(snazzy music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE, covering WTG Transform 2019, brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE exclusive coverage of WTG Transform 2019. It's the Winslow Technology's Dell MC user group, and therefore, we are always thrilled when, not only do we have a user on the program, but we have a local user who's also the Chief Information Officer. Shawn Rothman, who is the Chief Information Officer, CIO, of the town of Weymouth. Coming up from the south shore, a nice easy drive when the traffic isn't too bad. Shawn, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, glad to be here. It's Boston though, so there is no such thing as the traffic being easy. >> Yeah, the traffic and the weather. Just wait a little while, it'll change greatly. We've got the mast plate right behind us with Fenway, and yeah, it is starting to get to the evening. You know, Friday commute back. But uh, you're probably going to the Sox game, so you won't have to worry about that. >> Exactly. That's my plan, is to wait it out. >> All right. So, as I mentioned, town of Weymouth about 12 miles from where we're sitting right now. You know, you're the CIO. Give us a little bit about, you know, what that means to be the CIO of a town here in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. >> Yeah, so you know, IT is so different when you get out of the corporate setting. We have a lot of high needs or requirements. There's a lot of public safety needs, things like that, that are consuming often. But the drive isn't always there to take advantage of it, so we've been continually working to grow new things, to grow new technology in Weymouth. We uh, I'm really struggling, sorry. >> Yeah, no it's great Shawn. Give us a little bit about, you know, what you can, how many people that you've served in the community, and your team itself, how many people you've managed, just to give us a little bit of a scope. >> So, in Weymouth we have about 500 full time employees within the town side and another, you know, more than 2,000 if you take in our schools. Now we have a separate IT department for our schools. We share combined networks, so we have a private dark fiber network that runs throughout the town that we share. I provide services for police, fire, DPW, emergency management, finance, all the things that you kind of do, public works. It's a lot of different areas. There's a lot of different needs and ways that we can meet the needs of the public. >> Okay, that's awesome. So underneath that, so infrastructure is a piece of what your group owns, yes? >> Yes. >> Give us a little bit, kind of scope that out for us, what that means when kind of the pieces that allow you to deliver those services to your constituents. >> Right, so it starts with lots of things people don't see, right? So, IT is often very hidden. If we're doing our job well, people don't really notice us. So, like I said, we have dark fiber all throughout the town that enables us to do everything from public safety communication, data replication, allows for DR so we have multiple sites for our data. We run Compellent SANs, based off running Dell servers, running VM ware. And, we run two different set ups. One at the town hall and another at my police department, and that provides my disaster recovery and things like that. From there, then you start looking towards facing of customers. We need to run bills for taxes, and water, and utilities, things like that, so, all those pieces start to play in. We're continually looking to grow in that area, so, one of the areas that we're actually looking at right now is increasing our presence online, as far as people's ability to apply for permits online to have inspectional services done online, to pay their bills online. You know, I think everybody wants their experience online to be Amazon, right? Go, open up your cart, buy up, put a bunch of things in there, hit pay, and be done. And, that's the direction we're trying to move, these days. >> Shawn, some of the fascinating conversations I've had in the last few years is when you talk to government agencies, municipalities, and the like, and that word gets thrown out, digital transformation, and what that means from you. Right, you know, today, you know, me? I live in a town here in Massachusetts. Yeah, gosh, why can't everything just be something that, I talk to my home assistant and it just gets done magically, and it's nice and easy? But you know, it's a journey that we all need to go on and there's some things that, you know, you don't have unlimited budget and unlimited head count to be able to manage that, so talk to us a little bit about, you know, does digital transformation mean something in your world? And, how are you helping to deliver some of those mobile enabled services? >> Yeah, so that really, I run into really two challenges there, well multiple challenges, more than two, but two really big challenges. One is getting people used to the idea of doing things in a way that they haven't done it before. You don't need to come to the town hall, go online and do it. You have to understand that billing, if you pay online, you pay with a credit card, there's charges that get assumed. With Amazon, that gets eaten by the product managers and things like that. Well, we don't have that, so those are surprise fees for people. So, those are challenges to teach people about. We also then have problems with teaching people within the town. Hey, I've always done my business x way. People come and see me, they do things, they fill out this form, they move along, and it's kind of transforming their abilities to understand and move in that technical age, also. Those are kind of the two biggest areas. Outside of that, is, you know, the up side is huge. We're talking to another community that has kind of gone to these things online, and they say they're getting like 40 to 60 percent of their building permits between midnight and 6:00 AM. That's a whole new world for the way the government has worked in the past. >> Yeah. Shawn, come on. I live in a town here in Massachusetts. We are proud of our 300 year old legacy and the way things are done here, which is a little bit different than the conversation we're generally having in IT these days. >> Yes, for sure. (chuckling) >> Great. So, you mentioned a little bit, you know, I hear Compellent SANs. You've got disaster recovery and all these pieces, so tie us into this event. What brings you to WTG Transform? Of course, I know Compellant has a long history of the team here, Scott and the team, so how long have you been working with them? And, tell us a little bit about the relationship. >> We've had a Compellent SAN actually installed by Winslow, it's got to be nine plus years ago to get started, and it's just kind of been one of those things that grew. You know, we started with Compellent, and then Dell bought Compellent, and we had HP servers, and while it was nice to have everything together, so we moved to our Dell servers, but I love to come here and see kind of where things are moving, where Winslow is going, where there's opportunities for me kind of to meet people's needs in ways that they're looking for that maybe I don't know about, ways I can protect our data, ways I can protect my constituents and my residents. Those are all concerns, and this is a great opportunity for kind of see all those different pieces, to get my hands on things once in a while, or to hear something that would get me moving in a direction maybe I hadn't previously looked at. >> Shawn, is there any initiatives you have, or technologies that you're poking at that you'd like to understand more, or things that you're looking for from kind of the vendor community that would make your world easier? >> It's hard to know what you don't know, and so there's always something new. Every time I get here, I see something that I'm like, "Man, this could really be transformative for us." It's often different to figure out how and when to implement those things. So, I don't know that I have, you know, I don't know that thing I don't know yet, I think I haven't found that key hot button for this year, I don't think. >> You bring up a really good point, a question I actually asked for years is, how do you keep up? And, of course the answer is, I don't care if you're the smartest person at the most important company in the world, no one can keep up with all of it all the time. So, the question is, who do you rely on to help you to understand and learn some of those new things? >> Yeah, so I mean, we all look at things from media, and there's Spiceworks is a great community I use, but my VARs are kind of, that's really where the rubber meets the road for me, And, you know, Winslow has just been, there are many things that I would, I'll take and leave. There's technology I use, and if I had to replace it, I get rid of it. Well, Compellent, Winslow, that combo is, I mean, it's called dead-hand technology, I mean, it doesn't leave, it's not going any place. They're crucial to me, knowing where to go, how to go. They help me figure out road maps, they've always kind of gone above and beyond in making sure that my needs are met, and that I know the direction things are going before I get jammed into a spot where I can't get out. >> Yeah, so last question I have for you, Shawn. CIO of a town here in Massachusetts, where do you find it kind of different and the same compared to the peers that you'd be talking to at an event like this? >> It's hard to find other venues like this. There's some government run programs, but they're not the same. >> So, I guess just to, what I'm asking for is when you talk to your peers here, do you have some of the same concerns and the same looking at technology, or are there opportunities or challenges you have working for a town government that maybe the average mid-sized business wouldn't? >> Sorry, yeah. Yeah, I think we share a lot of security concerns. Security, I think our concerns are very much aligned, right, we're all worried about what's happening outside our environment, we're concerned about the weakest link, which tends to be our end users ability to click a button, but outside of that, when we get to like how business really works, at times we're very different, at times we're very similar. So, my needs for disaster recovery, again, two buildings across town, that works for me. If I lose those two buildings across town, two, three, four miles, I've lost everything I care about, where a company, you lose something, you need to have backups across the country. So, there's some different needs, but the reality is we both need to protect our data, we both want to provide quality service to the people that depend on us, we both want to be moving in positive directions, we both have constraints on our budgets. So, I think there's a lot of overlap for me that I can pick up information here, even if sometimes the exact model they use isn't the same as what I would use. >> All right, last question I have for you, Shawn is, when I travel, you know, I live about 26.2 miles from downtown Boston, but I say I'm from Boston because people definitely outside this country, and even across this country, don't necessary know much of Massachusetts, so when you talk to somebody, how do we put Weymouth on the map? >> So, Weymouth is on the south shore of Boston, but generally, I would say the same thing, I'm from Boston, but we're, like you said, I mean, we're less than 10 miles really from the edges of Boston. We're right along the water, we have one, actually, one of the busiest ports in Massachusetts, outside of Boston, itself, Boston harbor, and so, you know, we're kind of right here in the middle of everything. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well it's getting close to beach season, it's actually the first day of Summer here. So, Shawn, thank you so much for sharing this story, town of Weymouth, and what's happening in your world, really appreciate you joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching the CUBE. (snazzy music)

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering Activia 2019 data-driven to you by Activia welcome to Boston everybody this is Dave Volante and I'm here with stupid man finally still in our hometown you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're covering actifi Oh data-driven hashtag data-driven 19 activity it was a company that is focus started focused on copy data management they sort of popularized the term the I the concept the idea of data virtualization there's big data digital transformation all the buzz it's kind of been a tailwind for the company and we followed them quite closely over the years poly st. Claire is here she's the CEO of the state of Massachusetts that's chief of ditch and chief data officer Holly thanks for coming on the Q thanks for having me so it's kind of rare that somebody shares the title of chief digital officer of chief data officer I think it's rare right now I think that would change you think it will change I think those two roles will come together I just think data fuels our digital world and it both creates the content and also monitors how we're doing and it's just inevitably I think either they're gonna be joined at the hip or it's gonna be the same person that's interesting I always thought the chief data officer sort of emerged from this wonky back-office role data quality of this careful the word walking okay well yeah let's talk about that but the chief digital officer is kind of the mover the shaker has a little marketing genius but but okay so you see those two roles coming together that maybe makes sense because why because there's there some tension in a lot of organizations between those two roles well I think the challenge with the way that sometimes people think about data is they think about it's only a technical process data is actually very creative and you also have to tell a story in order to be good with it it's the same thing as marketing but it's just a little bit of a different hue a different type of audience a different type of pace there's a technical component to the data work but I'm looking at my organization that I'm surrounded by additional technical folks CTO CSO privacy officer CIO so we have a lot of supports that might take away some of those roles are scrunched in under the data officer or the digital so I used to turn wonky before it kind of triggered you a little bit but but you're a modeler you're a data scientist your development programmer right no but I know enough to I know enough to read code and get in trouble okay so you can direct coders and you have data scientists working for you yeah right so you've got that entire organization underneath you and your your mission is blank fill in the blank so our mission is to use the best information technology to ensure that every users experience with the Commonwealth is fast easy and wicked awesome awesome Holly our team just got back from a very large public sector event down in DC and digging into you know how our agency is doing with you know cloud force initiatives how are they doing the city environments you were state of Massachusetts and you know rolled out that that first chief data if you keep dipped officer gets a little bit of insight inside how Massachusetts doing with these latest waves of innovation uh well you know we have our legacy systems and as our opportunities come up to improve those systems our reinvest in them we are taking a step forward to cloud we're not so dogmatic that it's cloud only but it's definitely cloud when it's appropriate I do think we'll always have some on-prem services but really when it's possible whether it's a staff service off-the-shelf or it's a cloud environment to make sense than we are moving to that in your keynote this morning you you talked about something called data minimalism yeah and wonder if you could explain that for audience because for the longest time it's been well you want to hoard all the data you want to get all the data and you know what do you do with it how do you manage you right right I mean data's only as good as your ability to use it and I often find that we're ingesting all this data and we don't really know what to do with it or really rather our business leaders and decision-makers can't quite figure out how to connect that to the mission or to act properly interrogate the data to get the information they want and so this idea is an idea that's sort of coming a little bit out of Europe and or some of the other trends we see around some cyber security and hacking worlds and the idea is this actually came from fjords Digital Trends for 2019 is data minimalism the idea is that you strongly connect your business objectives to the data collection program that you have you don't just collect data until you're sure that it supports your objectives so you know one of the things that I also talked about in the keynote was not just data minimalism but doing a try test iterate approach we often collect data hoping to see that we can create a change I think we need to prove that we can create the change before we do a widespread scalable data collection program because often we collect data and you still can't see what you're doing has an effect within the data the signals too strong or too too weak or you're asking the wrong question of the data or it's the wrong plectra collection of the technique and that's largely driven from a sort of privacy a privacy privacy the reality of how costly sometimes the kennedys but you know storage of data is cheap but the actual reality of moving it and saving it and knowing where it is and accessing it later that takes time and energy of your of your actual people so I think it's just important for us to think carefully about a resource in government we have a little less resources sometimes in the private sector so we're very strategic on what we do and so I think we need to really think about the data we use if the pendulum swings remember back to the days of you know 2006 the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure said okay you got to keep electronic records for whatever seven years of depending on industry and people said okay let's get rid of it as soon as we can data was viewed as a liability and then of course all the big data height we've talked about a little bit in your in your speech everybody said I could collect everything throw it into a data Lake and we all know those became data swamps so do you feel like the pendulum is swinging and there's maybe a little balance are we reaching an equilibrium is it going to be a you know hard shift back to data as a liability what are your thoughts well I think isn't with any trend there's always a little bit of a pendulum swing as we're learning it's with it with the equilibrium is equilibrium is I think that's a great word I think the piece that I neglected to mention is the relationship to the consumer trust you know for us in government we have to have the trust of our constituents we do have a higher bar than public sector in terms of handling data in a way that's respectful of individuals privacy and their security of their data and so I think to the extent that we are able to lend transparency and show the utility and the data we're using and that will gain the trust of our users or customers but if we continue to do things behind the scenes and not be overt about it I think then that can cause more problems I think we face is organizations to ask ourselves is having more data worth the sort of vulnerability introduces and the possible liability of trust of our of our customers when you betray to test over your customers it's really hard to replace that and so you know to a certain extent I think we should be more deliberate about our data and earn the trust of our customers okay how how does Massachusetts look at the boundary of data between the public sector and the private sector I've talked to you know some states where you know we're helping business off parking by giving you know new mobile apps access to that information you talked a little bit about health care you know I've done interviews with the massive macleod initiative here locally how do you look at that balance of sharing I think it is a real balance you know I don't think we do very much of it yet and we certainly don't share data that were not allowed to by law and we have very strict laws here in Massachusetts the stricter at the ten most states and so I think it's very strategic when we do share data we are looking for opportunities when we can when I talk about demand driven data I look forward to opening the conversation a little bit to ask people what data are they looking for to ask businesses and different institutions we have throughout the Commonwealth what data would help you do your job better and grow our economy and our jobs and I think that's a conversation we need to have over time to figure out what the right balances someday it'll be easier for us to share than others and some will never be able to share the first data scientist I've ever met is somebody I interviewed the amazing Hilary Mason and she said something that I want to circle back to something you said in your talk if she said the hardest part of my job or one of the hardest parts is people come to me with data and and it's the most valuable thing I can do is show them which questions to ask and you have talked about well what's a lot of times you don't know what questions to ask until you look at the data or vice versa what comes first the chicken or the egg what's your experience pin well I do think we need to be driven by the business objectives and goals it doesn't mean there's not an iterative process in there somewhere but you know data wonks we can we can just throw data all day long and still might not give you the answer there forward but I think it's really important for us to be driven by the business and I think executives don't know how to ask the questions of the data they don't know how to interrogate it or honestly more realistically we don't have a date of actually answers the question they want to know so we often have to use proxies for that information but I do think if there's an iterative after you get to a starting point so I do think knowing what the business question is first I know you gotta go but I want to ask your last question bring it back to the state where both Massachusetts residents and your services it sounds like you're picking off some some good wins with a through the fast ROI I mean you mentioned you know driver's license renewals etc how about procurement has procurement been a challenge from the state standpoint you are you looking at sort of the digital process and how to streamline procurement that is a conversation that the secretary what is currently in and I think it's a good one I don't think we have any any solutions yet but I think we have a lot of the issues that were struggling with but we're not alone all public sectors struggling with this type of procurement question so we're working on it all right last question there's quick thoughts on you know what you've seen here I know you're in and out but data-driven yeah it's a great theme it's a really exciting agenda there's people for all these different organizations and approaches to data-driven you know from movie executives and casting to era it's just really exciting to see the program it's Nate Claire thanks so much I'm coming on the queue thank you great to meet you okay keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break well the cube is here at data-driven day one special coverage we'll be right back

>> Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE! Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our continuing coverage of our event, Big data SV. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host George Gilbert. We're down the street from the Strata Data Conference, hearing a lot of interesting insights on big data. Peeling back the layers, looking at opportunities, some of the challenges, barriers to overcome but also the plethora of opportunities that enterprises alike have that they can take advantage of. Our next guest is no stranger to theCUBE, she was just on with me a couple days ago at the Women in Data Science Conference. Please welcome back to theCUBE, Ziya Ma. Vice President of Software and Services Group and the Director of Big Data Technologies from Intel. Hi Ziya! >> Hi Lisa. >> Long time, no see. >> I know, it was just really two to three days ago. >> It was, well and now I can say happy International Women's Day. >> The same to you, Lisa. >> Thank you, it's great to have you here. So as I mentioned, we are down the street from the Strata Data Conference. You've been up there over the last couple days. What are some of the things that you're hearing with respect to big data? Trends, barriers, opportunities? >> Yeah, so first it's very exciting to be back at the conference again. The one biggest trend, or one topic that's hit really hard by many presenters, is the power of bringing the big data system and data science solutions together. You know, we're definitely seeing in the last few years the advancement of big data and advancement of data science or you know, machine learning, deep learning truly pushing forward business differentiation and improve our life quality. So that's definitely one of the biggest trends. Another thing I noticed is there was a lot of discussion on big data and data science getting deployed into the cloud. What are the learnings, what are the use cases? So I think that's another noticeable trend. And also, there were some presentations on doing the data science or having the business intelligence on the edge devices. That's another noticeable trend. And of course, there were discussion on security, privacy for data science and big data so that continued to be one of the topics. >> So we were talking earlier, 'cause there's so many concepts and products to get your arms around. If someone is looking at AI and machine learning on the back end, you know, we'll worry about edge intelligence some other time, but we know that Intel has the CPU with the Xeon and then this lower power one with Atom. There's the GPU, there's ASICs, FPGAS, and then there are these software layers you know, with higher abstraction layer, higher abstraction level. Help us put some of those pieces together for people who are like saying, okay, I know I've got a lot of data, I've got to train these sophisticated models, you know, explain this to me. >> Right, so Intel is a real solution provider for data science and big data. So at the hardware level, and George, as you mentioned, we offer a wide range of products from general purpose like Xeon to targeted silicon such as FPGA, Nervana, and other ASICs chips like Nervana. And also we provide adjacencies like networking the hardware, non-volatile memory and mobile. You know, those are the other adjacent products that we offer. Now on top of the hardware layer, we deliver fully optimized software solutions stack from libraries, frameworks, to tools and solutions. So that we can help engineers or developers to create AI solutions with greater ease and productivity. For instance, we deliver Intel optimized math kernel library. That leverage of the latest instruction set gives us significant performance boosts when you are running your software on Intel hardware. We also deliver framework like BigDL and for Spark and big data type of customers if they are looking for deep learning capabilities. We also optimize some popular open source deep learning frameworks like Caffe, like TensorFlow, MXNet, and a few others. So our goal is to provide all the necessary solutions so that at the end our customers can create the applications, the solutions that they really need to address their biggest pinpoints. >> Help us think about the maturity level now. Like, we know that the very most sophisticated internet service providers who are sort of all over this machine learning now for quite a few years. Banks, insurance companies, people who've had this. Statisticians and actuaries who have that sort of skillset are beginning to deploy some of these early production apps. Where are we in terms of getting this out to the mainstream? What are some of the things that have to happen? >> To get it to mainstream, there are so many things we could do. First I think we will continue to see the wide range of silicon products but then there are a few things Intel is pushing. For example, we're developing this in Nervana, graph compiler that will encapsulate the hardware integration details and present a consistent API for developers to work with. And this is one thing that we hope that we can eventually help the developer community with. And also, we are collaborating with the end user. Like, from the enterprise segment. For example, we're working with the financial services industry, we're working with a manufacturing sector and also customers from the medical field. And online retailers, trying to help them to deliver or create the data science and analytics solutions on Intel-based hardware or Intel optimized software. So that's another thing that we do. And we're seeing actually very good progress in this area. Now we're also collaborating with many cloud service providers. For instance, we work with some of the top seven cloud service providers, both in the U.S. and also in China to democratize the, not only our hardware, but also our libraries and tools, BigDL, MKL, and other frameworks and libraries so that our customers, including individuals and businesses, can easily access to those building blocks from the cloud. So definitely we're working from different factors. >> So last question in the last couple of minutes. Let's kind of vibe on this collaboration theme. Tell us a little bit about the collaboration that you're having with, you mentioned customers in some highly regulated industries, for as an example. But a little bit to understand what's that symbiosis? What is Intel learning from your customers that's driving Intel's innovation of your technologies and big data? >> That's an excellent question. So Lisa, maybe I can start my sharing a couple of customer use cases. What kind of a solution that we help our customer to address. I think it's always wise not to start a conversation with the customer on technology that you deliver. You want to understand the customer's needs first. And then so that you can provide a solution that really address their biggest pinpoint rather than simply selling technology. So for example, we have worked with an online retailer to better understand their customers' shopping behavior and to assess their customers' preferences and interests. And based upon that analysis, the online retailer made different product recommendations and maximized its customers' purchase potential. And it drove up the retailer's sales. You know, that's one type of use case that we have worked. We also have partnered with the customers from the medical field. Actually, today at the Strata Conference we actually had somebody highlighting, we had a joint presentation with UCSF where we helped the medical center to automate the diagnosis and grading of meniscus lesions. And so today actually, that's all done manually by the radiologist but now that entire process is automated. The result is much more accurate, much more consistent, and much more timely. Because you don't have to wait for the availability of a radiologist to read all the 3D MRI images. And that can all be done by machines. You know, so those are the areas that we work with our customers, understand their business need, and give them the solution they are looking for. >> Wow, the impact there. I wish we had more time to dive into some of those examples. But we thank you so much, Ziya, for stopping by twice in one week to theCUBE and sharing your insights. And we look forward to having you back on the show in the near future. >> Thanks, so thanks Lisa, thanks George for having me. >> And for my co-host George Gilbert, I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at Big Data SV in San Jose. Come down, join us for the rest of the afternoon. We're at this cool place called Forager Tasting and Eatery. We will be right back with our next guest after a short break. (electronic outro music)

