>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California. It's theCube! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat. A cloud native computing foundation. >> Welcome back. 12 thousand here in attendance for KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. I am Stu Miniman, my cohost for this afternoon is John troyer. And happy to welcome to the program, recently out of Stealth, two gentlemen from Chronosphere, Austin. To my right is Martin Mao who is the co-founder and CEO and his co-founder Rob Skillington, who's also the CTO, we've stated on theCUBE actually, you understand where this conference is, where co-founder and CTO is like you know, the most prominent title that we've seen to get on here, because that's the type of geeks we love on the program and in this community. So first of all, congratulations on the launch >> Thank you so much >> And thank you so much for joining us. >> No worries. >> All right, when I've got the founders on, I'm going to start with the whys. How was kind of the problem statement, where you were coming from, and what led to the creation of Chronosphere. >> For sure for sure. So with Chronosphere we found a actual gap in the monitoring market, and a very crowded monitoring market, we found a gap, and the gap exists when companies with very large complex technology stacks, or large enterprises, move on to Cloud Native Technology and Kubernetes. So with this migration, what we've found was there's actually a lot more monitoring data being produced, because there's a lot more pieces now, we're moving from monoliths microservices, we're moving from like physical machines to VMs, to containers and pods. And that generates a lot more things that you need to monitor and track. And not only a lot more things, but you generally monitoring the relationship between these things. So as the number of things increases, the number of relationships exponentially increases. So yeah, that's the sort of problem we're solving, it's like monitoring all of these things at large scale, and when we couldn't find anything, and I could even store all of theses things, so that's it sort of. >> All right, so what is the background of the team that made you into position to work on this problem? >> Yeah great question. I mean me and Martin go back quite a few years. I officiated his wedding, only very very recently actually. And I, yeah we basically work together at several different companies. You know, I think both of us are entrepreneurial at heart. I'll let Martin talk a little bit more about the last few years. >> Yeah, so like you know, a few years ago we started working at Uber. And at Uber, we went through this migrations to our native communities and through that migration that's when we sort of had to solve the problem ourselves. And we solved the problem at Uber, with an open-source project called M3. That's really where this whole thing started. And Chronosphere sort of you know, building on top of M3, and now providing a product on top of the open-source platform that we created. >> Can we talk a little bit about the business? I noticed that you know, there are many ways of approaching open-source, in 2019, you know open core and but also as a service. So can you talk a little bit about how you've approached your business model. >> Yeah for sure. So we're very much in the position or in the camp of as a service, right, because you know a lot of companies do do open core, and they're sort of going into the enterprise support model, we sort of didn't want to go down that route. And also with our open-source product, it's not really an end to end solution in itself, like you use an open-source M3, but you still need to plug it together with other things yourself. So what we really wanted to do was to give customers, and end to end solution, and that was built on top of the great technology, we built with M3, but really it solves the problem sort of end to end, and we do that best as a service. >> Rob maybe you can help explain M3 a little bit for us as to how that fits in the landscape, but what it works with and the like. >> Yeah of course. Yeah it's basically at it's heart a metrics platform, that is built on, at first the lower layer in 3DB, which is a distributive time series database. And then on top of that, we have basically an aggregation platform, that is actually aggregating a lot of the samples, and metrics that we're, collecting. So we can really do some transformations on the data, as it comes in, before it's stored in the database itself. And this let's us do a lot of like smart processing, of what signals actually matter, what signals don't matter, kind of like storing them in a way that can be accessed, much faster than like, other typical systems that don't really do any aggregation before it gets stored. And then, you know we have of course like a query engine that works with this distributed set of data, and so, you know, it's really a database that was designed from day one, to be a metric store. You know, it's not built on Cassandra, it doesn't use Rocks DB, at the lower layers, it literarily every part of it, was built for this purpose. >> Can you talk a little bit about dimensionality and cardinality? Because as I look at this observability monitoring space, I see a lot of current discussion about that and frankly a little bit of fighting, and I'm not always, I can kind of see it, why it's important, but what are some of the reasons and what do people do where you know by having it, and what is it actually, let's start with that. >> Yeah for sure. So you know, with this hot topic of like high cardinality and high dimensionality is, what I was talking about earlier, where as you move into cloud native world, you're now monitoring things at like a pod level. So it's like instead of tracking things on like a per host level, you're now tracking things on like a per pod level now, and that is at >> (interjects) You're tracking more things per pod. >> More things per pod and like every pod unit, these are ephemeral pods now, so they don't live for very long. So you end up having more pieces of data and they're kept around for shorter period of time. And now you need a system that can store all of these pieces of data, because you want to see them uniquely. So you want to monitor each individual pod to see exactly what is running at the finest levels. Right, so you actually need technology that can store a lot more data than you could before. >> And I you know, adding to that, there's a lot more people running with like mobile applications, they use you know that are running in markets all round the world, using different cell providers, and different backend services. You may deploy your backend services multiple times, a week or even a day, and if you want to tag you know, the meta data on and slice and dice by that metadata, with your business and with your applications and your system, that requires you know, adding yet another dimension on your data, which adds to that cardinality. Every time you add a dimension, you know that just multiplies the cardinality of your existing data set of monitoring data. >> And it quickly adds up a lot right, so. >> All right Martin, maybe, since you're just out of Stealth, give us some of the speeds and feeds you know, the product GA, is it globally available? Series A funding, who's behind that? >> Yeah so we just kind of still two weeks ago, we closed up Series A a few months ago actually. It was led by Great Luck, we raised 11 million dollars, and our partner at Great Luck is Gary, and we like him very much. And you know the state of the companies that we are currently in private beta right now. So with our hosted platform, we are onboarding to customers into a private offering right now. And early next year, we'll sort of open that up for more public beta. Yeah. >> And the way folks would use this. You'll be using Prometheus or Graphite or something, and you'd be, so you'd have tracing, you'd have logs, you'd have other things and you would be plugging all of them into, into your services. >> Yeah it's a great question. So you mentioned two of the technologies. So if you're Prometheus or Graphite like to try find metrics, both of those can be pushed into the M3 system for sure. We actually just announced a trace integration, this week a KubeCon actually, Rob David spoke about that integration earlier this week at KubeCon. We haven't moved into the logs yet because the way we look at the problem is not from like a sort of like providing a one-stop shop for all observability solutions, we actually look at it from a use case perspective. So the use case we're looking at is like, realtime monitoring and remediation. So tracing is a part of that stroy, it's a critical part of that story, and now to add additional context, when you get to load it based on your metrics, but, we haven't quite moved into logging yet. >> Yeah, and we don't really want to solve any of these problems without knowing it'll work at scale, you know like a fundamental reason we even built the open-source project in the first place, was we were dealing with cardinality in the tens of billions of unique time series, and so, we don't want to just kind of like roll into any, every single feature under the sun, we really want to