>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante with theCUBE, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I've been running a CEO series for the last several weeks, talking to leaders about how they're dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and really, trying to understand how they've been navigating through and communicating to their employees, and their customers. I'm really excited to have Melissa Di Donato here, she's the CEO of SUSE. Melissa, great to see you again. >> Great to see you, thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome, and you and I met last September and one of the reasons I've been looking forward to this interview, I'm a fanboy. I threw the kitchen sink at you last year, and you batted everything out of the park. We were talking about digital transformation, digital business, and you were really one of my favorite guests of the year. So, >> Thank you. >> Talk about kitchen sink. This COVID-19 thing came out of nowhere, when did you see it coming? And what was your first move as a leader? >> Well, so for us, we had a really unique position, Dave, because we have a number of people staying in China, so we've got more than 250 employees sitting in China, so for us COVID-19 is not new, we've been dealing with this for quite a long time, since December when first started becoming ill in China, realizing that there was an issue. As of the seventh of January we had to move very quickly when China went onto lockdown, we had to find a way to get our employees to be able to work from home very quickly, and taking a couple of hundred of employees that are sitting in China and being able to empower them and enable them to work from home very quickly, nearly overnight, was no short task, so we took all of that learning back in January, and then we were able to respond as the countries fell ill, and the government requirements went in place around the world since then. So for us, this is nothing new, we were really fortunate that we had the mechanisms in place to handle the pandemic first in China, now as it came across Europe, and then of course into the US. >> Yeah so, you had the canary in the coalmine, so to speak, Well before >> Kind of, something like that >> Yeah, well before you had to start making decisions about SUSECon in Dublin, which was scheduled to be in March, so that was your other big decision point, wasn't it? >> Yeah, it was really difficult for us, because obviously, we had customers, we had partners, all wanted to come to Dublin, in fact, we were scheduled to be there together as well, and we had to give them enough time to be able to make alternate arrangements, but at the same time, we had to wait to see what the government was going to do in Ireland, because obviously that has a very big impact on the structure, the cost, et cetera. But we made a early decision, as early as we could, and that was the beginning part of March, to make the decision to unfortunately move it to a digital event, which was not an easy solution. The first time in our history, bringing a big, annual conference that's physical and in person, to a virtual event that's in digital, it wasn't an easy over-the-night kind of process and decision to make, so it was a hard one, but we're really confident, and May 20th is the announcment and the start of our SUSECon digital event, so not too long away from where we are now. >> Melissa, how have you altered, enhanced, your communications to your employees, your team, and ultimately your customers and partners? Have you increased the cadence? How have you altered? >> Yeah, so much so. I do a video with my team that I announce and push out every Monday, so every Monday I give them a business update, I tell them what's happening in the industry, what's happening with SUSE, what's happening with our customers. That happens every week, once a week. That's for every employee, and its a video call, something like this, almost. Then what we do is weekly updates on the great things that are happening around SUSE. You know, we've got a lot of amazing employees here in the open source community, but also employees as well. We've had employees in Italy who created virtual classrooms for their employees, we had an employee in the US who dedicated 30% of his bonus to give back to his local school, he's bought lunches for all the people at his hospital locally, we've had our entire Nuremberg, Germany office give all of their lunch vouchers to the homeless in Germany, so we also like to publicize all the good work that all of our employees are doing, to give back to their local communities and globally, so the cadence has definitely been increased. We just ran a survey this last week that closed yesterday. We got very, very favorable results. And that was definitely geared towards communication, no more so than now, do the employees and the customers need to be aware of what's going on. You probably feel the same thing, and through me and probably loads of other interviews, know that we're not a magician, we're not a scientist here that could predict necessarily the future. I think the scientists themselves don't even know what's going to happen, but we're doing our best to take outlook, and take a lot of concerted approach to educate our employees and our customers with what they can expect. Now for us, I'm in the very fortunate position that before COVID-19, 38% of our employees work remotely, so working from home for us is quite easy, it's quite natural for our community and our open source community as well as a whole. So for us to make that transition, we were uninterrupted in way of dealing with our customers. I've been communicating with them as well, through emails and phone calls and other means, pretty much at least once a month, if not every other week or so, to communicate what we're doing for them, but again, you said it, being proactive and being communicative right now, it's never been more important. >> So you, it sounds like, are maintaining productivity. A lot of organizations are actually seeing a productivity hit, and they're having trouble getting work-from-home infrastructure up and spun a bit. People joke on Twitter that's the new tissue paper, you can't, I don't know what it's like in London, but you can't get toilet paper (laughs) on the shelves here, so work from home infrastructure, laptops, VDI, et cetera, But it sounds like you really haven't taken a productivity hit, it's sort of a natural progression for you. >> Yeah, you know when we met last September, we talked about the importance of open source, and we've been a business for nearly 30 years, and we've always run our business in open source community, and that is a community that's obviously geographically dispersed all over the world, so people have been working from home, working in their community, being transparent and collaborative, regardless of where they sit, so from an innovation perspective, we've had no impact to our business, so being able to work from anywhere, across any boundary, has been been uninterrupted, so that's been great. 