>> Announcer: Live from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Women in Data Science Conference 2018. Brought to you by Stanford. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Stanford University for the third annual Women in Data Science Conference, hashtag WiDS2018. Participate in the conversation and you're going to see people at WiDS events in over 177 regions in over 53 countries. This even is aiming to reach about 100,000 people in the next couple of days, which in its third year is remarkable. It's aimed at inspiring and educating data scientists worldwide and of course supporting females in the field. It's also got keynotes, technical vision tracks, and a career panel. And we're excited to welcome back to theCUBE, a cube alumni, Ziya Ma, the Vice President of Software and Services Group and the Director of Big Data Technologies at Intel. Ziya, welcome back to theCube. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. >> You have been, this is your first time coming to a WiDS event in person and your first year here. You are on the career panel. >> Yes. >> That's pretty cool. Tell us about, you just came from that career panel, tell us about that. What were some of the things that excited you? What are some of the things that surprised you in what you heard at that panel? >> So I think one thing that was really exciting is to see the passion from the audience, so many women excited with data science. And it was the future of what data science can bring. That's the most exciting part. And also, it's very exciting to get connected with so many women professionals. And in terms of, you know, surprise? I think it's a good surprise to see so much advancement in women development in data science. Comparing where we are and where we were two years ago, it's great to see so many woman speakers and leaders talking about their work in the data science space, applying data science to solve real business problems, to solve transportation problems, to solve education, healthcare problems. I think that's the happy surprise, you know, the fast advancement with woman development in this field. >> What were some of the things that you shared, maybe recommendations or advice. You've been in industry for a long time. You've been at Intel for quite a long time. What were some of the things that you felt important to share with the audience, those in-person here at Stanford which is about 400 plus, and those watching the live stream? >> Yeah, you know, Lisa, I provide career coaching actually for many women professionals at Intel and also from the industry. And a lot of them expressed an interest of getting into a data science field. And they ask me, what is the skillset that I need to develop in order to get into this field? I think first, you need to ask yourself, what kind of job you want to get into in this field. You know, there are marketing jobs, there are sales jobs. And even for technical jobs, there are data engineering type of jobs, data visualization, statistician, data science, or AI engineer, machine learning, deep learning engineer. So you have to ask yourself, what kind of job you want to move to and then assess your skillset gap. And work to close that gap. Another advice I give to many woman professionals is that data science appears to have a high bar today. And it may be too significant a jump to move from where you are to a data science field. You may want to move to adjacent field first. And to have a sense of what is it like to work in the data science field and also have more insights with what's going on. And then, to better prepare you for eventually moving into this field. >> Great advice and I think one of the things that jumped out at me was you talked about skillsets. And we often hear a lot of the technical skills, right, that are essential for a data scientist. But there's also softer skills, maybe it's more left brain, right brain, creativity, empathy, communication. Tell me, in your ascension to now the VP level at Intel, what are some of the other skills besides the technical skills that you find as data science as a field grows and infiltrates everything, what are some of those softer skills that you think are really advantageous? >> Great question. I think openness and collaboration are very important soft skills. Because as a data scientist, you need to work with data engineering teams. Because as a data scientist, you extract business insights from the data. But then you cannot work alone. You have to work with the data engineering team who prepares the data infrastructure, stores, and manages the data very efficiently for you to consume. You also have to work with domain experts. Let's say if you are applying data science solutions to solve a real business problem, let's say in a medical field. You need to work with a domain expert from the medical field so that you can tailor your solution towards, you know, addressing some medical problems. So you need to work with that domain expert who knows the business operations and processes in medical field really, really well. So I think that's, you know, collaboration is key. And of course you also want to collaborate maybe with academia and open source community where a lot of real innovations are happening. And you want to leverage the latest technology building blocks so that you can accelerate your data science application or solution advancement. So collaboration and openness are the key. >> Openness is a great one. I'm glad that you brought that up. We had another guest on talking about that earlier. In terms of being open, one, to not expecting, you know, in the scientific method, you go into it with a hypothesis and you think you know what you're going to find or you want to know, I want to find this. And you might not, and being open to going, okay, that's okay, I'm going to course correct. 'Cause failure in this sense is not a bad F word. But also being open to other opinions, other perspectives. That seems to be kind of a theme that we're hearing more about today, it's be willing to be open-minded. >> You know, that's an excellent point, Lisa. You know, I can share one example. When coming from an engineering background, when I first moved into this field, we always had the assumption that when we talk with your customers, they must be looking for something that's high performance. So our initial discussion with our customers centered around Intel product lineup that will give you the highest of performance for deep learning training or for analytics solution. But as we went deeper with the discussion, we realized that's not what customers are looking for in many cases. The fact is that many of them have collected a massive amount of data over the years. They have built analytics applications and you add on top of that. And so as the data representations get more complex, we want to extract more complex insights. That's the time they want to apply deep learning but to the existing application infrastructure. So they're looking for something, let's say deep learning capability, that can be easily integrated into the existing analytics solutions stack, into its existing infrastructure and reuse its existing infrastructure for lower cost of ownership. That's what they are looking for. And high performance is just nice to have. So once we are open-minded to that learning, that totally changed the conversation. Actually, in the last couple of years, we applied that learning and we have collaborated with top cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and you know, Alibaba and Baidu and a few others to deploy Intel-based deep learning capabilities. Libraries, frameworks, into cloud so that, you know, more businesses and individuals can have access. But again, it's that openness. You truly need to understand what is the problem you are solving before simply just selling a technology. >> Absolutely, and that's one of the best examples of openness that's obviously in this case listening to customers. We think we know the problem that we need to solve and they're telling you, actually, it's not that. It's a nice to have, and you go, whoa, that changes everything! And it also changes, sounds like, the downstream collaboration that Intel knew we need to have in order to drive our business forward and help our customers in every industry do the same thing. >> Exactly, exactly. >> So a couple of things that I'd love to get your perspective on is the culture at Intel. You've been there a long time. What is that culture like in terms of maybe fueling or being a nice opportunity for bringing in this diversity that we so need in every industry? >> Yeah, you know, one thing I want to share, actually, just now during the panel discussion I shared this. I said Intel will be the first high tech company achieving full representation of women and under-represented minorities by the end of this year. >> Wow, by the end of 2018? >> Yes, we pulled in our timeline by two years. Yes, we're well on track for this year. >> Wow. >> To achieve that. And I personally, I like this quote from Brian Krzanich, our CEO, that if we want tech to define the future, we must be representative of that future. So in the last few years now, Intel has put great effort into hiring and retention for diversity. We also have put great effort for inclusion. We want to make sure our employees, every one of them, come to work, bring their full selves for the value add. We also invest in diverse entrepreneurs through Intel capital initiatives. And most importantly, we also partner with academia, universities, to build the pipeline for tech sectors. So we put a lot of effort and we committed about $300 million for closing the gap at the company but also for the high tech sector. So definitely we are very committed to the diversity and inclusion. But that doesn't mean that we only focus on this. And of course, we make sure that our people are bringing the right skillsets and we bring the most qualified people, you know, to do the job. >> On the pipeline front, one of the things I was reading recently is some of the challenges that organizations that are going to, say, college campuses to recruit, some of the missteps they might be taking in terms of if they're trying to bring more females info their organization in STEM roles, don't staff a booth with men, right? Or have the only females that are at a recruitment event be doing, handing out swag, or taking names. Obviously there's important roles to be had everywhere. But that was one of the things that seems to be, well what a simple thing to change. Just flip the model so that the pipeline, to your point, is fueling really what corporations like Intel want to achieve so that that future is really as inclusive and diverse as it should be. The second thing that you mentioned before we went live, from an Intel perspective, is you guys were challenged on the talent acquisition front. And so a few years ago, you started the Women in Big Data Forum to solve that problem. Tell us about that and what have you achieved so far? >> Great question. So you know, this is three or four years ago. And Intel, you know, because I manage the big data engineering organization within Intel, and we are working to hire some diversity talents. So we opened some racks and we look at our candidate pool. There were very few women, actually barely any women in the candidate pool. Again, yes, we always want to hire the most qualified people, but it also does not feel right that when you don't even have any diversity candidates in that pool. Even though we exhausted all possible options, even tried to bring the relevant diversity candidates into the pool. But it's very challenging. So then we reached out to a few industrial partners to see, is Intel the only company that had this problem or you have the same problem? It turned out everyone had the same problem. So yes, people value diversity, they all see the value. But it's very challenging to have a successful recruiting process for diversity. That's the time the few of us gathered together, we said, maybe there is something that we can do to support a stronger woman pipeline for future hiring. And it may take a couple of years, and it may take one year, but unless we start doing something today, we're going to talk about the same problem two years from now. >> Exactly. >> So then with sponsorship from our executive team, Doug Fisher, the Intel software analysis group GM, and also Michael Greene and a few others, we bring the team together, we started to look at networking opportunities, training opportunities. We worked with our industrial partners to offer many free training classes and we also start reaching out to universities to build the pipeline. And especially to motivate the female students to get passionate about big data, about analytics. So as of now, we have more than 2000 members globally for the forum and also we have many chapters. We have chapters along the West Coast in the Bay Area, also East Coast. We also have chapters in Europe and Asia so we're definitely seeing more and more women getting excited with big data and analytics. And also, we have great collaboration with women in data science at Stanford. >> Yeah and it sounds like the momentum, it doesn't sound like the momentum, you can feel it, right? You can feel it online with, I can see a Twitter stream in front of me on this monitor. People are getting involved in droves all across the globe and I said to Margot, I asked her earlier, Margot Gerritsen, one of the founders of WiDS, I said, first of all, you must be pleasantly pretty shocked at how quickly this has ascended. And she said yes, and I said, where do you go from here? And she said, it's really now going to be about getting involved with WiDS more frequently throughout the year. Also, kind of going up a funnel if you will, to high school students and starting to encourage them, excite them, and start that motivation track, if you will, even earlier. And I think that is, in terms to your point about we can't do anything if the pipeline isn't there to support it. One of the things that WiDS is aiming to do, and it sounds like what you're doing as well, similar to Women in Big Data Forum at Intel, is let's start creating a pipeline of women that are educated in the technical side and the software softer skill side that are interested and find their passion so that we can help motivate them, that you can do this. The sky's the limit where data science is concerned. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And it's great to see actually everybody recognize the value of building the pipeline and reaching out beyond the university students. Because have to get more and more girls getting into the science and tech sector. And we have to start from young. And I, yeah, totally agree, I think we really need to build our pipeline and a pipeline for our pipeline. >> Yes, exactly. And also that sort of sustaining momentum as women, you know, go in university and study STEM subjects, get into the field. Obviously retention is a big challenge that the tech industry and STEM fields alike have faced. But that retention, that motivation, and I think organizations like this, just with this, you can feel the passion when you walk into this alumni center at Stanford is really key. We thank you so much for carving out some time to share your insights and your career path and your recommendations on theCUBE and wish you continued success at Intel and with Women in Big Data Forum, which I'm sure we'll see you back at WiDS next year. >> Alright, thank you, thanks Lisa. >> Absolutely, my pleasure. We want to thank you, you have been watching theCUBE live from the Women in Data Science Conference 2018. Hashtag WiDS2018, join the conversation, get involved. I'm Lisa Martin from Stanford. Stick around, I'll be right back with John Furrier to do a wrap of the day. (outro electronic music)

>> [Narrator] Live from Boston Massachusetts. This is the Cube, covering Sparks Summit East 2017. Brought to you by Databricks. Now here are your hosts, Dave Alante and George Gilbert. >> Back to you Boston everybody. This is the Cube and we're here live at Spark Summit East, #SparkSummit. Ziya Ma is here. She's the Vice President of Big Data at Intel. Ziya, thanks for coming to the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So software is our topic. Software at Intel. You know people don't necessarily associate Intel with always with software but what's the story there? >> So actually there are many things that we do for software. Since I manage the Big Data engineering organization so I'll just say a little bit more about what we do for Big Data. >> [Dave] Great. >> So you know Intel do all the processors, all the hardware. But when our customers are using the hardware, they like to get the best performance out of Intel hardware. So this is for the Big Data space. We optimize the Big Data solution stack, including Spark and Hadoop on top of Intel hardware. And make sure that we leverage the latest instructions set so that the customers get the most performance out of the newest released Intel hardware. And also we collaborated very extensively with the open source community for Big Data ecosystem advancement. For example we're a leading contributor to Apache Spark ecosystem. We're also a top contributor to Apache Hadoop ecosystem. And lately we're getting into the machine learning and deep learning and the AI space, especially integrating those capabilities into the Big Data eTcosystem. >> So I have to ask you a question to just sort of strategically, if we go back several years, you look at during the Unix days, you had a number of players developing hardware, microprocessors, there were risk-based systems, remember MIPS and of course IBM had one and Sun, et cetera, et cetera. Some of those live on but very, very small portion of the market. So Intel has dominated the general purpose market. So as Big Data became more mainstream, was there a discussion okay, we have to develop specialized processors, which I know Intel can do as well, or did you say, okay, we can actually optimize through software. Was that how you got here? Or am I understanding that? >> We believe definitely software optimization, optimizing through software is one thing that we do. That's why Intel actually have, you may not know this, Intel has one of the largest software divisions that focus on enabling and optimizing the solutions in Intel hardware. And of course we also have very aggressive product roadmap for advancing continuously our hardware products. And actually, you mentioned a general purpose computing. CPU today, in the Big Data market, still has more than 95% of the market. So that's still the biggest portion of the Big Data market. And will continue our advancement in that area. And obviously as the Ai and machine learning, deep learning use cases getting added into the Big Data domain and we are expanding our product portfolio into some other Silicon products. >> And of course that was kind of the big bet of, we want to bet on Intel. And I guess, I guess-- >> You should still do. >> And still do. And I guess, at the time, Seagate or other disk mounts. Now flash comes in. And of course now Spark with memory, it's really changing the game, isn't it? What does that mean for you and the software group? >> Right, so what do we... Actually, still we focus on the optimi-- Obviously at the hardware level, like Intel now, is not just offering the computing capability. We also offer very powerful network capability. We offer very good memory solutions, memory hardware. Like we keep talking about this non-volatile memory technologies. So for Big Data, we're trying to leverage all those newest hardware. And we're already working with many of our customers to help them, to improve their Big Data memory solution, the e-memory, analytics type of capability on Intel hardware, give them the most optimum performance and most secure result using Intel hardware. So that's definitely one thing that we continue to do. That's going to be our still our top priority. But we don't just limit our work to optimization. Because giving user the best experience, giving user the complete experience on Intel platform is our ultimate goal. So we work with our customers from financial services company. We work with folks from manufacturing. From transportation. And from other IOT internet of things segment. And to make sure that we give them the easiest Big Data analytics experience on Intel hardware. So when they are running those solutions they don't have to worry too much about how to make their application work with Intel hardware, and how to make it more performant with Intel hardware. Because that's the Intel software solution that's going to bridge the gap. We do that part of the job. And so that it will make our customers experience easier and more complete. >> You serve as the accelerant to the marketplace. Go ahead George. >> [Ziya] That's right. >> So Intel's big ML as the news product, as of the last month of so, open source solution. Tell us how there are other deep learning frameworks that aren't as fully integrated with Spark yet and where BigML fits in since we're at a Spark conference. How it backfills some functionality and how it really takes advantage of Intel hardware. >> George, just like you said, BigDL, we just open sourced a month ago. It's a deep learning framework that we organically built onto of Apache Spark. And it has quite some differences from the other mainstream deep learning frameworks like Caffe, Tensorflow, Torch and Tianu are you name it. The reason that we decide to work on this project was again, through our experience, working with our analytics, especially Big Data analytic customers, as they build their AI solutions or AI modules within their analytics application, it's funny, it's getting more and more difficult to build and integrate AI capability into their existing Big Data analytics ecosystem. They had to set up a different cluster and build a different set of AI capabilities using, let's say, one of the deep learning frameworks. And later they have to overcome a lot of challenges, for example, moving the model and data between the two different clusters and then make sure that AI result is getting integrated into the existing analytics platform or analytics application. So that was the primary driver. How do we make our customers experience easier? Do they have to leave their existing infrastructure and build a separate AI module? And can we do something organic on top of the existing Big Data platform, let's say Apache Spark? Can we just do something like that? So that the user can just leverage the existing infrastructure and make it a naturally integral part of the overall analytics ecosystem that they already have. So this was the primary driver. And also the other benefit that we see by integrating this BigDL framework naturally was the Big Data platform, is that it enables efficient scale-out and fault tolerance and elasticity and dynamic resource management. And those are the benefits that's on naturally brought by Big Data platform. And today, actually, just with this short period of time, we have already tested that BigDL can scale easily to tens or hundreds of nodes. So the scalability is also quite good. And another benefit with solution like BigDL, especially because it eliminates the need of setting a separate cluster and moving the model between different hardware clusters, you save your total cost of ownership. You can just leverage your existing infrastructure. There is no need to buy additional set of hardware and build another environment just for training the model. So that's another benefit that we see. And performance-wise, again we also tested BigDL with Caffe, Torch and TensorFlow. So the performance of BigDL on single node Xeon is orders of magnitude faster than out of box at open source Caffe, TensorFlow or Torch. So it definitely it's going to be very promising. >> Without the heavy lifting. >> And useful solution, yeah. >> Okay, can you talk about some of the use cases that you expect to see from your partners and your customers. >> Actually very good question. You know we already started a few engagement with some of the interested customers. The first customer is from Stuart Industry. Where improving the accuracy for steel-surface defect recognition is very important to it's quality control. So we worked with this customer in the last few months and built end-to-end image recognition pipeline using BigDL and Spark. And the customer just through phase one work, already improved it's defect recognition accuracy to 90%. And they're seeing a very yield improvement with steel production. >> And it used to by human? >> It used to be done by human, yes. >> And you said, what was the degree of improvement? >> 90, nine, zero. So now the accuracy is up to 90%. And another use case and financial services actually, is another use case, especially for fraud detection. So this customer, again I'm not at the customer's request, they're very sensitive the financial industry, they're very sensitive with releasing their name. So the customer, we're seeing is fraud risks were increasing tremendously. With it's wide range of products, services and customer interaction channels. So the implemented end-to-end deep learning solution using BigDL and Spark. And again, through phase one work, they are seeing the fraud detection rate improved 40 times, four, zero times. Through phase one work. We think there were more improvement that we can do because this is just a collaboration in the last few month. And we'll continue this collaboration with this customer. And we expect more use cases from other business segments. But that are the two that's already have BigDL running in production today. >> Well so the first, that's amazing. Essentially replacing the human, have to interact and be much more accurate. The fraud detection, is interesting because fraud detection has come a long way in the last 10 years as you know. Used to take six months, if they found fraud. And now it's minutes, seconds but there's a lot of false positives still. So do you see this technology helping address that problem? >> Yeah, we actually that's continuously improving the prediction accuracy is one of the goals. This is another reason why we need to bring AI and Big Data together. Because you need to train your model. You need to train your AI capabilities with more and more training data. So that you get much more improved training accuracy. Actually this is the biggest way of improving your training accuracy. So you need a huge infrastructure, a big data platform so that you can host and well manage your training data sets. And so that it can feed into your deep learning solution or module for continuously improving your training accuracy. So yes. >> This is a really key point it seems like. I would like to unpack that a little bit. So when we talk to customers and application vendors, it's that training feedback loop that gets the models smarter and smarter. So if you had one cluster for training that was with another framework, and then Spark was your... Rest of your analytics. How would training with feedback data work when you had two separate environments? >> You know that's one of the drivers why we're creating BigDL. Because, we tried to port, we did not come to BigDL at the very beginning. We tried to port the existing deep learning frameworks like Caffe and Tensorflow onto Spark. And you also probably saw some research papers folks. There's other teams that out there that's also trying to port Caffe, Tensorflow and other deep learning framework that's out there onto Spark. Because you have that need. You need to bring the two capabilities together. But the problem is that those systems were developed in a very traditional way. With Big Data, not yet in consideration, when those frameworks were created, were innovated. But now the need for converging the two becomes more and more clear, and more necessary. And that's we way, when we port it over, we said gosh, this is so difficult. First it's very challenging to integrate the two. And secondly the experience, after you've moved it over, is awkward. You're literally using Spark as a dispatcher. The integration is not coherent. It's like they're superficially integrated. So this is where we said, we got to do something different. We can not just superficially integrate two systems together. Can we do something organic on top of the Big Data platform, on top of Apache Spark? So that the integration between the training system, between the feature engineering, between data management can &be more consistent, can be more integrated. So that's exactly the driver for this work. >> That's huge. Seamless integration is one of the most overused phrases in the technology business. Superficial integration is maybe a better description for a lot of those so-called seamless integrations. You're claiming here that it's seamless integration. We're out of time but last word Intel and Spark Summit. What do you guys got going here? What's the vibe like? >> So actually tomorrow I have a keynote. I'm going to talk a little bit more about what we're doing with BigDL. Actually this is one of the big things that we're doing. And of course, in order for BigDL, system like BigDL or even other deep learning frameworks, to get optimum performance on Intel hardware, there's another item that we're highlighting at MKL, Intel optimized Math Kernel Library. It has a lot of common math routines. That's optimized for Intel processor using the latest instruction set. And that's already, today, integrated into the BigDL ecosystem.z6 So that's another thing that we're highlighting. And another thing is that those are just software. And at hardware level, during November, Intel's AI day, our executives from BK, Diane Bryant and Doug Fisher. They also highlighted the Nirvana product portfolio that's coming out. That will give you different hardware choices for AI. You can look at FPGA, Xeon Fi, Xeon and our new Nirvana based Silicon like Crestlake. And those are some good silicon products that you can expect in the future. Intel, taking us to Nirvana, touching every part of the ecosystem. Like you said, 95% share and in all parts of the business. Yeah, thanks very much for coming the Cube. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there. George and I will be back with our next guest. This is Spark Summit, #SparkSummit. We're the Cube. We'll be right back.

