>> Now we're recording. >> All right. >> Appreciate that, Hannah. >> Yeah, so I mean, I think in general we continue to do very, very well as a company. I think like everybody, there's economic headwinds today that are unavoidable, but I think we have a couple things going for us. One, we're in the cyberspace, which I think is, for the most part, recession proof as an industry. I think the impact of a recession will impact some vendors and some categories, but in general, I think the industry is pretty resilient. It's like the power industry, no? Recession or not, you still need electricity to your house. Cybersecurity is almost becoming a utility like that as far as the needs of companies go. I think for us, we also have the ability to do the security, the security operations, for a lot of companies, and if you look at the value proposition, the ROI for the cost of less than one to maybe two or three, depending on how big you are as a customer, what you'd have to pay for half to three security operations people, we can give you a full security operations. And so the ROI is is almost kind of brain dead simple, and so that keeps us going pretty well. And I think the other areas, we remove all that complexity for people. So in a world where you got other problems to worry about, handling all the security complexity is something that adds to that ROI. So for us, I think what we're seeing is mostly is some of the larger deals are taking a little bit longer than they have, some of the large enterprise deals, 'cause I think they are being a little more cautious about how they spend it, but in general, business is still kind of cranking along. >> Anything you can share with me that you guys have talked about publicly in terms of any metrics, or what can you tell me other than cranking? >> Yeah, I mean, I would just say we're still very, very high growth, so I think our financial profile would kind of still put us clearly in the cyber unicorn position, but I think other than that, we don't really share business metrics as a private- >> Okay, so how about headcount? >> Still growing. So we're not growing as fast as we've been growing, but I don't think we were anyway. I think we kind of, we're getting to the point of critical mass. We'll start to grow in a more kind of normal course and speed. I don't think we overhired like a lot of companies did in the past, even though we added, almost doubled the size of the company in the last 18 months. So we're still hiring, but very kind of targeted to certain roles going forward 'cause I do think we're kind of at critical mass in some of the other functions. >> You disclose headcount or no? >> We do not. >> You don't, okay. And never have? >> Not that I'm aware of, no. >> Okay, on the macro, I don't know if security's recession proof, but it's less susceptible, let's say. I've had Nikesh Arora on recently, we're at Palo Alto's Ignite, and he was saying, "Look," it's just like you were saying, "Larger deal's a little harder." A lot of times customers, he was saying customers are breaking larger deals into smaller deals, more POCs, more approvals, more people to get through the approval, not whole, blah, blah, blah. Now they're a different animal, I understand, but are you seeing similar trends, and how are you dealing with that? >> Yeah, I think the exact same trends, and I think it's just in a world where spending a dollar matters, I think a lot more oversight comes into play, a lot more reviewers, and can you shave it down here? Can you reduce the scope of the project to save money there? And I think it just caused a lot of those things. I think, in the large enterprise, I think most of those deals for companies like us and Palo and CrowdStrike and kind of the upper tier companies, they'll still go through. I think they'll just going to take a lot longer, and, yeah, maybe they're 80% of what they would've been otherwise, but there's still a lot of business to be had out there. >> So how are you dealing with that? I mean, you're talking about you double the size of the company. Is it kind of more focused on go-to-market, more sort of, maybe not overlay, but sort of SE types that are going to be doing more handholding. How have you dealt with that? Or have you just sort of said, "Hey, it is what it is, and we're not going to, we're not going to tactically respond to. We got long-term direction"? >> Yeah, I think it's more the latter. I think for us, it's we've gone through all these things before. It just takes longer now. So a lot of the steps we're taking are the same steps. We're still involved in a lot of POCs, we're involved in a lot of demos, and I don't think that changed. It's just the time between your POC and when someone sends you the PO, there's five more people now got to review things and go through a budget committee and all sorts of stuff like that. I think where we're probably focused more now is adding more and more capabilities just so we continue to be on the front foot of innovation and being relevant to the market, and trying to create more differentiators for us and the competitors. That's something that's just built into our culture, and we don't want to slow that down. And so even though the business is still doing extremely, extremely well, we want to keep investing in kind of technology. >> So the deal size, is it fair to say the initial deal size for new accounts, while it may be smaller, you're adding more capabilities, and so over time, your average contract values will go up? Are you seeing that trend? Or am I- >> Well, I would say I don't even necessarily see our average deal size has gotten smaller. I think in total, it's probably gotten a little bigger. I think what happens is when something like this happens, the old cream rises to the top thing, I think, comes into play, and you'll see some organizations instead of doing a deal with three or four vendors, they may want to pick one or two and really kind of put a lot of energy behind that. For them, they're maybe spending a little less money, but for those vendors who are amongst those getting chosen, I think they're doing pretty good. So our average deal size is pretty stable. For us, it's just a temporal thing. It's just the larger deals take a little bit longer. I don't think we're seeing much of a deal velocity difference in our mid-market commercial spaces, but in the large enterprise it's a little bit slower. But for us, we have ambitious plans in our strategy or on how we want to execute and what we want to build, and so I think we want to just continue to make sure we go down that path technically. >> So I have some questions on sort of the target markets and the cohorts you're going after, and I have some product questions. I know we're somewhat limited on time, but the historical focus has been on SMB, and I know you guys have gone in into enterprise. I'm curious as to how that's going. Any guidance you can give me on mix? Or when I talk to the big guys, right, you know who they are, the big managed service providers, MSSPs, and they're like, "Poo poo on Arctic Wolf," like, "Oh, they're (groans)." I said, "Yeah, that's what they used to say about the PC. It's just a toy. Or Microsoft SQL Server." But so I kind of love that narrative for you guys, but I'm curious from your words as to, what is that enterprise? How's the historical business doing, and how's the entrance into the enterprise going? What kind of hurdles are you having, blockers are you having to remove? Any color you can give me there would be super helpful. >> Yeah, so I think our commercial S&B business continues to do really good. Our mid-market is a very strong market for us. And I think while a lot of companies like to focus purely on large enterprise, there's a lot more mid-market companies, and a much larger piece of the IT puzzle collectively is in mid-market than it is large enterprise. That being said, we started to get pulled into the large enterprise not because we're a toy but because we're quite a comprehensive service. And so I think what we're trying to do from a roadmap perspective is catch up with some of the kind of capabilities that a large enterprise would want from us that a potential mid-market customer wouldn't. In some case, it's not doing more. It's just doing it different. Like, so we have a very kind of hands-on engagement with some of our smaller customers, something we call our concierge. Some of the large enterprises want more of a hybrid where they do some stuff and you do some stuff. And so kind of building that capability into the