99% of our workforce are now working remotely from home, versus up from 38% pre-COVID, it doesn't change the fact that things like hardware and software and the means that they need to actually operate from home is difficult, so we've made the concerted effort, for example, to make sure our employees in Germany have the capability to bring home their desk chairs, to bring home their monitors, to bring home their machines to set them up with the ability to be able to work from home. Building on the experience from China, we learned we needed to provision early, so what we did in the beginning part of February was to begin to procure software and hardware that enabled us to have a bench of technology that we could utilize, in case we had this pandemic run wild to support our employees to work from home, so I'm very happy to say we were well prepared. In our survey, we asked the question how prepared are you to be able to work from home? And it was extremely high, best practice in way of benchmarking for any employee survey, to be able to provide them the productivity tools necessary to be able to work from home, so we're very, very proud of that. >> I want to ask you about the recovery, nobody knows, we've never seen this >> No >> Forced shut down of the economy before. Saw Bill Gates this morning on TV, saying he thinks it's really through June that we're going to have to live with this, I know the president of the United States is saying we'd like to happen before that, but assuming there is a comeback, lets say June, start to bring back the economy in waves, how do you see open source in a downturn, some prolonged downturn, months, maybe as much as a year or even more, how do you see open source playing there? >> Yeah, that's a good question, I'm glad you asked it. I think that as the pandemic continues, and any crisis for that matter, open source adoption is going to accelerate, there's no doubt. There's a huge pressure we're all going to face, even those successful businesses like us here at SUSE, we're going to have to go under some crunch and consideration around cost. Open source adoption will accelerate digital transformation efforts, and will definitely speed up organizations to respond to the crisis, because they're able to utilize all the technology innovation, and standardization of Linux and other open source technologies, from anywhere. Whether it's on-premise, the cloud, utilizing Edge, they're going to look for innovations in constant uptick whilst gaining cost-saving at the same time. There's no better place to achieve that, besides being in an open source community, so we're very fortunate, I never would've predicted a pandemic, if I had I'd be a multi-millionaire, would've played the lotto by now, nonetheless, I think there's no place I'd rather be for sure, and I wouldn't want to run any other company besides an open source business right now, because we're seeing an uptick rather than having a decline. >> You know, I want to ask you about culture, because you've been in SUSE as the CEO less than a year, inside of a year, and you really have always focused on culture, you know, CEOs obviously got to worry about growth, you got to worry about profitability, productivity and the like, but I want to actually pull up something that I found on LinkedIn, it was from one of your newer employees, new to SUSE, he said "my first month here, amazing colleagues, high amount of trust, lots of collaboration, willing to help each other succeed, giving back to the less fortunate in the community, high amount of respect for diversity, amazing values, leadership is open, honest, trend-setting, industry defining, really smart, and genuinely superior." Wow, I mean >> (Melissa laughs) >> He said, "in short, best organization I've ever contributed my efforts to and been a part of." Your leadership, whether it's diversity, openness, transparency, you really have set from day one a cultural foundation, which I think is playing out well for you right now, but I wonder if you could talk about the culture that you're trying to drive with SUSE. >> Yeah I mean, wow I did read that post, and that's life -changing I think for leaders like myself, when you have employees that feel the sense of urgency around the criticality that they play, and the role they play in the company, you can't ask for more than that, really genuinely, and I think that when I came, I took it personal to make sure that we led the company leading with people first. We're probably one of the very few companies in the world that have one trademark, and our trademark is our SUSE Chameleon. We don't have any other trademarks or patents on any of our technology, because it is open. So the only thing I have is the people. The link to the world, and this business being successful, is our people, and there inevitably lies the importance that's pertaining to their culture. And I think that because we're community-based and open source, it's really important that we continually collaborate, that we're constantly giving back and giving insight and giving support in the community, and that needs to transcend the community and be living every single day in our company. You mentioned something in that post, which is the philanthropic side of who I am, I believe very whole-heartedly in the responsibility we carry as CEOs, executives, as companies, to give back to our community. When I started nearly year ago, I instituted the Month of Giving, which happens to be May, in conjunction with one day off every year for every single employee to give back to their local communities, or a charity of their choice. Now that's proven very well, particularly now. Folks are taking time off, they're donating their time to local hospitals, they're creating that sense of community giving and care that again, bleeds itself into the fabric of what this culture is. On top of that, recently you may have read the press, I'm sure you have, about us giving