(inspirational music) >> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting electronic music) (crowd chattering in background) >> Hi everybody. We're back at the Fira in Barcelona. Winding up our four day wall-to-wall coverage of MWC23 theCUBE has been thrilled to cover the telco transformation. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Really excited to have NTT on. Shahid Ahmed is the Group EVP of New Ventures and Innovation at NTT in from Chicago. Welcome to Barcelona. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me over. >> So, really interesting title. You have, you know, people might not know NTT you know, huge Japan telco but a lot of other businesses, explain your business. >> So we do a lot of things. Most of us are known for our Docomo business in Japan. We have one of the largest wireless cellular carriers in the world. We serve most of Japan. Outside of Japan, we are B2B systems, integration, professional services company. So we offer managed services. We have data centers, we have undersea cables. We offer all kinds of outsourcing services. So we're a big company. >> So there's a narrative out there that says, you know, 5G, it's a lot of hype, not a lot of adoption. Nobody's ever going to make money at 5G. You have a different point of view, I understand. You're like leaning into 5G and you've actually got some traction there. Explain that. >> So 5G can be viewed from two lenses. One is just you and I using our cell phones and we get 5G coverage over it. And the other one is for businesses to use 5G, and we call that private 5G or enterprise grade 5G. Two very separate distinct things, but it is 5G in the end. Now the big debate here in Europe and US is how to monetize 5G. As a consumer, you and I are not going to pay extra for 5G. I mean, I haven't. I just expect the carrier to offer faster, cheaper services. And so would I pay extra? Not really. I just want a reliable network from my carrier. >> Paid up for the good camera though, didn't you? >> I did. (Dave and Dave laughing) >> I'm waiting for four cameras now. >> So the carriers are in this little bit of a pickle at the moment because they've just spent billions of dollars, not only on spectrum but the infrastructure needed to upgrade to 5G, yet nobody's willing to pay extra for that 5G service. >> Oh, right. >> So what do they do? And one idea is to look at enterprises, companies, industrial companies, manufacturing companies who want to build their own 5G networks to support their own use cases. And these use cases could be anything from automating the surveyor belt to cameras with 5G in it to AGVs. These are little carts running around warehouses picking up products and goods, but they have to be connected all the time. Wifi doesn't work all the time there. And so those businesses are willing to pay for 5G. So your question is, is there a business case for 5G? Yes. I don't think it's in the consumer side. I think it's in the business side. And that's where NTT is finding success. >> So you said, you know, how they going to make money, right? You very well described the telco dilemma. We heard earlier this week, you know, well, we could tax the OTT vendors, like Netflix of course shot back and said, "Well, we spent a lot of money on content. We're driving a lot of value. Why don't you help us pay for the content development?" Which is incredibly expensive. I think I heard we're going to tax the developers for API calls on the network. I'm not sure how well that's going to work out. Look at Twitter, you know, we'll see. And then yeah, there's the B2B piece. What's your take on, we heard the Orange CEO say, "We need help." You know, maybe implying we're going to tax the OTT vendors, but we're for net neutrality, which seems like it's completely counter-posed. What's your take on, you know, fair share in the network? >> Look, we've seen this debate unfold in the US for the last 10 years. >> Yeah. >> Tom Wheeler, the FCC chairman started that debate and he made great progress and open internet and net neutrality. The thing is that if you create a lane, a tollway, where some companies have to pay toll and others don't have to, you create an environment where the innovation could be stifled. Content providers may not appear on the scene anymore. And with everything happening around AI, we may see that backfire. So creating a toll for rich companies to be able to pay that toll and get on a faster speed internet, that may work some places may backfire in others. >> It's, you know, you're bringing up a great point. It's one of those sort of unintended consequences. You got to be be careful because the little guy gets crushed in that environment, and then what? Right? Then you stifle innovation. So, okay, so you're a fan of net neutrality. You think the balance that the US model, for a change, maybe the US got it right instead of like GDPR, who sort of informed the US on privacy, maybe the opposite on net neutrality. >> I think so. I mean, look, the way the US, particularly the FCC and the FTC has mandated these rules and regulation. I think it's a nice balance. FTC is all looking at big tech at the moment, but- >> Lena Khan wants to break up big tech. I mean for, you know, you big tech, boom, break 'em up, right? So, but that's, you know- >> That's a whole different story. >> Yeah. Right. We could talk about that too, if you want. >> Right. But I think that we have a balanced approach, a measured approach. Asking the content providers or the developers to pay for your innovative creative application that's on your phone, you know, that's asking for too much in my opinion. >> You know, I think you're right though. Government did do a good job with net neutrality in the US and, I mean, I'm just going to go my high horse for a second, so forgive me. >> Go for it. >> Market forces have always done a better job at adjudicating, you know, competition. Now, if a company's a monopoly, in my view they should be, you know, regulated, or at least penalized. Yeah, but generally speaking, you know the attack on big tech, I think is perhaps misplaced. I sat through, and the reason it's relevant to Mobile World Congress or MWC, is I sat through a Nokia presentation this week and they were talking about Bell Labs when United States broke up, you know, the US telcos, >> Yeah. >> Bell Labs was a gem in the US and now it's owned by Nokia. >> Yeah. >> Right? And so you got to be careful about, you know what you wish for with breaking up big tech. You got AI, you've got, you know, competition with China- >> Yeah, but the upside to breaking up Ma Bell was not just the baby Bells and maybe the stranded orphan asset of Bell Labs, but I would argue it led to innovation. I'm old enough to remember- >> I would say it made the US less competitive. >> I know. >> You were in junior high school, but I remember as an adult, having a rotary dial phone and having to pay for that access, and there was no such- >> Yeah, but they all came back together. The baby Bells are all, they got all acquired. And the cable company, it was no different. So I don't know, do you have a perspective of this? Because you know this better than I do. >> Well, I think look at Nokia, just they announced a whole new branding strategy and new brand. >> I like the brand. >> Yeah. And- >> It looks cool. >> But guess what? It's B2B oriented. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> It's no longer consumer, >> Right, yeah. >> because they felt that Nokia brand phone was sort of misleading towards a lot of business to business work that they do. And so they've oriented themselves to B2B. Look, my point is, the carriers and the service providers, network operators, and look, I'm a network operator, too, in Japan. We need to innovate ourselves. Nobody's stopping us from coming up with a content strategy. Nobody's stopping a carrier from building a interesting, new, over-the-top app. In fact, we have better control over that because we are closer to the customer. We need to innovate, we need to be more creative. I don't think taxing the little developer that's building a very innovative application is going to help in the long run. >> NTT Japan, what do they have a content play? I, sorry, I'm not familiar with it. Are they strong in content, or competitive like Netflix-like, or? >> We have relationships with them, and you remember i-mode? >> Yeah. Oh yeah, sure. >> Remember in the old days. I mean, that was a big hit. >> Yeah, yeah, you're right. >> Right? I mean, that was actually the original app marketplace. >> Right. >> And the application store. So, of course we've evolved from that and we should, and this is an evolution and we should look at it more positively instead of looking at ways to regulate it. We should let it prosper and let it see where- >> But why do you think that telcos generally have failed at content? I mean, AT&T is sort of the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they got some great properties, obviously, CNN and HBO, but generally it's viewed as a challenging asset and others have had to diversify or, you know, sell the assets. Why do you think that telcos have had such trouble there? >> Well, Comcast owns also a lot of content. >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. >> And I think, I think that is definitely a strategy that should be explored here in Europe. And I think that has been underexplored. I, in my opinion, I believe that every large carrier must have some sort of content strategy at some point, or else you are a pipe. >> Yeah. You lose touch with a customer. >> Yeah. And by the way, being a dump pipe is okay. >> No, it's a lucrative business. >> It's a good business. You just have to focus. And if you start to do a lot of ancillary things around it then you start to see the margins erode. But if you just focus on being a pipe, I think that's a very good business and it's very lucrative. Everybody wants bandwidth. There's insatiable demand for bandwidth all the time. >> Enjoy the monopoly, I say. >> Yeah, well, capital is like an organism in and of itself. It's going to seek a place where it can insert itself and grow. Do you think that the questions around fair share right now are having people wait in the wings to see what's going to happen? Because especially if I'm on the small end of creating content, creating services, and there's possibly a death blow to my fixed costs that could be coming down the line, I'm going to hold back and wait. Do you think that the answer is let's solve this sooner than later? What are your thoughts? >> I think in Europe the opinion has been always to go after the big tech. I mean, we've seen a lot of moves either through antitrust, or other means. >> Or the guillotine! >> That's right. (all chuckle) A guillotine. Yes. And I've heard those directly. I think, look, in the end, EU has to decide what's right for their constituents, the countries they operate, and the economy. Frankly, with where the economy is, you got recession, inflation pressures, a war, and who knows what else might come down the pipe. I would be very careful in messing with this equilibrium in this economy. Until at least we have gone through this inflation and recessionary pressure and see what happens. >> I, again, I think I come back to markets, ultimately, will adjudicate. I think what we're seeing with chatGPT is like a Netscape moment in some ways. And I can't predict what's going to happen, but I can predict that it's going to change the world. And there's going to be new disruptors that come about. That just, I don't think Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple are going to rule the world forever. They're just, I guarantee they're not, you know. They'll make it through. But there's going to be some new companies. I think it might be open AI, might not be. Give us a plug for NTT at the show. What do you guys got going here? Really appreciate you coming on. >> Thank you. So, you know, we're showing off our private 5G network for enterprises, for businesses. We see this as a huge opportunities. If you look around here you've got Rohde & Schwarz, that's the industrial company. You got Airbus here. All the big industrial companies are here. Automotive companies and private 5G. 5G inside a factory, inside a hospital, a warehouse, a mining operation. That's where the dollars are. >> Is it a meaningful business for you today? >> It is. We just started this business only a couple of years ago. We're seeing amazing growth and I think there's a lot of good opportunities there. >> Shahid Ahmed, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. Really a pleasure. >> Thanks for having me over. Great questions. >> Oh, you're welcome. All right. For David Nicholson, Dave Vellante. We'll be back, right after this short break, from the Fira in Barcelona, MWC23. You're watching theCUBE. (uplifting electronic music)

>>Hello, welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furr, your host of The Cube. We had a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Meor Ma Makowski, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloudnative at scale. So enjoy the program. See you soon. Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Furry, host of the Cube. A pleasure to have here, me Makoski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. Thank >>You for having me. >>So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good, in a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributions of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of microsites, these microsites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think supercloud is a, is an appropriate term for that. >>So you brought a couple of things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, ot, and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infras infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud or across multiple edges and regions? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have deploy a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. Yeah, >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So I, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this chain, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies, or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors are their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale, because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native. You know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can figure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is in when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and pos from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes nightmarishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem, another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. Very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arlon is, it's an open source project, and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the site of those clusters, security policies, your middleware, plug-ins, and finally your applications. So what our LA you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, what >>Would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right? Our line, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale, creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what arlon really does. That's like the deliver pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for >>Those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. See c i CD pipe pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both >>Those teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud needed developer's. That's right. The option teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, ES really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, s clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined a declarative way, and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>And do I want to get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at Platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fision, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also open source, because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. And what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that long. But that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating met metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer. Yep. Why should I be enthused about Arla? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo? I'm a >>Customer. Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native Kubernetes, and then we have our C I C D pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS c D pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Ops FICO would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on ecos Amazon, and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the >>Ability to, Yeah, I think people are scared. Not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlan uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest and used CD open source tools that's out there. Right's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Alon also makes use of Cluster api cappi, which is a Kubernetes sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what City can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, platform line has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy online at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that >>Sla. And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with that are familiar with, with Argo and then rlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo adn, they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our land before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customers' hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment, as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and you know, give you an inventory. And that will, >>So if customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yep. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. And >>You provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value here. >>That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up, >>Well profile and policy based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables supercloud, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And you know, our alarm fills in >>One. Okay. So now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. Is under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for that. >>So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this RLO solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, they're designed to do, the question is, what did does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo and, and all the other goodness to automate? What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be indications of things are effed up a little bit. Yeah. >>More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they're, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because they're the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So those are, those are the signals. >>This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the maybe terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. Company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and boards is saying, How is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yep. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are >>Just taking care of the CIO doesn't exist. There's no ciso, they're at the beach. >>Yep. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for >>Having me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here with Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine Pick. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or later, earlier when OpenStack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now has realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just the success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructures code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our, our lawn, and you guys just launched the infrastructures code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructures code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructure as code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure is configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specified. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah. And that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. That declare, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code, this code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space. >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is a new breed. The trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your view? >>It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at AR GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the community meeting by in two, they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in AAL event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or applications specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so of deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer two is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think that the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna >>Continue. It's interesting. I just, when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on a rise. We remember pointing for many years now that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in in this community of, of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at Argo Con, which came out of Intuit. We've had Mariana Tessel at our super cloud event. She's the cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? >>Yeah, so the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and, you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself. You can, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built our lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the the, this abstraction or thin layer below as the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads. At the end of the day, you know, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructures code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And is my workloads running effectively? So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, >>Right? So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's kinda like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We very, people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with Armon you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call a profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, so >>Essentially standard creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook. You deploy it. Now what's there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I could just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructures configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things about controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure has configuration is built kind of on, it's as super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring and saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years? I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Could be nice, it has value. We're gonna hear this year coan a lot of this. What does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot road that CubeCon coming up and obviously this will be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at Coan this year? What's the big story this year? What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jogging for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of cons and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career, VMware over decades with them obviously in 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here at Platform. Now you guys have been around for a while at this game. We, man, we talked about OpenStack, that project you, we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. And I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a cloud ERO team at that time. We would to joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys tr pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? OpenStack was an example when the Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud native of its scale? >>The, the hyperscalers, >>Yeahs Azure, Google. >>You mean from a business perspective? Yeah, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep, >>Well they got great I performance, I mean from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes, that's gonna be key, right? >>Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the the new risk and arm ecosystems and the platforms. >>Yeah, not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer, it's, it's hardware and he got software and you got middleware and he kind over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. >>Yes, >>Exactly. It's, we're back on the same game. Vic, thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud Cloud Native Phil for developers and John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud clouds around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark. I put on on that panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's interest thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm? Yeah, right. >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you do on the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what we, we come into, >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were gonna talk about the glory days in 2000, 2001, when the first as piece application service providers came out, kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloudlike. >>It wasn't, >>And and web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>I, in fact you, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflation's here. It's interesting. This is the first downturn in the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. >>Nope. >>Cuz the pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing Infras infrastructure is not just some new servers and new application tools, It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Ante and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, more dynamic, more real. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pain, a single platform for you to build your innovations on regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is to, as a pilots, to get the conversations flowing with with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration and then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. What's the, what's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere else in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have won two, three container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here, it is in production at scale by many customers. And the beauty of it is, yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool >>And just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores are thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un OnPrem as an air gap version. >>Can you give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your >>Customer? Right. So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have, I dunno, hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms but they really needed to bring the agility and they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact the customer says like, like the Maytag service person cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. >>What benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we've heard it all here, ops and security teams cuz they're kind of too part of one theme, but ops and security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right. >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams, >>You working two sides of that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side side, okay. >>Another customer like give you an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on, It's a classic edge. It's classic edge. Yeah. Right. They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a net box box, like a small little >>Box and all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage >>Thousands of them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the location. So >>You guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented where you, well >>Con of course Detroit's >>Coming here, so, so it's already there, right? So, so we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud native, you have to rewrite and redevelop your application and business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexities there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly them. >>And I'll give you an example. I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations of the, for the customer. >>Customer, the customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn >>Best car. To wrap it up, I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now the CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super >>Cloud. Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. Cars being been, been in an asp, been in a realtime software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with a lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative that know that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce was interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the game, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think, and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of eCommerce, just putting up a shopping cart didn't made you an eCommerce or an E retailer or an e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Mascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Feer with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. >>Hello. Welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around the solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

>> From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from "theCUBE" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> There are very few political issues that get bipartisan support these days, nevermind consensus spanning geopolitical boundaries. But whether we're talking across the aisle or over the pond, there seems to be common agreement that the power of big tech firms should be regulated. But the government's track record when it comes to antitrust aimed at big tech is actually really mixed, mixed at best. History has shown that market forces rather than public policy have been much more effective at curbing monopoly power in the technology industry. Hello, and welcome to this week's "Wikibon CUBE" insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in frequent "CUBE" contributor Dave Moschella, author and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Dave, welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks Dave, good to be here. >> So you just recently published an article, we're going to bring it up here and I'll read the title, "Theory Aside, Antitrust Advocates Should Keep Their "Big Tech" Ambitions Narrow". And in this post you argue that big sweeping changes like breaking apart companies to moderate monopoly power in the tech industry have been ineffective compared to market forces, but you're not saying government shouldn't be involved rather you're suggesting that more targeted measures combined with market forces are the right answer. Can you maybe explain a little bit more the premise behind your research and some of your conclusions? >> Sure, and first let's go back to that title, when I said, theory aside, that is referring to a huge debate that's going on in global antitrust circles these days about whether antitrust should follow the traditional path of being invoked when there's real harm, demonstrable harm to consumers or a new theory that says that any sort of vast monopoly power inevitably will be bad for competition and consumers at some point, so your best to intervene now to avoid harms later. And that school, which was a very minor part of the antitrust world for many, many years is now quite ascendant and the debate goes on doesn't matter which side of that you're on the questions sort of there well, all right, well, if you're going to do something to take on big tech and clearly many politicians, regulators are sort of issuing to do something, what would you actually do? And what are the odds that that'll do more good than harm? And that was really the origins of the piece and trying to take a historical view of that. >> Yeah, I learned a new word, thank you. Neo-brandzian had to look it up, but basically you're saying that traditionally it was proving consumer harm versus being proactive about the possibility or likelihood of consumer harm. >> Correct, and that's a really big shift that a lot of traditional antitrust people strongly object to, but is now sort of the trendy and more send and view. >> Got it, okay, let's look a little deeper into the history of tech monopolies and government action and see what we can learn from that. We put together this slide that we can reference. It shows the three historical targets in the tech business and now the new ones. In 1969, the DOJ went after IBM, Big Blue and it's 13 years later, dropped its suit. And then in 1984 the government broke Ma Bell apart and in the late 1990s, went after Microsoft, I think it was 1998 in the Wintel monopoly. And recently in an interview with tech journalist, Kara Swisher, the FTC chair Lena Khan claimed that the government played a major role in moderating the power of tech giants historically. And I think she even specifically referenced Microsoft or maybe Kara did and basically said the industry and consumers from the dominance of companies like Microsoft. So Dave, let's briefly talk about and Kara by the way, didn't really challenge that, she kind of let it slide. But let's talk about each of these and test this concept a bit. Were the government actions in these instances necessary? What were the outcomes and the consequences? Maybe you could start with IBM and AT&T. >> Yeah, it's a big topic and there's a lot there and a lot of history, but I might just sort of introduce by saying for whatever reasons antitrust has been part of the entire information technology industry history from mainframe to the current period and that slide sort of gives you that. And the reasons for that are I think once that we sort of know the economies of scale, network effects, lock in safe choices, lot of things that explain it, but the good bit about that is we actually have so much history of this and we can at least see what's happened in the past and when you look at IBM and AT&T they both were massive antitrust cases. The one against IBM was dropped and it was dropped in as you say, in 1980. Well, what was going on in at that time, IBM was sort of considered invincible and unbeatable, but it was 1981 that the personal computer came around and within just a couple of years the world could see that the computing paradigm had change from main frames and minis to PCs lines client server and what have you. So IBM in just a couple of years went from being unbeatable, you can't compete with them, we have to break up with them to being incredibly vulnerable and in trouble and never fully recovered and is sort of a shell of what it once was. And so the market took care of that and no action was really necessary just by everybody thinking there was. The case of AT&T, they did act and they broke up the company and I would say, first question is, was that necessary? Well, lots of countries didn't do that and the reality is 1980 breaking it up into long distance and regional may have made some sense, but by the 1990 it was pretty clear that the telecom world was going to change dramatically from long distance and fixed wires services to internet services, data services, wireless services and all of these things that we're going to restructure the industry anyways. But AT& T one to me is very interesting because of the unintended consequences. And I would say that the main unintended consequence of that was America's competitiveness in telecommunications took a huge hit. And today, to this day telecommunications is dominated by European, Chinese and other firms. And the big American sort of players of the time AT&T which Western Electric became Lucent, Lucent is now owned by Nokia and is really out of it completely and most notably and compellingly Bell Labs, the Bell Labs once the world's most prominent research institution now also a shell of itself and as it was part of Lucent is also now owned by the Finnish company Nokia. So that restructuring greatly damaged America's core strength in telecommunications hardware and research and one can argue we've never recovered right through this 5IG today. So it's a very good example of the market taking care of, the big problem, but meddling leading to some unintended consequences that have hurt the American competitiveness and as we'll talk about, probably later, you can see some of that going on again today and in the past with Microsoft and Intel. >> Right, yeah, Bell Labs was an American gem, kind of like Xerox PARC and basically gone now. You mentioned Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft and Intel. As many people know, some young people don't, IBM unwillingly handed its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft by outsourcing the micro processor and operating system, respectively. Those two companies ended up with IBM ironically, agreeing to take OS2 which was its proprietary operating system and giving Intel, Microsoft Windows not realizing that its ability to dominate a new disruptive market like PCs and operating systems had been vaporized to your earlier point by the new Wintel ecosystem. Now Dave, the government wanted to break Microsoft apart and split its OS business from its application software, in the case of Intel, Intel only had one business. You pointed out microprocessors so it couldn't bust it up, but take us through the history here and the consequences of each. >> Well, the Microsoft one is sort of a classic because the antitrust case which was raging in the sort of mid nineties and 1998 when it finally ended, those were the very, once again, everybody said, Bill Gates was unstoppable, no one could compete with Microsoft they'd buy them, destroy them, predatory pricing, whatever they were accusing of the attacks on Netscape all these sort of things. But those the very years where it was becoming clear first that Microsoft basically missed the early big years of the internet and then again, later missed all the early years of the mobile phone business going back to BlackBerrys and pilots and all those sorts of things. So here we are the government making the case that this company is unstoppable and you can't compete with them the very moment they're entirely on the defensive. And therefore wasn't surprising that that suit eventually was dropped with some minor concessions about Microsoft making it a little bit easier for third parties to work with them and treating people a little bit more, even handling perfectly good things that they did. But again, the more market took care of the problem far more than the antitrust activities did. The Intel one is also interesting cause it's sort of like the AT& T one. On the one hand antitrust actions made Intel much more likely and in fact, required to work with AMD enough to keep that company in business and having AMD lowered prices for consumers certainly probably sped up innovation in the personal computer business and appeared to have a lot of benefits for those early years. But when you look at it from a longer point of view and particularly when look at it again from a global point of view you see that, wow, they not so clear because that very presence of AMD meant that there's a lot more pressure on Intel in terms of its pricing, its profitability, its flexibility and its volumes. All the things that have made it harder for them to A, compete with chips made in Taiwan, let alone build them in the United States and therefore that long term effect of essentially requiring Intel to allow AMD to exist has undermined Intel's position globally and arguably has undermined America's position in the long run. And certainly Intel today is far more vulnerable to an ARM and Invidia to other specialized chips to China, to Taiwan all of these things are going on out there, they're less capable of resisting that than they would've been otherwise. So, you thought we had some real benefits with AMD and lower prices for consumers, but the long term unintended consequences are arguably pretty bad. >> Yeah, that's why we recently wrote in Intel two "Strategic To Fail", we'll see, Okay. now we come to 2022 and there are five companies with anti-trust targets on their backs. Although Microsoft seems to be the least susceptible to US government ironically intervention at this this point, but maybe not and we show "The Cincos Comas Club" in a homage to Russ Hanneman of the show "Silicon Valley" Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all with trillion dollar plus valuations. But meta briefly crossed that threshold like Mr. Hanneman lost a comma and is now well under that market cap probably around five or 600 million, sorry, billion. But under serious fire nonetheless Dave, people often don't realize the immense monopoly power that IBM had which relatively speaking when measured its percent of industry revenue or profit dwarf that of any company in tech ever, but the industry is much smaller then, no internet, no cloud. Does it call for a different approach this time around? How should we think about these five companies their market power, the implications of government action and maybe what you suggested more narrow action versus broad sweeping changes. >> Yeah, and there's a lot there. I mean, if you go back to the old days IBM had what, 70% of the computer business globally and AT&T had 90% or so of the American telecom market. So market shares that today's players can only dream of. Intel and Microsoft had 90% of the personal computer market. And then you look at today the big five and as wealthy and as incredibly successful as they've been, you sort of have almost the argument that's wrong on the face of it. How can five companies all of which compete with each other to at least some degree, how can they all be monopolies? And the reality is they're not monopolies, they're all oligopolies that are very powerful firms, but none of them have an outright monopoly on anything. There are competitors in all the spaces that they're in and increasing and probably increasingly so. And so, yeah, I think people conflate the extraordinary success of the companies with this belief that therefore they are monopolist and I think they're far less so than those in the past. >> Great, all right, I want to do a quick drill down to cloud computing, it's a key component of digital business infrastructure in his book, "Seeing Digital", Dave Moschella coined a term the matrix or the key which is really referred to the key technology platforms on which people are going to build digital businesses. Dave, we joke you should have called it the metaverse you were way ahead of your time. But I want to look at this ETR chart, we show spending momentum or net score on the vertical access market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. We show this view a lot, we put a dotted line at the 40% mark which indicates highly elevated spending. And you can sort of see Microsoft in the upper right, it's so far up to the right it's hidden behind the January 22 and AWS is right there. Those two dominate the cloud far ahead of the pack including Google Cloud. Microsoft and to a lesser extent AWS they dominate in a lot of other businesses, productivity, collaboration, database, security, video conferencing. MarTech with LinkedIn PC software et cetera, et cetera, Googles or alphabets of business of course is ads and we don't have similar spending data on Apple and Facebook, but we know these companies dominate their respective business. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of these companies, here's some financial data that's worth looking at briefly. The table ranks companies by market cap in trillions that's the second column and everyone in the club, but meta and each has revenue well over a hundred billion dollars, Amazon approaching half a trillion dollars in revenue. The operating income and cash positions are just mind boggling and the cash equivalents are comparable or well above the revenues of highly successful tech companies like Cisco, Dell, HPE, Oracle, and Salesforce. They're extremely profitable from an operating income standpoint with the clear exception of Amazon and we'll come back to that in a moment and we show the revenue multiples in the last column, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, just insane. Dave, there are other equally important metrics, CapX is one which kind of sets the stage for future scale and there are other measures. >> Yeah, including our research and development where those companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. And I think it's easy to look at those numbers and just say, this doesn't seem right, how can any companies have so much and spend so much? But if you think of what they're actually doing, those companies are building out the digital infrastructure of essentially the entire world. And I remember once meeting some folks at Google, and they said, beyond AI, beyond Search, beyond Android, beyond all the specific things we do, the biggest thing we're actually doing is building a physical infrastructure that can deliver search results on any topic in microseconds and the physical capacity they built costs those sorts of money. And when people start saying, well, we should have lots and lots of smaller companies well, that sounds good, yeah, it's all right, but where are those companies going to get the money to build out what needs to be built out? And every country in the world is trying to build out its digital infrastructure and some are going to do it much better than others. >> I want to just come back to that chart on Amazon for a bit, notice their comparatively tiny operating profit as a percentage of revenue, Amazon is like Bezos giant lifestyle business, it's really never been that profitable like most retail. However, there's one other financial data point around Amazon's business that we want to share and this chart here shows Amazon's operating profit in the blue bars and AWS's in the orange. And the gray line is the percentage of Amazon's overall operating profit that comes from AWS. That's the right most access, so last quarter we were well over a hundred percent underscoring the power of AWS and the horrendous margins in retail. But AWS is essentially funding Amazon's entrance into new markets, whether it's grocery or movies, Bezos moves into space. Dave, a while back you collaborated with us and we asked our audience, what could disrupt Amazon? And we came up with your detailed help, a number of scenarios as shown here. And we asked the audience to rate the likelihood of each scenario in terms of its likelihood of disrupting Amazon with a 10 being highly likely on average the score was six with complacency, arrogance, blindness, you know, self-inflicted wounds really taking the top spot with 6.5. So Dave is breaking up Amazon the right formula in your view, why or why not? >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there. The first is sort of the irony that when people in the sort of regulatory world talk about the power of Amazon, they almost always talk about their power in consumer markets, whether it's books or retail or impact on malls or main street shops or whatever and as you say that they make very little money doing that. The interest people almost never look at the big cloud battle between Amazon, Microsoft and lesser extent Google, Alibaba others, even though that's where they're by far highest market share and pricing power and all those things are. So the regulatory focus is sort of weird, but you know, the consumer stuff obviously gets more appeal to the general public. But that survey you referred to me was interesting because one of the challenges I sort of sent myself I was like okay, well, if I'm going to say that IBM case, AT&T case, Microsoft's case in all those situations the market was the one that actually minimized the power of those firms and therefore the antitrust stuff wasn't really necessary. Well, how true is that going to be again, just cause it's been true in the past doesn't mean it's true now. So what are the possible scenarios over the 2020s that might make it all happen again? And so each of those were sort of questions that we put out to others, but the ones that to me by far are the most likely I mean, they have the traditional one of company cultures sort of getting fat and happy and all, that's always the case, but the more specific ones, first of all by far I think is China. You know, Amazon retail is a low margin business. It would be vulnerable if it didn't have the cloud profits behind it, but imagine a year from now two years from now trade tensions with China get worse and Christmas comes along and China just says, well, you know, American consumers if you want that new exercise bike or that new shoes or clothing, well, anything that we make well, actually that's not available on Amazon right now, but you can get that from Alibaba. And maybe in America that's a little more farfetched, but in many countries all over the world it's not farfetched at all. And so the retail divisions vulnerability to China just seems pretty obvious. Another possible disruption, Amazon has spent billions and billions with their warehouses and their robots and their automated inventory systems and all the efficiencies that they've done there, but you could argue that maybe someday that's not really necessary that you have Search which finds where a good is made and a logistical system that picks that up and delivers it to customers and why do you need all those warehouses anyways? So those are probably the two top one, but there are others. I mean, a lot of retailers as they get stronger online, maybe they start pulling back some of the premium products from Amazon and Amazon takes their cut of whatever 30% or so people might want to keep more of that in house. You see some of that going on today. So the idea that the Amazon is in vulnerable disruption is probably is wrong and as part of the work that I'm doing, as part of stuff that I do with Dave and SiliconANGLE is how's that true for the others too? What are the scenarios for Google or Apple or Microsoft and the scenarios are all there. And so, will these companies be disrupted as they have in the past? Well, you can't say for sure, but the scenarios are certainly plausible and I certainly wouldn't bet against it and that's what history tells us. And it could easily happen once again and therefore, the antitrust should at least be cautionary and humble and realize that maybe they don't need to act as much as they think. >> Yeah, now, one of the things that you mentioned in your piece was felt like narrow remedies, were more logical. So you're not arguing for totally Les Affaire you're pushing for remedies that are more targeted in scope. And while the EU just yesterday announced new rules to limit the power of tech companies and we showed the article, some comments here the regulators they took the social media to announce a victory and they had a press conference. I know you watched that it was sort of a back slapping fest. The comments however, that we've sort of listed here are mixed, some people applauded, but we saw many comments that were, hey, this is a horrible idea, this was rushed together. And these are going to result as you say in unintended consequences, but this is serious stuff they're talking about applying would appear to be to your point or your prescription more narrowly defined restrictions although a lot of them to any company with a market cap of more than 75 billion Euro or turnover of more than 77.5 billion Euro which is a lot of companies and imposing huge penalties for violations up to 20% of annual revenue for repeat offenders, wow. So again, you've taken a brief look at these developments, you watched the press conference, what do you make of this? This is an application of more narrow restrictions, but in your quick assessment did they get it right? >> Yeah, let's break that down a little bit, start a little bit of history again and then get to Europe because although big sweeping breakups of the type that were proposed for IBM, Microsoft and all weren't necessary that doesn't mean that the government didn't do some useful things because they did. In the case of IBM government forces in Europe and America basically required IBM to make it easier for companies to make peripherals type drives, disc drives, printers that worked with IBM mainframes. They made them un-bundle their software pricing that made it easier for database companies and others to sell their of products. With AT&T it was the government that required AT&T to actually allow other phones to connect to the network, something they argued at the time would destroy security or whatever that it was the government that required them to allow MCI the long distance carrier to connect to the AT network for local deliveries. And with that Microsoft and Intel the government required them to at least treat their suppliers more even handly in terms of pricing and policies and support and such things. So the lessons out there is the big stuff wasn't really necessary, but the little stuff actually helped a lot and I think you can see the scenarios and argue in the piece that there's little stuff that can be done today in all the cases for the big five, there are things that you might want to consider the companies aren't saints they take advantage of their power, they use it in ways that sometimes can be reigned in and make for better off overall. And so that's how it brings us to the European piece of it. And to me, the European piece is much more the bad scenario of doing too much than the wiser course of trying to be narrow and specific. What they've basically done is they have a whole long list of narrow things that they're all trying to do at once. So they want Amazon not to be able to share data about its selling partners and they want Apple to open up their app store and they don't want people Google to be able to share data across its different services, Android, Search, Mail or whatever. And they don't want Facebook to be able to, they want to force Facebook to open up to other messaging services. And they want to do all these things for all the big companies all of which are American, and they want to do all that starting next year. And to me that looks like a scenario of a lot of difficult problems done quickly all of which might have some value if done really, really well, but all of which have all kinds of risks for the unintended consequence we've talked before and therefore they seem to me being too much too soon and the sort of problems we've seen in the past and frankly to really say that, I mean, the Europeans would never have done this to the companies if they're European firms, they're doing this because they're all American firms and the sort of frustration of Americans dominance of the European tech industry has always been there going back to IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and all of them. But it's particularly strong now because the tech business is so big. And so I think the politics of this at a time where we're supposedly all this great unity of America and NATO and Europe in regards to Ukraine, having the Europeans essentially go after the most important American industry brings in the geopolitics in I think an unavoidable way. And I would think the story is going to get pretty tense over the next year or so and as you say, the Europeans think that they're taking massive actions, they think they're doing the right thing. They think this is the natural follow on to the GDPR stuff and even a bigger version of that and they think they have more to come and they see themselves as the people taming big tech not just within Europe, but for the world and absent any other rules that they may pull that off. I mean, GDPR has indeed spread despite all of its flaws. So the European thing which it doesn't necessarily get huge attention here in America is certainly getting attention around the world and I would think it would get more, even more going forward. >> And the caution there is US public policy makers, maybe they can provide, they will provide a tailwind maybe it's a blind spot for them and it could be a template like you say, just like GDPR. Okay, Dave, we got to leave it there. Thanks for coming on the program today, always appreciate your insight and your views, thank you. >> Hey, thanks a lot, Dave. >> All right, don't forget these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR website, etr.ai. We publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @davevellante. Comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Michelle for "theCUBE Insights" powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (slow tempo music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff Freak here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with ongoing coverage of Cisco Definite create. We've been going to definite create, I think, since the very beginning. This year, of course. Like everything else, it's it's virtual. So we're excited to cover it virtually and digitally like we have a lot of other shows here in 2020 and we're excited to have our next guest. We've got Kun Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering. Francisco, Good to see you. Coun. Thank >>you for having me. >>And joining him is Eric Nippy is the VP of system systems Engineering. Francisco. Good to see Eric. >>Good to be here. Thank you. >>Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now, in this new great world of program ability and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute. Because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was kun. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered, human centered network, and you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come. But but I would love to get kind of historical perspective because we've been talking a lot. And I know Eric Son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them. But they're really important to everything, and the only time you hear about him was when the flag is thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective load and the numbers and the evolution of the network as we've moved to this modern time and you know thank goodness, because if Cove it hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition, so I just I just love to get some historical perspective because you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think you know what you're referring to was back in the day the human network campaign and to your point that the load, the number of hosts, the traffic just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over the last decade and a half, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers on how you know the role of I t. Has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic. You know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic eyes is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, on an ongoing basis a great customer experience. And so it's been It's been a very interesting right, indeed. Yeah, >>And then and then just to close the loop, the one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia. You're the question is, are you developer an engineer? So And your whole advice to all these network engineers is just Just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate is a complete is completely 15 years over to the, you know, really software to find side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of C I C D pipeline to network infrastructure. Look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that in the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve in that is just, you know, quite quite significant in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't don't be shy. It's It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. You know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely software Centris City and the, um, program ability. >>Right? So, Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there, too, that I was able to dig up Going back to 2000 and 2 752 page book in the very back corner of a dark, dirty, dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco Network Security 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed? From a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected, everything is a p. I driven. Everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workload spread out all over the place. And, Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, No eso Wow. Kudos that you you found that book. I'm really impressed there, so thank you. Little street credit. So I want to get on something that you you talked about because I think it's very important to to this overall conversation if we think about the scale of the network and coun hit on it briefly. You talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the you know it's estimated By the end of this year, there's gonna be about 27 billion devices on the global Internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory, we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global Internet on a on a daily basis in the primarily that that that is I o T devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connect, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global Internet is within a company's infrastructure. Accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor, so we really need Thio and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002. I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion, prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security. Really? In the in the guise of under the under the under the realm of really two aspects the identity. Who is accessing the data in the context, What data is being access and that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and technologies like machine learning, an automated intelligence. They're going to be our artificial intelligence. Rather are gonna be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current. You know, just current security practices mean the network is gonna have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally, shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing That cove it has done a bunk many things is kind of re taught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave Rennes in on it Google Cloud a couple years ago, and I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you describe kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it, right? So really kind of rethinking automation and re thinking about the way that you manage these things and and the level right, the old Is it a pet or is it or is it, um, part of the herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about coun really human powered Internet and being driven by a lot of this video. But to what you just said, Erik, the next big wave right is I, O. T and five G. And I think you know, you talk about 3.7 of devices per person. That's nothing compared toa right, all these sensors and all these devices and all these factories because five G is really targeted to machine to machines, which there's ah lot of them, and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to Yukun thinking about this next great wave in a five G i o t kind of driven world where it's kind of like one voice kind of fell off compared to I p traffic on the network, I think you're going to see the same thing. Kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also gonna fall off dramatically. Is the machine generated data just skyrockets through the roof? >>Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think thio also what Eric touched on the visibility on that and they'll be able to process that data at the edge that's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further. And it's gonna, you know, make the role of the network the connectivity of it all, and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of program ability. Within that, we're see the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an I. O. T. Speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, you know, behaving like other hosts would on a network, for example, manufacturing floor production, robot or security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing you know, partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at. But then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, bringing on board those those hosts in a very transparent way on then, you know, keep keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going right, >>right. So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the A. D and the machines along along for middle minute. But I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way toe to motivate people to build this new skill set in terms of getting software certifications within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated because there's posts all over the place and they've all got their their nice big badge of their certification. But, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus and engineering a technician. And it's a, you know, kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce as well as the partners, etcetera and really adopting kind of almost a software first in this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently, a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, that in of itself was was a was a great success. But, you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? I mean, obviously, he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was. It was to change the way the world, you know, worked, played, live and learn. And if you think about and you hit on this when we were you know, your discussion with with With Kun in the early days of Cove it. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that that our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several last three decades really help the world continue Thio to to do business for students to continue to go thio school or, you know, clinicians to connect with patients. If I think about that mission to meet program ability is just the next generation of that mission, uh, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing to enable customers, employees, partners to, uh, essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity. Now the leverage it for critical insight again, If we look at some of the some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing, the network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from the but it isn't necessarily and out of the box type of integration. So I look at program ability and and what we're doing with debt net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now. It's a way to extrapolate its away thio full critical data so that I can make a decision and I if that decisions automated or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting, or in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most. The definite pounds we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skills that's going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we dropped were created to beat the boss challenge, it was really simple. Hey, guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out, and I'm gonna achieve the certification myself because I want to continue to be very relevant. I'm gonna continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of ah, a lot of our team who achieved it Incentive with secondary. They just wanted have bragging rights like, Yeah, I beat Eric, Right, Right. >>Absolutely. No, that Z you know, put your money where your mouth is, right? If it's important than what you know, you should do it too. And you know, the whole not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I wanna extend kind of the conversation on the Koven impact. Right? Because I'm sure you've seen all the social media means you know who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know the answer to the question. But you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure, world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, and people are trying to move stuff all the way around. Now suddenly had this co vid moment right in March, which is really a light switch moment. People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home and it's not only you but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So but now we're six months plus into this thing, and I would just love to get your perspective, you know, and kind of the change from Oh, my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can can get get what they need when they need it from where they are? But but then really moving from this is an emergency situation. Stopgap situation toe. This is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know this is going to drive. Ah, riel change in the way that people communicate in the way that people where they sit and do their job and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need thio to plan for. >>So I think I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized any any interaction that could be driven virtually waas. And what's interesting is we, as you said. We went from that light switch moment where, and I believe the status this and I'll probably get the number wrong. But like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70% in interesting that it worked. You know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on How do I enable VPN scale of mass? How doe I, you know, leverage. You know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings in virtual connectivity much faster now that as you said that we've kind of gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations, we're looking at what they accomplished. And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition. Thio Oh my gosh, we need to change, too. We have an opportunity to change and we're looking. We see a lot of organizations specifically around financial services, health care through the K through 20 educational environment, all looking at how can they doom or virtually for a couple of reasons? Obviously, there is a significant safety factor, and again, we're still in that we're still in the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students patients remain safe. But second, we've found in discussions with a lot of senior I T executives and our customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. And then, third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining again leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like, uh, unified collaboration that's very personalized to the end users experience, they're going to do that and again they're going to save money. They're gonna have happier employees, and ultimately they're gonna make their their employees in their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent. And some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay today in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I would say I'd say 15% is low, especially if you if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right? There was a great interview were doing and, you know, talk about working from home. He used to work from home as the exception, right? Because the cable person was coming or you get a new washing machine or something, where now that's probably get, you know, in many cases will shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless you know somebody's in town or have an important meeting or there's some special collaboration. Uh, that drives me to be in. But, you know, I wanna go back to Yukun and and really doubled down on. You know, I think most people spend too much time focusing, especially. We'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually. We can't meet in the hall. We can't grab a quick coffee to drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here. You're in Belgium, right? Eric is in Ohio, were in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and and check into a hotel and and all that stuff to get together for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that that it doesn't replace, and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives because those are coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives airway way more out spoken. I you know, I look at myself I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are, in a way, wanting to go back to the office part time, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you could do virtually. We have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium are are local. General manager has, ah, virtual aperitif. Every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But you know, there's there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, Um, you know, to to get the basketball world right, >>So I just we're gonna wrap the segment. I wanna give you guys both the last word. You both Francisco for a while and you know, Susie, we and the team on Definite has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of 456 years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts is, you know, with a little bit of perspective. And you know what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road. Since you guys have been there for a while, you've been in the space. Uh, let's start with Yukun. >>Okay? I think the possibility it creates, I think, really program ability, software defined is really about the art of the possible. It's what you can dream up and then go code Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance. And a customer base is, um, you know, and then it is the evolution off the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. We're seeing really people dive into that in customers, um, co creating with us on. I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution off the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and and redefines process. >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in, uh, hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. >>America, I >>love to get your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career in Cisco turning, putting I P phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 1 4002 when three idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a of just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a We're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really it's not about programming is not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation. But again, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past what you know, just connectivity. The network touches everything and is more workload. Moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. The network is the really the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the in the i t. Lexicon as being that critical for that critical insight provider for for how users are interacting with the network. How users air interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one another. Program ability is a way to do that more efficiently with greater, greater degree of certainty, with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of I t services and digitization. So to me, I think we're gonna look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, Man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think I think really, this is This is the future, and I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>Well, coun Eric. Thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference on. It's also nice to be living in a new age where you can you can, you know, stay at the same company and and still refresh. You know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing because a zoo said I remember those i p first i p phone days and I thought, Well, Ma Bell must be happy because the old Mother's Day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a >>dedicated connection >>between every mother and every child in the middle of May. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>Yeah. All >>right. He's kun. He was Eric. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube for continuing coverage of Cisco Definite Connect. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff Freak here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with ongoing coverage of Cisco Definite create. We've been going to definite create, I think, since the very beginning. This year, of course. Like everything else, it's it's virtual. So we're excited to cover it virtually and digitally like we have a lot of other shows here in 2020 and we're excited to have our next guest. We've got Kun Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering. Francisco, Good to see you. Coun. >>Thank you for having me. >>And joining him is Eric Nappy is the VP of systems systems Engineering. Francisco. Good to see Eric. >>Good to be here. Thank you. >>Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now, in this new great world of program ability and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute. Because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was kun. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered, human centered network, and you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come. But but I would love to get kind of historical perspective because we've been talking a lot. And I know Eric Son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them. But they're really important to everything, and the only time you hear about him was when the flag is thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective load and the numbers and the evolution of the network as we've moved to this modern time and you know thank goodness, because if Cove it hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition, so I just I just love to get some historical perspective because you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think you know what you're referring to was back in the day the human network campaign and to your point that the load, the number of hosts, the traffic just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over the last decade and a half, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers on how you know the role of I t. Has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic. You know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic eyes is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, on an ongoing basis a great customer experience. And so it's been It's been a very interesting right, indeed. Yeah, >>And then and then just to close the loop, the one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia. You're the question is, are you developer an engineer? So And your whole advice to all these network engineers is just Just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate is a complete is completely 15 years over to the, you know, really software to find side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of C I C D pipeline to network infrastructure. Look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that in the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve in that is just, you know, quite quite significant in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't don't be shy. It's It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. You know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely software Centris City and the, um, program ability. >>Right? So, Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there, too, that I was able to dig up Going back to 2000 and 2 752 page book in the very back corner of a dark, dirty, dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco Network Security 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed? From a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected, everything is a p. I driven. Everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workload spread out all over the place. And, Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, No eso Wow. Kudos that you you found that book. I'm really impressed there, so thank you. Little street credit. So I want to get on something that you you talked about because I think it's very important to to this overall conversation if we think about the scale of the network and coun hit on it briefly. You talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the you know it's estimated By the end of this year, there's gonna be about 27 billion devices on the global Internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory, we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global Internet on a on a daily basis in the primarily that that that is I o T devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connect, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global Internet is within a company's infrastructure. Accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor, so we really need Thio and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002. I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion, prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security. Really? In the in the guise of under the under the under the realm of really two aspects the identity. Who is accessing the data in the context, What data is being access and that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and technologies like machine learning, an automated intelligence. They're going to be our artificial intelligence. Rather are gonna be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current. You know, just current security practices mean the network is gonna have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally, shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing That cove it has done a bunk many things is kind of re taught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave Rennes in on it Google Cloud a couple years ago, and I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you describe kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it, right? So really kind of rethinking automation and re thinking about the way that you manage these things and and the level right, the old Is it a pet or is it or is it, um, part of the herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about coun really human powered Internet and being driven by a lot of this video. But to what you just said, Erik, the next big wave right is I, O. T and five G. And I think you know, you talk about 3.7 of devices per person. That's nothing compared toa right, all these sensors and all these devices and all these factories because five G is really targeted to machine to machines, which there's ah lot of them, and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to Yukun thinking about this next great wave in a five G i o t kind of driven world where it's kind of like one voice kind of fell off compared to I p traffic on the network, I think you're going to see the same thing. Kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also gonna fall off dramatically. Is the machine generated data just skyrockets through the roof? >>Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think thio also what Eric touched on the visibility on that and they'll be able to process that data at the edge that's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further. And it's gonna, you know, make the role of the network the connectivity of it all, and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of program ability. Within that, we're see the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an I. O. T. Speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, you know, behaving like other hosts would on a network, for example, manufacturing floor production, robot or security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing you know, partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at. But then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, bringing on board those those hosts in a very transparent way on then, you know, keep keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going right, >>right. So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the A. D and the machines along along for middle minute. But I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way toe to motivate people to build this new skill set in terms of getting software certifications within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated because there's posts all over the place and they've all got their their nice big badge of their certification. But, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus and engineering a technician. And it's a, you know, kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce as well as the partners, etcetera and really adopting kind of almost a software first in this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently, a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, that in of itself was was a was a great success. But, you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? I mean, obviously, he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was. It was to change the way the world, you know, worked, played, live and learn. And if you think about and you hit on this when we were you know, your discussion with with With Kun in the early days of Cove it. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that that our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several last three decades really help the world continue Thio to to do business for students to continue to go thio school or, you know, clinicians to connect with patients. If I think about that mission to meet program ability is just the next generation of that mission, uh, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing to enable customers, employees, partners to, uh, essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity. Now the leverage it for critical insight again, If we look at some of the some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing, the network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from the but it isn't necessarily and out of the box type of integration. So I look at program ability and and what we're doing with debt net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now. It's a way to extrapolate its away thio full critical data so that I can make a decision and I if that decisions automated or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting, or in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most. The definite pounds we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skills that's going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we dropped were created to beat the boss challenge, it was really simple. Hey, guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out, and I'm gonna achieve the certification myself because I want to continue to be very relevant. I'm gonna continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of ah, a lot of our team who achieved it Incentive with secondary. They just wanted have bragging rights like, Yeah, I beat Eric, Right, Right. >>Absolutely. No, that Z you know, put your money where your mouth is, right? If it's important than what you know, you should do it too. And you know, the whole not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I wanna extend kind of the conversation on the Koven impact. Right? Because I'm sure you've seen all the social media means you know who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know the answer to the question. But you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure, world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, and people are trying to move stuff all the way around. Now suddenly had this co vid moment right in March, which is really a light switch moment. People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home and it's not only you but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So but now we're six months plus into this thing, and I would just love to get your perspective, you know, and kind of the change from Oh, my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can can get get what they need when they need it from where they are? But but then really moving from this is an emergency situation. Stopgap situation toe. This is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know this is going to drive. Ah, riel change in the way that people communicate in the way that people where they sit and do their job and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need thio to plan for. >>So I think I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized any any interaction that could be driven virtually waas. And what's interesting is we, as you said. We went from that light switch moment where, and I believe the status this and I'll probably get the number wrong. But like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70% in interesting that it worked. You know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on How do I enable VPN scale of mass? How doe I, you know, leverage. You know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings in virtual connectivity much faster now that as you said that we've kind of gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations, we're looking at what they accomplished. And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition. Thio Oh my gosh, we need to change, too. We have an opportunity to change and we're looking. We see a lot of organizations specifically around financial services, health care through the K through 20 educational environment, all looking at how can they doom or virtually for a couple of reasons? Obviously, there is a significant safety factor, and again, we're still in that we're still in the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students patients remain safe. But second, we've found in discussions with a lot of senior I T executives and our customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. And then, third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining again leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like, uh, unified collaboration that's very personalized to the end users experience, they're going to do that and again they're going to save money. They're gonna have happier employees, and ultimately they're gonna make their their employees in their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent. And some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay today in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I would say I'd say 15% is low, especially if you if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right? There was a great interview were doing and, you know, talk about working from home. He used to work from home as the exception, right? Because the cable person was coming or you get a new washing machine or something, where now that's probably get, you know, in many cases will shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless you know somebody's in town or have an important meeting or there's some special collaboration. Uh, that drives me to be in. But, you know, I wanna go back to Yukun and and really doubled down on. You know, I think most people spend too much time focusing, especially. We'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually. We can't meet in the hall. We can't grab a quick coffee to drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here. You're in Belgium, right? Eric is in Ohio, were in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and and check into a hotel and and all that stuff to get together for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that that it doesn't replace, and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives because those are coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives airway way more out spoken. I you know, I look at myself I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are, in a way, wanting to go back to the office part time, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you could do virtually. We have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium are are local. General manager has, ah, virtual aperitif. Every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But you know, there's there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, Um, you know, to to get the basketball world right, >>So I just we're gonna wrap the segment. I wanna give you guys both the last word. You both Francisco for a while and you know, Susie, we and the team on Definite has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of 456 years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts is, you know, with a little bit of perspective. And you know what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road. Since you guys have been there for a while, you've been in the space. Uh, let's start with Yukun. >>Okay? I think the possibility it creates, I think, really program ability, software defined is really about the art of the possible. It's what you can dream up and then go code Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance. And a customer base is, um, you know, and then it is the evolution off the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. We're seeing really people dive into that in customers, um, co creating with us on. I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution off the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and and redefines process. >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in, uh, hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. >>America, I >>love to get your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career in Cisco turning, putting I P phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 1 4002 when three idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a of just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a We're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really it's not about programming is not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation. But again, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past what you know, just connectivity. The network touches everything and is more workload. Moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. The network is the really the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the in the i t. Lexicon as being that critical for that critical insight provider for for how users are interacting with the network. How users air interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one another. Program ability is a way to do that more efficiently with greater, greater degree of certainty, with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of I t services and digitization. So to me, I think we're gonna look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, Man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think I think really, this is This is the future, and I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>Well, coun Eric. Thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference on. It's also nice to be living in a new age where you can you can, you know, stay at the same company and and still refresh. You know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing because a zoo said I remember those i p first i p phone days and I thought, Well, Ma Bell must be happy because the old Mother's Day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a >>dedicated connection >>between every mother and every child in the middle of May. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>Yeah. All >>right. He's kun. He was Eric. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube for continuing coverage of Cisco Definite Connect. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu man a man and welcome to this special cube conversation over helping cover the second generation of the VMware cloud on Dell EMC happy to welcome to the program Rick fillers who's the vice president of data center and cloud with IDC not too far from me physically even though of course in today's day and age we're all practicing social distance so Rick great to see you thanks so much we've done it well thanks Stu pleasure to be here looking forward to a great conversation all right so Rick you know usually this time of year you and I see other more than we their families because we are traveling a circuit going to the analyst invent like and one of the topics we spent a lot of time talking about over the years is of course cloud you know VMware's partnership with Amazon is of course one that the entire industry but notice of and the relationship of Amazon VMware and Dell is an interesting one what we're talking about today though is the VMware cloud or in the shorthand VM see on LEM see and it's the second generation of this product help us understand kind of where this fits in the categorization and the research that you and an IDC look at yes - it's an interesting question it's one that we've actually been thinking about for several years now and it had to do with some early conversations we were having back then with companies about their private cloud environment they'd been deploying those for the last four or five years we were seeing them up on a sort of refresh cycle and when he started asking about how satisfied they'd been with those and where they wanted to use them and we got back some very consistent feedback saying that they'd had some problems with their first generation of their private cloud environment and nothing needed to address those and one of them was a consistency problem is that you know every private cloud they built whether they build it themselves or they looked at a hosted private cloud provider even in their own company we're different different technologies different and figure different sets of tools and that was a big problem for them the second big problem they'd run into was basically every time there's a new technology or an upgrade or fix we basically can't adopt it quickly we can't use it till the next refresh cycle so we're always behind we're playing catch-up and and neither one of those things really aligned with what they felt cloud should be and what they've been seeing in their public cloud environment and so when we looked at that and we started looking at the feedback about was combiner we realized that we were about to see a new generation of private cloud environment but we said but this will be different not just because of new technology but it'll be actually different use cases and a different approach and the first thing is we said it's first of all these are it's not so much a private cloud is that they dedicated cloud it's it's I have resources that are dedicated to a business or a service an application I want to get done and and I want to basically operate that just like all those other cloud and then the second thing is is they said and by the way this is less and less about a general-purpose new data center and we just run my data center same way it's I want this to be a platform for creating new services that I want to deliver in a location a factory a hospital you know a city block whatever that is and and so we brought those together and we started looking at those and saying well this is really going to lead to the emergence of a whole new product class which we've started calling local cloud as a service because it reflected both of those things is like it is no longer assembling piece parts but it was consuming these resources and as a service method with all the benefits of agility and responsiveness and and continued enhancement that come with that but it was also about I need to be able to put these in new location not just in my corporate data center but out where I'm trying to do new businesses and services in and that's what led us to start talking about this in this new product category called local cloud as a service and then we started seeing solutions that came out on the market that fit very much with this idea okay yeah Rick really interesting because you're right you know private cloud is a conversation we've been having in the industry for about a dozen years and one of the biggest challenges is you talk to 100 customers and you get a hundred and fifty definitions of what a private cloud is so if I hear you right local cloud is in some ways it's an extension of what we see in the public cloud so you know I think back it used to be hey can I get this same stack in both place we saw companies like you know IBM and Oracle and even VMware dang you know how can I match what you have in your data center there as opposed to you know as your stack AWS outposts we're saying hey we're actually gonna give you the you know the same you know same hardware you know same software and as a service as you said yeah you talked about also some of those new locations so you know without getting into too much depth so it sounds like and I looked a little bit of research there there is the data center piece and then really emerging there's the potential for edge use cases do I see that right is just just like you know we've got kind of the hyper scalars we've the data center edge is pulling on everything so you're saying edge doesn't kill the cloud and everything before it it's gonna just be another op in oh absolutely I mean trust this is it's more of an extension of the cloud environment and by that we also said one of the other critical things in this is it's it changes you if you think about new applications that you're trying to create whether it's in the public cloud or whether one of these local cloud environments they're being built on a cloud native architecture and that's one of the other key elements of this solution is these become the platforms that allow enterprises to bring things like containers and service designs and this sort of you know DevOps driven application development model into both the corporate data centers which absolutely this these solutions like but also again to extend it out to places where in the past you didn't have a lot of IT didn't have a lot of compute and storage but now if you're trying to do things like real-time monitoring for you know in the world we're living in today Oh an airport you know can I use machine vision to track the health of the going through the airport I need to deliver a cloud service essentially at that Airport I have latency issues I have availability issues I can't do it from a data center you know sitting out halfway across the country it has to be at the airport but I need to be able to basically have a reliable consistent cloud environment but now I can put in ten airports or a hundred so it's that combination of location but consistency everywhere I put it that's part of what this this new stories about and and I think that's the other big part of the messenger excellent Rick so one of the things I for we get into the numbers and talk specifically about the VMware solution how do customers get from where they are who these type of solutions you know one of the discussions around private cloud is could I upgrade what I have moved to these environment I think about many of the solutions that are extending public clouds it it doesn't necessarily mesh into what I have today so it did how do we get from you know the environments that I have today you know and how do these local cloud as a services fit in yeah so this is this is actually one of the interesting use cases for this is one way you can use this is to deploy this in your corporate data set where you but yet it's creating that public cloud environment you can do a lift and shift and leverage this as a way to MA I guess you would say now it's shift and lift because now you can bring it into this local fly as a service platform and still run it locally get those kind of things tested and by weight and as you decide which functions you may want to move offload to a public cloud or add dr you can use this platform to do that but I think there's there's more to it than that the the other part of of what we talk about here is is and I think it's something that that needs to be addressed as something that helps people do this faster is these new systems while very modern very consistent there is a great value they like many of the more modern merged systems that are coming on the market have very different power profiles very different network requirements then what's in a lot of corporate data centers and that's one thing we've seen again and again when we've talked to people about deploying these is the technology's great the solutions great but you know I have to make sure I've got the right power and I've opened up the firewalls and all those things one thing that I found interesting is we're starting to see companies say one way to remove that friction is you know there if there's a colocation facility near the customer site that has great power has great network connectivity you know I can use that place to now deliver this service in days instead of weeks because it's concentrated there you know it's a pure environment yeah and I think that's one thing that's also helping with this shift is people can leverage those facilities in that activity to basically make this migration a lot easier for companies when they want to when they want to transform their environment yeah really important points there Rick absolutely we you know we've been telling companies for years you need to understand what you're good at and what you're not and you know pouring concrete and managing power and bullying there's a handful of companies that are excellent at that most of the rest of you companies you suck at it so therefore if you can leverage other people that you can do that so when you say local it does not need to mean a piece of real estate that I own it could be you know that that spectrum of boosting or the environment yeah all right let's get to the numbers Rick so we're gonna pull up a light here with some of your research you know for years we've been talking about you know the private cloud category is huge compared to a public cloud because well public cloud is growing huge numbers compared to traditional IT it is small so let's take a look at the slides and talk us through what we're looking at here yeah so this is the thing part of it when we were talking about this forecast and we again we're looking at product like you know the VMware cloud on Dell you see and the alternative solutions out there is is for part of the use case which we've talked about whereas this is a the next-generation of the corporation private cloud with better connectivity and better consistency in some ways that's the easy activity but what you're doing is as we've said is I'm translate I'm transferring from a upfront capital expenditure to a 3-4 year subscription and so when we look at this and we started thinking about the forecast and what we're saying is what I've done is I've moved from you know an upfront spend in one year to spreading it out over three years and from a forecast standpoint that means in the early years while you may be deploying and lot of companies are gonna be leveraging these in their in their private cloud and their data centers the revenue stream to the provider in this case VMware and WMC or the group we're talking about today streams over three years so the forecasts can look really big or grows very fast but that's because that subscription revenue keeps growing and growing so today when we looked at you know comment some of the solutions that have been out there you brought up earlier you know the Rackspace and others as early versions of this but you know it's still relatively new these types of solutions of only on the market after six months seven month so 2020 even without Cove it wasn't going to be some huge year one thing we see actually is that these types of solutions are even more attractive in the world we're living in because they give you that promise of rapid deployment in scale but absolutely by 2022 you know that accumulated revenue stream that subscription scream both for enterprise and for a growing number of edge use cases we're talking you know revenues up and around the five seven billion dollar range and that only accelerates one thing that's not really showing in here yet but it's also part of this local conversation is is the 5g build-out and the extension and use of these local clouds in connection with the 5g environment and that's part of this edge use case too so so absolutely if you want to see you know total revenue streams here over you know in 2022 as we talked about here just under five billion dollars going from you know a half a billion dollars this year but even the biggest growth and the biggest expansion is after that and why we think this is is the value why why people are willing to pay for this is because of that value of consistency continuous enhancements and a platform for innovation that's what makes this all come together and why we think this is gonna be such a big and important market in the coming years yeah absolutely and you know has an impact on your job rake instead of counting on is in the growth there you're now talking to Wall Street about you know oh well Dell might have shipped X number of boxes but they can't recognize it over this period of time so let's talk about the customers though how it is a solution like this you know what do you see it affecting their adoption of what they're doing with their overall you know I mean this is the case specifically for VMware cloud on Delhi see is you know without a doubt as we all know that VMware and and is is a critical part of most corporations IT environments today many of their applications are there they've invested great amounts of resources and expertise and understanding how to operate and drive those environments and and one thing this does is again it gives them that ability to leverage those investments and the things they've done there for application design and that's the recovery and and and sort of the app mule management of their IT environment but now again use it in this as a service way so it's definitely one of the big benefits we see is it helps people make that transition removing the friction of that modernization for a lot of companies if they want to move to a cloud environment that's step one I think that's value one I would say and point out you know VMware also now is being very you know focused on making sure that it's also a strong platform for these next-generation cloud native development environment and that's been added to these platforms and we'll absolutely expect to see this and all the VMware cloud solution so that's another great part of this is there again preserving that ability for their customers who both do better with their existing environment and also have a platform for going forward with these new systems you know for us the big thing is is a continual focus by VMware and Dell as partners to make sure that it can scale its ability to operate these environment one of the things they're making a commitment to to their customers we are going to make these continuously available available on very good short notice and that they continually improve and that's gonna take a lot of back-end investment because really VMware has to now centrally manage not one hundred or a thousand potentially tens of thousands of system for many customers around the world that's the real next big step here we see is when you can add that fleet management ability so the company has the ability to say I can now deploy some great new service in one place a hundred places a thousand places while still being secure while still offering my end users you know the availability and the latency that they want that's a very powerful thing that companies are gonna be able to offer in the coming years all right well Rick fillers really important items they're really glad you brought up you know about the modern application about their data of course you know the immersed partner Dell has a strong legacy in data you know something shiny sees track you know the explosive growth of that or you know more than a decade now so thanks a lot and I think you capture that perfectly the data control part of this is is critical all right lots more from the VMware cloud on Dell EMC I'm Stu minimun and thank you for watch the queue [Music]

