer and we were able to see a doctor on the screen and they had to stick your tongue out and do all the things you got care. And we were able to deliver that based on our platform, based on our network, we helped healthcare providers, you know, go remote to see patients as COVID was happening and people were going to the hospital. So that's just a real world scenario that we did for a very large network when people were dealing with it, they needed to really expand horizontally horizontally to allow care providers, to operate in different areas. And we were able to hit it outta the park. >>That's a great explanation. Did, did your kids go, wow, dad, that's >>Awesome. Absolutely. Absolutely. But then they're like, anything else, like, is there anything else cool. And talk about sporting stadiums, lighting up, you know, a different venue where they go and they're able to from their, you know, phone order, a soda or a pretzel and, and with the different sensors from an I two, >>Now you're talking >>Yeah. Perspective like dad, you guys did this. Yes. You know, it it's, so it resonates. And those, those use cases, if you think about the building blocks, right. Whether it's the medical scenario or, or a, a smart stadium, the building blocks are very similar. Right. And we're lucky enough that you put those building blocks together in a, in a, in a prescriptive way for a specific outcome. You're able to play with strikes and you're able to get better scale and you're able to move fast because the technology industry we're in is it's. I mean, it's, it's moving at light speeds >>As the edge become grows and grows and expands and becomes more and more amorphous, how have your customer conversations changed as there's more demand for every company to become a data company, to be a security company. Right. How have they kind of elevated up the stack to the C-suite >>We've really had to just pivot to talking about that, that outcome, that, that entity, that, that enterprise is really trying to achieve. You know, if you think about, you know, the, the two examples, another one, it could be very, you know, cost driven. It could be that we need to get to market in a much more rapid fashion at a global level. How can we stamp things out quickly? So you take those outcomes, show them how the technology's going to enable it, and then you can really open the door for the return. Right. Did you get the cost savings? Yes. Did you, did you achieve that time to market for, it could be seasonality, right. Right. People don't have to pay for the full boat anymore. If, if let's say there are an online marketplace and it it's huge around the seasons, right. Around the holiday season, there's gonna be big peaks that they have there. Right. We like to be able to have them burst and, and ebb and flow. So it's all about that outcome. And getting to that, the technology pieces, you just put 'em together to accommodate. >>What, what does your go-to market strategy look like? How do you engage with customers? You know, there are, there are finite number of seats, strategic seats at a customer table. Yeah. Are you typically going in arm and arm with partners and alliances? What does that ecosystem look like? Or do you, do you have a direct sales force that engages customers? Yep. Tell, tell me about the, how the whole thing >>Works. So we have a direct sales force. Okay. And we like to play to our strengths. So we have a great Alliance partners as well. So that arm and arm absolutely happens where we are heavily connected already at C-suites. They're able to walk in and make those types of relationships and outcomes a reality. But we find that we are, we're better with partners playing to their strengths with us. Right. If we come in and show up and we have that complete stack, the software experts as well, our assets, our platform, our network, it's really a one, two punch wrap with our service capabilities at a global level that it's unbeatable. So we show up to the very best of our abilities with our alliances. And then with those more steep relationships where we've been there, where we have the relationships, there's more of a trust factor, but it's all about building trust. And we gotta, we gotta show up appropriately to do that. >>So if it's unbeatable, why do customers choose? Luin what, what's the value prop that you talk to customers about? >>So if you think about a, a COO or CIO or CTO and all of the different things, you need to purchase to make outcomes a reality, whether it's network, whether it's compute, whether it's storage, whether it's software, right? Whether it's people, it becomes very easy. If you have a partner that can do all of that for you and it's their assets, right? So we have those assets. We have those, you know, you know, our, our employees are absolutely our greatest asset. My, in my opinion, at a global level. And then we partner with the biggest software manufacturers, like, like an AWS or a, like a VMware. And we, we loaded into our, our fabric. And now we have literally the entire stack right there. It's a single hand to shake rather than I needed to go to a network provider to go to compute provider storage, security. Like you get that holistic solution approach makes it far easier. And that's a, it's a huge differentiator. And >>You, you, you said AWS. Yeah. You work with all you work with all, all the >>Har hyperscalers. Like if you think about the cloud, the, I'll say the, the big three, right? AWS, Google, and Microsoft, everything is using the cloud and the fact that we can connect to it in dynamic ways and extend that experience all the way out to our edge and on-prem and deliver the same experience again, massive differentiator. >>So from your customer's point of view, you can be agnostic. Yes. So you, you can say, well, Azure for this AWS, for that maybe run VMware in both >>100, >>Both context. Interesting stat that was brought up to Lisa and I yesterday through the VCP P program. Yep. The, the VMware cloud provider program, if you aggregate all of that cloud stuff, that's going on, that becomes the third or fourth largest cloud on earth. Yeah. So a lot of the messaging, a lot of the stuff they're talking about now has to do with that. So you, so for example, you could be involved in deploying that software defined data center stack in a variety of hyperscale class. Yes. Where appropriate for people? >>Yeah. 100%. And whether it's in the hyperscalers or in their own data center, in one of our platforms, the, the, the, the biggest differentiators, it's gonna be the same. Right? You have that partner that can do it for you no matter where the venue is. So that's really the, the coming of hybrid cloud, very agnostic. But I always say, it's the best venue. Right? You have different applications are gonna need different things, build it to suit. And when you do that, okay. And it's, and you're not pushing one way, you're taking the, the requirements you build trust. And when you build trust, you build long lasting relationships with your clients, and that's, that's what it's about. And you then make more great outcomes, a reality, >>Right. That trust is absolutely critical. It's currency really is. Yes. Talk about, you have a, a joint innovation lab with VMware. Talk a little bit about that. What is it all about? How long have you guys been doing it? What exciting things are coming from it? So >>We, we, we launched at about 18 months ago. Some, some, some amazing thinkers, you know, on our team and their team came together and it's really to, to keep pace with the market. Okay. So platforms and software evolve at a, at a, at a certain pace, right. And it's always speeding up, but creating use cases within that lab to solve a common core set of problems for maybe a specific vertical is really what it's intended to do. So when the software's ready to kind of an incubation engine that we're testing these use cases, so we can then go deploy and begin solving immediately when market ready. So it, it, it puts us ahead of the game. It gives us those at bats. So we're very comfortable deploying. And, and I would say, you know, created that muscle memory before you're going live in a, in a client environment. >>And then you can show, see, you know, and seen is believing. So there are multiple just, I'll say different, you know, IOT use cases that we're doing right now, 5g wireless, you know, untethered headsets, things of that nature. You think about some of the VI and, and AI capabilities that are emerging, whether it's digital twin, whether it's literally T sensors with packages, tracking those types of things, the use cases are endless. But the, the cool thing about it is you're testing those building blocks that I kind of keep referring to. And you're expanding the portfolio of use cases that you can solve with them. And when you start to see patterns, you now have use cases that can solve many similar needs and outcomes. So it's a, it's a huge differentiator. We're lucky to have the, the teams, the, the collective teams together, making those outcomes a reality, some of the best technologies I've ever seen. >>So the joint innovation lab formed about 18 months ago during the pandemic. What was the compelling event or was, was that part of it, or was it customer demand that, that caused you guys to go, you know what, let's come together and actually build a joint lab. >>We saw how fast things were moving. We wanted to say, okay, as something's getting ready to roll out, let's start touching it before, before it's market ready. So when it does, we can hit market and begin generating those outcomes immediately. And it, it, it took a little doing, but it came to place very quickly, like mines, right. Thinking the right way, you get a good outcome. >>So if you think about the way that a lot of consolidation has happened, yeah. Over, over recent years, you have large cloud vendors, including VMware. If you, if you accept that definition of their partner program, spanning their software to find data center stack across clouds. And then on the other side of the chasm, you have the organizations that help people take the technology and move it into the realm of outcomes. Yes. Doing actual things with the shiny toys, right. It's one thing to develop the shiny toys. It's another thing to get value out of them. Right. You guys are in that middle space, that critical space. So are the largest global systems integrators in the world. Sure. So how do you, how do you work with, or are you strictly competitive with yeah. The, you know, the, the alphabet soup of, of, yeah. Of global systems integrators, where do you fit into that space? >>So, so again, go back to those, the assets and the capabilities that we have, right? The power users of software, we have a manage and professional services organization, and it's all about, I'll say day zero day one, think of that consultative professional services approach to literally discover, define design, analyze what that outcome is, and then build and deploy. Okay. So migration, you know, transition of workloads, all tee it up for the day, two type capabilities where we are different, those assets that we're building on are hours. Okay. You know, the Accentures, the Deloittes, they're amazing, right. They're also sourcing network, they're sourcing compute, they're sourcing edge. They're sourcing things from other third providers. We are the power users of our capabilities that makes us the best at it. So that integration, we have the, the, the ways to put the, the instructions to put those Legos together better than anybody else. >>Well, so does that mean that you are best targeting at a certain market segment? Where possibly, would you seed some market to the largest of, of global systems integrators at some point? Sure. >>So, so there are certain things that they are amazing at, right. Think about some of the, the, the biggest M applications and things like that. We're power users and power deployers of SAP. That's really, the niche is high up that will go into the app stack, right? Doing the dynamics, doing different types of Oracle suites and things of that nature, let them go there. Right. But enabling applications to live on our platforms and across our networks, we play to our strengths there, leveraging software technologies like VMware, right. And the hyperscalers that's really where I don't wanna say it's their hard boundaries, but again, it's boundaries where we have strength. We will always wanna play to our strengths and be honest, right. If you're honest about your capabilities, you will win the business that you were, that you were great at. And that's what we did. >>Yeah. I, I think there's huge opportunity in that space, frankly. I think not too long ago when asked, I think a lot of people would say, Hmm, it's all gonna be consolidation. There's gonna be five standing over here, five standing over there and they're gonna work together and everyone else is gonna have to go work for those people. What we've seen is organizations like lumen yeah. Taking their historical capabilities and finding that space. Sure. It's really, really interesting to see that >>There's one thing that I'll add too. And the, you know, the, the, the way of the world is automation and orchestration. Okay. When you own the platforms, when you own the technologies that you're able to work with, you're able to evolve those capabilities and it, it, it stays your intellectual property, right. That intellectual property gives you amazing scale too. So that's one of the things that we've been lucky enough to do is we're continually working and involving that suite of orchestration and automation, that layers on top of our platform, right. Our platform for amazing things is it's that automation, orchestration is very key to making it go round. >>Speaking of amazing things, what are some of the things on the horizon for Lumin and VMware? What can customers look forward to in the coming months? >>So yesterday we actually just launched our sassy offering. So that's amazing and great job to the product teams for >>That. I, I, I, I gave one of your colleagues grief yesterday. He didn't appreciate it. I'm sure, but it's considered a party foul to let's, let's remind people what sassy stands for. >>So, so secure a access service edge, basically, all right. Software to find networking. Plus security it's really becomes a dynamic network, right. One that can live, breathe and grow and, and VMware has amazing technology yeah. That we are leveraging that's really the under or the, the overlay network for, for our network. And then we're also even scaling that out too, to, to, to include carbon black security offerings. Okay. As well as workspace one. So those are additional evolutions, some of the, the, the further enhancements with Tansu and Kubernetes. Right, right. In the portfolio as well. So as that capability expands. So, so does, so does the efforts that we have with it. >>Fantastic. Awesome. >>Steve, thank you so much for joining David. Me, I program appreciate talking about lumen. What's going on there, how you're working better together with VMware and the, and the outcomes that you're delivering for customers. We appreciate your time. Thank >>You very much greatly. Appreciate >>It. Our pleasure. Thank you for our guest and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022, Dave. And I will be right back with our next guest. So don't change the channel.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2022. We are at Moscone West. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. Excited, really excited, whereas they were saying in the VMware keynote, pumped and jacked and jazzed to be back in-person with a lot of folks here. Keynote with standing room only. We've just come from that. We've got a couple of guests here from Expedient, going to unpack their relationship with VMware. Please welcome Brian Smith, the Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Expedient. And Brent Meadows, the Vice President of Advanced Solution Architecture at Expedient. Guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Appreciate it bringing us on. >> Yep, welcome. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> It is phenomenal to be back. >> So let's talk about obviously three years since the last, what was called VMworld, so many dynamics in the market. Talk to us about what's going on at Expedient, we want to dig into Cloud Different, but kind of give us a lay of the land of what's going on and then we're going to uncrack the VMware partnership as well. >> Sure, so Expedient we're a full stack cloud service provider. So we have physical data centers that we run and then have VMware-based cloud and we've seen a huge shift from the client perspective during the pandemic in how they've really responded from everything pre-pandemic was very focused with Cloud First and trying to go that route only with hyper scaler. And there's been a big evolution with how people have to change how they think about their transformation to get the end result they're looking for. >> Talk about Cloud Different and what it's helping customers to achieve as everyone's in this accelerated transformation. >> Yeah. So, Cloud Different is something that Expedient branded. It's really about how the transformation works. And traditionally, companies thought about doing their transformation, at first they kept everything in house that they were doing and they started building their new applications out into a hyper scale cloud. And what that really is like is, a good analogy would be, it's like living in a house while you're renovating it. And I know what that's like from my relationship versus if you build a new house, or move to a new property that's completed already. And that's really the difference in that experience from a Cloud Different approach from transformation is you think of all the things that you have internally, and there's a lot of technical debt there, and that's a lot of weight that you're carrying when you're trying to do that transformation. So if you kind of flip that around and instead look to make that transformation and move all that technical debt into a cloud that's already built to run those same types of applications, a VMware-based cloud, now you can remove all of that noise, move into a curated stack of technology and everything just works. It has the security in place, your teams know how to run it, and then you can take that time you really reclaim and apply that towards new applications and new things that are strategic to the business. >> That's really critical, Brent, to get folks in the IT organization across the business, really focused on strategic initiatives rather than a lot of the mundane tasks that they just don't have time for. Brent, what are you hearing in the last couple of years with the dynamics we talked about, what are you hearing from the customer? >> Right. So, one of the big things and the challenges in the current dynamic is kind of that staffing part. So as people have built their infrastructure over the years, there's a lot of tribal knowledge that's been created during that process and every day more and more of that knowledge is walking out the door. So taking some of that technical debt that Brian mentioned and kind of removing that so you don't have to have all that tribal knowledge, really standardizing on the foundational infrastructure pieces, allows them to make that transition and not have to carry that technical debt along with them as they make their digital transformations. >> We heard a lot this morning in the keynote guys about customers going, most of them still being in cloud chaos, but VMware wanting them to get to cloud smart. What does that mean, Brian, from Expedient's perspective? What does cloud smart look like to Expedient and its customers? >> Yeah, we completely agree with that message. And it's something we've been preaching for a couple years in part of that Cloud Different story. And it's really about having a consistent wrapper across all of your environments. It doesn't matter if it's things that you're running on-premises that's legacy to things that are in a VMware-based cloud, like an Expedient cloud or things that are in a hyper scale, but having one consistent security, one consistent automation, one consistent cost management, really gives you the governance so that you can get the value out of cloud that you are hoping for and remove a lot of the noise and think less about the technology and more about what the business is getting out of the technology. >> So what does that look like as a practical matter? I imagine you have customers whose on-premises VMware environments look different than what you've created within Expedient data centers. I'm thinking of things like the level of adoption of NSX, how well a customer may embrace VSAN on-prem as an example. Is part of this transmogrification into your data center, kind of nudging people to adopt frameworks that are really necessary for success in the future? >> It's less of a nudge because a lot of times as a service provider, we don't talk about the technology, we talk more about the outcome. So the nice thing with VMware is we can move that same virtual machine or that container into the platform and the client doesn't always know exactly what's underneath because we have that standardized VMware stack and it just works. And that's part of the beauty of the process. I dunno if you want to talk about a specific client or... >> Yeah, so one of the ones we worked with is Bob Evans Foods. So they were in that transformation stage of refreshing, not only their office space and their data center, but also their VMware environment. So we helped them go through and first thing is looking at their existing environment, figuring out what they currently have, because you can't really make a good decision of what you need to change until you know where you're starting from. So we worked with them through that process, completely evacuated their data center. And from a business perspective, what that allowed them to do as well is have more flexibility in the choice of their next corporate office, because they didn't have to have a data center attached to it. So just from that data center perspective, we gave them some flexibility there. But then from an operations perspective, really standardize that process, offloaded some of those menial tasks that you mentioned earlier, and allow them to really look more towards business-driving projects, instead of just trying to keep those lights on, keeping the backups running, et cetera. >> Brian, question for you, here we are, the theme of the event is "The Center of the Multi-cloud Universe" which seems like a Marvel movie, I haven't seen any new superheroes yet, but I suspect there might be some here. But as customers end up and land in multi-cloud by default not by strategy, how does Expedient and VMware help them actually take the environment that they have and make it strategic so that the business can achieve the outcomes, improving revenue, finding new revenue streams, new products, new routes to market to delight those customers. How do you turn that kind of cloud chaos into a strategy? >> Yeah. I'd say there's a couple different components. One is really time. How can you give them time back for things that are creating noise and aren't really strategic to the business? And so if you can give that time back, that's the first way that you can really impact the business. And the second is through that standardization, but also a lot of times when people think of that new standard, they're only thinking if you're building from scratch. And what VMware has really helped is by taking those existing workloads and giving a standard that works for those applications and what you're building new and brings those together under a common platform and so had a really significant impact to the speed that somebody can get to that cloud operating model, that used to be a multi-year process and most of our clients can go from really everything or almost everything on-prem and a little bit in a cloud to a complete cloud operating model, on average, in four to six months. >> Wow! >> So if I have an on-premises environment and some of my workloads are running in a VMware context, VMware would make the pitch in an agnostic way that, "Well, you can go and deploy that "on top of a stack of infrastructure "and anybody and anywhere now." Why do customers come to you instead of