solve it once correctly and be able to systematically roll that out to enterprises at scale. >> Without, I mean without talking too much about Uber and any Uber secrets, I mean it seems like the game has changed with that kind of a scale of, you could not have done, you can't run Uber if you're tracking all those cars like literarily without some sort of a tracing like high cardinality sort of a system right? Because you're literarily tracking cars all over the world people all over the world, routes all over the world. >> Exactly, well uniquely positioned, we had the requirements to solve it at such a scale, and that's why we had to build this technology to solve it for that unique situation, because you know technologies ahead of time, did not really have this use case to solve. So that's why we had to sort of, we couldn't find anything out in the market because to solve it at that scale, that's why we sort of had to build our own, to uniquely solve it for this use case. >> And yeah, I would add to that, that typically engineers you know, at larger organizations, tend to want to organize everything very nicely, and split it up, and really control how they're monitoring that data, but we've noticed actually, definitely over the last few years, more and more people are open to letting people just start collecting you know, random data, that is relevant to the systems that they're building as they're rolling it out, even as they're experimenting with it, and you know systems today that are built from scratch, to deal with, to be as efficient as possible, with very unstructured data is becoming wildly popular because that's how developers want to develop software. You know, they don't want to have to have to like slice and dice it neatly and package it up and pass it on to others to run. They want to basically slice and dice however they want to, and dynamically , and as they scale up. >> I've always enjoyed every sequel skimmer I've had two, or change oh, yeah. (laughter) >> All right, how have you found the show? How's the reception been? Give us a little bit of the vibe of the show and how it's been going for you. >> Yeah it's been fantastic for us actually. So we just came in at silk so like the name is still quite new, but yeah, we've had a bunch of folks set up with the whole day, we've been giving a demo on the product, so a lot of companies are getting excited about it. I think a we're solving at a scale and that really resonates with, you know, a lot of the people here at the show, we're still solving at a scope, we're solving at a scale that's also in a cost efficient way as well. So that's really been our, we sleep quite well so far. >> Yeah Rob, you gave some sessions. What kind of feedback are you getting from people? Is the problem statement that we talked about at the beginning you know resonating with people that you talk to. >> I mean, I was really, yeah pleased to hear that after my session today, that a lot of people came up to me and said you know, I've never really seen metrics been linked to tracers, the way that we're doing it, in fact that's the first time they'd ever seen a demo, that can do, what we're kind of trying to upstream, we're actually you know, up-streaming a lot of those changes in the open-source well, as well at the same time. And so, you know we've found especially in a lot of the companies today that are pushing everything forward with development wise and how they are running operations is that they using a lot of pages in open source, and then those pages are battle tested in open-source, generally it becomes abstracted, to the point where we're actually a very large amount of people, but then when they need to scale it up, that's when it becomes difficult. So, no I think that you know, a lot of people have been very positive with basically us being able to also push forward the feature on >> Back upstream into the M3 project. >> And also into Prometheus. So I, you know I'm an open metrics, contributor and that's essentially, an exposition format that's built on the Prometheus, exposition format. So it's kind of become a standard way of exchanging metrics, from one system to another. And that's kind of like, basically commoditized and democratize the exchange of metrics to make a lot more systems, interoperable with each another. Which we fundamentally believe in as well, of course we're developing in open-source, and we believe that this systems need to play nicely together. So we can build you know, have building blocks that large companies and organizations can all share and build better things on top of. >> All right, so looking to go to public beta early 2020s, what we said, when we come back in 2020, what kind of the, some of the key KPIs and metrics that you'll be looking at to be successfull in your first year out of Stealth. >> Yeah it's a great question. So you know, since some of the KPIs you guys were looking at doing is coming at the public beta, making it available to a large range of companies, because right now we're sort of onboarding companies sort of one or two at a time, so yeah it's seeing how many companies adopt the product and also, we're again adding more features over time, for that particular use case of like you know, monitoring your technology just like in your business in real time. So it'll be a lot more features coming down the pipeline, and a lot more customer adoption along with that. >> And I would also say you know, our hosted platform is really about offering like deep isolation, between our tenants as well, so basically when we you know, in the next few months to come, we want to make sure that it works basically like clockwork, and everyone can, we can roll out and scale that highly isolated platform for you know tens and hundreds of organizations, and thousands eventually. And so, and doing that at scale is hard. So I think yeah, we'll see how we're doing with that. >> Yeah for sure. >> All right. Rob, Martin congratulations on coming out of Stealth, look forward to hearing more and thank you so much for joining us. >> Glad, thank you so much. >> All right, for John Troyer I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back getting towards the end of three days, want to walk over here KubeCon, CloudNativeCon thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're in Washington D.C., the nation's capital of course, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, it's a pleasure welcoming Dhiraj Shah in with us, the CEO of Avaap. Dhiraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon! >> Good to see you again! >> Absolutely, big pleasure, it was great talking to you for the last two years, and a pleasure to be back here. >> Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean Avaap, I've read a little bit, I mean the five letters of Sanskrit language, what do the five letters represent? I mean how did you come up with the title? >> You know, that's the first question that gets asked, the two questions I get. >> Sorry to be cliche, but I'm just really curious! >> No, no, the two questions is, "Why did you start Avaap?" and the other question is, "What is Avaap?" and it's actually five elements in Sanskrit and each of them are tied to a cultural value that we hold at Avaap, so, Agni, which is fire stands for passion, 'cause I'm a deep believer of being very passionate in what you do; if you're passionate, you'll follow through and it won't feel like work. Water is tied to innovation, sky is tied to goals, we're very ambitious. We've been able to have a rocket ship type of growth, so far, and we continue to aspire to do more. We have Earth, which is tied to eco conscience, cause we like to be globally eco conscious and genuine in what we're doing. And then air, which is transparency. I think we live in a world that, you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy, and the more there is transparency, the better there is organizational development. >> Gotcha, well thank you, I appreciate the rundown. So services and solutions, and the relationship with Infor, walk us through that a little bit, of why you're here. >> Absolutely, so, we are Infor's most decorated partner, so I'd like to say that, because we just came off the stage getting four awards with Infor this year. >> Congratulations! Fantastic. >> Yeah, thank you very much. They were overall partner of the year five years in a row. Our partnership with Infor, started five years ago, before that it was with Lawson. So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board, I was in the back of the room, and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012. And he said "I want to do two things, I want to make software that is industry specific." And this is coming at a time where everything was one size fits all. And he said "We want to reinvent the software that's driven for future technologies. Cloud, mobile, big data." Right? So I had a great opportunity, and we made a momentous decision of parking all our eggs in the Infor basket, and just doing Infor. And that served us well of going from 20, at that point we were like 25 employees, to having over 450 today. >> Wow! And we've talked about this in the past is you got in early, and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in, so you have to stay ahead of