any medical device supplier, or any medical device, and not just manufacturer, but institution for research of COVID-19, we're giving them free software and support to run and develop technologies associated with solving this pandemic. And that is truly a gift, I feel incredibly privileged to be able to give back because you again well know we supply all the operating systems to many of our really important medical devices, like CAT scan machines and mammogram machines, in fact, probably most of the machines being used in the US today to combat many diseases are running on a SUSE operating system. We want to offer that back, again, to the community. The employees went wild over the fact that we were being able to give back on a big scale, to solve a problem like this, so I think when it comes down to who we are and what our culture is Dave, people are the most important thing to me. I did an interview recently, and they said you know, going from a CEO that's very focused on sales and like you said earlier, very focused on outcome and deliverables and forecasts and budgets and EBITDA, is that still the case? And I have to say confidently, no that's not the thing that keeps me up at night now. What keeps me up at night now, and how I wake up every morning is wondering about the health of my employees. We had a couple of employees, one that was quite ill in Italy, we were phoning him and calling and emailing him from his hospital bed, and that's what's really keeping me going, what's inspiring me to lead this incredible company, is the people and the culture that they've built that I'm honoring and taking forward, as part of the open source value system. >> Well I think those metrics, those business performance metrics, what I've learned is they're actually a symptom of a great culture, and so I'm really excited and amazed at what you're building there, and thank you. You know, in this day and age you hear, at least prior to COVID, you heard a lot of attacks on technology companies and big tech, on billionaires, and it's really refreshing to see technology companies stepping up, you mentioned the example of medical device, there are many, many examples, and so thank you for that, really appreciate it. >> Thank you too. >> Dave: All right Melissa, great having you, I hope we can talk again leading up to SUSECon virtual slash digital, thanks so much >> (Melissa laughs) >> For coming on theCUBE, great to see you again. >> It's been great to >> Stay safe. >> Thank you very much for having me again as well and inviting me back, I look forward to seeing you next month. >> All right ditto, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue. Now here's your host. Still minimum. >> I'm stupid, Aman and this is a cube conversation from our Boston area studio. We spent a lot of time talking about digital transformation. Of course, At the center of that digital transformations data this segment We're going to be talking about the data integration platform. Joining me for that segment is Itamar on Cory on Who's the senior vice president of enterprise data Integration with Click. Thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks to left me here. >> All right, so a zay just said, you know the customers, you know, digital information when you talked to any user, you know, there there's some that might say, Oh, there's a little bit of hyper I don't understand it, but really leveraging that data, you know, there are very few places that that is not core toe what they need to do, and if they're not doing it, they're competition will do it. So can you bring us inside a little bit? That customers you're talking to that, that you know where that fits into their business needs and you know how the data integration platform, you know, helps them solve that issue. >> Absolutely so, As you mentioned, the diesel transformation is driving a lot ofthe innovation, a lot off efforts by corporations and virtually any organization that we're talking. Toa seize data is a core component off, enabling the little transformation. The data creates new analytics, and there was toe power, the digital transformation, whether it's in making better decisions, whether it's embedding the analytics and the intelligence into business processes and custom applications to ever to reach the experience and make it better. So data becomes key, and the more data you can make available through the process, the faster you can make a development in the process. The faster you can adapt your process to accommodate the changes, the better it will be. So we're saying organization, virtually all of them looking to modernize their day, the strategy and the day, the platforms in order to accommodate these needs. >> Yeah, it's such a complex issue. We've we've been at, you know, chief data officer events way, talk about data initiatives. You know, we worry a little bit that the sea seats sometimes here it's like up. They heard data is the new oil and they came and they said, You know, according to the magazine I read, you need we need to have a date, a strategy, and give me the value of data. But, you know, where is the rubber hitting the road? You know what? What are some of those steps that they're taking? You know, how do I help, you know, get my arms around the data and that help make sure it can move along that spectrum from kind of the raw or two, you know, real value. >> I think you made a great point. Talking about the or to value our as we refer to it is a road to ready. And part of the whole innovation that we're seeing is the modernization of the platform where organizations are looking to tap into the tremendous amount of data that is available today. So a couple of things have happened first in the last decade. First of all, we have significantly more data. It is available and and then ever before, because of digitization, off data and new sources become available. But beyond that, we have the technology is the platforms that can both store in process large amounts of data. So we have foundations. But in the end, to make it happen, we need to get all the data to where we want to analyze it and find a way to put it together and turning from more row material into ready, material ready products that can be consumed. And that's really where the challenges and we're seeing. A lot of organizations, especially the CEO Seo the animals, architecture and First data architecture, teams on a journey to understand how to put together these kind of architectures and data systems. And that's