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host still minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and this is a cube conversation from our Boston area studio happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest on the program but from knit scout who we've been digging into the concept of visibility without borders dr. Vikram Saxena who's with the office of the CTO from the for mention net scout thank you so much for joining us thanks to it thanks for having me all right dr. Zana before we get into kind of your role why don't you go back give us a little bit about you know your background you and I have some shared background comm we both work for some of the arms of you know Ma Bell that's right back in the day yeah you work a little bit more senior and yeah you know probably a lot more patents than I have my current count is still sure happy to do that you're right I started in 82 which was two years before the breakup of Marbella so you know and then everything started happening right around that time so yeah I started in Bell Labs you know stayed there close to 20 years did lot of the early pioneering work on packet switching before the days of internet frame relay all of that happened it was a pretty exciting time I was there building up we built up the AT&T business from scratch to a billion dollars in the IP space you know in a voice company that was always challenging so and then I moved on to do startups in the broadband space the two of them moved to the Boston area and then moved on to play the CTO role and public companies sonnez networks Tellabs and then you know came to an EPS card about five years ago yeah you know I I love talking about you know some of those incubators of innovation though I you know historically speaking just you know threw off so much technology that's right been seeing so much the media lately about you know the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 that's so many things that came out of NASA Bell Labs was one of those places that helped inspire me to study engineering that's you know definitely got me on my career but here we are 2019 that's you're still you know working into with some of these telcos and how they're all you know dealing with this wave of cloud and yeah I know the constant change there so bring us inside you know what's your role inside net Scout that office of the CTO yes so net Scout is in the business of you know mining Network data and and what we excel at is extracting what we call actionable intelligence from network traffic which we use the term smart data but essentially my role is really to be the bridge between our technology group and the customers you know bring out understand the problems the challenges that our customers are facing and then work with the teams to build the right product to you know to fit in to the current environment okay one of our favorite things on the cube is you know talking to customers they're going through their transformation that's what you talk about the enterprise you know digital transformation that's what we think there's more than just the buzzword there yeah I've talked to financial institutions manufacturing you know you name it out there if it's a company that's not necessarily born in the cloud they are undergoing that digital transformation bring us inside you know your customer base that this telcos the service providers you know most of them have a heavy tech component to what they're doing but you know are they embracing digital transformation what what does it mean for them so you know as you said it's it's a big term that catches a lot of things but in one word if I described for the telcos it's all about agility if you look at the telco model historically it has been on a path where services get rolled out every six months year multiple years you know not exactly what we call an agile environment compared to today you know but when the cloud happened it changed the landscape because cloud not only created a new way of delivering services but also changed expectations on how fast things can happen and that created high expectations on the customer side which in turn started putting pressure on the on the telcos and and the service providers to become as agile as cloud providers and and and as you know the the network which is really the main asset of a service provider was built around platforms that were not really designed to be programmable you know so they came in with hardwired services and they would change at a very low timescale and building around that is the whole software layer of OS SPSS which over time became very monolithic very slow to change so coupling the network and the software layer created a very slow moving environment so this is what's really causing the change to go to a model where the networks can be programmable which essentially means moving from a hardware centric model to a software centric model where services can be programmed on-demand and created on the fly and maybe sometimes even under the control of the customers and layering on top of that changing the OS s infrastructure to make it more predictive make it more actionable and driven by advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence to make this entire environment extremely dynamic in agile so that's kind of what we are seeing in the marketplace yeah I totally agree that that agility is usually the first thing put forward I I need to be faster yeah it used to be you know faster better cheaper now like a faster faster faster I can actually help compensate for some of those other pieces there of course service riders usually you know very conscious on the cost of things there because if they can lower their cost they can usually of course make them more competitive and pass that along to their ultimate consumers you know bring us inside that you know you mentions this change to software that's going on you know there are so many waves of change going on there everything from you know you talk about IOT and edge computing yeah it's a big you know massive role at a 5g that ya even gets talked about in the general press that these days and at government states they're so you know where are you know your customers today what are some of the critical challenge they have and yeah you know where is that kind of monitoring observability that that kind of piece fit in so so good so let me give to backdrop points first of all you mentioned cost so they are always very cost-conscious trying to drive it down and the reason for that is the traditional services have been heavily commoditized you know voice texting video data they've been commoditized so the customers worn the same stuff cheaper and cheaper and cheaper all the time right so that puts a pressure on margins and reducing cost but now you the industry is at a point where I think the telcos need to grow the top line you know that's a challenge because you can always reduce cost but at some point you get to a point of diminishing returns so now I think the challenge is how do they grow their top line you know so they can become healthier again in that context and that leads to whole notion of what services they need to innovate on so it's all about once you have a programmable Network and a software that is intelligent and smart that becomes a platform for delivering new services so this is where you know you see on the enterprise side Sdn Enterprise IOT all these services are coming now using technologies of software-defined networking network function virtualization and 5g as you mentioned is the next generation of wireless technology that is coming on board right now and that opens up the possibility for the first time to new things dimensions come into play first not only a consumer centric focus which was always there but now opening it up to enterprises and businesses and IOT and secondly fixed broadband right the the the era where telcos used to either drive copper or fiber slow cumbersome takes a lot of time right and the cable guys have already done that with coaxial cable so they need to go faster and faster means use Wireless and finally with 5g you have a technology that can deliver fixed broadband which means all the high definition video voice data and other services like AR VR into the home so it's opening up a new possibility rather than having a separate fixed network and a separate wireless network for the first time they can collapse that into one common platform and go after both fixed and mobile and both consumers and enterprise force yeah we said what one of the big topics of conversation at Cisco live was at San Diego just a short time ago it was 5g and then it you know Wi-Fi six the next generation of that because I'm still going to need inside my building you know for the companies but the 5g holds the promise - give me - so much faster bandwidth so much dense for environment I guess some of the concerns I hear out there and maybe you can tell me kind of where we are and where the telcos fit in is you know 5g from a technology standpoint we understand where it is but that rollout is going to take time yes you know it's great to say you're going to have this dense and highly available thing but you know that's gonna start the same place all the previous generations all right it's the place where actually we don't have bad connectivity today it's you know it's in the urban areas it's where we have dense populations you know sometimes it's thrown out there o5g is gonna be great for edge and IOT and it's like well you know we don't have balloons and planes you know and you know the you know the towers everywhere so where are we with that rollout of 5g what side of timeframes are your customer base looking at as to where that where that goes to play so I think from what I'm seeing in the marketplace I think there is a less of a focus on building out ubiquitous coverage because you know when the focus is on consumers you need coverage because they're everywhere right but I think where they are focusing on because they want to create new revenue a new top-line growth they're focusing more on industry verticals IOT now that allows you to build out networks and pockets of air your customers are because enterprises are always focused in the top cities and you know heck top metro areas so before you make it available for consumers if you get an opportunity to build out at least in the major metropolitan area an infrastructure where you're getting paid as you're building it out because you're signing up this enterprise customers who are willing to pay for these IOT services you get paid you get to build out the infrastructure and then slowly as new applications emerge I think you can make it widely available for consumers I think the challenge on consumer side is the smart phones have been tapped out you know and and people are not going to get that excited about 5g just to use the next-gen I found right so there it has to be about new applications and services and things that people talk about always on the horizon are a are we are and think like that but they are out there they're not there today because it device has to come on board that becomes mass consumable and exciting to customers so while the industry is waiting for that to happen I think there's a great opportunity right now to turn up services for enterprise verticals in the IOT space because the devices are ready and everybody because enterprises are going through their own digital transformation they want to be in a connected world right so they're putting pressure on telcos to connect all their devices into the network and there is a monetization opportunity there so I think what the carriers are going to do is sign up verticals whether it's transportation health care so if they sign up a bunch of hospitals they're going to deploy infrastructure in that area to sign up hospitals if they're going to sign up manufacturing they're going to build their infrastructure in those areas where they're right so by that model you can build out a 5g network that is concentrated on their customer base and then get to ubiquitous coverage later when the consumer applications come yeah so I like that a lot because you know when I think back if we've learned from the sins of the past it used to be if we build it they will come let's you know dig trenches across all the highways and with as much fiber as we can and then the dot-com burst happens and we have all of this capacity that we can't give away yeah what it sounds like you're describing is really a service centric view yes I've got customers and I've got applications and I'm going to build to that and then I can build off of that yeah piece there could talk a little bit about that focus and you know where yeah where your customers are going yeah so maybe just likely before that what I want to talk about the distributed nature of the 5g network so you mentioned edge right so one of the things that are happening when you want to deliver low latency services or high bandwidth services you need to push things closer to the edge as you know when cloud started it's more in the what we call the core you know the large data centers the hyper scale data centers where applications are are being deployed now but when you demand low latency let's say sub 15 millisecond 10 millisecond latency that has to be pushed much more closer to the customer now this is what's for saying the edge cloud deployment in 5g and then what that does is it also forces you to distribute functionality you know everything is not centralized in the core but it's distributed in the edge and the code the control plane maybe in the core but the user plane moves to the edge so that changes the entire flow of traffic and services in a 5g Network they are no longer centralized which means it becomes more challenging to be able to manage and assure these services in a highly distributed telco cloud environment which has this notion of edge and core now on top of that if you say that you know this is all about top-line growth and customer satisfaction then your focus on operationalizing these services has to change from in network centric view to a service centric view because in the past as you know when we were both in Bell Labs in AT&T you know we were pretty much you know focused on the network you know focused on the data from the network the network elements the switches and the routers and all of that and making sure that the network is healthy now that is good but it's not sufficient to guarantee that the services and the service level agreements for customers are being met so what you need to do is focus at the service layer much more so than you were doing it in the past so that changes the paradigm on what data you need to use how you want to use it and how do you stitch together this view in a highly distributed environment and do it in real-time and do it all very quickly so the customers don't see the pain if anything breaks and actually be more proactive in lot of cases be more predictive and take corrective actions before the impact services so this is the challenge and and clearly from a net Scout point of view I think we are right in the center of this hurricane and you know given the history we sort of have figured out on how to do this yeah you know the networking has a long history of we've got a lot of data we've got all of these flows and things change but right exactly as you said understanding what happened at that application that is we've been really tie to make sure it's just IT sitting on the side but IT driving that business that's my application those data flows so yeah you maybe expound a little bit more net Scouts fit there yeah and you know what why it's so critical for what customers need today yeah happy to do that so so if you look at what are the sources of data that you actually can use and and what you should use so basically they fall into three buckets what I call first is what I call infrastructure data which is all about data you get from hypervisors we switches they're telling you more about how the infrastructure is behaving where you need to add more horsepower CPU is memory storage and so on so that is very infrastructure centric the second one is from network elements you know what the DNS servers give you DHCP servers what your routers and switches are giving you the firewalls are giving you and they are also in a way telling you more about what the network elements are seeing so there's a little bit of a hybrid between infrastructure and a service layer component but the problem is that data is it's very vendor dependent it's highly fragmented across there because there's no real standards how to create this data so there is telemetry data there are sis logs and they all vendors do it what they think is best for them so the challenge then becomes on the service provider side and how do you stitch together because service is an end-to-end construct or an application it starts at a at a at a user and goes to a server and you need to be able to get that holistic view n2n so the most appropriate data that net scout feels is what we call the wire data or the traffic data is actually looking at packets themselves because they give you the most direct knowledge about how the service is behaving how it's performing and not only that you can actually predict problems as opposed to react to problems because you can trend this data you can apply machine learning to this data and be able to say what might go wrong and be able to take corrective action so we feel that extracting the right contextual information relevant implicit information timely information in a vendor independent way in a way that is universally if we available from edge to core those are the attributes of wire data and we excel in processing that at the source in real-time and converting all of that into actionable intelligence that is very analytics and automation friendly so this is our strength what that allows us to do is as they are going through this transition between 4G and 5g between physical and virtual across fixed and mobile networks you know you can go through this transition if you have it stitched together end to end view that crosses these boundaries or borders as we call it visibility without borders and in this context your operations people never lose insight into what's going on with their customer applications and behavior so they can go through this migration with confidence that they will not negatively impact their user experience by using our technology yeah you know we've thrown out these terms intelligence and automation for decades yes in our industry but if you look at these hybrid environments and all of these changes come out if an operator doesn't have tools like this they can't keep up they can go so I need to have that machine learning I have to have those tools that can help me intelligently attack these pieces otherwise there's no way I can do it yeah and one point there is you know it's like garbage in garbage out if you don't get the right data you can have the most sophisticated machine learning but it's not going to predict the right answer so the quality of data is very important just as the quality of your analytics in your algorithms so we feel that the combination of right data and the right analytics is how you're going to get advantage of you know accurate predictions and automation around that whole suite okay love that right data right information right delusion why don't want to give you right analytics I want to give you the final word final takeaways for your customers today so I think we are in a very exciting time in the industry you know 5g as a technology is a probably the first generation technology which is coming on board where there is so much focus on on things like security and and new applications and so on and and I think it's an exciting time for service providers to take advantage of this platform and then be able to use it to deliver new services and ultimately see their top lines grow which we all want in the industry because if they are successful then via suppliers you know do well you know so I think it's a pretty exciting time and and vyas net scout are happy to be in this spot right now and to see and help our customers go to go through this transition alright dr. Vikram Singh Saxena thank you so much for joining us sharing with us everything that's happening in your space and it glad to see the excitement still with the journey that you've been on thank you Stu happy to be here all right and as always check out the cubed on net for all of our content I'm Stu minimun and thanks as always for watching the cube [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Boston, MA it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. (upbeat music continues) >> It is so good to have you back with us here on theCUBE as we continue our live coverage here at the BCEC at Red Hat Summit 2019. Glad to have you watching wherever you might be, Eastern Time Zone or maybe out West. Stu Miniman, John Walls here. Our coverage continuing; sixth year we've been at this summit. Eric Kern now joins us here. Both from Lenovo, Eric and Steve Brown. Eric is the Executive Distinguished Engineer. And Steve is the Managing Partner in the Software Business Unit and the DevOps practice leader. So gentlemen good to have you with us on theCUBE. Good to see you today! >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> No surprise, right, that you're here; long term partnership, very successful get together. First off, I want your ideas or your impressions of what you've hear or what you've seen so far here in the day and a half that we've been underway. And whether it's keynote or maybe one of the side sessions, just what's your first impression of what's goin' on here? >> Yeah, I mean it's great. There's a lot of people here, a lot of activity. I mean we can see the Expo behind us. You know the food is great, lunch is great so- (laughter) >> Rub it in. (laughter continues) Rub it in just a little bit. Okay, so a little bit of news this week with regard to what you're up to. And if you would, I'm not gonna ask you to go terribly deep, but just give us an idea of what some of the headlines are you guys were sending out this week. Steve, why don't you take that? >> Yeah, so this week we announced six new reference designs and solutions, engineered solutions. But pretty excited about OpenShift 4 and certainly Rel8 after a five year I guess pause, if you will, on major releases. So that's exciting. >> So, Eric, why don't we start with building on those partnerships, talk about some of the solutions your talking to customers and some of the latest and greatest? There's a lot of interesting things we're doing; one of the things we've been doing recently is around TruScale. So TruScale is our infrastructure as a service on premise. So one of the things we do with it is we build overall solutions. So there's a number of reference architectures that we talked about with Red Hat. These solutions, think about them as having an overall CapEx price and then we convert that into a OpEx price. Probably one of the neat novel things, and this is kind of the area that I really got into, right, is around how do we build a metering system that doesn't require us to install a bunch of software and can be compatible with everything? So with TruScale what we've done is we've leveraged our what's called our xclarity controller, it's the chip basically on the motherboard, and that xclarity controller has the ability to measure power. And measure power both at the overall input consumption, as well measuring power in the CPU, the memory and the eye out. And we built an infrastructure around that. We can actually tell you exactly what percentage the system is being used and consumed based on that. And we can charge for the overall system on a monthly basis. So we have a portal that's set up for that, whether it be our hardware on its own or our hardware with the Red Hat software installed on top of it. >> So how's that effect the customer relationship then? All the sudden your- whether there was a- not I'd say a dispute, but might of been questions about how much usage am I getting? How am I using this? Why am I being billed as I'm being billed? So on and so forth. Now all the sudden you can just deliver the proof's in the pudding, right? You can say this is exactly what you're doing with this, this is exactly how much you're consuming. And I would assume from a pricing standpoint for that modeling standpoint, you give everybody a lot of comfort, I would think; right? >> You do, right. Not only do they see exactly what they're being charged for, they see exactly some of the usage on their own systems. A lot of times they don't know how well-balanced or unbalanced their systems are. And so we're actually providing real usage data. It's different than what you get in public cloud. It's different in what you get in other solutions where it's virtual allocation. So there's a difference in knowing the physical utilization versus the allocated utilization. What a lot of people do, a lot of companies do when they're renting public cloud infrastructure is they spend a lot of time in automation to actually deallocate. Right, so they're doing all this work just to try to save money. Whereas in the TruScale model, you just run it like you normally run it and you save money because you know, if you're not using it, you're not paying for it. >> John: You don't pay for it. >> Exactly, exactly. >> All right, well Steve, a lot of discussion at the show this week about OpenShift, not least this morning, OpenShift 4 was released. We've had a chance to talk to a number of customers, bring us inside, you know, Lenovo's worked with OpenShift for awhile. Oftentimes we think about the application layers like oh, it's totally divorced, I don't need to think of it. Well, we understand there's integration work that happens there and would love your insight into what is happening at he integration, where it's progressed, and any customer stories that you've got along those lines. >> Well, yeah, we've been doing a lot of work with OpenShift. I would say for an upwards of more than two years. We started with Intel and Red Hat and built a number of Intel Select solutions, reference designs, both bare metal and hyper converged. We are on our fifth edition now of the OpenShift design on Cascade Lake. We're the, I wanna say the pioneers in the industry. We have a center of competency in DevOps with software to really promote software development solutions. And we're excited with OpenShift 4 because of the CoreOS integration as well as the auto-provisioning. Key things, it makes it so much easier to adopt and integrate. >> Any customer deployments? When they come to you, what's the kind of a-ha moment that they have? Is it just the agility that it brings them? Is there anything you can share as to the customers that are actually doing this in the field? >> Well, I like to think the customers get the a-ha when they realize that there is an engineered platform that's been purpose built and they're not coddling software and tools together. It helps with the CI/CD pipeline process templating much more effectively. Overall it's, I think, a lot more streamlined than it was in the earlier editions of OpenShift, especially Open Source. So we're pretty excited with comprehensive business support. I think that businesses feel comfortable. >> Kind of a simple question, but what do you, in terms of what TruScale operates now, what is the- what are you allowing people to do now that they didn't do before? In the latest version here, what exactly is- where's, you think, this improvement? Or where's the new efficiency? What are they getting out of it that would make me, as a customer, have that- if I haven't converted yet, or if I'm perhaps ripe for the taking, what would make me jump? >> Part of it is customers don't want to be managing their infrastructure. And so this there's a big push to public cloud. They just wanna be managing their applications. They just wanna focus on what's paying the bills, right? And paying the bills are providing the IT service is all in the application layer for the most part. What TruScale allows them to do is to have that public cloud kind of management platform. So it's Lenovo premium support behind the scenes; so Lenovo is managing the hardware itself, Lenovo maintains the ownership of the hardware, so they're not even owning the hardware, very similar to public cloud. And they can go and use it on FREM. So they don't have to worry about any security issues with the public cloud. They don't have to worry about any kind of network issues, right, it's all in their data center. It's running just exactly the way they'd run CapEx, but they're running in the way that they have really liked with the public cloud infrastructure. >> So confidence, comfort, security and all that stuff right? >> Eric: There ya go. Yeah. >> Yeah, that's just- I'll pay for that! >> Sure! (laughter) So, we've seen software move heavily towards this model whether it be SaaS or various moving CapEx to OpEx. When I look at infrastructure it's been a little bit of a slower move, especially, I've got some background on the storage side, if you look at storage, it's like oh okay. I'm conditioned as a customer to think about my capacity, my performance, and how I'm tuning everything, and I need to make adjustments, and making changes usually takes a little bit longer. Red Hat's got a lot of software products in the storage space. Help us understand how this fits in and are customers gettin' more comfortable moving from the CapEx to the OpEx for their uses? >> Yeah, good segue. So Ceph and Gluster are some really interesting storage products from Red Hat. And they fit right on our servers, and so we install them; we build big solutions around both of them. I'm actually working on big architecture for another company, for another customer out in Germany. So it's huge stuff cluster. The neat thing about it is our TruScale model allows us to actually sell them on OpEx in a storage product. And what we're measuring is the storage, what I call storage in motion versus the storage at rest. So we see all the different usages of the different servers. The servers are acting as controllers, a multi-tenant controller. And there's a lot of information that's being stored and transmitted through the systems. TruScale's just accumulating all the usage of that. And Steve, maybe you want to talk about some of the software side of it from the storage perspective, but it's really, TruScale fits right in real nicely with the storage side of it. >> I'd actually like to talk about it more comprehensively from the Red Hat software side of it. Anywho, let's talk about how they're already no certification needed. We're looking at all Red Hat applications on TruScale; whether it's OpenShift, or Rel8, Gluster, Ceph, Ansible. So we're really excited because we're not limited in the portfolio. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> Yeah. >> So, Steve, it's interesting, you used to think about, okay, what boxes am I buying, what license I'm doing. If you talk about a real true software world it should be a platform that unifies these things together. So it sounds like you're saying we're getting there. I shouldn't have to think about- give us a little bit, kind of the old way and where customers are seeing it today. >> Yeah, well we're not getting there. We're there. What that allows us to do is to take the reference designs that we have and the testing that we've previously validated with Intel and Red Hat and be able to snap pieces together. So it's just a matter of what's different and unique for the client and the client's situation and their growth pattern. What's great about TruScale is that in this model we can predicatively analyze their consumption forward based on the business growth. So for example, if you're using OpenShift and you start with a small cluster for one or two lines of business, as they adopt DevOps methodologies going from either Waterfall or Agile, we can predicatively analyze the consumption forward that they're gonna need. So they can plan years in advance as they progress. And as such, the other snap-ins, say storage, that they're gonna need for data in motion or data at rest. So it's actually smarter. And what that ends up doing is obviously saving them money, but it saves them time. The typical model is going back to IT and saying we need these severs, we need the storage and the software, and bolt it altogether. And the IT guys are hair on fire running around already. So they can, as long as IT approves it, they can sort of bypass that big, heavy lift. >> So from what you've heard of this week, with Rel8, the big launch last night, a lot of fun, right? >> Steve: Yeah. >> And then OpenShift 4 earlier today talked about- >> Yeah. >> What if there are elements to those two, either one of them, that you find most attractive? Or that really kinda jump off the page to you? Is there anything out there that you're seein' or through the demos that we saw today, or last night even that you think wow, that's cool, that's good, that this is gonna be useful for us? >> OpenShift is one of the things that we're seeing in the industry that's just really enabling the whole DevOps practice. So OpenShift is interesting from the perspective of flexibility, automation, the tooling. Rel8, of course, we've all been waiting for it, I guess for a while now probably. >> Host: Right. >> It's just the next level, the next generation. The Red Hat software, see I'm a big fan of Ceph. I mean I just like Ceph, it's just a neat storage product. It's been around for awhile, but it keeps getting better. It's kinda like the old storage product that first came out with some soft-refined storage. But the whole ecosystem around Red Hat is just very appealing. I actually, Cloudforms is one I think is a little under-utilized today. Cloudforms is a real nice cloud management platform as well. So there's a lot of interesting Red Hat software. Steve, we've done all these reference architectures, are there any ones that stick out to you? I've just been kind of rattling off some of the ones that I like. >> Yeah, I really like the CoreOS integration, 'cause we now see that acquisition really taking shape in a true productization sense, in a practical use sense. I think with Red Hat owning that asset and controlling the development, they can build out features as needed. They're not having to wait on the ecosystem or to spin different cycles for growth. So I think that's my highlight. I've been looking for that. And auto-provisioning as well. I think that's a really key benefit to it, just to make things more smooth and simple. >> Well gentlemen, thanks for the time. >> Guest: Sure. >> Nice to meet you. Look forward to seeing you down the road. We were talkin' about Lenovo, Stu and I were there a couple of years ago, Ashton Kutcher out in San Francisco, so now we get the two of you guys. You're right there with Ashton, right? (laughter) >> That's right. >> Same celebrity! Thanks for sharing the time. Good to see you guys. >> Eric: Thank you. >> Steve: You too. >> Back with more live here at Red Hat Summit 2019, we're in Boston, and you're watching theCube. (electronic music)

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi. Lisa Martin for the Cube, Live at Cisco Definite. Create twenty nineteen. This is Day two of our coverage here. We're excited to welcome Taylor Barnett, a speaker tech talk speaker for this event. Lead community engineer at Stoplight Taylor. It's great to have you on the Cube. I'm glad to be here. So first, inform us before we talk about your tech talk that you can yesterday here, adept that create tell us a little bit about Stop like, >> yeah, So stoplight is a platform. Teo, build test and design web ap eyes specifically, we focus right now on recipe eyes, but we're really encouraging design first principles when people are building out there a prize for very much preproduction And what we have found was so many guys out there are not documented. They're not tested, they're not designed well And so we wanted to build tooling the help users be able to do that. >> So that documentation we've heard yeah, yesterday and today is absolutely >> essential. Yeah, And so a lot of what we're doing is we're actually using the Open A P I specifications, which a lot of teams at Cisco are now using. And so we can auto generate documentation from that. But also, we can auto generate instant mock >> servers. >> Um, do different types of testing all from that, because it's both human and machine readable. You're taking advantage of that. >> So you gave a tech talk yesterday, so I like the title going to Infinity and beyond Documentation with open FBI. Tell us our audience, like basically kind of an overview of what you presented in the three takeaways that your audience left with. >> Yeah, so historically open a P I specification has been known to be an auto generating reference documentation. So what people are like, Yeah, I know it for documentation, but they don't know it for all the other things. So the things that helped them do design first principles, the things that helped them mock and get feedback about their AP eyes and also how to test. And so I say, the three takeaways, that's what I focus on, was, how does this design first really benefit us? And why is it worth spending that time? Because a lot of engineers. It kind of feels like a friction point. Like you're making me do something else before I can start coding on DSO helping them see those benefits and then also being ableto use the feedback through They get through mach ap eyes so that they don't have tio code all the p I and then get the feedback. They could do it before that process. So much, master. Yeah, totally. And just better testing to actually make sure that we once we designed the A that we actually implementing it to what the design says. Uh, >> so I'm not design front. You mentioned design first telling you before we met. Lied that we've heard that. Yeah, I did what I had yesterday and today. This's design first approach and it sounds like from what you're saying for developers, it's not necessarily the first thing they want to do. They want to get their hands on start coding. So yeah, tell may tell us what design first means and actually how it can really make the developers job better. >> Yeah, Yes. Oh, Design First is really just being able to take a step back before that code and like describe what the is on a lower like endpoint level for us that's doing it in a visual editor at Stoplight. We actually have a visual editor to help people do that so that it's not like writing things from scratch. So even then, that makes it faster than having to write on a blank document that nobody wants to like right in. And it might be a mess. And decisions are hard to make around that document because it's a mess and all this stuff and then being able to take that and then start doing the mocking and all the other things. So for developers, it's a lot about getting to see what those other benefits are to convince them that it's worth it. And that's going to save some time overall versus like having toe wait. One great example of that is actually with being ableto Ma K P IIs friend and engineers could go ahead and start implementing the guy before the development process of actually implement thing is even done so that traditional, like waterfall development process. You just cut that out because they can start doing in a parallel on DH so it can really make teams a lot more efficient. >> Did you Were you happy with the reaction yesterday? This is a This is the definite communities. God. Five hundred eighty five thousand plus people. There's been about four hundred here in person. What was the reaction? Especially from developers who may have been around a while and are very used to the waterfall upload where they like. Taylor. This is amazing. Or girl, this is like a whole cultural change. Yeah, you know, I mean, we we work well, >> actually, a lot of enterprise companies that stoplight. And it is it is a little bit of a cultural change. You talk, there's this whole bigger idea of, like, a P I transformation. Even just moving to having a pee ice first is a bigger change. And then, you know, then the design part. But I have found that once, if you're introducing somebody to a prize first, it's easy to sneak in design. So then you don't have to Then teach Oh, let's design the first and do decide. It's all part of the same package s o. A lot of enterprises what They're like transformations to moving toe, like in a very FBI focused infrastructures. They then are just more receptacle to design >> first. That's good. Especially if you're able to show them that the obvious benefits. Yeah, there getting things done faster like this is actually taking this new approach. Is that going to be better for you? And do you find that that developers are adjusting quickly to this new? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely >> pain points. The tooling is still catching up. Uh, so the industry is for recipe eyes has kind of centered around open FBI specifications. But there were others before that Ramel for a specifically and I'd use it for anybody. Also open a p. I used to be called swagger specification. Some people might know it by that, but a lot of it is like, Yeah, the tooling is still maturing, but it's in a lot better place than it used to be. So when I was a back end FBI engineer about four five years ago, I was introduced through a P I blueprint, which is another justification, and it was very painful tohave to document in a p I with it. And now it's just gotten so much better with the tooling mature >> you can see massive differences alone just by asking. >> Totally. Yeah, just like the last four years, actually. >> So this is your first definite create and your speaker at your very first one. That's pretty cool, Taylor. Yeah? Yeah. How long have you been involved in the definite community? And how is it impacted what you do for stuff like, >> Yeah. So I was kind of introduced through it. I knew people that worked on definite and like Mandy. And And so then I kind of got introduced that that, you know, it's been really interesting to see how they built up this community of people sharing code. And it's different then, like, get hub type community. And so it's kind of interesting. It was just like it's ah, you know, you don't see a lot of communities that are run by companies that necessarily >> there they're >> not in the code repository business, but they see the value in people sharing things and collaborating and stuff like that. And so it's kind of different of a community, but also very interesting tow. Have watching grab >> the sharing in the collaboration you walk in yesterday. People are eager to do that Yeah, and other types of conferences that we covered the Cube, especially if there's cooperative Shin Partners there. It's a different vibe has been very, very much one that's been refreshing on and to your point. The difference between what Cisco's built here in the lost, very organically bio away in the last five years with Suzie and Mandy have done that opened nous and that excitability to share things and learn from each other, even though there's got to be developers here from competing companies. Yeah, that's a very cool spirit. Yeah, and something that I think they've done a very good job fostering that they also I kind of wonder if it's chicken and egg. How much has definite. And this, you know, over half a million strong community been sort of forcing function or an accelerator of Cisco's evolution? If you look at Cisco's been around for such a long time, not on a P I first company Yeah, big enterprise. This is a big all of their products and with GPS ***, been really >> awesome to see all the talks that are focused on Cisco's a prize being designed first like I don't see a lot of enterprises that feel like they've really taken it toe heart as much. I've talked to some people and they say, Yeah, I mean, you know, there's been some pain points, but I'm like, Yeah, but there's companies that are envious of the Y .'All done this. Yes, and they've really, like, probably improved the developer experience that they're a piece so much because of having that design first >> approach. So one other thing that I think it's very cool about definite and create is that yesterday morning it was kicked off by two really strong technologists. You don't mention we had Mandy really on yesterday is a senior director of developer experience. Right after you. I've got Susie Leon, the SPP in CTO, and I go to a lot of events. The Cube covers a lot of events every year, and it's very important to us to be able to highlight women and technology because it's still an unresolved, you know, gap there. But it's also really unusual to see an event kicked off both days. No females. You've been a stem since you were a kid. How does that impact you? Do you see that is inspiring. You that is. I wish it wasn't an issue. >> Yeah, no. Yeah. I wish it was an issue, but no, but it's really awesome. So, like, when I was trying to decide if I accept my when they asked me to come speak, I totally looked at that. That was something when I saw their faces on them that they were going to be key notes and stuff, you know, it gave me already, like, a whole different feeling of how the conference >> was going to be >> so it was really exciting to see that. Yeah, >> that's good. And when I first got into tech a long time ago, I was just not aware of what was not monitor in a technical role. But I didn't notice. I mean, they noticed the difference and the disparity, but I didn't feel it. Yeah, And so it wasn't until I started going to more and more events where I sell >> theirs. So, yeah, sometimes you're at events where it's just the sea of people that don't look like you. And it's a lot different here. >> Yeah, until I imagine I appreciated it this morning. I'm sure. Well, when Susie called onto stage the young girls from Verizon and those from Presidio that are Cisco's clearly making a concerted effort to recognize and help this diversity in thought. I mean, imagine designing AP eyes with, you know, many different perspective is better products and services and company, and will be we just have more thought divers in and of itself. >> Oh, yeah, I think about it a lot with developer experience. So one of the things is there's this idea of beginner's mind failure that sometimes if if you think you're a p, I is like, great. But you don't approach it with the beginner's mind, you might actually be failing a lot of your users. So, you know, your, uh, your veteran developer, you're, you know, super skilled and you you don't fail in the somewhere areas that someone who's newer to development might fail. And so then you just lost a bunch of customers and right up front without even them getting deeper into the FBI. And so being ableto have, like more diverse perspectives around, designing a prize could definitely help prevent that. That's a >> really important point so that you make there because it's like if this is really everything that's designed these days. Whatever it is a on iPad. But sticker a piece of clothing. It's all designed for a consumer. Yeah, to consume whatever the product of services. And, you know, in technology, so much conversation goes around delivering an outstanding customer experience. And you're saying, you know, we have to think about that. Probably worked design, thinking, coming play right about designing with that sort of a day bers perspective of approach. That paper you gonna lose customers here were >> actually gets to the bottom line. Yeah, versus just being like a nice benefit kinds. >> Yeah, well, Taylor has been so fun having you on the Cube. Thank you so much. Now you have a flight to catch back in Austin. So thank you so much for doing this afternoon and rats on being a speaker at first. And it will seem Thanks for having me. My pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching to keep live from Cisco. Definite. Create twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching

>> [Narrator] From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, Dave Vellante here coming at you from our East Coast studios in Marlborough, MA just outside of Boston. What I wanted to do is give you a little recap of 2017 and what's happening and give you an update on SiliconANGLE Media. So as many of you know SiliconANGLE Media INC comprises three brands. TheCUBE, which as most of you know is we call it sometimes the ESPN of tech, it's our live and on demand video broadcasting element. And of course we have the research arm which is Wikibon and Wikibon.com And then, SiliconANGLE is our news site. And so I want to just, as I said, recap what went down in 2017 some of the things you may not know about. >> Last February, February first, actually we opened the new studio in Palo Alto, California. It's at 989 Commercial ST, you should check it out. It's sort of near the mountain view line but it's in Palo Alto, it's a great location, we have a large studio there. And throughout the year, in 2017 we held events, we had launches, but most importantly John Furrier, my business partner, is really running editorial content programs out of that studio. >> So every Thursday Furrier has high level key guests come in CEOs, VCs, in customers, and they just riff on what's going on in the industry and what's happening It's been an absolutely awesome resource for us and I really encourage you guys to go check it out. We did 135 show days last year. TheCUBE is run by our general manager, Jeff Frick and 135 show days meaning we broadcast live at 135 days at events last year, which is just incredible. >> It was our first year we ever did anything in China We did the Alibaba conference, the cloud show there that was very exciting. We did a number of shows in Europe and of course all the big shows in the United States as well >> We launched three websites last year. TheCUBE.net is the latest one. You know, a lot of times we talk about data driven media. If you go to theCube.net and check it out, you'll see something called theCUBE Alumni database. And theCUBE Alumni database contains virtually everybody who's ever been on theCUBE. So you can search CIOs, CEOs, developers, bloggers, analysts all the folks that have been on theCUBE you can see and they've got a profile page on each one of those so, we're collecting all that data SiliconANGLE.com we launched the new website >> SiliconANGLE is run by Rob Hof, who is our Editor-in-Chief Rob was the Silicon Valley beuro chief for business week for the better part of a decade, so we're really proud to have Rob on. He's been on for the last couple of years and just doing a great job with that site. >> And then Wikibon.com is run by Peter Burris he's our Chief Research Officer He's been with us now for the better part of 2 years and he's got that team cranking on all kinds of research in cloud and AI and data orientation, the edge, and infrastructure for emerging applications like AI. >> One of the areas we're most excited about that we launched in 2017 was a new capability called Clipper. So we have this tool called Video Clipper as you know, John Furrier and I, when we met we had this vision for data driven media and innovation and we launched this tool we call video clipper that was developed by Kent Libbey and his team one of our newer executives that we brought in last year on the product side. >> What Video Clipper does is we transcribe every video now that we do, we'll transcribe this video, and then we synchronize the transcript with the video and we're able to then search video, highlight a text, a paragraph let's say, push a button and boom we've got a clip and that clip is ready to be shared throughout various social media platforms like Twitter, and LinkedIn, and Facebook and the like So very, very excited about that tool you're going to be hearing more about that We don't sell it as a separate tool, we integrate it as part of our offerings and got some new offerings that we're bringing to customers in 2018. >> One of the other really exciting things in 2017 we brought in a new chief revenue officer his name is Greg Theriault, I'm going to introduce you to him today Greg Theriault is with me here in studio, Greg, it's great see you, thanks for spending some time with us. >> [Greg] Thank you, Dave, thanks for the opportunity I've never been more excited. Let me tell you a little bit about myself I live in Concord, MA right around the studio here and I came from the IT industry. I've been there for a long time. I used to be at a small systems integrator, kind of the size of SiliconANGLE Media, building client servers, computing, got certified in Novell, and then I jumped into sales. I worked most recently at Forester Research and was there for almost 18 years, two decades, building the sales capabilities, always wrapped around the customers, but I am thrilled to be here today >> [Dave] So, Novell, when our network goes down can you help us fix that? >> It was about 20 years ago but, you know the history with Novell >> Yeah, another Utah company that somehow didn't make it, but for a while they were a little monopoly. So you've been in the business now for a couple of decades maybe, you know, think about what has happened over the last 20 years, what kind of changes have you seen? Share with us your perspectives. >> I've never seen so much disruption from client server, to social computing, to AI, now it's digital disruption in everything and you hear about this all the time in the news that companies are becoming software companies look around the corner, GE is now GE digital, they're trying to reinvent themselves, very, very exciting times. AI machine learning, autonomous computing, and then right around the corner there's block chain I mean that's the big buzz these days Also there's the autonomous vehicles, and let em give you a quick story About two years ago my son was born and I was fortunate enough to have a breakfast with the CEO of Tesla, and I asked him "Hey, he was born, what's going to happen in 16 years?" and JB said to me quite candidly, he said "if your son is driving a car that's not autonomous it won't be safe and he won't need a license" So, things are happening at an epic speed I don't know I these prediction will be true but it is Telsa >> [Dave] Won't need a license, you know it's funny, I mean, I don't know how you feel about it but when I turned 16 it was one of the most exciting days of a young person's life. You wonder what the social implications of that is if you don't need a license, I don't know maybe they can start driving at 14 or 13, you know whatever but you know what I'm saying? >> [Greg] Yeah That was a really exciting time we couldn't wait to get our permits and "Dad can I drive you to the dump?" Right? It's like... >> Self driving cars and self driving refrigerators, I mean, it's moving fast it's at an epic speed right now >> Well everything, and again, you take that business it's all about the data, as I said in my intro we always talk about data driven media we got so much data, you talk about digital transformation, philosophy is digital meets data >> Right >> and you talked about GE you're seeing all these companies now getting disrupted because digital allows people to move so fast, it allows companies like Apple to get into financial servies and you're seeing Amazon become a content company and it's really all around the data, isn't it? >> [Greg] Absolutely >> So, I wonder if you could share with our audience, SiliconANGLE Media, small company you came from a much larger firm, a big brand, Forester, your former company. What attracted you to SiliconANGLE Media? >> I think it was the fact that I jumped on airplane and went out to Palo Alto and met with your general managers. I think the innovation and the speed, the speed around it's in your DNA and then you took social computing, combined it with really computing power. And then I saw the Video Clipper tool. It's the fastest application I've ever seen to clip video and that innovation, the speed really attracted me to the company, to build really powerful content >> [Dave] Yeah it's been quite a ride since I met John Furrier in 2010. You know, John at the time, said "Dave, whatever we do we have to innovate. "We have to continue to invest in R&D" And those R&D experiments they don't always pay off but when one hits, like the Clipepr tool, it can be a home run so we're very excited about that. Share with us your philosophy, what can we expect from Greg Theriault? >> [Greg] Sure, I appreciate that. Well I'm happy to be here I actually blogged on LinkedIn over the weekend about my transition here, and I think it starts off with my family, my son and my wife they helped me, they grounded me, but my philosophy on business is to really be customer focused to hire the right people, train and coach, and build a different mindset which I call the growth mindset the sales rep of the future is being disrupted right now just like very other function. And that is absolutely pivotal. I think the buyers change, Dave. Faster in two years than the past 100 years the buyer is in control, you have to build systems, processes and technologies wrapped around how do you help the customer be successful at drygrowth and that's the biggest shift going on right now I mean sales right now, again, is being disrupted so social selling and things like that, I want to bring that kind of discipline and processes to SiliconANGLE Media >> [Dave] Well, what about social selling? A lot of people will, when social media really started to come into play, a lot of people say "well, we sell to IT people, and IT people, they don't have time to go on Twitter, they don't do Facebook" What's your perspective, has that changed you know and what about that? >> It's changed faster than I could ever believe buyers buy differently but they also need to see the different presence in social that's Twitter, that's LinkedIn, and that's also you have to be on the phone, you have to be in front of customers but it absolutely is pivotal that the new, let's call it a digital rep, needs to understand the tools to listen. Listen to the customer first and foremost, and it's a new channel but it's a channel here for a long time. Again, it's disrupting sales at an epic pace >> [Dave] So what are your priorities, looking out, say, near term, mid-term, long term? >> [Greg] To wrap my hand around the customer base you have to innovate with them, with the team we build And also to build the collaborative culture I'm really into culture and the ability to kind of game-afy the culture, grow the business, accelerate the business, and also develop the team that we build. I mean, the aspirations to where do they want to be in a couple years will help build the business and that's a global business as well >> Well, of course, a lot of the action in the tech business is out in Silicon Valley, and you and I are based here in the East coast, What can we expect in terms of your presence in Silicon Valley? >> I'll be on a plane a lot, and I don't mind that at all I mean, it's a flat country right now So I'll be on a plane, but also the heat is in Boston, New York, Chicago, but the Valley is where it's at so I'm going to be jumping on plane in two weeks to meet with the team, I can't wait >> [Dave] Well, we're excited Greg, to have an executive of your callabor join our team. >> [Greg] Thank you, appreciate that >> Congratulations, and look forward to many, many years of productive growth and adding value for our clients with you >> [Greg] Likewise, thank you >> Alright, you're welcome. Thanks for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Greg Theriault, we'll see you next time.