>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >>Good morning cube land and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Carl holes, our, he is the supervisor of infrastructure Shumaker loop and Kendrick based in Toledo, Ohio. Thank you so much for coming on the show tomorrow. So tell our viewers first of all a little bit about uh, she make her loop. So Schulich >>is a top 200 law firm in the U S we have seven locations across the country, most of the East coast and we serve as anything from litigation to environmental to legal and things like that. >>Okay. So you and you are the supervisor of infrastructure. >>Yeah, my role there is to make sure anything with plugs and switches keeps working, so. >>All right. And so Carl, tell us a little bit about, you said you've got multiple occasions once that span and to the lawyers tell you everything and how it must be. >>The lawyers definitely have a say in the way things work. We have most of the locations in Florida and the Carolinas and two in Ohio. Okay. >>Um, and you know, with the locations, you know, what are some of the business drivers that you're going on? When I talked to most companies, you know, there's the constant change. Is there M and a happening? Is it growth? What are some of the drivers of your business? >>Oh, for sure it's growth. You know, obviously as time goes on there's more and more cases, more and more legal things have to happen. Lawyers love documents, so we have to store documents, index amend, make sure that they're always available for their use. And then of course, as part of that too, there's, there's legals holds on things, you know, stuff the case that stretches over, you know, five, 10 years. We need to keep that data safe. Yeah. So I would, >>I think that the word compliance is one that you know, all too well. Exactly. Bring us in a little bit to them. Side is, so some of those, you know, what do you have to be concerned about? You know, how many petabytes exabytes of things in years >>I'll have to that. It depends on the kind of case it is and what it involves. Some, some cases, as long as you have the data in some form you're okay. Other cases the data can't change. So we have systems that might be a little older because they, it has to be as it was when we actually had the case come into us. Okay. That's challenging too. So data, when we talked to so many companies, it's, you know, how can I monetize data? How can I do that? Data has to be a slightly different role inside your organization. How, how's that thought of, >> we have to be careful obviously because conflict of interest, you know, we so have to keep data separate in some instances and internally, not everybody can see the same data because there is issues with privacy or hippo or you know, or so on and so forth that they can't see this stuff. So for us, we need to keep it safe more than monetize it. >>So as you said, the lawyers have a, have a big say in how things empower things happen. So how would you describe the approach and mindset of, of Chyulu toward technology and toward cloud-based and new kinds of, to, to store >>and keep data safe? We, our goal is to make sure things are always online. Um, so we kind of tend toward the more, the more tried and true methods of doing things, the bleeding edge doesn't always work for us. So, but we also can't afford to, to lag behind. So we need to find that balance in between somehow to keep things moving, but the same time make sure that things don't go down or offline fraternities. So protecting and backing up your data across a hybrid environment isn't easy. So Ty, and I know you, you are on a panel here at ignite about, uh, backup disasters and how to avoid them. So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about, about how you think about this and then, and how you interview vendors, vendors and decide what's the right solution for your show. >> Every different, I guess a practice inside of law firm has different ways of getting data. They like their programs this way or that way and they're all different. So the hard part for us is how to keep that data always available to them in different systems. So whatever we do has to encompass making sure these all, all these things work, you know, kind of as, as one. So we've used Cohesity to do backups, we've used Xero to do dr mixer always online. >>Okay. And how long have you been using those solutions? I, how did you reach the kind of those decisions? >>Those were brought in? Just as I joined the firm about a year and a half ago. Um, our vendor who we're using is very tight with Cohesity and Xero and said that might be a good idea. And the more I use them, the more I agree with that. And they're all good. >>So you're saying it's your, your CI, your channel partner channel that does, that. They're trusted, they provide your gear, advise you on the software. Because let's be honest, as time goes on, you can't know everything. So you need to somebody that you can trust to bring in and say, Hey, do it this way. Well, yeah, Carl, I mean, I don't know if you caught the day one keynote, but even those of us that watch the industry in DOE, it's, there's no way any of us could keep up at though. So that, that, that's really important. How do you make sure that you know that that's a trusted advisor? You know, what's, what's the kind of the give and take between them? >>I think a lot of that comes down to a gut feeling, right? I you, if you feel slimy when you meet somebody, you know, they don't have your best interests in mind and that's what you want. Not my best interest, but the interest of the firm and of the company. So once you have established those guidelines, you usually can trust what they're saying. And I guess every time you meet them too, you have to reevaluate is this still a good fit? >> So when you comes to backup and recovery, I'd love to hear more about this panel and how you and your colleagues came to conclusions about how here's some, here's some big ones and here's how you can avoid them. So I think for us it was just what worked and what didn't work. You know, we all, all three of us use this stuff day to day. So we found the pitfalls, we found what you should and shouldn't do. And when we share that with the, with the community, we get some good feedback on that. >>So Carl, a year and a half there, any, any specific advice that you'd share? People as to what you've learned? Say I hired pitfalls in there as you know, was it a configuration issue or something went wrong because we know the best intentions and best products out there, so you know, things can get in the way. Yeah, >>definitely. We've learned to keep support clothes. I mean, they're awesome. They know their stuff. There's some things we've had issues with that I wanted to do that it wasn't a good fit or we've ran into some bugs here and there, but they're really responsive and they'll put all the alpha specialists for you and weeks, you know, and things just end up working. >> Alright, so here at the conference, what are some of the conversations that you're having because you are in the legal industry and so not necessarily community college communicating all day with people in the high tech industry. So bring us inside a little, tell us about the conversations you're having, interesting people that you're meeting, things that are sparking your interest. >> It's neat because I've met some people through the panel I was on yesterday and they're asking questions that don't even title legal. You know, they have the same access as we do, but they are just either apply to manufacturing or applied to natural gas or whatever happens to be. Um, and then when you know, meetings from the vendors here, it's interesting too, you know, I'm an illegal mindset now and they say, Hey, what about this? And you go, Oh, that's some game changer. And you know, and all of a sudden you can apply it to your field. >>More sense. Yeah. How about this your first time attending Microsoft ignite? Give us a little bit your impressions, you know, uh, the, the, the good, the bad. And the interesting is it's really >>big. I walked through here Sunday night when when nobody was here. It's like, Oh, this isn't too bad. And then I think I walked 10 miles the first day getting places and it's usually pretty well laid out and unless there's beer or food and everybody kind of goes to it and it's hard to move around. But other than that I think it's pretty cool. So what are the kinds of things you're going to take back? As you said, you are sometimes talking to people who are in a completely different industry with you and they are saying things that spark your interest and spark new ideas. What are the kinds of things you're going to take back to shoe loop when you arrive back in total Toledo, we're trying to look at all these new buzzwords like on new, but like blockchain or AI and how they can help us do our jobs better and serve their attorneys better. Um, is there something that I haven't thought of that blockchain can, can do this >>for us and better than we're doing it now now. So Carl, one of the things we've noticed there, there's a real growth in some of the developer content here as an infrastructure person. And I'm curious your view on that, that that side of the world. >>That is not my strong suit. Obviously I came from a world where that was a big deal and I could learn some things. But as far as my background goes and learning about it, it's kinda over my head. Um, you know, I can get it behind this stuff, talk to automate processes and make things, you know better. But as far as the dev side, I'm kind of going, Hey, no, I know if I get this, but, but there is such a push here for citizens and for citizen developers and to sort of democratize this and say even you can do this, which is awesome and in a way because the more eyes have on something, the better they go. You know I can even if I don't understand something, I can ask the question, Hey, why is this work this way? You go, Oh it shouldn't work this way. >>Let's fix this and and make things better. You know. Anything more about kinda your firm's relationship with Microsoft? So many announcements here. Not, no, not sure if teams has used a in your environment. We are using Skype right now but we have way pushed to go to two teams. So that's going to be a big, big push for us in queue for this year and digging next year and then we're looking at moving to Azure at some point. Getting our stuff up there and making you know to be most effective, faster, better. How do you stay up to date with all of these new announcements and not just here at Microsoft, but even in the larger technology community. You can't stop learning. You can't stop reading. You know? You look at the like the slash dots of the world and you just keep looking at things and some things may make sense. >>Some things I'm like, Oh, that's kind of cool. I'll read it later. All of a sudden it goes, Oh, that's a big idea and we should look at this some more. But again, it's having those trusted people that you know or colleagues that say, Hey, I saw this. I saw that. Take a look at that suit. You think so? I know in your, in your off time, you are an officiant of a number of different sports. I'm curious to hear how you bring what you do as an officiant into your job at shoe loop and the similarities. The differences. In my help desk days, it was a lot easier because I could take the, the end user ratings a lot easier because I will hold nothing personal, but it's neat too. I mean, when you're an official, you have, there's a, there's a way things work. There's a, there's a set of rules you have to follow and, and it, and even anything that's technology based there, it's all logical progression of things. This is the way things work and not they blinders as much, but as much as you just follow the process, which makes this audience here. Great. Well thank you so much Carla, for having me. It was great having you on the show. Thank you guys. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage. Microsoft ignite.

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube and Horizon three.ai special presentation. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We with Chris Hill, Sector head for strategic accounts and federal@horizonthree.ai. Great innovative company. Chris, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >>Yeah, like I said, you know, great to meet you John. Long time listener. First time call. So excited to be here with >>You guys. Yeah, we were talking before camera. You had Splunk back in 2013 and I think 2012 was our first splunk.com. Yep. And boy man, you know, talk about being in the right place at the right time. Now we're at another inflection point and Splunk continues to be relevant and continuing to have that data driving security and that interplay. And your ceo, former CTO of Splunk as well at Horizons Neha, who's been on before. Really innovative product you guys have, but you know, Yeah, don't wait for a brief to find out if you're locking the right data. This is the topic of this thread. Splunk is very much part of this new international expansion announcement with you guys. Tell us what are some of the challenges that you see where this is relevant for the Splunk and the Horizon AI as you guys expand Node zero out internationally? >>Yeah, well so across, so you know, my role within Splunk was working with our most strategic accounts. And so I look back to 2013 and I think about the sales process like working with, with our small customers. You know, it was, it was still very siloed back then. Like I was selling to an IT team that was either using us for IT operations. We generally would always even say, yeah, although we do security, we weren't really designed for it. We're a log management tool. And you know, we, and I'm sure you remember back then John, we were like sort of stepping into the security space and in the public sector domain that I was in, you know, security was 70% of what we did. When I look back to sort of the transformation that I was, was witnessing in that digital transformation, you know when I, you look at like 2019 to today, you look at how the IT team and the security teams are, have been forced to break down those barriers that they used to sort of be silo away, would not communicate one, you know, the security guys would be like, Oh this is my BA box it, you're not allowed in today. >>You can't get away with that. And I think that the value that we bring to, you know, and of course Splunk has been a huge leader in that space and continues to do innovation across the board. But I think what we've we're seeing in the space that I was talking with Patrick Kauflin, the SVP of security markets about this, is that, you know, what we've been able to do with Splunk is build a purpose built solution that allows Splunk to eat more data. So Splunk itself, as you well know, it's an ingest engine, right? So the great reason people bought it was you could build these really fast dashboards and grab intelligence out of it, but without data it doesn't do anything, right? So how do you drive and how do you bring more data in? And most importantly from a customer perspective, how do you bring the right data in? >>And so if you think about what node zero and what we're doing in a Horizon three is that, sure we do pen testing, but because we're an autonomous pen testing tool, we do it continuously. So this whole thought of being like, Oh, crud like my customers, Oh yeah, we got a pen test coming up, it's gonna be six weeks. The wait. Oh yeah. You know, and everyone's gonna sit on their hands, Call me back in two months, Chris, we'll talk to you then. Right? Not, not a real efficient way to test your environment and shoot, we, we saw that with Uber this week. Right? You know, and that's a case where we could have helped. >>Well just real quick, explain the Uber thing cause it was a contractor. Just give a quick highlight of what happened so you can connect the >>Dots. Yeah, no problem. So there it was, I think it was one of those, you know, games where they would try and test an environment. And what the pen tester did was he kept on calling them MFA guys being like, I need to reset my password re to set my password. And eventually the customer service guy said, Okay, I'm resetting it. Once he had reset and bypassed the multifactor authentication, he then was able to get in and get access to the domain area that he was in or the, not the domain, but he was able to gain access to a partial part of the network. He then paralleled over to what would I assume is like a VA VMware or some virtual machine that had notes that had all of the credentials for logging into various domains. And so within minutes they had access. And that's the sort of stuff that we do under, you know, a lot of these tools. >>Like not, and I'm not, you know, you think about the cacophony of tools that are out there in a CTA orchestra architecture, right? I'm gonna get like a Zscaler, I'm gonna have Okta, I'm gonna have a Splunk, I'm gonna do this sore system. I mean, I don't mean to name names, we're gonna have crowd strike or, or Sentinel one in there. It's just, it's a cacophony of things that don't work together. They weren't designed work together. And so we have seen so many times in our business through our customer support and just working with customers when we do their pen test, that there will be 5,000 servers out there. Three are misconfigured. Those three misconfigurations will create the open door. Cause remember the hacker only needs to be right once, the defender needs to be right all the time. And that's the challenge. And so that's why I'm really passionate about what we're doing here at Horizon three. I see this my digital transformation, migration and security going on, which we're at the tip of the sp, it's why I joined say Hall coming on this journey and just super excited about where the path's going and super excited about the relationship with Splunk. I get into more details on some of the specifics of that. But you know, >>I mean, well you're nailing, I mean we've been doing a lot of things around super cloud and this next gen environment, we're calling it NextGen. You're really seeing DevOps, obviously Dev SecOps has, has already won the IT role has moved to the developer shift left as an indicator of that. It's one of the many examples, higher velocity code software supply chain. You hear these things. That means that it is now in the developer hands, it is replaced by the new ops, data ops teams and security where there's a lot of horizontal thinking. To your point about access, there's no more perimeter. So >>That there is no perimeter. >>Huge. A hundred percent right, is really right on. I don't think it's one time, you know, to get in there. Once you're in, then you can hang out, move around, move laterally. Big problem. Okay, so we get that. Now, the challenges for these teams as they are transitioning organizationally, how do they figure out what to do? Okay, this is the next step. They already have Splunk, so now they're kind of in transition while protecting for a hundred percent ratio of success. So how would you look at that and describe the challenges? What do they do? What is, what are the teams facing with their data and what's next? What do they, what do they, what action do they take? >>So let's do some vernacular that folks will know. So if I think about dev sec ops, right? We both know what that means, that I'm gonna build security into the app, but no one really talks about SEC DevOps, right? How am I building security around the perimeter of what's going inside my ecosystem and what are they doing? And so if you think about what we're able to do with somebody like Splunk is we could pen test the entire environment from soup to nuts, right? So I'm gonna test the end points through to it. So I'm gonna look for misconfigurations, I'm gonna, and I'm gonna look for credential exposed credentials. You know, I'm gonna look for anything I can in the environment. Again, I'm gonna do it at at light speed. And, and what we're, what we're doing for that SEC dev space is to, you know, did you detect that we were in your environment? >>So did we alert Splunk or the SIM that there's someone in the environment laterally moving around? Did they, more importantly, did they log us into their environment? And when did they detect that log to trigger that log? Did they alert on us? And then finally, most importantly, for every CSO out there is gonna be did they stop us? And so that's how we, we, we do this in, I think you, when speaking with Stay Hall, before, you know, we've come up with this boils U Loop, but we call it fine fix verify. So what we do is we go in is we act as the attacker, right? We act in a production environment. So we're not gonna be, we're a passive attacker, but we will go in un credentialed UN agents. But we have to assume, have an assumed breach model, which means we're gonna put a Docker container in your environment and then we're going to fingerprint the environment. >>So we're gonna go out and do an asset survey. Now that's something that's not something that Splunk does super well, you know, so can Splunk see all the assets, do the same assets marry up? We're gonna log all that data and think then put load that into the Splunk sim or the smoke logging tools just to have it in enterprise, right? That's an immediate future ad that they've got. And then we've got the fix. So once we've completed our pen test, we are then gonna generate a report and we could talk about about these in a little bit later. But the reports will show an executive summary the assets that we found, which would be your asset discovery aspect of that, a fixed report. And the fixed report I think is probably the most important one. It will go down and identify what we did, how we did it, and then how to fix that. >>And then from that, the pen tester or the organization should fix those. Then they go back and run another test. And then they validate through like a change detection environment to see, hey, did those fixes taste, play take place? And you know, SNA Hall, when he was the CTO of JS o, he shared with me a number of times about, he's like, Man, there would be 15 more items on next week's punch sheet that we didn't know about. And it's, and it has to do with how we, you know, how they were prioritizing the CVEs and whatnot because they would take all CVS was critical or non-critical. And it's like we are able to create context in that environment that feeds better information into Splunk and whatnot. That >>Was a lot. That brings, that brings up the, the efficiency for Splunk specifically. The teams out there. By the way, the burnout thing is real. I mean, this whole, I just finished my list and I got 15 more or whatever the list just can, keeps, keeps growing. How did Node zero specifically help Splunk teams be more efficient? Now that's the question I want to get at, because this seems like a very scalable way for Splunk customers and teams, service teams to be more efficient. So the question is, how does Node zero help make Splunk specifically their service teams be more efficient? >>So to, so today in our early interactions with building Splunk customers, what we've seen are five things, and I'll start with sort of identifying the blind spots, right? So kind of what I just talked about with you. Did we detect, did we log, did we alert? Did they stop node zero, right? And so I would, I put that at, you know, a a a more layman's third grade term. And if I was gonna beat a fifth grader at this game would be, we can be the sparring partner for a Splunk enterprise customer, a Splunk essentials customer, someone using Splunk soar, or even just an enterprise Splunk customer that may be a small shop with three people and, and just wants to know where am I exposed. So by creating and generating these reports and then having the API that actually generates the dashboard, they can take all of these events that we've logged and log them in. >>And then where that then comes in is number two is how do we prioritize those logs, right? So how do we create visibility to logs that are, have critical impacts? And again, as I mentioned earlier, not all CVEs are high impact regard and also not all are low, right? So if you daisy chain a bunch of low CVEs together, boom, I've got a mission critical AP CVE that needs to be fixed now, such as a credential moving to an NT box that's got a text file with a bunch of passwords on it, that would be very bad. And then third would be verifying that you have all of the hosts. So one of the things that Splunk's not particularly great at, and they, they themselves, they don't do asset discovery. So do what assets do we see and what are they logging from that? And then for, from, for every event that they are able to identify the, one of the cool things that we can do is actually create this low-code, no-code environment. >>So they could let, you know, float customers can use Splunk. So to actually triage events and prioritize that events or where they're being routed within it to optimize the SOX team time to market or time to triage any given event. Obviously reducing mtr. And then finally, I think one of the neatest things that we'll be seeing us develop is our ability to build glass tables. So behind me you'll see one of our triage events and how we build a lock Lockheed Martin kill chain on that with a glass table, which is very familiar to this Splunk community. We're going to have the ability, not too distant future to allow people to search, observe on those IOCs. And if people aren't familiar with an ioc, it's an incident of compromise. So that's a vector that we want to drill into. And of course who's better at drilling in into data and Splunk. >>Yeah, this is a critical, this is awesome synergy there. I mean I can see a Splunk customer going, Man, this just gives me so much more capability. Action actionability. And also real understanding, and I think this is what I wanna dig into, if you don't mind understanding that critical impact, okay. Is kind of where I see this coming. I got the data, data ingest now data's data. But the question is what not to log, You know, where are things misconfigured? These are critical questions. So can you talk about what it means to understand critical impact? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, going back to those things that I just spoke about, a lot of those CVEs where you'll see low, low, low and then you daisy chain together and you're suddenly like, oh, this is high now. But then to your other impact of like if you're a, if you're a a Splunk customer, you know, and I had, I had several of them, I had one customer that, you know, terabytes of McAfee data being brought in and it was like, all right, there's a lot of other data that you probably also wanna bring, but they could only afford, wanted to do certain data sets because that's, and they didn't know how to prioritize or filter those data sets. And so we provide that opportunity to say, Hey, these are the critical ones to bring in. But there's also the ones that you don't necessarily need to bring in because low CVE in this case really does mean low cve. >>Like an ILO server would be one that, that's the print server where the, your admin credentials are on, on like a, a printer. And so there will be credentials on that. That's something that a hacker might go in to look at. So although the CVE on it is low, if you daisy chain was something that's able to get into that, you might say, ah, that's high. And we would then potentially rank it giving our AI logic to say that's a moderate. So put it on the scale and we prioritize though, versus a, a vulner review scanner's just gonna give you a bunch of CVEs and good luck. >>And translating that if I, if I can and tell me if I'm wrong, that kind of speaks to that whole lateral movement. That's it. Challenge, right? Print server, great example, look stupid low end, who's gonna wanna deal with the print server? Oh, but it's connected into a critical system. There's a path. Is that kind of what you're getting at? >>Yeah, I used daisy chain. I think that's from the community they came from. But it's, it's just a lateral movement. It's exactly what they're doing. And those low level, low critical lateral movements is where the hackers are getting in. Right? So that's what the beauty thing about the, the Uber example is that who would've thought, you know, I've got my multifactor authentication going in a human made a mistake. We can't, we can't not expect humans to make mistakes. Were fall, were fallible, right? Yeah. The reality is is once they were in the environment, they could have protected themselves by running enough pen tests to know that they had certain exposed credentials that would've stopped the breach. Yeah. And they did not, had not done that in their environment. And I'm not poking. Yeah, >>They put it's interesting trend though. I mean it's obvious if sometimes those low end items are also not protected well. So it's easy to get at from a hacker standpoint, but also the people in charge of them can be fished easily or spear fished because they're not paying attention. Cause they don't have to. No one ever told them, Hey, be careful of what you collect. >>Yeah. For the community that I came from, John, that's exactly how they, they would meet you at a, an international event introduce themselves as a graduate student. These are national actor states. Would you mind reviewing my thesis on such and such? And I was at Adobe at the time though I was working on this and start off, you get the pdf, they opened the PDF and whoever that customer was launches, and I don't know if you remember back in like 2002, 2008 time frame, there was a lot of issues around IP being by a nation state being stolen from the United States and that's exactly how they did it. And John, that's >>Or LinkedIn. Hey I wanna get a joke, we wanna hire you double the salary. Oh I'm gonna click on that for sure. You know? Yeah, >>Right. Exactly. Yeah. The one thing I would say to you is like when we look at like sort of, you know, cuz I think we did 10,000 pen test last year is it's probably over that now, you know, we have these sort of top 10 ways that we think then fine people coming into the environment. The funniest thing is that only one of them is a, a CVE related vulnerability. Like, you know, you guys know what they are, right? So it's it, but it's, it's like 2% of the attacks are occurring through the CVEs, but yet there's all that attention spent to that. Yeah. And very little attention spent to this pen testing side. Yeah. Which is sort of this continuous threat, you know, monitoring space and, and, and this vulnerability space where I think we play such an important role and I'm so excited to be a part of the tip of the spear on this one. >>Yeah. I'm old enough to know the movie sneakers, which I love as a, you know, watching that movie, you know, professional hackers are testing, testing, always testing the environment. I love this. I gotta ask you, as we kind of wrap up here, Chris, if you don't mind the benefits to team professional services from this alliance, big news Splunk and you guys work well together. We see that clearly. What are, what other benefits do professional services teams see from the Splunk and Horizon three AI alliance? >>So if you're a, I think for, from our, our, from both of our partners as we bring these guys together and many of them already are the same partner, right? Is that first off, the licensing model is probably one of the key areas that we really excel at. So if you're an end user, you can buy for the enterprise by the enter of IP addresses you're using. But if you're a partner working with this, there's solution ways that you can go in and we'll license as to MSPs and what that business model on our MSPs looks like. But the unique thing that we do here is this c plus license. And so the Consulting Plus license allows like a, somebody a small to midsize to some very large, you know, Fortune 100, you know, consulting firms uses by buying into a license called Consulting Plus where they can have unlimited access to as many ips as they want. >>But you can only run one test at a time. And as you can imagine when we're going and hacking passwords and checking hashes and decrypting hashes, that can take a while. So, but for the right customer, it's, it's a perfect tool. And so I I'm so excited about our ability to go to market with our partners so that we underhand to sell, understand how not to just sell too or not tell just to sell through, but we know how to sell with them as a good vendor partner. I think that that's one thing that we've done a really good job building bringing into market. >>Yeah. I think also the Splunk has had great success how they've enabled partners and professional services. Absolutely. They've, you know, the services that layer on top of Splunk are multifold tons of great benefits. So you guys vector right into that ride, that wave with >>Friction. And, and the cool thing is that in, you know, in one of our reports, which could be totally customized with someone else's logo, we're going to generate, you know, so I, I used to work at another organization, it wasn't Splunk, but we, we did, you know, pen testing as a, as a for, for customers and my pen testers would come on site, they, they do the engagement and they would leave. And then another really, someone would be, oh shoot, we got another sector that was breached and they'd call you back, you know, four weeks later. And so by August our entire pen testings teams would be sold out and it would be like, wow. And in March maybe, and they'd like, No, no, no, I gotta breach now. And, and, and then when they do go in, they go through, do the pen test and they hand over a PDF and they pat you on the back and say, there's where your problems are, you need to fix it. And the reality is, is that what we're gonna generate completely autonomously with no human interaction is we're gonna go and find all the permutations that anything we found and the fix for those permutations and then once you fixed everything, you just go back and run another pen test. Yeah. It's, you know, for what people pay for one pen test, they could have a tool that does that. Every, every pat patch on Tuesday pen test on Wednesday, you know, triage throughout the week, >>Green, yellow, red. I wanted to see colors show me green, green is good, right? Not red. >>And once CIO doesn't want, who doesn't want that dashboard, right? It's, it's, it is exactly it. And we can help bring, I think that, you know, I'm really excited about helping drive this with the Splunk team cuz they get that, they understand that it's the green, yellow, red dashboard and, and how do we help them find more green so that the other guys are >>In Yeah. And get in the data and do the right thing and be efficient with how you use the data, Know what to look at. So many things to pay attention to, you know, the combination of both and then, then go to market strategy. Real brilliant. Congratulations Chris. Thanks for coming on and sharing this news with the detail around this Splunk in action around the alliance. Thanks for sharing, >>John. My pleasure. Thanks. Look forward to seeing you soon. >>All right, great. We'll follow up and do another segment on DevOps and IT and security teams as the new new ops, but, and Super cloud, a bunch of other stuff. So thanks for coming on. And our next segment, the CEO of Verizon, three AA, will break down all the new news for us here on the cube. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

