from New York City it's the cube covering welcome to the new edge brought to you by pensando systems hey welcome back here ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we are in downtown Manhattan at the top of goldman sachs it was a beautiful day now the clouds coming in but that's appropriate because we're talking about cloud we're talking about edge and the launch of a brand new company is pensando and their event it's called welcome to the new edge and we're happy to have since we're goldman the guys who have the money we're barry Eggers a founding partner of Lightspeed ventures and randy pond the CFO a pensando gentlemen welcome thank you thank you so Barry let's start with you you think you were involved at this early on why did you get involved what what kind of sparked your interest we got involved in this round and the reason we got involved were mainly because we've worked with this team before at Cisco we know they're fantastic they're probably the most prolific team and the enterprise and they're going after a big opportunity so we were pleased when the company said hey you guys want to work with us on this as a financial investor and we did some diligence and dug in and found you know everything to our liking and jump right in didn't anybody tell them this startup is a young man's game they mixed up the twenty-something I think yeah they sort of turned the startup on its head if you will no pun intended that's going right yeah yeah and Randy you've joined him a CFO you've known them for a while I mean what is it about this group of people that execute kind of forward-looking transformation transformational technologies time and time again that's not a very common trait it's a it's a great question so you know the key for these guys have been well they've been together since the 80s so Mario look and primitive this is the 80s I work with them at their previous startup before Christian two ladies and they're the combination of their skills are phenomenal together so you know one of them has some of the vision of where they want to go the second guy is a substantive sort of engineer takes it from concept first drawing and then the Prem takes over the execution perspective and then drives this thing and they've really been incredible together and then we added Sony at crescendo as a as a product marketing person and she's really stepped up and become integral part on the team so they work together so well it just makes a huge difference yeah it's it's it's amazing that that a that they keep doing it and B that they want to keep doing it right because they've got a few bucks in the bank and they don't really need to do it but still to take on a big challenge and then to keep it under wraps for two and a half years that's pretty pretty amazing so curious Barry from your point of view venture investing you guys kind of see the future you get pitched by smart people all day when you looked at John Chambers kind of conversation of these ten-year kind of big cycles you know what did you think of that how do you guys kind of slice and dice your opportunities and looking at these big Nick's yeah going back going back to the team a little bit they've been pretty good at identifying a lot of these cycles they brought us land switching a long time ago with crescendo they sort of redefined the data center several times and so there's another opportunity what's driving this opportunity really is the fact that explosion of applications in the network and of course east-west traffic in the network so networks were more designed north-south and they're slowly becoming more east-west but because the applications are closer to the edge and networks today mostly provide services in the core the idea for pensando is well why don't we bring the service deliver the services closer to the applications improve performance better security and better monitoring yeah and then just the just the hyper acceleration of you know the amount of data the amount of applications and then this age-old it's we're going to use the data to the computer do you move the compute to the data now the answer is yes all the above so you got some money to work with we do you got a round that he could be around you guys are closing the C round so I think 180 people approximately I think somebody told me close enough so as you put some of this capital to work what are some of your priorities going forward so we will continue to hire both in the engineering side but more importantly now we're hiring in sales and service we've been waiting for the product quite frankly so we've just got our first few sales guys hired we've got a pretty aggressive ramp especially with the HP relationship to put people out into the field we've hired a couple guys in New York will continue to hire at the sales team we're ramping the supply chain and we've got a relative complicated supply chain model but that has to react now that we're going to market all that might be pretty used to do that we're changing facilities we need to grow we're sort of cramped in a one-story building open up one floor of a building right now so the money is going to be used sort of critically to really scale the business down they can go to market okay but a pretty impressive list of both partners and customers on launch day you don't see Goldman HPE Equinix I think it was quite a slide some of that is the uniqueness of the way we went to market and did the original due diligence on the product and bringing customers in early and then converting them to investors you end up with a customer investment model so they stayed with us Goldman's been through all three rounds we've been about HP and last model we had NetApp has been um two rounds now so we've we've continued to develop as a business with this small core group of customers and investors that we could try to expand every time we move to the next round and as Barry said earlier this is the first time we had a traditional financial investor in our rounds the rest of them have all been customers they've been friends and family for the most part did you join the board too right I did yeah so what are you what are you excited about what what do you see is I mean just clearly your side you invested but is there something just extra special here you know react chambers put in a 10-year 10-year cycle yeah we've talked about it I mean I'm excited to work with the team right there best-in-class working closely with John again is a lot of fun a chance to not exhaust yeah yeah you know a chance to read redefine the data center and be part of the next way even as a VC you love waves and build my Connick company right and I think we have a real opportunity in front of us it it takes a lot of money to do this and do it right and I think we have the team that proven they can execute on this kind of opportunities from I'm excited to see what the next five years hold for this company good well it was funny John teased him a little bit about you know all the M&A stuff that he was famous for at Cisco he's like I don't do that anymore now I'm an investor I want IPOs all the way what's all 18 thinks it is 18 companies in his portfolio their routes they're going to IPO all the way yeah that's that's a good point actually this team has been prolific and they've delivered products that have generated fifty billion dollars and any walk into any data center in the world you're gonna see a product this team has built however this team has not taken a company public so that's really the opportunity I think that's what excites them Randy's here it's why Jon's here that's why I'm here we want to build a company that can be an independent company be a lasting leader in a new category yeah so last word Randy for you for people that aren't familiar with the team that aren't familiar with with with what they've done what would you tell them about why you came to this opportunity and why you're excited about it well this there is no higher quality engineering team in the world didn't these people so it's to get re-engaged with them again with an entirely new concept that's catching a transition and the market was just too good an opportunity to pass I mean I had retired for 15 months and I came out of retirement to join this team much to the chagrin of my wife but I just couldn't pass up the opportunity high caliber talent it's um every day is is interesting I have to say well thanks for for sharing the story with us and and congratulations on a great day and in a terrific event thank you thank you very much all right he's berry he's Randy I'm Jeff you're watching the cube from the top of goldman sachs in Manhattan thanks for watching we'll see you next time

(upbeat music) >> From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering the Churchills, 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back here Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Chuchill's, it's the 9th annual award celebration put on by the Churchill club and the theme is all about leadership this year. We're really excited to have a very special guest John W. Thompson, chairman of Microsoft, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, he's been around a long time. He's known and talks to a lot of leaders. So john, great to have you on. >> Nice to be here, thank you very much for having me. >> So leadership is such an interesting topic right? You go everything from, um, West point and trying to train young men to be leaders in a military situation to a start up that starts as some small company that had some interesting idea that grows to a huge corporate thing that's changing the world. Ya know, what are some of your thoughts as Silicon Valley is going through some hiccups right now and when you look, >> [John W. Thompson] We are? >> Just a couple little ones. >> I did recognize any of those. >> Well maybe not looking at the stock market. I don't know when that thing is coming back down. But you know when you think about leaders, what are somethings people maybe don't think about and really more interestingly how should people grow or what do you look for in a board member when you're talking to some CEO of a hot rising company? >> Well I think leadership is is as much about your personality and the business that use chose to go run is anything else. And the skills and experiences that someone might need to run a, pick a business, a business the size of Microsoft are fundamentally different than what you might need to run Rubrik, which is a company whose board I serve on. But that being said, leadership has some core principles that are critical independent of the size of the company or organization you're on. First of which is, integrity, second of which is focus, third of which is follow through and execution. There is lots of things that fundamental do and do well. And those who don't do well, don't become or stay leaders very long, that's for sure. >> It's interesting to look at Microsoft cause, ya know, three big personalities. Obviously Bill got it started as a young kid, I mean he was literally a kid in college. Um, then you had Steve Ballmer come in, completely different personalities and ya know, interesting for Bill to be willing to give up their reigns and then ya know, some tough times at Microsoft little bit stagnant and then Satya came in and just has supercharged and really driven a huge transformation in a giant big company. What are some of the attributes when you look at those three as leaders and you've worked with them, that make them so successful? >> Well, I think each of them brought something fundamentally different to the table when they were in the leadership role. In the case of Bill, he clearly was a visionary. He defined a point of view about the technology industry. That had he not done that, we wouldn't be where we are in the world today. And so, Bills role was unique. In the case of Steve, the company had hit a significant bump in the road all around the anti-trust activity. And candidly, it's my impression that Bill really didn't want to be involved in that, so he turned to Steve and says tag you're it. And Steve had a very fundamental view about execution. He was very much focus on execute, execute, execute. And if you look at the way the company preformed, its revenue grew from roughly ten, fifteen billion to almost eighty billion dollars during his term as CEO. However, the stock did not perform very well. So people weren't very happy with that. Ironically enough Satya come in, Satya had run the search business, had run the cloud business, had even run the enterprise software business. So he had a very fundamental view about of what he thought the company needed to do. And there were two issues, issues number one was strategy around cloud. And on the day of his announcement, he announced mobile first, cloud first are the strategies of Microsoft. And then he quickly, quickly made it clear that the number two issue, for the company, was about its culture. And while I am unbelievably fascinated by how much progress we've made on the product front, I'm even more encouraged by what has happened on the, candidly, on the cultural front. >> Right. So on the cultural front that is, are you a harder thing to impact especially on a large global company with hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world, so what are the secrets that change culture like that? >> Its fundamental, it's about openness and honesty and candor. Um, one of the things that happens here in the valley, often for some companies is when they do their quarterly or monthly employee all hands meetings, guess what? They screen and filter all of the questions. Well, we don't do that at Microsoft office. Satya does not do that. He wants to be open and honest and candid with his employees with what's going on. My gosh! That's what real leaders do. And so I think what he has done is nothing that is unique, it's just consistent. He has been very very consistent and predictable in his execution of what openness, listening rather than talking, all of the things that good leaders are able to do. >> Right, its funny the one word you haven't said since we have been sitting here, you keep saying execution of focus, which I love focus execute and delight the customer. You haven't said strategy one single time. you said vision, but not strategy. Its interesting because I think a lot of people don't put enough emphasis on, its just work, you just got to execute. >> Its one thing to have a strategy, but if you can't execute the strategy, of what value is it? So I have always had a view in my roles as leader that it's about focus and executing. Yes, you have to come up with a vision and yes you have to create ideas that employees, and partners, and customers can become excited about. But ultimately it's about execution day in and day out. 368 days of the years, not 365. >> Alright, final question I know you've got a busy night. As you look as some leaders that you look up to, maybe not of this generation that you've been working with, but maybe of a past generation, who are some of the folks that you look to for your inspiration on the leadership side? >> Well, I would have to say the first one was the former vice chairman of IBM, who I was the chief of staff to many many many years ago. His name was Paul Rizzo. Paul was probably one of the most influential people in the company during that period of time, but you'd never know it. He had a level of humility about himself. He had a level of openness and candor in his interaction with employees at all levels up and down the line. And a company of IBM's size back in those days, it was two, three hundred thousand people big. And so he would be the first leader that comes to my mind as someone who was impactful on me. Another one would have been, a guy who created Akamai. He's on the board of Oracle and he's an awesome awesome friend of mine. He was the guy that ran the America's and gave me my first really really big job. And the fact that he was willing to give a guy like me a job like that, was a pretty important move. George Conrades is his name by the way. And so those two people were very very influential as leaders. As I would look at them and try to determine whether or not can I, can I pattern myself after that? Or are there things that they do and say and execute that I should consider as I think about my evolving leadership. >> Right so important to have people that you can look up to, learn from, and to take care of ya and help you along the way. >> [John W. Thompson] I agree >> John, thanks for spending some time it's always great to sit down with you >> Nice to see you as well. >> And continue success. We'll hopefully see you next time not to long from now. >> Lets hope not. >> Alright, he's John W. Thompson and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube, were at the Churchill's in Santa Clara California. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Well, hi everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE as we continue our IBM Think initiative. And today talking with Clemens Reijnen who is the Global CTO Cloud and DevOps Leader at Capgemini. And the Clemens, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Good to see you today. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. >> Yeah, tell us a little bit about Capgemini, if you will, first off for our viewers at home who might not be familiar with your services. Tell us a little bit about that and maybe a little bit more about your specific responsibilities there. >> So who doesn't know Capgemini in this system in the greater world and the IT world as we lived on a stone. So Capgemini is a worldwide system integrated with offerings in all kinds of spaces and all areas there. My responsibility is mainly around cloud and DevOps and taking care of countries or delivery centers have the right knowledge around cloud and the right capabilities around DevOps. And to support our customers and with their journey to the cloud into a digital organization. >> Yeah. Everybody's talking about digital these days. >> Everybody yeah. >> And it's magical digital transformation that's occurring, that's been going on for quite some time. What does that look like to you? And when you start defining digital organizations and digital transformations what are the kinds of things that you're talking about with organizations in terms of that kind of migration path? >> Yeah. So it's quite interesting to just start discussion about how does a digital landscape looks like for an organization wants to start transforming to a digital organization. And then when you are looking at that I'm always talking to discretion with business capabilities. An organization wants to create business capabilities either to interact and engage with their workforce and to make them work in the most efficient way. And what they are using for that are all kinds of different digital channels. And those digital channels they can be a mobile app. I'm working with my mobile app to connect with my work. I'm calling, I'm using zoom, I'm using teams and that kind of stuff. We also using chatbots for IT devices. And that's what the normal workforce expect nowadays. All have to have all those digital channels to interact with the business. That's also on the other side, at the customer side and organizations want to engage and grow on the customer site and have their nice interaction there. And again, they are using those digital channels all the different digital channels, maybe IoT, maybe API to interact with those customers to bring them the engagement interaction they really want to have. And in that transformation part definitely they are looking at what kind of challenges I have with working with customers like this and working with my workforce. Now everybody's working from home challenges with maybe the connections and that kind of stuff. But they are also starting to leverage, and that's where the transformation and migration start with their on-prem systems, their legacy systems to move those kinds of capabilities and enrich that with cloud native capabilities to all kinds of enterprise solutions like the ones from IBM for example, to expose that to their digital channels, to their organizations. And that's the landscape, how it looks like. And then we have the discussion with organizations. How do you want to engage with your customers? What kind of digital channels do you need? What are the business systems you have and how can we enrich them and expose them to the outside world with all the enterprise solutions around them. >> And when you talk about a process like this which sounds holistic, right? You're looking at, what do you have? Where do you want to go? What are your business needs? Which all makes great sense. But then all of a sudden you start hitting speed bumps along the way. There are always challenges in terms of deployments There are always challenges in terms of decisions and those things. So what are you hearing again from on the customer side about, what are my pain points? What are my headaches here as I know, I want to make this jump, but how do I get there? And I have these obstacles in my way. >> Yeah, definitely. And the ones I explained already which are underlooked for site and on the customer side. You want to have the engagements there you want to have interactions there. And then you have that whole digital landscape which comes with some interesting challenges. Then how do I implement this landscape in the right scalable way? How do I expose my data in such a way that it is secure? How do I leverage all the capabilities from the platforms I'm using? And how do I make all these moving parts consistent, compliant with the regulations I need to work towards to? How do I make it secure? So those are definitely big enterprise challenges like appliances, security and that kind of stuff but also technology challenges. How do I adopt those kinds of technologies? How do I make it scalable? How do I make it really an integrated solution on its own? So that my platform is not only working for the digital channels we know right now but they are also ready for the digital channels We don't know yet will start to come here. That's the biggest challenges there for me. >> Yeah. I want to get into that a little bit later too. Cause you raised a great point. Well, let's just jump right now. We know what the here now is but you just talked about building for the future building for a more expansive footprint or kinds of capabilities that frankly we're not even aware of right now. So how do you plan for that kind of flexibility that kind of agility when it's a bit unpredictable? >> Yeah. And that's what every organization tries to be agile, flexible, resilient and you need to build your system conform that. And well we normally start with you need to have a clear foundation and a foundation when, for example when you are using the cloud for it every organization is cloud for it. You want to have that foundation in such a way that those digital channels can connect really easy to it. And then the capabilities the business capabilities created are done by product teams product and feature teams are creating those kinds of capabilities on top of that cloud foundation. And in that foundation, you want to put everything in place. What makes it easy for those teams to focus on that business functionality on those business capabilities. You want to make it very easy for them to do it the right thing that I always love to say that that's what you want to put in your cloud foundation. And that's where you are harnessing your security. Every application with learning on the foundation has secure. You are embracing a standard way of working although not every DevOps teams like that they want to be organizing and that kind of stuff. But when you are having 50 or a 100 DevOps teams you'd want to have some kind of standardization and provide them a way. And again, the easy way should be the right way to provide them templates, provide them technologies so that they can really focus very quickly on those kinds of business capabilities. So the cloud foundation is the base that needs to be in place. >> Now, you've been doing this for a long time and the conversation used to be, shall we move to the cloud? Can we move to the cloud? Now it's about how fast can we move to the cloud? How much do we move to the cloud? So looking at that kind of the change in paradigm if you will, what are organizations having to consider in terms of the scale, the depth, the breadth of their offering now, because innovation and as you know, it can happen at a much faster pace than it could have just a very short time ago. >> Yeah. And then I'm reflecting again back to the easy thing should be the right thing. That's what you want to do for your DevOps. >> I love that concept. (laughs) >> And that's where you should focus on as an organization. For example, what we've put in place. We put a lot of standardization, a lot of knowledge in place in what we call in an Inner Source library. And in that Inner Source library, for example we put all kinds of strips, all kinds of templates all kinds of standardization for teams who want to deploy OpenShift on their platform or want to start working with certain cloud packs. That they can set it up very easily conforms the standards of your organization and start moving from there. And then in the cloud foundation, you have your cloud management and the IBM Cloud Manager because organizations are definitely going towards the hybrid scenarios, different organizational or units wants to start using different clouds in there. And also for the migration part you want to have that grow from there. And standardization, Inner Source and having those templates ready, it's key for organizations now to speed up and be ready to start juggling around with workloads now on any cloud where you want to and that's the idea. >> Sure. Now, so Red Hats involved in this she had IBM involved as well obviously your partnership working with them. Talk about that kind of merger of resources, if you will. And in terms of what the value proposition is to your clients at the end of the day to have that kind of firepower working in their behalf. >> Yeah. And that's for example, IBM is for us a very important partner. Definitely on the hybrid multi-cloud scenarios where we can leverage OpenShift on those kinds of platforms for our customers. And we created what I said, templates, scripts. We use the IBM garage projects for it to create deployments for our teams in a kind of self servicing way to deploy those OpenShift clusters on top of the cloud platform of their choice. And then for sure, with the multi-cloud manager from IBM we can manage that actually in the lending zone and that's actually the whole ID. And you want to give the flexibility and the speeds to your DevOps teams to be able to do the right thing is the easy thing. And then manage it from your cloud foundation so that they are comfortable that when they're putting the workloads in that whole multi hybrid cloud platform that it is managed, organized all in the right way. And that that's definitely where IBM Red Hat OpenShift comes in play. And because they have already such a great tool sets ready it really think DevOps. That's what I really like. And also with the migrations, it comes with a lot of DevOps capabilities in there not playing lift shift but also the modelisation immediately in there. And that's what I like about our partnership with IBM is just, they are DevOps in mind also. That's cool. >> Yeah. What about the speed here? Just in general, just about the, almost the pace of change and what's happening in that space cause it used to be these kinds of things took forever. It seemed like or evolutions, transitions were to take a long period of time. It's not the case anymore now that things are happening in relatively lightning speed. So when you're talking with an organization about the kinds of changes they could make and the speed at which they can do that. Marry those up for me and those conversations that you're having. And if I'm a CIO out there and I'm thinking about how am I going to flip this switch? Convince me right now, (Clemens laughing) What are the key factors? And how easy, how right will this be for me? >> So as a CIO, you want to have your scalable and your flexible organization probably at this moment, you're sitting with your on-prem system with probably a very large relational database with several components around there. And now you want to fuel those digital channels there. The great way with IBM with Red Hat is that we can deploy OpenShift container solutions everywhere and then starting to modernize those small components or at that big relational database. And we were at starting to do that, we can do that really at Lightspeed. And there are, we have a factory model up and running, where we can put in the application landscape of a customer and look at it and say, "Okay, this one is quite easy. We are running it to, or modernization street. And it runs into a container." And from there, you start to untangle actually the hair ball of your whole application landscape and starting to move those components. And you definitely want to prioritize them. And that's where you have discussions with the business, which is most valuable to move first and which one to move there. And that's actually what we put in place is the factory model to analyze an application landscape of a customer, having the discussions with those customers and then say, "Okay we are going to move these workloads first. Then we are going to analyze the count of these and then we are going to move these." And we really start rocking fast moving their workloads to the cloud and so that they can start and reach those digital channels you want to do it in half. >> Well, a great process. And I love your analogies by the way you say about hairball there. (Clemens and John laughing) I totally get it. Hey Clemens, thank you for the time today. I appreciate hearing about the Capgemini story and about your partnership with IBM. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. So well, we have learned one thing the easy thing is the right thing and that's the Capgemini way of getting things done. You've been watching part of the IBM Think initiative here on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Well, hi everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE as we continue our IBM Think initiative. And today talking with Clemens Reijnen who is the Global CTO Cloud and DevOps Leader at Capgemini. And the Clemens, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Good to see you today. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. >> Yeah, tell us a little bit about Capgemini, if you will, first off for our viewers at home who might not be familiar with your services. Tell us a little bit about that and maybe a little bit more about your specific responsibilities there. >> So who doesn't know Capgemini in this system in the greater world and the IT world as we lived on a stone. So Capgemini is a worldwide system integrated with offerings in all kinds of spaces and all areas there. My responsibility is mainly around cloud and DevOps and taking care of countries or delivery centers have the right knowledge around cloud and the right capabilities around DevOps. And to support our customers and with their journey to the cloud into a digital organization. >> Yeah. Everybody's talking about digital these days. >> Everybody yeah. >> And it's magical digital transformation that's occurring, that's been going on for quite some time. What does that look like to you? And when you start defining digital organizations and digital transformations what are the kinds of things that you're talking about with organizations in terms of that kind of migration path? >> Yeah. So it's quite interesting to just start discussion about how does a digital landscape looks like for an organization wants to start transforming to a digital organization. And then when you are looking at that I'm always talking to discretion with business capabilities. An organization wants to create business capabilities either to interact and engage with their workforce and to make them work in the most efficient way. And what they are using for that are all kinds of different digital channels. And those digital channels they can be a mobile app. I'm working with my mobile app to connect with my work. I'm calling, I'm using zoom, I'm using teams and that kind of stuff. We also using chatbots for IT devices. And that's what the normal workforce expect nowadays. All have to have all those digital channels to interact with the business. That's also on the other side, at the customer side and organizations want to engage and grow on the customer site and have their nice interaction there. And again, they are using those digital channels all the different digital channels, maybe IoT, maybe API to interact with those customers to bring them the engagement interaction they really want to have. And in that transformation part definitely they are looking at what kind of challenges I have with working with customers like this and working with my workforce. Now everybody's working from home challenges with maybe the connections and that kind of stuff. But they also started to leverage and that's where the transformation and migration start with their on-prem systems, their legacy systems to move those kinds of capabilities and enrich that with cloud native capabilities to all kinds of enterprise solutions like the ones from IBM for example, to expose that to their digital channels, to their organizations. And that's the landscape, how it looks like. And then we have the discussion with organizations. How do you want to engage with your customers? What kind of digital channels do you need? What are the business systems you have and how can we enrich them and expose them to the outside world with all the enterprise solutions around you. >> And when you talk about a process like this which sounds holistic, right? You're looking at, what do you have? Where do you want to go? What are your business needs? Which all makes great sense. But then all of a sudden you start hitting speed bumps along the way. There are always challenges in terms of deployments There are always challenges in terms of decisions and those things. So what are you hearing again from on the customer side about, what are my pain points? What are my headaches here as I know, I want to make this jump, but how do I get there? And I have these obstacles in my way. >> Yeah, definitely. And the ones I explained already which are underlooked for site and on the customer side. You want to have the engagements there you want to have interactions there. And then you have that whole digital landscape which comes with some interesting challenges. Then how do I implement this landscape in the right scalable way? How do I expose my data in such a way that it is secure? How do I leverage all the capabilities from the platforms I'm using? And how do I make all these moving parts consistent, compliant with the regulations I need to work towards to? How do I make it secure? So those are definitely big enterprise challenges like appliances, security and that kind of stuff but also technology challenges. How do I adopt those kinds of technologies? How do I make it scalable? How do I make it really an integrated solution on its own? So that my platform is not only working for the digital channels we know right now but they are also ready for the digital channels We don't know yet will start to come here. That's the biggest challenges there for me. >> Yeah. I want to get into that a little bit later too. Cause you raised a great point. Well, let's just jump right now. We know what the here now is but you just talked about building for the future building for a more expansive footprint or kinds of capabilities that frankly we're not even aware of right now. So how do you plan for that kind of flexibility that kind of agility when it's a bit unpredictable? >> Yeah. And that's what every organization tries to be agile, flexible, resilient and you need to build your system conform that. And well we normally start with you need to have a clear foundation and a foundation when, for example when you are using the cloud for it every organization is cloud for it. You want to have that foundation in such a way that those digital channels can connect really easy to it. And then the capabilities the business capabilities created are done by product teams product and feature teams are creating those kinds of capabilities on top of that cloud foundation. And in that foundation, you want to put everything in place. What makes it easy for those teams to focus on that business functionality on those business capabilities. You want to make it very easy for them to do it the right thing that I always love to say that that's what you want to put in your cloud foundation. And that's where you are harnessing your security. Every application with learning on the foundation has secure. You are embracing a standard way of working although not every DevOps teams like that they want to be organizing and that kind of stuff. But when you are having 50 or a 100 DevOps teams you'd want to have some kind of standardization and provide them a way. And again, the easy way should be the right way to provide them templates, provide them technologies so that they can really focus very quickly on those kinds of business capabilities. So the cloud foundation is the base that needs to be in place. >> Now, you've been doing this for a long time and the conversation used to be, shall we move to the cloud? Can we move to the cloud? Now it's about how fast can we move to the cloud? How much do we move to the cloud? So looking at that kind of the change in paradigm if you will, what are organizations having to consider in terms of the scale, the depth, the breadth of their offering now, because innovation and as you know, it can happen at a much faster pace than it could have just a very short time ago. >> Yeah. And then I'm reflecting again back to the easy thing should be the right thing. That's what you want to do for your DevOps. >> I love that concept. (laughs) >> And that's where you should focus on as an organization. For example, what we've put in place. We put a lot of standardization, a lot of knowledge in place in what we call in an Inner Source library. And in that Inner Source library, for example we put all kinds of strips, all kinds of templates all kinds of standardization for teams who want to deploy OpenShift on their platform or want to start working with certain cloud packs. That they can set it up very easily conforms the standards of your organization and start moving from there. And then in the cloud foundation, you have your cloud management and the IBM Cloud Manager because organizations are definitely going towards the hybrid scenarios, different organizational or units wants to start using different clouds in there. And also for the migration part you want to have that grow from there. And standardization, Inner Source and having those templates ready, it's key for organizations now to speed up and be ready to start juggling around with workloads now on any cloud where you want to and that's the idea. >> Sure. Now, so Red Hats involved in this she had IBM involved as well obviously your partnership working with them. Talk about that kind of merger of resources, if you will. And in terms of what the value proposition is to your clients at the end of the day to have that kind of firepower working in their behalf. >> Yeah. And that's for example, IBM is for us a very important partner. Definitely on the hybrid multi-cloud scenarios where we can leverage OpenShift on those kinds of platforms for our customers. And we created what I said, templates, scripts. We use the IBM garage projects for it to create deployments for our teams in a kind of self servicing way to deploy those OpenShift clusters on top of the cloud platform of their choice. And then for sure, with the multi-cloud manager from IBM we can manage that actually in the lending zone and that's actually the whole ID. And you want to give the flexibility and the speeds to your DevOps teams to be able to do the right thing is the easy thing. And then manage it from your cloud foundation so that they are comfortable that when they're putting the workloads in that whole multi hybrid cloud platform that it is managed, organized all in the right way. And that that's definitely where IBM Red Hat OpenShift comes in play. And because they have already such a great tool sets ready it really think DevOps. That's what I really like. And also with the migrations, it comes with a lot of DevOps capabilities in there not playing lift shift but also the modelisation immediately in there. And that's what I like about our partnership with IBM is just, they are DevOps in mind also. That's cool. >> Yeah. What about the speed here? Just in general, just about the, almost the pace of change and what's happening in that space cause it used to be these kinds of things took forever. It seemed like or evolutions, transitions were to take a long period of time. It's not the case anymore now that things are happening in relatively lightning speed. So when you're talking with an organization about the kinds of changes they could make and the speed at which they can do that. Marry those up for me and those conversations that you're having. And if I'm a CIO out there and I'm thinking about how am I going to flip this switch? Convince me right now, (Clemens laughing) What are the key factors? And how easy, how right will this be for me? >> So as a CIO, you want to have your scalable and your flexible organization probably at this moment, you're sitting with your on-prem system with probably a very large relational database with several components around there. And now you want to fuel those digital channels there. The great way with IBM with Red Hat is that we can deploy OpenShift container solutions everywhere and then starting to modernize those small components or at that big relational database. And we were at starting to do that, we can do that really at Lightspeed. And there are, we have a factory model up and running, where we can put in the application landscape of a customer and look at it and say, "Okay, this one is quite easy. We are running it to, or modernization street. And it runs into a container." And from there, you start to untangle actually the hair ball of your whole application landscape and starting to move those components. And you definitely want to prioritize them. And that's where you have discussions with the business, which is most valuable to move first and which one to move there. And that's actually what we put in place is the factory model to analyze an application landscape of a customer, having the discussions with those customers and then say, "Okay we are going to move these workloads first. Then we are going to analyze the count of these and then we are going to move these." And we really start rocking fast moving their workloads to the cloud and so that they can start and reach those digital channels you want to do it in half. >> Well, a great process. And I love your analogies by the way you say about hairball there. (Clemens and John laughing) I totally get it. Hey Clemens, thank you for the time today. I appreciate hearing about the Capgemini story and about your partnership with IBM. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. So well, we have learned one thing the easy thing is the right thing and that's the Capgemini way of getting things done. You've been watching part of the IBM Think initiative here on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Live from San Diego, California. It's the cube covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem. >>Welcome back to the queue bumps to men. And my cohost is John Troyer and you're watching the cube here at CubeCon, cloud-native con 2019 in beautiful and sunny San Diego today. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Tom Willkie, who's vice president of product ECRO funnel labs. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. All right, so it's on your tee shirt. We've been hearing, uh, customers talking about it and the like, but, uh, why don't you introduce the company to our audience in a, where you fit in this broad landscape, uh, here at the CNCF show. Thank you. Yes. So Grafana is probably the most popular open source project for dashboarding and visualization. Um, started off focused on time series data on metrics, um, but really recently has branched out into log analysis and tracing and, and all, all of the kinds of aspects of your observability stack. >>Alright, so really big, uh, you know, broad topic there. Uh, we know many of the companies in that space. Uh, there's been many acquisitions, uh, you know, uh, recently in this, um, where, where do you fit in your system? I saw like databases, like a big focus, uh, when, when I, when I look at the company website, uh, bring us inside a little bit. Yeah. As a product to the offering. The customers most, um, >> most, most vendors in this space will sell you a monitoring product that includes the time series database normally includes visualization and some agent as well where pharma Lampson Griffon open source projects, very focused on the visualization aspects. So we are data source agnostic and we have back ends for more than 60 different data sources. So if you want to bring together data from let's say Datadog and combine it with some open source monitoring from, you can do that with. >>Uh, you can, you can have the dashboards and the individual panels in that dashboard combined data from multiple different data sources and we're pretty much the only game in town for that. You can, you can think of it like Tableau allows you to plug into a whole bunch of different databases for your BI with that. But for monitoring and for metrics. Well, so Tom, maybe let's, before we get into the exit products and more of the service and the, and the conference here, let's talk a little well on the front page of your website, you use the Oh 11, why word? So we've said where it's like monitoring here we use words like management, we use words like ops. Observability is a hot topic in the space and for people in a space that has some nuances. And so can you just maybe let the viewers and us know a little bit about what, how the space is looking at this and how you all feel about observability and what everybody here who's running some cloud native apps needs to actually function in production. >>Yeah. So I think, um, you can't talk about observability without either being pro or, or for, um, uh, the three pillars, right? So people talk about metrics, logs and traces. Um, I think what people miss here is that it's more about the experience for the developer, you know, Gruffalo and what we're trying to achieve is all about giving engineers and developers the tools they need to understand what their applications and their infrastructure doing, right? So we're not actually particularly picky about which pillars you use and which products you use to implement those pillars. But what we want to do is provide you with an experience that allows you to bring it all into a single, a single user interface and allows you to seamlessly move between the different sources of data and, and hopefully, uh, combine them in your analysis and in your root cause of any particular incident. >>And that for me is what observability means. It's about helping you understand the behavior of your application in particular. I mean, I'm, I'm a, I'm a software engineer by trade. I'm still on call. I still get paged at 3:00 AM occasionally. And, and having the right tools at 3:00 AM to allow me to as quickly as possible, figure out what happened and then dive into a fix. That's what we're about over funnel labs. All right. So Tom, one of the things we always need to understand and show here. There's the project and there's the company. Yep. Help us just kind of understand, you know, definitely a difference. The products, the, the, the mission of the company and how that fits with the project. So the Gruffalo project predates the company and it was started by taco. Um, he, you know, he saw a spot for like needing a much better kind of graphical editing of dashboards and making, making the kind of metrics way more accessible to your average human. >>Um, the final lab started really to focus on the it and, uh, monitoring observability use cases of profanity and, but the project itself is much broader than that. We see a lot of use cases in industrial, in IOT, even in BI as well. But Grafana labs is a company we're focused on the monitoring side of things. We're focused on the observability. So we also offer, we mean, like most companies, we have an enterprise version of. It has a few data sources for commercial vendors. So if you want to, you want to get your data dog or your Splunk into Grafana, then there's a commercial auction for that. But we also offer a hosted observability platform called Grafana clown. And this is where we take the best open source projects, the best tools that we think you need as an engineer to understand your applications and we host them for you and we operate them for you. >>We scale them, we upgrade them, we fix bugs, we sacrifice the clouds predominantly are hosted from atheists, our hosted graphite and our hosted Loki, our log aggregation system, um, all combined and brought together with uh, with the Gruffalo frontend. So yeah, like two products, a bunch of open source projects for final labs, employees, four of the promethium maintainers. And I'm one of the promethium maintainers. Um, we am employee graphite maintainers. Obviously a lot of Gryffindor maintainers, but also Loki. Um, I'm trying to think, like there's just so many open source projects. We, uh, we get involved with that. Really it's about synthesizing, uh, an observability platform out of those. And that's what we offer as a product. So you recently had an announcement that Loki is now GA. can you talk just a little bit about Loki and aggregation and logs and what Loki does? >>Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah. Um, a year ago in Seattle actually we announced the Loki project. Um, it was super early. I mean I just basically been finishing the code on the plane over and we announced it and no one I think could have predicted the response we had. Um, everyone was so keen and so hungry for alternative to traditional log aggregation systems. Um, so it's been a year and we've learned a hell of a lot. We've had so much feedback from the community. We've built a whole team internally around, around Loki. We now offer a hosted version of it and we've been running it in production now for over a year, um, doing some really great scale on it and we think it's ready for other people to do the same. One of the things we hear, especially at shows like this is I really, I really, you know, developers and the grassroots adopters come to us, say, we really love Loki. >>We really love what you're doing with it. Um, but my boss won't let me use it until it goes to be one. And so really yesterday we announced it's Don V. one, we think it's stable. We're not going to change any of the APS on you. We, uh, we would love you to use it and uh, and put it into production. All right. Uh, we'd like to hear a little bit more about the business side of things. So, um, I believe there was some news around funding, uh, uh, you know, how many people you have, how many, you know, can you parse for us, you know, how many customers have the projects versus how many customers have, uh, you know, the company's products. Well, we don't, we don't call them customers of the projects that users, yes, yes, we, uh, but I'm from a company where we have hundreds of customers. >>Um, I don't believe we make our revenue figures public and, uh, so I'm probably not going to dive into them, but I know, I know the CEO stands up at our, our yearly conference and, and discloses, you know, what our revenue the last year was. So I'll refer you to that. Um, the funding announcement, that was about a month ago. We, uh, we raised a great round from Lightspeed, um, 24 million I believe. Um, and we're gonna use that to really invest in the community, really invest in our projects and, and build a bit more of a commercial function. Um, the company is now about 110 people. I think, um, it's growing so quickly. I joined 18 months ago and we were 30 people and so we've almost quadrupled in size in, in the last year and a half. Um, so keeping up is quite a challenge. Uh, the two projects, uh, products I've already touched on a few hundred customers and I think we're, you know, we're really happy with the growth. >>We've been, uh, we've never had any institutional funding before this. The company is about five years old. So we've been growing based on organic revenue and, and, and, and, you know, barely profitable, uh, but reinvesting that into the company and, and it's, yeah, it's going really well. We're also one of the, I mean it's not that unique I guess, but we're remote first. We have a more than 50% of our employees work from home. I work from my basement in London. We have a few tiny like offices, one in Stockholm and one in New York, but, but we're really keen to hire the best people wherever they are. Um, and we invest a lot in travel. Uh, we invest a lot in, um, the, the right tools and getting the whole company together to really make that work. Actually a really fun place to work. What time? >>We're S we're still in the business here and I don't know how much time you've spent at the booth this year, but I don't, can you compare, I mean, we've been talking about the growth of this community and the growth of this conference. Can you compare say this year to last year, the, the people coming up, their maturity, the maturity of their production, et cetera. Are they, are they ready to buy? Are they still kicking? Are they still wondering what this Cooper Cooper need easy things is, you know, where, where is everybody this year and how does that, how has it changed? Yeah, and that's a good question where we're definitely seeing people with a lot more sophisticated questions. The, the, the conversations we're having at the booth are a lot longer than they've been in previous years. The um, you know, in particular people now know what key is. We only announced it a year ago and gonna have a lot of people asking us very detailed questions about what scale they can run it at. >>Um, otherwise, yeah, I think there is starting to be a bit more commercial intent at the conference, some few more buying decisions being made here. It's still predominantly a community oriented conference and I think the, the, I don't want that to go away. Like, that's one of the things that makes it attractive to me. And, and I bring my whole team here and that's one of the things that makes it attractive to them. But there is a little bit more, I'm a little more sales activity going on for sure. Any updates to the, to the tracing and monitoring observability stories of the projects here at CNCF this year since you as you're part of the promethium project? >> Yes. So we actually, we had the promethium conference in Munich two weeks ago and after each committee conference, the maintainers like to get together and kind of plan out the next six months of the project. >>So we started to talk about um, adding support for things like exemplars into Prometheus's. This is where each histogram bucket, you can associate an example trace that goes, that contributed towards that, that history and that latency. And then you can build nice user interfaces around that. So you can very quickly move from a latency graph to example traces that caused that. Um, so that's one of the things we're looking to do in Prometheus. And of course Jaeger graduated just a week ago. I think. Um, we're big users of Jaeger internally at for final amps. And actually on our booth right now, uh, we're showing a demo of how we're integrating, um, visualization of distributed tracing, integral foreigner. So you can, you know, using the same approach we do with metrics where we support multiple backends, we're going to support Yeager, we're going to support Zipkin, we're going to support as many open source tracing projects as we can with the Grafana UI experience and being able to seamlessly kind of switch between different data sources, metrics all the way to logs all the way to traces within one UI. >>And without ever having to copy and paste your query and make mistakes and kind of translate it in your head. Right. >> Tom, give us a little bit, look forward. Uh, you know, a lot of activities as the thing's going to, you know, graduating and pulling things together. So what should your users be looking for kind of over the next six to 12 months? >> That's a great question. Yeah, I think we do a yearly release cycle for foreigners. So the next one we're, we're aiming towards is for seven, like for me to find a seven's going to be all about tracing. So I really want to see the demo we're doing. I want to see that turned into like production ready code support for multiple different data sources, support for things like exemplars, which we're not showing yet. Um, I want to see all of that done in Grafana in the next year and we've also massively been flushing out the logging story. >>I'm with Loki, we've been adding support for uh, extracting metrics from the logs and I really think that's kind of where we're going to drive Loki forward in the future. And that really helps with systems that aren't really exposing metrics like legacy systems where the only kind of output you get from them is the logs. Um, beyond that. Yeah, I mean the welds are kind of oyster. I think I'm really keen to see the development of open telemetry and um, we've just starting to get involved to that project ourselves. Um, I'm really interested to kind of talk to people about what they need out of a tracing system. We, we see people asking for a hosted tracing systems. Um, but, but IMO is very much like pick the best open source ones. I don't think that's, that's emerged yet. I don't think people know which is the best one yet. >>So we're going to get involved in all of them. See which one's a C, which one's a community kind of coalesces around and maybe start offering a hosted version of that. >> You know, our final thing is, uh, you know, what advice do you have for users? Obviously, you know, you like the open source thing, but you know, they're hearing about observability everywhere there are, you know, the, the whole APM market is moving this direction. There's acquisitions as we talked about earlier. Um, there's so many moving pieces and a lot of different viewpoints out there. So just, you know, from a user, how do you know, how will things ma, what makes their lives easier and what advice would you give them? Yeah, no, definitely. I think a lot of vendors will tell you like to pick a, pick a vendor who's going to help you with this journey. >>Like I would say like, pick a vendor you trust who can help you make those decisions. Like find someone impartial who's gonna not make, not try and persuade you to buy their product. So we would, uh, you know, I would encourage you to try things out to dog food and to really like invest in experimentation. There's a lot going on in, uh, in, in the observability world and in the cloud native world. And you've got to, you've got to try it and see what fits. Like we embrace this, uh, composability of the, uh, of the observatory of, of the observability ecosystem. So like, try and find which, which choices work best for you. Like I, uh, whenever, whenever I talk to him, you still have to lick all the cupcakes in 2019. I think. I mean, I would, it depends on your level of kind of maturity, right? >>And sophistication. Like, I think if, uh, if, if this is really important to you, you should go down that approach. You should try them all. If this is not one of your core competencies that may be going with a vendor that helps you is a better approach. But, but I'm, I come from the open source world and, uh, you know, I like to see the, um, the whole ecosystem and all the different players and all the different, new and exciting ways to solve these problems. Um, so I'm, I'm always going to encourage people to have a play and try things out. All right, Tom, final word, Loki. Explain to us, uh, you know, when you're coming up with it, how you ended, uh, are you the God of mischief? Well, so the official line is the Loki is the, um, is the North mythology equivalent of Prometheus's, uh, in Greek mythology and, and lochia logging project is, is, is Prometheus's inspired logging. So we've tried to take the operational model from, from atheists, the query language from, from atheists and, and the kind of a cost efficiency from, from atheists and apply it to logs. Um, but I will admit to being a big fan of the Marvel movies. All right, Tom Willkie. Thank you so much for sharing the updates on, on the labs. Uh, we definitely look forward to hearing updates from you and thank you. All right, for, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Madmen back with more coverage here from San Diego. Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching the cube.