platform is something that's really important for us. Just how we engage with them as far as giving 'em access to their data, the certain APIs they want, things of that nature, what we're building out for large enterprise, but the demand by large enterprise on our business is enormous. And so it's really just us kind of catching up with some of the kind of the features that they want that we lack today, but many of 'em are still signing up with us, obviously, and in lieu of that, knowing that it's coming soon. And so I think if you look at the growth of our large enterprise, it's one of our fastest growing segments, and I think it shows anything but we're a toy. I would be shocked, frankly, if there's an MSSP, and, of course, we don't see ourself as an MSSP, but I'd be shocked if any of them operate a platform at the scale that ours operates. >> Okay, so wow. A lot I want to unpack there. So just to follow up on that last question, you don't see yourself as an MSSP because why, you see yourselves as a technology platform? >> Yes, I mean, the vast, vast, vast majority of what we deliver is our own technology. So we integrate with third-party solutions mostly to bring in that telemetry. So we've built our own platform from the ground up. We have our own threat intelligence, our own detection logic. We do have our own agents and network sensors. MSSP is typically cobbling together other tools, third party off-the-shelf tools to run their SOC. Ours is all homegrown technology. So I have a whole group called Arctic Wolf Labs, is building, just cranking out ML-based detections, building out infrastructure to take feeds in from a variety of different sources. We have a full integration kind of effort where we integrate into other third parties. So when we go into a customer, we can leverage whatever they have, but at the same time, we produce some tech that if they're lacking in a certain area, we can provide that tech, particularly around things like endpoint agents and network sensors and the like. >> What about like identity, doing your own identity? >> So we don't do our own identity, but we take feeds in from things like Okta and Active Directory and the like, and we have detection logic built on top of that. So part of our value add is we were XDR before XDR was the cool thing to talk about, meaning we can look across multiple attack surfaces and come to a security conclusion where most EDR vendors started with looking just at the endpoint, right? And then they called themselves XDR because now they took in a network feed, but they still looked at it as a separate network detection. We actually look at the things across multiple attack surfaces and stitch 'em together to look at that from a security perspective. In some cases we have automatic detections that will fire. In other cases, we can surface some to a security professional who can go start pulling on that thread. >> So you don't need to purchase CrowdStrike software and integrate it. You have your own equivalent essentially. >> Well, we'll take a feed from the CrowdStrike endpoint into our platform. We don't have to rely on their detections and their alerts, and things of that nature. Now obviously anything they discover we pull in as well, it's just additional context, but we have all our own tech behind it. So we operate kind of at an MSSP scale. We have a similar value proposition in the sense that we'll use whatever the customer has, but once that data kind of comes into our pipeline, it's all our own homegrown tech from there. >> But I mean, what I like about the MSSP piece of your business is it's very high touch. It's very intimate. What I like about what you're saying is that it's software-like economics, so software, software-like part of it. >> That's what makes us the unicorn, right? Is we do have, our concierges is very hands-on. We continue to drive automation that makes our concierge security professionals more efficient, but we always want that customer to have that concierge person as, is almost an extension to their security team, or in some cases, for companies that don't even have a security team, as their security team. As we go down the path, as I mentioned, one of the things we want to be able to do is start to have a more flexible model where we can have that high touch if you want it. We can have the high touch on certain occasions, and you can do stuff. We can have low touch, like we can span the spectrum, but we never want to lose our kind of unique value proposition around the concierge, but we also want to make sure that we're providing an interface that any customer would want to use. >> So given that sort of software-like economics, I mean, services companies need this too, but especially in software, things like net revenue retention and churn are super important. How are those metrics looking? What can you share with me there? >> Yeah, I mean, again, we don't share those metrics publicly, but all's I can continue to repeat is, if you looked at all of our financial metrics, I think you would clearly put us in the unicorn category. I think very few companies are going to have the level of growth that we have on the amount of ARR that we have with the net revenue retention and the churn and upsell. All those aspects continue to be very, very strong for us. >> I want to go back to the sort of enterprise conversation. So large enterprises would engage with you as a complement to their existing SOC, correct? Is that a fair statement or not necessarily? >> It's in some cases. In some cases, they're looking to not have a SOC. So we run into a lot of cases where they want to replace their SIEM, and they want a solution like Arctic Wolf to do that. And so there's a poll, I can't remember, I think it was Forrester, IDC, one of them did it a couple years ago, and they found out that 70% of large enterprises do not want to build the SOC, and it's not 'cause they don't need one, it's 'cause they can't afford it, they can't staff it, they don't have the expertise. And you think about if you're a tech company or a bank, or something like that, of course you can do it, but if you're an international plumbing distributor, you're not going to (chuckles), someone's not going to graduate from Stanford with a cybersecurity degree and go, "Cool, I want to go work for a plumbing distributor in their SOC," right? So they're going to have trouble kind of bringing in the right talent, and as a result, it's difficult to go make a multimillion-dollar investment into a SOC if you're not going to get the quality people to operate it, so they turn to companies like us. >> Got it, so, okay, so you're talking earlier about capabilities that large enterprises require that there might be some gaps, you might lack some features. A couple questions there. One is, when you do some of those, I inferred some of that is integrations. Are those integrations sort of one-off snowflakes or are you finding that you're able to scale those across the large enterprises? That's my first question. >> Yeah, so most of the integrations are pretty straightforward. I think where we run into things that are kind of enterprise-centric, they definitely want open APIs, they want access to our platform, which we don't do today, which we are going to be doing, but we don't do that yet today. They want to do more of a SIEM replacement. So we're really kind of what we call an open XDR platform, so there's things that we would need to build to kind of do raw log ingestion. I mean, we do this today. We have raw log ingestion, we have log storage, we have log searching, but there's like some of the compliance scenarios that they need out of their SIEM. We don't do those today. And so that's kind of holding them back from getting off their SIEM and going fully onto a solution like ours. Then the other one is kind of the level of customization, so the ability to create a whole bunch of custom rules, and that ties back to, "I want to get off my SIEM. I've built all these custom rules in my SIEM, and it's great that you guys do all this automatic AI stuff in the background, but I need these very specific things to be executed on." And so trying to build an interface for them to be able to do that and then also simulate it, again, because, no matter how big they are running their SIEM and their SOC... Like, we talked to one of the largest financial institutions in the world. As far as we were told, they have the largest individual company SOC in the world, and we operate almost 15 times their size. So we always have to be careful because