where without data integration platform, we focused on accommodating the new challenges they have encountered in trying to make that happen. >> Yeah, help us unpack a little bit, You know, a here today. You know, it's the economy. Everything should work together when I rolled out. You know, in our company, you know, the industries leading serum, it's like, Oh, I've got hundreds of data sources and hundreds of tools I could put together, and it should be really easy for me to just, you know, allow my data to flow and get to the right place. But I always always find a lot a lot of times that that easy. But I've been having a hard time finding that so so >> that that's a good point. And if you cannot takes the bag, understand water, this side of the court challenges or the new needs that we're seeing because we talk about the transformation and more than analytics field by data being part of it. More analytics created a new type of challenges that didn't exist before and therefore kind of traditional data integration tools didn't do the job they didn't meet. Those model needs me very touched on a few of those. So, first of all, and people, when customers are implementing more than analytics many times where they refer to escape well they're trying to do is to do a I machine learning. We'LL use those terms and we talk about him but machine learning and I get smarter, the more data you give them. So it's all about the scale of data, and what we're seeing with customers is where if in the past data warehouse system, but if typically had five ten twenty, they the source is going into it. When I was saying one hundred X uh, times that number of sources. So we have customers that worked with five hundred six hundred, some over two thousand source of data feeding the data analytics system. So scale becomes a critical need and we talk about scale. You need the ability to bring data from hundreds or thousands of sources so systems efficiently with very low impact and ideally, do it also with less resources. Because again, you need to scale the second second chair and you ran in tow s to do with the fact that more than analytics for many organizations means real Time analytics or streaming analytics. So they wantto be ableto process data in real time. In response for that, to do that, you need away toe move data, capture it in real time and be able to make it available and do that in a very economic fashion. And then the third one is in order to deal with the scare in order to deal with the agility that the customers want. The question is, well, are they doing the analytics? And many of them are adopting the cloud, and we've been seeing multicoloured adoption. So in order to get data to the cloud. Now you're dealing with the challenge of efficiency. I have limited network band with. I have a lot of data that I need to move around. How can I move all of that and do that more efficiently? And, uh, the only thing that would add to that is that beyond that, the mechanics of how you move the data with scale, with efficiency even in real time there's also how you approach the process where the whole solution is to beware. What a join those the operations you can implement and accommodate any type of architecture. I need to have a platform that you may choose and we sink us was changed those overtime. So I need a breather to be agile and flexible. >> Yeah, well, ah, Lotto unpack there because, you know, I just made the comment. You know, if you talk about us humans, the more data we give them doesn't mean I'm actually going to get better. It's I need to We need to be able to have those tool ings in there to be able to have that data and help give me the insights, which then I could do on otherwise, you know, we understand most people. It's like if I have to make decisions or choices and I get more thrown at me, there's less and less likelihood that I can do on that on boy the Data Lakes. Yeah, I I remember the first time I heard Data Lakes. It was, you know, we talked about what infrastructure rebuilding, and now the last couple of years, the cloud public cloud tends to be a big piece of it. Even though we know data is goingto live everywhere, you know everything, not just public private ground. But EJ gets into a piece of it so that you know that the data integration platform, you know how easy it for customers get started on that We'LL talk about that diversity of everything else, you know, Where do they start? Give me a little bit of kind of customer journey, if you would. And maybe even if you have a customer example that that would be a great way to go illustrated. >> Absolutely so First of all, it's a journey, and I think that journey started quite a few years ago. I mean, do it is now over ten years old, and they were actually seeing a big change in shifting the market from what was initially the Duke ecosystem into a much brother sort of technology's, especially with the cloud in order to store and process large scales of data. So the journey customs we're going through with a few years, which were very experimental customers were trying trying it on for size. They were trying to understand how Toby the process around it, the solutions of them ivory batch oriented with may produce back in the early days off. But when you look at it today, it's a very it's already evolved significantly, and you're saying this big data systems needing to support different and diverse type off workloads. Some of them are michelle machine learning and sign. Some of them are streaming in the Olympics. Some of them are serving data for micro services toe parad, Egil applications. So there's a lot of need for the data in the journey, and what we're seeing is that customers as they move through this journey, they sometimes need to people and they need if they find you technology that come out and they had the ability to be able to accommodate, to adapt and adopt new technologies as they go through. It s so that's kind of the journey we have worked with our customers through. And as they evolved, once they figured it out, this scale came along. So it's very common to see a customer start with a smaller project and then scale it up. So for many of the cost me worked with, that's how it worked out. And you ask for an example. So one of her customers this month, the world's largest automotive companies, and they decided to have a strategy to turn what they believe is a huge asset they have, which is data. But the data is in a lot of silos across manufacturing facility supply facilities