them. How are you doing that, and why are you succeeding? >> You know it's not necessarily always being ahead, so that actually, that's a question I got, is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here, Capgemini is here, do you feel threatened? We actually don't, because it's a validation of what's occurring in this eco system with the big system integrators coming in. And with a rising tide, all boats rise. So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIs, because there's roles that they play and we let them do a lot of business transformation, change management, program management, and we do what we do best, which is Infor knowledge, and consulting services. >> The deep, deep Infor, that's kind of, it's ironic, right? Infor's specialty is the last mile, micro-industry capabilities, and that's really kind of how you specialize is deep Infor expertise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So give us an example of, you go through an engagement, you got one of the big SIs and they're going to do their big global thing, business process change, they really are global in scale, et cetera. Where do you come in? where does Infor sort of, where does their micro services, or micro-function leave off, and where do you pick up? >> So yeah, I'll give you a real world example, in fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning, Christus Health, they are one of the largest health systems in the country, 60 hospitals, close to 60 thousand employees. They're looking for transformation on their ERP, full suite, HCM, Supply Chain, Financial. Went through a large system selection process the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, Infor, kind of being in that race. It was down selected to Infor and Oracle as the two lenders that had full capabilities that they were looking for. And then once they made their decision on Infor as their vendor of choice, they did a services RFP, which we partnered with Deloitte, because the scope of that was, as I said earlier, around business transformation services, that we didn't have in our bag. And Deloitte does not have the 20 years of expertise, the deep Infor knowledge around the solutions of Infor, that we have within our healthcare team. So, we bridged and built an alliance, that, today is starting the project journey in Infor, Deloitte, Avaap, Christus, to make that project a success. >> In the capabilities that you, that they were looking for, that you said that Infor and Oracle had, were what? the coverage of the functionality across the suites, was it the cloud capabilities? What's the high level of that? >> So the one thing that I will tell you, is the consumer, in this case the healthcare market, if we talk about them, is getting extremely knowledgeable, so the way it's starting is around cloud. So gone are the days, I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud, artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud, there's a lot of education already around single tenant, and multi-tenant, and they understand. So it starts with the cloud platform, that is the software provider on a stable, secure cloud platform, and are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant, as opposed to individually hosted for each customer. And then they break it down into the different buckets of the applications, within HCM, within Supply Chain, within Financials to see what not a product features. So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality, but their business processes, and best practices. And that's really, in my opinion, where Infor really came ahead at Christus. >> In the multi-tenant verses hosted, I mean, Vodka would say, "Well why would a customer care?" I'm presuming the customer cares because when you do a software release, it's just seamless, right? Verses okay, we got to freeze the code, and do an upgrade, it's more disruptive. Is that why? >> Yes, that's definitely a large portion because over the period of time, every time there is a manufactured change on the software side, development chain, you're adding code that impacts a customer to have to take their system down, and then bring it back up, and here it's done without the customer even finding out, so it's a huge advantage. The second advantage is a cost, which in today's world not as much, because hardware's become very cheap. But it's still conquered hardware that's sitting on the premise, as opposed to individually putting it out there, as opposed to having one system that's scalable. And then your third is security, on multi-tenant capable software, it's more secure than your single tenant capability. >> And Avaap brings that to the table. So it's not, I mean Infor has the micro-vertical function, so yours is what? Onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things? >> Yeah, so it starts with helping them align, and educate on the system selection on what it does. So we have a offering called Align and Define that allows customers to prepare for the cloud, to take steps today, and educate them on what needs to be done. Once they do that, then it's going through the implementation process, and post-implementation is optimization. So on the optimization side, Avaap also has capabilities on our EHR side. So one of the big challenge in healthcare, is a wall that exists between the ERP and the EHR, you have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side, and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR, and there's a wall there, one doesn't talk to the other. And the systems need to be really integrated, to be able to drive efficiency and cost benefits for that, so that's one of the things that we're heavily invested in. >> Well healthcare is your biggest business, right? >> Right. >> So what's goin on these days? You obviously, last sort of wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, there's some uncertainty around that, certainly meaningful use is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers, EMR is still you know, a big deal. What are the hot trends, what are the drivers, and how are you guys responding? >> ERP. ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market, so there's a lot of fatigue with healthcare having gone through meaningful use over the last decade of spending hundreds of millions of dollars, of putting in the EHR platforms. So that fatigue, and that focus on EHR has led to no real advancement on the ERP side. And that's why we're in a midst of what I think, is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry are on ERP platforms that we're seeing, there were 55 system selections done, just in the last 12 months. My personal view is that over the next three to five years, we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap or upgrade their ERP platforms. >> Wow. Okay, please, go ahead. >> So swap-- what's... the fundamental of that decision? >> So there are a lot of legacy providers, so the market is going to get consolidated, so we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Infor, Workday, but there is a lot of other providers, there's, if you count mid market and up, there's 5,000 health systems out there that's customer base. >> Very fragmented, isn't it? >> Very fragmented. >> Okay, alright. >> So there's McKesson as an example. McKesson had a big ERP platform, officially said that they are stopping development on it. And that's going to create a void that needs to be filled. There's Meditech on the lower end of the spectrum that serves these regional, individual health system that exist in rural areas. So those systems are, need to be upgraded, because the rural systems of most of anywhere else that have connectivity issues need the cloud platforms to kind of go through. >> Yeah I mean a lot of these, a lot of these healthcare platforms were, they were literally, they were born in the mini-computer era it was a mantra, let's buy a VAX, and we'll become a valuated re-seller, and healthcare was such a huge opportunity, and so under technologized, not a word but, and then over the years, these systems just kept getting updated, now they're just left with this fossilized mess, right? >> Absolutely >> And the cloud comes in and that's really driving a lot of the change. >> Yeah, and Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time, to make the change. I think Charles was very visionary, and kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform, and making it multi-tenant, cloud enabled, for the healthcare industry, specifically written. So the last mile functionality that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has is unmatched, in our opinion, in the field today. >> Who does that last mile functionality, if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor, is it the SI, is it some other internal software developer? >> So, the software developers as Infor is, trying to build that as much in the software as they can. But there's always extensions, which is where tools from the Infor OS, as an example come in, to allow to build the extensions that allow us to then have that capability. >> You do that work, is that right? >> We do that work, absolutely. >> Okay, and then, how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not getting in the way of their road map? Soma's got his ERD