this is a cloud-based native platform, but someone creates some rule that then just craters the performance of the whole platform, so we have to build kind of those guardrails around it. So those are the things primarily that the large enterprises are asking for. Most of those issues are not holding them back from coming. They want to know they're coming, and we're working on all of those. >> Cool, and see, just aside, I was talking to CISO the other day, said, "If it weren't for my compliance and audit group, I would chuck my SIEM." I mean, everybody wants to get rid of their SIEM. >> I've never met anyone who likes their SIEM. >> Do you feel like you've achieved product market fit in the larger enterprise or is that still something that you're sorting out? >> So I think we know, like, we're on a path to do that. We're on a provable path to do that, so I don't think there's any surprises left. I think everything that we know we need to do for that is someone's writing code for it today. It's just a matter of getting it through the system and getting into production. So I feel pretty good about it. I think that's why we are seeing such a high growth rate in our large enterprise business, 'cause we share that feedback with some of those key customers. We have a Customer Advisory Board that we share a lot of this information with. So yeah, I mean, I feel pretty good about what we need to do. We're certainly operate at large enterprise scales, so taking in the amount of the volume of data they're going to have and the types of integrations they need. We're comfortable with that. It's just more or less the interfaces that a large enterprise would want that some of the smaller companies don't ask for. >> Do you have enough tenure in the market to get a sense as to stickiness or even indicators that will lead toward retention? Have you been at it long enough in the enterprise or you still, again, figuring that out? >> Yeah, no, I think we've been at it long enough, and our retention rates are extremely high. If anything, kind of our net retention rates, well over 100% 'cause we have opportunities to upsell into new modules and expanding the coverage of what they have today. I think the areas that if you cornered enterprise that use us and things they would complain about are things I just told you about, right? There's still some things I want to do in my Splunk, and I need an API to pull my data out and put it in my Splunk and stuff like that, and those are the things we want to enable. >> Yeah, so I can't wait till you guys go public because you got Snowflake up here, and you got Veritas down here, and I'm very curious as to where you guys go. When's the IPO? You want to tell me that? (chuckling) >> Unfortunately, it's not up to us right now. You got to get the markets- >> Yeah, I hear you. Right, if the market were better. Well, if the market were better, you think you'd be out? >> Yeah, I mean, we'd certainly be a viable candidate to go. >> Yeah, there you go. I have a question for you because I don't have a SOC. I run a small business with my co-CEO. We're like 30, 40 people W-2s, we got another 50 or so contractors, and I'm always like have one eye, sleep with one eye open 'cause of security. What is your ideal SMB customer? Think S. >> Yeah. >> Would I fit? >> Yeah, I mean you're you're right in the sweet spot. I think where the company started and where we still have a lot of value proposition, which is companies like, like you said it, you sleep with one eye open, but you don't have necessarily the technical acumen to be able to do that security for yourself, and that's where we fit in. We bring kind of this whole security, we call it Security Operations Cloud, to bear, and we have some of the best professionals in the world who can basically be your SOC for less than it would cost you to hire somebody right out of college to do IT stuff. And so the value proposition's there. You're going to get the best of the best, providing you a kind of a security service that you couldn't possibly build on your own, and that way you can go to bed at night and close both eyes. >> So (chuckling) I'm sure something else would keep me up. But so in thinking about that, our Amazon bill keeps growing and growing and growing. What would it, and I presume I can engage with you on a monthly basis, right? As a consumption model, or how's the pricing work? >> Yeah, so there's two models that we have. So typically the kind of the monthly billing type of models would be through one of our MSP partners, where they have monthly billing capabilities. Usually direct with us is more of a longer term deal, could be one, two, or three, or it's up to the customer. And so we have both of those engagement models. Were doing more and more and more through MSPs today because of that model you just described, and they do kind of target the very S in the SMB as well. >> I mean, rough numbers, even ranges. If I wanted to go with the MSP monthly, I mean, what would a small company like mine be looking at a month? >> Honestly, I do not even know the answer to that. >> We're not talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a month? >> No. God, no. God, no. No, no, no. >> I mean, order of magnitude, we're talking thousands, tens of thousands? >> Thousands, on a monthly basis. Yeah. >> Yeah, yeah. Thousands per month. So if I were to budget between 20 and $50,000 a year, I'm definitely within the envelope. Is that fair? I mean, I'm giving a wide range >> That's fair. just to try to make- >> No, that's fair. >> And if I wanted to go direct with you, I would be signing up for a longer term agreement, correct, like I do with Salesforce? >> Yeah, yeah, a year. A year would, I think, be the minimum for that, and, yeah, I think the budget you set aside is kind of right in the sweet spot there. >> Yeah, I'm interested, I'm going to... Have a sales guy call me (chuckles) somehow. >> All right, will do. >> No, I'm serious. I want to start >> I will. >> investigating these things because we sell to very large organizations. I mean, name a tech company. That's our client base, except for Arctic Wolf. We should talk about that. And increasingly they're paranoid about data protection agreements, how you're protecting your data, our data. We write a lot of software and deliver it as part of our services, so it's something that's increasingly important. It's certainly a board level discussion and beyond, and most large organizations and small companies oftentimes don't think about it or try not to. They just put their head in the sand and, "We don't want to be doing that," so. >> Yeah, I will definitely have someone get in touch with you. >> Cool. Let's see. Anything else you can tell me on the product side? Are there things that you're doing that we talked about, the gaps at the high end that you're, some of the features that you're building in, which was super helpful. Anything in the SMB space that you want to share? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we're doing technically now is really trying to drive more and more automation and efficiency through our operations, and that comes through really kind of a generous use of AI. So building models around more efficient detections based upon signal, but also automating the actions of our operators so we can start to learn through the interface. When they do A and B, they always do C. Well, let's just do C for them, stuff like that. Then also building more automation as far as the response back to third-party solutions as well so we can remediate more directly on third-party products without having to get into the consoles or having our customers do it. So that's really just trying to drive efficiency in the system, and that helps provide better security outcomes but also has a big impact on our margins as well. >> I know you got to go, but I want to show you something real quick. I have data. I do a weekly program called "Breaking Analysis," and I have a partner called ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, and they have a platform. I don't know if you can see this. They have a survey platform, and each quarter, they do a survey of about 1,500 IT decision makers. They also have a survey on, they call ETS, Emerging Technology Survey. So it's private companies. And I don't want to go into it too much, but this is a sentiment graph. This is net sentiment. >> Just so you know, all I see is a white- >> Yeah, just a white bar. >> Oh, that's weird. Oh, whiteboard. Oh, here we go. How about that? >> There you go. >> Yeah, so