and others inventory and bring it all together into one place. Combined data with data to bring from the car itself and by having all the data in one place, be able to derive new insights into information that they they can use as well as potentially sale or monetizing other other ways. So as they got started, they initially start by running it out to set a number off their data data centers and their source of information manufacturing facilities. So they started small. But then very quickly, once they figured out they can do it fast and figure out the process to scale it. Today, there are over five hundred systems they have. Martha is over two hundred billion changes in data being fed daily. Okay, enter their Data lake. So it's a very, very large scale system. I feel we can talk about what it takes to put together something so big. >> Yeah. Don't pleaded. Please take the next step. That would that would be perfect. >> Okay, so I think whether the key things customers have to understand, uh, you were saying that the enterprise architecture teams is that when you need to scale, you need to change the way you think about things. And in the end of the day, there are two fundamental differences in the approach and the other light technology that enabled that. So we talked earlier about the little things help for the mind to understand. Now I'm going to focus on and hide it. Only two that should be easy to take away. First is that they're the move from bench to real time or from batch tow. The Delta to the changes. Traditionally, data integration was done in the best process. You reload the data today if you want to scale. If you want to work in a real time, you need to work based on the Delta on the change, the fundamental technology behind it. It's called change data capture, and it's like technology and approach. It allows you to find and identify only the changes on the enterprise data systems and imagine all the innovation you can get by capturing, imposing or the change is. First of all, you have a significant impact on the systems. Okay, so we can scale because you were moving less data. It's very efficient as you move the data around because it's only a fraction off the data, and it could be real time because again, you capturing the data as it changes. So they move from bitch to real time or to streaming data based on changes. The capture is fundamental, fundamental in creating a more than their integration environment. >> I'm assuming there's an initial load that has to go in something like that, >> correct. But he did that once and then for the rest of the time you're really moving onto the deltas. The second difference, toe one was get moving from batch toe streaming based on change. The capture and the second eyes how you approach building it, which is moving from a development. Let platform to automation. So through automation, you could take workloads that have traditionally being in the realm ofthe the developer and allow people with out development skills to be able to implement such solutions very quickly. So again, the move from developer toe toe configuration based automation based products or what we've done opportunity is First, we have been one of the pioneers in the innovators in change that I capture technology. So the platform that now it's part of the clique that integration plan from brings with it okay over fifteen years off innovation and optimization change their capture with the broader set of data sources that our support there, with lots of optimization ranging from data sources like sickle server and Oracle, the mainstream toe mainframes and to escape system. And then one of the key focus with the head is how do we take complex processes and ultimatum. So from a user perspective, you can click a few buttons, then few knobs, and you have the optimize solution available for making data moving data across that they're very sets off systems. So through moving on to the Delta and the automation, you allow this cape. >> So a lot of the systems I'm familiar with it's the metadata you know, comes in the system. I don't have to as an admin or somebody's setting that up. I don't have to do all of this or even if you think about you know, the way I think of photos these days. It used to be. I took photos and trying to sort them was, you know, ridiculous. Now, my, you know, my apple or Google, you know, normally facial recognition, but timestamp location, all those things I can sort it and find it. You know, it's built into the system >> absolutely in the metadata is critical to us to the whole process. First of all, because when you bring data from one system to another system, somebody's to understand their data. And the process of getting data into a lake and into a data warehouse is becoming a multi step day the pipeline, and in order to trust the data and understanding that you need to understand all the steps that they went through. And we also see different teams taking part in this process. So for it seemed to be able to pick up the data and work on it, it needs to understand its meta data. By the way, this is also where the click their integration platform bring together the unity software. Together with Click the catalyst, we'LL provide unique value proposition for you that because you have the ability to capture changed data as it changes, deliver that data virtually anywhere. Any data lake, any cloud platform, any analytic platform. And then we find the data to generate analytic ready data sets and together with the click data Catalyst, create derivative data sets and publish all of their for a catalogue that makes it really easy to understand which data exists and how to use it. So we have an end to end solution for streaming data pipelines that generate analytic data that data sets for the end of the day, wrote to ready an accelerated fashion. >> So, Itamar, your customers of the world that out, How did they measures Casesa? Their critical KP eyes is there You know some, you know, journey, you know, math that they help go along. You know what? What? What are some commonalities? >> So it's a great question. And naturally, for many organizations, it's about an arrow. I It's about total cost of ownership. It seeing result, as I mentioned earlier, agility and the timeto value is really changing. Customers are looking to get results within a matter of, if very few month and even sometimes weeks versus what it used to be, which is many months and sometimes even years. So again, the whole point is to do with