saying, "Oh, we'll go to "pick your flavor of hyper scale cloud provider." What's kind of your superpower? You've mentioned a couple of things, but really hone it in on, why would someone want to go to Expedient? >> Yeah. In a single word, service. I mean, we have a 99% client retention rate and have for well over a decade. So it's really that expertise that wraps around all the different technology so that you're not worried about what's happening and you're not worried about trying to keep the lights on and doing the firefighting. You're really focused on the business. And the other way to, I guess another analogy is, if you think about a lot of the technology and the way people go to cloud, it's like if you got a set of Legos without the box or the instructions. So you can build stuff, it could be cool, but you're not going to get to that end state-- >> Hold on. That's how Legos used to work. Just maybe you're too young to remember a time-- >> You see their sales go up because now you buy a different set for this-- >> I build those sets with my son, but I do it grudgingly. >> Do you ever step on one? >> Of course I do. >> Yeah, there's some pain involved. Same thing happens in the transformation. So when they're buying services from an Expedient, you're buying that box set where you have a picture of what your outcome's going to be, the instructions are there. So you also have confidence that you're going to get to the end outcome much faster than you would if you're trying to assemble everything yourself. (David laughing) >> In my mind, I'm imagining the things that I built with Lego, before there were instructions. >> No death star? >> No. Nothing close with the death star. Definitely something that you would not want your information technology to depend upon. >> Got it. >> Brent, we've seen obviously, it seems like every customer these days, regardless of industry has a cloud first initiative. They have competitors in the rear view mirror who are, if they're able to be more agile and faster to market, are potential huge competitive threat. As we see the rise of multi-cloud in the last 12 months, there's also been a lot of increased analyst coverage for alternate specialty hybrid cloud. Talk to us about, Expedient was in the recent Gartner market guide for specialty cloud. How are these related? What's driving this constant change out in the customer marketplace? >> Sure. So a lot of that agility that clients are getting and trying to do that digital transformation or refactor their applications requires a lot of effort from the developers and the internal IT practitioners. So by moving to a model with an enterprise kind of like Expedient, that allows them to get a consistent foundational level for those technical debt, the 'traditional workloads' where they can start focusing their efforts more on that refactoring of their applications, to get that agility, to get the flexibility, to get the market advantage of time to market with their new refactored applications. That takes them much faster to market, allows them to get ahead of those competitors, if they're not already ahead of them, get further ahead of them or catch up the ones that may have already made that transition. >> And I would add that the analyst coverage you've seen in the last 9 to 12 months, really accelerate for our type of cloud because before everything was hyper scale, everything's going to be hyper scale and they realized that companies have been trying to go to the cloud really for over a decade, really 15 years, that digital transformation, but most companies, when you look at the analysts say they're about 30% there, they've hit a plateau. So they need to look at a different way to approach that. And they're realizing that a VMware-based cloud or the specialty cloud providers give a different mode of cloud. Because you had of a pendulum that everything was on-premises, everything swung to cloud first and then it swung to multi-cloud, which meant multiple hyper scale providers and now it's really landing at that equilibrium where you have different modes of cloud. So it's similar like if you want to travel the world, you don't use one mode of transportation to get from one continent to the other. You have to use different modes. Same thing to get all the way to that cloud transformation, you need to use different modes of cloud, an enterprise cloud, a hyper scale cloud, working them together with that common management plan. >> And with that said Brian, where have customer conversations gone in the last couple of years? Obviously this has got to be an executive level, maybe even a board level conversation. Talk to us about how your customer conversations have changed. Have the stakeholders changed? Has things gone up to stack? >> Yeah. The business is much more involved than what it's been in the past and some of the drivers, even through the pandemic, as people reevaluate office space, a lot of times data centers were part of the same building. Or they were added into a review that nobody ever asked, "Well, why are you only using 20% of your data center?" So now that conversation is very active and they're reevaluating that and then the conversation shifts to "Where's the best place?" And that's a lot of, the conference also talks about the best place for your application for the workload in the right location. >> My role here is to dive down into the weeds constantly to stay away from business outcomes and things like that. But somewhere in the middle there's this question of how what you provide is consumed. So fair to assume that often people are moving from CapEx model to an OPEX model where they're consuming by the glass, by the drink. What does that mean organizationally for your customers? And do you help them work through that journey, reorganizing their internal organization to take advantage of cloud? Is that something that Expedient is a part of, or do you have partners that help them through that? How does that work? >> Yeah. There's some unique things that an enterprise doesn't understand when they think about what they've done on-prem versus a service provider is. There's whole models that they can purchase with us in consumption, not just the physical hardware, but licensing as well. Do you want to talk about how clients actually step in and start to do that evaluation? >> Sure. So it really kind of starts on the front end of evaluating what they have. So going through an assessment process, because traditionally, if you have a big data center full of hardware, you've already paid for it. So as you're deploying new workloads, it's "free to deploy." But when you go to that cloud operating model, you're paying for each drink that you're taking. So we want to make sure that as they're going into that cloud operating model, that they are right sized on the front end. They're not over-provisioned on anything that they're going to just waste money and resources on after they make that transition. So it's really about giving them great data on the front end, doing all that collection from a foundational level, from a infrastructure level, but also from a business and IT operations perspective and figuring out where they're spending, not just their money, but also their time and effort and helping them streamline and simplify those IT operations. >> Let's talk about one of the other elephants in the room and that is the remote hybrid workforce. Obviously it's been two and a half years, which is hard to believe. I think I'm one of the only people that hates working from home. Most people, do you too? Okay, good. Thank you, we're normal. >> Absolutely. (Lisa laughing) But VMware was talking about desktop as a service, there was so much change and quick temporary platform set up to accommodate offsite workers during the pandemic. What are some of the experiences that your clients are having and how is Expedient plus VMware helping businesses adapt and really create them the right hybrid model for them going forward? >> Sure. So as part of being that full sack cloud service provider, desktop in that remote user has to be part of that consideration. And one of the biggest things we saw with the pandemic was people stood up what we call pandemic VDI, very temporary solutions. And you saw the news articles that they said, "We did it in 10 days." And how many big transformational events do people plan and execute in 10 days that transform their workforce? So now they're having to come back and say, "Okay, what's the right way to deploy it?" And do you want to talk about some of the specifics of what we're seeing in the adjustments that they're doing? >> Sure. So it is, when you look at it from the end user perspective, it's how they're operating, how they're getting their tools through their day to day job, but it's also the IT administrators that are having to provide that service to the end users. So it's really kind of across the board, it's affecting everyone. So it's really kind of going through and helping them figure out how they're going to support their users going forward. So we've spun up things like VMware desktop as a service providing that multi-tenant ability to consume on a per desktop basis, but then we've also wrapped around with a lot of security features. So one of the big things is as people are going and distributing where they're working from, that data and access to data is also opened up to those locations. So putting those protections in place to be able to protect the environment and then be able, if something does get in, to be able to detect what's going on. And then of course, with a lot of the other components, being able to recover those environments. So building the desktops, the end user access into the disaster recovery plans. >> And talk more, a little bit Brent, about the security aspect. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years, ransomware is a household word. I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that means, to some degree. Where is that in customer conversations? I can imagine in certain industries like financial services and healthcare with PII, it's absolutely critical to ensure that that data is, they know where it is. It's protected and it's recoverable, 'cause everyone's talking about cyber resilience these days. >> Right. And if it's not conversation 1, it's conversation 1A. So it's really kind of core to everything that we do when we're talking to clients. It's whether it's production DR or the desktops, is building that security in place to help them build their security practice up. So when you think about it, it's doing it at layers. So starting with things like more advanced antivirus to see what's actually going on the desktop and then kind of layering above there. So even up to micro-segmentation, where you can envelop each individual desktop in their own quasi network, so that they're only allowed kind of that zero trust model where, Hey, if you can get to a file share, that's the only place you should be going or do I need web apps to get my day to day job done, but really restricting that access and making sure that everything is more good traffic versus unknown traffic. >> Yeah. >> And also on the, you asked about the clouds smarter earlier. And you can really weave the desktop into that because when you're thinking of your production compute environment and your remote desktop environment, and now you can actually share storage together, you can share security together and you start to get economies of scale across those different environments as well. >> So as we are in August, I think still yeah, 2022, barely for a couple more days, lot of change going on at VMware. Expedient has been VMware America's partner of the year before. Talk to us about some of the things that you think from a strategic perspective are next for the partnership. >> That it's definitely the multi-cloud world is here. And it's how we can go deeper, how we're going to see that really mature. You know, one of the things that we've actually done together this year was we worked on a project and evaluated over 30 different companies of what they spend on IT. Everything from the physical data center to the entire stack, to people and actually build a cloud transformation calculator that allows you to compare strategies, so that if you look at Strategy A over a five year period, doing your current transformation, versus that Cloud Different approach, it can actually help quantify the number of hours difference that you can get, the total cost of ownership and the speed that you can get there. So it's things like that that help people make easier decisions and simplify information are going to be part of it. But without a doubt, it's going to be how you can have that wrapper across all of your different environments that really delivers that cloud-like environment that panacea people have been looking for. >> Yeah. That panacea, that seems like it's critical for every organization to achieve. Last question for you. When customers come to you, when they've hit that plateau. They come to Expedient saying, "Guys, with VMware, help us accelerate past this. "We don't have the time, we need to get this done quickly." How do you advise them to move forward? >> Sure. So it goes back to that, what's causing them to hit that plateau? Is it more on the development side of things? Is it the infrastructure teams, not being able to respond fast enough to the developers? And really putting a plan in place to really get rid of those plateaus. It could be getting rid of the technical debt. It could be changing the IT operations and kind of that, the way that they're looking at a cloud transformation model, to help them kind of get accelerated and get them back on the right path. >> Back on the right path. I think we all want to get back on the right path. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on theCUBE today, talking about Expedient Cloud Different, what you're seeing in the marketplace, and how Expedient and VMware are helping customers to succeed. We appreciate your time. >> Yep. >> Thanks for having us. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer '22, stick around, Dave and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Hello. Welcome back to our super cloud 22 event. I'm John F host the cue with my co-host Dave ante. Extracting the signal from noise. We're proud to have two amazing cube alumnis here. We got Sanja Putin. Who's now the CEO of cohesive the emo Aaron who's the CTO. Co-founder also former CEO Cub alumni. The father of hyper-converged welcome back to the cube I endorsed the >>Cloud. Absolutely. Is the father. Great >>To see you guys. Thank thanks for coming on and perfect timing. The new job taking over that. The helm Mo it at cohesive big news, but part of super cloud, we wanna dig into it. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having >>Us here. So first of all, we'll get into super before we get into the Supercloud. I want to just get the thoughts on the move Sanjay. We've been following your career since 2010. You've been a cube alumni from that point, we followed that your career. Why cohesive? Why now? >>Yeah, John David, thank you first and all for having us here, and it's great to be at your event. You know, when I left VMware last year, I took some time off just really primarily. I hadn't had a sabbatical in probably 18 years. I joined two boards, Phillips and sneak, and then, you know, started just invest and help entrepreneurs. Most of them were, you know, Indian Americans like me who were had great tech, were looking for the kind of go to market connections. And it was just a wonderful year to just de to unwind a bit. And along the, the way came CEO calls. And I'd asked myself, the question is the tech the best in the industry? Could you see value creation that was signi significant and you know, three, four months ago, Mohit and Carl Eschenbach and a few of the board members of cohesive called me and walk me through Mo's decision, which he'll talk about in a second. And we spent the last few months getting to know him, and he's everything you describe. He's not just the father of hyperconverge. And he wrote the Google file system, wicked smart, built a tech platform better than that second time. But we had to really kind of walk through the chemistry between us, which we did in long walks in, in, you know, discrete places so that people wouldn't find us in a Starbucks and start gossiping. So >>Why Sanjay? There you go. >>Actually, I should say it's a combination of two different decisions. The first one was to, for me to take a different role and I run the company as a CEO for, for nine years. And, you know, as a, as a technologist, I always like, you know, going deep into technology at the same time, the CEO duties require a lot of breadth, right? You're talking to customers, you're talking to partners, you're doing so much. And with the way we've been growing the with, you know, we've been fortunate, it was becoming hard to balance both. It's really also not fair to the company. Yeah. So I opted to do the depth job, you know, be the visionary, be the technologist. And that was the first decision to bring a CEO, a great CEO from outside. >>And I saw your video on the site. You said it was your decision. Yes. Go ahead. I have to ask you, cuz this is a real big transition for founders and you know, I have founder artists cuz everyone, you know, calls me that. But being the founder of a company, it's always hard to let go. I mean nine years as CEO, it's not like you had a, you had a great run. So this was it timing for you? Was it, was it a structural shift, like at super cloud, we're talking about a major shift that's happening right now in the industry. Was it a balance issue? Was it more if you wanted to get back in and in the tech >>Look, I, I also wanna answer, you know, why Sanja, but, but I'll address your question first. I always put the company first what's right for the company. Is it for me to start get stuck the co seat and try to juggle this depth and Brad simultaneously. I mean, I can stroke my ego a little bit there, but it's not good for the company. What's best for the company. You know, I'm a technologist. How about I oversee the technology part in partnership with so many great people I have in the company and I bring someone kick ass to be the CEO. And so then that was the second decision. Why Sanja when Sanjay, you know, is a very well known figure. He's managed billions of dollars of business in VMware. You know, been there, done that has, you know, some of the biggest, you know, people in the industry on his speed dial, you know, we were really fortunate to have someone like that, come in and accept the role of the CEO of cohesive. I think we can take the company to new Heights and I'm looking forward to my partnership with, with Sanja on this. >>It it's we, we called it the splash brothers and >>The, >>In the vernacular. It doesn't matter who gets the ball, whether it's step clay, we shoot. And I think if you look at some of the great partnerships, whether it was gates bomber, there, plenty of history of this, where a founder and a someone who was, it has to be complimentary skills. If I was a technologist myself and wanted to code we'd clash. Yeah. But I think this was really a match me in heaven because he, he can, I want him to keep innovating and building the best platform for today in the future. And our customers tell one customer told me, this is the best tech they've seen since VMware, 20 years ago, AWS, 10 years ago. And most recently this was a global 100 big customers. So I feel like this combination, now we have to show that it works. It's, you know, it's been three, four months. My getting to know him, you know, I'm day eight on the job, but I'm loving it. >>Well, it's a sluman model too. It's more modern example. You saw, he did it with Fred Ludy at service now. Yes. And, and of course at, at snowflake, yeah. And his book, you read his book. I dunno if you've read his book, amp it up, but app it up. And he says, I always you'll love this. Give great deference to the founder. Always show great respect. Right. And for good reason. So >>In fact, I mean you could talk to him, you actually met to >>Frank. I actually, you know, a month or so back, I actually had dinner with him in his ranch in Moana. And I posed the question. There was a number of CEOs that went there and I posed him the question. So Frank, you know, many of us, we grow being deaf guys, you know? And eventually when we take on the home of our CEO, we have to do breadth. How do you do it? And he's like, well, let me tell you, I was never a death guy. I'm a breath guy. >>I'm like, >>That's my answer. Yeah. >>So, so I >>Want the short story. So the day I got the job, I, I got a text from Frank and I said, what's your advice the first time CEO, three words, amp it up, >>Amp it up. Right? Yeah. >>And so you're always on brand, man. >>So you're an amazing operator. You've proven that time and time again at SAP, VMware, et cetera, you feel like now you, you, you wanna do both of those skills. You got the board and you got the operations cuz you look, you know, look at sloop when he's got Scarelli wherever he goes, he brings Scarelli with him as sort of the operator. How, how do you, how are you thinking >>About that? I mean it's early days, but yeah. Yeah. Small. I mean I've, you know, when I was, you know, it was 35,000 people at VMware, 80, 90,000 people at SAP, a really good run. The SAP run was 10 to 20 billion innovative products, especially in analytics and VMware six to 12 end user computing cloud. So I learned a lot. I think the company, you know, being about 2000 employees plus not to mayor tomorrow, but over the course next year I can meet everybody. Right? So first off the executive team, 10 of us, we're, we're building more and more cohesiveness if I could use that word between us, which is great, the next, you know, layers of VPs and every manager, I think that's possible. So I I'm a people person and a customer person. So I think when you take that sort of extroverted mindset, we'll bring energy to the workforce to, to retain the best and then recruit the best. >>And you know, even just the week we, we were announced that this announcement happened. Our website traffic went through the roof, the highest it's ever been, lots of resumes coming in. So, and then lots of customer engagement. So I think we'll take this, but I, I feel very good about the possibilities, because see, for me, I didn't wanna walk into the company to a company where the technology risk was high. Okay. I feel like that I can go to bed at night and the technology risk is low. This guy's gonna run a machine at the current and the future. And I'm hearing that from customers. Now, what I gotta do is get the, the amp it up part on the go to market. I know a little thing or too about >>That. You've got that down. I think the partnership is really key here. And again, nine use the CEO and then Sanja points to our super cloud trend that we've been looking at, which is there's another wave happening. There's a structural change in real time happening now, cloud one was done. We saw that transition, AWS cloud native now cloud native with an kind of operating system kind of vibe going on with on-premise hybrid edge. People say multi-cloud, but we're looking at this as an opportunity for companies like cohesive to go to the next level. So I gotta ask you guys, what do you see as structural change right now in the industry? That's disruptive. People are using cloud and scale and data to refactor their business models, change modern cases with cloud native. How are you guys looking at this next structural change that's happening right now? Yeah, >>I'll take that. So, so I'll start by saying that. Number one, data is the new oil and number two data is exploding, right? Every year data just grows like crazy managing data is becoming harder and harder. You mentioned some of those, right? There's so many cloud options available. Cloud one different vendors have different clouds. There is still on-prem there's edge infrastructure. And the number one problem that happens is our data is getting fragmented all over the place and managing so many fragments of data is getting harder and harder even within a cloud or within on-prem or within edge data is fragmented. Right? Number two, I think the hackers out there have realized that, you know, to make money, it's no longer necessary to Rob banks. They