>>Hello and welcome today's cube presentation of eight of us startup showcase. I'm john for your host highlighting the hottest companies and devops data analytics and cloud management lisa martin and David want are here to kick it off. We've got a great program for you again. This is our, our new community event model where we're doing every quarter, we have every new episode, this is quarter three this year or episode three, season one of the hottest cloud startups and we're gonna be featured. Then we're gonna do a keynote package and then 15 countries will present their story, Go check them out and then have a closing keynote with a practitioner and we've got some great lineups, lisa Dave, great to see you. Thanks for joining me. >>Hey guys, >>great to be here. So David got to ask you, you know, back in events last night we're at the 14 it's event where they had the golf PGA championship with the cube Now we got the hybrid model, This is the new normal. We're in, we got these great companies were showcasing them. What's your take? >>Well, you're right. I mean, I think there's a combination of things. We're seeing some live shows. We saw what we did with at mobile world Congress. We did the show with AWS storage day where it was, we were at the spheres, there was no, there was a live audience, but they weren't there physically. It was just virtual and yeah, so, and I just got pained about reinvent. Hey Dave, you gotta make your flights. So I'm making my flights >>were gonna be at the amazon web services, public sector summit next week. At least a lot, a lot of cloud convergence going on here. We got many companies being featured here that we spoke with the Ceo and their top people cloud management, devops data, nelson security. Really cutting edge companies, >>yes, cutting edge companies who are all focused on acceleration. We've talked about the acceleration of digital transformation the last 18 months and we've seen a tremendous amount of acceleration in innovation with what these startups are doing. We've talked to like you said, there's, there's C suite, we've also talked to their customers about how they are innovating so quickly with this hybrid environment, this remote work and we've talked a lot about security in the last week or so. You mentioned that we were at Fortinet cybersecurity skills gap. What some of these companies are doing with automation for example, to help shorten that gap, which is a big opportunity >>for the job market. Great stuff. Dave so the format of this event, you're going to have a fireside chat with the practitioner, we'd like to end these programs with a great experienced practitioner cutting edge in data february. The beginning lisa are gonna be kicking off with of course Jeff bar to give us the update on what's going on AWS and then a special presentation from Emily Freeman who is the author of devops for dummies, she's introducing new content. The revolution in devops devops two point oh and of course jerry Chen from Greylock cube alumni is going to come on and talk about his new thesis castles in the cloud creating moats at cloud scale. We've got a great lineup of people and so the front ends can be great. Dave give us a little preview of what people can expect at the end of the fireside chat. >>Well at the highest level john I've always said we're entering that sort of third great wave of cloud. First wave was experimentation. The second big wave was migration. The third wave of integration, Deep business integration and what you're >>going to hear from >>Hello Fresh today is how they like many companies that started early last decade. They started with an on prem Hadoop system and then of course we all know what happened is S three essentially took the knees out from, from the on prem Hadoop market lowered costs, brought things into the cloud and what Hello Fresh is doing is they're transforming from that legacy Hadoop system into its running on AWS but into a data mess, you know, it's a passionate topic of mine. Hello Fresh was scaling they realized that they couldn't keep up so they had to rethink their entire data architecture and they built it around data mesh Clements key and christoph Soewandi gonna explain how they actually did that are on a journey or decentralized data >>measure it and your posts have been awesome on data measure. We get a lot of traction. Certainly you're breaking analysis for the folks watching check out David Landes, Breaking analysis every week, highlighting the cutting edge trends in tech Dave. We're gonna see you later, lisa and I are gonna be here in the morning talking about with Emily. We got Jeff Barr teed up. Dave. Thanks for coming on. Looking forward to fireside chat lisa. We'll see you when Emily comes back on. But we're gonna go to Jeff bar right now for Dave and I are gonna interview Jeff. Mm >>Hey Jeff, >>here he is. Hey, how are you? How's it going really well. So I gotta ask you, the reinvent is on, everyone wants to know that's happening right. We're good with Reinvent. >>Reinvent is happening. I've got my hotel and actually listening today, if I just remembered, I still need to actually book my flights. I've got my to do list on my desk and I do need to get my >>flights. Uh, >>really looking forward >>to it. I can't wait to see the all the announcements and blog posts. We're gonna, we're gonna hear from jerry Chen later. I love the after on our next event. Get your reaction to this castle and castles in the cloud where competitive advantages can be built in the cloud. We're seeing examples of that. But first I gotta ask you give us an update of what's going on. The ap and ecosystem has been an incredible uh, celebration these past couple weeks, >>so, so a lot of different things happening and the interesting thing to me is that as part of my job, I often think that I'm effectively living in the future because I get to see all this really cool stuff that we're building just a little bit before our customers get to, and so I'm always thinking okay, here I am now, and what's the world going to be like in a couple of weeks to a month or two when these launches? I'm working on actually get out the door and that, that's always really, really fun, just kind of getting that, that little edge into where we're going, but this year was a little interesting because we had to really significant birthdays, we had the 15 year anniversary of both EC two and S three and we're so focused on innovating and moving forward, that it's actually pretty rare for us at Aws to look back and say, wow, we've actually done all these amazing things in in the last 15 years, >>you know, it's kind of cool Jeff, if I may is is, you know, of course in the early days everybody said, well, a place for startup is a W. S and now the great thing about the startup showcases, we're seeing the startups that >>are >>very near, or some of them have even reached escape velocity, so they're not, they're not tiny little companies anymore, they're in their transforming their respective industries, >>they really are and I think that as they start ups grow, they really start to lean into the power of the cloud. They as they start to think, okay, we've we've got our basic infrastructure in place, we've got, we were serving data, we're serving up a few customers, everything is actually working pretty well for us. We've got our fundamental model proven out now, we can invest in publicity and marketing and scaling and but they don't have to think about what's happening behind the scenes. They just if they've got their auto scaling or if they're survivalists, the infrastructure simply grows to meet their demand and it's it's just a lot less things that they have to worry about. They can focus on the fun part of their business which is actually listening to customers and building up an awesome business >>Jeff as you guys are putting together all the big pre reinvented, knows a lot of stuff that goes on prior as well and they say all the big good stuff to reinvent. But you start to see some themes emerged this year. One of them is modernization of applications, the speed of application development in the cloud with the cloud scale devops personas, whatever persona you want to talk about but basically speed the speed of of the app developers where other departments have been slowing things down, I won't say name names, but security group and I t I mean I shouldn't have said that but only kidding but no but seriously people want in minutes and seconds now not days or weeks. You know whether it's policy. What are some of the trends that you're seeing around this this year as we get into some of the new stuff coming out >>So Dave customers really do want speed and for we've actually encapsulate this for a long time in amazon in what we call the bias for action leadership principle >>where >>we just need to jump in and move forward and and make things happen. A lot of customers look at that and they say yes this is great. We need to have the same bias fraction. Some do. Some are still trying to figure out exactly how to put it into play. And they absolutely for sure need to pay attention to security. They need to respect the past and make sure that whatever they're doing is in line with I. T. But they do want to move forward. And the interesting thing that I see time and time again is it's not simply about let's adopt a new technology. It's how do we >>how do we keep our workforce >>engaged? How do we make sure that they've got the right training? How do we bring our our I. T. Team along for this. Hopefully new and fun and exciting journey where they get to learn some interesting new technologies they've got all this very much accumulated business knowledge they still want to put to use, maybe they're a little bit apprehensive about something brand new and they hear about the cloud, but there by and large, they really want to move forward. They just need a little bit of >>help to make it happen >>real good guys. One of the things you're gonna hear today, we're talking about speed traditionally going fast. Oftentimes you meant you have to sacrifice some things on quality and what you're going to hear from some of the startups today is how they're addressing that to automation and modern devoPS technologies and sort of rethinking that whole application development approach. That's something I'm really excited to see organization is beginning to adopt so they don't have to make that tradeoff anymore. >>Yeah, I would >>never want to see someone >>sacrifice quality, >>but I do think that iterating very quickly and using the best of devoPS principles to be able to iterate incredibly quickly and get that first launch out there and then listen with both ears just >>as much >>as you can, Everything. You hear iterate really quickly to meet those needs in, in hours and days, not months, quarters or years. >>Great stuff. Chef and a lot of the companies were featuring here in the startup showcase represent that new kind of thinking, um, systems thinking as well as you know, the cloud scale and again and it's finally here, the revolution of deVOps is going to the next generation and uh, we're excited to have Emily Freeman who's going to come on and give a little preview for her new talk on this revolution. So Jeff, thank you for coming on, appreciate you sharing the update here on the cube. Happy >>to be. I'm actually really looking forward to hearing from Emily. >>Yeah, it's great. Great. Looking forward to the talk. Brand new Premier, Okay, uh, lisa martin, Emily Freeman is here. She's ready to come in and we're going to preview her lightning talk Emily. Um, thanks for coming on, we really appreciate you coming on really, this is about to talk around deVOPS next gen and I think lisa this is one of those things we've been, we've been discussing with all the companies. It's a new kind of thinking it's a revolution, it's a systems mindset, you're starting to see the connections there she is. Emily, Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you for having me. So your teaser video >>was amazing. Um, you know, that little secret radical idea, something completely different. Um, you gotta talk coming up, what's the premise behind this revolution, you know, these tying together architecture, development, automation deployment, operating altogether. >>Yes, well, we have traditionally always used the sclc, which is the software delivery life cycle. Um, and it is a straight linear process that has actually been around since the sixties, which is wild to me um, and really originated in manufacturing. Um, and as much as I love the Toyota production system and how much it has shown up in devops as a sort of inspiration on how to run things better. We are not making cars, we are making software and I think we have to use different approaches and create a sort of model that better reflects our modern software development process. >>It's a bold idea and looking forward to the talk and as motivation. I went into my basement and dusted off all my books from college in the 80s and the sea estimates it was waterfall. It was software development life cycle. They trained us to think this way and it came from the mainframe people. It was like, it's old school, like really, really old and it really hasn't been updated. Where's the motivation? I actually cloud is kind of converging everything together. We see that, but you kind of hit on this persona thing. Where did that come from this persona? Because you know, people want to put people in buckets release engineer. I mean, where's that motivation coming from? >>Yes, you're absolutely right that it came from the mainframes. I think, you know, waterfall is necessary when you're using a punch card or mag tape to load things onto a mainframe, but we don't exist in that world anymore. Thank goodness. And um, yes, so we, we use personas all the time in tech, you know, even to register, well not actually to register for this event, but a lot events. A lot of events, you have to click that drop down. Right. Are you a developer? Are you a manager, whatever? And the thing is personas are immutable in my opinion. I was a developer. I will always identify as a developer despite playing a lot of different roles and doing a lot of different jobs. Uh, and this can vary throughout the day. Right. You might have someone who has a title of software architect who ends up helping someone pair program or develop or test or deploy. Um, and so we wear a lot of hats day to day and I think our discussions around roles would be a better, um, certainly a better approach than personas >>lease. And I've been discussing with many of these companies around the roles and we're hearing from them directly and they're finding out that people have, they're mixing and matching on teams. So you're, you're an S R E on one team and you're doing something on another team where the workflows and the workloads defined the team formation. So this is a cultural discussion. >>It absolutely is. Yes. I think it is a cultural discussion and it really comes to the heart of devops, right? It's people process. And then tools deVOps has always been about culture and making sure that developers have all the tools they need to be productive and honestly happy. What good is all of this? If developing software isn't a joyful experience. Well, >>I got to ask you, I got you here obviously with server list and functions just starting to see this kind of this next gen. And we're gonna hear from jerry Chen, who's a Greylock VC who's going to talk about castles in the clouds, where he's discussing the moats that could be created with a competitive advantage in cloud scale. And I think he points to the snowflakes of the world. You're starting to see this new thing happening. This is devops 2.0, this is the revolution. Is this kind of where you see the same vision of your talk? >>Yes, so DeVOps created 2000 and 8, 2000 and nine, totally different ecosystem in the world we were living in, you know, we didn't have things like surveillance and containers, we didn't have this sort of default distributed nature, certainly not the cloud. Uh and so I'm very excited for jerry's talk. I'm curious to hear more about these moz. I think it's fascinating. Um but yeah, you're seeing different companies use different tools and processes to accelerate their delivery and that is the competitive advantage. How can we figure out how to utilize these tools in the most efficient way possible. >>Thank you for coming and giving us a preview. Let's now go to your lightning keynote talk. Fresh content. Premier of this revolution in Devops and the Freemans Talk, we'll go there now. >>Hi, I'm Emily Freeman, I'm the author of devops for dummies and the curator of 97 things every cloud engineer should know. I am thrilled to be here with you all today. I am really excited to share with you a kind of a wild idea, a complete re imagining of the S DLC and I want to be clear, I need your feedback. I want to know what you think of this. You can always find me on twitter at editing. Emily, most of my work centers around deVOps and I really can't overstate what an impact the concept of deVOPS has had on this industry in many ways it built on the foundation of Agile to become a default a standard we all reach for in our everyday work. When devops surfaced as an idea in 2008, the tech industry was in a vastly different space. AWS was an infancy offering only a handful of services. Azure and G C P didn't exist yet. The majority's majority of companies maintained their own infrastructure. Developers wrote code and relied on sys admins to deploy new code at scheduled intervals. Sometimes months apart, container technology hadn't been invented applications adhered to a monolithic architecture, databases were almost exclusively relational and serverless wasn't even a concept. Everything from the application to the engineers was centralized. Our current ecosystem couldn't be more different. Software is still hard, don't get me wrong, but we continue to find novel solutions to consistently difficult, persistent problems. Now, some of these end up being a sort of rebranding of old ideas, but others are a unique and clever take to abstracting complexity or automating toil or perhaps most important, rethinking challenging the very premises we have accepted as Cannon for years, if not decades. In the years since deVOps attempted to answer the critical conflict between developers and operations, engineers, deVOps has become a catch all term and there have been a number of derivative works. Devops has come to mean 5000 different things to 5000 different people. For some, it can be distilled to continuous integration and continuous delivery or C I C D. For others, it's simply deploying code more frequently, perhaps adding a smattering of tests for others. Still, its organizational, they've added a platform team, perhaps even a questionably named DEVOPS team or have created an engineering structure that focuses on a separation of concerns. Leaving feature teams to manage the development, deployment, security and maintenance of their siloed services, say, whatever the interpretation, what's important is that there isn't a universally accepted standard. Well, what deVOPS is or what it looks like an execution, it's a philosophy more than anything else. A framework people can utilize to configure and customize their specific circumstances to modern development practices. The characteristic of deVOPS that I think we can all agree on though, is that an attempted to capture the challenges of the entire software development process. It's that broad umbrella, that holistic view that I think we need to breathe life into again, The challenge we face is that DeVOps isn't increasingly outmoded solution to a previous problem developers now face. Cultural and technical challenge is far greater than how to more quickly deploy a monolithic application. Cloud native is the future the next collection of default development decisions and one the deVOPS story can't absorb in its current form. I believe the era of deVOPS is waning and in this moment as the sun sets on deVOPS, we have a unique opportunity to rethink rebuild free platform. Even now, I don't have a crystal ball. That would be very handy. I'm not completely certain with the next decade of tech looks like and I can't write this story alone. I need you but I have some ideas that can get the conversation started, I believe to build on what was we have to throw away assumptions that we've taken for granted all this time in order to move forward. We must first step back. Mhm. The software or systems development life cycle, what we call the S. D. L. C. has been in use since the 1960s and it's remained more or less the same since before color television and the touch tone phone. Over the last 60 or so odd years we've made tweaks, slight adjustments, massaged it. The stages or steps are always a little different with agile and deVOps we sort of looped it into a circle and then an infinity loop we've added pretty colors. But the sclc is more or less the same and it has become an assumption. We don't even think about it anymore, universally adopted constructs like the sclc have an unspoken permanence. They feel as if they have always been and always will be. I think the impact of that is even more potent. If you were born after a construct was popularized. Nearly everything around us is a construct, a model, an artifact of a human idea. The chair you're sitting in the desk, you work at the mug from which you drink coffee or sometimes wine, buildings, toilets, plumbing, roads, cars, art, computers, everything. The sclc is a remnant an artifact of a previous era and I think we should throw it away or perhaps more accurately replace it, replace it with something that better reflects the actual nature of our work. A linear, single threaded model designed for the manufacturer of material goods cannot possibly capture the distributed complexity of modern socio technical systems. It just can't. Mhm. And these two ideas aren't mutually exclusive that the sclc was industry changing, valuable and extraordinarily impactful and that it's time for something new. I believe we are strong enough to hold these two ideas at the same time, showing respect for the past while envisioning the future. Now, I don't know about you, I've never had a software project goes smoothly in one go. No matter how small. Even if I'm the only person working on it and committing directly to master software development is chaos. It's a study and entropy and it is not getting any more simple. The model with which we think and talk about software development must capture the multithreaded, non sequential nature of our work. It should embody the roles engineers take on and the considerations they make along the way. It should build on the foundations of agile and devops and represent the iterative nature of continuous innovation. Now, when I was thinking about this, I was inspired by ideas like extreme programming and the spiral model. I I wanted something that would have layers, threads, even a way of visually representing multiple processes happening in parallel. And what I settled on is the revolution model. I believe the visualization of revolution is capable of capturing the pivotal moments of any software scenario. And I'm going to dive into all the discrete elements. But I want to give you a moment to have a first impression, to absorb my idea. I call it revolution because well for one it revolves, it's circular shape reflects the continuous and iterative nature of our work, but also because it is revolutionary. I am challenging a 60 year old model that is embedded into our daily language. I don't expect Gartner to build a magic quadrant around this tomorrow, but that would be super cool. And you should call me my mission with. This is to challenge the status quo to create a model that I think more accurately reflects the complexity of modern cloud native software development. The revolution model is constructed of five concentric circles describing the critical roles of software development architect. Ng development, automating, deploying and operating intersecting each loop are six spokes that describe the production considerations every engineer has to consider throughout any engineering work and that's test, ability, secure ability, reliability, observe ability, flexibility and scalability. The considerations listed are not all encompassing. There are of course things not explicitly included. I figured if I put 20 spokes, some of us, including myself, might feel a little overwhelmed. So let's dive into each element in this model. We have long used personas as the default way to do divide audiences and tailor messages to group people. Every company in the world right now is repeating the mantra of developers, developers, developers but personas have always bugged me a bit because this approach typically either oversimplifies someone's career are needlessly complicated. Few people fit cleanly and completely into persona based buckets like developers and operations anymore. The lines have gotten fuzzy on the other hand, I don't think we need to specifically tailor messages as to call out the difference between a devops engineer and a release engineer or a security administrator versus a security engineer but perhaps most critically, I believe personas are immutable. A persona is wholly dependent on how someone identifies themselves. It's intrinsic not extrinsic. Their titles may change their jobs may differ, but they're probably still selecting the same persona on that ubiquitous drop down. We all have to choose from when registering for an event. Probably this one too. I I was a developer and I will always identify as a developer despite doing a ton of work in areas like devops and Ai Ops and Deverell in my heart. I'm a developer I think about problems from that perspective. First it influences my thinking and my approach roles are very different. Roles are temporary, inconsistent, constantly fluctuating. If I were an actress, the parts I would play would be lengthy and varied, but the persona I would identify as would remain an actress and artist lesbian. Your work isn't confined to a single set of skills. It may have been a decade ago, but it is not today in any given week or sprint, you may play the role of an architect. Thinking about how to design a feature or service, developer building out code or fixing a bug and on automation engineer, looking at how to improve manual processes. We often refer to as soil release engineer, deploying code to different environments or releasing it to customers or in operations. Engineer ensuring an application functions inconsistent expected ways and no matter what role we play. We have to consider a number of issues. The first is test ability. All software systems require testing to assure architects that designs work developers, the code works operators, that infrastructure is running as expected and engineers of all disciplines that code changes won't bring down the whole system testing in its many forms is what enables systems to be durable and have longevity. It's what reassures engineers that changes won't impact current functionality. A system without tests is a disaster waiting to happen, which is why test ability is first among equals at this particular roundtable. Security is everyone's responsibility. But if you understand how to design and execute secure systems, I struggle with this security incidents for the most part are high impact, low probability events. The really big disasters, the one that the ones that end up on the news and get us all free credit reporting for a year. They don't happen super frequently and then goodness because you know that there are endless small vulnerabilities lurking in our systems. Security is something we all know we should dedicate time to but often don't make time for. And let's be honest, it's hard and complicated and a little scary def sec apps. The first derivative of deVOPS asked engineers to move security left this approach. Mint security was a consideration early in the process, not something that would block release at the last moment. This is also the consideration under which I'm putting compliance and governance well not perfectly aligned. I figure all the things you have to call lawyers for should just live together. I'm kidding. But in all seriousness, these three concepts are really about risk management, identity, data, authorization. It doesn't really matter what specific issue you're speaking about, the question is who has access to what win and how and that is everyone's responsibility at every stage site reliability engineering or sorry, is a discipline job and approach for good reason. It is absolutely critical that applications and services work as expected. Most of the time. That said, availability is often mistakenly treated as a synonym for reliability. Instead, it's a single aspect of the concept if a system is available but customer data is inaccurate or out of sync. The system is not reliable, reliability has five key components, availability, latency, throughput. Fidelity and durability, reliability is the end result. But resiliency for me is the journey the action engineers can take to improve reliability, observe ability is the ability to have insight into an application or system. It's the combination of telemetry and monitoring and alerting available to engineers and leadership. There's an aspect of observe ability that overlaps with reliability, but the purpose of observe ability isn't just to maintain a reliable system though, that is of course important. It is the capacity for engineers working on a system to have visibility into the inner workings of that system. The concept of observe ability actually originates and linear dynamic systems. It's defined as how well internal states of a system can be understood based on information about its external outputs. If it is critical when companies move systems to the cloud or utilize managed services that they don't lose visibility and confidence in their systems. The shared responsibility model of cloud storage compute and managed services require that engineering teams be able to quickly be alerted to identify and remediate issues as they arise. Flexible systems are capable of adapting to meet the ever changing needs of the customer and the market segment, flexible code bases absorb new code smoothly. Embody a clean separation of concerns. Are partitioned into small components or classes and architected to enable the now as well as the next inflexible systems. Change dependencies are reduced or eliminated. Database schemas accommodate change well components, communicate via a standardized and well documented A. P. I. The only thing constant in our industry is change and every role we play, creating flexibility and solutions that can be flexible that will grow as the applications grow is absolutely critical. Finally, scalability scalability refers to more than a system's ability to scale for additional load. It implies growth scalability and the revolution model carries the continuous innovation of a team and the byproducts of that growth within a system. For me, scalability is the most human of the considerations. It requires each of us in our various roles to consider everyone around us, our customers who use the system or rely on its services, our colleagues current and future with whom we collaborate and even our future selves. Mhm. Software development isn't a straight line, nor is it a perfect loop. It is an ever changing complex dance. There are twirls and pivots and difficult spins forward and backward. Engineers move in parallel, creating truly magnificent pieces of art. We need a modern model for this modern era and I believe this is just the revolution to get us started. Thank you so much for having me. >>Hey, we're back here. Live in the keynote studio. I'm john for your host here with lisa martin. David lot is getting ready for the fireside chat ending keynote with the practitioner. Hello! Fresh without data mesh lisa Emily is amazing. The funky artwork there. She's amazing with the talk. I was mesmerized. It was impressive. >>The revolution of devops and the creative element was a really nice surprise there. But I love what she's doing. She's challenging the status quo. If we've learned nothing in the last year and a half, We need to challenge the status quo. A model from the 1960s that is no longer linear. What she's doing is revolutionary. >>And we hear this all the time. All the cube interviews we do is that you're seeing the leaders, the SVP's of engineering or these departments where there's new new people coming in that are engineering or developers, they're playing multiple roles. It's almost a multidisciplinary aspect where you know, it's like going into in and out burger in the fryer later and then you're doing the grill, you're doing the cashier, people are changing roles or an architect, their test release all in one no longer departmental, slow siloed groups. >>She brought up a great point about persona is that we no longer fit into these buckets. That the changing roles. It's really the driver of how we should be looking at this. >>I think I'm really impressed, really bold idea, no brainer as far as I'm concerned, I think one of the things and then the comments were off the charts in a lot of young people come from discord servers. We had a good traction over there but they're all like learning. Then you have the experience, people saying this is definitely has happened and happening. The dominoes are falling and they're falling in the direction of modernization. That's the key trend speed. >>Absolutely with speed. But the way that Emily is presenting it is not in a brash bold, but it's in a way that makes great sense. The way that she creatively visually lined out what she was talking about Is amenable to the folks that have been doing this for since the 60s and the new folks now to really look at this from a different >>lens and I think she's a great setup on that lightning top of the 15 companies we got because you think about sis dig harness. I white sourced flamingo hacker one send out, I oh, okay. Thought spot rock set Sarah Ops ramp and Ops Monte cloud apps, sani all are doing modern stuff and we talked to them and they're all on this new wave, this monster wave coming. What's your observation when you talk to these companies? >>They are, it was great. I got to talk with eight of the 15 and the amount of acceleration of innovation that they've done in the last 18 months is phenomenal obviously with the power and the fuel and the brand reputation of aws but really what they're all facilitating cultural shift when we think of devoPS and the security folks. Um, there's a lot of work going on with ai to an automation to really kind of enabled to develop the develops folks to be in control of the process and not have to be security experts but ensuring that the security is baked in shifting >>left. We saw that the chat room was really active on the security side and one of the things I noticed was not just shift left but the other groups, the security groups and the theme of cultural, I won't say war but collision cultural shift that's happening between the groups is interesting because you have this new devops persona has been around Emily put it out for a while. But now it's going to the next level. There's new revolutions about a mindset, a systems mindset. It's a thinking and you start to see the new young companies coming out being funded by the gray locks of the world who are now like not going to be given the we lost the top three clouds one, everything. there's new business models and new technical architecture in the cloud and that's gonna be jerry Chen talk coming up next is going to be castles in the clouds because jerry chant always talked about moats, competitive advantage and how moats are key to success to guard the castle. And then we always joke, there's no more moz because the cloud has killed all the boats. But now the motor in the cloud, the castles are in the cloud, not on the ground. So very interesting thought provoking. But he's got data and if you look at the successful companies like the snowflakes of the world, you're starting to see these new formations of this new layer of innovation where companies are growing rapidly, 98 unicorns now in the cloud. Unbelievable, >>wow, that's a lot. One of the things you mentioned, there's competitive advantage and these startups are all fueled by that they know that there are other companies in the rear view mirror right behind them. If they're not able to work as quickly and as flexibly as a competitor, they have to have that speed that time to market that time to value. It was absolutely critical. And that's one of the things I think thematically that I saw along the eighth sort of that I talked to is that time to value is absolutely table stakes. >>Well, I'm looking forward to talking to jerry chan because we've talked on the queue before about this whole idea of What happens when winner takes most would mean the top 3, 4 cloud players. What happens? And we were talking about that and saying, if you have a model where an ecosystem can develop, what does that look like and back in 2013, 2014, 2015, no one really had an answer. Jerry was the only BC. He really nailed it with this castles in the cloud. He nailed the idea that this is going to happen. And so I think, you know, we'll look back at the tape or the videos from the cube, we'll find those cuts. But we were talking about this then we were pontificating and riffing on the fact that there's going to be new winners and they're gonna look different as Andy Jassy always says in the cube you have to be misunderstood if you're really going to make something happen. Most of the most successful companies are misunderstood. Not anymore. The cloud scales there. And that's what's exciting about all this. >>It is exciting that the scale is there, the appetite is there the appetite to challenge the status quo, which is right now in this economic and dynamic market that we're living in is there's nothing better. >>One of the things that's come up and and that's just real quick before we bring jerry in is automation has been insecurity, absolutely security's been in every conversation, but automation is now so hot in the sense of it's real and it's becoming part of all the