much, much faster. So from a metric for success, what we're seeing his customers that buy our solution toe enable again large scale strategic initiatives where they have dozens to hundreds of data sources. One of the key metrics is how many data sources heavy onboard that heavy, made available. How many in the end of the data sets that already analytic ready have we published or made available Torrey Tor users and I'LL give you an example. Another example from one of for customers, very large corporation in the United States in the opportunity of after trying to move to the cloud and build a cloud Data Lake and analytic platform. In the two years they're able to move to two three data sets to the cloud after they try, they knew they'd integration platform okay, there. But they moved thirty day The sits within three months, so completely different result. And the other thing that they pointed out and actually talk about their solution is that unlike traditional data integration software, and they took an example of one of those traditional PTL platforms and they pointed out it takes seven months to get a new person skilled on that platform. Okay, with our data integration platform, they could do that in a matter of hours to a few days. So again, the ability to get results much faster is completely different. When you have that kind of software that goes back to a dimension about automation versus development based mouth now, >> it really seems like the industry's going through another step function, just as we saw from traditional data warehouses. Tto win. Who? Duke rolled out that just the order of magnitude, how long it took and the business value return Seems like we're we're going through yet another step function there. So final thing. Yeah, You know what? Some of the first things that people usually get started with any final takeaways you want to share? >> Sure. First, for what people are starting to work with. Is there usually selecting a platform of choice where they're gonna get started in respect of whether Iran analytics and the one take a way I'LL give customers is don't assume that the platform you chose is we're going to end up because new technologies come to market, a new options come. Customers are having mergers, acquisitions, so things change all the time. And as you plan, make sure you have the right infrastructure toe allow you two kind of people support and make changes as you move through the throw. These are innovation. So they may be key key takeaway. And the other one is make sure that you're feeling the right infrastructure that can accommodate speed in terms of real time accomodate scale. Okay, in terms of both enabling data legs, letting cloud data stores having the right efficiency to scale, and then anything agility in respect to being able to deploy solution much, much faster. Yeah, >> well, tomorrow I think that. That's some real important things to say. Well, we know that the only constant Internet industry is change on DH. Therefore, we need to have solutions that can help keep up with that on and be able to manage those environments. And, you know, the the role of is to be able to respond to those needs of the business fast. Because if I don't choose the right thing, the business will go elsewhere. Tara trying to fuck with Angelo. Thank you so much for sharing all the latest on the immigration data platforms. Thank you. Alright, Uh, always lots more on the cube dot Net comes to minimum is always thanks for watching.

>> live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's the cues covering via World 2016 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here you're Hope's Stool Minimum and John Walls. And welcome back to Las Vegas. Here on the cubicle, tear our coverage. Of'em world here. Mandalay Bay along with minimum. I'm John Woes. Thanks for joining us here for our coverage throughout the next three days. All that's happened in Vienna World. Almost 25,000 attendees to pretty good crowd. Well, I hadn't heard the number, so that would be the largest bm world ever. If we believe the numbers, so no reason not to With John Gill Martin, Who is the vice president? General manager of the integrated assistant business at VM. Where, John. Thanks for being with us once again. It's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me. You know, like you bet I am at this point. Yeah. Tell us about the vibe of the show. First off, day one things underway. A lot of excitement, I would think. Yeah, it's fantastic. You know, I think this is my 11 PM world in a row s so I've got to see a huge evolution in this program is amazing to see how much has changed over the years. Going back, you know, it used to be a server virtualization. What is this thing and where we are today? It's so different. There's a lot of excitement. People trying to figure out how to manage and deal with all the change happen in the industry right now. So, John, one of the things we're all coming into this week looking at is kind of the the cloud management suite, which is right in your area. Can you help us unpack? We looked at kind of V cloud sweet, and then there was some STD see stuff, and now it's cloud foundations. How did these things relate? Is it rebranding, Renaming, repackaging? Help us understand, Actually. So with that foundation, that's one of the key announcements we made today. The objective. There is what I think. How do we take what we have been talking about? Whats offered by Data Center and just make it easy? I don't make it easy for our customers to deploy easy for them to architect easy that even offer as a service from public cloud. That's kind of a key concept. So we are taking and integrating together the key components of softer, defined compute storage and network. There are wrapping some new capabilities to automate deployment autumn E provisioning. And so some ways is an extension, but also in evolution of what we've been doing previously. Okay, but this is still a software offering. Correct is what >> one of the components inside of that >> s O. There's four key components inside of my foundation. There's peace here, virtual sand NSX that gives you that software defined across all three domains and >> then a new component >> that we call STD. See, Manager. So what the SEC Manager does is sort of the glue that brings it all together to bring that integrated experience. It takes all the work that our customers do around you. How do I think about design? How does architect how to deploy? How'd I manage patches and