pipeline, and you don't want to just do something that he's going to do in week, a month or a year. How do you communicate with those guys, and how do you find the white space? And then does it somehow get back into the platform and become advantageous for others? >> So Soma has spent 4 billion dollars on product, that's the budget his board gave. I can't go in front of my board, ask for that kind of budget, then I'd be out. >> Well you could. >> I could, yeah >> It could be some good laughs >> Yeah, so we are realistic in what we can do. So the extensions we build are very specific, and not necessarily product centric. We have a good relationship with the product development team, that allows us to see their road map and make sure. So an example I'll give you is test automation. So we've built an automation framework using an industry recognized platform, and customized it for the ERP, for healthcare. So, regression testing is one of the largest pin point, manual, laborious, takes a business uses away. So this tool, called Avaap Test Automation, which has been in the field, we have, close to 100 customers using it, allows us to automate that entire regression testing sidle, and is an accelerator that condenses the entire implementation life cycle. >> You've got, we've talked a lot about healthcare, you have another interest inside of your business, with a little Beatles connection. So fill us in on that a little bit. >> Yeah, so two of the four awards we got, one, and I definitely want to talk on both of them, because those are important parts of our business, One is retail, we did get retail partner of the year award, and Stella McCartney, is our project that we're actively working on in UK. She, Stella McCartney, is Paul McCartney's daughter, and has built a very reputable shoe company, that's a brand highly sought after, and we're working on modernizing their ERP applications, using cloud suite fashion, which has the underlying technology base on M3 platform. >> She loves you, yeah, yeah, right? >> That's cool, that is cool! >> Absolutely! >> That's great, well Dhiraj, thanks for being here, thanks for sharing the story! >> Absolutely, thank you very much. >> Congratulations on all the progress! >> It's always good to be here! >> It is full speed ahead. Good for you. Dhiraj Shah from Avaap >> Thank you! >> Back with more on theCUBE. We're at in Informen, Informer rather, (laughs) I did it again, didn't I? >> Inforum! >> Inforum! >> I'll step in when you need me! (laughing) >> 2018, D.C. Did it again. >> Excellent! (bubbly music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. I'm here with my co-host Keith Townsend, and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017 here in the heart of the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, 43,000 people in attendance, spread out across many of the facilities here in Vegas, So lots of lines, lots of things going on. Happy to welcome back to the program Andrew Hillier, who is the CTO and co-founder of Densify. Great to see you, how have you been? >> It's good to be back. It's been great, been loving the show. It's a huge show. >> All right, so we're pretty excited, because we've got a double set here at Amazon's show for the first time, it's our fifth year doing the show. There's another show that we interviewed at where we've had a double set for a few years. That, of course, is VMWorld. We've been watching this change, as AWS says, it's from the old guard, you know, that cloud native if you will. Talk to us a little bit about what Densify's doing, how you fit into the ecosystem here? >> Sure, yeah, it's a very different show than I think the one two months ago, also right here, I think. Even this morning at the keynote, they were referring to that as what you've been doing the last 10 years, and this is all very forward looking, much more vision, and what we're finding is that a lot of the challenges of the past are coming right back again. When you start moving to this new operational model, how do you optimize it, how do save money, how do you keep pace with change? So today on the keynote was a very different thing than you would have seen two months ago. It's all about innovation, innovation, innovation, not just new feature, new feature. >> Andrew, I want you to talk about the customers that you talk to, the mindset. Are there VMware customers and AWS customers? How are they approaching things like innovation and strategy? >> Well I think everybody's kinda caught in between, and you know, people talk about hybrid a lot, and what we find is that a lot people's mentality is there's really the cloud, and then all that other stuff, and one is just one that I divest or get rid of and one is really where the mind share is. So even though people might have 10 times as much in VMs as they do in the cloud, they're just thinking about the cloud, that's what they... And then there's a lot of questions about how do I move there, how do I run there, how do I get that bill down, because the bill's are very, very high, you know when you start running there. And there's constantly new services, like saw this morning, that also can help make that bill even higher. So how do you get there in a safe way, safety and efficiency. >> Densify focuses on that cloud optimization piece. We used to talk about VMware when it first started, it was like, oh great, utilization efficiencies, to be able to kind of consolidate, but we had VM sprawl. And now there's cloud sprawl and containers, people are trying to figure out however things. What are some of the key challenges that you see from customers, what are some of the big places that they can really save a lot of money? >> Sure, yeah, you know in the virtual world it's all about what we would call playing Tetris, where you look at the workload patterns, we do a lot of workload pattern analysis, and say, that's busy in the morning, that's busy at night, put them on the same host, it's cheaper, and runs better. And you can you get huge efficiency gains in those environments. As you move to the cloud, it starts to look a bit different, and buying small, medium and large. So we do the same pattern analysis, but say, yeah you're on an M3, you should be on a T2, you're on the wrong thing. And we're seeing around 40% savings on average just by pointing and doing that. So we're seeing massive... You know, it's a different kind of opportunity, but it's equal in magnitude, the savings. We saw one customer last week, was 57% savings by just getting the cloud watch data, analyzing the patterns and saying, you're buying the wrong stuff. Now where this is all going interestingly is that when you start to move to containers, that game of Tetris comes back into play again. It's a much more advanced analytics to say, yeah, how do I combine my workloads to make them fit on the smallest footprint? You know, hence Densify, you know, that's what we do. And we're seeing savings of upwards of 80% when you do that. So there's huge savings with the right analytics. >> So with the analytics, much different conversation as you mentioned than it was a few years ago to now. You wouldn't go to a data center manager and say, you know what, I can really save you on infrastructure costs by optimizing your efficiency. You know what, sunk costs, I don't care that, you know, if I'm oversubscribed, not a big deal. In the cloud, that is a tangible thing. Someone has to pay that op ex bill. But with that said, even with the optimization, that can sometimes go into reverse, especially with all the announcements today. You gotta figure out, you know what, am I optimal in the cloud or can I use some of these older assets in my data center, move workloads back there? Do you guys help with that decision matrix sort of thing, you know what, do I run what's existing in the cloud that's not elastic, back in the data center? >> Yeah you can do that and whatever else, absolutely. People do ask that question. And again it comes down to overcommit. If I can actually take multiple workloads, stack them up, some workloads, that's what's cheaper than others, and it really depends on the workload. So if you're running in the cloud, we can say, those are good where they are, we're working on reports to say that's better off in a Docker container in the cloud. Or as you say, what if I put them back on-prem? You can do that too. Now that's kind of regressive. We don't see a lot of people, they're curious about that number, but we don't see people moving backwards. But in the cloud there's so many different ways you can run the workloads, and there are wildly different cost structures. Again, if you have very peaky workloads that are just busy for a short period of time, to put them in a standard large instance is very expensive. >> So let's talk about that cloud Tetris in the cloud. Because with containers obviously, I can now oversubscribe a bit, 'cause I couldn't do that before. You know if I had a EC2 instance, a M2 large, if I was too big, I'm just too big and I can't oversubscribe that, and I pay for what I use, there's advantages and disadvantages. How does that impact the conversations, the design conversations customers are having over stuff like we heard, EKF this morning, Fargate, and all these container orchestration management tools. How