design decisions. How can we automate can we automate faster where the keys to automation? Is that having the right data, What data is available? So I think the idea of automation and Ai are driving all the change and that's to me is what these new companies represent this modern error where AI is built into the outcome and the apps and all that infrastructure. So it's super exciting. Um, let's check in, we got jerry Chen line at least a great. We're gonna come back after jerry and then kick off the day. Let's bring in jerry Chen from Greylock is he here? Let's bring him in there. He is. >>Hey john good to see you. >>Hey, congratulations on an amazing talk and thesis on the castles on the cloud. Thanks for coming on. >>All right, Well thanks for reading it. Um, always were being put a piece of workout out either. Not sure what the responses, but it seemed to resonate with a bunch of developers, founders, investors and folks like yourself. So smart people seem to gravitate to us. So thank you very much. >>Well, one of the benefits of doing the Cube for 11 years, Jerry's we have videotape of many, many people talking about what the future will hold. You kind of are on this early, it wasn't called castles in the cloud, but you were all I was, we had many conversations were kind of connecting the dots in real time. But you've been on this for a while. It's great to see the work. I really think you nailed this. I think you're absolutely on point here. So let's get into it. What is castles in the cloud? New research to come out from Greylock that you spearheaded? It's collaborative effort, but you've got data behind it. Give a quick overview of what is castle the cloud, the new modes of competitive advantage for companies. >>Yeah, it's as a group project that our team put together but basically john the question is, how do you win in the cloud? Remember the conversation we had eight years ago when amazon re event was holy cow, Like can you compete with them? Like is it a winner? Take all? Winner take most And if it is winner take most, where are the white spaces for Some starts to to emerge and clearly the past eight years in the cloud this journey, we've seen big companies, data breaks, snowflakes, elastic Mongo data robot. And so um they spotted the question is, you know, why are the castles in the cloud? The big three cloud providers, Amazon google and Azure winning. You know, what advantage do they have? And then given their modes of scale network effects, how can you as a startup win? And so look, there are 500 plus services between all three cloud vendors, but there are like 500 plus um startups competing gets a cloud vendors and there's like almost 100 unicorn of private companies competing successfully against the cloud vendors, including public companies. So like Alaska, Mongo Snowflake. No data breaks. Not public yet. Hashtag or not public yet. These are some examples of the names that I think are winning and watch this space because you see more of these guys storm the castle if you will. >>Yeah. And you know one of the things that's a funny metaphor because it has many different implications. One, as we talk about security, the perimeter of the gates, the moats being on land. But now you're in the cloud, you have also different security paradigm. You have a different um, new kinds of services that are coming on board faster than ever before. Not just from the cloud players but From companies contributing into the ecosystem. So the combination of the big three making the market the main markets you, I think you call 31 markets that we know of that probably maybe more. And then you have this notion of a sub market, which means that there's like we used to call it white space back in the day, remember how many whites? Where's the white space? I mean if you're in the cloud, there's like a zillion white spaces. So talk about this sub market dynamic between markets and that are being enabled by the cloud players and how these sub markets play into it. >>Sure. So first, the first problem was what we did. We downloaded all the services for the big three clowns. Right? And you know what as recalls a database or database service like a document DB and amazon is like Cosmo dB and Azure. So first thing first is we had to like look at all three cloud providers and you? Re categorize all the services almost 500 Apples, Apples, Apples # one number two is you look at all these markets or sub markets and said, okay, how can we cluster these services into things that you know you and I can rock right. That's what amazon Azure and google think about. It is very different and the beauty of the cloud is this kind of fat long tail of services for developers. So instead of like oracle is a single database for all your needs. They're like 20 or 30 different databases from time series um analytics, databases. We're talking rocks at later today. Right. Um uh, document databases like Mongo search database like elastic. And so what happens is there's not one giant market like databases, there's a database market And 30, 40 sub markets that serve the needs developers. So the Great News is cloud has reduced the cost and create something that new for developers. Um also the good news is for a start up you can find plenty of white speeds solving a pain point, very specific to a different type of problem >>and you can sequence up to power law to this. I love the power of a metaphor, you know, used to be a very thin neck note no torso and then a long tail. But now as you're pointing out this expansion of the fat tail of services, but also there's big tam's and markets available at the top of the power law where you see coming like snowflake essentially take on the data warehousing market by basically sitting on amazon re factoring with new services and then getting a flywheel completely changing the economic unit economics completely changing the consumption model completely changing the value proposition >>literally you >>get Snowflake has created like a storm, create a hole, that mode or that castle wall against red shift. Then companies like rock set do your real time analytics is Russian right behind snowflakes saying, hey snowflake is great for data warehouse but it's not fast enough for real time analytics. Let me give you something new to your, to your parallel argument. Even the big optic snowflake have created kind of a wake behind them that created even more white space for Gaza rock set. So that's exciting for guys like me and >>you. And then also as we were talking about our last episode two or quarter two of our showcase. Um, from a VC came on, it's like the old shelf where you didn't know if a company's successful until they had to return the inventory now with cloud you if you're not successful, you know it right away. It's like there's no debate. Like, I mean you're either winning or not. This is like that's so instrumented so a company can have a good better mousetrap and win and fill the white space and then move up. >>It goes both ways. The cloud vendor, the big three amazon google and Azure for sure. They instrument their own class. They know john which ecosystem partners doing well in which ecosystems doing poorly and they hear from the customers exactly what they want. So it goes both ways they can weaponize that. And just as well as you started to weaponize that info >>and that's the big argument of do that snowflake still pays the amazon bills. They're still there. So again, repatriation comes back, That's a big conversation that's come up. What's your quick take on that? Because if you're gonna have a castle in the cloud, then you're gonna bring it back to land. I mean, what's that dynamic? Where do you see that compete? Because on one hand is innovation. The other ones maybe cost efficiency. Is that a growth indicator slow down? What's your view on the movement from and to the cloud? >>I think there's probably three forces you're finding here. One is the cost advantage in the scale advantage of cloud so that I think has been going for the past eight years, there's a repatriation movement for a certain subset of customers, I think for cost purposes makes sense. I think that's a tiny handful that believe they can actually run things better than a cloud. The third thing we're seeing around repatriation is not necessary against cloud, but you're gonna see more decentralized clouds and things pushed to the edge. Right? So you look at companies like Cloudflare Fastly or a company that we're investing in Cato networks. All ideas focus on secure access at the edge. And so I think that's not the repatriation of my own data center, which is kind of a disaggregated of cloud from one giant monolithic cloud, like AWS east or like a google region in europe to multiple smaller clouds for governance purposes, security purposes or legacy purposes. >>So I'm looking at my notes here, looking down on the screen here for this to read this because it's uh to cut and paste from your thesis on the cloud. The excellent cloud. The of the $38 billion invested this quarter. Um Ai and ml number one, um analytics. Number two, security number three. Actually, security number one. But you can see the bubbles here. So all those are data problems I need to ask you. I see data is hot data as intellectual property. How do you look at that? Because we've been reporting on this and we just started the cube conversation around workflows as intellectual property. If you have scale and your motives in the cloud. You could argue that data and the workflows around those data streams is intellectual property. It's a protocol >>I believe both are. And they just kind of go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly. Right? So data for sure. I. P. So if you know people talk about days in the oil, the new resource. That's largely true because of powers a bunch. But the workflow to your point john is sticky because every company is a unique snowflake right? Like the process used to run the cube and your business different how we run our business. So if you can build a workflow that leverages the data, that's super sticky. So in terms of switching costs, if my work is very bespoke to your business, then I think that's competitive advantage. >>Well certainly your workflow is a lot different than the cube. You guys just a lot of billions of dollars in capital. We're talking to all the people out here jerry. Great to have you on final thought on your thesis. Where does it go from here? What's been the reaction? Uh No, you put it out there. Great love the restart. Think you're on point on this one. Where did we go from here? >>We have to follow pieces um in the near term one around, you know, deep diver on open source. So look out for that pretty soon and how that's been a powerful strategy a second. Is this kind of just aggregation of the cloud be a Blockchain and you know, decentralized apps, be edge applications. So that's in the near term two more pieces of, of deep dive we're doing. And then the goal here is to update this on a quarterly and annual basis. So we're getting submissions from founders that wanted to say, hey, you missed us or he screwed up here. We got the big cloud vendors saying, Hey jerry, we just lost his new things. So our goal here is to update this every single year and then probably do look back saying, okay, uh, where were we wrong? We're right. And then let's say the castle clouds 2022. We'll see the difference were the more unicorns were there more services were the IPO's happening. So look for some short term work from us on analytics, like around open source and clouds. And then next year we hope that all of this forward saying, Hey, you have two year, what's happening? What's changing? >>Great stuff and, and congratulations on the southern news. You guys put another half a billion dollars into early, early stage, which is your roots. Are you still doing a lot of great investments in a lot of unicorns. Congratulations that. Great luck on the team. Thanks for coming on and congratulations you nailed this one. I think I'm gonna look back and say that this is a pretty seminal piece of work here. Thanks for sharing. >>Thanks john thanks for having us. >>Okay. Okay. This is the cube here and 81 startup showcase. We're about to get going in on all the hot companies closing out the kino lisa uh, see jerry Chen cube alumni. He was right from day one. We've been riffing on this, but he nails it here. I think Greylock is lucky to have him as a general partner. He's done great deals, but I think he's hitting the next wave big. This is, this is huge. >>I was listening to you guys talking thinking if if you had a crystal ball back in 2013, some of the things Jerry saying now his narrative now, what did he have a crystal >>ball? He did. I mean he could be a cuBA host and I could be a venture capital. We were both right. I think so. We could have been, you know, doing that together now and all serious now. He was right. I mean, we talked off camera about who's the next amazon who's going to challenge amazon and Andy Jassy was quoted many times in the queue by saying, you know, he was surprised that it took so long for people to figure out what they were doing. Okay, jerry was that VM where he had visibility into the cloud. He saw amazon right away like we did like this is a winning formula and so he was really out front on this one. >>Well in the investments that they're making in these unicorns is exciting. They have this, this lens that they're able to see the opportunities there almost before anybody else can. And finding more white space where we didn't even know there was any. >>Yeah. And what's interesting about the report I'm gonna dig into and I want to get to him while he's on camera because it's a great report, but He says it's like 500 services I think Amazon has 5000. So how you define services as an interesting thing and a lot of amazon services that they have as your doesn't have and vice versa, they do call that out. So I find the report interesting. It's gonna be a feature game in the future between clouds the big three. They're gonna say we do this, you're starting to see the formation, Google's much more developer oriented. Amazon is much more stronger in the governance area with data obviously as he pointed out, they have such experience Microsoft, not so much their developer cloud and more office, not so much on the government's side. So that that's an indicator of my, my opinion of kind of where they rank. So including the number one is still amazon web services as your long second place, way behind google, right behind Azure. So we'll see how the horses come in, >>right. And it's also kind of speaks to the hybrid world in which we're living the hybrid multi cloud world in which many companies are living as companies to not just survive in the last year and a half, but to thrive and really have to become data companies and leverage that data as a competitive advantage to be able to unlock the value of it. And a lot of these startups that we talked to in the showcase are talking about how they're helping organizations unlock that data value. As jerry said, it is the new oil, it's the new gold. Not unless you can unlock that value faster than your competition. >>Yeah, well, I'm just super excited. We got a great day ahead of us with with all the cots startups. And then at the end day, Volonte is gonna interview, hello, fresh practitioners, We're gonna close it out every episode now, we're going to do with the closing practitioner. We try to get jpmorgan chase data measures. The hottest area right now in the enterprise data is new competitive advantage. We know that data workflows are now intellectual property. You're starting to see data really factoring into these applications now as a key aspect of the competitive advantage and the value creation. So companies that are smart are investing heavily in that and the ones that are kind of slow on the uptake are lagging the market and just trying to figure it out. So you start to see that transition and you're starting to see people fall away now from the fact that they're not gonna make it right, You're starting to, you know, you can look at look at any happens saying how much ai is really in there. Real ai what's their data strategy and you almost squint through that and go, okay, that's gonna be losing application. >>Well the winners are making it a board level conversation >>And security isn't built in. Great to have you on this morning kicking it off. Thanks John Okay, we're going to go into the next set of the program at 10:00 we're going to move into the breakouts. Check out the companies is three tracks in there. We have an awesome track on devops pure devops. We've got the data and analytics and we got the cloud management and just to run down real quick check out the sis dig harness. Io system is doing great, securing devops harness. IO modern software delivery platform, White Source. They're preventing and remediating the rest of the internet for them for the company's that's a really interesting and lumbago, effortless acres land and monitoring functions, server list super hot. And of course hacker one is always great doing a lot of great missions and and bounties you see those success continue to send i O there in Palo alto changing the game on data engineering and data pipe lining. Okay. Data driven another new platform, horizontally scalable and of course thought spot ai driven kind of a search paradigm and of course rock set jerry Chen's companies here and press are all doing great in the analytics and then the cloud management cost side 80 operations day to operate. Ops ramps and ops multi cloud are all there and sunny, all all going to present. So check them out. This is the Cubes Adria's startup showcase episode three.

>>Hi, I'm Emily Freeman, I'm the author of devops for dummies and the curator of 97 things every cloud engineer should know. I am thrilled to be here with you all today. >>I'm really excited to share with you a kind of a wild idea. A complete re imagining >>of the S DLC >>and I want to be clear, I need your feedback. I want to >>know what you think of this. You can always find me >>on twitter at editing. Emily, >>most of my work centers around devops and I really >>can't overstate what an impact >>the concept of devoPS has had on this industry >>in many ways it built on the foundation of agile to become a default a standard we all reach for in our everyday work. >>When devops surfaced as an idea in 2000 >>and eight, the tech industry was in a vastly different space. >>AWS was an infancy >>offering. Only a handful >>of services, >>Azure and G C P didn't exist yet. The majority's majority of companies maintained their own infrastructure. >>Developers wrote code and relied on sys admins to deploy new code at scheduled intervals. Sometimes months apart, container technology hadn't been invented. >>Applications adhered >>to a monolithic architecture, databases were almost exclusively relational >>and serverless wasn't even a concept. Everything from the application to the engineers >>was centralized. >>Our current ecosystem couldn't >>be more different. Software is still hard. Don't get me wrong, >>but we continue to find novel solutions to consistently difficult, persistent problems. >>Now, some of these end up being a sort of rebranding of old ideas >>but others are a unique and clever take to abstracting complexity >>or >>automating toil or >>perhaps most important, >>rethinking challenging the very >>premises we have accepted as Cannon for years, if not decades. >>In the years since deVOps attempted to answer the critical conflict between developers and operations engineers. Devops has become a catch all term >>and there have been a number of >>derivative works. DeVos has come to mean 5000 different things to 5000 different people. For some, it can be distilled >>to continuous integration and continuous delivery or C I C D. For others, it's >>simply deploying code more frequently, perhaps adding a smattering of tests >>for others. Still its organizational, they've added a platform team, perhaps even a >>questionably named DevoPS team or have created an engineering structure that focuses on a separation of concerns, leaving feature teams to manage the development, >>deployment, security and maintenance of their siloed services. Whatever >>the interpretation, what's important is that there isn't a universally accepted >>standard, well what deVOPS is or what it looks like an execution, it's a philosophy more than anything else. >>A framework people can utilize to configure >>and customize >>their specific circumstances >>to modern development practices. The characteristic of DEVOPS that I think we can all >>agree on though, is that an attempted to capture the challenges of the entire >>software development process. It's that broad >>umbrella, that holistic view that I think we need to breathe life into again, The challenge we face >>is that devops isn't >>increasingly outmoded solution to a >>previous problem developers now face >>cultural and technical challenge is far greater than how to more quickly deploy a monolithic application >>cloud native is the future. The next collection of default development decisions >>and one the deVOps story can't absorb in its current form. >>I believe the era of devops is waning and in this moment as the sun sets on >>deVOps, we have a unique opportunity to rethink >>rebuild free platform. Even now, I don't have a crystal ball that would be >>very handy. >>I'm not completely certain with the next decade of tech looks like >>and I can't write this story alone. I need you >>but I have some ideas >>that can get the conversation >>started, I believe to >>build on what was we have to throw away assumptions >>that we've taken for granted all this time in order to move forward. We must first step back. Mhm. The software or systems development life cycle, what we call the S DLC >>has been in use since the 1960s and it's remained more or less the same since before >>color television >>and the touch tone phone >>Over the last 60 or so odd years we've made tweaks, slight adjustments, massaged it. The stages or steps are always a little different >>with agile and devops we sort of looped it into a circle >>and then an infinity loop. >>We've added pretty colors. But the sclc >>is more or less >>the same and it has become an assumption. We don't even think about it anymore, >>universally adopted constructs like the sclc have an unspoken >>permanence. They feel as if they have always been and always will be. I think the impact of that is even more potent. If you were born after a >>construct was popularized, nearly everything around us is a construct. A model, an artifact of >>a human idea. >>The chair you're sitting in the >>desk, you work at the mug from which you drink coffee or sometimes wine, >>buildings, toilets, >>plumbing, roads, cars, art, computers, everything. The splc is a remnant an artifact of a previous era and I think we should throw it away >>or perhaps more accurately replace >>it, replace it with something that better reflects the actual nature of our work. A linear, single threaded model designed for the manufacturer of material goods cannot possibly capture the distributed >>complexity of modern socio technical systems. >>It just can't. Mhm. >>And these two ideas aren't mutually exclusive that >>the sclc was industry changing, valuable and extraordinarily impactful and that it's time for something new. I believe we are strong enough to hold these two ideas at the same time showing respect for the past while envisioning the future. >>No, I don't know about you. I've never had a software project goes smoothly in one >>go, no matter how small, even if I'm the only person working on it and committing directly to master >>Software development >>is chaos. It's a study and entropy and it is not getting any more simple. The model with which we think and talk about software development must capture the multithreaded, non sequential nature of our work. It should embody the roles engineers take on and the considerations they make along the way. It should build on the foundations >>of agile >>and devops and represent the iterative nature of continuous innovation. >>Now when I was thinking about this I was inspired by ideas like extreme programming and the spiral model. Yeah >>I wanted something that would have layers, >>threads, even a way >>of visually representing multiple processes happening in parallel. >>And what I settled on is the revolution model. >>I believe the visualization of revolution is capable of capturing the pivotal moments of any software scenario >>and I'm going to dive into all the discrete elements but I want to give you a moment to have a first impression to absorb >>my idea. >>I call it revolution because well for one it revolves, >>it's circular shape reflects the continuous and iterative nature of our work. >>But also because it is >>revolutionary. I am challenging a 60 year old model that is embedded into our daily language. I don't expect Gartner to build a magic quadrant around this tomorrow but that would be super cool and you should call me my mission with this is to challenge the status quo. To create a model that I think more accurately reflects the complexity of modern cloud. Native >>software development. The revolution model is constructed of five concentric circles describing the critical roles of software development architect. Ng development, >>automating, >>deploying and operating >>intersecting each loop are six >>spokes >>that describe the production considerations every engineer has to consider throughout any engineering work and that's test, >>ability, secure ability, reliability, observe ability, flexibility and scalability. The considerations listed >>are not all >>encompassing. There are of course things not explicitly included. I figured if I put 20 spokes, some of us, including myself, might feel a little overwhelmed. So let's dive into each element in this model, >>we have long used personas as the default way to do divide >>audiences and tailor messages to group people. >>Every company in the world right now is repeating the mantra of developers, developers, developers, but personas have >>always bugged me a bit >>because this approach typically >>either oversimplifies someone's career >>are needlessly complicated. Few people fit cleanly and completely >>into persona based buckets like developers and >>operations anymore. The lines have gotten fuzzy on the other hand, I don't think we need to specifically tailor >>messages >>as to call out the difference between a devops engineer and a release engineer or security administrator versus a security engineer. But perhaps most critically, I believe personas are immutable. Mhm. A persona is wholly dependent on how someone identifies themselves. It's intrinsic not extrinsic. Their titles may change their jobs may differ but they're probably >>still selecting the same persona on that ubiquitous drop down. We all have to choose >>from when registering for an >>event. Probably this one too. I I was a developer and I will always identify as a developer despite doing a ton of work in areas like devops and Ai ops and Deverell >>in my heart. I'm a developer I think about problems from that perspective. First it influences my thinking and my approach. Mhm roles are very different. Roles are temporary, >>inconsistent, >>constantly fluctuating. If I were an actress, the parts I would play would be lengthy and varied but the persona I would identify as would remain an actress and artist >>lesbian. >>Your work isn't confined >>to a single set of skills. It may have been a decade ago but it is not today >>in any given week or sprint. You may play the role of an architect thinking about how to design a feature or service, >>developer, building out code or fixing a bug >>and on automation engineer, looking at how to improve manual >>processes. We often refer to as soil release engineer, deploying code to different environments or releasing it to customers. >>We're in operations. Engineer, ensuring an application functions >>inconsistent expected ways >>and no matter what role we play. We have to consider a number of issues. >>The first is test ability. All software systems require >>testing to assure architects >>that designs work developers that code works operators, that >>infrastructure is running as expected >>and engineers of all disciplines >>that code changes won't >>bring down the whole system testing >>in its many forms >>is what enables >>systems to be durable and have >>longevity. It's what reassures engineers that changes >>won't impact current functionality. A system without tests >>is a disaster waiting to happen. Which is why test ability >>is first among >>equals at this particular roundtable. Security is everyone's responsibility. But if you understand how to design and execute secure systems, I struggle with this security incidents for the most >>part are high impact, low >>probability events. The really big disasters, the one that the ones that end up on the news and get us all free credit reporting >>for a year. They don't happen super frequently and >>then goodness because you know that there are >>endless small >>vulnerabilities lurking in our systems. >>Security is something we all know we should dedicate time to but often don't make time for. >>And let's be honest, it's hard and >>complicated >>and a little scary. The cops. The first derivative of deVOPS asked engineers >>to move >>security left this approach. Mint security was a consideration >>early in the process, not something that would block >>release at the last moment. >>This is also the consideration under which I'm putting compliance >>and governance >>well not perfectly aligned. I figure all the things you have to call lawyers for should just live together. >>I'm kidding. But >>in all seriousness, these three concepts >>are really about >>risk management, >>identity, >>data, authorization. It doesn't really matter what specific issue you're speaking about. The question >>is who has access to what, when and how and that is everyone's responsibility at every stage, site, reliability, engineering or SRE is a discipline and job and approach for good reason, it is absolutely >>critical that >>applications and services work as expected. Most of the time. That said, availability is often mistakenly >>treated as a synonym >>for reliability. Instead, it's a single aspect of the concept if a system is available but customer data is inaccurate or out of sync. >>The system is >>not reliable, reliability has five key components, availability latency through but fidelity and durability, reliability >>is the end result. But resiliency for me is the journey the action engineers >>can take to improve reliability, observe ability is the ability to have insight into an application or >>system. It's the combination of telemetry and monitoring and alerting available to engineers >>and leadership. There's an aspect of observe ability that overlaps with reliability but the purpose of observe ability >>isn't just to maintain a reliable system though, that is of course important. It is the capacity for engineers working on a system to have visibility into the inner >>workings of that system. The concept of observe ability actually >>originates and linear >>dynamic systems. It's defined as how well internal states of a system can be understood based on information about its external outputs when it is critical when companies move systems to the cloud or utilize managed services that they don't lose visibility and confidence in their systems. The shared >>responsibility model >>of cloud storage compute and managed services >>require that engineering teams be able to quickly be alerted to identify and remediate >>issues as they arise, flexible systems are capable of >>adapting to meet the ever changing >>needs of the customer and the market segment, flexible code bases absorb new code smoothly. Embody a clean separation of concerns, are partitioned into small components or classes >>and architected to enable the Now as >>well as the next inflexible systems. Change dependencies are reduced or eliminated. Database schemas, accommodate change well components communicate via a standardized and well documented A. P. I. >>The only thing >>constant in our industry is >>change and every role we play, >>creating flexibility and solutions that can be >>flexible that will grow >>as the applications grow >>is absolutely critical. >>Finally, scalability scalability refers to more than a system's ability to scale for additional >>load. It implies growth >>scalability in the revolution model carries the continuous >>innovation of a team >>and the byproducts of that growth within a system. For me, scalability is the most human of the considerations. It requires each of us in our various roles >>to consider everyone >>around us, our customers who use the system or rely on its services, our colleagues, >>current and future with whom we collaborate and even our future selves. Mhm. >>Software development isn't a straight line, nor is it a perfect loop. >>It isn't ever changing complex dance. >>There are twirls and pivots and difficult spins >>forward and backward engineers move in parallel, creating truly magnificent pieces of art. We need a modern >>model for this modern >>era, and I believe this is just the >>revolution to get us started. Thank you so much for having me. Mm.