this is a sentiment graph. So this is net sentiment and this is mindshare. And if I go to Arctic Wolf... So it's typical security, right? The 8,000 companies. And when I go here, what impresses me about this is you got a decent mindshare, that's this axis, but you've also got an N in the survey. It's about 1,500 in the survey, It's 479 Arctic Wolf customers responded to this. 57% don't know you. Oh, sorry, they're aware of you, but no plan to evaluate; 19% plan to evaluate, 7% are evaluating; 11%, no plan to utilize even though they've evaluated you; and 1% say they've evaluated you and plan to utilize. It's a small percentage, but actually it's not bad in the random sample of the world about that. And so obviously you want to get that number up, but this is a really impressive position right here that I wanted to just share with you. I do a lot of analysis weekly, and this is a really, it's completely independent survey, and you're sort of separating from the pack, as you can see. So kind of- >> Well, it's good to see that. And I think that just is a further indicator of what I was telling you. We continue to have a strong financial performance. >> Yeah, in a good market. Okay, well, thanks you guys. And hey, if I can get this recording, Hannah, I may even figure out how to write it up. (chuckles) That would be super helpful. >> Yes. We'll get that up. >> And David or Hannah, if you can send me David's contact info so I can get a salesperson in touch with him. (Hannah chuckling) >> Yeah, great. >> Yeah, we'll work on that as well. Thanks so much for both your time. >> Thanks a lot. It was great talking with you. >> Thanks, you guys. Great to meet you. >> Thank you. >> Bye. >> Bye.

(upbeat music beginning) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Making predictions about the future of enterprise tech is more challenging if you strive to lay down forecasts that are measurable. In other words, if you make a prediction, you should be able to look back a year later and say, with some degree of certainty, whether the prediction came true or not, with evidence to back that up. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we aim to do just that, with predictions about the macro IT spending environment, cost optimization, security, lots to talk about there, generative AI, cloud, and of course supercloud, blockchain adoption, data platforms, including commentary on Databricks, snowflake, and other key players, automation, events, and we may even have some bonus predictions around quantum computing, and perhaps some other areas. To make all this happen, we welcome back, for the third year in a row, my colleague and friend Eric Bradley from ETR. Eric, thanks for all you do for the community, and thanks for being part of this program. Again. >> I wouldn't miss it for the world. I always enjoy this one. Dave, good to see you. >> Yeah, so let me bring up this next slide and show you, actually come back to me if you would. I got to show the audience this. These are the inbounds that we got from PR firms starting in October around predictions. They know we do prediction posts. And so they'll send literally thousands and thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts in the industry, technologists, consultants, et cetera. And if you bring up the slide I can show you sort of the pattern that developed here. 40% of these thousands of predictions were from cyber. You had AI and data. If you combine those, it's still not close to cyber. Cost optimization was a big thing. Of course, cloud, some on DevOps, and software. Digital... Digital transformation got, you know, some lip service and SaaS. And then there was other, it's kind of around 2%. So quite remarkable, when you think about the focus on cyber, Eric. >> Yeah, there's two reasons why I think it makes sense, though. One, the cybersecurity companies have a lot of cash, so therefore the PR firms might be working a little bit harder for them than some of their other clients. (laughs) And then secondly, as you know, for multiple years now, when we do our macro survey, we ask, "What's your number one spending priority?" And again, it's security. It just isn't going anywhere. It just stays at the top. So I'm actually not that surprised by that little pie chart there, but I was shocked that SaaS was only 5%. You know, going back 10 years ago, that would've been the only thing anyone was talking about. >> Yeah. So true. All right, let's get into it. First prediction, we always start with kind of tech spending. Number one is tech spending increases between four and 5%. ETR has currently got it at 4.6% coming into 2023. This has been a consistently downward trend all year. We started, you know, much, much higher as we've been reporting. Bottom line is the fed is still in control. They're going to ease up on tightening, is the expectation, they're going to shoot for a soft landing. But you know, my feeling is this slingshot economy is going to continue, and it's going to continue to confound, whether it's supply chains or spending. The, the interesting thing about the ETR data, Eric, and I want you to comment on this, the largest companies are the most aggressive to cut. They're laying off, smaller firms are spending faster. They're actually growing at a much larger, faster rate as are companies in EMEA. And that's a surprise. That's outpacing the US and APAC. Chime in on this, Eric. >> Yeah, I was surprised on all of that. First on the higher level spending, we are definitely seeing it coming down, but the interesting thing here is headlines are making it worse. The huge research shop recently said 0% growth. We're coming in at 4.6%. And just so everyone knows, this is not us guessing, we asked 1,525 IT decision-makers what their budget growth will be, and they came in at 4.6%. Now there's a huge disparity, as you mentioned. The Fortune 500, global 2000, barely at 2% growth, but small, it's at 7%. So we're at a situation right now where the smaller companies are still playing a little bit of catch up on digital transformation, and they're spending money. The largest companies that have the most to lose from a recession are being more trepidatious, obviously. So they're playing a "Wait and see." And I hope we don't talk ourselves into a recession. Certainly the headlines and some of their research shops are helping it along. But another interesting comment here is, you know, energy and utilities used to be called an orphan and widow stock group, right? They are spending more than anyone, more than financials insurance, more than retail consumer. So right now it's being driven by mid, small, and energy and utilities. They're all spending like gangbusters, like nothing's happening. And it's the rest of everyone else that's being very cautious. >> Yeah, so very unpredictable right now. All right, let's go to number two. Cost optimization remains a major theme in 2023. We've been reporting on this. You've, we've shown a chart here. What's the primary method that your organization plans to use? You asked this question of those individuals that cited that they were going to reduce their spend and- >> Mhm. >> consolidating redundant vendors, you know, still leads the way, you know, far behind, cloud optimization is second, but it, but cloud continues to outpace legacy on-prem spending, no doubt. Somebody, it was, the guy's name was Alexander Feiglstorfer from Storyblok, sent in a prediction, said "All in one becomes extinct." Now, generally I would say I disagree with that because, you know, as we know over the years, suites tend to win out over, you know, individual, you know, point products. But I think what's going to happen is all in one is going to remain the norm for these larger companies that are cutting back. They want to consolidate redundant vendors, and the smaller companies are going to stick with that best of breed and be more aggressive and try to compete more effectively. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I'm seeing much more consolidation in vendors, but also consolidation in functionality. We're seeing people building out new functionality, whether it's, we're going to talk about this later, so I don't want to steal too much of our thunder right now, but data and security also, we're seeing a functionality creep. So I think there's further consolidation happening here. I think niche solutions are going to be less likely, and platform solutions are going to be more likely in a spending environment where you want to reduce your vendors. You want to have one bill to pay, not 10. Another thing on this slide, real quick if I can before I move on, is we had a bunch of people write in and some of the answer options that aren't on this graph but did get cited a lot, unfortunately, is the obvious reduction in staff, hiring freezes, and delaying hardware, were three of the top write-ins. And another one was offshore outsourcing. So in addition to what we're seeing here, there were a lot of write-in options, and I just thought it would be important to state that, but essentially the cost optimization is by and far the highest one, and it's growing. So it's actually increased in our citations over the last year. >> And yeah, specifically consolidating redundant vendors. And so I actually thank you for bringing that other up, 'cause I had asked you, Eric, is there any evidence that repatriation is going on and we don't see it in the numbers, we don't see it even in the other, there was, I think very little or no mention of cloud repatriation, even though it might be happening in this in a smattering. >> Not a single mention, not one single mention. I went through it for you. Yep. Not one write-in. >> All right, let's move on. Number three, security leads M&A in 2023. Now you might say, "Oh, well that's a layup," but let me set this up Eric, because I didn't really do a great job with the slide. I hid the, what you've done, because you basically took, this is from the emerging technology survey with 1,181 responses from November. And what we did is we took Palo Alto and looked at the overlap in Palo Alto Networks accounts with these vendors that were showing on this chart. And Eric, I'm going to ask you to explain why we put a circle around OneTrust, but let me just set it up, and then have you comment on the slide and take, give us more detail. We're seeing private company valuations are off, you know, 10 to 40%. We saw a sneak, do a down round, but pretty good actually only down 12%. We've seen much higher down rounds. Palo Alto Networks we think is going to get busy. Again, they're an inquisitive company, they've been sort of quiet lately, and we think CrowdStrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Zscaler, we're predicting all of those will make some acquisitions and we're thinking that the targets are somewhere in this mess of security taxonomy. Other thing we're predicting AI meets cyber big time in 2023, we're going to probably going to see some acquisitions of those companies that are leaning into AI. We've seen some of that with Palo Alto. And then, you know, your comment to me, Eric, was "The RSA conference is going to be insane, hopping mad, "crazy this April," (Eric laughing) but give us your take on this data, and why the red circle around OneTrust? Take us back to that slide if you would, Alex. >> Sure. There's a few things here. First, let me explain what we're looking at. So because we separate the public companies and the private companies into two separate surveys, this allows us the ability to cross-reference that data. So what we're doing here is in our public survey, the tesis, everyone who cited some spending with Palo Alto, meaning they're a Palo Alto customer, we then cross-reference that with the private tech companies. Who also are they spending with? So what you're seeing here is an overlap. These companies that we have circled are doing the best in Palo Alto's accounts. Now, Palo Alto went and bought Twistlock a few years ago, which this data slide predicted, to be quite honest. And so I don't know if they necessarily are going to go after Snyk. Snyk, sorry. They already have something in that space. What they do need, however, is more on the authentication space. So I'm looking at OneTrust, with a 45% overlap in their overall net sentiment. That is a company that's already existing in their accounts and could be very synergistic to them. BeyondTrust as well, authentication identity. This is something that Palo needs to do to move more down that zero trust path. Now why did I pick Palo first? Because usually they're very inquisitive. They've been a little quiet lately. Secondly, if you look at the backdrop in the markets, the IPO freeze isn't going to last forever. Sooner or later, the IPO markets are going to open up, and some of these private companies are going to tap into public equity. In the meantime, however, cash funding on the private side is drying up. If they need another round, they're not going to get it, and they're certainly not going to get it at the valuations they were getting. So we're seeing valuations maybe come down where they're a touch more attractive, and Palo knows this isn't going to last forever. Cisco knows that, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all these companies that are trying to make a push to become that vendor that you're consolidating in, around, they have a chance now, they have a window where they need to go make some acquisitions. And that's why I believe leading up to RSA, we're going to see some movement. I think it's going to pretty, a really exciting time in security right now. >> Awesome. Thank you. Great explanation. All right, let's go on the next one. Number four is, it relates to security. Let's stay there. Zero trust moves from hype to reality in 2023. Now again, you might say, "Oh yeah, that's a layup." A lot of these inbounds that we got are very, you know, kind of self-serving, but we always try to put some meat in the bone. So first thing we do is we pull out some commentary from, Eric, your roundtable, your insights roundtable. And we have a CISO from a global hospitality firm says, "For me that's the highest priority." He's talking about zero trust because it's the best ROI, it's the most forward-looking, and it enables a lot of the business transformation activities that we want to do. CISOs tell me that they actually can drive forward transformation projects that have zero trust, and because they can accelerate them, because they don't have to go through the hurdle of, you know, getting, making sure that it's secure. Second comment, zero trust closes that last mile where once you're authenticated, they open up the resource to you in a zero trust way. That's a CISO of a, and a managing director of a cyber risk services enterprise. Your thoughts on this? >> I can be here all day, so I'm going to try to be quick on this one. This is not a fluff piece on this one. There's a couple of other reasons this is happening. One, the board finally gets it. Zero trust at first was just a marketing hype term. Now the board understands it, and that's why CISOs are able to push through it. And what they finally did was redefine what it means. Zero trust simply means moving away from hardware security, moving towards software-defined security, with authentication as its base. The board finally gets that, and now they understand that this is necessary and it's being moved forward. The other reason it's happening now is hybrid work is here to stay. We weren't really sure at first, large companies were still trying to push people back to the office, and it's going to happen. The pendulum will swing back, but hybrid work's not going anywhere. By basically on our own data, we're seeing that 69% of companies expect remote and hybrid to be permanent, with only 30% permanent in office. Zero trust works for a hybrid environment. So all of that is the reason why this is happening right now. And going back to our previous prediction, this is why we're picking Palo, this is why we're picking Zscaler to make these acquisitions. Palo Alto needs to be better on the authentication side, and so does Zscaler. They're both fantastic on zero trust network access, but they need the authentication software defined aspect, and that's why we think this is going to happen. One last thing, in that CISO round table, I also had somebody say, "Listen, Zscaler is incredible. "They're doing incredibly well pervading the enterprise, "but their pricing's getting a little high," and they actually think Palo Alto is well-suited to start taking some of that share, if Palo can make one move. >> Yeah, Palo Alto's consolidation story is very strong. Here's my question and challenge. Do you and me, so I'm always hardcore about, okay, you've got to have evidence. I want to look back at these things a year from now and say, "Did we get it right? Yes or no?" If we got it wrong, we'll tell you we got it wrong. So how are we going to measure this? I'd say a couple things, and you can chime in. One is just the number of vendors talking about it. That's, but the marketing always leads