does that complicate the conversation? >> Yeah, it's interesting because you have a workload that's not doing very much, but you can't turn it off, it's doing something, and then peaks once a day, and you put it in a large M4 or whatever, you're gonna pay for the area, you're gonna pay for it all even though you're only doing a little bit of work, right? So that can be very expensive. That same type of workload, if you put it in a container with other ones that have a similar pattern but at different times, they all stack and gravitate nicely. So that's where we see a huge opportunity to run much higher density and lower cost, but the big challenge we're seeing that affects all the technologies that interest us this morning is that from a development group, they don't know how to say what those containers need. >> Right. >> So we're seeing a lot of Kubernetes environments, lot of ECS environments that are running very low utilization, 'cause the developers are asking for two CPUs for each container, and it scales based on the number of CPUs or the amount of memory, the resources, not the utilization. So we're finding it's like history repeating itself. I've got the scale group running on containers, very low utilization, and coming to say, well, wait a minute now, that's all wrong, if you do this and you recommend that our analytics give you a bunch of very prescriptive actions, you're gonna run much higher utilization, your bill goes way down again. So it's the same, you know lack of visibility, lack of analytics to figure out how to optimize that equation. >> Andrew, one of the biggest challenges coming to a show like this is things change so fast. Last year or two, heard a lot of grumbling from customers about oh reserved instances kinda locked me in, it was inflexible, Google was better, wait, Amazon changed what they're doing. This year, a lot of new things on spot instances. The spot market's been around for years, but didn't seem to have a lot of utilization, Amazon was like, no, this is gonna be it, if you don't need to have it now, we're gonna save you 90% if you do that. So you help with that. What are you seeing and hearing from customers and how do they take advantage, and you know, don't get locked into some huge bill? >> Yeah absolutely. Well in general, we find that the pace of change is fantastic for everybody if you know how to figure it out. So what we find in customers is that just keeping track of, you know we have a lot of customers that haven't seen this keynote this morning. They may not be aware of all this stuff yet. So, and even if you are aware, do you know how it impacts you? You know, can I actually leverage that M5, how does that affect me? So that's one of the things that, the strength of us is that we deliver a service, not a product, not a tool. So it's analytics, SAS-hosted analytics, very powerful analytics, with a densification advisor, a human that comes with it. So we're on top of these things. So when new stuff comes out, for example, we're sending a message out to our customers right now saying, we're on it, there's three new instance types came out this morning, we're analyzing your environment to tell you if you can use them. So what we're seeing is a kind a conversion to say that customers, they can't figure it all out anymore. It used to be that in the old world I could buy gear once every three years, I could understand that gear and I could understand my apps. Now you have to pick. Do you want to follow all the news in the cloud or do you want to work on your apps? And what we do is say, work on your business services, your differentiation, we will tell you how it maps to whatever Amazon's selling today, and don't worry about that, and our advisors just do that for you. >> Yeah Andrew I laugh, I think how much of my career was it like, oh well, we're managing that on a spreadsheet and we (mumbles) No no, >> No, not anymore. >> Forget about it. I'm curious. The bare metal instance is one there's been a little bit of buzz. It's what they designed for the VMware on AWS environment and offered it, but it's big honking machine, it's super-expensive, but have to think, if you're working with them, you could probably help customers optimize, get great utilization. What do you see that being used for? Is that something that you think your customers are gonna be interested in? >> Absolutely, I think it goes back to that playing Tetris discussion. So if you take one of these big bare metal nodes and run Docker containers stacked properly, we see that, in one study we did it's 82% cheaper than if you put them in small, medium and large instances. >> Stu: Wow. >> Again, it's because of the shapes and patterns of the workloads, and they can dovetail. So there is a place for these big monstrous machines, like the X1 32 extra large is all of those things. If you use them right, you can save a ton of money cause you get economies of scale. So bare metal is great, it's just another way to host things that for certain apps, certain workloads, makes a lot of sense. For other ones it makes no sense. >> So, we're at a conference full of developers. They don't care about infrastructure, more or less. And the Tetris works well when we're talking about containers, EC2-size instances, even bare metal. What about concepts such as serverless, okay, in which we're just running code? Obviously, we can't make every application based on microservices and it's not practical to take Lambda and build an entire stack. However, there's obviously some opportunity for some really incredible savings if we choose Lambda for certain functions. How do you guys help customers make that determination? >> So I mean, Lambda's very interesting because there is a break even point. So if I'm charged for every hundred milliseconds for what I run, if it doesn't happen very often that's a much better way than running an instance. Now once that gets beyond a certain point, it might be cheaper to actually just run it on an instance. If you have constant workload that's taking up many servers worth of capacity, There's a break even point there where it'll become more expensive to run that, 'cause again, you're paying by the hundred milliseconds by the resources that you're being allocated. So if you can run that workload with other workloads and get economies of scale, it might be cheaper. So it's kind of, if we picture Lambda it's almost like the area under the curve. What work am I doing in my app or my service, and I turn that into how many, and we use benchmarks to normalize everything, so we understand that that running there is the equivalent of that running over here. So that workload would require this many time slices, and cost you this much. And so that's something we're working on, it's not released yet, it's kinda coming, but we see that as being able to analyze the equivalency between different models. You know, that workload, very expensive in Lambda, that other one, perfect candidate. >> Andrew, while you're there, bring us inside a little bit, what it's like to be a partner in the AWS ecosystem? You know, any announcements that surprise you, you guys get some preview on this, how fast can you kind of ramp your team up to take advantage of the umpteen billion new announcements, 1,300 announcements a year? So you know, take us inside how that works for you, and then how you help your customers to take advantage of that. >> Sure, yeah, so I mean we stay pretty plugged in, we are partnered with all the major providers, and we do of course. And a lot of them, in fact Amazon provides the API to get all the latest and greatest stuff, if you're constantly hitting that, you get all the latest stuff anyway. So that pace is just built into what we do. You know, we had a customer said, hey, you guys have really kind of, you know, while we were evaluating your software, you did a lot of things to kind of show up the latest stuff coming out of the plug. Is that just you selling us, and you'll stop? We said, no, that's just the way we operate. That is the new model that everything is just up to date all the time. You know, for customers long term, you are getting new stuff every day, we're sending out the notes. So we try and stay on top, and again the key here is that interpreting what that means for you. To know that there's a new M5 is one thing. To know that it's got a different hypervisor, and you might need to rebuild your AMIs to run on it, is something we can say, okay, we're gonna help you with this and help interpret this delta. And I think it's a very important thing that Amazon has so many priorities of all the breadth and everything else that they're doing. They're not really focused on helping you shake your bill down. They're just not doing that to date. And so I think this fills a very important role in the ecosystem. >> Andrew, want to give you the final word. What are the things that your customers are doing that really helping to transform their businesses, kind of the biggest kind of challenges and opportunities that they're seeing? >> Well I mean I think, clearly I think containers are gonna be a very big part, I know we talked about them a lot already, but I think that's one of the most exciting areas. I think everybody's moving to the cloud or starting to leverage it, and doing it in various ways, but I think everybody's goal, and really Kubernetes is a big part of that, you know we saw different options right there, really centered on Kubernetes, everybody's doing that, and I think that's really gonna be the transformative technology. You can host, you know, born in the cloud microservices, you can host legacy apps in it. You can get through to a really high level of efficiency all in the cloud with that one technology. I think it's a real game changer and just needs to roll through these environments. >> All right, Andrew Hillier, always a pleasure to catch up. Thank you for giving us all the updates on Densify. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE.