can actually see steal the data. So ransomware attacks on the rise it's become a boardroom level discussion. They say there's a ransomware attack happening every 11 seconds or so. Right? So protecting your data has become very important security data. Security has become very important. Compliance is important, right? So people are looking for data management solutions, the next gen data management platform that can really provide all this stuff. And that's what cohesive is about. >>What's the difference between data management and backup. Explain that >>Backup is just an entry point. That's one use case. I wanna draw an analogy. Let's draw an analogy to my former company, Google right? Google started by doing Google search, but is Google really just a search engine. They've built a platform that can do multiple things. You know, they might have started with search, but then they went down to roll out Google maps and Gmail and YouTube and so many other things on that platform. So similarly backups might be just the first use case, but it's really about that platform on which you can do more with the data that's next gen data management. >>But, but you am, I correct. You don't consider yourself a security company. One of your competitors is actually pivoting and in positioning themselves as a security company, I've always felt like data management, backup and recovery data protection is an adjacency to security, but those two worlds are coming together. How do you see >>It? Yeah. The way I see it is that security is part of data management. You start maybe by backing with data, but then you secure it and then you do more with that data. If you're only doing security, then you're just securing the data. You, you gotta do more with the data. So data management is much bigger. So >>It's a security is a subset of data. I mean, there you go. Big TA Sanjay. >>Well, I mean I've, and I, I, I I'd agree. And I actually, we don't get into that debate. You know, I've told the company, listen, we'll figure that out. Cuz who cares about the positioning at the bottom? My email, I say we are data management and data security company. Okay. Now what's the best word that describes three nouns, which I think we're gonna do management security and analytics. Okay. He showed me a beautiful diagram, went to his home in the course of one of these, you know, discrete conversations. And this was, I mean, he's done this before. Many, if you watch on YouTube, he showed me a picture of an ice big iceberg. And he said, listen, you know, if you look at companies like snowflake and data bricks, they're doing the management security and mostly analytics of data. That's the top of the iceberg, the stuff you see. >>But a lot of the stuff that's get backed archive is the bottom of the iceberg that you don't see. And you try to, if you try to ask a question on age data, the it guy will say, get a ticket. I'll come back with three days. I'll UNIV the data rehydrate and then you'll put it into a database. And you can think now imagine that you could do live searches analytics on, on age data that's analytics. So I think the management, the security, the analytics of, you know, if you wanna call it secondary data or backed up data or data, that's not hot and live warm, colder is a huge opportunity. Now, what do you wanna call one phrase that describes all of it. Do you call that superpower management security? Okay, whatever you wanna call it. I view it as saying, listen, let's build a platform. >>Some people call Google, a search company. People, some people call Google and information company and we just have to go and pursue every CIO and every CSO that has a management and a security and do course analytics problem. And that's what we're doing. And when I talk to the, you know, I didn't talk to all the 3000 customers, but the biggest customers and I was doing diligence. They're like this thing has got enormous potential. Okay. And we just have to now go focus, get every fortune 1000 company to pick us because this problem, even the first use case you talk back up is a little bit like, you know, razor blades and soap you've needed. You needed it 30 years ago and you'll need it for 30 years. It's just that the tools that were built in the last generation that were companies formed in 1990s, one of them I worked for years ago are aids are not built for the cloud. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity where many of those, those, those nos management security analytics will become part of what we do. And we'll come up with the right phrase for what the companies and do course >>Sanjay. So ma and Sanja. So given that given that's this Google transition, I like that example search was a data problem. They got sequenced to a broader market opportunity. What super cloud we trying to tease out is what does that change over from a data standpoint, cuz now the operating environments change has become more complex and the enterprises are savvy. Developers are savvy. Now they want, they want SAS solutions. They want freemium and expanding. They're gonna drive the operations agenda with DevOps. So what is the complexity that needs to be abstracted away? How do you see that moment? Because this is what people are talking about. They're saying security's built in, driven by developers. Developers are driving operations behavior. So what is the shift? Where do you guys see this new? Yeah. Expansive for cohesive. How do you fit into super cloud? >>So let me build up from that entry point. Maybe back up to what you're saying is the super cloud, right? Let me draw that journey. So let's say the legacy players are just doing backups. How, how sad is it that you have one silo sitting there just for peace of mind as an insurance policy and you do nothing with the data. If you have to do something with the data, you have to build another silo, you have to build another copy. You have to manage it separately. Right. So clearly that's a little bit brain damaged. Right. So, okay. So now you take a little bit of, you know, newer vendors who may take that backup platform and do a little bit more with that. Maybe they provide security, but your problem still remains. How do you do more with the data? How do you do some analytics? >>Like he's saying, right. How do you test development on that? How do you migrate the data to the cloud? How do you manage it? The data at scale? How do you do you provide a unified experience across, across multiple cloud, which you're calling the super cloud. That's where cohesive goes. So what we do, we provide a platform, right? We have tentacles in on-prem in each of the clouds. And on top of that, it looks like one platform that you manage. We have a single control plane, a UI. If you may, a single pin of glass, if, if you may, that our customers can use to manage all of it. And now it looks, starts looking like one platform. You mentioned Google, do you, when you go to, you know, kind Google search or a URL, do you really care? What happens behind the scenes mean behind the scenes? Google's built a platform that spans the whole world. No, >>But it's interesting. What's behind the scenes. It's a beautiful now. And I would say, listen, one other thing to pull on Dave, on the security part, I saw a lot of vendors this day in this space, white washing a security message on top of backup. Okay. And CSO, see through that, they'll offer warranties and guarantees or whatever, have you of X million dollars with a lot of caveats, which will never paid because it's like escape clause here. We won't pay it. Yeah. And, and what people really want is a scalable solution that works. And you know, we can match every warranty that's easy. And what I heard was this was the most scalable solution at scale. And that's why you have to approach this with a Google type mindset. I love the fact that every time you listen to sun pitch, I would, what, what I like about him, the most common word to use is scale. >>We do things at scale. So I found that him and AUR and some of the early Google people who come into the company had thought about scale. And, and even me it's like day eight. I found even the non-tech pieces of it. The processes that, you know, these guys are built for simple things in some cases were better than some of the things I saw are bigger companies I'd been used to. So we just have to continue, you know, building a scale platform with the enterprise. And then our cloud product is gonna be the simple solution for the masses. And my view of the world is there's 5,000 big companies and 5 million small companies we'll push the 5 million small companies as the cloud. Okay. Amazon's an investor in the company. AWS is a big partner. We'll talk about I'm sure knowing John's interest in that area, but that's a cloud play and that's gonna go to the cloud really fast. You not build you're in the marketplace, you're in the marketplace. I mean, maybe talk about the history of the Amazon relationship investing and all that. >>Yeah, absolutely. So in two years back late 2020, we, you know, in collaboration with AWS who also by the way is an investor now. And in cohesive, we rolled out what we call data management as a service. It's our SaaS service where we run our software in the cloud. And literally all customers have to do is just go there and sign on, right? They don't have to manage any infrastructure and stuff. What's nice is they can then combine that with, you know, software that they might have bought from cohesive. And it still looks like one platform. So what I'm trying to say is that they get a choice of the, of the way they wanna consume our software. They can consume it as a SAS service in the cloud. They can buy our software, manage it themselves, offload it to a partner on premises or what have you. But it still looks like that one platform, what you're calling a Supercloud >>Yeah. And developers are saying, they want the bag of Legos to compose their solutions. That's the Nirvana they want to get there. So that's, it has to look the same. >>Well, what is it? What we're calling a Superlo can we, can we test that for a second? So data management and service could span AWS and on-prem with the identical experience. So I guess I would call that a Supercloud I presume it's not gonna through AWS span multiple clouds, but, but >>Why not? >>Well, well interesting cuz we had this, I mean, so, okay. So we could in the future, it doesn't today. Well, >>David enough kind of pause for a second. Everything that we do there, if we do it will be customer driven. So there might be some customers I'll give you one Walmart that may want to store the data in a non AWS cloud risk cuz they're competitors. Right. So, but the control plane could still be in, in, in the way we built it, but the data might be stored somewhere else. >>What about, what about a on-prem customer? Who says, Hey, I, I like cohesive. I've now got multiple clouds. I want the identical experience across clouds. Yeah. Okay. So, so can you do that today? How do you do that today? Can we talk >>About that? Yeah. So basically think roughly about the split between the data plane and the control plane, the data plane is, you know, our cohesive clusters that could be sitting on premises that could be sitting in multiple data centers or you can run an instance of that cluster in the cloud, whichever cloud you choose. Right. That's what he was referring to as the data plane. So collectively all these clusters from the data plane, right? They stored the data, but it can all be managed using the control plane. So you still get that single image, the single experience across all clouds. And by the way, the, the, the, the cloud vendor does actually benefit because here's a customer. He mentioned a customer that may not wanna go to AWS, but when they get the data plane on a different cloud, whether it's Azure, whether it's the Google cloud, they then get data management services. Maybe they're able to replicate the data over to AWS. So AWS also gains. >>And your deployment model is you instantiate the cohesive stack on each of the regions and clouds, is that correct? And you building essentially, >>It all happens behind the scenes. That's right. You know, just like Google probably has their tentacles all over the world. We will instantiate and then make it all look like one platform. >>I mean, you should really think it's like a human body, right? The control planes, the head. Okay. And that controls everything. The data plane is large because it's a lot of the data, right? It's the rest of the body, that data plane could be wherever you want it to be. Traditionally, the part the old days was tape. Then you got disk. Now you got multiple clouds. So that's the way we think about it. And there on that piece of it will be neutral, right? We should be multi-cloud to the data plane being every single place. Cause it's customer demand. Where do you want your store data? Air gapped. On-prem no problem. We'll work with Dell. Okay. You wanna be in a particular cloud, AWS we'll work then optimized with S3 and glacier. So this is where I think the, the path to a multi-cloud or Supercloud is to be customer driven, but the control plane sits in Amazon. So >>We're blessed to have a number of, you know, technical geniuses in here. So earlier we were speaking to Ben wa deja VI, and what they do is different. They don't instantiate an individual, you know, regions. What they do is of a single global. Is there a, is there an advantage of doing it the way the cohesive does it in terms of simplicity or how do you see that? Is that a future direction for you from a technology standpoint? What are the trade offs there? >>So you want to be where the data is when you said single global, I take it that they run somewhere and the data has to go there. And in this day age, correct >>Said that. He said, you gotta move that in this >>Day and >>Age query that's, you know, across regions, look >>In this day and age with the way the data is growing, the way it is, it's hard to move around the data. It's much easier to move around the competition. And in these instances, what have you, so let the data be where it is and you manage it right there. >>So that's the advantage of instantiating in multiple regions. As you don't have to move the >>Data cost, we have the philosophy we call it. Let's bring the, the computation to the data rather than the data to >>The competition and the same security model, same governance model, same. How do you, how do you federate that? >>So it's all based on policies. You know, this overarching platform controlled by, by the control plane, you just, our customers just put in the policies and then the underlying nuts and bolts just take care >>Of, you know, it's when I first heard and start, I started watching some of his old videos, ACE really like hyperconverged brought to secondary storage. In fact, he said, oh yeah, that's great. You got it. Because I first called this idea, hyperconverged secondary storage, because the idea of him inventing hyperconverge was bringing compute to storage. It had never been done. I mean, you had the kind of big VC stuff, but these guys were the first to bring that hyperconverge at, at Nutanix. So I think this is that same idea of bringing computer storage, but now applied not to the warm data, but to the rest of the data, including a >>Lot of, what about developers? What's, what's your relationship with developers? >>Maybe you talk about the marketplace and everything >>He's yeah. And I'm, I'm curious as to do you have a PAs layer, what we call super PAs layer to create an identical developer experience across your Supercloud. I'm gonna my >>Term. So we want our customers not just to benefit from the software that we write. We also want them to benefit from, you know, software that's written by developers by third party people and so on and so forth. So we also support a marketplace on the platform where you can download apps from third party developers and run them on this platform. There's a, a number of successful apps. There's one, you know, look like I said, our entry point might be backups, but even when backups, we don't do everything. Look, for instance, we don't backup mainframes. There is a, a company we partner with, you know, and their software can run in our marketplace. And it's actually used by many, many of our financial customers. So our customers don't get, just get the benefit of what we build, but they also get the benefit of what third parties build. Another analogy I like to draw. You can tell. And front of analogy is I drew an analogy to hyperscale is like Google. Yeah. The second analogy I like to draw is that to a simple smartphone, right? A smartphone starts off by being a great phone. But beyond that, it's also a GPS player. It's a, it's a, it's a music player. It's a camera, it's a flashlight. And it also has a marketplace from where you can download apps and extend the power of that platform. >>Is that a, can we think of that as a PAs layer or no? Is it really not? You can, okay. You can say, is it purpose built for what you're the problem that you're trying to solve? >>So we, we just built APIs. Yeah. Right. We have an SDK that developers can use. And through those APIs, they get to leverage the underlying services that exist on the platform. And now developers can use that to take advantage of all that stuff. >>And it was, that was a key factor for me too. Cause I, what I, you know, I've studied all the six, seven players that sort of so-called leaders. Nobody had a developer ecosystem, nobody. Right? The old folks were built for the hardware era, but anyones were built for the cloud to it didn't have any partners were building on their platform. So I felt for me listen, and that the example of, you know, model nine rights, the name of the company that does back up. So there's, there's companies that are built on and there's a number of others. So our goal is to have a big tent, David, to everybody in the ecosystem to partner with us, to build on this platform. And, and that may take over time, but that's the way we're build >>It. And you have a metadata layer too, that has the intelligence >>To correct. It's all abstract. That that's right. So it's a combination of data and metadata. We have lots of metadata that keeps track of where the data is. You know, it allows you to index the data you can do quick searches. You can actually, you, we talking about the control plan from that >>Tracing, >>You can inject a search that'll through search throughout your multi-cloud environment, right? The super cloud that you call it. We have all that, all that goodness sounds >>Like a Supercloud John. >>Yeah. I mean, data tracing involved can trace the data lineage. >>You, you can trace the data lineage. So we, you know, provide, you know, compliance and stuff. So you can, >>All right. So my final question to wrap up, we guys, first of all, thanks for coming on. I know you're super busy, San Jose. We, we know what you're gonna do. You're gonna amp it up and, you know, knock all your numbers out. Think you always do. But what I'm interested in, what you're gonna jump into, cuz now you're gonna have the creative license to jump in to the product, the platform there has to be the next level in your mind. Can you share your thoughts on where this goes next? Love the control plane, separate out from the data plane. I think that plays well for super. How >>Much time do you have John? This guy's got, he's got a wealth. Ditis keep >>Going. Mark. Give us the most important thing you're gonna focus on. That kind of brings the super cloud and vision together. >>Yeah. Right away. I'm gonna, perhaps I, I can ion into two things. The first one is I like to call it building the, the machine, the system, right. Just to draw an analogy. Look, I draw an analogy to the us traffic system. People from all walks of life, rich, poor Democrats, Republicans, you know, different states. They all work in the, the traffic system and we drive well, right. It's a system that just works. Whereas in some other countries, you know, the system doesn't work. >>We know, >>We know a few of those. >>It's not about works. It's not about the people. It's the same people who would go from here to those countries and, and not dry. Well, so it's all about the system. So the first thing I, I have my sights on is to really strengthen the system that we have in our research development to make it a machine. I mean, it functions quite well even today, but wanna take it to the next level. Right. So that I wanna get to a point where innovation just happens in the grassroots. And it just, just like >>We automations scale optic brings all, >>Just happens without anyone overseeing it. Anyone there's no single point of bottleneck. I don't have to go take any diving catches or have you, there are people just working, you know, in a decentralized fashion and innovation just happens. Yeah. The second thing I work on of course is, you know, my heart and soul is in, you know, driving the vision, you know, the next level. And that of course is part of it. So those are the two things >>We heard from all day in our super cloud event that there's a need for an, an operating system. Yeah. Whether that's defacto standard or open. Correct. Do you see a consortium around the corner potentially to bring people together so that things could work together? Cuz there really isn't no stand there. Isn't a standards bodies. Now we have great hyperscale growth. We have on-prem we got the super cloud thing happening >>And it's a, it's kind of like what is an operating system? Operating system exposes some APIs that the applications can then use. And if you think about what we've been trying to do with the marketplace, right, we've built a huge platform and that platform is exposed through APIs. That third party developers can use. Right? And even we, when we, you know, built more and more services on top, you know, we rolled our D as we rolled out, backup as a service and a ready for thing security as a service governance, as a service, they're using those APIs. So we are building a distributor, putting systems of sorts. >>Well, congratulations on a great journey. Sanja. Congratulations on taking the hem. Thank you've got ball control. Now you're gonna be calling the ball cohesive as they say, it's, >>It's a team. It's, you know, I think I like that African phrase. If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you wanna go far, you go together. So I've always operated with the best deal. I'm so fortunate. This is to me like a dream come true because I always thought I wanted to work with a technologist that frees me up to do what I like. I mean, I started as an engineer, but that's not what I am today. Right? Yeah. So I do understand the product and this category I think is right for disruption. So I feel excited, you know, it's changing growing. Yeah. No. And it's a, it requires innovation with a cloud scale mindset and you guys have been great friends through the years. >>We'll be, we'll be watching you. >>I think it's not only disruption. It's creation. Yeah. There's a lot of white space that just hasn't been created yet. >>You're gonna have to, and you know, the proof, isn't the pudding. Yeah. You already have five of the biggest 10 financial institutions in the us and our customers. 25% of the fortune 500 users, us two of the biggest five pharmaceutical companies in the world use us. Probably, you know, some of the biggest companies, you know, the cars you have, you know, out there probably are customers. So it's already happening. >>I know you got an IPO filed confidentially. I know you can't talk numbers, but I can tell by your confidence, you're feeling good right now we are >>Feeling >>Good. Yeah. One day, one week, one month at a time. I mean, you just, you know, I like the, you know, Jeff Bezos, Andy jazzy expression, which is, it's always day one, you know, just because you've had success, even, you know, if, if a and when an IPO O makes sense, you just have to stay humble and hungry because you realize, okay, we've had a lot of success in the fortune 1000, but there's a lot of white space that hasn't picked USS yet. So let's go, yeah, there's lots of midmarket account >>Product opportunities are still, >>You know, I just stay humble and hungry and if you've got the team and then, you know, I'm really gonna be working also in the ecosystem. I think there's a lot of very good partners. So lots of ideas brew through >>The head. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on our super cloud event and, and, and also doubling up on the news of the new appointment and congratulations on the success guys. Coverage super cloud 22, I'm sure. Dave ante, thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more segments after this break.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to super cloud 22 here in our live studio performance. You're on stage in Palo Alto. I'm Sean fur. You're host with the queue with Dave ante. My co it's got a great industry ecosystem panel to discuss whether it's realer hype, David MC Janet CEO of Hashi Corp, hugely successful company as will LA forest field CTO, Colu and Victoria over yourgo from VMware guys. Thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. So realer, hype, super cloud David. >>Well, I think it depends on the definition. >>Okay. How do you define super cloud start there? So I think we have a, >>I think we have a, like an inherently pragmatic view of super cloud of the idea of super cloud as you talk about it, which is, you know, for those of us that have been in the infrastructure world for a long time, we know there are really only six or seven categories of infrastructure. There's sort of the infrastructure security, networking databases, middleware, and, and, and, and really the message queuing aspects. And I think our view is that if the steady state of the world is multi-cloud, what you've seen is sort of some modicum of standardization across those different elements, you know, take, you know, take confluent. You know, I, I worked in the middleware world years ago, MQ series, and typical multicast was how you did message queuing. Well, you don't do that anymore. All the different cloud providers have their own message, queuing tech, there's, Google pub sub, and the equivalents across the different, different clouds. Kafka has provided a consistent way to do that. And they're not trying to project that. You can run everything connected. They're saying, Hey, you should standardize on Kafka for message cuing is that way you can have operational consistency. So I think to me, that's more how we think about it is sort of, there is sort of layer by layer of sort of de facto standardization for the lingo Franco. >>So a streaming super cloud is how you would think of it, or no, I just, or a component of >>Cloud that could be a super cloud. >>I just, I just think that there are like, if I'm gonna build an application message, queuing is gonna be a necessary element of it. I'm gonna use Kafka, not, you know, a native pub sub engine on one of the clouds, because operationally that's just the only way I can do it. So I think that's more, our view's much more pragmatic rather than trying to create like a single platform that you can run everywhere and deal with the networking realities of like network, you know, hops missing across those different worlds and have that be our responsibility. It's much more around, Hey, let's standardize each layer, operational >>Standardized layer that you can use to build a super cloud if that's in your, your intent or, yeah. Okay. >>And it reminds me of the web services days. You kind of go throwback there. I mean, we're kind of living the next gen of web services, the dream of that next level, because DevOps dev SecOps now is now gone mainstream. That's the big challenge we're hearing devs are doing great. Yep. But the ops teams and screen, they gotta go faster. This seems to be a core, I won't say blocker, but more of a drag to the innovation. >>Well, I I'll just get off, I'll hand it off to, to you guys. But I think the idea that like, you know, if I'm gonna have an app that's running on Amazon that needs to connect to a database that's running on, on the private data center, that's essentially the SOA notion, you know, w large that we're all trying to solve 20 years ago, but is much more complicated because you're brokering different identity models, different networking models. They're just much more complex. So that's where the ops bit is the constraint, you know, for me to build that app, not that complicated for the ops person to let it see traffic is another thing altogether. I think that's, that's the break point for so much of what looks easier to a developer is the operational reality of how you do that. And the good news is those are actually really well solved problems. They're just not broadly understood. >>Well, what's your take, you talk to customers all the time, field CTO, confluent, really doing well, streaming data. I mean, everyone's doing it now. They have to, yeah. These are new things that pop up that need solutions. You guys step up and doing more. What's your take on super cloud? >>Well, I mean, the way we address it honestly is we don't, it's gonna be honest. We don't think about super cloud much less is the fact that SAS is really being pushed down. Like if we rely on seven years ago and you took a look at SAS, like it was obvious if you were gonna build a product for an end consumer or business user, you'd do SAS. You'd be crazy not to. Right. But seven years ago, if you look at your average software company producing something for a developer that people building those apps, chances are you had an open source model. Yeah. Or, you know, self-managed, I think with the success of a lot of the companies that are here today, you know, snowflake data, bricks, Colu, it's, it's obvious that SaaS is the way to deliver software to the developers as well. And as such, because our product is provided that way to the developers across the clouds. That's, that's how they have a unifying data layer, right. They don't necessarily, you know, developers like many people don't necessarily wanna deal with the infrastructure. They just wanna consume cloud data services. Right. So that's how we help our customers span cloud. >>So we evenly that SAS was gonna be either built on a single cloud or in the case of service. Now they built their own cloud. Right. So increasingly we're seeing opportunities to build a Salesforce as well across clouds tap different, different, different services. So, so how does that evolve? Do you, some clouds have, you know, better capabilities in other clouds. So how does that all get sort of adjudicated, do you, do you devolve to the lowest common denominator? Or can you take the best of all of each? >>The whole point to that I think is that when you move from the business user and the personal consumer to the developer, you, you can no longer be on a cloud, right. There has to be locality to where applications are being developed. So we can't just deploy on a single cloud and have people send their data to that cloud. We have to be where the developer is. And our job is to make the most of each, an individual cloud to provide the same experience to them. Right. So yes, we're using the capabilities of each cloud, but we're hiding that to the developer. They don't shouldn't need to know or care. Right. >>Okay. And you're hiding that with the abstraction layer. We talked about this before Victoria, and that, that layer has what, some intelligence that has metadata knowledge that can adjudicate what, what, the best, where the best, you know, service is, or function of latency or data sovereignty. How do you see that? >>Well, I think as the, you need to instrument these applications so that you, you, you can get that data and then make the intelligent decision of where, where, where this, the deploy application. I think what Dave said is, is right. You know, the level of super cloud that they talking about is the standardization across messaging. And, and are you what's happening within the application, right? So you don't, you are not too dependent on the underlying, but then the application say that it takes the form of a, of a microservice, right. And you deploy that. There has to be a way for operator to say, okay, I see all these microservices running across clouds, and I can factor out how they're performing, how I, I, life lifecycle managed and all that. And so I think there is, there is, to me, there's the next level of the super cloud is how you factor this out. So an operator can actually keep up with the developers and make sense of all that and manage it. Like >>You guys that's time. Like its also like that's what Datadog does. So Datadog basically in allows you to instrument all those services, on-prem private data center, you know, all the different clouds to have a consistent view. I think that that's not a good example of a vendor that's created a, a sort of a level of standardization across a layer. And I think that's, that's more how we think about it. I think the notion of like a developer building an application, they can deploy and not have to worry where it exists. Yeah. Is more of a PAs kind of construct, you know, things like cloud Foundry have done a great job of, of doing that. But underneath that there's still infrastructure. There's still security. There's still networking underneath it. And I think that's where, you know, things like confluent and perhaps at the infrastructure layer have standardized, but >>You have off the shelf PAs, if I can call it that. Yeah. Kind of plain. And then, and then you have PAs and I think about, you mentioned snowflake, snowflake is with snow park, seems to be developing a PAs layer that's purpose built for their specific purpose of sharing data and governing data across multiple clouds call super paths. Is, is that a prerequisite of a super cloud you're building blocks. I'm hearing yeah. For super cloud. Is that a prerequisite for super cloud? That's different than PAs of 10 years ago. No, but I, >>But I think this is, there's just different layers. So it's like, I don't know how that the, the snowflake offering is built built, but I would guess it's probably built on Terraform and vault and cons underneath it. Cuz those are the ingredients with respect to how you would build a composite application that runs across multiple. And >>That's how Oracle that town that's how Oracle with the Microsoft announcement. They just, they just made if you saw that that was built on Terraform. Right. But, but they would claim that they, they did some special things within their past that were purpose built for, for sure. Low latency, for example, they're not gonna build that on, you know, open shift as an, as an example, they're gonna, you know, do their own little, you know, >>For sure, for sure. So I think what you're, you're pointing at and what Victoria was talking about is, Hey, can a vendor provided consistent experience across the application layer across these multiple clouds? And I would say, sure, just like, you know, you might build a mobile banking application that has a front end on Amazon in the back end running on vSphere on your private data center. Sure. But the ingredients you use to do that have to be, they can't be the cloud native aspects for how you do that. How do you think about, you know, the connectivity of, of like networking between that thing to this thing? Is it different on Amazon? Is it different on Azure? Is it different on, on Google? And so the, the, the, the companies that we all serve, that's what they're building, they're building composited applications. Snowflake is just an example of a company that we serve this building >>Composite. And, but, but, but don't those don't, you have to hide the complexity of that, those, those cloud native primitives that's your job, right. Is to actually it creates simplicity across clouds. Is it not? >>Why? Go ahead. You. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean that in fact is what we're doing for developers that need to do event streaming, right. That need to process this data in real time. Now we're, we're doing the sort of things that Victoria was just talking about, like underneath the covers, of course, you know, we're using Kubernetes and we're managing the differences between the clouds, but we're hiding the, that, and we've become sort of a defacto standard across the cloud. So if I'm developing an app in any of those cloud, and I think we all know, and you were mentioning earlier every significant company's multi-cloud now all the large enterprises, I just got back from Brazil and like every single one of 'em have multiple clouds and on-prem right. So they need something that can span those. >>What's the challenge there. If you talk to those customers, because we're seeing the same thing, they have multiple clouds. Yeah. But it was kind of by default or they had some use case, either.net developers there with Azure, they'll do whatever cloud. And it kind of seems specialty relative to the cloud native that they're on what problems do they have because the complexity to run infrastructure risk code across clouds is hard. Right? So the trade up between native cloud and have better integration to complexity of multiple clouds seems to be a topic around super cloud. What are you seeing for, for issues that they might have or concerns? >>Yeah. I mean, honestly it is, it is hard to actually, so here's the thing that I think is kind of interesting though, by the way, is that I, I think we tend to, you know, if you're, if you're from a technical background, you tend to think of multicloud as a problem for the it organization. Like how do we solve this? How do we save money? But actually it's a business problem now, too, because every single one of these companies that have multiple clouds, they want to integrate their data, their products across these, and it it's inhibiting their innovation. It's hard to do, but that's where something like, you know, Hatchie Corp comes in right. Is to help solve that. So you can instrument it. It has to happen at each of these layers. And I suppose if it does happen at every single layer, then voila, we organically have something that amounts to Supercloud. Right. >>I love how you guys are representing each other's firms. And, but, but, and they also correct me if I'm a very similar, your customers want to, it is very similar, but your customers want to monetize, right. They want bring their tools, their software, their particular IP and their data and create, you know, every, every company's a software company, as you know, Andreesen says every company's becoming a cloud company to, to monetize in, in the future. Is that, is that a reasonable premise of super cloud? >>Yeah. I think, think everyone's trying to build composite applications to, to generate revenue. Like that's, that's why they're building applications. So yeah. One, 100%. I'm just gonna make it point cuz we see it as well. Like it's actually quite different by geography weirdly. So if you go to like different geographies, you see actually different cloud providers, more represented than others. So like in north America, Amazon's pretty dominant Japan. Amazon's pretty dominant. You go to Southeast Asia actually. It's not necessarily that way. Like it might be Google for, for whatever reason more hourly Bob. So this notion of multi's just the reality of one's everybody's dealing with. But yeah, I think everyone, everyone goes through the same process. What we've observed, they kind of go, there's like there's cloud V one and there's cloud V two. Yeah. Cloud V one is sort of the very tactical let's go build something on cloud cloud V two is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And I have some stuff on Amazon, some stuff on Azure, some stuff on, on vSphere and I need some operational consistency. How do I think about zero trust across that way in a consistent way. And that's where this conversation comes into being. It's sort of, it's not like the first version of cloud it's actually when people step back and say, Hey, Hey, I wanna build composite applications to monetize. How am I gonna do that in an industrialized way? And that's the problem that you were for. It's >>Not, it's not as, it's not a no brainer like it was with cloud, go to the cloud, write an app. You're good here. It's architectural systems thinking, you gotta think about regions. What's the latency, you know, >>It's step back and go. Like, how are we gonna do this, this exactly. Like it's wanted to do one app, but how we do this at scale >>Zero trust is a great example. I mean, Amazon kind of had, was forced to get into the zero trust, you know, discussion that, that wasn't, you know, even a term that they used and now sort of, they're starting to talk about it, but within their domain. And so how do you do zero trust trust across cost to your point? >>I, I wonder if we're limiting our conversation too much to the, the very technical set of developers, cuz I'm thinking back at again, my example of C plus plus libraries C plus plus libraries makes it easier. And then visual BA visual basic. Right. And right now we don't have enough developers to build the software that we want to build. And so I want, and we are like now debating, oh, can we, do we hide that AI API from Google versus that SQL server API from, from Microsoft. I wonder at some point who cares? Right. You know, we, I think if we want to get really economy scale, we need to get to a level of abstraction for developers that really allows them to say, I don't need, for most of most of the procedural application that I need to build as a developer, as a, as a procedural developer, I don't care about this. Some, some propeller had, has done that for me. I just like plug it in my ID and, and I use it. And so I don't, I don't know how far we are from that, but if we don't get to that level, it fits me that we never gonna get really the, the economy or the cost of building application to the level. >>I was gonna ask you in the previous segment about low code, no code expanding the number of developers out there and you talking about propel heads. That's, that's what you guys all do. Yeah. You're the technical geniuses, right. To solve that problem so that, so you can have low code development is that I >>Don't think we have the right here. Cause I, we, we are still, you know, trying to solve that problem at that level. But, but >>That problem has to be solved first, right before we can address what you're talking about. >>Yeah. I, I worked very closely with one of my biggest mentors was Adam Bosworth that built, you know, all the APIs for visual basics and, and the SQL API to visual basic and all that stuff. And he always was on that front. In fact that his last job was at my, at AWS building that no code environment. So I'm a little detached from that. It just hit me as we were discussing this. It's like, maybe we're just like >>Creating, but I would, I would argue that you kind of gotta separate the two layers. So you think about the application platform layer that a developer interfaces to, you know, Victoria and I worked together years ago and one of the products we created was cloud Foundry, right? So this is the idea of like just, you know, CF push, just push this app artifact and I don't care. That's how you get the developer community written large to adopt something complicated by hiding all the complexity. And I think that that is one model. Yeah. Turns out Kubernetes is actually become a peer to that and perhaps become more popular. And that's what folks like Tanza are trying to do. But there's another layer underneath that, which is the infrastructure that supports it. Right? Yeah. Cause that's only needs to run on something. And I think that's, that's the separation we have to do. Yes. We're talking a little bit about the plumbing, but you know, we just easily be talking about the app layer. You need, both of them. Our point of view is you need to standardize at this layer just like you need standardize at this layer. >>Well, this is, this is infrastructure. This is DevOps V two >>Dev >>Ops. Yeah. And this is where I think the ops piece with open source, I would argue that open source is blooming more than ever. So I think there's plenty of developers coming. The automation question becomes interesting because I think what we're seeing is shift left is proving that there's app developers out there that wanna stay in their pipelining. They don't want to get in under the hood. They just want infrastructure as code, but then you got supply chain software issues there. We talked about the Docker on big time. So developers at the top, I think are gonna be fine. The question is what's the blocker. What's holding them back. And I don't see the devs piece Victoria as much. What do you guys think? Is it, is the, is the blocker ops or is it the developer experience? That's the blocker. >>It's both. There are enough people truthfully. >>That's true. Yeah. I mean, I think I sort of view the developer as sort of the engine of the digital innovation. So, you know, if you talk about creative destruction, that's, that was the economic equivalent of softwares, eating the world. The developers are the ones that are doing that innovation. It's absolutely essential that you make it super easy for them to consume. Right. So I think, you know, they're nerds, they want to deal with infrastructure to some degree, but I think they understand the value of getting a bag of Legos that they can construct something new around. And I think that's the key because honestly, I mean, no code may help for some things. Maybe I'm just old >>School, >>But I, I went through this before with like Delphy and there were some other ones and, and I hated it. Like I just wanted a code. Yeah. Right. So I think making them more efficient is, is absolutely good. >>But I think what, where you're going with that question is that the, the developers, they tend to stay ahead. They, they just, they're just gear, you know, wired that way. Right. So I think right now where there is a big bottleneck in developers, I think the operation team needs to catch up. Cuz I, I talk to these, these, these people like our customers all the time and I see them still stuck in the old world. Right. Gimme a bunch of VMs and I'll, I know how to manage well that world, you know, although as lag is gonna be there forever, so managing mainframe. But so if they, the world is all about microservices and containers and if the operation team doesn't get on top of it and the security team that then that they're gonna be a bottleneck. >>Okay. I want to ask you guys if the, if the companies can get through that knothole of having their ops teams and the dev teams work well together, what's the benefits of a Supercloud. How do you see the, the outcome if you kind of architect it, right? You think the big picture you zoom as saying what's the end game look like for Supercloud? Is that >>What I would >>Say? Or what's the Nirvana >>To me Nirvana is that you don't care. You just don't don't care. You know, you just think when you running building application, let's go back to the on-prem days. You don't care if it runs on HP or Dell or, you know, I'm gonna make some enemies here with my old, old family, but you know, you don't really care, right. What you want is the application is up and running and people can use it. Right. And so I think that Nirvana is that, you know, there is some, some computing power out there, some pass layer that allows me to deploy, build application. And I just like build code and I deploy it and I get value at a reasonable cost. I think one of the things that the super cloud for as far as we're concerned is cost. How do you manage monitor the cost across all this cloud? >>Make sure that you don't, the economics don't get outta whack. Right? How many companies we know that have gone to the cloud only to realize that holy crap, now I, I got the bill and, and you know, I, as a vendor, when I was in my previous company, you know, we had a whole team figuring out how to lower our cost on the one hyperscaler that we were using. So these are, you know, the, once you have in the super cloud, you don't care just you, you, you go with the path of least the best economics is. >>So what about the open versus closed debate will you were mentioning that we had snowflake here and data bricks is both ends of the spectrum. Yeah. You guys are building open standards across clouds. Clearly even the CLO, the walled gardens are using O open standards, but historically de facto standards have emerged and solved these problems. So the super cloud as a defacto standard, versus what data bricks is trying to do super cloud kind of as an, as an open platform, what are you, what are your thoughts on that? Can you actually have an, an open