upgrades over time and just automates all that inside of software so they can go from air medal systems deployed cloud infrastructure very, very quickly. So So what was the gap? You know what? What do you dress in here in terms of improvement in terms of change. You're talking about doing something a little bit differently for customers. Use a visa. What have you, But we're trying to get done it. So the key thing, just like the two key new things in this that are really different one is that just making it really easy on the private cloud side. But then we also take exactly that same sort of technologies and also work with our partners to offer it as a service. That's also the really new thing that we're doing today. So we had an announcement today with IBM as part of their IBM cloud. They're offering Cloud Foundation as a service, which >> means customers and go to a >> portal and provisioned out capacity based upon 100% consistent infrastructure. >> That means, you know, if I need some more capacity, as you have it inside my data center provisioned it out inside IBM Cloud. And now I have seen management tools, the same operations, everything I do in my data center. I can now do inside of this cloud environment. We'll extend that after other partners in the future. We'll send that out into the crowd air next quarter. This is really a great way for customers to start extending our migrating into the cloud. But do it based upon without having the architect. The applications are fundamentally change how they operate. >> Eso We've been arguing. We've been trying to figure out this hybrid cloud thing to the last few years, and there's many companies that are saying Okay, here's the software sack. You can put it in your own data center, or you can put it in some kind of public cloud environment. We see IBM does that sum. We see Oracle do that. Microsoft, of course, has azure and azure stacks coming some diamond next year. Is this The em wears answer to say OK in the data center where you know and love these fear, this is a full set, and then you can put it in IBM Soft Layer or a bunch of other writers. >> Yes, it is that concept of a consistent stack, yet a seem stacked inside the day's center, exactly the same stack outside the data center. So it is 100% consistent, right? That's part of what's really attractive about that. And then his customers think about well, what are the management tools or the cloud management platform, but I won't run on top of that. That can extend very seamlessly now across multiple environments. >> Okay, what about the interconnection between different locations? How does that >> work? So interconnections. You can take advantage of NSX and what it does around stretching, stretching, networking across environments like it's a very powerful capability to really think about it, really, as it's seamless extension of the data center. That's one of the unique capabilities and obviously with IBM has a first partner. They have almost having 50 data centers around the world, so it becomes very easy to collate. Locate your applications close to your private data center, which >> is important. So IBM is the first partner. How does this fit into, like the V Cloud their network, then, where you have thousands of >> partners already? Yeah, so they're the first Qatar network partner to offer a service, and then we expect that are working with other because our network partners to do the same offer Cloud Foundation as a service and, you know, kind of underlying that technology is this s CDC manager, which makes it easy for them as well. They go provision out these infrastructures very quickly and easily. >> Yeah, when you're about customers, what are the pain points that you were hearing from them that you were dressing? Because we take about the sophistication of technology, these of use efficiencies, high performance, all this stuff. It couldn't be any better, but obviously could have been better. So what we're hearing from them that led you to develop the new product. >> Well, the big thing is his customers were trying to think about how to the leverage public cloud is part of their architectures. You can kind of, It's pretty clear, that kind of result they want. They want to able to have an environment where their application owners and the developers sort of don't even know where things are running. They wanted to be a little bit transparent, kind of seamless. At the same time, they want to be able to have the ability to maintain control, maintain security policies, maintain operational control over the environment, have good insight into it. And so I sort of challenge that we're walking into, and your traditional infrastructure still very much stands in the way people trying to support the developers, people enterprise has spent too much time hugging components together trying to make things work together. And that's just not value added activity. It's not differentiating. It doesn't help them compete in the marketplace. And so we saw is what happened. We help them get out of that business and focus more on the things they want to do above the infrastructure layer. That's sort of the whole rationale for building a foundation was, Just take everything that they do today That's on value, out of activity. Put that in software, automated public empire the cloud and they can focus on what there is value out of business on. >> One of the challenges we've been facing in this transformation is kind of the go to market. If I think about traditionally the sphere, you know Veum. He's got a great channel partnership Lotto, EMS in the early days, and now, I mean just a huge amount of channel parts that know how to sell it, know how to make money. Cloud is a big shift for them. There's only a small percent of the channel that kind of understands this with IBM, kind of as a first partner. How do you see this playing out with kind of official panic Channel partners, service providers and the whole go to market. >> As you point out, it's clearly an evolving story. Right and different partners were kind of thinking about it in different ways. You know, there's still, you know, definitely in on premise opportunity that they're going after. But clearly having a good crowd strategy is going to be important for every reseller out there in every partner. And some of that is gonna be thinking about what are the kind of service is that you can offer your customers to help them make that transition. Yeah, if you think about you know, if I want to extend