>> So, we see this picture, right, of the hybrid cloud. And we've talked about how we do that for the private cloud. So, let's look over at the public cloud, and let's dig into this a little bit more deeply. You know, we're taking this incredible power of the VMware Cloud Foundation and making it available for the leading cloud providers in the world. And, with that, the partnership that we announced almost two years ago with Amazon, and on this stage, last year, we announced our first generation of products. No better example of the hybrid cloud. And for that, it's my pleasure to bring to the stage my friend, my partner, the CEO of AWS. Please welcome Andy Jassy. (crowd applauding) (upbeat music) Thank you, Andy. You know, you honor us with your presence. You know, and it really is a pleasure to be able to come in front of this audience and talk about what our teams have accomplished together over the last year. Can you give us some perspective on that, Andy, and what customers are doing with this? >> Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with all of you. You know, the offering that we have together, VMware Cloud and AWS, is very appealing to customers because it allows them to use the same software they've been using to manage their infrastructure for years, but be able to deploy it in AWS. And we see a lot of customer momentum, and a lot of customers using it. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment. In transportation, you see it with Stagecoach. In media and entertainment you see it with Discovery Communications. In education, MIT and Cal Tech, in consulting, Accenture and Cognizant and DXC. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment. And the number of customers using the offering is doubling at every quarter. So, people are really excited about it. And I think that probably the number one use case we see so far, although there are a lot of them, is customers who are looking to migrate on-premises applications to the cloud. And a good example of that is MIT, where they're right now in the process of migrating, in fact they just did migrate 3,000 VMs from their data centers to VMware Cloud and AWS. And this would've taken them years before, to do in the past, but they did it in just three months. >> Yeah, it was really, really spectacular. And they're just a fun company, and, you know, to work with, and the team there. But we're also seeing other use cases, as well. And, you know, probably the second most common example is, well I'll say, on demand capabilities for things like disaster recovery. And we have great examples of customers using it for that. And, one in particular is Brink's, right? Everybody knows the Brink's security trucks, and you know, armored trucks coming by. And they had a critical need to retire a secondary data center that they were using, you know, for DR. So we quickly built a DR protection environment for 600 of the VMs. You know, they migrated their mission-critical workloads, and voila, stable and consistent DR, and now they're eliminating that site, and looking for other migrations, as well. >> It saved 10 to 15 percent in the process, doin' it. >> Yeah, it was just great. You know, one of the things I believe, Andy, customers should never spend capital on DR, ever again, with this kind of capability in place. It is just that game changing. You know, and, obviously we've been working on expanding our reach. We promised to make the service available a year ago, with the global footprint of Amazon. And now we've delivered on that promise. And, in fact, today, or yesterday if your an Aussie, right down under, we announced in Sydney as well. And now we're in US, Europe, and in APJ. >> Yeah, it's really, I mean it's very exciting. Of course, Australia is one of the most virtualized places in the world, and it's pretty remarkable how fast European customers have started using the offering, too, in just the quarter that's been out there. And probably, of the many requests customers have had, you've had, probably the number one request has been that we make the offering available in all of the regions that AWS has regions. And, I can tell you, by the end of 2019, we'll largely be there, including with GovCloud. So, GovCloud-- >> Oh yeah, you guys have been, that's been huge for you guys. >> Yeah, it's a government-only region that we have, that a lot of federal government workloads live in. And, we are pretty close together having the offering, FedRAMP authority to operate, which is a big deal and a game-changer for governments, because then they'll be able to use the familiar tools that they use in VMware not just to run their workloads on premises, but also in the cloud as well, with the data privacy requirements and security requirements they need. So it's a real game-changer for government, too. >> Yeah, and as you can see by the picture here, basically before the end of next year, everywhere that you are, and have an availability zone, we're going to be there running on top of you. >> Giddyup! >> Yeah, let's get with it (laughs). Okay, we're a team, go faster, okay. You know, and, it's not just making it available, but this pace of innovation. And, you know, you guys have really taught us a few things in this respect. And since we went life, in the Oregon region, we've been on a quarterly cadence of major releases. M2 was really about mission-critical at scale, and we added our second region. We added our Hybrid Cloud Extension. With M3, we moved the global rollout, and we launched in Europe. With M4, we really added a lot of these mission-critical governance aspects, started to attack all of the industry certifications. And today, we're announcing M5, alright? And, with that, I think we have this little cool thing that we're doing with EBS and storage. >> Yeah, well you know, two of the most important priorities for customers are cost and performance. And so, we have a couple things to talk about today that we're bringing to you that I think hit both of those. On the storage side, we've combined the elasticity of Amazon Elastic Block Store, or EBS, with VMware's vSAN. And we've provided now a storage option that you'll be able to use that is much, it's very high-capacity and much more cost-effective. You'll start to see this initially on the VMware Cloud native USR5 instances, which are compute instances that are memory-optimized. And so, this will change the cost equation. You'll be able to use EBS by default, and it'll be much more cost-effective for storage or memory-intensive workloads. It's something that you guys have asked for, it's been very frequently requested, and it hits preview today. And then, the other thing is that we've worked really hard together to integrate VMware's NSX along with AWS's Direct Connect, to have a private, even higher performance connectivity between on-premises and the cloud. So, you know, very, very exciting new capabilities that show deep integration between the companies. >> Yeah, you know, and that aspect of the deep integration has really been the thing that we committed to. You know, we have large engineering teams that are working literally every day, right, on bringing together, and how do we fuse these platforms together at a deep and intimate way, so that we can deliver new services. Just like Elastic DRS, and the vSAN EBS, really powerful capabilities. And, that pace of innovation continues. So, M Next maybe, maybe M, maybe six? I dunno, we'll see. Alright, but we're continuing this toward pace of innovation. You know, completing all of the capabilities of NSX, you know, full integration for all of the direct-connect capabilities, really expanding that. You know, improving license capabilities on the platform. We'll be adding PKS on top of, for expanded developer capabilities. >> Yeah! >> So just, oh, thank you. (audience applauding) I think that was formerly known as storage Chad, so anyway, alright. And, you know, we're continuing this pace of innovation, going forward, but I think we also have a few other things to talk about today, Andy. >> Yeah, I think we have some news that hopefully people here will be pretty excited about. We have a pretty big database business in AWS, and it's both on the relational and on the non-relational side. And the business does billions of dollars in revenue for us. And, on the relational side, we have a service called Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS, that we have hundreds of thousands of customers using, because it makes it much easier for them to set up, operate, and scale their databases. And, so many companies now