set of standards that can be a super cloud for a specific purpose, or will it just be built on open source technologies? >>Well, I mean, I, I think open source continues to be an important part of innovation, but I will say from a business model perspective, like the days, like when we started off, we were an open source company. I think that's really done in my opinion, because if you wanna be successful nowadays, you need to provide a cloud native SAS oriented product. It doesn't matter. What's running underneath the covers could be commercial closed source, open source. They just wanna service and they want to use it quite frankly. Now it's nice to have open source cuz the developers can download it and run on their laptop. But I, I can imagine in 10 years time actually, and you see most companies that are in the cloud providing SAS, you know, free $500 credit, they may not even be doing that. They'll just, you know, go whatever cloud provider that their company is telling them to use. They'll spin up their SAS product, they'll start playing with it. And that's how adoption will grow. Right? >>Yeah. I, I think, I mean my personal view is that it's, that it's infrastructure is pervasive enough. It exists at the bottom of everything that the standards emerge out of open source in my view. And you think about how something like Terraform is built, just, just pick one of the layers there's Terraform core. And then there's a plugin for everything you integrate with all of those are open source. There are over 2000 of these. We don't build them. Right. That's and it's the same way that drove Linux standardization years ago, like someone had to build the drivers for every piece of hardware in the world. The market does not do that twice. The market does that once. And so I, I I'm deeply convicted that opensource is the only way that this works at the infrastructure layer, because everybody relies on it at the application layer, you may have different kinds of databases. You may have different kind of runtime environments. And that's just the nature of it. You can't to have two different ways of doing network, >>Right? Because the stakes are so high, basically. >>Yeah. Cuz there's, there's an infinite number of the surface areas are so large. So I actually worked in product development years ago for middleware. And the biggest challenge was how do you keep the adapter ecosystem up to date to integrate with everything in the world? And the only way to do it in our view is through open source. And I think that's a fundamental philosophical view that it we're just, you know, grounded in. I think when people are making infrastructure decisions that span 20 years at the customer base, this is what they think about. They go which standard it will emerge based on the model of the vendor. And I don't think my personal view is, is it's not possible to do in a, in >>A, do you think that's a defacto standard kind of psychological perspective or is there actual material work being done or both in >>There it's, it's, it's a network effect thing. Right? So, so, you know, before Google releases a new service service on Google cloud, as part of the release checklist is does it support Terraform? They do that work, not us. Why? Because every one of their customers uses Terraform to interface with them and that's how it works. So see, so the philosophical view of, of the customers, okay, what am I making a standardize on for this layer for the next 30 years? It's kind of a no brainer. Philosophically. >>I tend, >>I think the standards are organically created based upon adoption. I mean, for instance, Terraform, we have a provider we're again, we're at the data layer that we created for you. So like, I don't think there's a board out there. I mean there are that creating standards. I think those days are kind of done to be honest, >>The, the Terraform provider for vSphere has been downloaded five and a half million times this year. Yeah. Right. Like, so, I >>Mean, these are unifying moments. This are like the de facto standards are really important process in these structural changes. I think that's something that we're looking at here at Supercloud is what's next? What has to unify look what Kubernetes has done? I mean, that's essentially the easy thing to orchestra, but people get behind it. So I see this is a big part of this next, the two. Totally. What do you guys see that's needed? What's the rallying unification point? Is it the past layer? Is it more infrastructure? I guess that's the question we're trying to, >>I think every layer will need that open source or a major traction from one of the proprietary vendor. But I, I agree with David, it's gonna be open source for the most part, but you know, going back to the original question of the whole panel, if I may, if this is reality of hype, look at the roster of companies that are presenting or participating today, these are all companies that have some sort of multi-cloud cross cloud, super cloud play. They're either public have real revenue or about to go public. So the answer to the question. Yeah, it's real. Yeah. >>And so, and there's more too, we had couldn't fit him in, but we, >>We chose super cloud on purpose cuz it kind of fun, John and I kind came up with it and, and but, but do you think it's, it hurts the industry to have this, try to put forth this new term or is it helpful to actually try to push the industry to define this new term? Or should it just be multi-cloud 2.0, >>I mean, conceptually it's different than multi-cloud right. I mean, in my opinion, right? So in that, in that respect, it has value, right? Because it's talking about something greater than just multi-cloud everyone's got multi-cloud well, >>To me multi-cloud is the, the problem I should say the opportunity. Yeah. Super cloud or we call it cross cloud is the solution to that channel. Let's >>Not call again. And we're debating that we're debating that in our cloud already panel where we're talking about is multi-cloud a problem yet that needs to get solved or is it not yet ready for a market to your point? Is it, are we, are we in the front end of coming into the true problem set, >>Give you definitely answer to that. The answer is yes. If you look at the customers that are there, they won, they have gone through the euphoria phase. They're all like, holy something, what, what are we gonna do about this? Right. >>And, but they don't know what to do. >>Yeah. And the more advanced ones as the vendor look at the end of the day, markets are created by vendors that build ed that customers wanna buy. Yeah. Because they get value >>And it's nuance. David, we were sort talking about before, but Goldman Sachs has announced they're analysis software vendor, right? Capital one is a software vendor. I've been really interested Liberty what Cerner does with what Oracle does with Cerner and in terms of them becoming super cloud vendors and monetizing that to me is that is their digital transformation. Do you guys, do you guys see that in the customer base? Am I way too far out of my, of my skis there or >>I think it's two different things. I think, I think basically it's the idea of building applications. If they monetize yeah. There and Cerner's gonna build those. And you know, I think about like, you know, IOT companies that sell that sell or, or you think people that sell like, you know, thermostats, they sell an application that monetizes those thermostats. Some of that runs on Amazon. Some of that runs a private data center. So they're basically in composite applications and monetize monetizing them for the particular vertical. I think that's what we ation every day. That's what, >>Yeah. You can, you can argue. That's not, not anything new, but what's new is they're doing that on the cloud and taking across multiple clouds. Multiple. Exactly. That's what makes >>Edge. And I think what we all participate in is, Hey, in order to do that, you need to drive standardization of how you do provisioning, how you do networking, how you do security to underpin those applications. I think that's what we're all >>Talking about, guys. It's great stuff. And I really appreciate you taking the time outta your day to help us continue the conversation to put out in the open. We wanna keep it out in the open. So in the last minute we have left, let's go down the line from a hash core perspective, confluent and VMware. What's your position on super cloud? What's the outcome that you would like to see from your standpoint, going out five years, what's it look like they will start with you? >>I just think people like sort under understanding that there is a layer by layer of view of how to interact across cloud, to provide operational consistency and decomposing it that way. Thinking about that way is the best way to enable people to build and run apps. >>We wanna help our customers work with their data in real time, regardless of where they're on primer in the cloud and super cloud can enable them to build applications that do that more effectively. That's that's great for us >>For tour you. >>I, my Niana for us is customers don't care, just that's computing out there. And it's a, it's a, it's a tool that allows me to grow my business and we make it all, all the differences and all the, the challenges, you know, >>Disappear, dial up, compute utility infrastructure, ISN >>Code. I open up the thought there's this water coming out? Yeah, I don't care. I got how I got here. I don't wanna care. Well, >>Thank you guys so much and congratulations on all your success in the marketplace, both of you guys and VMware and your new journey, and it's gonna be great to watch. Thanks for participating. Really appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Okay. This is super cloud 22, our events, a pilot. We're gonna get it out there in the open. We're gonna get the data we're gonna share with everyone out in the open on Silicon angle.com in the cube.net. We'll be back with more live coverage here in Palo Alto. After this short break.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Veeam on 2022 at the RS. Nice to be at the aria. My co-host Dave Nicholson here. We spend a lot of time at the Venetian convention center, formerly the sand. So it's nice to have a more intimate venue. I really like it here. George Burg is joining us. He's the vice president of data protection at vast data, a company that some of you may not know about. George. >>Welcome a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. >>So VAs is smoking hot, raised a ton of dough. You've got great founders, hard charging, interesting tech. We've covered a little bit on the Wikibon research side, but give us the overview of the company. Yeah, >>If I could please. So we're here at the, you know, the Veeam show and, you know, the theme is modern data protection, and I don't think there's any company that epitomizes modern data protection more than vast data. The fact that we're able to do an all flash system at exabyte scale, but the economics of cloud object based deep, cheap, and deep archive type solutions and an extremely resilient platform is really game changing for the marketplace. So, and quite frankly, a marketplace from a data protection target space that I think is, is ripe for change and in need of change based on the things that are going on in the marketplace today. >>Yeah. So a lot of what you said is gonna be surprising to people, wait a minute, you're talking about data protection and all flash sure. I thought you'd use cheap and deep disc or, you know, even tape for that or, you know, spin it up in the cloud in a, in a deep archive or a glacier. Explain your approach in, in architecture. Yeah. At a >>High level. Yeah. So great question. We get that question every day and got it in the booth yesterday, probably about 40 or 50 times. How could it be all flash that at an economic point that is the fitting that of, you know, data protection. Yeah. >>What is this Ferrari minivan of which you speak? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah. The minivan that goes 180 miles an hour, right. That, you know, it's, it's really all about the architecture, right? The component tree is, is somewhat similar to what you'll see in other devices. However, it's how we're leveraging them in the architecture and design, you know, from our founders years ago and building a solution that just not, was not available in the marketplace. So yeah, sure. We're using, you know, all flash QLC drives, but the technology, you know, the advanced next generation algorithms or erasure coding or rage striping allows us to be extremely efficient. We also have some technologies around what we call similarity, some advanced data reduction. So you need less, less capacity if you will, with a vast system. So that obviously help obviously helps us out tremendously with their economics. But the other thing is I could sell a customer exactly what they need. If you think about the legacy data protection market purpose built back of appliances, for example, you know, ALA, Adele, Aita, and HP, you know, they're selling systems that are somewhat rigid. There's always a controller in a capacity. It's tied to a model number right. Soon as you need more performance, you buy another, as soon as you need more capacity, you buy another, it's really not modular in any way. It's great >>Model. If you want to just keep, keep billing the >>Customer. Yeah. If, if that, if yeah. And, and I, I think, I think at this point, the purpose, you know, Dave, the purpose built backup appliance market is, is hungry for a change. Right. You know, there's, there's not anyone that has one. It doesn't exist. I'm not just talking about having two because of replication. I'm it's because of organic growth. Ransomware needs to have a second unit, a second copy. And just, and just scalability. Well, you >>Guys saw that fatigue with that model of, oh, you need more buy more, >>Right? Oh, without a doubt, you said we're gonna attack that. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. No, no, no. That's great. Without a doubt. So, so we can configure a solution exactly. To the need. Cause let's face it. Every single data center, every single vertical market, it's a work of art. You know, everyone's retention policies are different. Everyone's compliance needs are different. There might be some things that are self mandated or government mandated and they're all gonna be somewhat different. Right? The fact of the matter is the way that our, our architecture works, disaggregated shared everything. Architecture is different because when we go back to those model numbers and there's more rigid purpose built back of appliances, or, or maybe a raise designed specifically for data protection, they don't offer that flexibility. And, you know, I, I, I think our, our, our, our entry point is sized to exactly what the need is. Our ease of scalability. You need more performance. We just add another compute, another compute box, what we call our C box. If you need more capacity, we just add another data box, a D box, you know, where the data resides. And, you know, I, you know, especially here at Veeam, I think customers are really clamoring for that next generation solution. They love the idea that there's a low point of entry, but they also love the idea that, that it's easy to scale on demand, you know, as, as needed and as needed basis. >>So just, I wanna be just, I want to go down another layer on that architecturally. Cause I think it's important for people to understand. Sure, exactly what you're saying. When you're talking about scaling, there's this concept of the, of the sort of devil's triangle, the tyranny of this combination of memory, CPU and storage. Sure. And if you're too rigid, like in an appliance, you end up paying for things you don't need. Correct. When all I need is a little more capacity. Correct. All I need is a little more horsepower. Well, you wanna horsepower? No, you gotta buy a bunch of capacity. Exactly. Oh, need capacity. No, no. You need to buy expensive CPUs and suck a bunch of power. All I need is capacity. So what, so go through that, just a little more detail in terms of sure. How you cobble these systems together. Sure. My, the way my brain works, it's always about Legos. So feel free to use Legos. >>Yeah. We, so, so with our disaggregated solution, right. We've separated basically hardware from software. Right. So, so, so that's a good thing, right? From an economic standpoint, but also a design and architecture standpoint, but also an underlining underpinning of that solution is we've also separated the capacity from the performance. And as you just mentioned, those are typically relatively speaking for every other solution on the planet. Those are tied together. Right? Right. So we've disaggregated that as well within our architecture. So we, we again have basically three tier, tier's not the right word, three components that build out a vast cluster. And again, we don't sell like a solution designed by a model number. And that's typically our C boxes connected via NVMe over fabric to a D box C is all the performance D is all the capacity because they're modular. You can end up like our, our baseline product would start out as a one by one, one C box one D box, right? >>Connected again, via different, different size and Vme fabrics. And that could scale to hundreds. When we do have customers with dozens of C boxes, meeting high performance requirements, keep in mind when, when vast data came to market, our founders brought it to the market for high performance computing machine learning, AI data protection was an afterthought, but those found, you know, foundational things that we're able to build in that modularity with performance at scale, it behooves itself, it's perfect fit for data protection. So we see in clients today, just yesterday, two clients standing next to each other in the same market in the same vertical. I have a 30 day retention. I have a 90 day retention. I have to keep one year worth of full backups. I have to keep seven years worth of full backups. We can accommodate both and size it to exactly what the need is. >>Now, the moment that they need one more terabyte, we license into 100 terabyte increments so they can actually buy it in a sense, almost in arrears, we don't turn it off. We don't, there's not a hard cat. They have access to that capacity within the solution that they provide and they can have access immediate access. And without going through, let's face it. A lot of the other companies that we're both thinking of that have those traditional again, purpose-built solutions or arrays. They want you to buy everything up front in advance, signing license agreements. We're the exact opposite. We want you to buy for the need as, and as needed basis. And also because the fact that we're, multi-protocol multi-use case, you see people doing many things within even a single vast cluster. >>I, I wanna come back to the architecture if I, I can and just understand it better. And I said, David, Flo's written a lot about this on our site, but I've had three key meetings in my life with Mosia and I, and I you've obviously know the first week you showed up in my offices at IDC in the late 1980s said, tell me everything, you know about the IBM mainframe IO subsystem. I'm like, oh, this is gonna be a short meeting. And then they came back a year later and showed us symmetric. I was like, wow, that's pretty impressive. The second one was, I gave a speech at 43 south of 42 south. He came up and gave me a big hug. I'm like, wow. He knows me. And the third one, he was in my offices at, in Mabo several years ago. And we were arguing about the flash versus spinning disc. And he's like, I can outperform an all flash array because we've tuned our algorithms for spinning disc. Everybody else is missing that. You're basically saying the opposite. Correct. We've turned tuned our algorithms to, for QC David Flos says Dave, there's a lot of ways to skin a cat in this technology industry. So I wanted to make sure I got that right. Basically you're skinning the cat with different >>Approach. Yeah. We've also changed really the approach of backup. I mean, the, the term backup is really legacy. I mean, that's 10, 12 years of our recovery. The, the story today is really about, about restore resiliency and recovery. So when you think about those legacy solutions, right, they were built to ingest fast, right? We wanna move the data off our primary systems, our, our primary applications and we needed to fit within a backup window. Restore was an afterthought. Restore was, I might occasionally need to restore something. Something got lost, something got re corrupted. I have to restore something today with the, you know, let's face it, the digital pandemic of, of, of cyber threats and, and ransomware it's about sometimes restoring everything. So if you look at a legacy system, they ingest, I'm sorry. They, they, they write very fast. They, they, they can bring the data in very quickly, but their restore time is typically about 20 to 25%. >>So their reading at only 20, 25% of their right speed, you know, is their rate speed. We flip the script on that. We actually read eight times faster than we write. So I could size again to the performance that you need. If you need 40 terabytes, an hour 50 terabytes an hour, we can do that. But those systems that write at 40 terabytes an hour are restoring at only eight. We're writing at a similarly size system, which actually comes out about 51 terabytes an hour 54 terabytes. We're restoring at 432 terabytes an hour. So we've broken the mold of data protection targets. We're no longer the bottleneck. We're no longer part of your recovery plan going to be the issue right now, you gotta start thinking about network connectivity. Do I have, you know, you know, with the, with our Veeam partners, do we have the right data movers, whether virtual or physical, where am I gonna put the data? >>We've really helped customer aided customers to rethinking their whole Dr. Plan, cuz let's face it. When, when ransomware occurs, you might not be able to get in the building, your phones don't work. Who do you call right? By the time you get that all figured out and you get to the point where you're start, you want to start recovering data. If I could recover 50 times faster than a purpose built backup appliance. Right? Think about it. Is it one day or is it 50 days? Am I gonna be back online? Is it one hour? Is it 50 hours? How many millions of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars were like, will that cost us? And that's why our architecture though our thought process and how the system was designed lends itself. So well for the requirements of today, data protection, not backup it's about data protection. >>Can you give us a sense as to how much of your business momentum is from data protection? >>Yeah, sure. So I joined VAs as we were talking chatting before I come on about six months ago. And it's funny, we had a lot of vast customers on their own because they wanted to leverage the platform and they saw the power of VAs. They started doing that. And then as our founders, you know, decided to lean in heavily into this marketplace with investments, not just in people, but also in technology and research and development, and also partnering with the likes of, of Veeam. We, we don't have a data mover, right. We, we require a data mover to bring us the data we've leaned in tremendously. Last quarter was really our, probably our first quarter where we had a lot of marketing and momentum around data protection. We sold five X last quarter than we did all of last year. So right now the momentum's great pipeline looks phenomenal and you know, we're gonna continue to lean in here. >>Describe the relationship with Veeam, like kind of, sort of started recently. It sounds like as customer demand. Yeah. But what's that like, what are you guys doing in terms of engineering integration go to market? >>Yeah. So, so we've gone through all the traditional, you know, verifications and certifications and, and, and I'm proud to say that we kind of blew the, the, the roof off the requirements of a Veeam environ. Remember Veeam was very innovative. 