(upbeat music) >> From New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering "Welcome To The New Edge." Brought to you by Pensando Systems. >> Hey, welcome back here ready. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop Goldman Sachs in downtown Manhattan, I think it's 43 floors, for a really special event. It's the Pensando launch. It's really called welcome to the new edge and we talked about technology. We had some of the founders on but, these type of opportunities are really special to talk to some really senior leaders and we're excited to have John Chambers back on, who as you know, historic CEO of Cisco for many, many years. Has left that, is doing his own ventures he's writing books, he's investing and he's, happens to be chairman of the board of Pensando. So John, thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Well, more than a few minutes, I think what we talked about today is a major industry change and so to focus on that and focus about the implications will be a lot of fun. >> So let's jump into it. So, one of the things you led with earlier today was kind of these 10 year cycles and they're not exactly 10 years, but you outlined a series of them from mainframe, mini client server everybody knows kind of the sequence. What do you think it is about the 10 year kind of cycle besides the fact that it's easy and convenient for us to remember, that, kind of paces these big disruptions? >> Well, I think it has to do with once a company takes off they tend to, dominate that segment of the industry for so long that even if a creative idea came up they were just overpowering. And then toward the end of a 10 year cycle they quit reinventing themselves. And we talked earlier about the innovator's dilemma and the implications for it. Or an architecture that was designed that suddenly can't go to the next level. So I think it's probably a combination of three or four different factors, including the original incumbent who broke the glass, disrupted others, not disrupting themselves. >> Right, but you also talked about a story where you had to shift focus based on some customer feedback and you ran Cisco for a lot longer than 10 years. So how do you as a leader kind of keep your ears open to something that's a disruptive change that's not your regular best customer and your regular best salesman asking for a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, a little bit of more the same versus the significant disruptive transformational shift? >> Well this goes back to one of my most basic views in life is I think we learn more from our setbacks or setbacks we were part of, or even the missteps or mistakes than you ever do your successes. Everybody loves to talk about successes and I'm no different there. But when you watched a great state like West Virginia that was the chemical center of the world and the coal mining center of the world, the 125,000 coal mines, six miners very well paid, 6,000 of the top engineers in the world, it was the Silicon Valley of the chemical industry and those just disappear. And because our state did not reinvent itself, because the education system didn't change, because we didn't distract attract a new set of businesses in we just kept doing the right thing too long, we got left behind. Then I went to Boston, it was the Silicon Valley of the world. And Route 128 around Boston was symbolic with the Silicon Valley and I-101 and 280 around it. And we had the top university at that time. Much like Stanford today, but MIT generating new companies. We had great companies, DEC, Wang, Data General. Probably a million jobs in the area and because we got stuck in a segment of the market, quit listening to our customers and missed the transitions, not only did we lose probably 1.2 million jobs on it, 100,000 out of DEC, 32,000 out of Wang, etc, we did not catch the next generation of technology changes. So I understand the implications if you don't disrupt yourself. But I also learned, that if you're not regularly reinventing yourself, you get left behind as a leader. And one of my toughest competitors came up to me and said, "John, I love the way you're reinventing Cisco "and how you've done that multiple times." And then I turned and I said "That's why a CEO has got to be in the job "for more than four or five years" and he said, "Now we disagree again." Which we usually did and he said, "Most people can't reinvent themselves." And he said "I'm an example." "I'm a pretty good CEO" he's actually a very good CEO, but he said, "After I've been there three or four years "I've made the changes, that I know "I've got to go somewhere else." And he could see I didn't buy-in and then he said, "How many of your top 100 people "you've been happy with once they've been "in the job for more than five years?" I hesitated and I said "Only one." And he's right, you've got to move people around, you've got to get people comfortable with disruption on it and, the hardest one to disrupt are the companies or the leaders who've been most successful and yet, that's when you got to think about disruption. >> Right, so to pivot on that a little bit in terms of kind of the government's role in jobs, specifically. >> Yes. >> We're in this really strange period of time. We have record low unemployment, right, tiny, tiny unemployment, and yet, we see automation coming in aggressively with autonomous vehicles and this and that and just to pick truck drivers as a category, everyone can clearly see that autonomous vehicles are going to knock them out in the not too distant future. That said, there's more demand for truck drivers today than there's every been and they can't fill the positions So, with this weird thing where we're going to have a bunch of new jobs that are created by technology, we're going to have a bunch of old jobs that get displaced by technology, but those people aren't necessarily the same people that can leave the one and go to the other. So as you look at that challenge, and I know you work with a lot of government leaders, how should they be thinking about taking on this challenge? >> Well, I think you've got to take it on very squarely and let's use the U.S. as an example and then I'll parallel what France is doing and what India is doing that is actually much more creative that what we are, from countries you wouldn't have anticipated. In the U.S. we know that 50% of the Fortune 500 will probably not exist in 10 years, 12 at the most. We know that the large companies will not incrementally hire people over this next decade and they've often been one of the best sources of hiring because of AI and automation will change that. So, it's not just a question of being schooled in one area and move to another, those jobs will disappear within the companies. If we don't have new jobs in startups and if we don't have the startups running at about three to four times the current volumes, we've got a real problem looking out five to 10 years. And the startups where everyone thinks we're doing a good job, the app user, third to a half of what they were two decades ago. And so if you need 25 million jobs over this next decade and your startups are at a level more like they were in the 90s, that's going to be a challenge. And so I think we've got to think from the government perspective of how we become a startup nation again, how we think about long-term job creation, how we think about job creation not taking money out of one pocket and give it to another. People want a real job, they want to have a meaningful job. We got to change our K through 12 education system which is broken, we've got to change our university system to generate the jobs for where people are going and then we've got to retrain people. That is very doable, if you got at it with a total plan and approach it from a scale perspective. That was lacking. And one of the disappointing things in the debate last night, and while I'm a republican I really want who's going to really lead us well both at the presidential level, but also within the senate, the house. Is, there was a complete lack of any vision on what the country should look like 10 years from now, and how we're going to create 25 million jobs and how we're going to create 10 million more that are going to be displaced and how we're going to re-educate people for it. It was a lot of finger pointing and transactional, but no overall plan. Modi did the reverse in India, and actually Macron, in all places, in France. Where they looked at GDP growth, job creation, startups, education changes, etc, and they executed to an overall approach. So, I'm looking for our government really to change the approach and to really say how are we going to generate jobs and how are we going to deal with the issues that are coming at us. It's a combination of all the the above. >> Yep. Let's shift gears a little bit about the education system and you're very involved and you talked about MIT. Obviously, I think Stanford and Cal are such big drivers of innovation in the Bay area because smart people go there and they don't leave. And then there's a lot of good buzz now happening in Atlanta as an investment really piggy-backing on Georgia Tech, which also creates a lot of great engineers. As you look at education, I don't want to go through K through 12, but more higher education, how do you see that evolving in today's world? It's super expensive, there's tremendous debt for the kids coming out, it doesn't necessarily train them for the new jobs. >> Where the jobs are. >> How do you see, kind of the role of higher education and that evolving into kind of this new world in which we're headed? >> Well, the good news and bad news about when I look at successful startups around the world, they're always centered around a innovative university and it isn't just about the raw horse power of the kids, It starts with the CEO of the university, the president of the university, their curriculum, their entrepreneurial approach, do they knock down the barriers across the various groups from engineering to business to law, etc? And are they thinking out of box? And if you watch, there is a huge missing piece between, Georgia Tech more of an exception, but still not running at the level they need to. And the Northeast around Boston and New York and Silicon Valley, The rest of the country's being left behind. So I'm looking for universities to completely redo their curriculum. I'm looking for it really breaking down the silos within the groups and focus on the outcomes. And much like Steve Case has done a very good job on focusing, about the Rust Belt and how do you do startups? I'm going to learn from what I saw in France at Polytechnique and the ITs in India, and what occurred in Stanford and MIT used to occur is, you've got to get the universities to be the core and that's where they kids want to stay close to, and we've got to generate a whole different curriculum, if you will, in the universities, including, continuous learning for their graduates, to be able to come back virtually and say how do I learn about re-skilling myself? >> Yeah. >> The current model is just not >> the right model >> It's broken. >> For the, for going forward. >> K through 12 is >> hopelessly broken >> Yeah. >> and the universities, while were still better than anywhere else in the world, we're still teaching, and some of the teachers and some of the books are what I could have used in college. >> Right, right >> So, we got to rethink the whole curriculum >> darn papers on the inside >> disrupt, disrupt >> So, shifting gears a little bit, you, played with lots of companies in your CEO role you guys did a ton of M&A, you're very famous for the successful M&A that you did over a number of years, but in an investor role, J2 now, you're looking at a more early stage. And you said you made a number of investments which is exciting. So, as you evaluate opportunities A. In teams that come to pitch to you >> Yeah. >> B. What are the key things you look for? >> In the sequence you've raised them, first in my prior world, I was really happy to do 180 acquisitions, in my current world, I'm reversed, I want them to go IPO. Because you add 76% of your headcount after an IPO, or after you've become a unicorn. When companies are bought, including what I bought in my prior role, their headcount growth is pretty well done. We'd add engineers after that, but would blow them through our sales channel, services, finance, etc. So, I want to see many more of these companies go public, and this goes back to national agenda about getting IPO's, not back to where they were during the 90's when it was almost two to three times, what you've seen over the last decade. But probably double, even that number the 90's, to generate the jobs we want. So, I'm very interested now about companies going public in direction. To the second part of your question, on what do I look for in startups and why, if I can bridge it, to am I so faired up about Pensando? If I look for my startups and, it's like I do acquisitions, I develop a playbook, I run that playbook faster and faster, it's how I do digitization of countries, etc. And so for a area I'm going to invest in and bet on, first thing I look at, is their market, technology transition, and business model transition occurring at the same time. That was Amazon of 15 years ago as an example. The second thing I look at, is the CEO and ideally, the whole founding team but it's usually just the CEO. The third thing I look for, is what are the customers really say about them? There's only one Steve Jobs, and it took him seven years. So, I go to the customers and say "What do you really think of this company?" Fourth thing I look for, is how close to an inflection point are they. The fifth thing I look for, is what they have in their ecosystem. Are they partnering? Things of that type. So, if I were to look at Pensando, Which is really the topic about can they bring to the market the new edge in a way that will be a market leading force for a whole decade? Through a ecosystem of partners that will change business dramatically and perhaps become the next major tech icon. It's how well you do that. Their vision in terms of market transitions, and business transitions 100% right. We've talked about it, 5G, IOT, internet of things, going from 15 billion devices to 500 billion devices in probably seven years. And, with the movement to the edge the business models will also change. And this is where, democratization, the cloud, and people able to share that power, where every technology company becomes a business becomes a, every business company becomes a technology company. >> Right. >> The other thing I look at is, the team. This is a team of six people, myself being a part of it, that thinks like one. That is so unusual, If you're lucky, you get a CEO and maybe a founder, a co-founder. This team, you've got six people who've worked together for over 20 years who think alike. The customers, you heard the discussions today. >> Right. >> And we've not talked to a single cloud player, a single enterprise company, a single insurance provider, or major technology company who doesn't say "This is very unique, let's talk about "how we work together on it." The inflection point, it's now you saw that today. >> Nobody told them it's young mans game obviously, they got the twenty-something mixed up >> No, actually were redefining (laughs) twenty-something, (laughs) but it does say, age is more perspective on how you think. >> Right, right. >> And Shimone Peres, who, passed away unfortunately, two years ago, was a very good friend. He basically said "You've got all your life "to think like a teenager, "and to really think and dream out of box." And he did it remarkably well. So, I think leaders, whether their twenty-something, or twenty-some years of experience working you've got to think that way. >> Right. So I'm curious, your take on how this has evolved, because, there was data and there was compute. And networking brought those two thing together, and you were at the heart of that. >> Mm-hmm. Now, it's getting so much more complex with edge, to get your take on edge. But, also more importantly exponential growth. You've talked about going from, how ever many millions the devices that were connected, to the billions of devices that are connected now. How do you stay? How do you help yourself think along exponential curves? Because that is not easy, and it's not human. But you have to, if you're going to try to get ahead of that next wave. >> Completely agree. And this is not just for me, how do I do it? I'm sharing it more that other people can learn and think about it perhaps the same way. The first thing is, it's always good to think of the positive, You can change the world here, the positive things, But I've also seen the negatives we talked about earlier. If you don't think that way, if you don't think that way as a leader of your company, leader of your country, or the leader of a venture group you're going to get left behind. The implications for it are really bad. The second is, you've got to say how do you catch and get a replicable playbook? The neat thing about what were talking about, whether it's by country in France, or India or the U.S., we've got replicable playbooks we know what to run. The third element is, you've got to have the courage to get outside your comfort zone. And I love change when it happens to you, I don't like it when it happens to me And I know that, So, I've got to get people around me who push me outside my comfort zone on that. And then, you've got to be able to dream and think like that teenager we talked about before. But that's what we were just with a group of customers, who were at this event. And they were asking "How do we get "this innovation into our company?" "How do we get the ability to innovate, through not just strategic partnerships with other large companies or partnerships with startups?" But "How do we build that internally?" It's comes down to the leader has to create that image and that approach. Modi's done it for 1.3 billion people in India. A vision, of the future on GDP growth. A digital country, startups, etc. If they can do it for 1.3 billion, tell me why the U.S. can not do it? (laughs) And why even small states here, can't do it. >> Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit, >> All right. >> A lot of black eyes in Silicon Valley right now, a lot of negativity going on, a lot of problems with privacy and trading data for currency and, it's been a rough road. You're way into tech for good and as you said, you can use technology for good you can use technology for bad. What are some things you're doing on the tech for good side? Because I don't think it gets the spotlight that it probably should, because it doesn't sell papers. >> Well, actually the press has been pretty good we just need to do it more on scale. Going back to Cisco days, we never had any major issues with governments. Even though there was a Snowden issue, there were a lot of implications about the power of the internet. Because we work with governments and citizens to say "What are the legitimate needs so that everybody benefits from this?" And where the things that we might have considered doing that, governments felt strongly about or the citizens wouldn't prosper from we just didn't do it. And we work with democrats and republicans alike and 90% of our nation believed tech was for good. But we worked hard on that. And today, I think you got to have more companies doing this and then, what, were doing uniquely in JC2, is were literally partnering with France on tech is for good and I'm Macron's, global tech ambassador and we focus about job creation and inclusion. Not just in Paris, or around Station F but throughout all the various regions in the country. Same thing within India, across 26 different states with Modi on how do you drive it through? And then if we can do it in France or India why can't we do it in each state in the U.S.? Partnering with West Virginia, with a very creative, president of the university there West Virginia University. With the democrats and republicans in their national senate, but also within the governor and speaker of the house and the president and senate within West Virginia, and really saying were going to change it together. And getting a model that you can then cookie cut across the U.S. if you change the curriculum, to your earlier comments. If you begin to focus on outcomes, not being an expert in one area, which is liable not to have a job >> Right. >> Ten years later. So, I'm a dreamer within that, but I think you owe an obligation to giving back, and I think they're all within our grasps >> Right >> And I think you can do, the both together. I think at JC2 we can create a billion dollar company with less than 10 people. I think you can change the world and also make a very good profit. And I think technology companies have to get back to that, you got to create more jobs than you destroy. And you can't be destroying jobs, then telling other people how to live their lives and what their politics should be. >> Yeah. >> That just doesn't work in terms of the environment. >> Well John, again, thanks for your time. Give you the last word on >> Sure >> Account of what happened here today, I mean you're here, and Tony O'Neary was here or at the headquarters of Goldman. A flagship launch customer, for the people that weren't here today why should they be paying attention? >> Well, if we've got this market transition right, the technology and business model, the next transition will be everything goes to the edge. And as every company or every government, or every person has to be both good in their "Area of expertise." or their vertical their in, they've got to also be good in technology. What happened today was a leveling of the playing field as it relates to cloud. In terms of everyone should have choice, democratization there, but also in architecture that allows people to really change their business models, as everything moves to the edge where 75% of all transactions, all data will be had and it might even be higher than that. Secondly, you saw a historic first never has anybody ever emerged from stealth after only two and a half years of existing as a company, with this type of powerhouse behind them. And you saw the players where you have a customer, Goldman Sachs, in one of the most leading edge areas, of industry change which is obviously finance leading as the customer who's driven our direction from the very beginning. And a company like NetApp, that understood the implication on storage, from two and a half years ago and drove our direction from the very beginning. A company like HP Enterprise's, who understood this could go across their whole company in terms of the implications, and the unique opportunity to really change and focus on, how do they evolve their company to provide their customer experience in a very unique way? How do you really begin to think about Equinix in terms of how they changed entirely from a source matter prospective, what they have to do in terms of the direction and capabilities? And then Lightspeed, one of the most creative intra capital that really understands this transition saying "I want to be a part of this." Including being on the board and changing the world one more time. So, what happened today? If we're right, I think this was the beginning of a major inflection point as everything moves to the edge. And how ecosystem players, with Pensando at the heart of that ecosystem, can take on the giants but also really use this technology to give everybody choice, and how they really make a difference in the future. As well as, perhaps give back to society. >> Love it. Thank you John >> My pleasure, that was fun. >> Appreciate it. You're John, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier host like you here in our Palo Alto studio here in Palo Alto. Here with Dominic Wilde, known as Dom, CEO of SnapRoute, a hot new startup. A great venture. Backers don. Welcome to skip conversation. So love having to start ups. And so talk about Snape route the company because you're doing something interesting that we've been covering your pretty aggressively the convergence between Dev Ops and Networking. We've known you for many, many years. You were a former Hewlett Packard than you woodpecker enterprise running the networking group over there. You know, networking. And you're an operator. Snap rows. Interesting, because, um, great names back behind it. Big venture backers. Lightspeed Norwest, among others. Yes. Take a minute. Explain what? A SnapRoute. >> So SnapRoute was founded to really address one of the big, big problems we see in infrastructure, which is that, you know, essentially the network gets in the way of the deployment the rapid and angel deployment of applications. And so in the modern environment that we're in, you know, the business environment, highly competitive environment of disruption, continuous disruption going on in our industry, every company out there is constantly looking over their shoulder is, you know, making sure that they're moving fast enough there innovating fast enough that they don't want to be disrupted. They don't want to be overrun by, you know, a new upstart. And in order to do that, you know the application is is actually the work product that you really want to deploy, that you you want to roll out, and you want to be able to do that on a continuous basis. You want to be really agile about how you do it. And, quite frankly, when it comes to infrastructure, networking has been fifteen years behind the rest of the infrastructure and enabling that it's, ah, it's a big roadblock. It's obviously, you know, some of the innovations and developments and networking of lag behind other areas on what we snap Brown set out to do was to say, You know, look, if we're if we're going to bring networking forward and we're going to try and solve some of these problems, how do we do that? In a way, architecturally, that will enable networking to become not just a part of Ah, you know a cloud native infrastructure but actually enable those those organizations to drive forward. And so what we did was we took all of our sort of devops principles and Dev ups tools, and we built a network operating system from the ground up using devops principles, devops architectures and devops tools. And so what we're delivering is a cloud native network operating system that is built entirely on containers and is delivered is a micro services architecture on the big...one of the big value propositions that we deliver is what we call see a CD for networking, which is your continuous integration. Continuous deployment is obviously, you know, Big devops principal there. But doing that for networking, allowing a network to be constantly up enabling network Teo adapt to immutable infrastructure principles. You know we're just replacing pieces that need to be replaced. Different pieces of the operating system can be replaced If there's a security vulnerability, for instance, or if there's ah, bugger and you feature needed so you know we can innovate quicker. We can enable the network to be more reliable, allow it to be more agile, more responsive to the needs of the organization on