are operating in hybrid mode, and will be for a while. And a lot of those customers have asked us, can you give us the ease of manageability of those databases, but on premises? And so, we talked about it, and we thought about it, and we worked with our partners in VMware, and I'm excited to announce today, right now, Amazon RDS on VMware. (audience applauding) And so that will bring all the capabilities of Amazon RDS to VMware's customers for their on-premises environments. So, what you'll be able to do is, you'll be able to provision databases, you'll be able to scale the compute, or the memory, or the storage for those database instances. You'll be able to patch the operating system or database engines. You'll be able to create read replicas, to scale your database reads. And you can deploy those replicas either on premises or in AWS. You'll be able to deploy in high-availability configuration by replicating the data to different VMware clusters. You'll be able to create online backups that either live on premises, or in AWS. And then, you'll be able to take all those databases, and if you eventually want to move them to AWS, you'll be able to do so rather easily. You have a pretty smooth path. This is going to be available in a few months. It'll be available on Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, and MariaDB. I think it's very exciting for our customers. And I think it's also a good example of where we're continuing to deepen the partnership, and listen to what customers want, and then innovate on their behalf. >> Absolutely. Thank you, Andy, it is thrilling to see this. (audience applauding) And as we said when we began the partnership, it was a deep integration of our offerings and our go-to-market. But also building this bi-directional hybrid highway to give customers the capabilities where they want it. Cloud, on premise, right, on premise to the cloud, it really is a unique partnership that we've built, the momentum we're feeling to our customer base, and the cool innovations that we're doing. Andy, thank you so much for joining us here, >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> At the Emerald 2018. >> Thank you guys. Appreciate it. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by, Infor. >> Welcome back to Inforum 2017. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Marc Scibelli, he is the chief creative officer here at Infor. Thanks so much for returning to The Cube. >> Thanks for having me again, it's good to see you guys. >> So last year, the big announcement was H and L Digital, Hook and loop digital. Bring us up to speed, give us a status update of where you are now. >> Well we're a year later, I think what's really important is that we've established our application development framework, which allows us to rapidly deploy our prototypes, rapidly deploy the projects we're working on for a lot of customers. We've had a lot of wins over the last year. We're working closely with Brooklyn Sports, both the basketball team and the stadium and entertainment center. We're working with Travis Perkins, we're working with American Express. So we've got a lot of great client wins in our belt. We've learned a lot over the last year, but most importantly we've been able to actually fine tune our application development framework to bring that stuff to market very quickly for our customers, which has been a very big deal for us. >> So you mentioned a couple of client wins, Brooklyn Sports, let's unpack that a little bit, tell me a little about, tell our viewers specifically what's gone on. >> Yeah so, Brooklyn Nets basketball team here in the U.S., player performance a little bit down, so we're working with the performance coaches, we're working with the telemetric data that's coming out from the players. Things as it pertains to the arc of the ball throw, or the scale to models of how they perform or how much sleep they're getting. We're tying into a lot of IOT devices that the players use. We're bringing all that data into one place for the performance coaches and then allowing them to make better decisions on the field, on the court, in real time. So you'll see actually, behind you guys is our half court. We've actually set up a half court to show some of that data that we're bringing in about player performance. We actually run an NBA player assessment and show your player readiness, I hit like an eight percent readiness (Dave and Rebecca laugh) >> Rebecca: There's still time. >> Yeah five, eight I didn't think I was going to get very far in the NBA. >> High single digits. >> High, yeah, high, real high. So we're working a lot around player performance, certainly. And also with Brooklyn Sports Entertainment around the Barclay Center here in Brooklyn, how they can start to brand that experience. Nobody really has an affinity for an arena, you go and see Beyoncé or you go to watch the Nets. You don't really think about going to the Barclays Center, so how do you start as soon as they walk in the door, engaging with the customer using technology to drive all this value all the way through. How do you find the shortest beverage and bar line. How do you find the cleanest bathroom. How do you find, to get beverage and drinks and food delivered to your seat. That's all going to be technology that's going to drive that. A lot of our clients we've installed the digital backbone underpinning of that with our cloud suite. And now it's our job to commit a certain, creating these apps that differentiate them in the market place, help Barclays compete against other next-gen stadiums. >> So the Nets example it's similar to Moneyball but different, so he's talking the arc of the ball and so the remediation of some of those, the optimization of some of those, is just different training patterns or different exercises or drills that they could do. Whereas Moneyball it's like this unseen value, unbased percentage for example, are there analogs to Moneyball? Like I was listening to an interview with an owner the other day and the interviewer was beating him up about one player and he said well if you look at the deeper analytics, I'm like oh, deeper analytics what does that mean? So are there deeper analytics? >> Absolutely, you know we've left a lot of the basketball to the basketball professionals. When we started this thing the GM said to us, "Should we really get this started with" "you guys? What do you know about basketball?" We looked around and it was like an Englishman next to me and myself and we're like we don't know a lot about basketball but we hope that, that's what you're bringing to the table. We know a lot about how to bring the data science together, we can bring the AI in, we can bring all that together for your performance coaches and work with them Just like we didn't know a lot about farming and agriculture but we can work with feed companies to help them optimize for their customers. So it's not about what we knew about basketball but up to your point, those performance coaches are definitely finding those little nuggets of data to help those teams perform better. I couldn't tell you more off the top of my head cause that's how little I know about basketball. My eight percent performance rating will show you that, but they are looking inside that data and able to find that. And the trick is bringing it to them in real-time, bringing it so that they don't have to go into deep excel documents. That's what they were doing before. It was all stored in excel and they had to go through it and maybe somebody make a pivot table or something. >> Rebecca: Or watching play tapes. >> Or watching play, absolutely, of course. And by being able to assess all of that data too as well and bring that into the feed and be able to actually assess that and report it back into the larger system we're providing. It gives them a lot more visibility so they can find those little nuggets that they know as basketball professionals. >> And Burst is part of this solution? >> Not currently, no, but certainly we will be needing the Burst into that play, yeah. >> So Thomas Perkins is another example -- >> Marc: Travis Perkins. >> Travis Perkins, I'm sorry, that you mentioned. What kind of things are you doing there to make make that company able to really use data more wisely? >> So Travis Perkins, one of the largest building manufacturing supply company in the U.K. over 2000 distribution locations across England, very strong in its footprint. It's a really strong brand in terms of, sort of the Home Depot of the U.K. They put in M3 last year, it was a big announcement and it was a very large initiative for them and that's the digital backbone we talk about. So now it's our job we're coming in now we're automating a lot of their systems for their distribution centers so they get a better customer experience. So when I go into a Travis Perkins distribution center, I can get what I need much quicker so that's kind of the baseline thing that we come in and do. We look at ways to optimize for example if I could fah-bin with my truck and actually just pull my truck fah-bin, you know it's me, my order is ready. I don't need to get out of the truck, they pack my truck and I just drive out the other side. How do we create engagements for visibility models for the distribution