my data center, I need to migrate workloads or re architect workloads. Those types of service is I think they're going to be critical to become experts in and help customers. We think about their long term strategy. The fact is, the customers are gonna move warm or the workloads into clouds of some type over the next few years, and they're gonna need help in your advice and guidance and migration surfaces to get there. So there's a real business to go be built around those kinds of opportunities. >> Okay. Can you give us a little bit of what should we be looking for? Going forward, You know, if their customers that are running this stack already before it was called this And how do we How could we benchmark to say whether or not you're successful by the time we come back next year? >> Yeah, that's a good question. >> Tough questions, >> A challenge. So now it's a great question. So this software is gonna be available later this week, so it's actually generally available on September 1st. So it's just coming in the marketplace now. And so we've been working with Summerlee Beta customers on this over the last couple a couple of months, get great feedback and really help this steer perfectly towards this public cloud opportunity S O. I would expect as we come back in a few months, we'd be able to talk about our kind of initial lighthouse customers and how they're doing. But we see just huge interest in this right now, right? Customers want to move, and companies want to move away from kind of plugging things together. They want away from individuals, components. They really are looking to buy Seymour integrated ways. This is kind of a key enabling technology to help him do that. And we could do that also with our partners. >> Yeah, Um, one of the big challenges we've had is everybody is always like, okay, but my needs are a little bit different. So we understand that if we can eliminate diversity of the environments in the homogeneity is good, I can repeat it. I understand it. But everybody, all that you know, that's the problem with ideas. They always want to tweak it. So what do you do when they say, Oh, you know, the sand's great. But, you know, you've got all these ecosystem part partners in storage. I kind of want this storage. And it's ex. I understand some pieces. Maybe I want over. Yes, but I wanted till some other pieces. What do you do for customers that want to kind of go outside of this initial package? What kind of choice and options that they have? >> Yeah. Yeah, it's, uh so just like this year, you know, these here is sort of been the universal platform for running virtual machines and has a lot of those connections into different things, so foundation fundamentally is based on the sphere. So for the take storage, for example, no keys here can connect to external storage. We can connect national storage and on a road map for the automation software inside. We'll look at how we can take advantage of external storage and some of these things as well, so as new as we talk to customers. And we, as we learned those areas that are consistent across many, we can start to bring some of those things in tow the equation as well. This gives us a very powerful starting point, and we can look at what are the right connections out system? >> And do you still have folks who are trying to hang on to say I understand what you're doing understands the new service of a new opportunity here, But I'm not ready to cut the Courtauld away. And how do you bring them along to showing them? There are new efficiencies here and there is a better bottom line benefit to you. >> I think you know the history of I t is a history of things remaining right. So you still have a I actually feel mainframes. Eso this transition will take time. This is not gonna be on overnight time type of changes. We moved to these types of architectures that are fully suffered a find, but we made a huge amount of progress thus far. We have over 5000 customers on virtual sand. Your NSX is going incredibly fast. Both of these approved points that these are the architecture's customers are trying to move to the end of the same time. Though we have to find the right the right starting points. What is the right project to start with? This doesn't have to be a wholesale change. The data center it could be. Let's take a virtual desktop project and run now on top of that foundation must take a new invite. New server applications, unemployed run that on foundation. And just like the sphere kind of started with these use cases that expanded over time. Same thing of foundation. We could start with a project and then and that shows success to move into other projects. >> John, you've been with the, um where for quite a few years you've done two stints of the company as you hear the outside world talking about, you know, cloud and where things were going. What do you think people don't understand about bm Worse position in the cloud marketplace going forward. >> You know the one thing you know, I've talked a lot right now about Cloud Foundation, which was one of our announcements. I think the other thing that is really unique that we talked about this week is, uh, something called across Cloud Architecture and said across Cloud service Is that in addition foundation and what we're recognizing is just like with server virtualization, we were able to abstract multiple types of servers and provide consistent layer we're going to do the same. Thing is we were across multiple clouds. Even non GM were based clouds, right, working with Amazon Azure Google. And I think that's one thing that is maybe even surprising, folks. And it's very different than kind of the company strategy going back 10 years ago. So we are fully embracing that these will be part of our customer strategy in the future. We do expect to see them, but we see a unique opportunity for us to go help them when it comes to managing applications across the networking security where we have really unique assets we can help with. And also data management. Government. >> Well, John, I know you said it takes time. Transition state time. >> Still gave you a year. >> Yeah. So next year at the world will come back and the update you on the progress that we've made, >> we look forward to it. Thank you for joining us and the best left down the road. We'll see a year from now. >> Fantastic. Thank you very much. >> You bet John Gill Martin from VM where we'll be back with more from Veum World here in Vegas. Right after this, You're watching the Cube.