10, 12 years ago, they were putting flash in servers because they, they, they want a high performing environment, a feature such as instant recovery. We've now enabled. When I talked about all those things about re about restore. We had customers yesterday come to us that have tens of thousands of VMs. Imagine that I can spin them up instantaneously and run Veeam's instant recovery solution. While then in the background, restoring those items that is powerful and you need a very fast high performance system to enable that instant. Recovery's not new. It's been in the market for very long, but you can ask nine outta 10 customers walk in the floor. >>They're not able to leverage that today in the systems that they have, or it's over architected and very expensive and somewhat cost prohibitive. So our relationship with Veeam is really skyrocketing actually, as part of that, that success and our, our last quarter, we did seven figure deals here in the United States. We've done deals in Australia. We were chatting. I, I, I happened to be in Dubai and we did a deal there with the government there. So, you know, there's no, there's no specific vertical market. They're all different. You know, it's, it's really driven by, you know, they have a great, you know, cyber resilient message. I mean, you get seen by the last couple of days today and they just want that power that vast. Now there are other systems in the marketplace today that leverage all flash, but they don't have the economic solution that we have. >>No, your, your design anticipated the era that we're we're in right now from it, it anticipated the ability to scale in, to scale, you know, in >>A variety. Well, listen, anticipation of course, co coincidental architecture. It's a fantastic fit either way, either way. I mean, it's a fantastic fit for today. And that's the conversations that we're having with, with all the customers here, it's really all about resiliency. And they know, I mean, one of the sessions, I think it was mentioned 82 or 84% of, of all clients interviewed don't believe that they can do a restore after a cyber attack or it'll cost them millions of dollars. So that there's a tremendous amount of risk there. So time is, is, is ultimately equals dollars. So we see a, a big uptick there, but we're, we're actually continuing our validation work and testing with Veeam. They've been very receptive, very receptive globally. Veeam's channel has also been very receptive globally because you know, their customers are, you know, hungry for innovation as well. And I really strongly believe ASBO brings that >>George, we gotta go, but thank you. Congratulations. Pleasure on the momentum. Say hi to Jeff for us. >>We'll we'll do so, you know, and we'll, can I leave you with one last thought? Yeah, >>Please do give us your final thought. >>If I could, in closing, I think it's pretty important when, when customers are, are evaluating vast, if I could give them three data points, 100% of customers that Triva test vast POC, vast BVAs 100% Gartner peer insights recently did a survey. You know, they, they do it with our, you know, blind survey, dozens of vast customers and never happened before where 100% of the respondents said, yes, I would recommend VA and I will buy VAs again. It was more >>Than two respondents. >>It was more, it was dozens. They won't do it. If it's not dozens, it's dozens. It's not dozen this >>Check >>In and last but not. And, and last but not least our customers are, are speaking with their wallet. And the fact of the matter is for every customer that spends a dollar with vast within a year, they spend three more. So, I mean, if there's no better endorsement, if you have a customer base, a client base that are coming back and looking for more use cases, not just data protection, but again, high performance computing machine learning AI for a company like VA data. >>Awesome. And a lot of investment in engineering, more investment in engineering than marketing. How do I know? Because your capacity nodes, aren't the C nodes. They're the D nodes somehow. So the engineers obviously won that naming. >>They'll always win that one and we, and we, and we let them, we need them. Thank you. So that awesome product >>Sales, it's the golden rule. All right. Thank you, George. Keep it right there. VEON 20, 22, you're watching the cube, Uber, Uber right back.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Dell tech world 2022. My name is Dave Volante and I'm here in our cube studios in Massachusetts getting ready for the first in person DT w since 2019, you know, Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor and former Oracle ex once set on the cube friends, don't let friends build data centers anymore. It's just not the best use of capital for most companies, unless you happen to be in the data center business like Sexter organizations wanna make hybrid connections to the cloud. They need a partner that knows how to build and manage world class data centers that are both efficient and resilient. And in this segment, we're gonna talk about the importance of hybrid strategies for organizations, how they're approaching hybrid and why a partner strategy is important to support the next decade of digital transformation initiatives. And with me are Randy Roland. Who's the COO of six Tara and Holland Barry, who is the field CTO for the company. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>Good to meet her. Thanks for having us. >>Hey, Randy, as a relatively new player, unlike a lot of data center operators, Cera, you're not shackled by decades of technical debt. Tell us more about the company. >>Yeah. So as you, uh, already discussed Ceras a data center company, and we're one of the few that can provide colocation globally. And so that allows our customers to scale, uh, across the globe, as our business scales, we operate in 28 markets. We have over 60 data centers and we continue to add more dots to the map based on customer demand. And the primary way we differentiate is that we've built a true global data center platform. And what do I mean by that is that we have a combination of 2300 customers, uh, enterprises, technology, service providers, government agencies, we're a leader in interconnection. Uh, we have a commitment to carry neutrality and to provide low latency access to all the different cloud platforms. And we've made major investments in developing our own technology in house. And this will come out. As we talk about hybrid cloud is to make our data centers easier to consume. Uh, we live in a cloud first world, and so we've got to be able to be responsive and be able to deliver capacity on demand and to allow our customer members to dynamically connect to each other so they can start to consume these valuable services. And so that's really what we're doing at Cera. >>You know, Randy, just a follow up is because when the cloud first came out, everybody said, oh, companies like, like yours, Dana data center operations are toast. And the exact opposite happened. It was like this rising tide lifted all boats. The, the business is, is booming. It's, uh, it's actually quite room, isn't it? >>Yeah, actually it's a good point. We actually lean into, uh, cloud consumption. I think, uh, if you remember, the cloud operates in four walls. And so when a company, um, actually starts to deploy and leverage more, they need a place to land their digital infrastructure hub, where they can make connections to all the different cloud solutions they're gonna consume. And they're using their own internal resources at the same time. And so the more that we adopt cloud, um, and lean into cloud, the more likely our customer gonna choose us. And back to your opening comment about, uh, the, the quote from the Oracle executive in, in my career, I've been in the data center business for a long time and it, it's definitely a generational thing. We have newer generation of it leaders when they think about their internal data center, their actual internal data center is ours. They're thinking about their own four walls sitting on their own property like they did historically. And so, uh, they view internal data centers as the contracts they have, uh, with six companies like six. >>Excellent. All right, Holland, let's bring you into the conversation. What are you seeing with, with hybrid cloud strategies? You, why are companies choosing hybrid? Give us some color there. >>Yeah, I think, you know, we, as a company sit in an interesting confluence of some workload movements, if you will. Um, so I think there's been, in some cases, an overcorrection in the public cloud, people thought that a cloud first strategy meant that you have to throw everything up in a public cloud. Uh, especially over the last couple years when we had, you know, the surprise of a large remote workforce. And as you mentioned at the top of the call, Dave, we also have folks with the shrinking appetite to own and operate their data centers, right? So the hybrid approach is a, um, a selective methodology to really look at the applications, uh, look at the strengths of each one of those venues, where you can run your applications and workloads, and really choosing the one that uses the strengths. And there's several, uh, drivers behind that. Uh, some of them are cost. Some of them are performance. Some of them might have to do a security or data sovereignty. Um, so you can really match those requirements and those business outcomes that you're looking to achieve, uh, and align them with that platform. That's that's best suited to serve it. >>So you mentioned a few of 'em, but I wanna sort of stay on that for a minute. Is it, is it, you know, egress cost, everybody talks about that, you know, latency proximity to the cloud. I mean, I think there's a lot of times, I think the ideal situation is you put your high performance, you know, transaction low latency stuff in one of your data centers. And, you know, a lot of the data is, is in the cloud that you might need access to. But is there other innovation, you know, talk a little bit more about the drivers that you're seeing with customers? >>Absolutely. We, I think, um, as it relates to data gravity and the potential relation to egress charges, that is a huge, uh, consideration, cuz there's a cost and a performance component to that. If you decide you want to take that data and move somewhere else, if it's in the public cloud, you're gonna pay some, uh, pretty large egres fees, but there's certainly other drivers, um, performance being another big one. Uh, if I've got a, a data lake or, or a big data analytics platform or maybe an AI platform that needs to live close to the data. Um, and especially if those workloads that are associated with crunching, the data are kind of high steady state, maybe even mission critical workloads that is certainly a workload profile. That's better suited to run within our four walls. You can have those CPU or GPU comput nodes sitting right next to those large data sets, operating with each other at land speed. Um, so in terms of the drivers behind, uh, making a, a venue change, if you will, I think cost is one of the biggest ones that we see and, and maybe performance and security following close after. >>So, so how are customers approaching hybrid? Can you paint a picture of kinda what that connection looks like and how, how they, you know, land on their strategies? >>Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing, uh, what I like to call a workload appropriateness, uh, exercise. And as they think about recalibrating where those workloads live, exactly what I said before, they're looking at the strengths of the platform and, uh, lining up those application profiles to live in, in the appropriate place. We have a unique advantage, uh, because of our interconnection profile and our adjacency to public cloud platforms, where if people want to have application tiers that may be sent on both sides of the fence, if you will, uh, we have super, super low latency connections. You can connect, you know, layer two, uh, maybe out to AWS, um, and, you know, have your VPC on one side, have, uh, you know, dedicated single tenant environments on our side and have those applications interact with each other. And then in a super low latency fashion, >>Hey, lemme just ask a follow up question on that. Because I remember the Y2K days, there was a, a lot of activity, a lot of spending and then CIOs wanted to look at their portfolio and, and rationalize that portfolio. When you talk about workload appropriateness, are you seeing a similar application rationalization exercise going on or is it just a Hey can spending, >>Uh, absolutely. We're seeing rationalization and I think what's happening is folks are getting a little more savvy about forecasting, the growth of their application, uh, the growth of the data associated with it, what the cost may be associated with needing to move them around to different venues. Um, and so we're, we're definitely seeing people look at those numbers and make decisions about workload placement based on that analytics and, and kind of knowledge of what it means down the road and also where the data might need to live locally too. We're seeing people, uh, being a little more cognizant geographically around data where it lives and how that relates to where the computer associated with that data is. >>Yeah. Hey Randy, can you tell us a little bit more from a business perspective about the Dell partnership? How did that come about, you know, who does, what, what are the swim lanes overlaps? Maybe you can help us understand that. >>Yeah, so we're very excited about, uh, our Dell partnership, as you can imagine, with as many customers and many data centers, as we've got deployed, we have Dell, uh, located it in a large percentage of our customer environments. And so it's just natural that we work together to figure out how we can continue to meet, uh, our customer's needs. And so the core idea that I'm excited about around Dell is that Dell has an excellent technology platform in all fronts, they've got great compute and storage and all types of software solutions. And what we want to do is help them make their platform more on demand. And so what do I mean by that? If you think about the historical, uh, time, it takes to deploy a traditional colo environment from the time you spec the cage, do you ship the equipment, you install the network, you rack and stack the equipment, unload the cloud stack. >>It takes weeks to months to deploy. And so what we're doing is working very closely with Dell to look at our existing customers and new prospects that are interested in their platform and how can we pre-provision that capacity in, in the data center make it so it's already plugged into the data center already is powered up. It's connected to the network and a customer can purchase it on demand. And so the idea behind this is how can we give our customers all the benefits of Kolo, which is what, uh, Holland was talking about a minute ago, but deliver that platform at the speed of cloud. And that's really the essence of the partnership we have with Dell. Uh, we think it could be explosive. Uh, we think there's a lot of opportunity, not only, uh, for us, but also for Dell as they continue to retain their customers and their customers go through tech refresh cycles, if they can have on demand technology that they're already familiar with, they can get the benefits that you get from co-location at the speed of cloud. And that that's what our, the, the basis of our, our relationship. >>Yeah. Thank you. So Holland, I mean, Randy was saying one of the pillars of Dell tech world this year is the whole as a service thrust. And, you know, essentially what it is, my, my viewpoint is Dell's building out its own cloud. That's, you know, it's, it's its aspiration I think, is to connect on-prem to, through hybrid, to public clouds across clouds, out to the edge extract that all that complexity and you guys would be a key part of that from a, from a CTO's perspective, that's a different mindset. I mean, it changes the way we manage, think about procure, you know, spend, uh, um, and, and maybe that even the technical configurations of, of how we deliver and consume it, you give us some thoughts on that. >>Absolutely. Look, I think what we're doing is we're laying the foundation for a truly hybrid experience. Um, Randy mentioned, uh, us going through great lengths with our technology partners like Dell and make the data center consumable in an automated fashion. And so as we increasingly move into technologies like containers and using coordinators managers like Kubernetes, we really now have the ability to make a true hybrid experience. And if you think about the experience of deploying, you know, in a data center, whether it's your own or a co like ours, that was, you know, a 60 to 90 day conversation to, to get that infrastructure spun up. And so now if you can consume public cloud resources, just like we've been used to doing where you can swipe a card and get access to infrastructure in a matter of minutes or hours have the same experience with us, we've kind of closed that last mile of infrastructure delivery. And the other neat thing about this is, uh, if you have a cloud first mandate, if some of those workloads are running a ter data center, uh, we check all those same boxes, right? Uh, we, we have infrastructure that sits off X. We have a global platform. Uh, we have, you know, highly automated environment. So you can really now start extracting yourself a little bit from the infrastructure and start focusing on the important stuff, which the applications that sit on top. >>So from a security standpoint, you have a similar, you know, the cloud guys talk about the shared responsibility model. Is that a similar model that, that you guys have? Can you describe that? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's very analogous to this shared responsibility model and, and public cloud. We give a little bit more control to our customers, like things like, you know, dictate maintenance windows. Um, we give a little bit more control in terms of access to the infrastructure. Uh, it's one of the reasons that organizations like running infrastructure with us is because we can hand off control to these certain things that the lower levels of the infrastructure stack versus that higher level of abstraction that happens with public cloud. >>And what, what kind of skills are you after, uh, these days? Is it people that can squeeze, you know, more power and, you know, more efficient cooling, uh, is it infrastructure management? You mentioned Kubernetes before. What, what matters to a company like yours from a skill standpoint? >>Yeah. And to terms of our staff, it is at the lower, uh, levels of the stack, if you will. So maybe going, you know, up to, uh, layer two or three, if we think about the OSI model. So certainly power engineering, cooling engineering, the stuff that physically runs our, our data center, that's our meat and potatoes. That's important to us, but as you consider our digital platform, um, certainly the networking, uh, know how knowledge of the entire stack, knowing how things are architected, understanding how cloud works, how understanding how cloud connectivity works. These are all super, super important skill sets. So we span the spectrum a bit. Um, but it's less on the upper ends of it, you know, kind of going up to layer seven, >>Although I'd imagine that data center automation is obviously a big part of your, your IP, right. Is that something that you have guys bring to the table? Yes. >>Yeah, it's actually one of our key innovations is around how we've architected our software platform, how we do our automation, uh, how we run our network. Uh, we we've, uh, built a, a super, super innovative SDN fabric that powers all of our Metro regions that enables the delivery, the infrastructure that hangs off of it. Um, so yeah, a huge percentage of our I P is around that software innovation and, uh, networking automation. >>Great. Randy, I wonder if you could close it out for us. Uh, I'd love your thoughts on where you'd like to see the Dell partnership go and any other, you know, information you'd like to leave the audience with. >>Yeah. I think you've asked a couple questions about the perspective from a CTO and the way that we want to build our solutions is if you are a CTO or if you're a cloud architect, what we are trying to build is a set of Legos to allow you to assemble your ultimate hybrid it solution to use a combination of traditional colocation, where you have equipment that you own, that you manage on demand, bare metal from great partnerships, like where we have with Dell, that can augment what you have in colo have access to a rich ecosystem of technology providers that sit in the same data center markets so that you can start to, to actually augment your it architecture with a lot of our, um, uh, solution providers that sit within our, our, our markets access to cloud OnRamp. So you get low latency access to public cloud to start to leverage some of the technologies they have, and also have the ability to switch, right? If you start with one cloud cloud provider, and at some point you find something more cost efficient, or a little bit more architecturally, uh, built that we can, uh, uh, facilitate that switch. And then also to have connectivity to all the different network carriers that we have. And so, and, and also to do it globally, right? And so our mission is to give the CTO and the cloud architect, the ultimate Legos, uh, to build their custom solution, it's highly, um, cost effective and meets all the technology requirements. >>Yeah. Hedging that risk and having exit strategies, I think is huge. Every, every customer needs to think about that, uh, before they, they dive into the cloud. Okay, guys, we gotta leave it there. Thanks so much for coming in the cube. Great discussion. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>And thank you for watching our ongoing coverage of Dell technologies, world 2022, the in-person live version where we insert great deep dive interviews like this one that focus on key customer topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube.