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all >>around the world. This is a cube conversation, Everyone. Welcome to this week's Cube insights, powered by ET are My name is Dave Volante, and we've been reporting every week really on the code. 19. Impact on Budgets Docker Korakia is back in with me soccer. It's great to see you really >>again for having >>your very welcome. Soccer is, of course, the director of research, that we are our data partner and man. I mean, you guys have just been digging into the data or a court reiterate We're down, you know, roughly around minus 5% for the year. The thing about what we're doing here and where they want to stress in the audience that that's going to change. The key point is we don't just do ah, placeholder and update you in December. Every time we get new information, we're going to convey it to you. So let's get right into it. What we want to do today is you kind of part two from the takeaways that we did last week. So let's start with the macro guys. If you bring up the first chart, take us through kind of the top three takeaways. And just to reiterate where we're at >>Yeah, no problem. And look, as you mentioned, uh, what we're doing right now is we're collecting the pulse of CIOs. And so things change on and we continue to expect them to change, you know, in the next few weeks, in the next few months, as things change with it. So just kind of give a recap of the survey and then kind of going through some of our top macro takeaways. So in March mid March, we launched our Technology Spending Intention Survey. We had 1250 CIOs approximately. Take that survey. They provided their updated 2020 verse 2019 spending intentions, right? So effectively, they first Davis, those 20 21st 19 spending intentions in January. And then they went ahead and up state of those based on what happened with move it and then in tandem with that, we did this kind of over 19 drill down survey where we asked CEOs to estimate the budget impact off overnight in versus what they originally forecast in the year. And so that leads us to our first take away here, where we essentially aggregated the data from all these CIOs in that Logan 19 drill down survey. And we saw a revision of 900 basis points so down to a decline of 5%. And so coming into the year, the consensus was about 4% growth. Ah, and now you can see we're down about 5% for the year. And again, that's subject to change. And we're going again re measure that a Z kind of get into June July and we have a couple of months under our belt with the folks at night. The second big take away here is, you know, the industries that are really indicating those declines and spend retail, consumer airlines, financials, telco I key services in consulting. Those are the verticals, as we mentioned last week, that we're really seeing some of the largest Pullbacks and spend from consumers and businesses. So it makes sense that they are revising their budgets downwards the most. And then finally, the last thing we captured that we spoke about last week as well as a few weeks before that, and I think that's really been playing out the last kind of week in 1/2 earnings is CIOs are continuing to press the pedal on digital transformation. Right? We saw that with Microsoft, with service now last night, right, those companies continued the post good numbers and you see good demand, what we're seeing and where those declines that we just mentioned earlier are coming from. It's it's the legacy that's the on premise that your place there's such a concentration of loss and deceleration within some of those companies. And we'll kind of get into that more a Z go through more slides. But that's really what kind of here, you know, that's really what we need to focus on is the declines are coming from very select vendors. >>Yeah, and of course you know where we were in earning season now, and we're paying close attention to that. A lot of people say I just ignore the earnings here, you know, you got the over 19 Mulligan, but But that's really not right. I mean, obviously you want to look at balance sheets, you want to look at cash flows, but also we're squinting through some of the data your point about I t services and insulting is interesting. I saw another research firm put out that you know, services and consulting was going to be OK. Our data does, you know, different. Uh, and we're watching. For instance, Jim Kavanaugh on IBM's earnings call was very specific about the metrics that they're watching. They're obviously very concerned about pricing and their ability. The book business. There we saw the cloud guys announced Google was up in the strong fifties. The estimate is DCP was even higher up in the 80% range. Azure, you know, we'll talk about this killing it. I mean, you guys have been all over of Microsoft and its presence, you know, high fifties aws solid at around 34% growth from a larger base. But as we've been reporting, you know, downturns. They've been they've been good to cloud. >>That's right. And I think, you know, based on the data that we've captured, um, you know, it's people are really pressing the pedal on cloud and SAS with this much remote work, you need to have you know, that structure in place to maintain productivity. >>Okay, let's bring up the next slide. Now. We've been reporting a lot on this sort of next generation work loads Bob one Dato all about storage and infrastructures of service. Compute. There's an obviously some database, but there's a new analytics workload emerging. Uh, and it's kind of replacing, or at least disinter mediating or disrupting the traditional e d ws. I've said for years. CDW is failed to live up to its expectations of 360 degree insights and real time data, and that's really what we're showing here is some of the traditional CDW guys are getting hit on Some of the emerging guys, um, are looking pretty good. So take us through what we're looking at here. Soccer. >>Yeah, no problem. So we're looking at the database data warehousing sector. What you're looking at here is replacement rates. Um And so, as example, if you see up in with roughly 20% replacement, what that means is one out of five people who took the survey for that particular sector for that vendor indicated that they were replacing, and so you can see here for their data. Cloudera, IBM, Oracle. They have very elevated and accelerating replacement rates. And so when we kind of think about this space. You can really see the bifurcation, right? Look how well positioned the Microsoft AWS is. Google Mongo, Snowflake, low replacements, right low, consistent replacements. And then, of course, on the left hand side of the screen, you're really seeing elevated, accelerating. And so this space is It kind of goes with that theme that we've been talking about that we covered last week by application, right when you think about the declines that you're seeing and spend again, it's very targeted for a lot of these kind of legacy legacy vendors. And we're again. We're seeing a lot of the next gen players that Microsoft AWS in your post very strong data. And so here, looking within database, it's very clear as to which vendors are well positioned for 2020 and which ones look like they're being ripped out and swapped out in the next few months. >>So this to me, is really interesting. So you know, you you've certainly reported on the impact that snowflake is having on Terra data. And in some of IBM's business, the old man, he's a business. You can see that here. You know, it's interesting. During the Hadoop days, Cloudera Horton works when they realize that it didn't really make money on Hadoop. They sort of getting the data management and data database and you're seeing that is under pressure. It's kind of interesting to me. Oracle, you know, is still not what we're seeing with terror data, right, Because they've got a stranglehold on the marketplace That's right, hanging in there. Right? But that snowflake would no replacements is very impressive. Mongo consistent performer. And in Google aws, Microsoft AWS supports with Red Shift. They did a one time license with Park Cell, which was an MPP database. They totally retooled a thing. And now they're sort of interestingly copycatting snowflake separating compute from storage and doing some other moves. And yet they're really strong partners. So interesting >>is going on and even, you know, red shift dynamodb all. They all look good. All these all these AWS products continue screen Very well. Ah, in the data warehousing space, So yeah, to your point, there's a clear divergence of which products CIOs want to use and which ones they no longer want in their stack. >>Yeah, the database market is very much now fragment that it used to be in an Oracle db two sequel server. As you mentioned, you got a lot of choices. The Amazon. I think I counted, you know, 10 data stores, maybe more. Dynamodb Aurora, Red shift on and on and on. So a really interesting space, a lot of activity in that new workload that I'm talking about taking, Ah, analytic databases, bringing data science, pooling into that space and really driving these real time insights that we've been reporting on. So that's that's quite an exciting space. Let's talk about this whole workflow. I t s m a service now. Just just announced, uh, we've been consistently crushing it. The Cube has been following them for many, many years, whether, you know, from the early days of Fred Luddy, Bruce Lukman, the short time John Donahoe. And now Bill McDermott is the CEO, but consistent performance since the AIPO. But what are we actually showing here? Saga? Yeah, You bring up that slot. Thank you. >>So our key take away on kind of the i t m m i t s m i t workflow spaces. Look, it's best in breed, which is service now, or some of the lower cost providers. Right There's really no room for middle of the pack, so >>this is an >>interesting charts. And so what you're looking at here, there's a few directives, so kind of walk you through it and then I'll walk through. The actual results is we're looking within service now accounts. And so we're seeing how these companies are doing within or among customers that are using service. Now, today, where you're looking at on the ex, access is essentially shared market share our shared customers, and then on the Y axis you're seeing essentially the spend velocity off those vendors within service. Now's outs, right? So if the vendor was doing well, you would see them moving up into the right, right? That means they're having more customer overlap with service now, and they're also accelerating Spend, but you can see if you will get zendesk. If you look at BMC, it's a managed right. You can see there either losing market share and spend within service now accounts or they're losing spend right and zendesk is another example Here, Um, and what's actually interesting is, and we've had a lot of anecdotal evidence from CIOs is that look they start with service. Now it's best in breed, but a few of them have said, Look, it's got expensive, Um, and so they would move over Rezendes. And then they would look at it versus a conference that last year, and we had a few CEO say, Look at last quarter of the price of zendesk. Andi moved away from Zendesk and subsequently well, with last year. And so it's just it's interesting that, you know, during these times where you know CIOs are reducing their budgets on that look, it's either best of breed or low cost. There's really no room in the middle, and so it's actually kind of interesting. In this space, it's It's an interesting dynamic and being usually it's best of breed or low cost. Rarely do you kind of see both win, and I think that's what kind of makes the space interesting. >>I've been following service now for a number of years. I just make a few comments there. First of all, you know, workday was the gold standard in enterprise software for the longest time and, you know, company and and and I I always considered service now to be kind of part of that you know Silicon Valley Mafia with Frank's Loop. But what's happened is, you know, Sluman did a masterful job of identifying the total available market and executing with demand, and now you know, his successors have picking it beyond there. You know, service now has a market cap that's not quite double, but I mean, I think workday last I checked was in the mid thirties. Service now is market valuation is up in the 60 billion range. I mean, they announced, um uh, just recently, very interestingly, they be expectations. They lowered their guidance relative to consensus guide, but I think the street hose, first of all, they beat their numbers and they've got that SAS model, that very predictable model. And I think people are saying, Look there, just leaving meat on the bone so they can continue to be because that's been their sort of m o these last several years. So you got to like their positioning and you get to talk to customers. They are pricey. You do hear complaints about that, and they've got a strong lock spec. But generally I got my experiences. If people can identify business value and clear productivity, they work through the lock in, you know, they'll just fight it out in the negotiations with procurement. >>That's right, and two things on that. So with service now and and even Salesforce, right, they are a platform like approach type of vendors right where you build on them. And that's what makes them such break companies, right? Even if they have, you know, little nicks and knacks here and there. When they report people see past that right, they understand their best of breed. You build your companies on the service now's and the sales forces of the world. And to the second point, you're exactly right. Businesses want to maintain consistent productivity on, and I think that, you know, is it kind of resonates with the theme, right, doubling down on Cloud and sas. Um, as as you have all this remote work, as you have kind of, you know, questionable are curating marquee a macro environment organizations want to make sure that their employees continue to execute that they're generating consistent productivity. And using these kind of best of breed tools is the way to go. >>It's interesting you mentioned, uh, salesforce and service now for years I've been saying they're on a collision course we haven't seen yet because they're both platforms. I still, uh I'm waiting for that to happen. Let's bring up the next card and let's get into networking way talk. Um Ah. Couple of weeks ago, about the whole shift from traditional Mpls moving to SD win. And this sort of really lays it out. Take us through the data here, please. >>Yeah, no problem. So we're just looking at a handful of vendors here. Really? We're looking at networking vendors that have the highest adoption rates within cloud accounts. And so what we did was we looked inside of aws azure GCC, right. We essentially isolated just those customers. And then we said which networking vendors are seeing the best spend data and the most adoptions within those cloud accounts. And so you get you can kind of see some, uh, some themes here, right? SD lan. Right. You can see Iraqi their VM. Where nsx. You see some next gen load balance saying are they're on the cdn side right then. And so you're seeing a theme here of more next gen players on You're not really seeing a lot of the mpls vendors here, right? They're the ones that have more flattening, decreasing and replacing data. And so the reason just kind of going on this slide is you know, when you kind of think about the networking space as a whole, this is where adoptions are going. This is this is where spends billing and expanded, arise it. And what we just talked about >>your networking such a fascinating space to me because you got you got the leader and Cisco That has helped 2/3 of the market for the longest time, despite competitors like Arista, Juniper and others trying to get in the Air Force and NSX. And the big Neisseria acquisition, you know, kind of potentially disrupted that. But you can see, you know, Cisco, they don't go down without a fight. And ah, there, let's take a look at the next card on Cdn. You know, this is interesting. Uh, you know, you think with all this activity around work from home and remote offices, there's a hot area, But what are we looking at here? >>Yeah, no problem. And that's right, right? You would think. And so we're looking at Cdn players here you would think with the uptake in traffic, you would see fantastic. That scores right for all the cdn vendor. So what you're looking at here and again there's a few lenses on here, so I kind of walk. You kind of walk the audience through here is first we isolated only those individuals that were accelerating their budgets due to work from home. Right. So we've had this conversation now for a few weeks where support employees working from home. You did see a decent number of organizations. I think it was 20 or 30% of organizations at the per server that indicated they're actually accelerate instead. So we're looking at those individuals. And then what we're doing is we're seeing how are how's Cloudflare and aka my performing within those accounts, right? And so we're looking at those specific customers and you could just see within Cloudflare and we practice and security and networking which by more the Cdn piece, How consistent elevated the date is right? This is spend in density, right? Not overall market share is obviously aka my you know, their brand father CD ends. They have the most market share and if you look at optimized to the right. Now you can see the spend velocity is not very good. It's actually negative across boats sector. So you know it's not. We're not saying that. Look, there's a changing of the guard that's occurring right now. We're still relatively small compared talk my But there's just such a start on trust here and again, it kind of goes to what we're talking about. Our macro themes, right? CIOs are continuing to invest in next gen Technologies, and better technologies on that is having an impact on some of these legacy. And, you know, grandfather providers. >>Well, I mean, I think as we enter this again, I've said a number of times. It's ironic overhead coming into a new decade. And you're seeing this throughout the I T. Stack, where you've got a lot of disruptors and you've got companies with large install bases, lot of on Prem or a lot of historical legacy. Yeah, and it's very hard for them to show growth. They often times squeeze R and D because they gotta serve Wall Street. And this is the kind of dilemma they're in, and the only good news with a comma here is there is less bad security go from negative 20% to a negative 8% net score. Um, but wow, what a what a contrast, but to your point, much, much smaller base, but still very relevant. We've seen this movie before. Let's let's wrap with another area that we've talked about. What is virtualization? Desktop virtualization? Beady eye again. A beneficiary of the work from home pivot. Um, And we're focused here, right on Fortune 500 net scores. But give us the low down on this start. >>Yeah, So this is something that look, I think it's it's pretty obvious to into the market you're seeing an uptake and spend across the board versus three months ago in a year ago and spending, etc. Among your desktop virtualization players, there's FBI, right? So that's gonna be your VPN right now. Obviously, they reported pretty good numbers there, so this is an obvious slide, but we wanted to kind of throw it in there. Just say, look, you know, these organizations are seeing nice upticks incent, you know, within the virtualization sectors, specifically within Fortune 500 again, that's kind of, you know, work from home spend that we're seeing here, >>right? So, I mean, this is really a 100% net score in the Fortune 500 for workspaces is pretty amazing. And I think the shared in on this that the end was actually quite large. It wasn't like single digits, Many dozens. I remember when Workspaces first came out, it maybe wasn't ready for prime time. But clearly there's momentum there, and we're seeing this across the board saga. Thanks so much for coming in this week. Really appreciate it. We're gonna be in touch with with you with the TR. We're gonna continue to report on this, but start Dr stay safe. And thanks again. >>Thanks again. Appreciate it. Looking for to do another one. >>All right. Thank you. Everybody for watching this Cube insights Powered by ET are this is Dave Volante for Dr Sadaaki. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. I published weekly on wiki bond dot com Uh, and also on silicon angle dot com Don't forget tr dot Plus, Check out all the action there. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, It's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's Boston area studio; our actually brand-new studio, and I'm really excited to have I believe is a first-time guest, a long-time caller, you know, a long time listener >> Yeah, yep. first time caller, good buddy of mine Dave Graham, who is the director, is a director of emerging technologies: messaging at Dell Technologies. Disclaimer, Dave and I worked together at a company some of you might have heard on the past, it was EMC Corporation, which was a local company. Dave and I both left EMC, and Dave went back, after Dell had bought EMC. So Dave, thanks so much for joining, it is your first time on theCUBE, yes? >> It is the first time on theCUBE. >> Yeah, so. >> Lets do some, Some of the first times that I actually interacted with, with this team here, you and I were bloggers and doing lots of stuff back in the industry, so it's great to be able to talk to you on-camera. >> Yeah, same here. >> All right, so Dave, I mentioned you were a returning former EMC-er, now Dell tech person, and you spent some time at Juniper, at some startups, but give our audience a little bit about your background and your passions. >> Oh, so background-wise, yep, so started my career in technology, if you will, at EMC, worked, started in inside sales of all places. Worked my way into a consulting/engineer type position within ECS, which was, obviously a pretty hard-core product inside of EMC now, or Dell Technologies now. Left, went to a startup, everybody's got to do a start up at some point in their life, right? Take the risk, make the leap, that was awesome, was actually one of those Cloud brokers that's out there, like Nasuni, company called Sertis. Had a little bit of trouble about eight months in, so it kind of fell apart. >> Yeah, the company did, not you. >> The company did! (men laughing) I was fine, you know, but the, yeah, the company had some problems, but ended up leaving there, going to Symantec of all places, so I worked on the Veritas side, kind of the enterprise side, which just recently got bought out by Avago, evidently just. >> Broadcom >> Broadcom, Broadcom, art of the grand whole Avago. >> Dave, Dave, you know we're getting up there in years and our tech, when we keep talking about something 'cause I was just reading about, right, Broadcom, which was of course Avago bought Broadcom in the second largest tech acquisition in history, but when they acquired Broadcom, they took on the name because most people know Broadcom, not as many people know Avago, even those of us with backgrounds in the chip semiconductor and all those pieces. I mean you got Brocade in there, you've got some of the software companies that they've bought over the time, so some of those go together. But yeah, Veritas and Symantec, those of us especially with some storage and networking background know those brands well. >> Absolutely, PLX's being the PCI switched as well, it's actually Broadcom, those things. So yeah, went from Symantec after a short period of time there, went to Juniper Networks, ran part of their Center of Excellence, kind of a data center overlay team, the only non-networking guy in a networking company, it felt like. Can't say that I learned a ton about the networking side, but definitely saw a huge expansion in the data center space with Juniper, which was awesome to see. And then the opportunity came to come back to Dell Technologies. Kind of a everything old becoming new again, right? Going and revisiting a whole bunch of folks that I had worked with 13, you know, 10 years ago. >> Dave, it's interesting, you know, I think about, talk about somebody like Broadcom, and Avago, and things like that. I remember reading blog posts of yours, that you'd get down to some of that nitty-level, you and I would be ones that would be the talk about the product, all right now pull the board out, let me look at all the components, let me understand, you know, the spacing, and the cooling, and all the things there, but you know here it's 2019, Dave. Don't you know software is eating the world? So, tell us a little bit about what you're working on these days, because the high-level things definitely don't bring to mind the low-level board pieces that we used to talk about many years ago. >> Exactly, yeah, it's no longer, you know, thermals and processing power as much, right? Still aspects of that, but a lot of what we're focused on now, or what I'm focused on now is within what we call the emerging technology space. Or horizon 2, horizon 3, I guess. >> Sounds like something some analyst firm came up with, Dave. (Dave laughing) >> Yeah, like Industry 4.0, 5.0 type stuff. It's all exciting stuff, but you know when you look at technologies like five, 5G, fifth generation wireless, you know both millimeter waves, sub six gigahertz, AI, you know, everything old becoming new again, right? Stuff from the fifties, and sixties that's now starting to permeate everything that we do, you're not opening your mouth and breathing unless you're talking about AI at some point, >> Yeah, and you bring up a great point. So, we've spent some time with the Dell team understanding AI, but help connect for our audience that when you talk high AI we're talking about, we're talking about data at the center of everything, and it's those applications, are you working on some of those solutions, or is it the infrastructure that's going to enable that, and what needs to be done at that level for things to work right? >> I think it's all of the above. The beauty of kind of Dell Technologies that you sit across, both infrastructure and software. You look at the efforts and the energies, stuff like VMware buying, BitFusion, right, as a mechanism trying to assuage some of that low-level hardware stuff. Start to tap into what the infrastructure guys have always been doing. When you bring that kind of capability up the stack, now you can start to develop within the software mindset, how, how you're going to access this. Infrastructure still plays a huge part of it, you got to run it on something, right? You can't really do serverless AI at this point, am I allowed to say that? (man laughing) >> Well, you could say that, I might disagree with you, because absolutely >> Eh, that's fine. there's AI that's running on it. Don't you know, Dave, I actually did my serverless 101 article that I had, I actually had Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who is the General Manager of Dell servers, holding the t-shirt that "there is no serverless, it's just, you know, a function that you only pay the piece that you need when you need and everything there." But the point of the humor that I was having there is even the largest server manufacturer in the world knows that underneath that serverless discussion, absolutely, there is still infrastructure that plays there, just today it tends to primarily be in AWS with all of their services, but that proliferation, serverless, we're just letting the developers be developers and not have to think about that stuff, and I mean, Dave, the stuff we've had background, you know, we want to get rid of silos and make things simpler, I mean, it's the things we've been talking about for decades, it's just, for me it was interesting to look at, it is very much a developer application driven piece, top-down as opposed to so many of the virtualization and infrastructure as a service is more of a bottom-up, let me try to change this construct so that we can then provide what you need above it, it's just a slightly different way of looking at things. >> Yeah, and I think we're really trying to push for that stuff, so you know you can bundle together hardware that makes it, makes the development platform easy to do, right? But the efforts and energy of our partnerships, Dell has engaged in a lot of partnerships within the industry, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Graphcore, you name it, right? We're out in that space working along with those folks, but a lot of that is driven by software. It's, you write to a library, like Kudu, or, you know pyEight, you know, PyTorch, you're using these type of elements and you're moving towards that, but then it has to run on something, right? So we want to be in that both-end space, right? We want to enable that kind of flexibility capability, and obviously not prevent it, but we want to also expose that platform to as many people within the industry as possible so they can kind of start to develop on it. You're becoming a platform company, really, when it comes down to it. >> I don't want to get down the semantical arguments of AI, if you will, but what are you hearing from customers, and what's some kind of driving some of the discussions lately that's the reality of AI as opposed to some of just the buzzy hype that everybody talks about? >> Well I still think there's some ambiguity in market around AI versus automation even, so what people that come and ask us are well, "you know, I believe in this thing called artificial intelligence, and I want to do X, Y, and Z." And these particular workloads could be better handled by a simple, not to distill it down to the barest minimum, but like cron jobs, something that's, go back in the history, look at the things that matter, that you could do very very simply that don't require a large amount of library, or sort of an understanding of more advanced-type algorithms or developments that way. In the reverse, you still have that capability now, where everything that we're doing within industry, you use chat-bots. Some of the intelligence that goes into those, people are starting to recognize, this is a better way that I could serve my customers. Really, it's that business out kind of viewpoint. How do I access these customers, where they may not have the knowledge set here, but they're coming to us and saying, "it's more than just, you know, a call, an IVR system," you know, like an electronic IVR system, right? Like I come in and it's just quick response stuff. I need some context, I need to be able to do this, and transform my data into something that's useful for my customers. >> Yeah, no, this is such a great point, Dave. The thing I've asked many times, is, my entire career we've talked about intelligence and we've talked about automation, what's different about it today? And the reality is, is it used to be all right. I was scripting things, or I would have some Bash processes, or I would put these things together. The order of magnitude and scale of what we're talking about today, I couldn't do it manually if I wanted to. And that automation is really, can be really cool these days, and it's not as, to set all of those up, there is more intelligence built into it, so whether it's AI or just machine learning kind of underneath it, that spectrum that we talk about it, there's some real-use cases, a real lot of things that are happening there, and it definitely is, order of magnitudes more improved than what we were talking about say, back when we were both at EMC and the latest generation of Symmetrix was much more intelligent than the last generation, but if you look at that 10 years later, boy, it's, it is night and day, and how could we ever have used those terms before, compared to where we are today. >> Yeah it's, it's, somebody probably at some point coined the term, "exponential". Like, things become exponential as you start to look at it. Yeah, the development in the last 10 years, both in computing horsepower, and GPU/GPGPU horsepower, you know, the innovation around, you know FPGAs are back in a big way now, right? All that brainpower that used to be in these systems now, you now can benefit even more from the flexibility of the systems in order to get specific workloads done. It's not for everybody, we all know that, but it's there. >> I'm glad you brought up FPGAs because those of us that are hardware geeks, I mean, some reason I studied mechanical engineering, not realizing that software would be a software world that we live in. I did a video with Amy Lewis and she's like, "what was your software-defined moments?" I'm like, "gosh, I'm the frog sitting in the pot, and, would love to, if I can't network-diagram it, or put these things together, networking guy, it's my background! So, the software world, but it is a real renaissance in hardware these days. Everything from the FPGAs you mentioned, you look at NVIDIA and all of their partners, and the competitors there. Anything you geeking out on the hardware side? >> I, yeah, a lot of the stuff, I mean, the era of GPU showed up in a big way, all right? We have NVIDIA to thank for that whole, I mean, the kudos to them for developing a software ecosystem alongside a hardware. I think that's really what sold that and made that work. >> Well, you know, you have to be able to solve that Bitcoin mining problem, so. >> Well, you know, depending on which cryptocurrency you did, EMD kind of snuck in there with their stuff and they did some of that stuff better. But you have that kind of competing architecture stuff, which is always good, competition you want. I think now that what we're seeing is that specific workloads now benefit from different styles of compute. And so you have the companies like Graphcore, or the chip that was just launched out of China this past week that's configurable to any type of network, enteral network underneath the covers. You see that kind of evolution in capability now, where general purpose is good, but now you start to go into reconfigurable elements so, I'll, FPGAs are some of these more advanced chips. The neuromorphic hardware, which is always, given my background in psychology, is always interesting to me, so anything that is biomorphic or neuromorphic to me is pinging around up here like, "oh, you're going to emulate the brain?" And Intel's done stuff, BraincChip's done stuff, Netspace, it's amazing. I just, the workloads that are coming along the way, I think are starting to demand different types or more effectiveness within that hardware now, so you're starting to see a lot of interesting developments, IPUs, TPUs, Teslas getting into the inferencing bit now, with their own hardware, so you see a lot of effort and energy being poured in there. Again, there's not going to be one ring to rule them all, to cop Tolkien there for a moment, but there's going to be, I think you're going to start to see the disparation of workloads into those specific hardware platforms. Again, software, it's going to start to drive the applications for how you see these things going, and it's going to be the people that can service the most amount of platforms, or the most amount of capability from a single platform even, I think are the people who are going to come out ahead. And whether it'll be us or any of our August competitors, it remains to be seen, but we want to be in that space we want to be playing hard in that space as well. >> All right Dave, last thing I want to ask you about is just career. So, it's interesting, at Vmworld, I kind of look at it in like, "wow, I'm actually, I'm sitting at a panel for Opening Acts, which is done by the VMunderground people the Sunday, day before VMworld really starts, talking about jobs and there's actually three panels, you know, careers, and financial, and some of those things, >> I'm going to be there, so come on by, >> Maybe I should join startin' at 1 o'clock Monday evening, I'm actually participating in a career cafe, talking about people and everything like that, so all that stuff's online if you want to check it out, but you know, right, you said psychology is what you studied but you worked in engineering, you were a systems engineer, and now you do messaging. The hardcore techies, there's always that boundary between the techies and the marketings, but I think it's obvious to our audience when they hear you geeking out on the TPUs and all the things there that you are not just, you're quite knowledgeable when it comes about the technology, and the good technical marketers I find tend to come from that kind of background, but give us a little bit, looking back at where you've been and where you're going, and some of those dynamics. >> Yeah, I was blessed from a really young age with a father who really loved technology. We were building PCs, like back in the eighties, right, when that was a thing, you know, "I built my AMD 386 DX box" >> Have you watched the AMC show, "Halt and Catch Fire," when that was on? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so there was that kind of, always interesting to me, and I, with the way my mind works, I can't code to save my life, that's my brother's gift, not mine. But being able to kind of assemble things in my head was kind of always something that stuck in the back. So going through college, I worked as a lab resident as well, working in computer labs and doing that stuff. It's just been, it's been a passion, right? I had the education, was very, you know, that was my family, was very hard on the education stuff. You're going to do this. But being able to follow that passion, a lot of things fell into place with that, it's been a huge blessing. But even in grad school when I was getting my Masters in clinical counseling, I ran my own consulting business as well, just buying and selling hardware. And a lot of what I've done is just I read and ask a ton of questions. I'm out on Twitter, I'm not the brightest bulb in the, of the bunch, but I've learned to ask a lot of questions and the amount of community support in that has gotten me a lot of where I am as well. But yeah, being able to come out on this side, marketing is, like you're saying, it's kind of an anathema to the technical guys, "oh those are the guys that kind of shine the, shine the turd, so to speak," right? But being able to come in and being able to kind of influence the way and make sure that we're technically sound in what we're saying, but you have to translate some of the harder stuff, the more hardcore engineering terms into layman's terms, because not everybody's going to approach that. A CIO with a double E, or an MS in electrical engineering are going on down that road are very few and far between. A lot of these folks have grown up or developed their careers in understanding things, but being able to kind of go in and translate through that, it's been a huge blessing, it's nice. But always following the areas where, networking for me was never a strong point, but jumping in, going, "hey, I'm here to learn," and being willing to learn has been one of the biggest, biggest things I think that's kind of reinforced that career process. >> Yeah, definitely Dave, that intellectual curiosity is something that serves anyone in the tech industry quite well, 'cause, you know, nobody is going to be an expert on everything, and I've spoken to some of the brightest people in the industry, and even they realize nobody can keep up with all of it, so that being able to ask questions, participate, and Dave, thank you so much for helping me, come have this conversation, great as always to have a chat. >> Ah, great to be here Stu, thanks. >> Alright, so be sure to check out the theCUBE.net, which is where all of our content always is, what shows we will be at, all the history of where we've been. This studio is actually in Marlborough, Massachusetts, so not too far outside of Boston, right on the 495 loop, we're going to be doing lot more videos here, myself and Dave Vellante are located here, we have a good team here, so look for more content out of here, and of course our big studio out of Palo Alto, California. So if we can be of help, please feel free to reach out, I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo. Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to sunny Barcelona. Everybody watching the Cube, the leader and live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise we hear There's our third day of coverage that Sisqo live. Barcelona David Lot. John Furrier. This here stew Minutemen all week. John, we've been covering this show. Walter Wall like a canon ae is here is a distinguished engineer and product line. CTO for Cisco Analytics. Welcome to the Cube. You see you again. Welcome back to the Cube. I should say thank you very much. So tell us about your role. You're focused right now on malware encryption. We want to get into that, but but set it up with your roll >> first. Well, I'm trying to raise the cost to the bad guy's hiding in your network. I mean, basically it's it. It it's an economics thing because one there's a lot of places for them to hide. And and they they are innovating just as much as we are. And so if I can make it more expensive for them to hide and operate. Then I'm doing my job. And and that means not only using techniques of the past but developing new techniques. You know, Like I said, it's It's really unlike a regular job. I'm not waiting for the hard drive to fail or a power supply to fail. I have an active adversary that's smart and well funded. So if I if I shipped some innovation, I forced them to innovate and vice versa. >> So you're trying to reduce their our ally and incentives. >> I want to make it too expensive for them to do business. >> So what's the strategy there? Because it's an arms race. Obviously wanted one one. You know, Whitehead over a black hat, kind of continue to do that. Is it decentralized to create more segments? What is the current strategies that you see to make it more complex or less economically viable to just throw resource at a port or whatever? >> There's sort of two dimensions that are driving change one. You know they're trying to make a buck. Okay? And and, you know, we saw the ransomware stuff we saw, you know, things that they did to extract money from a victim. Their latest thing now is they've They've realized that Ransomware wasn't a recurring revenue stream for them. Right? And so what's called crypto jacking is so they essentially have taking the cost structure out of doing crypto mining. You know, when you do crypto mining, you'll make a nickel, maybe ten cents, maybe even twenty cents a day. Just doing this. Mathematical mining, solving these puzzles. And if you had to do that on your own computer, you'd suck up all this electricity and thing. You'd have some cost structure, right and less of a margin. But if you go on, you know, breach a thousand computers, maybe ten thousand, maybe one hundred thousand. Guess what, right you? Not one you're hiding. So guess what? Today you make a nickel tomorrow, you make another nickel. So, you know, if you if you go to the threat wall here, you'd be surprised this crypto mining activity taking place here and nobody knows about it. We have it up on the threat wall because we can detect its behavior. We can't see the actual payload because all encrypted. But we have techniques now. Advanced Analytics by which we can now call out its unique behaviour very distinctly. >> Okay, so you're attacking this problem with with data and analytics. Is that right? What? One of the ingredients of your defense? >> Yeah. I mean, they're sort of Ah, three layer cake There. You first. You have? You know, I always say all telemetry is data, but not all data. Is telemetry. All right? So when you when you go about looking at an observation or domain, you know, Inhumans, we have sight. We have hearing these air just like the network or the endpoint. And there's there's telemetry coming out of that, hopefully from the network itself. Okay, because it's the most pervasive. And so you have this dilemma tree telling you something about the good guys and the bad guys and you, you perform synthesis and analytics, and then you have an analytical outcome. So that's sort of the three layer cake is telemetry, analytics, analytical outcome. And what matters to you and me is really the outcome, right? In this case, detecting malicious activity without doing decryption. >> You mentioned observation. Love this. We've been talking to Cuba in the past about observation space. Having an observation base is critical because you know, people don't write bomb on a manifest and ship it. They they hide it's it's hidden in the network, even their high, but also the meta data. You have to kind extract that out. That's kind of where you get into the analytics. How does that observation space gets set up? Happened? Someone creating observation special? They sharing the space with a public private? This becomes kind of almost Internet infrastructure. Sound familiar? Network opportunity? >> Yeah. You know, there's just three other. The other driver of change is just infrastructure is changing. Okay. You mean the past? Go back. Go back twenty years, you had to rent some real estate. You gotto put up some rocks, some air conditioning, and you were running on raw iron. Then the hyper visors came. Okay, well, I need another observation. A ll. You know, I meet eyes and ears on this hyper visor you got urbanity is now you've got hybrid Cloud. You have even serve Ellis computing, right? These are all things I need eyes and ears. Now, there that traditional methods don't don't get me there so again, being able to respect the fact that there are multiple environments that my digital business thrives on. And it's not just the traditional stuff, you know, there's there's the new stuff that we need to invent ways by which to get the dilemma tree and get the analytical >> talkabout this dynamic because we're seeing this. I think we're just both talking before we came on camera way all got our kind of CS degrees in the eighties. But if you look at the decomposition of building blocks with a P, I's and clouds, it's now a lot of moving to spare it parts for good reasons, but also now, to your point, about having eyes and ears on these components. They're all from different vendors, different clouds. Multi cloud creates Mohr opportunities. But yet more complexity. Software abstractions will help manage that. Now you have almost like an operating system concept around it. How are you guys looking at this? I'll see the intent based networking and hyper flex anywhere. You seeing that vision of data being critical, observation space, etcetera. But if you think about holistically, the network is the computer. Scott McNealy once said. Yeah, I mean, last week, when we are this is actually happening. So it's not just cloud a or cloud be anon premise and EJ, it's the totality of the system. This is what's happening >> ways. It's it's absolutely a reality. And and and the sooner you embrace that, the better. Because when the bad guys embrace it verse, You have problems, right? And and you look at even how they you know how they scale techniques. They use their cloud first, okay, that, you know their innovative buns. And when you look at a cloud, you know, we mentioned the eyes and ears right in the past. You had eyes and ears on a body you own. You're trying to put eyes in here on a body you don't own anymore. This's public cloud, right? So again, the reality is somebody you know. These businesses are somewhere on the journey, right? And the journey goes traditional hyper visor. You have then ultimately hybrid multi clouds. >> So the cost issue comes back. The play of everything sass and cloud. It's just You start a company in the cloud versus standing up here on the check, we see the start of wave from a state sponsored terrorist organization. It's easy for me to start a threat. So this lowers the cost actually threat. So that lowers the IQ you needed to be a hacker. So making it harder also helps that this is kind of where you're going. Explain this dynamic because it's easy to start threats, throw, throw some code at something. I could be in a bedroom anywhere in the world. Or I could be a group that gets free, open source tools sent to me by a state and act on behalf of China. Russia, >> Of course, of course, you know, software, software, infrastructures, infrastructure, right? It's It's the same for the bad guys, the good guys. That's sort of the good news and the bad news. And you look at the way they scale, you know, techniques. They used to stay private saying, You know, all of these things are are valid, no matter what side of the line you sit on, right? Math is still math. And again, you know, I just have Ah, maybe a fascination for how quickly they innovate, How quickly they ship code, how quickly they scale. You know, these botnets are massive, right? If you could get about that, you're looking at a very cloud infrastructure system that expands and contracts. >> So let's let's talk a little more about scale. You got way more good guys on the network than bad guys get you. First of all, most trying to do good and you need more good guys to fight the bad guys up, do things. Those things like infrastructure is code dev ops. Does that help the good guys scale? And and how so? >> You know it does. There's a air. You familiar with the concept called The Loop Joe? It was It was invented by a gentleman, Colonel John Boyd, and he was a jet fighter pilot. Need taught other jet fighter pilots tactics, and he invented this thing called Guadalupe and it's it's o d a observe orient decide. And at all right. And the quicker you can spin your doodle ooh, the more disoriented your adversary ISS. And so speed speed matters. Okay. And so if you can observe Orient, decide, act faster, then your adversary, you created almost a knowledge margin by which they're disoriented. And and the speed of Dev ops has really brought this two defenders. They can essentially push code and reorient themselves in a cycle that's frankly too small of a window for the adversary to even get their bearings right. And so speed doesn't matter. And this >> changing the conditions of the test, if you will. How far the environment, of course, on a rabbit is a strategy whether it's segmenting networks, making things harder to get at. So in a way, complexity is better for security because it's more complex. It costs more to penetrate complex to whom to the adversary of the machine, trying very central data base. Second, just hack in, get all the jewels >> leave. That's right, >> that's right. And and again. You know, I think that all of this new technology and and as you mentioned new processes around these technologies, I think it's it's really changing the game. The things that are very deterministic, very static, very slow moving those things. They're just become easy targets. Low cost targets. If you will >> talk about the innovation that you guys are doing around the encryption detecting malware over encrypted traffic. Yeah, the average person Oh, encrypted traffic is totally secure. But you guys have a method to figure out Mel, where behavior over encrypted, which means the payload can't be penetrated or it's not penetrated. So you write full. We don't know what's in there but through and network trav explain what you're working on. >> Yeah. The paradox begins with the fact that everybody's using networks now. Everything, even your thermostat. You're probably your tea kettle is crossing a network somewhere. And and in that reality, that transmission should be secure. So the good news is, I no longer have to complain as much about looking at somebody's business and saying, Why would you operate in the clear? Okay, now I say, Oh, my God, you're business is about ninety percent dot Okay, when I talked about technology working well for everyone, it works just as well for the bad guys. So I'm not going to tell this this business start operating in the clear anymore, so I can expect for malicious activity. No, we have to now in for malicious activity from behavior. Because the inspection, the direct inspection is no longer available. So that we came up with a technique called encrypted Traffic analytics. And again, we could have done it just in a product. But what we did that was clever was we went to the Enterprise networking group and said, if I could get of new telemetry, I can give you this analytical outcome. Okay? That'll allow us to detect malicious activity without doing decryption. And so the network as a sensor, the routers and switches, all of those things are sending me this. Richard, it's Tellem aji, by which I can infer this malicious activity without doing any secret. >> So payload and network are too separate things contractually because you don't need look at the payload network. >> Yeah. I mean, if you want to think about it this way, all encrypted traffic starts out unencrypted. Okay, It's a very small percentage, but everything in that start up is visible. So we have the routers and switches are sending us that metadata. Then we do something clever. I call it Instead of having direct observation, I need an observational derivative. Okay, I need to see its shape and size over time. So at minute five minute, fifteen minute thirty, I can see it's timing, and I can model on that timing. And this is where machine learning comes in because it's It's a science. That's just it's day has come for behavioral science, so I could train on all this data and say, If this malware looks like this at minute, five minute, ten minute fifteen, then if I see that exact behavior mathematically precise behaviour on your network, I can infer that's the same Mallory >> Okay, And your ability you mentioned just you don't have to decrypt that's that gives you more protection. Obviously, you're not exposed, but also presumably better performance. Is that right, or is that not affected? >> A lot? A lot better performance. The cryptographic protocols themselves are becoming more and more opaque. T L s, which is one of the protocols used to encrypt all of the Web traffic. For instance, they just went through a massive revision from one dot two two version one not three. It is faster, It is stronger. It's just better. But there's less visible fields now in the hitter. So you know things that there's a term being thrown around called Dark Data, and it's getting darker for everyone. >> So, looking at the envelope, looking at the network of fact, this is the key thing. Value. The network is now more important than ever explain why? Well, >> it connects everything right, and there's more things getting connected. And so, as you build, you know you can reach more customers. You can You can operate more efficiently, efficiently. You can. You can bring down your operational costs. There's so many so many benefit. >> FBI's also add more connection points as well. Integration. It's Metcalfe's law within a third dimension That dimension data value >> conductivity. I mean, the message itself is growing exponentially. Right? So that's just incredibly exciting. >> Super awesome topic. Looking forward to continuing this conversation. Great. Great. Come. Super important, cool and relevant and more impactful. A lot more action happening. Okay, Thanks for sharing that. Great. It's so great to have you on a keeper. Right, everybody, we'll be back to wrap Day three. Francisco live Barcelona. You're watching the Cube. Stay right there.

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well good afternoon, and welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at Inforum 2018, live from Washington, DC. We're in the Washington Convention Center centrally located, I got to tell ya. The White house less than a mile that way, Capital Hill's just right up the street as well. We're kind of caught in the middle. Bad spot to be these days! (laughing) >> I hope you're not setting the tone for this. >> We'll leave that alone. >> I like being in the middle, personally. (laughing) I'll take it from both sides. >> When you sit in the middle of the road, there's a six inch yellow line, you get it equally hard from both sides. >> Bring it on! >> So, lets stay away from that. Dave Vellante, John Walls and Rod Johnson, who is the EVP of Manufacturing and Supply Chain, and the GT Nexus Business Unit at Infor. Rod, good to see you Sir! >> Great to be here, thanks guys. >> You're okay with being in the middle? >> Yeah, sure! Yeah, of course. >> Independent thought, right? I love it. >> Middle of the road. It's the place to be. >> So you're the new kid on the block, right? >> One of them, yeah. >> You've been here, just at Infor for a few months now, assuming the EVP role. How's it been for you so far? >> Hey, it's been a breath of fresh air. I was 11 years with one of our competitors, the Oracle Corporation. Its quite a breath of fresh air. Go with a company that's agile, innovative, much more customer centric. I think the timing is perfect for a company like Infor, that's really grown up in these key industries and working with customers for over decades. Now its made this transition to the Cloud, and now I think all the markets are waking up. It's not just CRM or HR, they're looking at: How do I take advantage of all this innovation, the Cloud's the platform, and who's the companies that really understand our type of business, whether you're a distribution company, or a food company, or an A&D Company. So it's a great time to be here, there's a lot of good energy, a lot of good innovation. A lot of good buzz from the customers about what we're doing. >> Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. I mean, you're right. The model of just having an install base that you can have locked in and just keep milking is very hard to do these days. Unless, you know, some of the private equity guys have done it, that's clearly not the case here at Infor. You know, Oracle is successful at it. I think it's because they do spend a lot of money on R&D, but boy oh boy! That model, you can't just go and reinvent that. >> Right. >> You're going to fail. >> Right. >> And if you're trying to hold on to that model, maybe they're the exception that proves the rule, but you're going to be toast. You know, in the long run. So you see what Amazon's doing, you see what Microsoft; how Microsoft completely pivoted away from that model. >> Right, Right. >> And Infor's riding that wave. >> Right, right. Hey, this is a business model. Fundamental business model change. You know, we can talk a lot about the technology, but transitioning from a product company that sells a license that sits on a maintenance base is a model that's no longer viable for what customers expect. They want a service provider that's delivering continuous innovation in service, and that's a big change. That's a big change to how we engage with our customers, how we support them, the service levels we're committing to. So, I lived through a bunch of that stuff at Oracle, transitioning to the cloud had a role for the last six years; doing that both from a sales and a global strategy role. Here, we're trying to do it better, faster, and never lose sight of the customer. >> So, you've serviced the manufacturing sector. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's still a lot of Infor's business that install base and that maintenance. You're in the process of transitioning those customers. >> Yeah. >> So, that takes a lot of care, a lot of feeding, cause anytime there's a transition everybody wants a piece of that action. So how's that going, what's the conversation like, and why should they stay with Infor? >> The conversation is, One: We really believe in a pragmatic business-led path to the Cloud. There's not going to be any forced march, no technology agenda that's going to drive us. It's got to be driven by value. We've got to present a business case to them that makes sense. That makes them more productive, now allows them to better engage with their customers, delivers innovation to their supply chain. So that's what we're spending a lot of time talking about. What's the case for change? What's the business case for change? I mean, all of the stuff about operating the Cloud, the service levels, potential total co-services, great! But, at the end of the day we deal with pretty, we're dealing with manufacturers. They're pretty down to earth. They know that they make their money building stuff, and shipping stuff and servicing that product. So we got to be engaged at that level, to show them how we help them do that better. I think the excitement is growing. That they recognize that there is real net new business value, new innovation that could really help their business. >> So lets talk about that. Forced march is a powerful phrase and you certainly see that in the industry. Thinking about supply chain, and the opportunities to drive even more efficiencies out of the supply chain, maybe through automation, we've heard a lot about RPA. >> Yeah. >> Maybe even bring back some of that offshore manufacturing. >> Right. >> That's certainly a conversation >> Right. >> that's going on in your world, so talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so one of our diamonds in the Infor portfolio is a product called GT Nexus. Which is, its been around for about 20 years. We have 65,000 companies around the world who are operating on a common network based platform that provides supply chain visibilities, supplies supply chain financial processing. Connects brands to their manufacturers to provide all the visibility and control and that. So, that's a powerful capability because you're right, it's an incredibly dynamic time. With the change of trade wars, weather events that are ever increasing. The supply chain's a very hard thing to manage. So if the asset is we've got a platform that enables companies to connect much deeper in their supply chain then use that information to make far better decisions on how they get their products to their customer at the right cost. So, and I see, you know the supply chain market, I always think of this transition to Cloud in waves. You know, we had the first wave breaking was the sales. Then the HR, the finance function. Operations in supply chains is the one that's cresting on the horizon. And you know, keep that going, we've got our surfboards in the water, we've got great capability. And we're really, really excited about what we can do for our clients! >> You got to ride the waves or you'll become driftwood >> How big is that wave? >> Well, hey that's the biggest market, right? I mean, you look at the size of the Enterprise software spend. Core ERP supply chain industry functionality is the big piece. It's probably two. It's probably by an HR, CRM, financials together, and it's not even as big as sort of the industry supply chain, manufacturing, procurement market core ERP market. So, its big! Its a big opportunity, but it requires a much more sophisticated response because you talk to our customers they're like hey, we operate our plants 365 days a year, three shifts sometimes in peak seasons. We can't afford an environment that isn't mission critical, that doesn't step up to service levels. So, you know, we're working really hard to address the mission critical system challenge, not just the benefits and payroll. >> So, there's certainly an opportunity with AI, with machine learning, certainly more analytics, bringing that to the manufacturing world. >> Oh yeah. >> So that's clearly fundamental to your strategies. >> Yeah. >> Is that, in your view, the tipping point to get really this whole market moving? >> I think. I mean I would agree with you. Its sort of an accumulation of digital capabilities. Certainly, mobility's sort of proved that its important, but its a little bit of a nice-to-have. Some of the innovations around user experiences, is really important but nice-to-have. I think that is the game changer. When you can use data as a weapon, a competitive weapon that you can make decisions faster, and how you discount your product or how you identify shortage faster than someone else. That's where, there's real money that comes out of that. >> What about Block Chain? We hear a lot about Block Chain in the supply chain and cutting out the middle man. We haven't heard much here about it, its not something. We're going to ask Charles. Somebody said to me, Once Charles gets on it, boom the company is behind it. >> Yeah. >> But, how real is that in manufacturing and supply chain specifically? Is it just way too early? Do you think there's potential there? Have you looked at it? >> Obviously we've looked at it, we've worked on with customers on prototypes. There's a couple areas, you know, there's a lot of hype as you guys know. You talked to a lot of us, a lot of hype in that space. It's certainly unproven in a lot of areas. But we think in the area of supply chain financing, Block Chain has a very, very powerful, you know, where you have multi parties, you've got suppliers and logistics companies and banks all who need a piece of information. We need distributed capabilities around that. We think there's a big potential in some of that area. We're talking. We're working with some of the banks on that. We think in the area of getting deeper into the supply chain around sustainability, to the ethical and traceability of the Supply Chain. You know, where you're goin down. Yeah we got customers in the pero business that are going down to the farms. They want to know exactly the lineage of all of their stuff that's going into their product that's ending up in a consumer. That's potentially a more efficient mechanism, to have all these different entities collaborating on a distributed model. So, I mean; and especially if we talk about the GT Nexus Network. There's natural extensions to it. That it already is a common platform that is serving a wide variety of companies, logistics companies, and manufacturers. So there's a lot of natural exit points from that, sort of, that integrated network to support a couple of these more extended processes that are a little bit more distributed. >> Yes, the smart contracts maybe fits there, and you talked about distributed a couple of times. What about IOT? The pendulum seems to be swinging now. Obviously Cloud is hot. Its got a re-centralization. But IOT's a whole new world. You get a lot of IT companies kind of pushing the IT model top down into operations technology and we don't think that's the way it's going to work. That the OT guys are actually going to drive the standards and the trends. What are you seeing? >> Well I think yeah hey, the people that have the, that make the equipment, you know, make the pipelines. Hey, obviously they got a big stake in this. You know, they understand how their kipid works, they know how to attach the sensors. They know how to translate things that are going on in the machines into data. We're going to be, and we're going to be taking that data, and how do you connect it to a business process. That's something that they don't understand. They don't understand how a heat event could translate, could connect to a maintenance process and how do you deploy a technician with the right part to go in there so they can offer some proactive service? So I think there's going to be a very tight partnership, where people coming from the equipment up, or the asset up, connect with the people that understand process analytics and sort of execution. >> Yeah. You talked about sustainability there just a moment ago, so obviously companies, their focus is changing in that regard. Right? People are paying more attention, a lot of that is being customer driven. >> Right >> At the same time too, in terms of distribution, in terms of manufacturing, customer expectations are changing too. Right? >> Right. >> We expect things on a much different time table. >> Absolutely. >> So how are you helping your clients recognize all those things? Like you're thinking about tomorrow today, and trying to get them to address that in terms of their technology plays down the road to meet these really fast changing demands. >> Yeah, I mean one of our really dominant industries is distribution. You know, probably three out of five distribution companies around the world run our software. So distribution is a space, typically between the manufacturing world and the consumer or the retail world is under tremendous pressure. While Amazon is inching into distribution centric industry so there's a lot of pressure from that, but there's also rising expectations that you have to do instantaneous fulfillment. That you have to provide complete visibility into where my order is, when am I going to get it, because I don't want to carry this supply. You got to carry it. So we're seeing a big rejuvenation of that industry, a little because of the pressures driving them to rethink e-commerce, to rethink the types of services they're providing to their companies. That even in some cases they're sneaking into retail, and having that type of experience because they need to compete in different ways. And I think that's always, the industry change is good for companies like us that have a lot of experience in the industry cause we can help them! Ya know, and they need a catalyst, right? They need a catalyst to go out and change and rethink how they operate, and it's created a pretty interesting opportunity. >> So, I wonder Rod if you could talk a little bit about, I know you're only a few months in, but just your impressions of the differentiation. Give us the bumper sticker pitch. Why Infor? How are you different? >> So, I mean, three things. Just netted out three things. Industry, and we talk a lot about industry. We talk a lot about last mile, its real. Its compelling to our customers. They're tired of having to finish the software for the vendor at their site. They want the provider to finish the software and take it to meet their unique needs. Two is I think even though we're smaller than some of the big, big names out there, I think pound for pound we out innovate almost every company. And I can talk very specifically, transitioning from a very, very large competitor. When you're actually looking into the detail of what we've actually delivered around AI, or what we've actually delivered around analytics or mobility, and pound for pound we fight way above our weight on that front. And I think, you know, if you look at even what we've done at Hook and Loop Digital over the years, the types of proof points we have with customers are something that very few of our competitors could boast. So I think, digital over use term, but just sort of understanding how this new technology works and being able to translate that to our customers is huge. And three, is culture. I think we have a fast oriented culture. There's not a lot of levels. We can cut through the nonsense for our customers pretty quickly. We organize around our customers, we don't have 3,000 sales teams trying to sell them piece parts so we can do the solution thing. And we're really working hard to differentiate on customer centricity. I made the comment yesterday at our executive forum that, in general, service at Enterprise Software stinks. You wouldn't accept, ya know, if a retailer was treating you the way the average Enterprise Software, you wouldn't accept it, right? You'd go somewhere else. We've had the benefit, or we've had customers that have such big investments in us, they have to deal with it. And we need to, we have an opportunity to fix that, to change that, to really reorganize and reorient our customer around the outcomes that matter to them. And its so important, if they're going to trust us. And its really about trust. They got to trust us to run their applications, our mission critical applications in our Cloud. We need to really change the game on that front, and we're doing a lot of things structurally. Like for example, maybe someone talked about were taking development customer support in Cloud operations, integrating that into a common organization. So, there's no finger pointing. If something goes down, its not well its the network, Its a bug, Its a knowledge issue. It's one team that's accountable for making sure that we resolve that issue rapidly. Same on the field side. So now we're organizing for manufacturing and distribution. Really, all the resources we need to both sell and service, deliver for our customers in a common team, so there's accountability. And on both sides. There's our product side, product and Cloud ops side, there's accountability and from a sort of customer engagement or accounts management accountability. And then, you know, we got to do a lot of things around service and automation, and better, proactive. We're running their cloud, we should be able to tell them, hey, this isn't running optimally. We need to come in and do this change. I mean, that's where we need to get. That's where the industry needs to get. And we want to get there first. >> Well, you're on the right path. >> Yeah. >> Again, congratulations on the new position, >> Yeah, thank you! >> and we appreciate the time here today, and wish you all the best down the road. >> I appreciate what you guys do. I love your show and content. >> Thank you, Rod. We appreciate that. Thank you sir. Back with more here on theCUBE. We are at Inforum 2018. We're in Washington, DC. (electronic jingle)