all of this, fundamentally means that your Operation shins model now becomes ah, lot more unified. A lot more simple. You. Now, we now enable the net ox teams to become a sort of more native part of the conversation with devils. Reduce the tension there, eliminate any conflicts and everything. And we do that through this. You know, this innovative offices. >> Classically, the infrastructure is code ethos. >> Yeah, exactly right. I mean, it's you know, a lot of people have been talking about infrastructure is code for a long, long time. But what we really do, I mean, if if you deploy our network operating system you employ onto the bare metal switching, then you really enable Dev ops to hang have, you know, I take control and to drive the network in the way they want using their native tool chains. So, you know, Cuba Netease, for instance, ears. You know that the big growing dev ops orchestration to all of the moment. In fact, we think it's more than of the moment. You know, I've never seen in the industry that sort of, you know, this kind of momentum behind on open source initiative like there is behind Cuba. Netease. And we've taken communities and baked it natively into the operating system. Such that now our network operating system that runs on a physical switch can be a native part off that communities and develops tool >> Dom, I want to get to the marketplace, dynamics. Kind of what's different. Why now? But I think what's interesting about SnapRoute you're the chief of is that it's a venture back with big names? Yeah. Lightspeed, Norwest, among others. It's a signal of a wave that we've been covering people are interested in. How do you make developers deploy faster, more agility at scale, on premises and in clouds. But I want you to before we get there, want to talk about the origin story of company? Yeah. Why does it exist? How did it come to bear you mentioned? Operation is a big part of cloud to cloud is about operating model so much a company. Yes. This is the big trend. That's the big way. But how did it all get started? What's the SnapRoute story? >> Yeah, it's an interesting story. Our founders were actually operators at at Apple back in the day, and they were responsible for building out some of Apple's biggest. You know, data centers for their sort of customer facing services, like, you know, like loud iTunes, all those good things and you know they would. They were tasked with, sort of, you know, sort of modernizing the operational model with with those data centers and, you know, and then they, like many other operators, do you know, had a sense of community and worked with their peers. You know, another big organizations, even you know, other hyper scale organizations and wanted to learn from what they did on DH. What they recognised was that, you know, cos like, you know, Google and Facebook and Microsoft is urine things. They had done some incredible things and some incredible innovations around infrastructure and particularly in networking, that enabled them to Dr Thie infrastructure from A from a Devil ops perspective and make it more native. But those words that if you know, fairly tailored for there, if you know, for their organizations and so what they saw was the opportunity to say, Well, you know, there's there's many other organizations who are delivering, you know, infrastructure is a service or SAS, or you know, who are just very large enterprises who are acting as these new cloud service providers. And they would have a need to, you know, to also have, you know, tools and capabilities, particularly in the network, to enable the network to be more responsive, more to the devil apps like. And so, you know, they they they founded SnapRoute on that principle that, you know, here's the problem that we know we can solve. It's been solved, you know, some degree, but it's an architectural problem, and it's not about taking, You know, all of the, you know, the last twenty five years of networking knowledge and just incrementally doing a sort of, you know, dot upgrade and, you know, trying to sort of say, Hey, we're just add on some AP eyes and things. You really needed to start from the ground up and rethink this entirely from an architectural perspective and design the network operating system as on with Dev ups, tools and principles. So they started the company, you know, been around just very late two thousand fifteen early two thousand sixteen. >> And how much money have you read >> The last around. We are Siri's, eh? We took in twenty five million. >> And who were the venture? >> It was Lightspeed Ventures on DH Norwest. And we also had some strategic investment from Microsoft Ventures and from teams >> from great name blue chips. What was their interest? What was their thesis? Well, and you mentioned the problem. What was the core problem that you're solving that they were attracted to? Why would that why was the thirst with such big name VCs? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it was, you know, a zip said, I think it's the the opportunity to change the operational more. And I think one of the big things that was very different about our company is and, you know, we like to say, you know, we're building for effort. Operators, by operators, you know, I've found is, as I said, well, more operators from Apple, they have lived and breathed what it is to be woken up at three. A. M. On Christmas Eve toe. You know, some outage and have to, you know, try and figure that out and fight your way through a legacy kind of network and figure out what's going on. So you know, so they empathize with what that means and having that DNA and our company is incredibly meaningful in terms of how we build that you know the product on how we engage with customers. We're not just a bunch of vendors who you know we're coming from, you know, previous spender backgrounds. Although I do, you know, I bring to the table the ability to, you know, to deliver a package and you know, So there's just a cloud scale its clouds, Gail. It's it's but it's It's enabling a bridge if you like. If you look at what the hyper scales have done, what they're achieving and the operational models they have, where a if you like a bridge to enable that capability for a much broader set of operators and C. S. P s and as a service companies and dry forward a an aggressive Angela innovation agenda for companies, >> businesses. You know, we always discussing the Cuban. Everyone who watches the Kiev knows I'm always ranting about how cloud providers make their market share numbers, and lot of people include sass, right? I think everyone will be in the SAS business, so I kind of look at the SAS numbers on, say, it's really infrastructures service platform to service Amazon, Google, Microsoft and then, you know, Ali Baba in China. Others. Then you got IBM or one of it's kind of in the big kind of cluster there top. That is a whole nother set of business requirements that sass driven this cloud based. Yeah, this seems to be a really growing market. Is that what you're targeting? And the question is, how do you relate Visa? Visa Cooper? Netease trend? Because communities and these abstraction layers, you're starting to hear things like service mesh, policy based state Full application states up. Is that you trying to that trend explain. >> We're very complimentary, Teo. Those trends, we're, you know, we're not looking to replace any of that, really. And and my big philosophy is, if you're not simplifying something, then you're not really adding back here, you know, what you're doing is complicating matters or adding another layer on top. So so yeah, I mean, we are of value to those companies who are looking at hybrid approaches or have some on prime asset. Our operating system will land on a physical, bare metal switch So you know what? What we do is when you look at it, you know, service most is your message measures and all the other, You know, technologies you talked about with very, very complimentary to those approaches because we're delivering the on underlying network infrastructure on network fabric. Whatever you'd like to call it, that can be managed natively with class native tools, squeezing the alliteration there. But but, you know, it means that you don't need toe add overlays. We don't need to sort of say, Hey, look, the network is this static, archaic thing that's really fragile. And And I mean, if we touch it, it's going to break. So let's just leave it alone and let's let's put some kind of overlay over the top of it on do you know, run over the top? What we're saying is you can collapse that down. Now what you can say, what you can do is you can say, Well, let's make the network dynamic responsive. Let's build a network operating system out of micro services so you can replace parts of it. You can, you know, fix bugs. You can fix security vulnerabilities and you can do all that on the fly without having to schedule outage windows, which is, you know, for a cloud native company or a sass or infrastructure service company. I mean, that's your business. You can't take outage windows. Your business depends on being available all the time. And so we were really changing that fundamentals of a principle of networking and saying, You know, networking is now dynamic, you know, in a very, very native way, but it also integrates very closely with Dev ops. Operational model >> is a lot of innovation that network. We're seeing that clearly around the industry. No doubt everyone sees late and see that comes into multi Cloud was saying that the trend moving the data to the compute coyote again that's a network issue network is now an innovation opportunity. So I gotta ask you, where do you guys see that happening? And I want to ask you specifically talking about the cloud architects out in the marketplace in these enterprises who were trying to figure out about the architecture of clowns. So they know on premises there, moving that into a cloud operations. We see Amazon, they see Google and Microsoft has clouds that might want to engage with have cloud native presence in a hybrid and multi cloud fashion for those cloud architects. What are the things that you like to see them doing? More of that relates to your value problems. In other words, if they're using containers or they're using micro services, is this good or bad? What? What you should enterprise to be working on that ties into your value proposition. >> So I think about this the other way around, actually, if I can kind of turn that turn that question. But on his head, I think what you know, enterprises, you know, organization C, S. P s. I think what they should be doing is focusing on their business and what their business needs. They shouldn't be looking at their infrastructure architecture and saying, you know, okay, how can we, you know, build all these pieces? And then you know what can the business and do on top of that infrastructure? You wanna look at it the other way around? I need to deploy applications rapidly. I need to innovate those applications. I need to, you know, upgrade, change whatever you need to do with those applications. And I need an infrastructure that can be responsive. I need an infrastructure that can be hybrid. I need infrastructure that can be, you know, orchestrated in the hybrid manner on DH. Therefore, I want to go and look for the building blocks out there of those those architectural and infrastructure building blocks out there that can service that application in the most appropriate way to enable the velocity of my business and the innovation from my business. Because at the end of the day, I mean, you know, when we talk to customers, the most important thing T customers, you know, is the velocity of their business. It is keeping ahead in the highly competitive environment and staying so far ahead that you're not going to be disrupted. And, you know, if any element of your infrastructure is holding you back and even you know, you know the most mild way it's a problem. It's something you should address. And we now have the capability to do that for, you know, for many, many years. In fact, you know, I would claim up to today without snap route that you know, you you do not have the ability to remove the network problem. The network is always going to be a boat anchor on your business. It introduces extra cycles. It introduces big security, of underplaying >> the problems of the network and the consequences that prior to snap her out that you guys saw. >> So I take the security issue right? I mean, everybody is very concerned about security today. One of the biggest attack vectors in the security world world today is the infrastructure. It's it's it's so vulnerable. A lot of infrastructure is is built on sort of proprietary software and operating systems. You know, it's very complex. There's a lot of, you know, operations, operational, moves out and change it. So there's there's a lot of opportunity for mistakes to be made. There's a lot of opportunity for, you know, for vulnerabilities to be exposed. And so what you want to do is you want to reduce the threat surface of, you know, your your infrastructure. So one of the things that we can do it SnapRoute that was never possible before is when you look at a traditional network operating system. Andreas, A traditional. I mean, any operating system is out there, other you know, Other >> than our own. >> It's basically a monolithic Lennox blob. It is one blob of code that contains all of the features. And it could be, you know, architect in in a way that it Sze chopped up nicely. But if you're not using certain features, they're still there. And that increases the threat surface with our sat proud plant native network operating system. Because it is a micro services are key picture. If you are not using certain services or features, you can destroy and remove the containers that contain those features and reduce the threat surface of the operating system. And then beyond that, if you do become aware ofthe vulnerability or a threat that you know is somewhere in there, you can replace it in seconds on the fly without taking the infrastructure. Damn, without having to completely replace that whole blob of software causing, you know, an outage window. So that's just one example of, you know, the things we can do. But even when it comes to simple things, like, you know, adding in new services or things because we're containerized service is a ll boot together. It's no, eh? You know it doesn't. It doesn't have a one after the other. It it's all in parallel. So you know this this operating system comes up faster. It's more reliable. It eliminates the risk factors, the security, you know, the issues that you have. It provides native automation capabilities. It natively integrates with, You know, your Dev Ops tool chain. It brings networking into the cloud. Native >> really, really isn't in frustrations. Code is an operating system, so it sounds like your solution is a cloud native operating system. That's correct. That's pretty much the solution. That's it. How do customers engage with you guys? And what do you say? That cloud architect this is Don't tell me what to do. What's the playbook, right? How you guys advice? Because I see this is a new solution. Talk about the solution and your recommendation to architects as they start thinking about building that elastic in that flexible environment. >> Yeah. I mean, I think you know, Ah, big recommendation is, you know, is to embrace, you know, that all the all of the cloud native principles and most of the companies that were talking to, you know, definitely doing that and moving very quickly. But, you know, my recommendation. You know, engaging with us is you should be looking for the network to in naval, your your goals and your you know your applications rather than limiting. I mean, that's that's the big difference that, you know, the people who really see the value in what we do recognize that, you know, the network should be Andi is an asset. It should be enabling new innovation, new capabilities in the business rather than looking at the network as necessary evil where we you know, where we have to get over its limitations or it's holding us back. And so, you know, for any organization that is, you know, is looking at deploying, you know, new switching infrastructure in any way, shape or form. I think, you know, you should be looking at Well, how am I going to integrate this into a dev ops? You know, world, how may going to integrate this into a cloud native world. So as my business moves forward, I'm actually servicing the application in enabling a faster time to service for the application for the business. At the end of the day, that's that's everybody's going, >> you know, we've been seeing in reporting this consistently, and it's even more mainstream now that cloud computing has opened up the aperture of the value and the economics and also the technical innovation around application developers coding faster having the kind of resource is. But it also created a CZ creating a renaissance and networking. So the value of networking and application development that collision is coming together very quickly. So the intersection you guys play. So I'm sure this will resonate well with customers Will as they try to figure out the role the network because against security number one analytics all the things that go into what Sadiq they care about share data, shared coat all this is kind of coming together. So if someone hears this story, they'll go, OK, love this snap around store. I gotta I gotta dig in. How do they engage you? What do you guys sell to them? What's the pitch? Give the quick plug for the company real >> quick. Engaging with us is, you know, is a simple issue. No, come to www snapper out dot com. And you know, you know contacts are up there. You know, we were currently obviously we're a small company. We sell direct, more engaged with, you know, our first customers and deploying our product, you know, right now, and it's going very, very well, and, you know, it's a PSE faras. You know how you know what and when to engage us. I would say you can engage us at any stage and and value whether or not your architect ing a whole new network deploying a new data center. Obviously. Which is, you know, it is an ideal is built from the ground up, but we add value to the >> data center preexisting data saying that wants >> the modernizing data centers. I mean, very want >> to modernize my data center, my candidate. >> So one of the biggest challenges in an existing data center in when one of the biggest areas of tension is at the top of rack switch the top of racks, which is where you connect in your you know, your your application assets, your servers are connected. You're connecting into the into the, you know, first leap into the network. One of the challenges there is. You know, Dev ops engineers, They want Teo, you know, deploy containers. They want to deploy virtual machines they wantto and stuff move stuff, change stuff and they need network engineers to help them to do that. For a network engineer, the least interesting part of the infrastructure is the top Arax. Which it is a constant barrage day in, day, out of request. Hey, can I have a villain? Can have an i p address. Can we move this? And it's not interesting. It just chews up time we alleviate that tension. What we enable you to do is network engineer can you know, deploy the network, get it up and running, and then control what needs to be controlled natively from their box from debits tool chains and allow the devil ups engineers to take control as infrastructure. So the >> Taelon is taking the stress out of the top of racks. Wedge, take the drama out of this. >> Take that arm around the network. Right. >> So okay, you have the soul from a customer. What am I buying? What do you guys offering? Is that a professional services package? Is it software? Is it a sad solution? Itself is the product. >> It is software, you know. We are. We're selling a network operating system. It lands on, you know, bare metal. He liked white box switching. Ah, nde. We offer that as both perpetual licenses or as a subscription. We also office, um, you know, the value and services around that as well. You know, Andre, right now that is, you know, that is our approach to market. You know, we may expand that, you know, two other services in the future, but that is what we're selling right now. It is a network operating >> system down. Thanks for coming and sharing this story of SnapRoute. Final question for you is you've been in this century. While we've had many conversations we'd love to talk about gear, speeds and feeds. I'll see softwares eating. The world was seeing that we're seeing cloud create massive amounts. Opportunity. You're in a big wave, right? What is this wave look like for the next couple of years? How do you see this? Playing out as Cloud continues to go global and you start to Seymour networking becoming much more innovative. Part of the equation with Mohr developers coming onboard. Faster, more scale. How do you see? It's all playing out in the industry. >> Yeah. So I think the next sort of, you know, big wave of things is really around the operational. But I mean, we've we've we've concentrated for many years in the networking industry on speeds and feeds. And then it was, you know, it's all about protocols and you know how protocol stacks of building stuff. That's all noise. It's really about How do you engage with the network? How do you how do you operate your network to service your business? Quite frankly, you know, you should not even know the network is there. If we're doing a really good job of network, you shouldn't even know about it. And that's where we need to get to is an industry. And you know that's that's my belief is where, where we can take >> it. Low latent. See programmable networks. Great stuff. SnapRoute Dominic. While no one is dominant industry friend of the Cube also keep alumni CEO of Snapper Out. Hot new start up with some big backers. Interesting signal. Programmable networks software Cloud Global all kind of big Party innovation equation. Here in Silicon Valley, I'm showing for with cube conversations. Thanks for watching

>> Hello everyone, welcome to a special CUBE conversation. We're here in our Palo Alto studios. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE and we're here with Bipul Sinha, Co-Founder and CEO of Rubrik, one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. Great to have you here in the cube. Thank you so much for this opportunity. So thanks for coming in. You guys have $292 million in funding led the Series A with Lightspeed, Series B with Greylock Series C with Khosla, Series D with IVP. You've got celebrities like Kevin Durant, Frank Slootman, rockstar investors. Great momentum. John Thompson. Just join your board recently. He's on the board of Microsoft as well.  All since 2014, like short time. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. And we have been very fortunate to have the market traction and demand for Rubrik's for what is now cloud data management product. When we started the company we saw a market need around simplification, cloud enablement and really automating, orchestrating, backup recovery, recovery archive and DR across on-premises and the cloud. >> You guys. Had it been pretty good run here. You've got a new CFO. Talk about that. News, I want to get that out. There was the new CFO, we have >> Our new CFO is Murray Demo. We hired him out of Atlassian where he, he joined the company and took the company public and then the company next two years become like a very fast growing, very successful public company. Our goal is to build Rubrik into the next 30-, 40-years iconic company and we're building a management team that, that will have the firepower and the and the talent to take this company to really become the standard for data management. >> Yeah. I want to get to that. That's I think the big story for you guys is that you've now come out of nowhere, but it's just, you know, the classic startup story, great investors, but you know, we'd go to all the events. We see you guys out there just all of a sudden, just a massive runs. You put the foundation together. Um, you've publicly said you, you're on a $300 million run rate. Great numbers. So great growth. What's take us inside Rubrik. I mean, how is this all working when you guys got good funding? You've got a great management team. What's the core strategy? How it. Why is it working for you guys? >> The core of Rubrik is our culture because technology evolves product. What is invariant is Rubrik's, culture, our culture of transparency, the culture of velocity. The culture of relentlessness is actually drives Rubrik. When we bring new employees into Rubrik, we tell them that it's not about what makes your boss happy or what makes the CEO of this company happy. What moves the agenda of this company? Always think about how do we make or give Rubrik the best opportunity that company can get and we'd drive on that basis so there is no ego, there is no superiority that sales is better than or engineering is a 'know-it-all' and Gods. It's all about how do we collectively build the foundation of a long lasting large public company. >> So that early DNA about that DNA. Where's that come from? The come from the product side engineering side. What? Where's that core DNA of that teamwork come from. >> The core DNA of the team is Google, Facebook, Oracle software. Essentially folks who built the largest scale distributed system, very strong industrial strength enterprise product that powers most of the large enterprises in the world, so we took these two thoughts, of Oracle-like industrial product and Google, Facebook, Amazon- like a scale-out distributed infrastructure and brought together in a single product. >> It's interesting. Lightspeed does it. A lot of interesting deals that were once poo-pooed by many in the industry. Nutanix was one and you mentioned Facebook, Google, these are not, I won't say cloud native. They basically built the cloud. They had to build their own hyperscale or they build their own infrastructure all on open source so you have that generational DNA with it from the tech standpoint and and market standpoint. And Nutanix is a great example because they, you know, they brought all this together. This is a new new kind of view. This is a modern perspective that you guys are taking. I want to ask you as you look at the cloud, and a lot of people were poo-pooing Amazon in the early days and look at them, they've run the table, the number one by miles and public cloud. No one's even close in my opinion, but you know, this is a whole new seat change, so you've got Facebook, you've got the Google's got the Nutanixs is of the world out there who were doing things different. Now are the standard. What are you guys doing that someone might say, I don't really get that yet. Or poo-pooing it that you think is a modern approach and that's different. >> See, the issue really is that how do enterprises take advantage of public cloud simplicity, agility, scale, without being bothered by it because the word, because the cloud is a programmatic paradigm, enterprise previously has been a declarative paradigm. How do