the reality. So the second part of that is we got to get evidence from the buying community. Can you help us with that? >> (laughs) Luckily, that's what I do. I have a data company that asks thousands of IT decision-makers what they're adopting and what they're increasing spend on, as well as what they're decreasing spend on and what they're replacing. So I have snapshots in time over the last 11 years where I can go ahead and compare and contrast whether this adoption is happening or not. So come back to me in 12 months and I'll let you know. >> Now, you know, I will. Okay, let's bring up the next one. Number five, generative AI hits where the Metaverse missed. Of course everybody's talking about ChatGPT, we just wrote last week in a breaking analysis with John Furrier and Sarjeet Joha our take on that. We think 2023 does mark a pivot point as natural language processing really infiltrates enterprise tech just as Amazon turned the data center into an API. We think going forward, you're going to be interacting with technology through natural language, through English commands or other, you know, foreign language commands, and investors are lining up, all the VCs are getting excited about creating something competitive to ChatGPT, according to (indistinct) a hundred million dollars gets you a seat at the table, gets you into the game. (laughing) That's before you have to start doing promotion. But he thinks that's what it takes to actually create a clone or something equivalent. We've seen stuff from, you know, the head of Facebook's, you know, AI saying, "Oh, it's really not that sophisticated, ChatGPT, "it's kind of like IBM Watson, it's great engineering, "but you know, we've got more advanced technology." We know Google's working on some really interesting stuff. But here's the thing. ETR just launched this survey for the February survey. It's in the field now. We circle open AI in this category. They weren't even in the survey, Eric, last quarter. So 52% of the ETR survey respondents indicated a positive sentiment toward open AI. I added up all the sort of different bars, we could double click on that. And then I got this inbound from Scott Stevenson of Deep Graham. He said "AI is recession-proof." I don't know if that's the case, but it's a good quote. So bring this back up and take us through this. Explain this chart for us, if you would. >> First of all, I like Scott's quote better than the Facebook one. I think that's some sour grapes. Meta just spent an insane amount of money on the Metaverse and that's a dud. Microsoft just spent money on open AI and it is hot, undoubtedly hot. We've only been in the field with our current ETS survey for a week. So my caveat is it's preliminary data, but I don't care if it's preliminary data. (laughing) We're getting a sneak peek here at what is the number one net sentiment and mindshare leader in the entire machine-learning AI sector within a week. It's beating Data- >> 600. 600 in. >> It's beating Databricks. And we all know Databricks is a huge established enterprise company, not only in machine-learning AI, but it's in the top 10 in the entire survey. We have over 400 vendors in this survey. It's number eight overall, already. In a week. This is not hype. This is real. And I could go on the NLP stuff for a while. Not only here are we seeing it in open AI and machine-learning and AI, but we're seeing NLP in security. It's huge in email security. It's completely transforming that area. It's one of the reasons I thought Palo might take Abnormal out. They're doing such a great job with NLP in this email side, and also in the data prep tools. NLP is going to take out data prep tools. If we have time, I'll discuss that later. But yeah, this is, to me this is a no-brainer, and we're already seeing it in the data. >> Yeah, John Furrier called, you know, the ChatGPT introduction. He said it reminded him of the Netscape moment, when we all first saw Netscape Navigator and went, "Wow, it really could be transformative." All right, number six, the cloud expands to supercloud as edge computing accelerates and CloudFlare is a big winner in 2023. We've reported obviously on cloud, multi-cloud, supercloud and CloudFlare, basically saying what multi-cloud should have been. We pulled this quote from Atif Kahn, who is the founder and CTO of Alkira, thanks, one of the inbounds, thank you. "In 2023, highly distributed IT environments "will become more the norm "as organizations increasingly deploy hybrid cloud, "multi-cloud and edge settings..." Eric, from one of your round tables, "If my sources from edge computing are coming "from the cloud, that means I have my workloads "running in the cloud. "There is no one better than CloudFlare," That's a senior director of IT architecture at a huge financial firm. And then your analysis shows CloudFlare really growing in pervasion, that sort of market presence in the dataset, dramatically, to near 20%, leading, I think you had told me that they're even ahead of Google Cloud in terms of momentum right now. >> That was probably the biggest shock to me in our January 2023 tesis, which covers the public companies in the cloud computing sector. CloudFlare has now overtaken GCP in overall spending, and I was shocked by that. It's already extremely pervasive in networking, of course, for the edge networking side, and also in security. This is the number one leader in SaaSi, web access firewall, DDoS, bot protection, by your definition of supercloud, which we just did a couple of weeks ago, and I really enjoyed that by the way Dave, I think CloudFlare is the one that fits your definition best, because it's bringing all of these aspects together, and most importantly, it's cloud agnostic. It does not need to rely on Azure or AWS to do this. It has its own cloud. So I just think it's, when we look at your definition of supercloud, CloudFlare is the poster child. >> You know, what's interesting about that too, is a lot of people are poo-pooing CloudFlare, "Ah, it's, you know, really kind of not that sophisticated." "You don't have as many tools," but to your point, you're can have those tools in the cloud, Cloudflare's doing serverless on steroids, trying to keep things really simple, doing a phenomenal job at, you know, various locations around the world. And they're definitely one to watch. Somebody put them on my radar (laughing) a while ago and said, "Dave, you got to do a breaking analysis on CloudFlare." And so I want to thank that person. I can't really name them, 'cause they work inside of a giant hyperscaler. But- (Eric laughing) (Dave chuckling) >> Real quickly, if I can from a competitive perspective too, who else is there? They've already taken share from Akamai, and Fastly is their really only other direct comp, and they're not there. And these guys are in poll position and they're the only game in town right now. I just, I don't see it slowing down. >> I thought one of your comments from your roundtable I was reading, one of the folks said, you know, CloudFlare, if my workloads are in the cloud, they are, you know, dominant, they said not as strong with on-prem. And so Akamai is doing better there. I'm like, "Okay, where would you want to be?" (laughing) >> Yeah, which one of those two would you rather be? >> Right? Anyway, all right, let's move on. Number seven, blockchain continues to look for a home in the enterprise, but devs will slowly begin to adopt in 2023. You know, blockchains have got a lot of buzz, obviously crypto is, you know, the killer app for blockchain. Senior IT architect in financial services from your, one of your insight roundtables said quote, "For enterprises to adopt a new technology, "there have to be proven turnkey solutions. "My experience in talking with my peers are, "blockchain is still an open-source component "where you have to build around it." Now I want to thank Ravi Mayuram, who's the CTO of Couchbase sent in, you know, one of the predictions, he said, "DevOps will adopt blockchain, specifically Ethereum." And he referenced actually in his email to me, Solidity, which is the programming language for Ethereum, "will be in every DevOps pro's playbook, "mirroring the boom in machine-learning. "Newer programming languages like Solidity "will enter the toolkits of devs." His point there, you know, Solidity for those of you don't know, you know, Bitcoin is not programmable. Solidity, you know, came out and that was their whole shtick, and they've been improving that, and so forth. But it, Eric, it's true, it really hasn't found its home despite, you