(electric upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well welcome back here on theCUBE along with Dave Vallante I'm John Walls as we wrap up our coverage here at Inforum 18, Washington D.C. Nations capital. Again just saying which we are between Capital Hill and the White House here. And just on top of the show floor Dave had a chance to check out the goings on down. So good feeling here. Good vibe on the floor. Good feeling on the Keynote stage. I know tomorrow, good lineup as well but just your thoughts as we wind up here on day one. Well I think Charles Phillips is an awesome host. I mean first of all he looks great up there. He's tall. He's thin. He's got has this awesome suit on. I mean the guy is just dressed impeccably. Add to that his mind. I mean he's a very clear thinker, a clear strategist. He's able to articulate the value, the strategy that Infor has and has had for quite some time and the value that it brings to customers. So I really like listening to him. He's not a hype machine. Unlike, you know, so many in this industry who are incredibly successful, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff you know others you know love to hype what they do. Charles throws a little, few little jokes in there but very low key as we heard this morning. And it seems to be working. I mean as a private company they can write their own narrative. Alright if this were a public company people would be hammering them on the debt. They'd be knocking them on the top-line growth. Cause the Income Statement, you know, from a growth stand point is not exploding but the SAS pieces of the business are. So but you know Wall street, they would be picking at this scabs. So as a private company, they're not subject to the 90-day shot clock. And so as a result they can write their own narrative which I think is incredibly important for this company right now because they have a large installed base of customers that they're trying to move to their new platform. Move, migrate you know, those are scary words for customers. And so the competition, this is why. Why is Oracle coming at Infor so much? Two reasons there may be others. But number one. Infor is hurting Oracle. They're taking share away and Oracle you know, think that they should have 100% market share. Same with SAP. The second is that it sees an opportunity to fight back you know the best, the best defense is a good offense. And so they're trying to go after those customers that Infor's trying to woe to their new platform. And any time you moving it's an opportunity. You know we saw this with big acquisitions like Dell and EMC. You know EMC took their eye off the ball, others came in allowed a company like NetApp to come back. So you see that certainly HP, when it was splitting up, got distracted so you see that and so now what's key about sessions like this, events like this, is it allows Infor to stay relevant. To put a relevance story in front of its customers. So what is that story? It's got a platform. It's got a full stack. It's investing in R and D. It's innovating with technologies like AI. It's building organic innovation. And it's bringing in inorganic through acquisition. Things like Birst for modern BI and injecting that throughout its application portfolio. It's got a full-suite. It was interesting somebody said we had to make a bet, do we go full-suite >> Or best-of-breed. >> Or do we go best-of-breed. >> Right. >> I would argue by going micro-vertical they can claim both. It's very hard to be both best-of-breed and both full-suite. I mean I would agree if you just want to do one thing, you're probably going to do that one thing better than anybody else. And so I'll grant you that. But I think that the balancing act is how do you stay like best-of-breed or near best-of-breed with that full-suite? And I think Infor's found the answer with micro-verticals. And bringing in technologies like AI. Was very impressed with all the robotic process automation talk this morning. That's going to be a huge business it's already. I mean it's growing like crazy. So if I'm an Infor customer and I'm an old Legacy customer I'm thinking: "Wow these guys are really making "some interesting investments." "Yeah I got to spend, "and I got to maybe migrate "but if I don't I'm going to get digitally transformed "by somebody else." And they didn't actually put a lot of scare tactics in there but maybe that's something they should, might want to add in, is some examples of customers that are, that have been left behind. But maybe that's bromide in the industry today. But I think that, that relevance message came through load and strong and I think it's critical for this company. >> I think interesting just to start with the Keynotes, and then we heard it throughout the various guest that we had here on the program today was that it's a compony that really knows who it is. At least that's the feeling I get. Knows where it's going. So it inspires a lot of confidence, right. He does, Charles does. The company does. And they're just kind, they're just real comfortable in their own skin for one. And two, they're committed to other principles outside of business. I'm talking about the diversity and inclusion. That's just not flab, that's really who they are. That's their DNA. I think there's an appealing aspect there too. >> Yeah and so. And then we heard a lot, you know, the Coke industries investment, two and a half billion. I said two billion earlier it's two and a half billion. That money didn't show up in the Balance Sheet, okay. So again. You get to write your own narrative as a private company. So there's still three hundred and thirty-eight million on the Balance Sheet you know, still quite a bit of debts. So again, Wall Street would be picking at that but doesn't even come up, at this event. Customers aren't really asking those questions. They want to see a company that's viable. This company is clearly viable. They have thrown off a lot of cash that's why private equity and organizations like Coke Industries are interested in them. Because it's cashflow positive, they see a lot of, you know, financial upside for this company. So that's kind if cool. They other things is Hook & Loop the Design firm that Infor bought you know, several years ago we heard how that's evolving and becoming a fundamental part of, not just design but product development. I think that's pretty impressive. Many companies are doing that now. These guys got in first and so they're a little bit ahead of the game. I think they're, they're innovating in a way that I think has ripple effects for customers. I mean the customer experience. You hear a lot about diversity at this company, I mean this is not to me lip service. >> Right. >> You know Charles is really serious about this stuff. And he's got the platform to do it and he's investing in it. And so, you know, you see a lot of substantive examples. And I think that will pay off. It will pay dividends. The Four Horsemen now have been sort of evolving. There's a succession planning with the Four Horsemen, right. Because Stephan and Duncan have, have moved on. You know they've left the company or at least they're not front and center anymore. They're LinkedIn still says they're working with Infor so they're somehow affiliated. But they don't have operating roles. It's clear. But Charles and Pam still do. And so you're seeing an evolution there. We're going to ask the head of HR tomorrow about that. We heard from, you know Martine, back to the diversity. Corey Tollefson talking retail. You know again, Micro industry. You know, we know, he didn't mention it, but you know guys like Macy's, Safeway, these are decent sized customers of Infor. We're seeing the partner ecosystem grow. We had Capgemini on today. Grant Thornton is out there. You know Deloitte and others that. >> Accenture is out here I think. >> Accenture's out here, yeah. So that's, that's important. Again I think, I think Coke Industries helped nudge some people in there. "Like Hey, we just made a big investment." "We're a big client of yours." >> Didn't hurt. >> "You're going to pay attention." (laughing) >> "And find some opportunities." Probably said: "Look it's got to be subsidize, "It's got to be a win-win but we want you to look in earnest." And I think others have. I've heard that there's been multi-million dollar deals that these guys have have catalyzed. Kevin Curry from Public Sector, a critical space for Infor, he has almost a thousand customers here and Amazon has a huge presence in Public Sector and they're drafting off of that. And then of course we ended with Raul from AWS which was fun interview. AWS is obviously winning in so many different fronts. Big partnerships with guys like VMware. Obviously number one in Cloud, others I guess if you add up all the revenue are number one. But really Amazon's number one in cloud. >> That's right. >> We know they're tops. Because they're in a. For their serve market, which is infrastructure as a service, they're by far the leader and they started the whole thing. Tomorrow we got Charles Phillips coming on. We got Pam Murphy the two, what I consider founders of Infor. They weren't right, but they were the founders of, the new co-founders of the new Infor if you will. And some customers coming on. So really excited to be here. >> Big day, look forward to it. >> Yeah. >> And we, unfortunately I can't share this with you at home but Venus Williams on the Keynote stage tomorrow. Looking forward to that. Talking about the human potential. Shackles going to be here. Had a last minute cancellation so they've Venus Williams in and talk about really thematically, very consistent to her life story with what Infor is talking about here this week. And we're glad to have the opportunity to be here with you throughout the week, and the show. So that's it for day one here at Inforum 18. From Dave Vallante, I'm John Walls, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE and we'll see you back here tomorrow from Washington D.C. (electric upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C., it's theCube, covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back here on theCube, we are live at Inforum '18 in the nation's capital Washington D.C. Where these days there's never a dull moment and we'll just leave it at that. I'm with John Walls, Dave Vellante and Stuart Applebaum is joining us here. He's the EVP of North America Service Industries at Infor, and Stuart, thanks for joining us here. >> No, thank you, looking forward to it, you're right. >> You got your hands on a lot of pies, right. >> Yeah. >> The bank, you got a retail, you got healthcare, hospitality. >> Right. >> And you've had some wins in hospitality of late. First off, what's driving that? What do you think as being-- >> Yes, sure, well I mean whether you look at hospitality whether it's managed food service or hotels or restaurants a lot the technology that's out there is dated, right, and the technology is not upkeeping with the requirements and the demand for a really different customer service level. So, you take the look and feel of what we've been able to do as a company over the last 10 years and build up a lot of knowledge base and seniority around what it means to serve those markets, but then re-architect with new products, right. Cloud first approach type technology that really allows for us to deliver a, you know what I would say a much more better experience for the guest at a hotel, or at a front at a cash register at a restaurant, or in a managed food service environment in a hospital, right. All those environments are a lot of touches that go on and the more the technology is modern the better you can improve those technology and those interactions that go on. You also look at the idea that these guys trying to manage these, whether it's a hotel chain, or a company like Sodexo where they have managed food service entities all over. Business in industry, healthcare, it doesn't matter what you see, a cafeteria somewhere, there's high odds that it's either a company like Sodexo or another managed food service provider. The complexity of trying to maintain on premise solutions is just, is backbreaking for them. So for them to be able to now actually get to a level with a company like Infor who not only has the experience in the space, but also have invested into the next generation cloud based solutions, really allows us to kind of differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. And the marketplace has been pushing us for that as well. >> Are these typically, install based Infor customers that you're now moving to a cloud model? Is it, sort of new logos? I'm wondering if you could describe that dynamic? >> Yeah, I would tell you it's pretty mixed, right. Our customer base is fairly broad. We serve hotels for example, in over 100 countries and territories today. A lot of those customers came up through legacy applications much like we complete in a marketplace on. So we've done really great job of migrating those customers up into the cloud with the next generation technology. But what's also happened is, as you look at the area in which people serve the hotel space, a lot of them are really legacy applications that have been around for 20, 30 years, and while those companies have tried to encapsulate modern technology and move into some cloud level environment, only Infor has actually re-architect and built them from the ground up. So what we're finding is a lot of different style of companies and groups. One great example of this is Mandarin Oriental has begun to role out our company, or role out our products globally. So being able to take a brand that's as exclusive as that, that's so focused on "How do we make the guest, at the forefront of everything that we do to make them feel special?" Well, they couldn't do that with the technology that they have today, right. So in order to be able to make those differences and those changes in how they're going to service their guest, they have to move to a next generation technology. So we're seeing a lot of new logo business in that space. We're also seeing a lot of new logo space in the casino marketplace, right. You think about how massive and big these casinos are so most of these guys are very careful and concerned, just like our banking customers for example, in being able to move into the cloud, move to new technology, cause, can companies really scale? Can they bring that capability and put it in the cloud? Well we very much started to prove that with these large casinos to the point where we just recently announced about a year ago signing one of the largest, or second largest casino company in the world, and 40 hotels with over 50,000 hotel rooms, right. The idea to be able to take these kind of technologies at that scale and pace, is driving a lot of new logo new customer business being driven from our competition, which has not been able to keep pace with that kind of technology in the cloud. >> So what are the winning attributes? I'm hearing architecture, we heard this morning platform, we had Nunzio on, the design, the whole user experience. There's the cloud component. Are those the sort of key factors? What else? >> They're very much the key but it's how Infor OS which I think maybe people have talked a little about. We have this capability to create a model that allows for not only a free flow of communication and understanding between systems, whether it's for a hotel environment or a hospital environment so that information can be shared amongst systems and among resources to be able to collaborate and do something with that information. But equally as important, at the same time, we put all that information into a data lake. So that we can now use Birst and we can use Coleman, to really start to help people understand not only what does it look like or what's the interactions occurring at the hotel space, or might you want to tell this customer or say to this customer to, "Hey, we're going to give you this information up front instead of guessing what that might look like, or guessing what you might want to offer that client." It's a very different approach. >> Give me an idea, I mean specifically, you talk about Mandarin, we'll just use them as an example. >> Yup >> What are you helping them do better, that they couldn't do before? Because when I think of service, I think of Mandarin, they did things pretty well before. So what are you doing to help them improve their processes and what are they turning to you for future? >> Sure, well, I mean from a simplistic standpoint talk about how they're able to interact with you as a guest, right. If you're a Mandarin type of client you're probably very much a more affluent business traveler or a-- >> Dave Vellante >> Yeah, a Vellante example right. At the end of the day while you want all the level of service that you expect at that kind of property the amount of effort or work they have to do or you might have to do to make them understand what that is, is very taxing. And it's also very hard for you guys to interact and change that. By getting to, what we have, HMS, which is Infor's hotel property management system, allows them to really streamline not only understanding who you are, what your preferences are, how you like to interact with them, but then also be able to deliver that in a mode of interaction that you like. Whether it be through mobile, whether it be through text, whether it be through personal conference calls, or discussions or touchpoints. That kind of capability in their legacy systems took a whole bunch of manual intervention to make that happen. Now we're able to automate that, make that information realtime so it's not just a few people digging in to try to find this information to go back and try to make that guest fell like they understood it. It's every point, right, every contact that touches that customer who has access to our solutions, is fed that information realtime, which gives the customer a much different experience. At the same time, it allows you guys to interact in a much different experience. You may not want to talk to people you want to check in on your phone, show up at the hotel, go to your room, open your door. Well, legacy architectures and technologies with closed type of infrastructure don't allow for that open API capability. Versus our technologies allow it free flowing out of a cloud scenario, which is even a more complex thing, to give the ability for those hoteliers like Mandarin, to say "Hey, I'm going to give Vellante a unique experience that is exactly what he likes, with all the information that I know about him to be what I would consider the best way I can service Vellante. >> So self-service is an obvious one. I don't want to have to wait on the phone on hold to check out for example. Just give me a pad or something that I can just go boom. And there are numerous other examples, but you've got to get the user experience and the design right. Maybe talk about how you guys approach that. >> Yeah, well, you guys had a chance to meet with Nunzio on our Hook & Loop. Hook & Loop is very instrumental in what we do in the hospitality space as well, as well in the healthcare space. Anytime people are interacting, not only as an employee but as a guest, whether you're an invited guest you know from a doctor to get to a hospital to have some kind of treatment or acute care. Or if you're a hotel guest where you're coming to stay. There is some level of interaction that's going on that requires a very unique, specific kind of touchpoint between the two. And in that area and in that space, there's a lot of data and elements that go on that if you feed those and understand what those elements are, and start to really understand what it is that individuals require in terms of their personal care or their personal interaction or stay at a hotel, the more unique an experience and the better experience that they can have. >> Stuart we heard about the skills gap, the skills shortage this morning. How can Infor and it's software help close that gap? >> Right, well you can look at it in a couple different ways. If you look at it at the grassroots of some of the industries that we serve that we've talked about. Whether it's hospitality or retail, or even healthcare in some scenarios. Not talking about professionals in the healthcare industry, but people who are just working day to day operations. Simplifying the interaction on how they use the solutions that they do their jobs everyday, minimizes the training requirements and the skilled labor that has to go on that would occur in legacy solutions and architects. So being able to hire a front desk guest agent who's got a great personality who knows how to interact and talk to people but maybe has never used a hotel system before to be able to put them in front of that hotel system and act just like their phone or their iPad, it gives them the ability to be interactive and understand and be on board pretty quickly. So that's one side, is simplifying, working with Hook & Loop, designing, making sure the applications, the workflows make sense. So it simplifies the work effort and simplifies the ability for people who are maybe less skilled in a particular area to jump in really quickly with less training. The other side of it is trying to find the right resources. And, going through the process of having a skilled attribute level of understanding of what your successful people look like, we can help through our Talent Science solutions find similar type of people. That doesn't mean, now we'll get to the education enablement side of it, that doesn't mean day one, that maybe they have the exact training they have required but that we found that they are the perfect fit for the job. So if they are going to be interacting on an everyday basis with a guest for example, and they're a front desk manager, there's attributes around that are so critical important. Now, they may not understand all the facets of the job but once we find that right resource you bring them into the talent solution and then really start to understand where are their gaps, where are the training requirements, what are the certifications by the way, depending on if you're in a complex industry like manufacturing or healthcare where there are certifications and safety regulations you have to occur. How do you maintain all that into one spot and be able to identify and be able to give them and provide them the personal interaction on what is it that they need to maintain and grow in terms of their own abilities to be suitable for the next job or the job that they're being hired for, and how do they actively get the learning and the education, the e-learning that goes with it. So, we've been able to kind of formulate that into a comprehensive product set that we think is pretty much best of breed in the industry, right. So not only do we have a great learning management system, an unbelievable talent acquisition and science system, a fabulous way to hire, to promote, to retire structure on understanding employees, what their skills are and how to place them, but bringing all that together from a unified front, and then being able to standardize that into an experience that makes it a much more different approach from what you would traditionally have had in finding skilled labor in the workforce. >> In automation, in AI, it's now a layer on top of all this that you're bringing to the table with Coleman you started to role out some capabilities there. What's the reaction been of customers? Is there uncertainty? Is there fear? Is there doubt? Are they embracing it? What is the conversation like? >> Really instead of saying, it's better to think of it, it's not on top, right. This is the underpinnings of how we built our cloud suites. >> Injected into the-- >> So we've taken our cloud suites and everything we've opened from a technology perspective to inform every information and job that flows through, whether it's in personal intervention into a task or whether it's machine to machine, goes through that Infor OS. So all of that interaction and data whether it's from a person or from a machine gets captured so you can start to begin to build intelligence on top of that. Now, what that means is, wherever those interactions and communications occur, Coleman is sitting in there understanding and learning, sitting on top of our data lake to say, "You know what? This is a process that is repeated a hundred times a day, by 50 different people on a particular firm. Why don't we automate that process and why don't we make that known to the entity and then adjust our process to automate that so no one has to interact with it, right. So being able to have that as an underpinning, not an overlay, right, cause a lot of businesses will come in and say "Hey we'll provide analytics and BI over the top." That's great, analytics and BI on the top is pulling information out of all different kinds of sources trying to make sense of all that data trying to make sense of all those sources. Versus what we're trying to do is every interaction that occurs between systems, we're not trying to identify right at that point what makes sense to store somewhere and put somewhere, it all goes into our data lake, and then the machine learning starts to tell you, "Here's some things you should understand about the data and the interactions. >> We've heard the theme about human potential, unlocking that. So, how does that translate in your world, I mean in your mind? How do you apply that in terms of the industries that you're providing services for? >> Again it goes back to, it also goes to our focus on bringing a diverse workforce to the table. To improve our capabilities and improve the way we approach things. But, it's understanding individual attributes of people and how they may interact and work within a company is a starting point, right. So they may not have a particular skill, but they have a capability or an ability to learn or they may have a personal interaction that is far excessive than what normal people would come in to interview first like a job. Well being able to do these type of talent assessments and understand as a baseline where they are, all of a sudden you're getting a more broader pool of skilled resources for what you're looking for, right. And then even if that skilled resource happens to be from a different part of the country than what your typical hiring manager is, or they look different, or their education background is different, it strips that out, right. It is giving you the personal attributes of that individual. So that allow a broader pool to look at. Then from that pool, then we can start to say "Okay, well here's a great candidate pool of people that may be able to quickly be skilled into a job or into a role, and then start to place those people into those positions. And then as the life cycle of that employee goes on so do their attributes, right. So what made them who they are as other roles and jobs as they build their resume within the company, they still have those capabilities so as a role in a management place comes up that has a good fit for this persons individual skills and their personal attributes, they're a natural fit for moving up into the world. And that's how we kind of continue to get that engine rollin in terms of how do we bring more people in without a prescriptive, only a prescriptive model, right. This is a scientific model of what is going to be the right fit for an employee for Infor, right. Or an employee for one of our customers or another company. And that's where we start with bringing in that ability to broaden our workforce and identify people who could be successful, without necessarily saying "You didn't punch this type of button for the last 10 years so you're not qualified for the job." >> So I'm hearing a lot of differentiation and I'd love to hear it more in your words from an executive of Infor. Every company out there, every software company says "Yeah, we have AI too." I'm sure you hear it: "Oh company A B and C, they have their new AI platform, everybody's doing AI." When you're talking to customers, how do you differentiate what Infor is doing, not with just machine intelligence, but across the board, from the competition? >> Well I would tell you to start with, one is the comprehensive set of our solutions, right. So by being able to go into an industry and have a cloud suite that we formulated that has the capability to manage a very significant portion of their operations already integrated together, already with the last industry model functionality built into it. It gives us a leg up in our competition. So when we walk into a healthcare, or a hospital, and they have challenges with nurse scheduling, they have financials they need to look at, they have general HR that they have to look at, and by the way, they're also trying to look at "Are we going to be profitable? And how do we become profitable? All these different touchpoints are a nightmare for us." Well as Infor, what we present to our customers and brought together was: "Hey we have that capability to do all your nurse scheduling, your workforce planning, your time attendance. We can manage your facilities, your assets, your expensive cost structures there." We have the ability to have a very complex set of financials that may serve 15 different hospitals that might also have different infused levels of ownership or investment or management. Being able to come to the table with that as a comprehensive system, eliminates a lot of the guesswork. Now, again, once you have that in there, someone coming in and selling AI, or BI, they still would have to, if it wasn't us, to come in over the top and say, "Well, if it's all Infor, that's good. At least we can connect all Infor. But if it's got Epic or it's got Cerner, it's got whatever solution's sitting out there, well all of a sudden you're not only having to connect those points but you're having to connect all over the place versus the way we built it is that cloud suite, all those points of connection are already prebuilt, right. And they're already dumping it into the data lake. So that now all you have to do is take some ancillary pieces of data to pull into that perspective. And with capabilities of clinical integrations that we have, to be able to follow and track those things. And we just actually announced not too long ago TrueCost. TrueCost is the ability to really understand down to a procedure level what something may cost to perform at a particular hospital. And that is, you would think that wouldn't be that hard but you're talking about people, you're talking about equipment, you're talking about what kind of room? What equipment's in that room that creates a certain cost per hour to do a procedure? All those things come to play in determining exactly what is profitable and what's not. So being able to really understand the true cost of care, not only at the hospital level, but by the way, how do we take into account what happened before? How do we take post care into that? And then how do we start to do predictive analytics on that kind of capability? Well, since we have this cloud suite healthcare, for example, building around all of these different components where we track the resources, we understand the rooms and the cost. We understand the doctor cost, we understand the facilities cost. We understand the care and the time that it take to go under the care. We can now start to really take and give hospitals an idea of saying: "Hey, maybe if we approach this a little differently." Or even with Coleman now, maybe you approach it this way. You can start to do and provide that specific care in a different way that will lower your cost to care, not only for your hospital but for your patients, and then hence you become more profitable as an entity. >> It's a real business impact. And the alternative would be, you would have to what? Develop custom modifications, or bring in an ISV who's got deep expertise there. Bring in another system. >> You could have a combination of it, right. Some of our competition would have to bring in a different workforce management and scheduling system. They'd have to bring in a different time and attendance system. They would probably have to bring in a different analytical engine and underlying platform to work with it. They would have to bring in a different talent assessment or talent management type of solution. They would have to bring in a different supply chain and materials management system for a healthcare environment for example. I mean, the list can go on and on. Where we've went out and built and looked for, whether it was through acquisition, where we then brought these cloud based products into our cloud suite, or we identified gaps or areas that we needed to build from scratch. And we talk about, you know, people don't really think about it, but as a percent of revenue, we outspend our competition 5x, right. And we talk about how much we've spent in the last several years in R&D. We do that because we know that if we can build a platform in the next generation for healthcare, for hospitality, for retail, then we can really be the leaders in the marketplace. And I think that's what's going to really differentiate us from our competition who's trying to either come in with a point area, start to broaden it a little bit. We've already broadened it, we integrated it, we built it together and we underpin it with the ability to do artificial intelligence and analytics from the box, right. That's a very different approach. >> And keep it simple. >> Right >> For me, right? At the end of the day-- >> Yeah, make it easier for the users. >> Stu thanks for the time. >> No, this was great. I appreciate it. >> Thanks for the run down. Stuart Applebaum from Infor. Back with more here from Inforum '18. We are live in Washington D.C. And you're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum DC 2018 brought to you by Infor. >> And good afternoon, or I guess at least Eastern Time, good afternoon. We're in Washington DC, theCUBE live here at Inforum '18. We're at the Washington D.C. Convention Center along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. It's a pleasure to welcome Nanzio Esposito who's a VP and Head of Experience at Infor and you can tell he's the coolest guy in the room right now. (all laughing) Yeah, Nanzio, good to see ya. Thanks for joining us, we appreciate that. >> Thank you, thank you for asking. >> So you had a, as part of your primary responsibility, the in-house creative agency. >> Yep. >> Hook and Loop. First off, let's just deal with design, from an approach standpoint. Why is that so important for Infor to have its own in-house agency? >> Well I mean, we have amazing capabilities, and a lot of, and those capabilities really differentiate us against our competitives that. But what ends up happening is that our end users essentially want to have a more enjoyable and more satisfying experience, through their work. So, the reason why design is extremely important to Infor is because, through design, we get to do things like provide efficiency through workflows. We get to do things like create a design system that helps to escale and empower and enable our development teams to pick up UX best practices and UI assets so that they can build quicker. Or open-sourcing those kind of capabilities to be able to empower our partners and our customers to build apps with kind of a standard code base. So, I would tell you that the reason why design is so important is because we look at things from a very macro view, strategically. Design is very holistic, it's problem-solving. And it's taking the best of some of design's key attributes of modernizing the UI, being able to apply design thinking to understand kind of what the business value needs to come out of the system or the solution that's put in play. And how that mutually creates a beneficial kind of delivery mechanism to each user as they're doing their work. And also looking at kind of just the raw, sheer amount of assets that we have from data and being able to find ways to essentially come up with solutions that businesses today really need. And it's a very competitive landscape. And what best to have a designer be able to try to solve some of your business application needs. >> And does it change depending upon the vertical in which you're working? So, I mean, those have to be considerations too, and the environment, right, from the mobile if you're going to be at the desktop, you're going to be on a laptop or? >> Yep, yep. >> On iPad or whatever. All that factors into that. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, it is interesting. I mean, part of Infor strategy has always been to, you know, have industry-focused cloud suites. And from a design perspective, for us, we do tend to see patterns. So, it depends on user roles, kind of access points, you talked about devices. So we see the use of device in, say, healthcare industry, very different, say, than to the use of a device in manufacturing. But mobile, is really starting to kind of blur those lines. And you brought up something that was part of our mobile strategy, internal that was kind of finished out in October of 2017. Which is essentially what we call mobility in context. So context is very important. Knowing situationally where a user is in a moment so that they can, from one moment, work with, say, some portal. And that portal may be a laptop to a, say, an iPhone or even just an Alexa device, and be able to understand where they are, allow them to continue on in that workflow and make sure that it's integrated, it's smooth and it's direct and to the point. So, that's what has kind of transpired through the evolution of Hook and Loop because design has evolved and it's bigger than just modernizing our user interfaces here at Infor. >> So when we first heard about Hook and Loop, it was through Infor. It was the early part of this decade. The mobile was only five or six years old. I mean, smart phones. >> Yeah. >> At the time. So in was early days, you guys were first, certainly, of all the major software company enterprises to focus on that. Now, subsequently, we hear you've always heard a lot about UI. >> M-hmm. >> And UX. Subsequently, much more recently we're hearing much more around design. You're seeing, you know, you go to conferences like Service Now and they're focusing on this stuff and you guys have always been there. What's the difference between UX, UI, and sort of design at the core? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it, sometimes the lines are blurred, right, and it depends on the industry and it depends on where you're speaking as far as when you say user experience design or if you say just design in general. So, I'm going to just take two steps back. The reason why I didn't go for head of design at Hook and Loop was just because design means, has a certain definition here at Infor. We are obviously an enterprise, it's very vast, it's extremely broad and at that point, each, say, of our major constituents, product management, it could be a product development, it could be a customer, they have different mental models on what design means. So, we wanted to go with something that's a little more elusive. Alright, so Head of Experience. But, essentially, now, through our evolution in our sixth year, we're really focused on product experience. So what that means is taking kind of all the learnings that we've had in the industry around modernizing UI, so that's essentially the way in which the solution manifests itself, how it looks, and the best of user experience. Essentially, what is the flow? What are the click states? How can we provide efficiency in form fields? But now you bring in A.I. and that obviously puts a different dimension on that process. But when it kind of all comes together, it's really just about making a strategic call on what the solution needs to be able to satisfy, all the different configurations in which it needs to account for, and then how to package that in a very lightweight manner. So, it's almost to the point that a company or a user doesn't need any instructional information on how to use it. And that's always been a goal at Hook and Loop. Through the six-year journey, strategically, even with some prior leadership, there was a very amazing strategic call to focus on a more mobile first initiative and mobile first, that brought forward kind of all the responsive web behaviors to our applications. So, that's great. Because that just essentially means that on any device, the application will conform, will render, to kind of provide the best usability that it can. As we're evolving, though, we're realizing that the future of work, and I mentioned this to the analysts yesterday, the future of work, which is now post-Millennial, and I know that sounds crazy 'cause I think we're all still seeing millennials in our workforce and trying to reconfigure, figure out what the company culture is, the purpose is, and how business solutions help to support that. But the article in the New York Times talked about iGen, and you know, the theme that Inforum here is all about human potential. Well, in the iGen generation, it's all about the personal aspects of the way in which they communicate, the way they do work, the way they have social gatherings. And I found it very profound because that essentially really supports what the vision of Hook and Loop is now in this era, which is the personal enterprise. And there's nothing more personal than the device that we choose on a daily level, which is the mobile device. So, at that point, it's extremely innate. And it definitely kind of personifies who we are in our digital world, our digital selves, and because it actually has all this tons of capability that's packed into it, what ends up happening is not about kind of the nine to five anymore, and I think you guys, and myself, we all know that. We're getting notifications and communication to, say, a loved one or some kind of social event that's going on and then getting pinged through some kind of communication or notification of work that we have jobs to do, there's things that have to get done. So, it moves from work-life balance to a work-life blend. And for our enterprise, and through kind of I think the investment that we've done with design, that allows us at Hook and Loop to really push the boundaries of user experience and think about the balance of all those to kind of give our customers always only exactly what the user needs right now. And that's been our new mantra, where we've kind of strategically pivoted, evolved, and been essentially looking at our principles and re-looking at our work, given all this investment in our capabilities. >> We heard this morning in the keynotes that you're basically infusing A.I. into your applications, in an effort to create better outcomes. Giving users advice as to how they maybe could have done things differently, maybe tracking some KPI's and giving feedback to the user, so that they can have better outcomes. How does A.I. from a design standpoint change the way in which you have to think about presenting data and information to the user? And not being intrusive, but being helpful? >> Yeah. I could probably talk about that for like the next two to five hours, but the reality is there's different versions or flavors of A.I. So, some of it could be more backend processes, like you alluded to and presenting, say, best potential outcomes that a user, or paths that a user can navigate or select or go down. One thing that we saw from a design perspective is the fact that you don't want to just present the recommendation. You don't want to lose the human factor. You have to establish trust with A.I. over time. So, in just saying, hey I got that or I got that done or here's the best KPI to use, you want to still have a system that can offer up why. And be able to kind of promote choice. A user doesn't want to feel, essentially, controlled. They want the system to be able to make them feel like they're in control. So, those are some nuances there. When it gets into kind of the more conversational aspects of A.I., you know, and I'm going well beyond kind of chat bots, having conversations and having it kind of leverage some of our CIR capabilities, find business objects and promote it, say through our GUI, conversations get intense. And why I say intense, it's some of the terminology we use at Hook and Loop. But that's just because utterances and variancing in the way in which we communicate, are complex. You might say, OK and I might say yeah. You might say I am on it and I might say, yo, I'm doin' that. And just through-- >> That's exactly right, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what David would say. (all laughing) >> I wasn't trying to say this or that. But they all mean the same thing, or in different contexts or whatever the inquiry was, we have to understand that kind of user intent and be able to map all those correlations. So, it's not so easy as just saying hey, we have A.I. and we'll put it into play. And from a design perspective, the last thing we want to do is ever alienate a user. So. >> A frustrated user. >> And frustrated user, exactly. So, just because you can doesn't mean you should and we really need to think strategically in a way in which we ultimately empower a user. So when I say user we're saying a name for customer's employee, or a new force customer customer. So it's a very interesting strategic place that we sit within Infora in our product development teams. >> Yeah, within user experience and best practices, so obviously there are some general trends or general concepts, what do you find out though amongst your clients and your user base maybe that offers additional insight or is giving you maybe a little sneak peak about something that you are uniquely discovering, if you can talk about that? >> Oh yeah, sure. I mean, I think as we evolved kind of our business model this year and our services, I think one of the things that we've learned over the years is that, like, we're no subject matter experts. Like at all. So it's kind of like, well, how do we get this information? How can we learn more? How can we provide or satisfy or create solutions that satisfy these certain pain points? So what we ended up doing is, ya know, I hear this from my team constantly, it's like who's the customer? Or who's the user? And we need personas. And we need to understand the journey maps. And we lose sight of some of the more internal mechanisms that we have that really kind of give us that information. So, we've, over the last few months, have gotten access to Infor Concierge, which is a tool that Infor created for our customers to be able to kind of understand what's new in the product. If they have any product enhancement requests, issues, that they would love to see, bugs, defects. They're finding that their Infor is working really well in creating kind of a two-way conversation. Well, what best to have design team, which, you know, product experience team, to be able to have access to all of that information. Be able to comb and sift through it. So, we're learning kind of what the customer and the user wants, but they're participating in that. So it's a really interesting orchestration or concert. And then on the flip side, we have a ton of subject matter experts. So, and that goes well beyond just our solution, industry solution, architects. This goes into like, our sales teams, or our solution consultants, or our channel partners. So, strategically over these last six to eight months, I think what we have uncovered is that we have a lot of support. And there's like ways for us to make decisions quicker and be able to test or have successes or failures in a very like small, confined box, so to speak. So that we make decisions that don't necessarily create massive ramifications in the enterprise but get us to kind of create value quicker in a more kind of sizeable chunk in deployment mechanism. So, I think the biggest thing that we've uncovered is the fact that, not only do we have a lot of talent but we have a lot of amazing, bright ideas. And that is why we moved from an in-house design agency to product experience because essentially Infor has grown and our team is everyone's becoming a designer. And that's you want. You want to go from a design organization which was the goal in 2012 to now in 2017, 2018 and where we're headed, to move from a design org to a design culture. And I think that's what is going to definitely going to get Infor to differentiate against its competitive landscape. >> 'Cause one of the problems with design is oftentimes the design, the ideal design, there's a gap between that and the actual functionality of the product. And then you end up with this kind of hybrid. Some of the design intent matches the outcome but then the functionality is sort of becomes roadmap. >> Yeah, and a lot of that was happening, I think 'cause we were going through an evolution. What we noticed is we need to move design closer to our product development teams in Hyderabad, Manila. You know, development is getting done all over the globe. So what we did was, we wanted to ensure that UX practitioners were, ya know, sitting side by side of our development teams so that in a moment's time they can have a conversation, quickly make a decision, and obviously just continue on their way. Another piece, though, is what is the right balance between having massive amounts of engineering capacity to, say, a designer that's in partnership with them? So we started practicing and growing our team to be less focused on some of the more baseline design capabilities and we brought in some really smart and talented engineers that understand design, find ways to translate it. And we're doing that kind of translation right now in building native mobile applications inside of Hook and Loop. And that gives us a mechanism to prove out our work, understand some of our decisions, get kind of the feasibility more done upfront so that when we make strategic calls or we want to scale from there, we start to minimize the gap between wouldn't this be amazing if it could render or do this, to, oh, God, we just did like, patchwork, or it was a quill that we created to get it done. We want to bridge that gap and get closer and closer to what the original concept or the idea was. >> So you announced one of those apps this week. >> Yeah, that was super exciting! >> If you want to talk about that. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I mean leveraging the best of human-centered design, I can't mention the customer's name given the NDA, but we did work with a very large consulting firm that had 18,000 users. And they're kind of road warriors. So, strategically working with our C suite, we were focusing on more agnostic solutions and then scale to more industry-focused solutions, so this is in expense management. But we needed something that was insanely high consumer grade. So really driven by usability. But offered more of the baseline utility. So leveraging the capabilities of XM, this was all kind of like the road warrior, I just need to capture my receipt, potentially build a queue, wait 'til my credit card feeds in these data points, my expenses, match these expenses, submit a report, and like can I just get back on my day 'cause we all hate doing that. So the app that we just released, it's available on Apple iTunes, the Apple Store, today. It's called Infor Expense. It acts as a companion to Infor Expense Management. We say companion because if you're an Infor Expense Management customer today, you have access to it. And it really is a mechanism to kind of promote the best of what Hook and Loop is trying to scale, continues to scale, inside of Infor. At the same time, it's a playground for us. It's a playground for us to test new capabilities, leverage capabilities that are on the device. You know, evolve our design patterns and our UI assets. So that we kind of always stay at the tip of the spear. And that's essentially where Hook and Loop sits for Infor from a product strategy perspective. >> Well if you make expense reports easy, I'm all for it. >> Me too, right? >> I got my parking ticket right here, we can start as soon as we're done. >> Alright, you want me to take a picture of that? (all laughing) >> Nunzio, thanks for the time. >> Awesome. >> Congratulations. I know you're moving into your second year, it'll be an exciting time for you I'm sure. >> Yeah, I'm excited. >> Keynote tomorrow, right? >> Yeah, I'm opening up day two. >> Just give us real quick, sneak peak, what are you going to talk about? >> Yeah, it's, I think it's really just all about design's evolution inside of Infor, really setting the stage that Hook and Loop went from an internal kind of creative agency and is really moving towards product experience. So that's product strategy, product thinking, how do we aggregate all of that capability, from a data and A.I. perspective, and then find deployment mechanisms that not only inspire our internal teams, but more importantly, inspire our customers in the market. >> Good deal. >> Thank you again for the time. Pleasure. >> Alright, thank you. >> See you tomorrow morning. Nunzio Esposito joining us from Infor. Back with more, we're at Inforum '18. We're live in Washington D.C. and you are watching theCUBE. (light upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, everybody. We are covering Veritas Vision 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman and Mike Palmer is here, he's the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Veritas. Mike, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me here. >> Great keynote, yesterday. We see hundreds, if not thousands of these discussions, and talking head presentations, and yours was hilarious. Let's set up for the people who didn't see it, yesterday. Mike gets up there, and he's talking about the, there's a video that's playing about the end of the world. And the basic theme is that you didn't take care of your data, and now the world's coming to an end. Las Vegas was in shambles, and there were waterfalls running through the hotels, drones attacking people, and then you picked it up from there and then took it into, just a really funny soliloquy. But, where'd you come up with that idea? And, how do you think, I thought it went great, but how did you feel afterwards? >> Well, I can take only partial credit. I have an amazing creative team, and when you work at a company that's been doing, you know, large-scale enterprise data-center stuff, we know that part of our obligation for our audience is kind of making it more palpable for them, making it feel a little bit more, bringing the emotion to it. So we want to have a little bit of excitement in there. But at the same time, we have a real message, you know, and hopefully that came across, too. >> It did, and then, you know, but again, a lot of good humor, the megabytes, gigabytes, you know, up to zetabytes, yadabytes, Mike Tyson-bytes, on and on and on. (laughing) Very clever, so congratulations on that... >> Mike: Oh, thanks! >> We really enjoyed it. Mixed things up a little bit. So, and again, very transparent. We talked about the UX, not the best. You're not happy with it. >> Mike: Right. >> And again, very transparent about that, I think that's a theme of many successful companies, today. But, so, let's start with, sort of, what does it take as the Chief Product Officer, to transform a company from somebody who's been around since 1983, into a modern, you know, cloud-like, hyper-scale, you know, set of service and software offerings. >> That's a big question, but I can tell you the first thing that it takes, the most important thing that it takes, is the best engineering team in the world. You can do a lot of things around the outside, we need to fix our UX, we know that, often considered that to be the kitchens and bathrooms of our house remodel. But if your foundation's broken, if your framing isn't there, you really don't have much of an asset to put on the market. We have a great engineering team, we are releasing products at a velocity that is incomparable in the enterprise ISV space, and we're super proud of that. So I think that's the number one thing. I think number two is the other thing, that we're the envy of the industry, for, and that is, an amazing install-base of customers. Very hard to name a fortune 2000 company that isn't a significant customer of Veritas, so we have a great basis to collaborate and innovate. You know, the rest, we know we have some work to do as we bring it into the modern age. You know, we talked a lot about the fact that workloads are changing in data centers, architectures are changing, we're establishing new partnerships with some of the sponsors that you see here today, like Microsoft, like Google, like IBM, and Oracle, and others. And, you know, it takes a village and they're helping us move into the next 10 years. >> Stu: You know, Mike, talk a little bit about the transition from, you know, software that lived on servers, to now, well, cloud is just isn't somebody else's servers, I think, is the word for that. >> Mike: Right. >> You know, it definitely, we've talked many times this week, you know, Veritas was software-defined before there was such a thing, used to be the FUD from the traditional players, that it was like, oh, you can't trust stuff like that, and now, of course, they're all software-defined and, you know, talking about that, too, so, what does that mean, going to kind of, being completely agnostic, for where things lived, and some of the intricacies of trying to work with, you know, some of the big and small cloud-players? >> A lot of questions in there, and I think David Noy, who I know you guys are going to talk to later, is going to talk a bit more specifically about this, but one of the first things you have to keep in mind, is if you're building software to be software-defined, then you have to build it without considering the hardware platform that you may deliver it on. And I think that's where some of our competitors get it wrong, they can say that they're software-defined, but the litmus test is, can I really pick up this software without modification, and go run it in one of those hyper-scalers? Or put it on one of the white boxes that I went into the market and procured and integrated myself? Veritas has been doing that for a long time. In fact, if you really look at Veritas's core, we're an integrator. We've been an integrator of applications, through the protection space, in our file-system and our info-scale technologies, we are integrators of operating systems, when you look at hyper-scalers, they're just the next operating system. Someone else's hardware, as you said. So we look to protect our customers in terms of their choices, make flexibility a real part of the multi-cloud architecture they're putting together, still doing the things we do well with protection, and ultimately layer on that last little bit when we're talking software-defined and that is not just focus on the infrastructure, but really aspire to this, how do I better manage data and get value from data? >> You know, Mike, I want to dig one level deeper on that. So, the cloud providers, it's all well and good to say, yeah, I'm agnostic, but each of them have their own little nuances. It's, at least today, it's not like, oh, I choose today to wake up and this one has cheaper prices, and it's not a commodity, it's not a utility, and each one of them have services that they want you to integrate with, have to have deeper, how do you balance that, you know, integration, how much work's done, where the customers are pulling you, how does that product portfolio get put together? >> That's an excellent question and I will be fully honest, that a year ago we thought about the answer to that question very differently than we do today. You know, a year ago, I think we were somewhat naive, and thought, hey, we're going to throw a thin layer of capability on top of the clouds, and in effect commoditize them ourselves, and hope our customers just move around as if there were no underlying services. And obviously if you're a cloud-provider, that is not an approach that you're a big fan of. (laughing) And frankly, it's a disservice to the customers, because they are building some really valuable services, and they are differentiating themselves. Our approach has changed, our approach today is a very deep-level integration with each cloud provider, and the specialization they're bringing to the market, without sacrificing the portability, without sacrificing the built-in protections that the cloud providers aren't putting on their platforms and don't want to put on their platforms. And again going back to this idea of data, ultimately, if it's someone else's hardware, in effect, in some cases, someone else's application, it's always your data, and how we are servicing that data is really the key. >> So, that's really hard work. In a lot of cases, you have to interface with very low-level, primitive APIs from the cloud service providers. How do you, sort of, balance your resources, or a portion of your resources, between doing that, because you guys, I call it the compatibility matrix, all kinds of data stores, all kinds of clouds, every one of those is engineering resources. And it seems that's a key part of your strategy, but you got to be sacrificing something, which is maybe, you know, the next widget on your existing products. How do you think about proportioning those? >> You know, at Veritas, in a way, the emergence of the cloud ecosystem actually improves that situation for us. We're carrying 30 years of operating systems that have come and gone, that have incremented versions, and our customers often strand or isolate single examples of those boxes, from 20 years ago that they expect us to test all of our software against, on their behalf. (laughing) For example, right, and so when you look at where we are today, there are five or 10 cloud providers, versus hundreds of operating system versions, and application, we have no problem supporting the proliferation in cloud, we actually welcome the ability to support those... >> Stu: You're much happier with the one version of AJUR, as opposed to the old Patch Monday. >> Exactly right, and you know, they upgrade the whole thing at once... >> Yeah. >> They issue a couple new services, and we adapt 'em, no problem. >> Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Because, while that's true, and I understand that, but within an individual cloud, you could have 15 data services. I think about AWS data services, their data pipeline is increasingly complex, so. Doesn't that complexity scale in a different direction? >> Mike: It scales differently for sure, but I would give a lot of credit to the cloud providers, because they're taking a lot of the regression testing that we used to have to do, for example, with application providers and operating system providers who didn't think about us when they were building their products. The cloud providers take accountability for regression testing all of the things that they release to their customers. So when we adopt an API, we're fully confident that that API works in the context of that cloud environment. So that's off our plate. It really isolates the need for us to simply test that API against our environment. >> Dave: OK, so much more stable and predictable environment for you. I want to ask you, I've heard the term modern data protection a lot, what is modern data protection? Everyone wants to be next-gen, how do you define modern data protection? >> Mike: And this is something we're super passionate about, because our industry has been around for quite a long time, and you get terms thrown out there, like legacy or modern, and everyone's fighting for brand recognition, and kind of, end of the growth spaces in the market. For us, it actually is very simple. We recognize that there are a lot of different techniques to protect data, we think of these protection schemes like lots of different insurance policies, and lots of different tools in your toolbox. Where Veritas is going to win, and continues to win, is that we can offer our customers all of those techniques. We're not trying to convince them that one technique is so much more special than another one, that they need to diversify and create complexity in their environment, so we talk about modern data protection as the ability to choose snapshots, or back-ups, or copy data management, or workload migration, in the future there will be other ways to do this: continuous data protection, or scale-out platforms for cloud providers. These are just techniques inside of a Veritas portfolio, as opposed to stand-alone companies that create complexity for our customers. So, modernization is choice. >> Dave: OK, so you have this awesome install-base. Bill Coleman said to us yesterday, in response to a similar but related question, that it's ours to lose. And the question that we have is, as you look at that install base, you got to get them onto this modern data platform. How do you do that? Do you write some abstraction layer? You talked about that thin layer in the cloud, you must have thought about doing that. Is that what you're doing? How is that going? What does that journey look like? >> Mike: You know, that is one of the most fundamental strategy questions for Veritas. And one of the things we recognized early on, is that while we do have an amazing install base of customers, and those customers are hyper-scaled themselves, you're talking about customers with tens of thousands of servers running our software, both on the storage and the protection site, so the thing that we cannot ask them to do is continuously upgrade their environment to take advantage of new features. We will put out one-to-two major releases of our software, particularly on a protection side, annually. But we're innovating at a far greater pace than that, so we've made some conscious choices to create new architectures for our customer that are workload-specific, so Cloud Point, being a great example, coming out in July, our Object Store announcements, underpinning our next generation protection solutions. So they have modern storage capabilities, our second example. But pulling them together is where only Veritas can offer a customer a complete catalog of that data. So, combining your net back-up catalog with Cloud Point, for example, with your storage, with what you've put into cloud, provides a customer, for the first time, kind of a complete view of the secondary estate. And so, as long as we get that right, we don't have to upgrade, we don't have to seed, what we have to do is enable our customers, through simple adoption of new tools, provide that visibility over the top, and I think that they'll be good to go. >> So that's kind of like a, I think of a term, backward compatibility, is essentially what you're providing for your install base, is that right? >> Mike: That's exactly right. Providing, and this is where API-based infrastructure and service-driven architectures help us a lot. We don't have to fully instantiate a code-base every time that we want to offer a service to a customer. >> Dave: There aren't many independent, in fact there aren't any independent, is one, two-and-a-half billion dollar software companies in your space, but there are many emerging guys, who are getting a lot of attention, well-funded, some, you know, hitting that kind of, 100 million dollar revenue mark, at least it appears that way. How do you look at those guys? What do you learn from them? You know, Branson said today, you know, you learn by listening and watching, in this case. You're watching the market, obviously, what are you seeing there, it's the hottest space in the infrastructure market right now, is your space and security. Are the two, you know, smoking hot spaces. What are you observing, and what are you learning? >> And I think the direct answer to your question is probably the user. You know, and I think that's the lesson of the industry even over the last 15 years, is that when a new workload arises, it's creating a new user inside the enterprise IT department. And that user often gets to determine all of the services that they need to make themselves successful. If that is a cloud workload, and they need availability services, or they need protection services, they want that to integrate in the same place that they buy in provision their cloud workload. If it's a container workload it's the same. We saw the rise of some of our competitors that got to multi-hundred million dollar revenue streams, by focusing on a single user, and a single type of transaction, with a single type of interface. And Veritas kind of lost its way, I think, a little bit, back in that time. So what we are watching today, is who are our users? What workloads are emerging? What sort of interfaces do we need to develop for those users? Which is why we made our UX statements as strongly as we did. We're committed to those. That is going to be the future of Veritas, it's serving the broadening user-base inside of enterprise. >> Dave: You're seeing a lot of discussion in the industry around design thinking, I know we're out of time, here, but, you know, you see companies, like, for instance, Charles Phillips's company, Infor, bought a company called Hook and Loop, and they're all about design, and, how is design thinking fitting into your, sort of, UX/UI plans? >> I mean, the parlance that we use internally is jobs to be done. Right, we clearly want to create a very consistent user experience, and look and feel, we want our customers to be proud to be Veritas customers. But we have to be super cognizant of, what is the job they're trying to get accomplished? And allow the system to be designed around accommodating that. If that is, I want three workflows in three steps or less, can I do that? It could be, I have a very complicated job and I want the ability to control very granular things, do I have an interface to do that? So, if we know the user and the job to be done, we can create a consistent look and feel, I think that we are, we're going to not only ride the wave, of change inside of our particular industry, but I think we're going to wind up in a consolidation space where we're a big winner. >> All right, last question, the bumper sticker on Vision 2017, as the trucks are pulling away from the area, what's the bumper sticker? >> Mike: Secondary data is your most under-utilized asset, and a platform provider is what you need to take advantage of it. >> Dave: All right, Mike, thanks very much for coming to The Cube. Congratulations, and good luck. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you're welcome, keep right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. The Cube, live we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017 brought to you by VM ware and it's ecosystem partner. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back, we are here on the ground at the VM village live in Las Vegas at VMworld 2017. People buzzing around us here on the ground floor in the hang space, I'm John Ferrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Craig Nunez, Chief VP of Marketing at Datrium, Andre Lebosi? >> Lebosi. >> VP Solutions and Alliances at Datrium. Welcome to The Cube, great to see you. >> I've been looking forward to this since I arrived in Vegas, man. (laughter) >> You guys are the hottest start-up right now on the track in Silicon Valley. A lot of people talking about you guys. Want to get this out there. Give you a minute to just talk about Datrium. You guys are a new model emerging, some real pros. David Doman everyone knows about your success with that. Frank's Loop and that went that way. You guys have a great team of XVM guys. >> Craig: Yes. >> So you're working on a really compelling unique thing but it's getting traction so give a minute to explain what Datrium is. >> In simple terms, we are a very different take on conversions. We were conversing VM ware and Linux virtualization even bare metal container hosts with your primary storage we leveraged host Flash for that with secondary storage and archived to cloud. All in one super simple system. And I mean, what a lot of our customers kind of tell us, wow you are a simpler more scalable kind of nutanix that meets rubrik. You're like this love child of nutanix and rubrik. (laughter) They just love it 'cause it's one thing that does it all, super simple. >> A lot of free love going around this generation. (laughter) You got AWS and VM ware bonding together. Google playing in here, it's like the 60's all over again. (laughter) >> Yeah, yeah, not that I remember. >> Tech B generation.6 >> Dave: Summer love 2017. Summer of love, that I'm going to use that. >> Okay love child between rubrick and nutanix. What specifically does that look like? Just clarify one from a product p6erspective. >> First of all there is absolutely zero Call it, HCI cluster administration and so you know growing is as simple as adding a server. Adding capacity, you add those independently as you need it, so it's super economic. Everything runs fast 'cause it runs right out of Flash in your server adjacent to your VM. Again no back up silo, you take care all of your protection and archiving to the cloud with the same console that you're running your business on. So it's in a nutshell what you get. >> So contrast that Andre with the classical hyper-converged infrastructure in terms of how it's scales and how it's managed. >> Yeah I know that's a good question. So if you think about hyper-convergence. It was great, it really changed the years. In many ways it simplified, you remove the no silos that san was creating complexity around scalability or configuring rate, lunz, zoning. All the things that you'd specialize as skill to manage, right? And as you know, as you move along in your journey in the data center, you end up with multiple different vendors. They have different skill sets to manage. So HCI really changed the game in that way. But it also created different challenges for the data center. And we were lucky enough that HCI's only starting, right? This whole thing about converging is only getting started. So one of the first problems that we are dress is being able to scale performance, independent of capacity. So we've hyper-converged for the most part. You know, if you might want more capacity you need to have a computer, if you need a computer, you need more capacity. So we enable customers to go in different directions as needed. We also enable customers to bring their own existing environment into the solution. With HCI generally speaking, you need to buy that specific appliance or that specific HCL and sort of like pour everything in that specific solution. Which kind of becomes a silo as well. So we enable companies to leverage the existing environments and get the same benefits that you'd get from a performance perspective that HCI is bringing. Data locality and relook or read IO's with ...... But at the same time, with your existing hardware. And allows you to use whatever you want. There are other benefits on the resilience side as well. A primary and secondary bad cops so all the primary data, leaves in the nodes in the servers but we have the copy of the data or the back up in what we call a data cluster. So, what that really makes is the solution is stateless on the server side. I don't know if you remember, it's the same timeframe. All the servers were stateless. If a server went down, you would just, no move. You restart the VM's or the workload in a different server. And it's great. With hyper-convergence, now it's always stateful. All the data is actually living on the server. So when you lose a server, you actually putting data at risk and to be cost effective with ACI, you need to do what they call IFTT1 or replication factor two which means I have two copies of the data across the cluster. But it's not very uncommon to have avoid this failure and the read error and then you down to back up and have to restore. You want to rely on the backup as your insurance-- >> Dave: Not as your-- >> Not as then we use it for a day today. >> Yeah. >> So there are a number of different things that we solved that we believe we solved well. That hyper-convergence was not able to solve in its first instance. But you know what? That said, hyper-convergence started this whole journey to convergence is starting. I think I heard Chad Sakeet saying that, there's 440,000 VMX out there. Those are all coming for renewal, no refresh cycles. And now customers that have been able to see what HCI was doing the past three, four years. What worked and what was not working well and look at the use solutions and see how we are addressing those changes. >> Well what about the data protection side. You guys obviously have with Brian and Hugo, a lot of experience as a target. >> Voiceover: Yeah, yeah. >> But you're talking about more. You're talking about a software platform. >> Yeah from a data protection perspective, first of all you've got a platform that's totally unified with your primary storage environment. You then have this wonderful grandularity at VM and V dis level, container level. Great scale, I mean again the chops that the founders bring to that. But one of the things that you know, it think is really powerful. other platforms will talk about, hey we can snap VM's. We can replicate but then they will store them on expensive Flash in those nods and we have a separate device that is cost optimized, globally dedupped compressed on very low cost capacity. That is ideal for all that capacity you need to keep to protect the business. And so bringing that together with the great performance of Flash, this thing really does it all end to end And so it's a different way to think about it. And when we go in, we typically solving problems on the compute primary storage side. >> Voiceover: Uh huh. >> But when we then describe what we do from a backup or archived to cloud perspective, the lights go on and oh my gosh, I simply don't need-- >> John: I got a two for one here. >> Yes exactly. >> Your file system basically you're saying eliminates the need for any separate backup software, is that right, or? >> We do, I would say 80 or 90% of what most people need because the convenience of having your virtualization engineer do it all is so good. Now what I would say is, there are a lot of requirements in the world that we absolutely are going to turn to our pals at Zerto for and Cool Replication. Our friends at Veem, Rubert Cohesidi. All of those guys, we'll team up with because if you want you know back up off platform you know we're daydream to daydream. >> Voiceover: Yeah, right. >> We're not, going to sugar coat that. But there are specific requirements that those guys do that you need. We're going to give them a ring and bring them in. But what we're finding is, most of our customers are looking for ways to just do it all in one spot with a guy running the business, so. >> So I want to back up for a second. We had Brian's founder on Monday and this is an interesting story. I want you to take a minute to describe why you're doing this, because a lot of people, you come in, okay primary storage compute and then that's how I used to operate and then the next guy comes in with his solution. You guys have an interesting perspective with the data domain backup side. Why are guys taking this approach? Explain the uniqueness, why you guys are engaging in this way and what does it mean for the person the customer on the other end. >> Craig: Yeah. >> Is it all in one, is it optional? I mean, the approach is unique 'cause of the founder. >> Craig: Yeah. Just take a minute to explain that. >> Here's the world, the world is hard and getting harder, right? I mean it's just a morning, noon, night and weekend job to keep businesses running with the pace of this economy we're in, right? >> John: The economists are pulling their hair out, basically. >> And the, exactly and so the winner in the market is the one who can bring the simplest approach that gets the job done. And the problem is the bolt on, peace meal solution's that folks are tasked to live with, if you sit down and just draw all of the software stacks and consoles, then you need to put together to go from your virtualization environment. Flash, your backup environment. Replication DR, security, you want to blow your brains out. (laughter) >> John: Hang from the raftors. And again guys, they're trying to get the job done. They're forced to move fast and they're tight on budget. And so if you Ycan bring them the simplest possible solution that solves the problem today and future proofs it going forward, that's what folks are looking for. And there's a lot of nuanced edges to a lot of different solutions out there but at the end of the day show me simple and that wins. >> Alright so, now give me the reactions. That's important to buyers to understand what the (mumbles) is, thank you very much for that. Now the reactions. So you walk into that buyer and say, hey don't blow your brains out. Don't hang from the rafters, we got you here. This is beautiful for you, simple works. Cleans those lines up. What are they reacting to? Are they skeptical, they say you're full of you know what? Do they test the hell out of it? What goes on? >> When you walk them through it, and I'm going to let you take this too. You've talked to a ton of people already. When you walk them through it, they totally get it. Where should Flash be? Right next to the VM on the host. Makes perfect since, it's cheaper there, right? How should you scale, well stateless host. You know, servers that aren't storage nods. You know you lose two and you cluster down. That's not a great situation. >> Voiceover: No problem. >> Voiceover: Yeah. (laughter) >> And so stateless hosts. Any number of servers can fail, you're still going. People love that, they get that. Bringing all the backup capability into that one console. If you've got it, people get it and by the way, a quick demo is kind of icing on the cake. But I mean-- >> Share some color. >> Yeah, no, I've been traveling the last few weeks and talking to customers. I joined Datrium four months ago, and customers understand the proposition and they like. They like that we bring performers. They like that we bring resiliency. They like that it re-utilize the existing investments in the data center. And they like that we do primary and secondary backup. The customers that we're talking to they get it and they understand it and they want to do POC's and move on. >> So you're talking about a lot of VMX's out there. 