you bring these two worlds together and really create a seamless platform where enterprises can automate, orchestrate and secure their data, and that has been the vision of Rubrik. The vision of Rubrik is simplicity at the scale with cloud-enabled a single software fabric across on premises and public cloud. That has been the vision of the company and we have been delivering our product from the very beginning. On this vision, we are just adding one blade after the next, after the next blade to really go be a single software platform across multiple clouds and data centers. >> That's great. Again, sounds like data's at the center of the value proposition from your. From your good discussion. Clearly Facebook status center, their value proposition, although under a lot of criticism today, Google as a data company, as companies realize that data is critical for their business, how do they transform it from what used to be because the old way was fenced-off data warehouse or some sort of batch siloed software stack and now that with all kinds of new things like GDPR for instance, and it's coming around the corner, all these headaches are emerging where it's like, wow, this is really painful, but they want to get to a seamless way, so what's going on there? Can you explain in simple way that that transition from the old data modeling where you had siloed stacks or you know, old fenced out data warehouses to something that's really agile somewhere data's a part of the intellectual property, part of the software fabric. >> This is a really insightful question because you have a dichotomy here. The dichotomy is on one side, data is the biggest strengths and biggest asset for all enterprises. On the other side there is a. there is a risk of a bad uses of that data and and and companies private or people's private information getting out. So how do enterprises or businesses create a platform where they can secure their data, they can provide access to the data, to the relevant people or applications in a very controlled and secure way and at the same time protect this strategy asset from tech, from ransomware, from just proliferating or losing, so, so the traditional industry focused on really building a storage platforms for it, but our view is that the storage platform is just the keeper of the data, but the real issue is that how do you automate, orchestrate and secure access to the data because data can be on premises, data can be public clouds, but really this data control plane that actually manages and secures and provides access to this data is the critical piece and that's the Rubrik's focus. >> All right, let's get into. I want to get into the new product announcement before we get there. I want to get your thoughts on architecture because a lot of people have been enamored and using successfully Amazon web services and some are saying that, oh, Amazon is the roach motel. Why don't you check in, you can check out with respect to your data center saying data portability is coming around the corner, but to move data around the cloud is not that easy. Um, so customers are building on Amazon but they also might have azure. So multi-cloud is out there and you can also. Google's got some great stuff going on with Tensorflow and other things that they'd got rolling out, but there's not a one cloud fits all for all workloads. Certainly in the enterprise. And then you've got the on premise, a dynamic. How do, how do you view that? Because now that's an opportunity for you guys, but also a challenge for the customers where they start using the public cloud for business benefits and then realize, well we got a lot of data in there and then it becomes a data opportunity and problem. What's your view of that landscape? >> So the VC, the whole data management, it is Rubrik is creating a whole new better diamond platform because architects really. We thought about this as something where you combine the data and metadata together so that you data becomes self describing. This is a very architectural thing that Rubrik debt because when data understand where it came from and who he he or she is, then you can take this data from on premises to the cloud and powered it on or go from cloud to cloud and power it on some other place, so this core fundamental vision and architecture of data plus deeply connected together and mobile is what really powers Rubrik and that is the fundamental platform and fundamental architecture of Rubrik and that is our view in the future. Saying that once you create the self describing data and this will see a data from the underlying infrastructure, then you give the true power of the data back to the customer because data knows where it came from, which application it is associated with, who has access to it and who can use it. That's where you see the real power of multi-cloud, multi data center, independence of data and application from the infrastructure. >> So you believe data should be friction-less with respect to where it should go at any given time. >> Absolutely. I mean that's where the power, the enterprises and businesses can realize from their data because they can actually collaborate, they can give more access to their data, to their own users without worrying about the wrong data falling into the wrong hands. Can they actually transcreate transport of the data? Can they not stuck in one infrastructure versus take the data wherever they find data to be most applicable, easiest to use and more secure. >> That's great. So we don't want to jump into a new announcement. Before we get there. I want you to just take a minute to explain, um, Rubriks, target customer that you guys are serving today. You get 900 employees, you've got over $300 million run rate in business. Who's buying the product? Why was it a physician? Who's the buyer? What's the value proposition of the offering? >> So we sell into a enterprises. So we are not an SMB product. We sell into the enterprise, I would buy it as our cloud architects, our buyers, our infrastructure architects are buyers are virtualizing architects, uh, folks who are thinking about automation, orchestration, security of the data, recoverability of the data, protection from ransomware, things like that. And that's our core technical and economic buyers and, uh, and, and the core businesses or people who have, um, who have employees more than. So, cloud transformation is classic. Absolutely functional guys are involved in. That's the big driver for Rubrik. Rubin's growth is indexed on the cloud, about has it on their agenda. >> All right, so let's get into the hard news. You guys are launching Rubrik's Polaris, the industry's first SaaS platform for data management applications. I'm smiling because whenever I see first I want to know what that means. I've seen data application platforms out there. I've seen SaaS. So SaaS is not new. What makes you guys first talk about this dynamic, about polaris? What, what is it? Why is it first? >> So the way we see our customers use multiple clouds and multiple data centers is they have some applications running on premises. Some applications running in the cloud, they're building a lot of new applications in the cloud, so essentially cloud is is fragmenting their data and applications and we have Rubrik core product or cloud data management product, wherever they run their application, so Rubrik product runs on premises. Rubrik product runs in the cloud to protect the application. >> Was that the first dynamic that it's on-prem? It's oncloud, >> Yeah, that's our first product and then what we will working with our customers was that once we have this setup, how do you bring all of your applications and all of your data under the single system of record and that is the Rubrik Polaris Platform which is complimentary to our first hybrid cloud product were to the single system of record, which is a global catalog of all the applicants and data content as well as workflows as well as security as well as orchestration, and we expose this to open apis for Rubrik as well as other third party vendors to really build applications no matter where application runs. >> So these applications, the data management application that people or Rubrik will build on top of politics is for compliance, for governance, for auditing, for search across all the infrastructure. So you guys are offering also an ecosystem play with the Polaris. You're enabling others to build on top of it. Absolutely. This is kind of like force.com platform for all your data management. >> So we started salesforce, a Mulesoft had an announcement and that got a lot of attraction. What does that mean to you guys? Because that's. You see sap, salesforce has been very successful for a SaaS platform as well as Mulesoft. What does that acquisition mean to the marketplace and how do you guys fit into that dynamic vis-a-vis that trend? >> Salesforce did a great strategic acquisition or Mulesoft because they realize that if they combine applications on premises as well as in the cloud, then they create a single platform for all the structure data applications, but our view is that this is just half of the problem are that half of the problem is on a structured data across many applications and all the Meta data Rubrik. Polaris is our SaaS platform across on-premise cloud. A single system of record with Apis were Rubrik will deliver data management applications for control, for governance, for compliance, for security across all applications that enterprises are managing, whether they're. Are these applications run on premises or in the cloud, >> And the unstructured data too is that metadata you're talking about, it's critical data. >> It's metadata is application data is is all your unstructured data, >> So bottom line is announced that why would you put this in a single sound byte for customers? What does it mean for me if I'm a customer? For you guys, what's the value proposition of this new product? >> If you want to manage your business with compliance, with governance, with security and access Rubrik delivers a single platform for all your data management needs, >> Platform Polaris from Rubrik enabling an ecosystem first time, bringing all that data together from the data center people. Thanks for coming on the cube. Great to see you. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you so much for the opportunity and thanks for stopping by. I'm job here for cube conversation. Exclusive News here with Rubrik at theCUBE in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat techno music) >> Narrator: Live, from San Jose, it's theCUBE! Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Big Data SV, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. You know, this is our 10th big data event. When we first started covering big data, back in 2010, it was Hadoop, and everything was a batch job. About four or five years ago, everybody started talking about real time and the ability to affect outcomes before you lose the customer. Lewis Kaneshiro was here. He's the CEO of Streamlio and he's joined by Karthik Ramasamy who's the chief product officer. They're both co-founders. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. My first question is, why did you start this company? >> Sure, we came together around a vision that enterprises need to access the value around fast data. And so as you mentioned, enterprises are moving out of the slow data era, and looking for a fast data value to their data, to really deliver that back to their users or their use cases. And so, coming together around that idea of real time action what we did was we realized that enterprises can't all access this data with projects right now that are not meant to work together, that are very difficult, perhaps, to stitch together. So what we did was create an intelligent platform for fast data that's really accessible to enterprises of all sizes. What we do is we unify the core components to access fast data, which is messaging, compute and stream storage, accessing the best of breed open-source technology that's really open-source out of Twitter and Yahoo! >> It's a good thing I was going to ask why does the world need to know there are, you know, streaming platforms, but Lewis kind of touched on it, 'cause it's too hard. It's too complicated, so you guys are trying to simplify all that. >> Yep, the reason mainly we wanted to simplify it because, based on all our experiences at Twitter and Yahoo! one of the key aspects was to to simplify it so that it's conceivable by regular enterprise because Twitter and Yahoo! kind of our position can afford the talent and the expertise in order to do this real time platforms. But when it goes to normal enterprises, they don't have access to the expertise and the cost benefits that they might have to reincur. So, because of that we wanted to use these open-source projects, the Twitter and the Yahoo!'s provider, combine them, and make sure that you have a simple, easy, drag and drop kind of interface, so that it's easily conceivable for any enterprise. Essentially, what we are trying to do is reduce the (mumbles) for enterprises for real time, for all enterprises. >> Dave: Yeah, enterprises will pay up... >> Yes. >> For a solution. The companies that you used to work for, they all gladly throw engineering at the problem. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> To save time, but most organizations, they don't have the resources and so. Okay, so how does it, would it work prior to Streamlio? Maybe take us through sort of how a company would attack this problem, the complexities of what they have to deal with, and what life is like with you guys. >> So, current state of the world is it's fragmented solution, today. So the state of the world is where you take multiple pieces of different projects and you'd assemble them together in formats so that you can do (mumbles) right? So the reason why people end up doing is each of these big data projects that people use was the same for completely different purpose. Like messaging is one, and compute is another one, and third one is storage one. So, essentially what we have done as company is to simplify this aspect by integrating this well-known, best-of-the-breed projects called, for messaging we use something called Apache Poser, for compute we use something called Apache Krem, from Twitter, and similarly for storage, for real time storage, we use something called Apache Bookkeeper, so and to unify them, so that, under the hoods, it may be three systems, but, as a user, when you are using it, it serves or functions as a single system. So you install the system, and ingest your data, express your computation, and get the results out, in one single system. >> So you've unified or converged these functions. If I understand it correctly, we talking off camera a little bit, the team, Lewis, that you've assembled actually developed a lot of these, or hugely committed to these open-source projects, right? >> Absolutely, co-creators of each of the projects and what that allows us to do is to really integrate, at a deep level, each project. For example, Pulsar is actually a pub/sub system that is built on Bookkeeper, and Bookkeeper, in our minds, is a pure list best-of-breed stream storage solution. So, fast and durable storage. That storage is also used in Apache Heron to store State. So, as you can see, enterprises, rather than stitching together multiple different solutions for queuing, streaming, compute, and storage, now have one option that they can install in a very small cluster, and operationally it's very simple to scale up. We simply add nodes if you get data spikes. And what this allows is enterprises to access new and exciting use cases that really weren't possible before. For example, machine learning model deployment to real time. So I'm a data scientist and what I found is in data science, you spend a lot of time training models in batch mode. It's a legacy type of approach, but once the model is trained, you want to put that model into production in real time so that you can deliver that value back to a user in real time. Let's call it under two second SLA. So, that has been a great use case for Streamlio because we are a ready made intelligent platform for fast data, for MLai deployment. >> And the use cases are typically stateful and your persisting data, is that right? >> Yes, use cases, it can be used for stateless use cases also, but the key advantage that we bring to a table is stateful storage. And since we ship along with the storage (mumbles) stateful storage becomes much easier because of the fact that it can be used to store a real intermediate state of the computation or it can be used for the staging (mumbles) data when it spills over from what the memory is it's automatically stored to disk or you can even in the data for as long as you want so that you can unlock the value later after the data has been processed for the fast data. You can access the lazy data later, in time. >> So give us the run-down on the company, funding, you know, VCs, head count. Give us the basics. >> Sure, we raise Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners, lead by John Vrionis and Sudip Chakrabarti. We've raised seven and a half million and emerged from stealth back in August. That allowed us to ramp up our team to 17, now, mainly engineers, in order to really have a very solid product, but we launched post rev, prelaunch and some of our customers are really looking at geo replication across multiple data centers and so active, active geo replication is an open-source feature in Apache Pulsar, and that's been a huge draw, compared to some other solutions that are out there. As you can see, this theme of simplifying architecture is where Streamlio sits, so unifying, queuing and streaming allows us to replace a number of different legacy systems. So that's been one avenue to help growth. The other, obviously is on the compute piece. As enterprises are finding new and exciting use cases to deliver back to their users, the compute piece needs to scale up and down. We also announce Pulsar Functions, which is stream-native compute that allows very simple function computation in native Python and Java, so you spin out the Apache Python cluster or Streamlio platform, and you simply have compute functionality. That allows us to access edge use cases, so IOT is a huge, kind of exciting POC's for us right now where we have connected car examples that don't need heavyweight schedule or deployment at the edge. It's Pulsar Pulsar functions. What that allows us to do are things like fraud detection, anomaly detection at the edge, model deployment at the edge, interpolation, observability, and alerts. >> And, so how do you charge for this? Is it usage based. >> Sure. What we found is enterprise are more comfortable on a per node basis, simply because we have the ambition to really scale up and help enterprises really use Streamlio as their fast data platform across the entire enterprise. We found that having a per data charge rate actually would limit that growth, and so per node and shared architecture. So, we took an early investment in optimizing around Kubernetes. And so, as enterprises are adopting Kubernetes, we are the most simple installation on Kubernetes, so on-prem, multicloud, at the edge. >> I love it, so I mean for years we've just been talking about the complexity headwinds in this big data space. We certainly saw that with Hadoop. You know, Spark was designed to certainly solve some of those problems, but. Sounds like you're doing some really good work to take that further. Lewis and Karthik, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us, Dave. >> All right, thank you for watching. We're here at Big Data SV, live from San Jose. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE, presenting Big Data Silicon Valley. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Big Data SV in San Jose. This theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and this is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage. We've been here most of the week, had a great event last night, about 50 or 60 of our CUBE community members were here. We had a breakfast this morning where the Wikibon research team laid out it's big data forecast, the eighth big data forecast and report that we've put out, so check out that online. Jacques Nadeau is here. He is the CTO and co-founder of Dremio. Jacque, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me here. >> So we were talking a little bit about what you guys do. Three year old company. Well, let me start. Why did you co-found Dremio? >> So, it was a very simple thing I saw, so, over the last ten years or so, we saw a regression in the ability for people to get at data, so you see all these really cool technologies that came out to store data. Data lakes, you know, SQL systems, all these different things that make developers very agile with data. But what we were also seeing was a regression in the ability for analysts and data consumers to get at that data because the systems weren't designed for analysts, they were designed for data producers and developers. And we said, you know what, there needs to be a way to solve this. We need to be able to empower people to be self-sufficient again at the data consumption layer. >> Okay, so you solved that problem how, you said, called it a self-service of a data platform. >> Yeah, yeah, so self-service data platform and the idea is pretty simple. It's that, no matter where the data is physically, people should be able to interact with a logical view of it. And so, we talk a little bit like it's Google Docs for your data. So people can go into the system, they can see the different data sets that are available to them, collaborate around those, create changes to those that they can then share with other people in the organization, always dealing with the logical layer and then, behind the scenes, we have physical capabilities to interact with all the different system we interact with. But that's something that business users shouldn't have to think as much about and so, if you think about how people interact with data today, it's very much about copies. So every time you want to do something, typically you're going to make a copy. I want to reshape the data, I make a copy. I want to make it go faster, I make a copy. And those copies are very, very difficult for people to manage and they could have mixed the business meaning of data with the physical, I'm making copies to make them faster or whatever. And so our perspective is that, if you can separate away the physical concerns from the logical, then business users have a much more, much more likelihood to be able to do something self-service. >> So you're essentially virtualizing my corpus of data, independent of location, is that right, I mean-- >> It's part of what we do, yeah. No, it's part of what we do. So, the way we look at it is, is kind of several different components to try to make something self-service. It starts with, yeah, virtualize or abstract away the details of the physical, right? But then, on top of that, expose a very, sort of a very user-friendly interface that allows people to sort of catalog and understand the different things, you know, search for things that they want to interact with, and then curate things, even if they're non-technical users, right? So the goal is that, if you talk to sort of even large internet companies in the Valley, it's very hard to even hire the amount of data engineering that you need to satisfy all the requests of your end-users of data. And so the, and so the goal of Dremio is basically to figure out different tools that can provide a non-technical experience for getting at the data. So that's sort of the start of it but then the second step is, once you've got access to this thing and people can collaborate and sort of deal with the data, then you've got these huge volumes of data, right? It's big data and so how do you make that go faster? And then we have some components that we deal with, sort of, speed and acceleration. >> So maybe talk about how people are leveraging this capability, this platform, what the business impact is, what have you seen there? >> So a lot of people have this problem, which is, they have data all over the place and they're trying to figure out "How do I expose this "to my end-users?" And those end-users might be analysts, they might be data scientists, they might be product managers that are trying to figure out how their product is working. And so, what they're doing today is they're typically trying to build systems internally that, to provide these capabilities. And so, for example, working with a large auto manufacturer. And they've got a big initiative where they're trying to make the data that they have, they have huge amounts of data across all sort of different parts of the organization and they're trying to make that available to different data consumers. Now, of course, there's a bunch of security concerns that you need to have around that, but they just want to make the data more accessible. And so, what they're doing is they're using Dremio to figure out ways to, basically, catalog all the data below, expose that to the different users, applying lots of different security rules around that, and then create a bunch of reflections, which make the things go faster as people are interacting with the things. >> Well, what about the governance factor? I mean, you heard this in the hadoop world years ago. "Ah, we're going to make, we're going to harden hadoop, "we're going to" and really, there was no governance and it became more and more important. How do you guys handle that? Do you partner with people? Is it up to the customer to figure that out? Do you provide that? >> It's several different things, right? It's a complex ecosystem, right? So it's a combination of things. You start with partnering with different systems to make sure that you integrate well with those things. So the different things that control some parts of credentials inside the systems all the way down to "What's the file system permissions?", right? "What are the permissions inside of something like Hive and the metastore there?" And then other systems on top of that, like Sentry or Ranger are also exposing different credentialing, right? And so we work hard to sort of integrate with those things. On top of that, Dremio also provides a full security model inside of the sort of virtual space that we work. And so people can control the permissions, the ability to access or edit any object inside of Dremio based on user roles and LDAP and those kinds of things. So it's, it's kind of multiple layers that have to be working together. >> And tell me more about the company. So founded three years ago, I think a couple of raises, >> Yep >> who's backing you? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we founded just under three years ago. We had great initial investors, in Red Point and Lightspeed, so two great initial investors and we raised about 15 million on that round. And then we actually just closed a B round in January of this year and we added Norwest to the portfolio there. >> Awesome, so you're now in the mode of, I mean, they always say, you know, software is such a capital-efficient business but you see software companies raising, you know, 900 million dollars and so, presumably, that's to compete, to go to market and, you know, differentiate with your messaging and branding. Is that sort of what the, the phase that you're in now? You kind of developed a product, it's technically sound, it's proven in the marketspace and now you're scaling the, the go-to-market, is that right? >> That's exactly right. So, so we've had a lot of early successes, a lot of Fortune 100 companies using Dremio today. For example, we're working with TransUnion. We're working with Intel. We actually have a great relationship with OVH, which is the third-largest hosting company in the world, so a lot of great, Daimler is another one. So working with a lot of great companies, seeing sort of great early success with the product with those companies, and really looking to say "Hey, we're out here." We've got a booth for the first time at Strata here and we're sort of letting people know about, sort of, a better way, or easier way, for people to deal with data >> Yeah. >> A happier way. >> I mean, it's a crowded space, right? There's a lot of tools out there, a lot of companies. I'm interested in how you sort of differentiate. Obviously simplification is a part of that, the breadth of your capabilities. But maybe, in your words, you could share with me how you differentiate from the competition and how you break out from the noise. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's, you're absolutely right, it's a very crowded space. Everybody's using the same words and that makes it very hard for people to understand what's going on. And so, what we've found is very simple is that typically we will actually, the first meeting we deal with a customer, within the first 10 minutes we'll demo the product. Because so many technologies are technologies, not, they're not products and so you have to figure out how to use the product. You've got to figure out how you would customize it for your certain use-case. And what we've found with our product is, by making it very, very simple, people start, the light goes on in a very short amount of time and so, we also do things on our website so that you can see, in a couple of minutes, or even less than that, little animations that sort of give you a sense of what it's about. But really, it's just "Hey, this is a product "which is about", there's this light bulb that goes on, it's great. And you figure this out over the course of working with different customers, right? But there's this light bulb that goes on for people that are so confused by all the things that are going on and if we can just sit down with them, show them the product for a few minutes, all of a sudden they're like "Wait a minute, "I can use this", right? So you're frequently talking to buyers that are not the most technical parts of the organization initially, and so most of the technologies they look at are technologies that are very difficult to understand and they have to look to others to try to even understand how it would fit into their architecture. With Dremio, we have customers that can, that have installed it and gotten up, and within an hour or two, started to see real value. And that sort of excitement happens even in the demo, with most people. >> So you kind of have this bifurcated market. Since the big data meme, everybody says they're data-driven and you've got a bifurcated market in that, you've got the companies that are data-driven and you've got companies who say they're data-driven but really aren't. Who are your customers? Are they in both? Are they predominantly in the data-driven side? Are they predominantly in the trying to be data-driven? >> Well, I would say that they all would say that they're data-driven. >> Yeah, everyone, who's going to say "Well, we're not data-driven." >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would say >> We're dead. >> I would say that everybody has data and they've got some ways that they're using it well and other places where they feel like they're not using it as well as they should. And so, I mean, the reason that we exist is to make it so it's easier for people to get value out of data, and so, if they were getting all the value they think they could get out of data, then we probably wouldn't exist and they would be fully data-driven. So I think that everybody, it's a journey and people are responding well to us, in part, because we're helping them down that journey. >> Well, the reason I asked that question is that we go to a lot of shows and everybody likes to throw out the digital transformation buzzword and then use Uber and Airbnb as an example, but if you dig deeper, you see that data is at the core of those companies and they're now beginning to apply machine intelligence and they're leveraging all this data that they've built up, this data architecture that they built up over the last five or 10 years. And then you've got this set of companies where all the data lives in silos and I can see you guys being able to help them. At the same time, I can see you helping the disruptors, so how do you see that? I mean, in terms of your role, in terms of affecting either digital transformations or digital disruptions. >> Well, I'd say that in either case, so we believe in a very sort of simple thing, which is that, so going back to what I said at the beginning, which is just that I see this regression in terms of data access, right? And so what happens is that, if you have a tightly-coupled system between two layers, then it becomes very difficult for people to sort of accommodate two different sets of needs. And so, the change over the last 10 years was the rise of the developer as the primary person for controlling data and that brought a huge amount of great things to it but analysis was not one of them. And there's tools that try to make that better but that's really the problem. And so our belief is very simple, which is that a new tier needs to be introduced between the consumers and the, and the producers of data. And that, and so that tier may interact with different systems, it may be more complex or whatever, for certain organizations, but the tier is necessary in all organizations because the analysts shouldn't be shaken around every time the developers change how they're doing data. >> Great. John Furrier has a saying that "Data is the new development kit", you know. He said that, I don't know, eight years ago and it's really kind of turned out to be the case. Jacques Nadeau, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah. >> Great to meet you. Good luck and keep us informed, please. >> Yes, thanks so much for your time, I've enjoyed it. >> You're welcome. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. This is theCUBE. We're live from Big Data SV. We'll be right back. (bright music)

(music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE, here in our studio in Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBEConversation; I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media, and co-host of theCUBE. Our next guest here is Surya Varanasi, who's the co-founder and CTO of Vexata, a hot startup here in Silicon Valley, also exhibiting this week at Oracle Open World in San Francisco. It's our 8th year of coverage at Oracle Open World, we will not be there on the ground with theCUBE; not a lot of room as they're doing a lot of reconstruction up there, among other events happening. Great, great conversations happening around the world of cloud, and certainly Big Data, now called 'data' generally because it's so hot. Sorry, welcome to the CUBEConversation. >> Thank you. >> So, first of all you guys are a hot new startup, really coming out of stealth, but not really stealth I mean stealth technically, not with general availability. You've been in business for a few years, building up great comprehensive storage-slash-data solution, I call it, with this "data fabric" concept. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Well-funded team, super technical. Tell us about the company, tell us about the launch, you guys are out public at Oracle Open World this week. What is Vexata? >> Vexata, we started in 2014, as you mentioned, a few years in development. We've been in trials for over a year and a half, shipping actually for a good eight or nine months. And what we're about is, we really wanted to design against three basic pillars. The first one being, there's digital businesses, they're all under pressure. "How do we survive, and how do we handle the transactions that are coming in?" And we wanted to build the highest performance storage system that we could build that really accelerates your apps, makes them super fast. The second thing we want to do is, the demanding enterprises, these are the ones that have the requirements, we wanted to be super enterprise-resilient. How do we deploy seamlessly? That was the third pillar we stood on, meaning no changes to your application or your, how do we plugin and just simply work? So we simply work, we're enterprise-resilient, and we have the highest-performance system that accelerates your apps with no changes. We built around Flash, and Intel's latest 3D Optane, and that's a big deal. >> Well you guys are well-funded, looking at the management team of the company, it's a start-up that began a couple years now, but you're now out in the wild, now launching. Just a couple of stats here, over 50 million dollars in funding, well-funded, great with a lot of work on the front end with the product, but the venture capitalists are interesting. Lightspeed has been very, very successful in the enterprise, just look at the list of successful day value, even if they have Snapchat too, so they know a little bit about data. Mayfield, Intel Capital, and Redline, and International One. Really really good pedigree there, and they know storage too, they see you telling us, they know what it looks like, they understand converge investors they now get the data play. I have to ask you, in the market everyone's kind of scratching their heads right now because real time data is super important. What problem are you guys solving because certainly the performance >> Yeah >> Is looking good. What's the problem you solve for customers? >> So, the specific problem is when you have digital businesses, what happens is that you don't have a little bit of data that's hot and the rest that's cold, everything is hot, so how do you serve all your data in real time? That's what we're about, and that's what we've built a transformative solution for. >> Well the thing that's coming out, some of the feedback we've been getting and seeing online is, besides the new logo, looks great by the way >> Thank you >> Is you guys are winning on the speeds and feeds. Now the market's going beyond speeds and feeds, which we'll get to in a second, so one: talk about the performance goals, you guys are saying exponential performance, but you're saying you're 10x the performance of anything else. But two, the challenge with data is these silos, right, and you're seeing a confluence of injection of open-source coding, real-time performance data in the application level as app developers start to come on board with open source. At the same time, data traditionally has not been open and free, democratized, if you will, that it's stuck in silos. So it's been a big challenge for architects and CXOs to say, "How do we deploy a solution that gets us to value quickly, not do these science projects." So talk about the performance and then the market model around "How do you free the data?". >> Yeah, so I think for us the simplest of value props is when you plug into your existing infrastructure, we show up to any OS just like a disc. We show up very simply like a disc, so any application that runs with Vexata powering the disc, the virtual disc, if you will, runs enormously fast. That's the very simple value prop, we've done something very basic. >> So on the integration site, like deploying it's easy. >> Not only is it easy, there's no change to the OS. So you talk about democratization, what are you looking for? Can I simply plug and play, will this just work? So that's the biggest thing of all, it just works. The second piece, and the most important thing is, it's not just out here our numbers that really work well, when you plug in Oracle and run OLTP or OLAP, you see this dramatic performance that if you didn't know better, you'd think this was an engineered system from Oracle, you know it's really just amazing performance. We maximize the utilization of your server, so any app that just plugs into an OS and looks at it as a disc will run great. >> Well when you say that, not to trivialize this, because I know it's probably complicated, I'm going to dig into the tech in a second, but when I plug in a thumb drive or an external hard drive into my Mac, it's just "Boom there it is!" >> Yeah. >> Similar, is that the kind of concept you guys are thinking? >> Pretty much, that's what we, really if you build a very complicated product that's complicated to use, nobody'd use it. So we want it really simple to consume. Complicated to build maybe, but really simple to consume. >> Alright so I'm going to play the naysayer, I don't believe you guys, it's smoke and mirrors in there, Cause no one can do that, you're going to give me 10x performance? Okay, that's marketing, I'm skeptical, but I have a problem. I have I/O bottlenecks, at the end of the day I have all these bottlenecks, how do you do it? >> You know, I think a few core principles, the first of them being we use solid state media. How we read and write to that solid state media is actually under patent, it's very specific to keep the performance very high all the time. The second piece of course is our system itself is designed to avoid, to separate control and data paths, so we keep them isolated, and we've invested a lot in our software to keep it and use the space and so on, a lot of jargon for we keep our latencies extremely low on the system, so your applications don't have to worry about anything and change anything. >> So are you lower in the stack in terms of, well a stack isn't perfectly speaking but, I start thinking about free data moving around, which by the way, people want, they want their data available at any given time, at any moment, cause you don't know what's going on in real time. All the data has got to be ready. But then it brings up the governance thing. Are you below the governance or is that a separate challenge on top, how do you deal with that dynamic? >> I'd say we're in the governance of it, so you know for example we provide the full standard based encryption so should anybody say, "Hey are you secure?" Yes, absolutely we are. It's a big deal, it's data, it's your active data, and so we protect it as well. >> One of the things that's coming out of Oracle Open World we're seeing obviously is they're comparing themselves to Amazon. And I was commenting last night on Twitter, I've been covering Oracle since 1994, watching and comparing them against SAP back then, the ERP days, and all the software mini computer days. But now they're comparing themselves not to SAP or IBM anymore, it's Amazon. What does that tell you, because that's also translating into the customer conversations because cloud has become mainstage, Oracle says "We have the cloud, it's Oracle on Oracle." They're not really winning the Cloud Native battles, they kind of own IT, Oracle does, so there's really no debate that IT, information technology CIOs know all about Oracle, but people who are doing Cloud-Native or DevOps might not be interested in Oracle, so how do you balance those two markets that, Oracle's trying to be more Cloud-Native and we're still evaluating their progress there, but you guys, are you impacted by those trends at all? >> You know, as you mentioned, everybody talks about the cloud, a lot of apps do go to the Native Cloud, if you will, the data that's very critical to your business, be it your intensive transaction processing, your OLAP, your machine learning, those seem to remain on premise. That's what our experience has been, and that's where we want to play first. Now, Oracle for Oracle Cloud, Oracle Cloud for Oracle may be a great thing, but-- >> Oracle on Oracle runs well, but I mean they're still playing catch up to Amazon, clearly number one. Okay let's get, you bring up the on-prem thing, this is important, business model. So you guys are out there, share the business model for you guys. What's on premise, is it hardware, software, both? Is there license, how do people engage with you, what's your business? >> So today we sell an appliance, that's the product we have today, and so we sell the appliance all included, software and hardware, and we offer the services to plug it in, and show you the transformative results on your applications. We don't stop at "Hey we plugged it in and you got your hero numbers," we show you. >> So I'm, I just want to buy it, how do I engage? I buy a license? A box? >> You buy the system. >> System, so it's hardware. >> Yeah >> And all the software and the intellectual property that you have >> All in. >> Is inside the box. And how do I, just connect to the network? >> Pretty much. >> Like, all interfaces? >> Pretty much; so today we have fiber channel, and we have NVMe over Fabric, so both ethernet and fabric channel, this is typically where you're on your highest performance of your data. So for us, very simple, it's very seamless to plug it in, and it'll be recognized in your servers, and off you go. >> Okay, so I'm an architect at a large enterprise, take me through the conversation you'd have with those geeks because they're going to want to (Surya laughs) have the conversation be, I want it, I need dashboarding, we're going to be moving high value applications so I need analytics, I want to kill the memory bottlenecks, but I also want the future, I don't want to foreclose anything so, you know, you guys are a startup so you've got my attention, I like what your story is. How do we move forward in the future, how do you talk through the, we've got your back covered, you've got the head room available, how does an IT or tech guy say, "You guys are solid."? >> Yeah. So here's how I start the conversation: I typically start the conversation by telling them, "Hey, you've got the highest performance servers, the latest servers, the Broadwells, the Prolines, what have you. The fastest networks are the 100 GigE, 50 GigE, you know whatever your ethernet network looks like, and then typically you have a SAN and it's really fast- 1630 to a gig. And you run your application, let's pretend it's Oracle RAC, you run that application. And when you run it, what you notice in your servers is eventually you see I/O wait times that slow down your application, and your servers, your really fast servers are under utilized because they're just not moving. >> Because you have bottlenecks. >> That's right. Well we say, it's very simple, if you plug us into your network and run your application on us, we will eliminate your I/O bottlenecks on your server, so your server is maximally utilized. So with no changes for you, you get 10x, and that's how easy we want to make it. That's really our value. >> So you guys are coming in and basically saying 10x performance right out of the gate. >> Yeah. >> Okay so what are some of the challenges on the dynamics, because you got my attention again, now I say, "How do I know I need you? Is there certain things, smoke before the thing blows up?" What are some of the tell signs for the customers to call you guys, cause they just started hearing about you guys as you start marketing. Why should customers work with you, what's the indicators on their side where they go, "I got to call them." >> The classic indicator is, for us, for one is, you're running an Oracle RAC. You're running an Oracle RAC for resiliency and for performance and you need both, right? The moment we see that we say, okay, we have a clean in. The second tell-tale sign, is when you have in-memory databases running. When you're in-memory, what you're trying to do is not write to your storage because that's your bottleneck, so you keep throwing memory at it, it's really expensive. And we know that's a classic sign. >> Okay, talk about Oracle Open World, you're going to be here this week, up in the city. What are you guys showing, what's the pitch, obviously you've got the new logo. >> Oh yeah. >> @VexataCorp is the Twitter handle so people can watch and can check out your updates on Twitter, but what's the value proposition, what are people in the booth talking about, what's the demos, what's the thing? >> You know, it's Oracle Open World, so we're going to do a whole lot of Oracle demos, so we have a RAC demo set up, and we show, with a four node, dual socket server, our system seamlessly plug in, and you get, the last I looked, it was 4,000,000+ OLTP transactions. It's phenomenal for a four socket, dual socket server. We're going to show our optane base array, the first of its kind in the industry, and show the same kind of results we have with optane. So it's all about Oracle and accelerating those apps. >> Alright so for Oracle customers out there, you know who you are, they're always evaluating stuff but it's always hard to kind of get out on the branch and be exposed if you try to go off Oracle, so people might be a little bit nervous. What's your conversation to the Oracle customers that's saying there's no risk in looking at Vexata. They're like, hey why not just buy a lot more Exadata, or the ZDLRA stuff, or other things that they have. >> And all those are entirely possible, I think that's the easiest way to get comfort. It's those trials, even in your research and development, and get used to us, because you'll be shocked at the performance you get. And eventually yeah, you can go to Exadata, but we're just so much more cost-effective than any solution out there. Try us, get comfortable with us, and then deploy when you're ready. >> And what's the price point? What's the price, or is it different by deployment? >> You know, honestly, it does differ by deployment, but really we use standard NVMe flash, and that's driven by the HyperScale guys, so we ride the curve of flash, we don't make our own. >> Yeah, you're not a sales guy, you're a CTO, co-founder, >> Thank you. >> So I don't want to put you on the spot there. Affordability relative to Oracle, let's talk about the customer conversation, so I don't want to put you on the spot on the pricing, we'll hit the CEO and some of your other guys on that. So, I'm a customer, I'll roleplay. Hey, I love this opportunity, but what's wrong with Oracle storage, why not just go with those guys? >> You can use us, not just for Oracle, but all your application workloads that are demanding, like your machine learning, like your SQL server, if you're running SAS analytics, so you have a general purpose platform, you're not silo'd. That's the biggest deal with us. >> So you give them scope outside of Oracle. >> That's right. Any app, really, I mean, just the simplest of all. >> Alright so I got to ask you the secret sauce question. You've got some patents, so your friend says, "Hey, what's going on, you guys are awesome, how did you get the 10x?" What's the bottom line, how did you guys do it? How do you get all that performance? >> I think the really, the investment in the software, to reduce the storage stack latencies, to the absolute minimum, that's what really gives us the biggest bang for the buck. >> So a lot of low-level engineering. >> Pretty much. >> Alright, so benefits to customers? What are the benefits, how do you guys see the benefits unfolding, take us through some of the anecdotal data you've seen in the trials you've done with customers, what are some of the benefits they've told you they've seen? >> You know, the simplest of them all, it's a very simple one, when we do a PoC with a customer, the customer usually says, "Hey this PoC's going to take two months." And afterward we find out it's two months because it takes three weeks to tune the system, and then the remainder of the weeks to do the PoC. For us, those first three weeks collapsed to one day. There's no tuning, you just plug it in and you all of a sudden get the performance and your PoC has just shrunken massively. That's really our value. Don't try hard, just right to your data, embrace it and it'll run for you. >> So you guys are a potential bridge to the future with the data. >> Yeah. >> You have this thing called Active Data Fabric, is that it? >> Yes. >> What is that about? >> It's really about how you actually scale your data over a very large amount. Today, yes we have an appliance, and it scales on size, ours scales to 150 terabytes and so on, but as data keeps growing and everything becomes hot, you really need to get into the many hundreds of terabytes, petabytes of active data. So how do we actually design that using external, open hardware, that's really what the principle is about. So this is the first realization and then we continue going with other implementation. >> Surya, great to have you on theCUBE, you guys have done a great job, so I got to ask the bigger question outside of Vexata, you know, data's been a challenge, and as an industry participant and a technologist, what's been the big thing, if you could summarize it down from your perspective, data obviously needs to be free, because applications never know when a piece of data will be needed in context to other things. You see things like metadata, active data's clearly the benefit there, but everyone's got these data lakes out there. We just came back from our Big Data NYC event, and the whole Hadoop thing has been very batch. >> Yeah. >> Store everything in a data lake, but you never know, at any given time, if a piece of data is going to be valuable, until you put it to work. So you really can't put a valuation on data. What has been an inhibitor, the bottlenecks. Has it been the silos, has it been data architecture, has it been the software, or now that the cloud's got compute power, all of the above, what's your thoughts? >> I think you netted out, really data, you look at it as hot data or cold data, and you decide data lake or active data, and I hold it in memory. The biggest problem I see is how do you call something hot or cold, it's hard to tell, and I think the biggest challenge for us is how do you make it all at least warm, so you can get to it when you need to. And that's the hardest challenge for the industry, I think. >> Yeah and I think that people look at self-driving cars to bring up that, because Larry Ellison said onstage, "Autonomous database", which I kind of roll my eyes cause Larry's so good at taking trends and making it look like Oracle has it. Autonomous cars being self-driving, it's the concept. >> Yeah. >> The data's really critical, cause if car's going to have telemetry data, real time is real time, it's not milliseconds, it's nanoseconds. You can't say one week, ten days, and a lot of time people say realtime queries can come back, but the data's a week old, so there's huge issues in what real time means. >> Yeah, and the second issue, you bring up self-driving cars, so the way self-driving cars, the test drives happen today, you plug in a lot of drives into the car, send it out for two weeks, and when it comes back to base you have 200 terabytes in the car that you want to learn with. How long does it take to transfer 200 terabytes? In a regular system? A few days? >> Yeah. >> So until that data's off, this car doesn't move. With us, it takes a few hours, so you can get your car back on the road. So we actually, we not only do great on the transactions, we do great with this, your basic data mobility problems, and we fix it. >> Yeah, you guys are fixing the data mobility problems. Okay, great connotation, one last final point I want to get your thoughts and color on, the internet of things. Cause now you're seeing industrial really being the low hanging fruit right now on IOT, and IOT certainly is hot, it will always be hot, but it also increases the surface area for cyber attacks. So people are kind of taking baby steps there, first one is industrial: plant equipment, could be manufacturing, it could be edge of the network sensor, something along those lines, hacking into the IP network. That's certainly going to create the need for active data. >> Absolutely. >> Your thoughts on that? >> Very much so. You know, IOT is really the classic future growth model, look at the amount of data you're trying to ingest and process. Everything is active, and you have to act on it in real time. >> Does IOT help you guys? >> You know, it does, it quite doesn't show up as IOT, it shows up as machine learning, you get another signature off it, you get all this data, you're trying to learn and figure out anomalies, and you need to process your data and that's us. >> You know I always said that a good business model is reducing steps it takes to do something, making it easy to use, and being high performance. You guys seem to do all three, congratulations. >> We do, thank you. >> Surya Varanasi, CTO and co-founder of Vexata, hot new startup, check them out, @VexataCorp is the Twitter handle, check out their updates, they're at Oracle Open World this week. I'm John Furrier, you're watching CUBEConversation here live in our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for watching. (music)