managers to be able to see what's selling, what's not selling. Who's performing, who's not performing. Those are the things that we do as the baseline of the experience and then additionally to that, we look at new business models with them. So we're actually helping them think about new ways that they can create subscription models or ecosystem models. So, for example working on, they're working on the tool locker rental, setting up a,basically locker or rental facility, then using software to be able to access that locker and then you sort of create a subscription model to that. I'm able to just pull up, punch in a code, that's my tool locker, I get my tools right out of it and I can drive right off. And then doing it in places geographically that make a lot of sense for them. So that's kind of the best time, I think we get these signature experiences and optimize on top of the backbone, but then we create these whole new business transformation models of these companies, that's really exciting, really helpful. >> So retail's an interesting example everybody's got an amazon war-room trying figure out how to compete, where they can add value. What have you seen specifically in the retail business? >> I just moderated a panel with the CIO of DSW and the COO of Crate and Barrel on either side of me and it was exciting to see their, they feel a disruption but they're certainly eager to take it over. So, on the Crate and Barrel side we're seeing them be, really beat up by the Wayfairs of the world, three billion dollar valuation. They can get the market much quicker, they're running products in a much different way. Where Crate and Barrel has a much longer lead timer, the CPQ model. They've got to configure pricing, quoting, get it out. Takes 12 weeks to get a couch. How do you get, on the supply chain side, how do you get that shorter. So they're working with Infor to get that supply chain shorter. So they can compete on a shorter lead times but we're coming in to help them do is also look at how can you start to create experiences while you're waiting for that couch to be produced. Or while your shopping online what are things that you can do to know how long it'll take to get that item. And now that we just take all that digital backbone of that supply chain and create new experiences for it. On the DSW side we've been working really closely with them on point of sale as well as deep customer experience, apps for them with their employees. They really see their employees as the key tool to driving loyalty to their stores. So, we've been working on brand new apps in the mobile space that'll help their employees be able to serve their customers a lot better, have a much more tied loyalty program to their job performance with the customer's loyalty. So, a lot of great things there that we're working hard on. But certainly it's a massive behemoth of competing against amazon as a retailer. >> So what's your advice then for a company that is, and you're talking about companies that are already being very thoughtful and planful about this transformation, and understanding first of all that they need to transform, that they need to change or else they'll be left behind. So what's your advice for companies that are just starting on it? >> I think we kind of look at this as a holistic approach, we cannot take a little nibble bite-size out of the problem. So when it comes to digital looking at the entire ecosystem, looking at the operations, looking at the customers, looking at the employee. Saying what are we doing on our core backbone of the operations to make that run efficiently, to automate that. Let's do that, let's get that out of the way of all those people, let's make that run as quickly, as streamline as possible. Our cloud suite certainly help companies do that. And then, let's look at how we can start to transform the way they do their, they function inside their business by creating these functionally integrated models between all three. Between the operations, the customer and the employee. And let's create new experiences that live on top of that of that backbone that drive new value and until you do that, until you leverage your brand, like Crate and Barrel can leverage their brand if they just shorten that supply chain and start to optimize how they deliver. DSW can leverage their brand as a shoe warehouse if they provide a larger assortment and a better experience in-store, they can compete against amazon. So, to do that, we need them to, I would recommend companies, think of the approach holistically and not as a small little bites of just let's create this app and this one app is going to solve our problems. It's not, you got this much larger holistic approach you need to take. >> What percent of the Infor portfolio has Hook and Loop touched, affected? >> So, Hook and Loop core, certainly the GA products have touched everything. You'll see tomorrow on-stage Nunzio Esposito, our new head of Hook and Loop core. Who's running the business that when I first met you, I was running. They're doing very well and they've touched, I would say percentage-wise, 80% of the product if not more. Certainly their products are driving our business, like EAM, ACM financials, they have re-invented. And you'll see it tomorrow, they have done some incredible work. They just, they'll be releasing tomorrow, it's pretty exciting, a new UX for an entire cloud suite, so that pretty incredible. How Colman will be integrated into our cloud, it's a big deal so how do you create UX for that. And then certainly of course, how much UX and UY do you take away because you introduced Colman. You could take a lot of UX and UY away, a lot of functionality gets stripped away. So it's changed the methodologies we've used in the Hook and Loop core team but Ninzio has done a great job challenging himself to do that. >> Rebecca you were saying when you read the press releases around Infor they use terms like beautiful and so it's very apple-esque. Where do you get your inspiration? >> I think it's the consumer great products we talked about years ago when I first met you. The idea that how I function, like daily life at home, should echo how I function at work. Certainly now we're getting inspiration for how companies that are born digitally are creating these models that drive them. How we can help other companies do that as well. so, we're inspired by everything that touches us. To be honest , I still use my TEVO, I might be the only person left, (Dave and Rebecca laughing) That's not true they're doing very well >> I like the little sound effects of TEVO, I know what you mean. >> I can't say I'm the only person, but I'm probably the only person that'll admit it. That I love my TEVO. But these are things that I've watched them, not just change their UX like we did with Infor five years ago, but now they've changed their business model, they've changed what they've become as a hub and as a digital solution. How they used media channels to drive their business, I think that's incredible and it's a similar journey we're going on. So, there's a lot to be inspired by. >> Why should the consumer guys have all the fun? >> Marc: Yeah exactly. >> So how do you keep your team, you're the chief creative officer, so how do you, you talked about what inspires you and what inspires the company as a whole but how do you, keep a culture of creativity and innovation going? How do you keep the momentum? >> We've been really fortunate to have a really great support system by the executive team, Charles Phillips, Duncan Angove, certainly have been incredible about needing a team like Hook and Loop. When I met David it was 15 people maybe a little more, and now it's a 120 that run that core team. We launched H and L Digital last year, we were like nine people and now we're over 40. That investment, those dollars they put back into these kind of endeavors are really indicative of that . And I think that it comes through to the creatives and the people that we bring in that this is the kind of investments that Infor is interested in. We have a beautiful working environment inside New York City inside our headquarters. We have a beautiful new garage we just opened up, an innovation lab, we get to play with the greatest toys. I think we're actually very, very fortunate, to be inside a company like Infor and get to work with the people, we get to work with as designers, and as creatives. And that was an up hill slope to keep people motivated to do that as creatives and we call them left brain creators. I think we're there now, we turn away a lot of people to come work for us now. So it's pretty exciting. >> New York, London, Dubai, right? >> That's exactly right thank you, yeah. We are, we opened London just recently, we're opening Dubai next and we have two teams in New York. It's pretty exciting. >> Rebecca: Great. >> Love to see the Dubai. >> Yeah, Dubai is being built up right now, we have an office there already. >> could be the next destination, >> Cube Dubai. >> We should do a cube Dubai, that'd be great, they would love it there. >> Alright. >> I love it. Well Marc-- >> Put that on the list. >> Marc, thanks so much for joining us it's always a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante we will have more from Inforum after this.