400,00 plus, obviously that's been a target for hyper-connected verge. Clearly a target for your guys.6 But you're also talking about stateless. And when you think about these emerging cloud native apps, these stateless apps, certain IOT apps that are being developed. Do you see the emergence within your customer base yet? Of those type of emerging applications that aren't staple. >> Absolutely, I mean well first of all. If you look at the public cloud world. Architecturally what those guys have had to do to kind of get latency low and scalable, they think EC2 and S3, you know think of how Google cloud is architected with Kolassas. They have separated that persistent capacity from what's going on, effectively on the nods, the compute nods. And they've done that for exactly for that reason. To scale, low latency workloads as you need as you grow on demand. >> And to make that infrastructure invisible to the developer. >> Absolutely, absolutely and so the approach we're taking is fundamentally to give customers in kind of this hybrid world a way to bring that kind of infrastructure with the simplicity, scale, performance you need and kind of on prim. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And then it's a wonderful map when you take that in hybrid way to public cloud, 'cause you can very easily map that capacity layer to capacity layer, compute to compute. Instead of this kind of crazy dance you have to do with traditional infrastructure. >> That was actually part of it. You look at the VM ware and nowadays there's keynotes and embracing double ups and container. It's all over the place now. Now we're counting the days for how many store engineers or infrastructural engineers who actually need the data center moving forward. But the way system that we said was the architecture while in mind just support very medal containers and provide all of the performance benefits. And really finding a way to run containers and native apps, called native apps across data centers, across clouds. And we're moving in that direction more and more to support (mumbles) integrated and a few other architectural solutions. >> So I want to follow up with that. I mean, everybody talks about cloud. The show it's cloud, cloud, cloud and obviously the big wave. But the, you know this well John being all the time you spent with AWS, Reinvent and Jassie and so forth. The (mumbles) cloud is not VM's. >> Voiceover: Right. >> Right, and so is the conversation beginning to change? And your customer base around more of a developer mindset and what does that conversation look like. >> For the customers that I've been talking they still are very VM centric. There are some discussions about containers and developing, developers embracing containers. Off brand on the &cloud and on premise but they know VM is still pervasive in the prize. >> Dave: So that's where the money is? (laughter) >> That's where the money is, at least for the large majority of -- >> I'm sorry now on premise. And so cloud is just a different vernacular true but-- >> But the reality is though folks have that've got a VM environment. A lot of people we talk to are they have mason container development work going on. >> John: Right. >> And the challenge is though that those kinds of customers wind up having to silo out the infrastructure that supports those. You just don't have the bridge. >> Dave: And with you, you're saying-- >> And the point is yeah, you can have your ESX, VM's, your Linux VM's, your containers running in those VM's or you can have those containers running bare metal. >> Yeah. >> It's all one shared pool of resources like it ought to be. >> And to some extent when I talk to customers, what I figured out is they all starting using containers running VM's. But as soon as they figured out their frame of work, their management, their orchestration, they wanted to move to bare metal 'cause they wanted to have is that additional 10, 15% performance that they get running bare metal. And that I see constantly and talking to Docker and other companies, that's what they see on their customer base as well. >> Voiceover: Yeah. >> So you know where all that is going, I don't believe everything is going to be running in the cloud. I don't believe everything is going to be running in the data center. There'll be a mix of everything. You talk to two customers, they have different hyper-visors, they had red hat visualization, they have VM ware, they have hyperV. And large customers are embracing everything to some extent. >> Yeah, and you want to set it up in a way that you know, you set your policies and you don't care where it is, right? You set it up, and economical way that is lined with you service levels and who care if it's you know, a different prim site, the cloud, which cloud it doesn't matter. It's all your cloud, one cloud, right? >> Guys, thanks for coming on. Andre Leibovici. >> Andre: Yeah. (laughter) >> Got it right? >> Andre: You, got it. >> Greg Nunez, good friend congratulations on the start-up. >> Craig: Thanks. >> Quick, I want to give you the last word here. Talk about the company's status, what you guys are hiring for, where you guys are in the start-up journey. I see great validation with multiple rounds of funding. How many employees? How much revenue are you doing? Tell me the product cost? (laughter) Share! >> We are growing rapidly, 130% quarter of a quarter. We are hiring literally across the board. We can't hire fast enough to keep up with the demand. And for us the number one goal is just getting in front of customers looking for a way out from personal infrastructure. >> John: Sales people, field organization, channel? >> Channel we have a wonderful channel network and absolutely hiring guys to partner up with our channel. Both sales and marketing and yeah we just-- >> Alright, I'll put you guys on the spot because we love big fan of start-ups, certainly ones that have great pedigree in product that's unique again like Utonics in the early days, no one understood it, founders had stayed on course. You guys are on a similar track where it doesn't look like everything else but it's game changing so. Each of you take a minute to explain to the buyer, a potential customer out there, why they should work with Datrium and what you can bring to the table. We'll start with you. >> So first of all, if you are on a ray based infrastructure now, you're dealing with your performance constraints, managing lines, you've looked at a modern approach to convergence and it just doesn't scale, it's not right for your infrastructure, and enterpriser service provider has to take a look at this new approach to convergence we've got. It will change your world, literally. Your business and your personal world. And if you don't take a look, you're missing out. It is different from hyper-convergence. But fundamentally brings your that wonderful X86 based infrastructure that the whole planet is moving to. Got to take a look. >> Andre you can't say the same thing he's said but in your own words what would you say to the potential buyers that are out there. Potential customers, why should they look at you guys. >> Sure, I'll let you all in on the HCI in the simplicatiion of the data center. You know HCI was great simplying data center, removing a lot of the complexity. We do the same things. We do it in a different way. We remove all the nobs and buttons that you have in the data center as an example our infrastructure doesn't require any tuning on performance. So enable this duplication, enable compression, disable original recording. All those features that people, that when you're managing hundreds or thousands of yams, there's no way you know what needs to be enabled and disabled for each one of your workloads. So we lack from simplicity and that's where I met my pace CI peg, it's simplicity. And we do the same thing but we now solve different challenges that HCI also brought into the market. >> Datrium start-up, hot start-up in Silicon Valley and all around the world. Congratulations. It's The Cube coverage here at VMWorld 2017. I'm John Ferrier and Dave Vellante. We'll be be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you buy Infor. >> Welcome back to Inforum 2017 everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Duncan Angove is here, the President of Infor and a Cube alum. Good to see you again Duncan. >> Hey, afternoon guys. >> So it's all coming together right? When we first met you guys down in New Orleans, we were sort of unpacking, trying to squint through what the strategy is. Now we call it the layer cake, we were talking about off camera, really starting to be cohesive. But set up sort of what's been going on at Infor. How are you feeling? What the vibe is like? >> Yeah it's been an amazing journey over the last six years. And, um, you know, all the investments we put in products, as you know, we said to you guys way back then, we've always put products at the center. Our belief is that if you put innovation and dramatic amounts of investment in the core product, everything else ends up taking care of itself. And we put our money where our mouth was. You know, we're a private company, so we can be fairly aggressive on the level of investment we put into R&D and it's increased double digit every single year. And I think the results you've seen over the last two years, in terms of our financials is that, you know the market's voting in a way that we're growing double digits dramatically faster than our peers. So that feels pretty good. >> So Jim is, I know, dying to get into the AI piece, but lets work our way up that sort of strategy layer cake with an individual had a lot to do with that. So you know, you guys started with the decision of Micro-verticals and you know the interesting thing to us is you're starting to see some of the big SI's join in. And I always joke, that they love to eat at the trough. But you took a lot of the food away by doing that last mile. >> Yeah. >> But now you're seeing them come in, why is that? >> You know I think the whole industry is evolving. And the roles that different and the valor that different companies in that ecosystem play, whether it's an enterprise software vendor or it's a systems integrator. Everything's changing. I mean, The Cloud was a big part of that. That took away tasks that you would sometimes see a systems integrator doing. As larger companies started to build more completely integrated suites, that took away the notion that you need a systems integrator to plug all those pieces together. And then the last piece for us was all of the modifications that were done to those suites of software to cover off gaps in industry functionality or gaps in localizations for a country, should be done inside the software. And you can only do that if you have a deep focus, by industry on going super, super deep at a rapid rate on covering out what we call these last malfeatures. So that means that the role of the systems integrators shifted. I mean they've obviously pivoted more recently into a digital realm. They've all acquired digital agencies. And having to adapt to this world where you have these suites of software that run in The Cloud that don't need as much integration or as much customization. So we were there you know five, six years ago. They weren't quite there. It was still part of this symbiotic relationship with other large vendors. And I think now, you know, the reason for the first time we've got guys like Accenture, and Deloitte, and Capgemini, and Grant Thornton here, is that they see that. And their business model's evolved. And you know those guys obviously like to be where they can win business and like to build practices around companies they see winning business. So the results we've seen and the growth we've seen over the last two to three years, obviously that's something they want a piece of. So I think it's going to work out. >> Alright so Jim, you're going to have to bear with me a second 'cause I want to keep going up the stack. So the second big milestone decision was AWS. >> Duncan: Yeah. >> And we all understand the benefits of AWS. But there's two sides to that cone and one is, when you show your architectural diagram, there's a lot of AWS in there. There's S3, there's DynamoDB, I think I saw Kinesis in there. I'm sure there's some Ec2 and other things. And it just allows you to focus on what you do best. At the same time, you're getting an increasingly complex data pipeline and ensuring end-to-end performance has to be technically, a real challenge for you. So, I wanted to ask you about that and see if you could comment and how you're managing that. >> Yeah so, I mean obviously, we were one of the first guys to actually go all in on Amazon as a Cloud delivery platform. And obviously others now have followed. But we're still one of their top five ISV's on there. The only company that Amazon reps actually get compensated on. And it's a two way relationship right? We're not just using them as a Cloud delivery partner. We're also using some of their components. You know you talked about some of their data storage components. We're also leverage them for AI which we'll get into in a second. But it's a two way relationship. You know, they run our asset management facility for all of their data centers globally. We do all the design and manufacturing of their drones and robots. We're partnered with them on the logistic side. So it's a deep two way relationship. But to get to your question on just sort of the volume and the integration. We work in integrations with staggering volumes right? I mean, retail, you're dealing with billions and billions of data points. And we'll probably get into that in a second you know. The whole asset management space, is one of the fastest growing applications we have. Driven by cycle dynamics of IoT and explosion in device data and all of that. So we've had for a very, very long time, had to figure out an efficient way to move large amounts of data that can be highly chatty. And do it in an efficient way. And sometimes it's less about the pipes in moving it around, it's how you ingest that data into the right technology from a data storage perspective. Ingest it and then turn it into insights that can power analytics or feed back into our applications to drive execution. Whether it's us predicting maintenance failure on a pump and then feeding that back into asset management to create a work order and schedule an engineer on it. Right? >> That's not a trivial calculus. Okay, now we're starting to get into Jim's wheelhouse, which is, you call it, I think you call it the "Age of Network Intelligence". And that's the GT Nexus acquisition. >> Yeah. >> To us it's all about the data. I think you said 18 years of transaction history there. So, talk about that layer and then we'll really get into the data the burst piece and then of course the AI. >> Yeah, so there were two parts to why we called it "The Age of Network Intelligence". And it's not often that technology or an idea comes along in human history that actually bends the curve of progress right? And I think that we said it on stage, the steam engine was one of those and it lead to the combustion engine, it lead to electricity and it lead to the internet and the mobile phone and it all kind of went. Of course it was invented by a British man, an Englishman you know? That doesn't happen very often right? Where it does that. And our belief is that the rise of networks, coupled with the rise of artificial intelligence, those two things together will have the same impact on society and mankind. And it's bigger than Infor and bigger than enterprise software, it's going to change everything. And it's not going to do it in a linear way. It's going to be exponential. So the network part of that for us, from an Infor perspective was, yes it was about the commerce network, which was GT Nexus, and the belief that almost every process you have inside an enterprise at some point has to leave the enterprise. You have to work with someone else, a supplier or a customer. But ERP's in general, were designed to automate everything inside the four walls. So our belief was that you should extend that and encompass an entire network. And that's obviously what the GT Nexus guys spent 18 years building was this idea of this logistics network and this network where you can actually conduct trade and commerce. They do over 500 billion dollars a year on that network. And we believe, and we've announced this as network CloudSuites, that those two worlds will blur. Right? That ultimately, CloudSuites will run completely nakedly on the network. And that gives you some very, very interesting information models and the parallel we always give is like a Linkedin or a Facebook. On Linkedin, there's one version of the application. Right? There's one information model where everyone's contact information is. Everyone's details about who they are is stored. It's not stored in all these disparate systems that need to be synchronized constantly. Right? It's all in one. And that's the power of GT Nexus and the commerce network, is that we have this one information model for the entire supply chain. And now, when you move the CloudSuite on top of that, it's like this one plus one is five. It's a very, very powerful idea. >> Alright Jim, chime in here, because you and I both excited about the burst when we dug into that a little bit. >> Yes. >> Quite impressed actually. Not lightweight vis, you know? It's not all sort of BI. >> Well the next generation of analytics, decision support analytics that infuse and inform and optimize transactions. In a distributed value chain. And so for the burst is a fairly strong team, you've got Brad Peters who was on the keynote yesterday, and of course did the pre-briefing for the analyst community the day before. I think it's really exciting, the Coleman strategy is really an ongoing initiative of course. First of all, on the competitive front, all of your top competitors in this very, I call it a war of attrition in ERP. SAP, Oracle and Microsoft have all made major investments on going in AI across their portfolios. With a specific focus on informing and infusing their respective ERP offerings. But what I conceived from what Infor's announced with the Coleman strategy, is that yours is far more comprehensive in terms of taking it across your entire portfolio, in a fairly accelerated fashion. I mean, you've already begun to incorporate, Coleman's already embedded in several of your vertical applications. First question I have for you Duncan, as I was looking through all the discussions around Coleman, when will this process be complete in terms of, "Colemanizing", is my term? "Colemanizing" the entire CloudSuite and of course network CloudSuite portfolio. That's a huge portfolio. And it's like you got fresh funding, a lot of it, from Koch industries. To what extent can, at what point in the next year or two, can most Infor customers have the confidence that their cloud applications are "Colemanized"? And then when will, if ever, Coleman AI technology be made available to those customers who are using your premises based software packages? >> So yeah, we could spend a long time talking about this. The thing about Coleman and RAI and machine learning capabilities is that we've been at work on it for a while. And you know we created the dynamic science labs. Our team of 65 Ph.D.'s based up in M.I.T. got over three and a half four years ago. And our differentiation versus all the other guys you mentioned is that, two things, one, we bring a very application-centric view of it. We're not trying to build a horizontal, generic, machine learning platform. In the same way that we- >> Yeah you're not IBM with Watson, all that stuff. >> Yeah, no, no. Or even Auricle. >> Jim: Understood. >> Or Microsoft. >> Jim: Nobody expects you to be. >> No, you know, and we've always been the guys that have worked for the Open Source community. Even when you look at like, we're the first guys to provide a completely open source stack underneath our technology with postscripts. We don't have a dog in the hunt like most of the other guys do. Right? So we tap in to the innovation that happens in the Open Source community. And when you look at all the real innovation that's happening in machine learning, it's happening in the Open Source Community. >> Jim: Yes. >> It's not happening with the old legacy, you know, ERP guys. >> Jim: Pencer, Flow and Spark and all that stuff. >> Yeah, Google, Apple, the GAFA. >> Yeah. >> Right? Google, Apple, Facebook, those are the guys that are doing it. And the academic community is light years ahead on top of that of what these other guys will do. So that's what we tap into right? >> Are you tapping into partners like AWS? 'Cause they've obviously, >> Duncan: Absolutely >> got a huge portfolio of AI. >> Yeah, so we. >> Give us a sense whether you're going to be licensing or co-developing Coleman technologies with them going forward. >> Yeah so we obviously we have NDA's with them, we're deeply inside their development organization in terms of working on things. You know, our science is obviously presented to them around ideas we think they need to go. I mean, we're a customer of their AI frameup to machine learning and we're testing it at scale with specific use cases in industries, right? So we can give them a lot of insights around where it needs to go and problems we're trying to solve. But we do that across a number of different organizations and we've got lots and lots of academic collaborations that happen on around all of the best universities that are pushing on this. We've even received funding from DAPA in certain cases around things that we're trying to solve for. You know quietly we've made some machine-learning acquisitions over the last five, six years. That have obviously brought this capability into it. But the point is we're going to leverage the innovation that happens around these frameworks. And then our job is understanding the industries we're in and that we're an applications company, is to bring it to life in these applications in a seamless way, that solves a very specific problem in an industry, in a powerful and unique way. You know on stage I talked about this idea of bringing this AI first mindset to how we go about doing it. >> So it's important, if I can interject. This is very important. This is Infor IP, the serious R&D that's gone into this. It's innovation. 'Cause you know what your competitors are going to say. They're going to deposition and say, oh, it's Alexa on steroids. But it's not. It's substantial IP and really leveraging a lot of the open source technologies that are out there. >> Yeah. So you know, I talked about there were four components to Coleman, right? And the first part of it was, we can leverage machine-learning services to make the CloudSuites conversational. So they can chat, and talk, and see, and hear, and all of that. And yeah, some of those are going to use the technology that sits behind Alexa. And it's available in AWS's Alexa as you guys know. But that's only really a small part of what we're doing. There are some places where we are looking at using computer vision. For example, automated inspection of car rental returns, is one area. We're using it for quality management pilot at a company that normally has humans inspect something on a production line. That kind of computer-vision, that's not Alexa, right? It's you know, I gave the example of image recognition. Some of it can leverage AWS's framework there. But again, we're always going to look for the best platform and framework out there to solve the specific problem that we're trying to solve. But we don't do it just for the sake of it. We do it with a focus to begin with, with an industry. Like, where's a really big problem we can solve? Or where is there a process that happens inside an application today that if you brought an AI first mindset to it, it's revolutionary. And we use this phrase, "the AI is the UI". And we've got some pretty good analogies there that can help bring it to life. >> And I like your approach for presenting your AI strategy, in terms of the value it delivers your customers, to business. You know, there's this specter out there in the culture that AI's going to automate everybody out of a job. Automation's very much a big part of your strategy but you expressed it well. Automating out those repetitive functions so that human beings, you can augment the productivity of human beings, free them up for more value-added activities and then augment those capabilities through conversational chat box. And so forth, and so on. Provide you know, in-application, in process, in context, decision support with recommendations and all that. I think that's the exact right way to pitch it. One of the things that we focus on and work on in terms of application development, disciplines that are totally fundamental to this new paradigm. Recommendation engines, recommender systems, in line to all application. It's happening, I mean, Coleman, that really in many ways, Coleman will be the silent, well not so silent, but it'll be the recommendation engine embedded inside all of your offerings at some point. At least in terms of the strategy you laid out. >> Yeah, no, absolutely right I mean. It's not just about, we all get hung up on machine-learning and deep learning 'cause it's the sexy part of AI, right? But there's a lot more. I mean, AI, all the way back, you can go all the way back to Socrates and the father of logic right? I mean, some of the things you can do is just based on very complex rules and logic. And what used to be called process automation right? And then it extends all the way to deep learning and neural networks and so on. So one of the things that Coleman also does, is it unifies a lot of this technology. Things that you would normally do for prediction or optimization, and optimization normally is the province of operations research guys right? Which again it's a completely different field. So it unifies all of that into one consistent platform that has all of that capability into it. And then it exposes it in a consistent way through our API architecture. So same thing with bots. People always think chat bots are separate. Well that too is unified inside Coleman. So it's a cohesive platform but again, industry focused. >> What's your point of view on developers? And how do you approach the development community and what's your strategy there? >> Yeah, I mean, it's critical right? So we've always, I mean, hired an incredible number of application engineers every year. I think the first 12 months we were here, we hired 1800 right? 'Cause you know, that's kind of what we do. So we believe hugely in smarts. And it sounds kind of obvious, but experience can be learned, smarts is portable. And we have a lot of programs in place with universities. We call it the Education Alliance Program. And I think we have up to 32 different universities around the world where we're actually influencing curriculum, and actually bringing students right out of there. Using internships during the year and then actually bringing them into our development organization. So we've got a whole pipeline there. I mean that's critical that we have access to those. >> And what about outside your four walls, or virtual walls have been four? Is there a strategy to specifically pursue external developers and open up a PAZ layer? >> Yeah we do. >> Or provide an STK for Coleman for example, for developers. >> Yeah so we did, as part of our Infor Operating Service update. Which is, you know, the name for our unified technology platform. We did announce Mongoose platform was a service. Our Mongoose pass. >> Host: Oh Mongoose, sure. >> So that now is being delivered as a platform with a service for application development. And it's used in two ways. It's used for us to build new applications. It's a very mobile-first type development framework too. And obviously Hook and Loop had a huge influence in how that ships. The neat thing about it, is that it ships with plumbing into ION API, plumbing into our security layer. So customers will use it because it leverages our security model. It's easy to access everything else. But it's also used by our Hook and Loop digital team. So those guys are going off and they're building completely differentiated curated apps for customers. And again, they're using Mongoose. So I think between ION API's and between all the things you get in the Infor Operating Service, and Mongoose, we've got a pretty good story around extensibility and application development. As it relates to an STK for Coleman, we're just working through that now. Again, our number one focus is to build those things into the applications. It's a feature. The way most companies have approached optimization and machine learning historically, is it's a discrete app that you have to license. And it's off to the side and you integrate it in. We don't think that's the right way of doing it. Machine-learning and artificial intelligence, is a platform. It's an enabler. And it fuses and changes every part of the CloudSuite. And we've got a great example on how you can rethink demand forecasting, demand planning. Every, regardless of the industry we serve, everyone has to predict demand right? It's the basis for almost every other decision that happens in the enterprise. And, how much to make, how many nurses to put on staff, all of that, every industry, that prediction of demand. And the thinking there really hasn't changed in 20, 30 years. It really hasn't. And some of that's just because of the constraints with technology. Storage, compute, all of that. Well with the access we have to the elastic super-computing now and the advancements in sort of machine-learning and AI, you can radically rethink all of that, and take what we call and "AI First" approach, which is what we've done with building our brand new demand prediction platform. So the example we gave is, you think about when early music players came along on the internet right? The focus was all around building a gorgeous experience for how to build a playlist. It was drag and drop, I could do it on a phone, I could share it with people and it showed pictures of the album art. But it was all around the usability of making that playlist better. Then guys like Spotify and Pandora came around and it took an AI First approach to it. And the machine builds your playlist. There is no UI. AI is the UI. And it can recommend music I never knew I would've liked. And the way it does that, comes back to the data. Which is why I'm going to circle back to Infor here in a second. Is that, it breaks a song down into hundreds if not thousands of attributes about that song. Sometimes it's done by a human, sometimes it's even done by machine listening algorithms. Then you have something that crawls the web, finds music reviews online, and further augments it with more and more attributes. Then you layer on top of that, user listening activity, thumbs up, thumbs down, play, pause, skip, share, purchase. And you find, at that attribute level, the very lowest level, the true demand drivers of a song. And that's what's powering it right? Just like you see with Netflix for movies and so on. Imagine bringing that same thought process into how you predict demand for items, that you've never promoted before. Never changed the price before. Never put in this store before. Never seen before. >> The cold start problem in billing recommendation areas. >> Exactly right, so, that's what we mean by AI First. It's not about just taking traditional demand planning approaches and making it look sexier and putting it on an iPad right? Rethink it. >> Well it's been awesome to watch. We are out of time. >> Yeah, we're out of time. >> Been awesome to watch the evolution, >> We could go on and on with this yeah. >> of Infor as it's really becoming a data company. And we love having executives like you on. >> Yeah >> You know, super articulate. You got technical chops. Congratulations on the last six years. >> Thanks. >> The sort of quasi-exit you guys had. >> Great show, amazing turnout. >> And look forward to watching the next six to 10. So thanks very much for coming out. >> Brilliant, thank you guys. Alright thank you. >> Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, this is Inforum 2017 and this is theCUBE. We'll be right back. (digital music)