[Announcer]: Live from Orlando, Florida, It's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (electronic music) >> Hi Everybody, we're back in Orlando, Florida. This is The Cube, the leader in live-tech coverage and we are covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and my co-host, Jeff Fricke. Jeff, our fifth year doing Knowledge. >> Amazing. >> We've talked over the years about ServiceNow extending its platform into the line of business, and one of those areas is HR. We've had a number of guests on the HR and we're pleased to invite Deepak Bharadwaj, who is the general manager of the HR business unit. Great to see you Deepak, thanks for coming on again. >> Thanks Dave, pleasure. >> So off from the keynote this morning, I had tweeted out it was the best IT demo I'd ever seen. No technology, just people with footballs, soccer balls, taking us through an HR example. But, so before we get there, the keynote today. A huge audience, a lot of interest in HR and bringing ServiceNow to HR. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think what we recognized is HR is where a lot of these processes related life events start and then that has implications to many other departments. So, you think about onboarding, off boarding, transfers, relocations, external leave of absence. Almost all of these processes cut across all departments. And the department that gets the biggest workload often times is IT. So, one of the reasons we see all that interest from IT in HR type use cases is because they are at the receiving end of all of that action, if you will, and if we can solve it for IT, we solve it for HR, we are ultimately solving it for the employee and that's what we're all about. So, it's truly exciting to see the interest both in my HR topic keynote yesterday, as well as today. There are slightly different audiences. My topic keynote was more geared towards the HR audience and we actually have a lot of them at the show, which is always encouraging. And today's keynote was more geared towards what we call our IT champions who want to integrate HR to impress the platform and that's absolutely work we like to see as well. >> Yeah, so the momentum in the business is quite good. I know you guys don't break out the numbers specifically for your business unit but you talk about a lot of Pioneer Lightspeed HR customers. You gave some examples. One of the examples you gave was your recent, your personal experience. Everybody can relate to HR, but your recent name change. >> Yup. >> So give us an update, sort of on the business and talk a little bit more about why HR is so critical to ServiceNow. >> I think the opportunity to transform the enterprise is huge with HR, and just looking at the traction that we're seeing from the market place, it's almost the next adjacency after IT where there's just a lot of inefficiency. If you think about our work and lightspeed model, we're really going after unstructured work patterns and guess where the most unstructured work happens today. It's in HR. It's a nice adjacency for us. Plays well with our platform, the core of what we do with service management. And it's a market that's been underserved for years. Customers have told us, "This is what we would like you "to do." And that's how the HR business unit itself was formed, that's why I came here, that's how I got this job. And since then, we've just seen just dramatic traction, especially as the emphasis moves more and more towards making that experience truly consumerized, the service experience for the employee consumerized across all of the departments within the enterprise. So how do you treat your employees just like you would your customers? That's kind of a theme that you see cut across the entire costumer base, and they're really wanting to get on that bandwagon. And ServiceNow is an excellent platform to be accomplishing that. >> It's just so interesting how we see these great successes built in companies recently, just attacking unidentified inefficiency. The Cloud identified just a ridiculously low utilization rate at corporate data centers, and unlocked the value of that efficiency. Uber unlocked the inefficiency of all these cars sitting around not being used. And as you guys have identified, there's so much inefficiency in these unstructured processes that go cross multiple channels. Phone, text, email, Slack, Gerub, pick your favorite thing, they're all over the place. So, it's really this huge value opportunity to grab because it is just grossly inefficient, and almost so inefficient we don't even recognize that there's a much, much better way, until you actually do it in a much, much better way. >> Yeah, no, Jeff, that's absolutely right. So, like you mentioned, there's a technology aspect to this, so, there's just multiple systems, and that leads to inefficiency. And then, when you don't get what you want from the technology, what do you do? You resort to people. And so, for years, HR has dealt with this problem by just throwing more people at it. And the way I like to think about it is we've gone from this era of trying to, essentially, create reincarnations of things that were already automated. So, I come from the HCM space, if you will. Talent management, recruiting, and so, we've taken a recruiting system, and then tried to make that better and better and better. Put it in the cloud, and so on and so forth. And if you look Code HR and some of these other technologies that's what they do, and they do a great job at that. But what we've recognized is, yes, that is obviously important and necessary, but really, like I said earlier, when you have a life event, you are looking for just information, so you can make the choices that you want to be making during that life event. You want step-by-step guidance. You want access to some person, a real person, that can help answer those questions. And when you don't get those types of things, now you're back to unstructured emails and sending text messages to somebody in HR, and that's not their job. Their job is to be helping you with providing strategic support. And so, how can we unlock the utilization, if you will, of those HR professionals, the people, as an asset, within HR, and make them more productive. That's what we're all about. >> And then jump on the latest, greatest trend, which is Cloud, obviously you guys have Cloud application, a little bit of software automation, a little bit data support into that automation, and then, ta-da. Hopefully, it's a whole lot smoother process. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What has to happen for a customer to take advantage of HR within ServiceNow? We had one guest on yesterday that they actually started at HR, but generally, that's not the case, right? Normally, it's an extension of ITSM. So, what's the typical case and what are the prerequisites for customers? >> I think in mind, a couple of things have to happen. One is HR has to be brought in. So, we got a lot of IT champions, which is great, but I encouraged them to go out and to give these HR people a hug, literally. Because they need to understand what the platform can do for HR and how it can unlock that productivity that he just spoke about, Jeff. And HR has to be brought in, they need to be educated on the problem that they have. A lot of times, they don't even recognize that there's a problem, because they've just gotten used to doing things a certain way, and now, there is this revolutionary platform that can help them, so getting them on board, getting that buy in is important. I think the other thing that has to happen is these organizations need to identify very specific set of problems that they want to go after because if you look at the problem set that we can address it's everything from just simple case management all the way to automating business processes like on boarding. You can start wherever you want in that spectrum, but you need to figure out what your priorities are and start there, and if it's case management, that's fine. You figure that out. Now, you can actually measure progress and move from there. If you want to start with on boarding and automating a business process, that's fine, as well. But very often, I find that our customers need some help in trying to identify the priority projects that they can tackle. And that's a blessing and a curse of having such a powerful platform. It can do everything, and often times, it's just getting to the right set of priorities that you want to tackle. >> The flexibility of the platform, like you say, it's a two-sided coin. But I want to ask you a question. You're a software executive, you've been in the business a while. You know one of the complaints of software, historically, is if I have a process that's fossilized, a lot of times when I bring in new software, I have to change that process to adapt to the way in which the software handles it, and that's been a headwind for a lot of adoption. If I have a process that's baked can I just sort of use that within ServiceNow, and apply the existing processes? And is that typically how it happens? Or do customers sit back and say, hey, there's a better way to do this? >> Yeah, I would say, there's probably a mix of the two. There is the where do I start? I have a process, can't I just take that and put it into ServiceNow? And absolutely. That's been happening since ServiceNow has been in its existence. That's the core of what we do, being able to structure work, being able to automate it through workflows, things like that. But oftentimes, what'll happen is then they get the analytics, using performance analytics or reporting solutions, you can now start to look at what's working, what's not, and then make some adjustments. So, for example, with HR, you might start off with, hey, everything is a general inquiry. And so, now you're getting a number of things that are tagged as general inquiries, but then you look at analytics data, and it says, well 30% of those are actually going to the payroll department. So guess what? Now we need to restructure our processes so that we've got some special handling for payroll, because that tends to be a friction point for employees. And that's how our platform can provide that visibility, so you can evolve as your needs evolve and you mature. >> I was going to say, and I'm sure people are wondering, there's other big HCM applications out there. You've worked with some of them. How does the ServiceNow offering suite fix into their existing HR application infrastructure. >> Great question. So, this is probably the number one question that our customers ask us. They're trying to figure out where does ServiceNow start and where do these other applications begin. And I think the answer is it depends. And we want to provide customers with choices. What we are trying to optimize for is that employee service experience. What does that look like, and how do we make it as consumerized as possible? So, there's maybe three broad use cases where these solutions fit in. So, one might be I am within one of these systems. So, let's say I'm doing a performance review within a work day or success factors, and now, I have a question, I'm stuck here. Now, you're in ServiceNow, and you're submitting a case, asking a question, searching a knowledge article, as an example. That's one use case. The second use case is something happened in my life. I'm going to have a baby, or somebody in my family is sick and I need to tend to them. Or I need to relocate an employee from a different country. Where do I even begin? So you start with ServiceNow, potentially. You figure out what you want to do, and then you submit the request, and eventually, you might end up completing a transaction in one of the systems. But what we do is help guide that employee to where they need to be going. And the third one really is the use case we explored this morning, which is around on boarding, off boarding, transfers, how do we take what's happening within those systems, and extend that to all the other department? So, there may be aspects of on boarding, as an example, that's happening in a recruiting system. How do we take that and then extend it into IT and finance and facilities, and so on and so forth. >> Jeff: Great. That's a good question. >> Deepak, can you share with us some early customer experiences, some maybe metrics, proof points? >> Sure, yeah. I actually had a couple of those on the screen this morning so I'll use Sally Beauty as an example. Beauty supply retailer. And they started with the employee relations function, and trying to optimize that. And the challenge they were having is all of the employee relations questions from the field, and they got a number of stores, and all of these associates where sending in these questions and inquiries and complaints, in some cases, to the HR business partner. So, there were regional business partners in each of the regions, and they were getting all of these questions. So, as a result, that HR business partner, who is supposed to be thinking about how to help staff new stores, and just provide more strategic support to the managers, district managers, they are fielding first level questions about employee relations. And so, what they did was they centralized that function, the HR service delivering function, so that there is all these calls go to a central location, and they just had two people, now, manning it, and we did some value calculation with them, and what we recognized is they had saved the equivalent of seven people's worth of time, that could then be repurposed back into something else. So, the centralized the function, the moved work from high cost business partners to lower cost HR support personnel, and each person that you can free up is at least $100,000 a year, fully loaded. And so that math starts to add up pretty fast and pretty quickly. This is just employee relations. You extend that to benefits and payroll, and so on and so forth. You in millions of dollars a year. >> That's a pretty powerful example, and even though they're not getting rid of people, but they're avoiding potentially new hires, and as you say, they're driving new value. Every company we talk to is trying to do some kind of digital transformation. What they don't want to do is route paper. So, is that what you're seeing? Where are they putting the resources that they're saving. What are seeing? Some examples of what customers are doing. >> It's all sorts of things. I think analyzing the data is a big area. Just the data science piece of it. So, if you look at a service center, would you rather be looking at how to reorganize your resources, or would you rather respond via email to all these unstructured queries? Clearly, the former is a much more higher value added work. So that's one area that you see a lot of repurposing. The other that I talk about is how can you improve the quality of service itself. So, instead of you answering questions about my benefits plan, go find me a better benefits plan. Do some research and look at what else it out there. That's where you should be spending time. And the classic one is really around talent. There's just a lot of talent management type activities that need to take place from sourcing, recruiting, managing succession planning processes and thing like that. Again, you should not be telling me how to put a job requisition online, and what pay grade to select and what area to post this in. All of that should be available as some sort of a knowledge-based item. You should be actually going out there and doing your job of sourcing high-quality candidates. So, that's how these things really compliment each other and unlock the potential of the HR team. >> Yeah, spend your time sharpening the sod, not whackin' at the tree, right? >> Exactly. >> I got an automated tree whacker. I can actually focus on where I want to go next. >> All right, real quick, we have limited time here, but the announcements that you're makin' today, we haven't touched on that yet. So, give us the run down. >> What we've done, essentially, is looked at processes that require, and the way we categorize it is these are processes that are usually long running, processes that require action across multiple parties, multiple departments, and they have a specific sequence. So, we looked at that as the baseline, and we said, hey, what fits into this? Because if we could create a structure that models this out in a very easy to configure manner, than what problems could we solve. Obviously we used onboarding as the example of where we wanted to go, but we found out that that model is easily applicable for transfers or off boarding, things like that. And so, what we've done is taken the underlying workflow capabilities off the platforms. Underneath the covers, it's still a workflow that is running but we essentially created a very clean data model on top. The imagery that I use is when you go into these HR, visit any HR customer, if they are going through an exercise of revamping, let's say, their onboarding process, then you'll see a wall with sticky notes, Post-It sticky notes, different colors. And we took that and we said how can we get that into the software, where you'll see phases. There is day, offer stage, pre boarding, week one, month one, and so on and so forth, and each of those stickies, they actually represent activities within the application. So, we've created a model that lets you take that visual imagery and put it in the product, so it's just easy for them, easy for HR to be able to configure this without needing any technical expertise and that's where I think there's a lot of IP. It helps them with change management. It'll help with adoption. And hopefully, it'll bring a true transformation, not just to HR, but across the enterprise. >> Excellent, well, Deepak, thanks very much for coming back in The Cube. It's good to see you again. >> My pleasure, Dave, Jeff. Thank you so much. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is The Cube, we're live from Knowledge17, and we'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Host: Live, from Santa Clara, California, it's TheCUBE covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are coming to the end of day two at Open Networking Summit. We just got here today, it's a great show. Everyone who's talking everything about software-defined networking is here. And along with Scott Raynovich we're joined by Dave Ward, one of the luminaries doing panels, doing keynotes. >> Here we are in TheCUBE. >> And here we are. Dave is the CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect at Cisco Systems. So Dave, great to see you as always. >> Great to see you guys. >> So what's the buzz of the show, you've been here for a couple of days, any surprises? >> No real big surprises to be honest, always there's some great announcements and great launches going on. But really what I'm finding surprising is that this is the sixth year of this conference, can you believe that? So year six from where we started, and I may be the first person to say this, have you ever had anybody in theCUBE today talking about openflow? >> Jeff: No. >> Remember those days? >> Now, nothing against open flow that's not my point, but think about how far we've gone and so. >> Scott: Actually, yeah, Martin was talking about it. >> Course he did. Course he did. He's not going to let it go. (laughter) But love you Martin. But really my point is, look how far we've come in six years. Six years ago we had a protocol, small community, one group working on this stuff, really working in standards, there was no open-source associated with that at that time, now look where we are. Basically the place to do work is now in open-source and come together as a community. So, the buzz for me really is holy shit, this thing is real! There's a lot of people investing a lot of money and time and really trying to work together to improve and build the ecosystem around networking, around network functions, what services are being delivered and building a business off networking again, so networking is back. It's cool again. >> Jeff: Right. Great. And then there's this whole new thing coming down the pike in the form of 5G, and IoT that's just opening up a new opportunity kind of redefine, what are these standards, and how is this going to help push things along? >> Well, it's kind of interesting and so I'm just ripping for a second. When you take a look at where we've come over the last several years and it was SDN controllers and configuring the network. Then it was virtualizing the network. There was a lot of talk yesterday and today about analytics and creating a reactive network. All of that has been built in the those six years and come together in different open-source communities to build those pieces. We've got SDN controllers, projects like OpenDaylight, projects like FD.io, projects like PNDA, P-N-D-A-.io. That's the SDN virtualized network and data analytics piece, but when you get to 5G and IoT, one thing I'll be talking about tomorrow in my keynote, is that there're big blocks missing in the industry. So, let's dial it back to historically, remember when the HVAC contractor logged on to the network and that malware on that laptop stole 70 million credit cards, remember that? >> Yes. >> Still haven't solved that problem yet. And so the reason why I'm bringing this up is what's missing, identity. So we had this notion that networks controlled by IT operators that are going to go in and config and provision that network. Well, we're now to the point where we need to link people and things to be able to drive what that intent is on the network, and whether its buzz words, which is real functionality by the way, of micro-segmentation. HVAC contractor goes into a micro-segment, can't get to the point of sale, can't steal the credit cards. Basic bread and butter stuff we want from the network. This is what SDN is supposed to deliver, virtualized services like firewalls and other sporadic security, we'll just hold that for a second. But that linking of who the person is, what device they're on, where they are on campus, where they are in the world, etc., etc., time of day, whatever the case may be, are now the variables that need to go into the top of this system, into a policy engine that then drives that reactive network. We've made a couple of great strides in six years, but to get to 5G, and in particular to get to IoT, we have to have another couple of major blocks come into the industry to make that work well. Hopefully it's open-source where that's going to go, and it's not just a standards body and not just open-source, cuz we still need things to be manufactured and interoperable and the rest of it. So hopefully these things come together as we've seen the maturing of those two big groups. >> I was going to say, it kind of begs the question, what is the interplay between standards bodies versa or together with open-source projects? Cuz before you didn't really have open-sources standards really set. Set the regs. Now you've got these open-source projects, which have a main channel, they might start forking, there's all kinds of places that they can go, and how do the two kind of work together? >> Well there's been a ton of effort, and coming out of the SDN open-source movement around model-driven networking, and although it sounds kind of geeky, the main way of representing those models is through representation called YANG. The interesting thing about YANG is that's been not only adopted in SDN, as the main object and way of representing the models being converted to network and equipment computes, computers etc. But the IETF has taken that up and really driven a service approach through the IETF which is I want to deliver a VPN service, I want to deliver load engineering on the network versus what we did with SNMP, or what the industry did, which was I'm going to fully distribute this out to all the protocols and all the functions and everybody's going to write a NIB etc., etc. and we know how that turned out. So the craze for model-driven networking, the standards bodies picking this up, IETF, MEF, which is metro ethernet forum, broadband forum, BBF. All these organizations have now taken on that mantra that came out of open-source SDN of model-driven networking and are working towards creating those models so that way we will have a standardized way to program the network. But what's next is the telemetry coming out. Those objects need to be standardized so that way whether it's a Cisco device or somebody else's device, it's actually sending out the same data that can be collected and can be interpreted properly. Does it mean that it's a NIB? Does it mean that it's only going to go over one particular transport? I don't think anybody in the industry really cares whether it's JSON, Google RPC, Protobuffs, Netconf, or any of these pieces, they're all perfectly fine, they have different semantics associated with them, but nonetheless those common objects and common data models have been what has been