>> Okay. We're back here. theCube and all the action here in Mobile World Congress, cloud city, I'm John ferry, host of the cube. We've got a great remote interviews. Of course, it's a hybrid event here in the cube. And of course, cloud city's bringing all the physical face-to-face and we're going to get the remote interviews. Peter Adderton, founder, chairman, CEO of Mobile X Global. Nicholas Gerrard, founder and CEO of OxyGo. Gentlemen, thank you for coming in remotely onto the cube here in the middle of cloud city. You missed Bon Jovi last night, he was awesome. The little acoustic unplugged and all the action. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right, Peter and Nicholas, if you don't mind, just take a quick 30 seconds to set the table on what you guys do, your business and your focus here at Mobile World Congress. >> So I'll jump in quickly. Being the Australian, I'll go first, but just quick by way of background, I founded a company called Boost Mobile, which is one of the, is now the fourth largest mobile brand in, in America. And I spent a lot of time managing effort in that, in that space and now launching Mobile X, which is kind of the first cloud AI platform that we're going to build for mobile. >> Awesome. Nicholas. >> So I'm a founder of a company called, Ox Fuel where we do is basically a telecommunity service platform for brands to basically incorporate telecom as part of their services and learn from their customers through what we call a telecom business intelligence. So basically making sense of the telecom data to improve their business across retail, financial services or in-demand economy. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for the setup. Peter, I want to ask you first, if you don't mind, the business models in the telecom area is really becoming, not just operate, but build and build new software enabled software defined just cloud-based software. And this has been a change in mindset, not so much a change so much in the actual topologies per se, or the actual investments, but as a change in personnel. What's your take on this whole cloud powering the change in the future of telco? >> Well, I think you've got to look at where the telcos have come from in order to understand where they're going in the future. And where they've come from is basically using other people's technology to try to create a differentiation. And I think that that's the struggle that they're going to have. They talk about wanting to convert themselves from telcos into techcos. I just think it's a leap too far for the carriers to do that. So I think we're going to see, you know, them pushing 5G, which you see they're doing out there right now. Then they start talking about open rand and cloud and, and at the end of the day, all they want to do is basically sell you a plan, give you a phone attached to that and try to make as much money out of you as they possibly can. And they disguise that basically in the whole technology 5G open rand discussion, but they really, I don't think care. And at the end of the day, I don't think the consumers care, their model isn't built around technology. The model is built around selling your data and, and that's their fundamental principle and how they do that. And I've seen them go through from 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. Every G we see come out has a promise of something new and incredible. But what we basically get is a data plan with the minutes. Right? >> Yeah, yeah I totally right on. And I think we're going to get into the whole edge piece of what that's going to open up when you start thinking about what, what the capabilities are and this new stakeholders who are going to have an interest in the trillions of dollars on the table right now, up for grabs. But Nicholas wanted to get to you on this whole digital-first thing, because one of the things we've been saying on theCube and interviewing folks and riffing on is: If digital drives more value and there's new use cases that are going to bring on, that's going to enabled by software. There's now new stakeholders coming and saying, Hey, you know what? I need more than just a pipe. I need more than just the network. I need to actually run healthcare. I need to run education on the edge. These are now industrial and consumer related use cases. I mean, this is software. This is where software and apps shine. So cloud native can enable that. So what's your take on the industry as they start to wake up and say, holy shit, this is going to be pretty massive when you look at what's coming. Not so much what's going to be replatformed, but what's coming. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's where I kind join Peter on this. There's been pretty significant, heavy innovation on the carrier side for, you know, if you think about it 30 years or so of like just reselling plans effectively, which is a virtual slice of the network that built. And all of a sudden they started competing against, you know, the heavyweights on the internet. We had, putting the bar really high in terms of, you know, latency in terms of expectation, in terms of APIs, right? We've we've heard about telecom APIs for 15 years, right? It's- nothing comes close to what you could get if you start building on top of a Stripe or a Google. So I think, it's going to be hard for a lot of those companies. What we do with our show is we try to bridge that gap. Right, we try to build on top of their infrastructure to be able to expose modern APIs, to be able to open up a programmatic interface so that innovators like Peter's are able to actually really take the user experience forward and start, building those specialized businesses across healthcare, financial services, and whatnot. >> Yeah, David Blanca and I were on the, on theCube yesterday talking about how Snowflake, a company that basically sits on top of Amazon built almost nothing on the infrastructure. Built on top of it and was successful. Peter, this is a growth thing. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on is you've had experiences in growing companies. How do you look at the growth coming into this market, Peter, because you know, you got to have new opportunities coming in. It's a growth play too. It's not just take share from someone. It's net new capabilities. >> Yeah. Here's the issue you've got with the wireless industry is that there's only a very few amount of them that actually have that last mile covered. So if you're going to build something on top of it, you're going to have to deal with the carrier, and the carrier as out of like a duopoly slash monopoly, because without their access to their network, you're not going to be able to do these incredible things. So I think we've got a real challenge there where you're going to have to get the carriers to innovate. Now you've got the CEO of Deutsche Telekom coming out yesterday saying that the OTT players aren't paying their fair share. Right, and I sit back and go, well, hang on. You're selling data to customers who basically are using that data to use apps and OTT. And now he's saying, well, they should pay as well. So not only the consumer pay, but now the OTT players should pay. It's a mixed message. So what you're going to have to do, and what we're going to have to do as a, as a growth industry is we're going to have to allow it to grow. And the only way to do that is that the carriers are going to have to have better access, allow more access to their networks, as Nico said, let the APIs has become more available. I just think that that's a leap too far. So I think we're going to be handicapped in our growth based on these carriers. And it's going to take regulators and it's going to take innovation and consumers demanding carriers, do it, otherwise, you know, you're still going to deal with the three carriers in your world. >> Yeah, That's interesting about- I was just talking to Danielle Royce, the DR here at TelcoDR. And she said, I was talking about ORAN and there's more infrastructure than needed. She said, oh, it's more software. I don't disagree with her. I do agree with it. But I also think that the ORAN points to, Nicholas, kind of this idea that there's more surface area to be had on the scale side. So standardizing hardware creates a lower fixed cost, so you can get some cost reduction. And then with standardized software, you get more enablement for hardened openness. I mean, open source is already proven. You can still be secure. And obviously Cloud was once said, could never be secure and most, is probably more secure than anything. What's your take on this whole ORAN commodity standardization mission- efforts? >> I think it's a, I mean, it goes along to the second phase, right? Of what the differentiation in telecom was, you know. Early on, specialized boxes that are very expensive. You know, that you, you, you, you get from a few vendors, then you have the transition over to a software. We lower the price, as you were mentioning. It can run on off the shelf hardware. And then we're in the transition, which is what Danielle is, is evangelizing, right. Transition towards the cloud and specifically the public cloud, because there's no such thing as a private cloud really. And, and so up and running is just another, another piece where you can make the Legos connect better effectively and just have more flexibility. And generally the, the, the game here is to also break the agenda when you- from, from the vendors, right? Because now you have a standard, so you don't necessarily need to buy the entire stack from, from the same vendors. You have a lot more flexibility. You know, you've probably followed the same debate that we've all seen, right. With a push against Huawei, for instance. Th-this is extremely hard for an operator, to start ripping out an entire vendor, because most of the time, they, they own the entire stack. But something like ORAN, now you can start mixing and matching with different vendors, but generally this is also a trend that's going to accelerate the move towards the public cloud. >> That's awesome. Peter, I want to get your thoughts because you're basically building on the cloud. And if you don't mind chime it in to kind of end the segment on this one point. People are trying to really get their minds around what refactoring means. And we've been saying, and talking about, you know, the three phases of, of waking up to the world. Reset your business, or reboot. Replatform to the cloud, and then refactor, which means take advantage of cloud enabled things, whether it's AI and other things. But first get on the platform, understand the economics, and then replatform. So the question, Peter, we'll start with you. What does refactoring actually mean and look like in a successful future execution or playbook? Can you share your thoughts, because this is what people want to get to because that's where the value will come from. That's where the iteration gets you. What's your take on this refactoring? >> Yeah, yeah. So I always, I mean, we're in the consumer business, so I'm always about what is the difference going to make for the consumer? So, whether you're, and when you look at refactoring and you look at what's happening in the space. Is what is the difference that's going to, what are the consumers going to see that's different and are they willing to pay for that? And so we can strip away the technical layers and we all get caught up in the industry with these buzzwords and terms, and we get, and at the end of the day, when it moves to the consumer, the consumer just sits there and says, so what's the value? How much am I paying? And so what we're trying to do at MobileX is, we're trying to use the cloud and we're trying to use kind of innovation into create a better experience for the consumer. One way to do that is to basically help the customer, understand their usage patents. You know, right now today, they don't understand that. Right if I asked you how much you paid for your mobile bill, you will tell me my cell phone bill is $150, but I'm going to ask you the next question How much data do you use? You go, I don't know, right? >> John: unlimited. >> And then I'd say why am I started- well you'd say limited, right. I will go. I'd go, I don't know. So I sit back and go, most customers are like you. You're basically paying for a service that you have no clear, no idea what you're getting. And it's designed by the carriers to scare you into thinking you need it. So I think we've got to get away from the buzzwords that we use as an industry and just dumb that down to what, what does that mean for a consumer? And I think that the cloud is going to allow us to create some very unique ways for consumers to interact with their device and their usage of that device. And I think that that's the holy grail for me. >> Yeah. That's a great point. And it's worth calling out because I think if the cloud can get you a 10X value at, at a reduction in costs compared to the competition, that's one benefit that people will pay for. And the other one is just, Hey, that's really cool. I want I'll, I value that, that's a valuable thing. I'll pay for it. So it's interesting that the cloud scale there, it's just a good mindset. >> Yeah. So it's always, I always like say to people, you know, I've spoken a lot to the Dish guys about what open rand is going to do and I keep saying to them, so what's the value that I'm going to get from a consumer. And they'll say, oh it's flexible pricing plans. They're now starting to talk about, okay, what the end product is of this technology. You look at ECM, right? ECM has been around for a long time. It's only now that we're to see ECM technology, get enabled. The carriers fought that for a long, long time. So there's a monumental shift that needs to take place. And it's in the four or five carriers in our counties. >> Awesome. Nicholas, what's your take on refactoring? Obviously, you know, you've got APIs, you've got all this cool software enabled. How do you get to refactoring and how do you execute through that? >> I mean, it's a little bit of a, what Peter was saying as well, right? There's the, the advantage of that point is to be, you know, all our stuff basically lives in the cloud, right. So it's opportunity to, to get that closer, you know, just having better latency, making sure that, you know, you're not losing your, your photos and your data as you lose your phone and yep. Just bet- better access in general. I, I think ultimately like the, the push to the cloud right now is it's mostly just a cost reduction. The back tick, as far as the carriers are concerned, right. They don't necessarily see how they can build that break. And then from there start interacting with the rest of the OTT world and, and, you know, Netflix is built on Amazon and companies like that, right? Like, so as you're able to get closer as a carrier to that cloud where the data lives, this is also just empowering better digital experience. >> Yeah I think that's where the that's, the proof point will be there, as they say, that's where the rubber will meet the road or proof is in the pudding, whatever expression. Once they get to that cost reduction, if they can wake up to that, whoa we can actually do something better here and make m- or if they don't someone else will. Right. That's the whole point. So, final question as we wrap up, ecosystem changeover. Lot more ecosystem action. I mean, there's a lot of vendors here at Mobile Congress, but real quick, Peter, Nicholas, your take on the future of ecosystem around this new telco. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I look, I mean, it, it, again, it keeps coming back to, to, to where I say that consumers have driven all the ecosystems that have ever existed. And when I say consumers also to IOT as well, right? So it's not just the B to C it's also B to B. So look to the consumer and look to the business to see what pain points you can solve. And that will create the ecosystems. None of us bet on Uber, none of us bet on Airbnb. Otherwise we'd all be a lot richer than we are today. So none of us took that platform- and by the way, we've been in mobile and wireless and any kind of that space smartphone space for a long time. And we will miss those applications. And if you ask a CEO today of a telco, what's the 5G killer application, that's going to send 5G into the next atmosphere, they can't answer the question. They'll talk about drones and robotic surgeries and all things that basically will never have any value to a consumer at the end of the day. So I think we've got to go back to the consumer and that's where my focus is and say, how do we make their lives better? And that will create the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, they go for the low hanging fruit. Low latency and, and whatnot. But yeah, let's, it's going to be, it's going to be, we'll see what happens. Nicolas your take on ecosystems as they develop. A lot more integrations and not customization. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I think going back to, you know, again like 20- 20 years ago, the network was the product conductivity to the product. Today it's a, it's a building block, right? Something that you integrate that's part of your experience. So the same way we're seeing like conversions between telecom and financial services. Right? You see a lot of telcos trying to be banks. Banks and fintechs trying to be telcos. It's, it's a blending of that, right? So it, at the end of the day, it's like, why, what is the experience? What is the above and beyond the conductivity? Because customers, at this point, it's just not differentiated based on conductivity, kind of become just a busy commodity. So even as you look at what Peter is building, right, this, what is the experience above and beyond just buying a plan that I get out of it, or if you are a media company, you know, how do I pair my content or resolve real problems? Like for instance, we work a lot to the NBA and TikTok. They get into markets where, you know, having a video product at the end and people not being well-connected, that's a problem, right? So it's an opportunity for them to bring the building block into their ecosystem and start offering solutions that are a different shape. >> Awesome. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Both of you, both experienced entrepreneurs and executives riding the wave on the right side of history, I believe. Thanks for coming on theCube, I appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> If you're not riding the wave the right way, you're driftwood. And we're going to toss it back to the studio. Adam and the team, take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE's back on day three here in Cloud City Mobile World Congress. This is where all the action is, and this is theCUBE set. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're here with DR, Danielle Royston, who is the CEO of TelcoDR, as well as the CEO of Totogi. Great to see you again. >> Hey. >> Hey, how are you guys? >> Good. >> Great time, great boat last night, good industry executives. A lot of intimate high player, big players here in the industry, even though not a lot of attendance, but the right people are here and events are back. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think, MWC was the first event to cancel with COVID in February, end of February 2020. So first big event to come back. It's such a nice symmetry. Yeah. Typically you have big delegations, hundreds of people from the big groups coming to the show. We're seeing the executives are coming, smaller delegations, but they're all in the booth and that we're having great conversations and it's awesome. >> Yeah, and the thing I will say is that theCUBE's back too. We'd like them to be, be in here in the action, because one of the things that's happened with this hybrid events is that people are watching. And so there's a virtual space and the physical space and Cloud City has built out paradise. It's beautiful and spectacular behind us. If you look around, for the people who can't see, it's really made for the combination of on-site and virtual experience, the content, the people, Bon Jovi last night, it's just the top of Mobile World Congress and it's translating to the industry. This has been amazing. So congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Well. I got to say, you have a lot to say as we all know. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But I think it was easy for the big guys. >> Danielle: Can't shut me up. (laughing) >> That's why we love you in theCUBE. But I think it was easy for the big guys to tap out and say, hey, we can save a bunch more money. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> We don't really have much to talk about. We're going to talk about it again. Hey, let's talk about 5G. >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. >> 5G's coming. >> It's the revolution. >> And I told you about 5G though. >> Whereas the narrative here is all about the future. And it's not about the future of blah blah blah, it's about the future of, this is the journey that we're taking and here's where it's starting and with the meat in the bone. >> Yeah. And I think what's really interesting about Cloud City is the fact that we've brought these different players together that are all focused, as you said, on the future. And I'm starting to see these connections where they're collaborating. Vendors that didn't know each other probably would never have partnered before. Totally different areas. I'm hearing the conversation in the booth about like, hey, I talked to P1 security, or I went and talked to LMX and we're putting deals together 'cause we're complimentary. And it's amazing and so that's really good. >> And the integration partnership, heard that from Google yesterday on our news exclusive break in there. They see integration and they're talking about Android, with what Android did for mobile. They're seeing a whole new software paradigm coming into telco. Its partnership, its ecosystem and open. These are new kind of dynamics. >> And I think for you guys, when you say integration and open, I think those things are really paired and they're important. A lot of times Telco people will hear integration, and they'll think customization. Coding it up and customizing it so that they talk to each other. But I think the open part of that is really important where we're connecting via APIs. And I think that's bringing the hyperscalers. That's what they do. They provide these systems and the software that's all API based and you can use it very quickly and you can unravel it if you need to. And it's that feature velocity, we talked about a couple days ago. >> And automation is the underpinning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean, that's really the theme, right? >> Right. >> It's not like a one-off hardcore custom integration that's going to be frozen. >> One time to upgrade it every 18 months or whatever it is. Yeah, it's a life. >> Dave: How about Musk yesterday? >> John: I mean, he's always a crowd pleaser. First of all, my kids love him. He's crazy. >> Who doesn't love Elon Musk? >> I mean, he is amazing. He's a builder and he takes no prisoners. He's just, you know what, my goal was not to go bankrupt. That's what he said a couple of years ago. >> Dave: Which was brilliant because everybody's gone bankrupt in that business and he's just close it off. >> And he's just like, look, we're here, we're just going to chip away at it and we're just going to keep striving, not making up excuses. He takes the failures. He takes the phase plans. He gets back up and he keeps going. He's focused on building. >> He's focused on one thing. He's not focused on everything. He's focused on getting to Mars. And I think that's what I like to compare myself to Elon Musk. Not that I'm building rockets or getting to Mars, but that the hard problem that I'm solving is getting Telco to the public cloud and that's going to take a decade. It might have been accelerated because of COVID, it might've taken 20 years and now it might take 10. But you look at what he does, and that guy, he has haters on Twitter that are pew- pew. Always like, throw in their bars, but he's like, I got my rocket company. I got my communication and space company. We're going to need the bore holes, the Boring Company. I need batteries, I got my Tesla company. And so this guy focuses. >> He's got some haters, but he's got a lot more lovers on his other side because people might not know this, but he fired the entire PR department because he's like, I don't need PR. I'm just going to go do my own, his own PR. >> Obviously, the crypto stuff's always fun. Doge coins, always a laugh. >> Danielle: I think he just plays around with that. >> And it's just more of like playing. >> Yeah, that's a watch this. >> He just likes to see what he can do. >> Doge coins app. That Saturday Night Live was an interesting thing he did, but I think he illustrates the point of a new generation. And I think my young kids, not young, they're in their twenties now. They look at him and they say, that's aspirational because he's building and he's focused on that one thing. And again, the growth that you mentioned Telco to the cloud, getting back to that is that, I want to ask you this growth question. It used to be like, okay, growth was there, people expanded cell towers, networks were networks. Now it seems that the growth of Telco, with Telco is going into, with the edge and all the open-RAN stuff, which means we need more infrastructure. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> We need more stuff. There's more needed and there's growth behind them. What's your reaction? >> I think we need more software. Software eats the world. And it's, I mean, there's a lot of hardware to chomp in Telco and it's just going to keep eating it and that's just going to accelerate. I think that's where Telco needs to start to build that muscle. They don't have great software capability. They don't have public cloud building capability. And so that's a big up-skilling. That's a new hiring. And I think it's an executive conversation. It's not just an IT thing or just a marketing thing or networking thing. >> I got to chime in here for a second because there are a lot of parallels with how the data center transition has occurred. And what's happening here. We talk about all the time. It was a mainframe, et cetera. There are parallels. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> And what happened when the data center went to software-defined a whole bunch of hardware was allocated to run all the software-defined stuff. It wasn't built for that. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the cloud, what you guys are doing with Totogi and taking advantage of AWS's is Nitro and Graviton. That's built to be software-defined. >> Correct. >> And so the Telcos are going to go through the same thing. If they just virtualize, they're going to say, oh wow, we're wasting 30% of our power, our compute power on just supporting all this software-defined stuff, because it wasn't built for that, but the cloud is built for that. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And that is going to be a huge difference. >> And I keep trying to make this distinction. And I think people in Telco still don't get this about the public cloud. They think of it as a place. It's a place to run a workload. And that tells me, they think of it as infrastructure. They think of it as servers still like, well, I'm going to run into my closet or AWS's closet. I'm like, and I was just having a conversation about this with this senior person from GSMA. I'm like, it's actually about the software that's there. It's about the databases they're building and the analytics and the AI and the ML but they let you buy by the minutes or by the API call. And that is my, like you need to think about that because it's mind-blowing. It's a totally different way to think. >> And you're totally right. I'm just going to, again, give you props on this. I've had many one-on-one with Andy Jassy for the past seven years for exclusives, but over the years it's been consistent. Each platform lifting and shift wasn't the end game. Okay. Replatforming in the cloud, certainly a great advantage, a great starting point. It was the refactoring. And that's why you see Amazon Web Services, for instance, keep adding more services 'cause that's the model. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> They keep offering more goodness so that the businesses could refactor, not just replatform. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And that's what you're getting at. I think with the AI and machine learning, where you start getting into these new use cases, but why I couldn't do that before. >> Danielle: Right, right. >> This is going to be a huge game changer. >> Well, Forrest Brazeal. A great guy, a cloud guru wrote a great blog called a lift-and-shift is a ticking time bomb. And it's a great start to get your stuff over there. It forces your team to start to interact with like an AWS or GCP in a real way. Like now they, they got to use it. You take it away and I'm like, but once you move it, you got to re-factor. You got to rewrite. And then that's why it's a ticking time bomb. You got to get, move it over and get going. >> Danielle Royston, DR, Digital Revolution of you are one. You got it here, Telco DR. And this has been a great experience for theCUBE, as we get back to business with real life events and virtual. For the folks who couldn't make it here, Barcelona is still a great city. Obviously a great place to come and the events will be back. They'll be hybrid. They'll be different. Certainly, theCUBE will wait double them down, but, we've got a great video. I want to share for the group, the Barcelona and Cloud City. This is a montage of what it's like here and a little experiential video. So take it away and run that video. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi, I'm Katie Goldfinch, here in Barcelona for an action packed Day Two at TelcoDR's Cloud City. This morning, the focus was firmly on DR. and her MWC keynote, which told Telco execs in no uncertain terms that now is the time to act on embracing public cloud. Back in Cloud City content ruled the day with both theCUBE and Cloud City live stages, hosting public cloud, thought-leaders covering a wide range of topics to educate and inspire attendees. And in the beautiful space of Cloud City, the excitement grew throughout the day as we streamed MWC's exclusive keynotes from Elon Musk and preparations got underway for tonight's star performer, Jon Bon Jovi. (upbeat techno music) Wow! What an amazing day from groundbreaking keynotes into space and back to a star studded performance. Don't forget, you can catch up on anything you missed and join us for the rest of the week at cloudcity.telcodr.com or following #cloudcity. (upbeat techno music) >> Okay, we're back. That was great look at what's going on here in Cloud City. This next video, DR, you're going to love this. Your keynote highlights and some Bon Jovi highlights, which by the way, was the most epic thing. People were packed. >> Dave: It was exciting. >> Place was packed. It had the security clicking people, counting all the people, people are standing back. All the people from their booths are all coming in to watch. >> Dave: He was pumped. >> Let's take a look at this awesome highlight video from yesterday. (upbeat techno music) (upbeat techno music) >> Okay, we're back at theCUBE. Dave, that was a highlight reel yesterday. DR has got some action on stage, great messaging, revolution, digital revolution. >> You know your comment about how you think like Elon Musk. That's an inspiration from it. I mean, what a lot of people don't know is when you look at autonomous vehicles, remember you're driving down Palo Alto, you see one of those lidar things. He's doing away with lidars, it's too expensive. It's $7,000. He's taking it with cheap cameras and software down to a couple of hundred bucks per vehicle. >> Danielle: Wow. >> That's the way he thinks. And you're doing the same thing to Telco. >> Danielle: I am. I am I'm trying to change Telco. I mean, he's changing the world. He might be one of the most important humans on Earth right now. I don't think I'm exactly that level, but I'm trying to become a really important person in Telco. We have this great message. I think it's going to help Telcos to get better businesses. And I think it's a great idea. >> For the folks out there watching, what is that big change? If you're going to drive down this Cloud City street, main street of Cloud City and just all about Cloud. Because public clouds here, it's going to become hybrid, dynamics, operating models are changing. What is the key message that you'd like to send? >> I think all of the software in Telco needs to be rewritten. And that's how many millions of lines of code is that? And it's going to be shrunk down and put out on public cloud and rewritten using the software Legos of the public cloud. That is a big undertaking. No one's working on it. I'm working on it. I'm doing it. Let's go do it. >> Let's do it. And if you look out a couple of years, what would be a successful, what does checkmate look like in this chess game? >> I'm winning? #winning >> You're opening move is pretty good as we say in chess. >> I mean, I think it, it takes, again, it takes singular focus like Elon Musk on Mars. Someone needs to singularly focus on getting the public cloud and you can't sit there and protect your old business models, your CR revenue, if you're Amdocs. Give that up. When they start to give up their CR revenue to focus on public cloud, then they'll be, okay, there's a worthy adversary out there really focusing on it. >> I mean the late Clayton Christensen had all the same things. Innovator's dilemma. You get stuck here, what do you do? >> Danielle: What do you do? >> You kill your own, you eat your own to bring in the new, I mean, all these things are going on. This is a huge test. >> And to be willing to burn some boats. >> I think it's transparency, simplicity, and the consumer saying, hey, this is a great experience. That's the Tel sign. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And that's what we're going to see over this next decade. >> Plus consumers love their Telco. I can't wait for that. I want to love my Telco. >> Dave: Like you love Netflix. >> Yes, exactly. >> DR, we love you because you've got a bold vision. You're putting it out there and you're driving it. You're walking the talk. Congratulations. And again, Cloud City's a home run. >> Awesome. >> Great success. Thanks for having theCUBE. >> Thank you guys. As always super fun. Great day. >> Okay. >> CUBE's coverage here. And remember, we're here getting all the action and it's all going to go online after a synchronous consumption. But right now, it's all about Mobile World Congress and Cloud City. This is the action. And of course, Adam in Cloud City Studio is waiting for us and he's going to take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for this very important event, the award for best partner transformation, best energy solution. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE and I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. Welcome to the program, so glad to have you here. >> Glad to be here. Thank you. >> Yes, thanks for having us. >> Terrific. Well, let's start with you, Doug. Can you give us a brief overview of your subsidiary for some of our audience that may not be familiar with it? And also how are you using AWS now to transform collaboration on major capital projects? >> Certainly and thank you. So as many will know ExxonMobil as a sort of a global energy provider around the world operating on six out of the seven continents. Global Projects, which is the specific subsidiary where I work, we are responsible for delivery of major capital projects to the various business units around the world. So we have the opportunity to, once approved by the business unit, to deliver on the engineering, procurement, and construction activities associated with building a new facility, if you will. And that ranges across oil and gas production, refining and chemical activities. >> Terrific. And I'd love to shift now to Alan. Could you give us an insight on DPH and your collaboration with ExxonMobil? That would be terrific. >> Happy too. We first got involved with Digital Project Home after Doug had reached out to AWS seeking ways to innovate how major capital projects look at collaboration in the engineering, procurement, and construction value chain. And we were brought in as an AWS Premier Partner to help design an uplift, a new way to facilitate that collaboration between ExxonMobil and its EPC companies. And we got involved early on in the design phase where we were in the room together putting up wire frames on the walls, walking through the processes, trying to figure out how do we streamline the process that had quite a bit of toil in it from both the combination of mixed systems to manual processes. And that's where we got involved and really helped to sketch out some of that early vision from Doug. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, how is Digital Project Home facilitating collaboration with your contractors? >> Well, as folks would recognize, some of these projects are quite large, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, very extensive in terms of the number of people on the owner-operator side as well as the various professional contracting firms that help us to succeed at building out these projects and the decisions, the interactions, the way that we work with one another involves hundreds of millions of hours in some cases, and many, many decisions. What we were looking for is to try to understand how some of those formal interactions, where questions are asked and answered and we need a record of the question that was asked and answered for contractual purposes and for the history, when documents are submitted and need to be reviewed and returned. Some of those formal interactions, historically, had been through platforms and methodologies that were really quite, to use the phrase Alan just did, quite toilsome. And what we were looking to do was to kind of come in to the modern world and use some of the digital tools, methods and programming that are available to help automate in some cases, to help smooth the actual transfer of information, and to bring information to the surface. As practitioners on a project, how do you have information available to you at your fingertips so that you can have better information that allows you to make better decisions and return your answers, not only more quickly with less hours involved in getting to that answer, but also a better answer with a higher confidence that we've answered it the way we need to, we don't have to revisit later. >> Terrific. Well, Alan can you now describe some of the benefits of this cloud native serverless architecture? >> Absolutely. If you remember back what Doug was saying earlier, ExxonMobil operates on six to seven continents around the world. So one of the first things we wanted to do is make sure that we were designing for a solution that could meet any end-user, no matter where they were in the world, whether it was Africa, North America, Australia, Asia, it didn't matter. So we wanted to choose a cloud infrastructure like AWS that had an amazing ability to serve global customers around the world. And more specifically, we knew it was really important to get to a value adding solution as quickly as possible. So by leveraging serverless technology, we got to spend most of our time building the technology that was going to be adding value because AWS infrastructure had already solved many of just the pipe work style issues at hand. So AWS really gave us an accelerated platform to really start diving in to the innovative side of improving collaboration between ExxonMobil and their engineering, procurement and construction vendors. >> Terrific. Now staying with you, Alan. I'd love to hear how is that helping ExxonMobil to build with greater agility and at lower costs? >> There are a couple of things that come to mind with me. First, we led very early on with a modular based design. We knew there were going to be multiple use cases that we had to satisfy and every major capital project does follow rigorous global processes, but often has to adapt them to the environment at hand to what they're particularly constructing, things of that nature. So we wanted to build a solution that would adapt them quickly, so they're not constantly having to go back and build new customizations, new workflows that were specific to one entity or project versus another. So just by making it modular and flexible, we were able to already start to save costs. Additionally, because we're moving into the cloud, we completely take out a lot of the infrastructure maintenance costs that go with that. And that's really where the AWS infrastructure and the cloud based solution really started to help save money as we streamlined this solution. >> Yeah. Well, speaking of flexibility, Doug, why is it so important for your business? >> So, as Alan pointed out, Natalie, we work all over the world with different partners, different EPC contractors, and so we needed the flexibility to be able to use this tool in locations, all around the world. In many cases, the same project has people located around the world. So we had to have that speed and access. We also had to have the flexibility to be able to adjust to specific requirements perhaps of unique relationships between us, our co-venture partners, the countries that host us and so forth. But in addition to that, I'll add to Alan's comment, by structuring it the way Pariveda did, what we ended up with is sort of foundational building blocks that allowed us then to extend in future to additional interactions that we might have with our contractors. So we built out the first couple, and those are available to us today, technical queries and document reviews, but we knew and anticipate that we will continue to have additional workflows, if you will, additional interactions with our partners that we will want to automate and strengthen in the same way. And so having the flexibility of this building block architecture that Pariveda put together allows us to anticipate that in future we can build that out to additional workflows. >> Terrific. Well, now shifting gears. I'd love to hear from Alan a bit here, or actually Doug, excuse me. How do you actually find the system? Do you find that it is intuitive, or do you have to train people really meticulously on this kind of platform? >> Well, design from the beginning to be a very user-friendly. The user experience element of the design work, Pariveda brought that in from the very beginning. And in fact, from our perspective, was one of the key talents that they brought to the design. So we had a problem that we were trying to solve, a platform that we wanted it to work on, but that user interaction, that user experience was so important from the very beginning and is quite frankly, an area where I lacked the experience to have been able to influence it very much, but the Pariveda team and the AWS team as they work together with us built in user experience from the very beginning. That doesn't mean that we don't have to still give some folks a little bit of training to get used to it, but it was designed from the beginning to be quite an intuitive approach, so folks could do their work. We really were after, from my view, from the very beginning, low in toil, rich in information, those were the two things we were trying to accomplish with the entire platform. >> Yeah. And if either one of you want to jump in here. Obviously, you're dealing with a lot of information, what is the data storage like? >> It's surprising not as much as you might think. We designed for optimized data storage from the beginning. We really wanted to make sure we only stored the data that we needed, but also capture as much of it as possible so that we could surface information. That was a goal for us in the beginning, was to not only capture the information that was happening between the collaboration, but design it in a way that we could use technologies like AI and machine learning languages capabilities to surface data out. So from a data storage standpoint, a lot of the data was stored outside of AWS, but we also have a fair amount stored inside of AWS. And because of that footprint, we were able to keep costs quite low. >> Terrific. Well, Alan, again, staying with you, really curious. How is this system addressing the pain points of ExxonMobil global projects specifically? >> One of the main goals from the beginning, like Doug was saying, is to reduce the toil. And a lot of the toil came from the process of an EPC company needing to submit a document over to ExxonMobil and then getting it distributed to the right teams to provide that feedback, or perhaps in reverse, where ExxonMobil needed to send a document over to another EPC companies to get feedback as well. That oftentimes involve multiple people on both sides of that equation. It involved multiple systems that had to be accessed and leveraged to not only capture and trance to document, provide tools for doing markup and providing comments. Digital Project Home unified that entire experience so that the engineers on both sides of the document collaboration process could go into one system and perform all their functions. We automated the routing. We gave them an in tool PDF markup capabilities. So they could just load the document straight into their browser, start doing their work, add their comments, save and submit, and the system would facilitate all of that. So we took out multiple hops in the process and reduce the amount of time people had to spend doing tasks that weren't necessarily a value add. >> And I'll add to that. Natalie, is it okay I'll add to that? >> Oh, please do. >> Both on the EPC contractor side as well as the owner side, we have small teams of what we call document controllers 'cause we handle so many documents. But it's quite a labor intensive or manual type approach, but it didn't need to be. And the DPH approach and the way that it was built out, it's still not completely eliminated all of the intervention of document controllers, but it reduces the burden and even the team size necessary to maneuver those documents back and forth. We in our engagements with our contractors have a contractual obligation to return our comments within a specified period of time. And we were losing 10 to 20% of that time just in the document management side of getting it from the right person to the right person and back. And so when schedules are tight, we have a lot to do, losing 20% of our contractual time to get a document returned with comments, that was a bit painful for us. So eliminating that, or at least drastically reducing it was a big win among others. >> Well, staying with you, Doug, what do you see as the major benefits of creating this platform on AWS? >> Really, to me, it comes down to better decisions. In underpinned by better information at hand to those who are or having to review, answer questions, review documents that are information at hand that allows us then to have the information that's required to get to a good answer and provide that back, whether it's from the contractor to us or the other way around. On either side, surfacing information, because otherwise a practitioner is going off to find an industry standard, going back to find out if we already had a query on that same document, see what we said last time or how that question was different from this question. There was a lot of hunting and pecking, so to speak to find out what information was allied to the question or allied to the document. And what we were really looking for was a solution that would bring that information up, give us live links, allow us to jump across to that information straight away. Not only have the information, but also be able to access it quite quickly. >> Terrific. And Alan, now shifting gears over to you. I'm really curious how this system will improve efficiencies for MCPs for the years to come. >> As Doug mentioned, we designed the system from the beginning to be extendable, to be modular, to think of like Lego blocks, where the Legos themselves represent functionality that we know can serve purposes in multiple different workflows. So as ExxonMobil continues to develop this platform in partnership with feedback from their engineering, procurement, and construction companies, they're going to be able to quickly build new workflows leveraging component based design that we did from day one. So the efficiency is going to come as they or able to add new capabilities to the platform very quickly and using modern technology to ensure that it's relevant and capable and serving the businesses needs. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, as this project scales up, what are some of the other benefits would you expect can be realized? >> Well, Natalie, we're looking to extend it to more projects as is often the case with things like this. We trial it in a few places to get, to build it out, gain the experience. We're looking to extend it to additional users, but we're also looking to do, just what Allan was just mentioning there, folks involved in major projects are familiar with such things as management of change, deviations, issues management. So there are a handful of interactions that happen between between parties and something like this. And so while we've built out two of the workflows as a starting place, and while we've deployed this tool, if you will to a few of our projects, our vision is that we would be able to extend the number of users and be able to build out additional important interactions or workflows that we have so that the Digital Project Home becomes a place that holds even more of a practitioners daily work activities. >> Terrific. And if either one of you would like to jump in here and provide just like a quick snapshot of how much manpower, time, and costs are saved as a result of using this type of platform. >> Well, on our side, Alan, I'll jump in here. We anticipate on a large project, we will transact over thousands of documents. Now, some of them get more review and some of them get less review, but there are thousands of documents that are developed in terms of engineering, procurement, and construction type activities. And to the extent that we can save a small amount of time and get better answers on each one, that really adds up quickly when you consider the number of hours expended in that overall effort. So we're talking thousands upon thousands of hours that we believe can be reduced and what that translates to, not only the ability to execute a project with a smaller team, but we are confident with better information in hand, we'll make better decisions. >> Well, thank you both for your insights. Loved having you on this program. That was Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. That's all for this session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, and I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (bright music)