the key to keeping the industry working together, the common architectural philosophy, and then the standards bodies have thankfully picked that up over the last couple of years. >> Yeah we were talking here earlier, I mean you just threw out a bunch of alphabet soup there and I understand 80% of it, but it does raise the issue we were talking about earlier about these standards development organizations and the IETF, the TM Forum, the MEF. Now we have open-source, so we have the Linux Foundation. We have a lot of these different organizations and I think while you would know better than I as a CTO, people are becoming challenged by tracking and following all this stuff, do you think we need some sort of consolidation of these standards or at least some more unification, we just saw ECOMP and Open-O merge so there seems to be some consolidation. What will we see going forward? What's going to help you as the CTO? >> There's no doubt if there's consolidation, that would be easier to track and easier place to develop, but in reality, Scott, it's 50 shades of YANG. (laughter) >> And the reason why I say that is each and every standards body has done their own specific function, again whether it's Metro Ethernet or its broadband access or its mobility, each one of those standards bodies is redefining themselves to be SDN capable. There's no doubt. If there's a one stop shop, it would be the most optimal way to get something done the fastest, but that's not the way the world works. So actually I think we are going to see a continuous increase of more folks working on this, more foundations being build, etc., etc. Although, what we have witnessed over the last couple days in the last year, is that the communities, the open-source communities in particular, are coming together and trying to integrate the pieces together versus just islands of cool technology that there's a few geeks interested in, no. Thankfully the operators and some enterprises have come in and said I need this stuff to work and I need this stuff to work together and that discipline is actually fundamentally new and different than the way either standards bodies worked or open-source worked in the past. So I'd love to say that there'd be even more consolidation. There's frankly a bit of fatigue over, not saying it's wack-a-mole but you have to chase, you have to really figure out and track where all this stuff is going on in the industry to really keep abreast and understand how wide and how deep it goes. >> It's interesting this trend lately where people are just donating ... The project is just being absorbed into Linux Foundation. So now there's at least kind of a consistency across all these various projects, in terms of the way things are managed, the shows, the communication, and them helping standardize a process to help those projects be more successful in their distribution and adoption in the company. >> Linux Foundation has done the industry a huge service. They understand governance. They've gone through a zillion different experiences of how to build communities. What works well when there's competing factions that need to come together and work, on board marketing team, on board legal team, able to build foundations as necessary, or what's been experimented with over the last couple of years is, if you remember when we started to number these, you need to have a 503C, you need to have a foundation, there was frankly a high cost associated with these. Now, open-source is being contributed there's no foundation, and there's no cost. And so there's a whole continuum of things that the industry, the networking industry I should say, is learning about how to build communities and although this sounds cliche, you may launch a product, but you don't launch a community, you actually have to build it. And it's not all one company that's doing the donating or doing the working and that will produce, that'll create the longevity of that particular project. And that is what the Linux Foundation knows how to do well or at least catalyzed people to come together to do that well. >> Now you mentioned one of the big questions that always comes up with open-source is well how do we make money, right? Cause it's all free. It's like, you know ... >> Are we on Jerry Maguire? What's going on? (laughter) >> Jeff: Free like a puppy. (laughing) >> Still my favorite. >> Free like a puppy, yeah, you guys still got to change the newspaper. So you were on a panel today there was a big discussion about the commercialization and how does, I mean obviously Cisco has to stare at this big puppy in the room if you will, you know. What's going to happen to our licensing model with all this open-source, what came out of that discussion, what came out of the panel about how do you make money in this open-source world? >> So a couple of things, one thing that was discussed was not only how to make money, is which comes first, cost reduction, total cost of ownership, or new service revenue. And really the outcome there, and AT&T, Comcast, and Lightspeed Ventures was also in the panel with me. Needless to say it's a combination of both. If you're coming in with a project and the project is please spend this money so you can save this money, we know how to do that math. We can add up the rows and columns and can understand whether or not money will be saved over time. But the new service revenue really certainly in an enterprise space, is really what's being discussed. In particular, can I get these new services, I need these new security functions, I want to manage all my branches from the cloud or whatever the case might be. So new service revenue is depending on which use case, which technology, which layer. Both of those two balance out and they both are required in the algorithm. Now, can people make money off of it? And the answer is, needless to say, Lightspeed Ventures colleague said, "Hey man, if there's a community "and there's a technology, "you can list off a zillion cases of where that community "is turned into a true company that can provide value-add "and additional IP and move forward." Now, let's move this from just startups to big companies like Cisco or AT&T and Comcast and not only do we all use open-source in our projects, all those companies are contributing to open-source. And in Cisco's case, we're contributing to open-source for a couple of key reasons, one is there are gaps in the industry, which were limiting the industry. So let me give an example. We open-sourced a virtual switch router, which you might think, okay it's Cisco they're going to do something in networking, but the reason why we open-sourced it, and it's a piece that we actually use in our products, was there was not a virtual switch or router that had the scale, performance, or features that enabled the industry to utilize all the capabilities of the hardware underneath, whether it's computer or networking or security. And so the industry literally would have stalled with a limited feature set versus being able to utilize decades of networking knowledge and experience in things that are key and necessary, encapsulations, features, filters, quality of service etc., etc. There's a zillion of these pieces. And so there's a couple different ways, how can somebody make money off of this really is the fundamental question. We contribute into open-source communities and use that open-source to build products as well. And we can do this across video, we can do this in networking, and we do this in NFV, we do this in orchestration in these pieces and we also catalyze an ecosystem around these projects and then potentially around our portfolio as well. And so we continuously expand our ecosystem into startups that are using this technology, advancing the technology, enabling the industry to move faster, and trying to fundamentally create those business outcomes that our customers want. >> I just love that you just innately understand the value of an active community and that really comes through, so but unfortunately the janitors have rolled in, the vacuums are going, the garbage cans are rolling, so before they unplug all of our gear, I want to give you the last word Dave. What are some of your top priorities for 2017? >> So top priorities for 2017 really comes down to working towards filling the gaps I mentioned, identity and policy, but additionally number one, make sure that the automation orchestration policy around networking in a containerized stack is created. So we live through a long era of hypervisors and what it was like to work with open stack and what it was like in open-source and have to invent all this technology. We learned a ton. But it doesn't exist in a containerized world. So for 2017, fill the big gaps in the industry and work towards orchestrating and automating networking, compute, storage, and security in a containerized world. >> Pretty simple. I think that's the answer. I was going to say 42 is usually the answer, but I think that was it Dave. (laughter) >> I love 42. (laughing) >> Thanks Dave, so he's Dave Ward, Scott Raynovich, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching TheCUBE from Open Networking Summit 2017. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music) >> You're also an entrepreneur, right? You know the business, you've been in the business.

(The Cube Theme) >> Voiceover: Live from Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering Google Cloud Next '17. >> Hey, welcome back here, and we're here live in Palo Alto for a special two days of coverage of Google Next 2017. I've John Furrier here in The Cube. We have reporters and analysts on the ground who are calling in, getting reaction on all the great news, and of course, Google's march to the enterprise cloud really is the big story, of course, they have their cloud they've been powering with their infrastructure and it had great presence, powering their own stuff, just like Amazon.com had Amazon webservices, Google Cloud now powering Google and others. Diane Green, new CEO, taking the reins, making things happen, we covered that news, and for an entrepreneurial perspective we have Tarun Thakur who is a co-founder and CEO Datos.io, former entrepreneur at Data Domain, been in the business, newly funded, Series A entrepreneur funded with True Ventures and Lightspeed. >> That is correct, John, thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. Tell us what you guys do first. Explain what you guys as a company are doing. >> Absolutely. I'd love to first thank you for the opportunity. It's a pleasure to be here. About Datos, I'll sort of zoom out a little bit and if you really see what's really happening out in the industry, our founding premise, me and my co-founder, Prasenjit, our founding principle is very simple. There are some transformative changes happening in the application era. I was just listening to Akash talk rom SAP, and enterprise workloads are moving to the cloud. That was our founding premise, that not only do you not have those IOT workloads, these SAS workloads, the real time analytics workloads, being born in the cloud, but you have all these traditional workloads that are moving as fast as they can to the cloud. So if you really look at that transformative change, we have a very simple founding premise: applications define the choice of the IT stack underneath it. What do we mean by that? The choice of the database, the choice of the storage, the choice of all the data management tooling around it, starting with protection, starting with governance, compliance, and so on and so forth, right? So if the application workloads are under disruption, and they're moving to the cloud, the impact it has on the IT stack underneath is phenomenal. >> So Tarun, you guys had a great write-up in the Register, Chris Miller, who is well known in the story, 'cause we all follow him, he's a great guy, and very fair, but he can be critical, too, he's very snarky. We like his columns. He called you guys the Tesla of the backup world. What does he mean by that? Does he mean it like you have all the bells and whistles of a modern thing, or is there a specific nuance to why he's calling you the Tesla of the backup world? >> No, this is excellent, John. You know, we are fortunate and we're honored. >> Electric backup? I mean, what's happening here? (laughing) I mean, what does he mean by that? What's the meaning? >> Couldn't have given us a better privilege than what he gave. Had a chance to host him in the office, small office, much smaller than what you have here, in December, and a 45 minute session became a two hour session and really he dug into why the Tesla, and essentially it goes back to, John, you had the traditional workloads running on your traditional databases, classical scale-operational databases like Oracle and SQL. Now, you're dealing with these next generation, hyperscale distributed applications. IOT real time analytic is building on that team, those are being deployed fundamentally on distributed architectures. Your Apache Cassandra, your Amazon Dynamo DB, your Google Spanner, now that we're talking in the context of Google Cloud Next, right? When you look at those distributed architectures, there's so much fundamental shift. You don't run them on shared storage, you don't have media servers anymore in the cloud- >> You have the edge. You have the edge out there. >> You have the edge computing. Given all those changes, you have to fundamentally rethink of backup, and that's essentially what we did. Just going back to Tesla, Tesla was started with a fundamentally seminal architecture. >> So you thought this from the ground up. That's essentially one point, and the other one is that it's modern in the sense of it's really taken advantage of the new architecture. >> That's absolutely right, you know, when we started, again, back in June of 2014, we really started with the end in mind, ten years, the next ten years ahead of us, and the end in mind was, "Look, it's going to be distributed architectures, "it's going to be your hyperscale applications, the webscale applications, and you need to be able to understand data and protect it and recover it and manage your data at that scale. >> Okay, so you guys are also Google partners, so you have an interesting perspective. You're on the front lines, Series A entrepreneur, you haven't cleared the runway yet. You still have to prove yourself. The game is just starting; you don't end it with the financing. That's just validation for the vision and the mission, and you've had some good press so far from Chris, now as you execute, you have a partner in Google. What's your analysis of Google, and as someone who's close to them, certainly as an entrepreneur, you're nimble, you're fast, you understand the tech, you mentioned Spanner, great horizontal scale of opportunity, but some of the enterprises might be a little slower, and they have different orientation, so help us understand what's Google doing? What's their main focus? >> I'll give you an answer in three part series. Number one, we are, again, a start-up, seriously, as you said, we have a lot ahead of us, even though we've been out here for three years, it feels like yesterday. (laughing) >> John: It's a grind. >> It is a grind, but to partner Google Cloud, one of our key marquee customers, a Fortune 100 home improvement retailer, under NDA, cannot take their name out of respect. >> John: Well the register says Home Depot. (laughing) >> Okay. >> Okay, so- >> I'll let Chris do the honor, but it's a Fortune 100 home improvement retailer, John, and their line of business, their entire e-commerce platform, the CIO down has moved their entire platform, migrated from DB2 to Google Cloud. It's not running on DB2 on Google Cloud platform, it's running all on a distributed massive scale- >> So did they sunset DB2 or did they completely- >> Tarun: Completely migrated away from DB2. >> Okay. >> It's part of the digital transformation journey Home Depot is at. They are three years in, they have two more years to go, and as part of the digital transformation journey they're on, they are now running their e-commerce website, which, think of you and I going to Thanksgiving and buying your home tools, and that application runs on a highly scalable Apache Cassandra database on Google Cloud. Now, second part, going back to large-scale enterprises, Home Depot, being how progressive they are, they understood cloud does not mean recoverability. Cloud gives me the scale, cloud gives me the economics, cloud gives me the availability, but it doesn't give me the point in time, and I need myself to be covered against that "what if" moment. We have hold-the-delta moments, we have hold-the-gitlack moments, SalesForce.com down with that human error, right? You don't want to be in that position as a Home Depot. >> You mean Amazon went down? >> Tarun: And Amazon. >> Yeah, Amazon went down. >> And if you read the analysis, the analysis was, "We're sorry guys, there was a human error. "Somebody was meant to change this directory; "he changed that directory." >> So this is a whole new game. One of the fears that the enterprises have is that in a new architecture, besides security, which is a huge issue, we'll have another segment on that shortly, but is that I want to leverage the capabilities of the partner in the cloud, because manageability, certain things, I don't want to build on my own, and so I can see you guys being a new modern piece because the data piece is so important because I'm storing at the edge, I'm not moving data around, so there's no data in motion as much as it is on premise. Is that a big part of this? >> It is, from a, I'll zoom out again, from a CIO perspective, we pitched this to about 100+ CIOs so far. From there it is truly, and I hate to use this word, but it's truly a multi-cloud world, John. They have invested in private clouds and an on-prem infrastructure that ain't going anywhere anytime soon. They are moving some of their SAP instances to a CenturyLink, MSPs, the managed service providers, but they know, as a CIO, I have my application developers and I have my lines of businesses- >> John: And they have their operations guys, too. >> Who want to go as fast as they can. I'll come back to the operations in a second because you'll be very surprised to hear this, but again from a CIO down, he wants to make his application developers to go as fast as they can, and he wants the lines of business just to go open up the next applications- >> John: Because that's top-line revenue right there. >> That's top-line revenue right there. So they want scale, they want agility, but they don't want to sacrifice that insurance piece. Going back to the IT ops and the dev-ops and the classical ops, you'll be surprised, we've been working with this team, our lead-in to the Fortune 100 home improvement retailer was a line of business, but right now it's all about their core IT team. Their IT ops team, the database admins, the database ops people, they are the ones who are really running this product day-to-day, day in and day out, and scaling it, and using it at the pace they need to. >> What's the big misconception, if you could point to, about Google, because one of the things we're trying to surface is that Amazon and Google, it's not apples to apples comparison, they're different clouds, and it is multi-cloud, I want to get you to that question today, but we can get to that in a second, what your definition of that means, but for now, what is the big misconception in your mind, people might misconstrue with Google? >> That's a great question, John, and I was hearing your previous interview with Akash, and again, I'll give you our partner-centric view; a young start-up built something disruptive for that platform. We got Amazon as the first platform. We have a good set of customers running on Amazon, and of course, this home improvement retailer took us to Google Cloud, "Hey guys, if you want to work with us, "you have to support Google Cloud." We went to Google Cloud, and the amount of pull that we got from Google Cloud folks to make it happen in less than three months was phenomenal. They didn't stop at that. They brought their solution architect team, Google Cloud, wrote a paper about Datos, their team, and posted it on their website. "How to use Datos on Google Cloud." Fascinating. Amazon has never done that. It, again, speaks to if you see all the announcements that came out yesterday, Google Cloud has been a significant- >> Well Google's partnering, Google's partnering, one of the things that came out of today's news that has been teased out is Diane Green said in the keynote, "I like partnering." She used the word, "I like partnering," meaning Google, and she has that DNA. She's from VM, where she knows the valley game, she understands ecosystems. She also likes to work on some cool stuff, which could be a double-edged sword. She's always been innovating. But Google has the tech, and she knows enterprise, so they're marching down that road. What areas would you say Google needs to sharpen up a little bit to kind of move faster on? I mean, obviously there's no critique on them; they're pedaling as fast as they can, but in the areas you think they should work on, is it security, is it the data side, what are the things that you think they've got to pedal a little faster on. >> I would definitely start with enterprising touch. I think they need to really amp up the game around enterprise. >> John: You mean the people, the process? >> The people, the processes, the onboarding, the deployment, giving them the blue templates, giving them reference architectures, giving them, hand ruling them a little bit, and I think that'll go a long ways- >> John: The basic enterprise motions. >> Yes, you need that. You're a cloud; that doesn't mean my database guy is not going to need the help of a Google Cloud admin to help me onboard. They need that wrap-up. From their point on they build phenomenal scalable services. Snap invested two billion dollars in Google Cloud. They understand- >> And Amazon got the other half, but- >> The underlying infrastructure is there. >> Yeah but this is the thing. The problem that, the problem is that there's two perspectives of what we see. One is people want to run like Google in the sense of how they're scaling, but not everyone has Google-like infrastructure, so I think Google has to kind of, they want the developers, in my mind, they get a A+ there, with open source, what they do with Kubernetes and whatnot, the operational orientation is something they've got to work on, SLAs are more important than price. >> Managing the orchestration piece, giving them the visibility, letting them come on and come off, and going back to multi-cloud, I'll tell you again, the same customer took us to a use case, which is so fascinating, John. They want on-prem backup and recovery. Remember, protection is the Trojan horse. Protection, it all starts with protection. >> It's always one of those things that's always been front and center. You saw that. It used to be kind of a throw-away thing. "Oh, what about backup? "Oh, we didn't factor in." Now it's front and center, certainly cloud is going to be impacted because data's everywhere. Data's going to be highly frictionless. Okay, question, and final question on this piece, where we talk about what you guys are doing, what does multi-cloud mean, or two questions: what is the definition of multi-cloud, and what does cloud-native mean to you? Define those terms. >> Absolutely. Those two terms are very, very close to us. So multi-cloud, I'll begin with that. I'll give you a customer use case that will hopefully ground the conversation. A multi-cloud essentially means from a customer perspective, I'm going to run on-prem infrastructure, I want to be able to recover or manage that data in the cloud, I don't want to make multiple copies, I don't want to duplicate data, I want to recover a version of that data in the cloud, why? Because I have my application developers who want to test staff. I want my DR to be in a different cloud. I do not want to put all my eggs in one basket. So again, it is truly- >> John: It's a diversity issue. >> It is, and they want multiple-use cases to be spread across clouds. Some clouds have strength in DR, some clouds, like Amazon, have strength in orchestration, and onboarding, and some cloud platforms like Google Cloud have strengths in, hey, you can bring your application developers and you don't have to worry about retail. Some of the retailers, like Gap, like Safeway, like eBay, those guys will hesitate to go to Amazon because they know Amazon, at the heart, is a retail business. >> So conflict there. Now, cloud-native. Define cloud-native. >> Cloud-native, to us, is you have Oracle running that database natively within the services of the cloud. For example, take Amazon Dynamo DB. It's a beautiful example of a cloud-native service. You don't run Dynamo DB on-prem. It was built ultimately for the cloud. Cloud Spanner, another example of cloud-native. It is built for that infrastructure, floor ground up, and has been nurtured for the last ten years for the elastic infrastructure. >> Alright, Tarun, great to have you on. Quick plug for what you guys are doing. What's next? You got the Series A, you're getting customers, you got a big customer you can't talk about, but it's in the Register article, Home Depot. What other things are you working on? What's the key priorities? Hiring? You've got some new announcements coming up I hear. Rumor mill, I won't say who they are, but you're partnering. What's the key focus? What's your key objectives? >> No, we only stay focused on building, and as you early on said, it's still early for us. We want to stay focused on getting customer acquisition, customer momentum, deploying those customers, making them happy customers, having them become referenceable customers for us, and of course, the next big focus for me personally is going to be bringing some of the people in the team, some of the people who can help me scale the company- >> John: Engineering- >> Engineering, marketing, business development, sales, go to market, so that's going to be second we're to focus, and third, and again, you'll hear the announcement coming very quickly, we're going to be partnering with some of the leading enterprise infrastructure companies, both on their enterprise traditional storage companies, and some of the leading, I'm just going to leave it at that. >> And True Ventures is the seed investor and Lightspeed on the Series A, the True company on the Series A with them. 'Cause they tend to follow, they don't leave you hanging. >> Yeah, Puneet is excellent. I love him. >> Yeah, John Callahan's company's got great stuff. And they had some great eggs, they had FitBit and they've got a lot of great stuff going on. >> Well they're excellent, excellent pro-entrepreneur people. Great to work with as well. >> High integrity, great people. Tarun, thanks for coming on and sharing the entrepreneurial perspective, the innovation perspective, certainly as a Google partner, good to have your reaction and analysis. >> Thank you, John. >> It's The Cube, bringing you all the action from Google Next here in our studio. More Google Next coverage after this short break. (The Cube Theme)