know, the potential for smart contracts. IBM's pushing it, VMware has had announcements, and others, really hasn't found its way in the enterprise yet. >> Yeah, and I got to be honest, I don't think it's going to, either. So when we did our top trends series, this was basically chosen as an anti-prediction, I would guess, that it just continues to not gain hold. And the reason why was that first comment, right? It's very much a niche solution that requires a ton of custom work around it. You can't just plug and play it. And at the end of the day, let's be very real what this technology is, it's a database ledger, and we already have database ledgers in the enterprise. So why is this a priority to move to a different database ledger? It's going to be very niche cases. I like the CTO comment from Couchbase about it being adopted by DevOps. I agree with that, but it has to be a DevOps in a very specific use case, and a very sophisticated use case in financial services, most likely. And that's not across the entire enterprise. So I just think it's still going to struggle to get its foothold for a little bit longer, if ever. >> Great, thanks. Okay, let's move on. Number eight, AWS Databricks, Google Snowflake lead the data charge with Microsoft. Keeping it simple. So let's unpack this a little bit. This is the shared accounts peer position for, I pulled data platforms in for analytics, machine-learning and AI and database. So I could grab all these accounts or these vendors and see how they compare in those three sectors. Analytics, machine-learning and database. Snowflake and Databricks, you know, they're on a crash course, as you and I have talked about. They're battling to be the single source of truth in analytics. They're, there's going to be a big focus. They're already started. It's going to be accelerated in 2023 on open formats. Iceberg, Python, you know, they're all the rage. We heard about Iceberg at Snowflake Summit, last summer or last June. Not a lot of people had heard of it, but of course the Databricks crowd, who knows it well. A lot of other open source tooling. There's a company called DBT Labs, which you're going to talk about in a minute. George Gilbert put them on our radar. We just had Tristan Handy, the CEO of DBT labs, on at supercloud last week. They are a new disruptor in data that's, they're essentially making, they're API-ifying, if you will, KPIs inside the data warehouse and dramatically simplifying that whole data pipeline. So really, you know, the ETL guys should be shaking in their boots with them. Coming back to the slide. Google really remains focused on BigQuery adoption. Customers have complained to me that they would like to use Snowflake with Google's AI tools, but they're being forced to go to BigQuery. I got to ask Google about that. AWS continues to stitch together its bespoke data stores, that's gone down that "Right tool for the right job" path. David Foyer two years ago said, "AWS absolutely is going to have to solve that problem." We saw them start to do it in, at Reinvent, bringing together NoETL between Aurora and Redshift, and really trying to simplify those worlds. There's going to be more of that. And then Microsoft, they're just making it cheap and easy to use their stuff, you know, despite some of the complaints that we hear in the community, you know, about things like Cosmos, but Eric, your take? >> Yeah, my concern here is that Snowflake and Databricks are fighting each other, and it's allowing AWS and Microsoft to kind of catch up against them, and I don't know if that's the right move for either of those two companies individually, Azure and AWS are building out functionality. Are they as good? No they're not. The other thing to remember too is that AWS and Azure get paid anyway, because both Databricks and Snowflake run on top of 'em. So (laughing) they're basically collecting their toll, while these two fight it out with each other, and they build out functionality. I think they need to stop focusing on each other, a little bit, and think about the overall strategy. Now for Databricks, we know they came out first as a machine-learning AI tool. They were known better for that spot, and now they're really trying to play catch-up on that data storage compute spot, and inversely for Snowflake, they were killing it with the compute separation from storage, and now they're trying to get into the MLAI spot. I actually wouldn't be surprised to see them make some sort of acquisition. Frank Slootman has been a little bit quiet, in my opinion there. The other thing to mention is your comment about DBT Labs. If we look at our emerging technology survey, last survey when this came out, DBT labs, number one leader in that data integration space, I'm going to just pull it up real quickly. It looks like they had a 33% overall net sentiment to lead data analytics integration. So they are clearly growing, it's fourth straight survey consecutively that they've grown. The other name we're seeing there a little bit is Cribl, but DBT labs is by far the number one player in this space. >> All right. Okay, cool. Moving on, let's go to number nine. With Automation mixer resurgence in 2023, we're showing again data. The x axis is overlap or presence in the dataset, and the vertical axis is shared net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum. As always, you've seen UI path and Microsoft Power Automate up until the right, that red line, that 40% line is generally considered elevated. UI path is really separating, creating some distance from Automation Anywhere, they, you know, previous quarters they were much closer. Microsoft Power Automate came on the scene in a big way, they loom large with this "Good enough" approach. I will say this, I, somebody sent me a results of a (indistinct) survey, which showed UiPath actually had more mentions than Power Automate, which was surprising, but I think that's not been the case in the ETR data set. We're definitely seeing a shift from back office to front soft office kind of workloads. Having said that, software testing is emerging as a mainstream use case, we're seeing ML and AI become embedded in end-to-end automations, and low-code is serving the line of business. And so this, we think, is going to increasingly have appeal to organizations in the coming year, who want to automate as much as possible and not necessarily, we've seen a lot of layoffs in tech, and people... You're going to have to fill the gaps with automation. That's a trend that's going to continue. >> Yep, agreed. At first that comment about Microsoft Power Automate having less citations than UiPath, that's shocking to me. I'm looking at my chart right here where Microsoft Power Automate was cited by over 60% of our entire survey takers, and UiPath at around 38%. Now don't get me wrong, 38% pervasion's fantastic, but you know you're not going to beat an entrenched Microsoft. So I don't really know where that comment came from. So UiPath, looking at it alone, it's doing incredibly well. It had a huge rebound in its net score this last survey. It had dropped going through the back half of 2022, but we saw a big spike in the last one. So it's got a net score of over 55%. A lot of people citing adoption and increasing. So that's really what you want to see for a name like this. The problem is that just Microsoft is doing its playbook. At the end of the day, I'm going to do a POC, why am I going to pay more for UiPath, or even take on another separate bill, when we know everyone's consolidating vendors, if my license already includes Microsoft Power Automate? It might not be perfect, it might not be as good, but what I'm hearing all the time is it's good enough, and I really don't want another invoice. >> Right. So how does UiPath, you know, and Automation Anywhere, how do they compete with that? Well, the way they compete with it is they got to have a better product. They got a product that's 10 times better. You know, they- >> Right. >> they're not going to compete based on where the lowest cost, Microsoft's got that locked up, or where the easiest to, you know, Microsoft basically give it away for free, and that's their playbook. So that's, you know, up to UiPath. UiPath brought on Rob Ensslin, I've interviewed him. Very, very capable individual, is now Co-CEO. So he's kind of bringing that adult supervision in, and really tightening up the go to market. So, you know, we know this company has been a rocket ship, and so getting some control on that and really getting focused like a laser, you know, could be good things ahead there for that company. Okay. >> One of the problems, if I could real quick Dave, is what the use cases are. When we first came out with RPA, everyone was super excited about like, "No, UiPath is going to be great for super powerful "projects, use cases." That's not what RPA is being used for. As you mentioned, it's being used for mundane tasks, so it's not automating complex things, which I think UiPath was built for. So if you were going to get UiPath, and choose that over Microsoft, it's going to be 'cause you're doing it for more powerful use case, where it is better. But the problem is that's not where the enterprise is using it. The enterprise are using this for base rote tasks, and simply, Microsoft Power Automate can do that. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I've had people on theCube that are both Microsoft Power Automate customers and UiPath customers, and I've asked them, "Well you know, "how do you differentiate between the two?" And they've said to me, "Look, our users and personal productivity users, "they like Power Automate, "they can use it themselves, and you know, "it doesn't take a lot of, you know, support on our end." The flip side is you could do that with UiPath, but like you said, there's more of a focus now on end-to-end enterprise automation and building out those capabilities. So it's increasingly a value play, and that's going to be obviously the challenge going forward. Okay, my last one, and then I think you've got some bonus ones. Number 10, hybrid events are the new category. Look it, if I can get a thousand inbounds that are largely self-serving, I can do my own here, 'cause we're in the events business. (Eric chuckling) Here's the prediction though, and this is a trend we're seeing, the number of physical events is going to dramatically increase. That might surprise people, but most of the big giant events are going to get smaller. The exception is AWS with Reinvent, I think Snowflake's going to continue to grow. So there are examples of physical events that are growing, but generally, most of the big ones are getting smaller, and there's going to be many more smaller intimate regional events and road shows. These micro-events, they're going to be stitched together. Digital is becoming a first class citizen, so people really got to get their digital acts together, and brands are prioritizing earned media, and they're beginning to build their own news networks, going direct to their customers. And so that's a trend we see, and I, you know, we're right in the middle of it, Eric, so you know we're going to, you mentioned RSA, I think that's perhaps going to be one of those crazy ones that continues to grow. It's shrunk, and then it, you know, 'cause last year- >> Yeah, it did shrink. >> right, it was the last one before the pandemic, and then they sort of made another run at it last year. It was smaller but it was very vibrant, and I think this year's going to be huge. Global World Congress is another one, we're going to be there end of Feb. That's obviously a big big show, but in general, the brands and the technology vendors, even Oracle is going to scale down. I don't know about Salesforce. We'll see. You had a couple of bonus predictions. Quantum and maybe some others? Bring us home. >> Yeah, sure. I got a few more. I think we touched upon one, but I definitely think the data prep tools are facing extinction, unfortunately, you know, the Talons Informatica is some of those names. The problem there is that the BI tools are kind of including data prep into it already. You know, an example of that is Tableau Prep Builder, and then in addition, Advanced NLP is being worked in as well. ThoughtSpot, Intelius, both often say that as their selling point, Tableau has Ask Data, Click has Insight Bot, so you don't have to really be intelligent on data prep anymore. A regular business user can just self-query, using either the search bar, or even just speaking into what it needs, and these tools are kind of doing the data prep for it. I don't think that's a, you know, an out in left field type of prediction, but it's the time is nigh. The other one I would also state is that I think knowledge graphs are going to break through this year. Neo4j in our survey is growing in pervasion in Mindshare. So more and more people are citing it, AWS Neptune's getting its act together, and we're seeing that spending intentions are growing there. Tiger Graph is also growing in our survey sample. I just think that the time is now for knowledge graphs to break through, and if I had to do one more, I'd say real-time streaming analytics moves from the very, very rich big enterprises to downstream, to more people are actually going to be moving towards real-time streaming, again, because the data prep tools and the data pipelines have gotten easier to use, and I think the ROI on real-time streaming is obviously there. So those are three that didn't make the cut, but I thought deserved an honorable mention. >> Yeah, I'm glad you did. Several weeks ago, we did an analyst prediction roundtable, if you will, a cube session power panel with a number of data analysts and that, you know, streaming, real-time streaming was top of mind. So glad you brought that up. Eric, as always, thank you very much. I appreciate the time you put in beforehand. I know it's been crazy, because you guys are wrapping up, you know, the last quarter survey in- >> Been a nuts three weeks for us. (laughing) >> job. I love the fact that you're doing, you know, the ETS survey now, I think it's quarterly now, right? Is that right? >> Yep. >> Yep. So that's phenomenal. >> Four times a year. I'll be happy to jump on with you when we get that done. I know you were really impressed with that last time. >> It's unbelievable. This is so much data at ETR. Okay. Hey, that's a wrap. Thanks again. >> Take care Dave. Good seeing you. >> All right, many thanks to our team here, Alex Myerson as production, he manages the podcast force. Ken Schiffman as well is a critical component of our East Coast studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoof is our editor-in-chief. He's at siliconangle.com. He's just a great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes that are available as podcasts, wherever you listen, podcast is doing great. Just search "Breaking analysis podcast." Really appreciate you guys listening. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch, david.vellante@siliconangle.com. That's how I got all these. I really appreciate it. I went through every single one with a yellow highlighter. It took some time, (laughing) but I appreciate it. You could DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post and please check out etr.ai. Its data is amazing. Best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat music beginning) (upbeat music ending)

>>Welcome back to the cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here at Coupa inspire 2022 with a couple thousand people here. And I got to tell you it's really great to be back in person, done a wheelchair. Join three next, the SVP of product strategy and innovation at Cooper. Donna, welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. It is great to be here and it's great to be live, but yet >>It is great to be alive. Again. I feel like I'm exhaling for the first time in a long time. >>I know, right. It's just so wonderful. I want >>To talk a little bit about you you've been a Cooper for a long time since it was just a baby startup, a little >>Baby >>Lady that also had a lot of leadership roles, product strategy, marketing, a customer experience, professional services. I also read that you have 12 software patent. I do. I love that. >>I know it's been one of the most amazing things that Coupa, which is this ability to be creative and innovate and then get your item patented. It's wonderful. >>Talk to me about, obviously the last two years have been so interesting, shall we say dynamic challenging? And we were talking before we went live that we haven't. The key bus had been that Coupa inspire, inspire hasn't happened since 2019 and it's almost three years ago. Talk to me about the last 10 years I Cooper and the massive acceleration I'm Rob was saying this morning in the keynote 3.3 trillion under spend under management almost at a trillion a year run rate. Yeah, >>We have huge. The numbers have just started to really become a fly wheel, right? More customers more spend. And really now having this big data repository of $3.3 trillion and the ability to apply AI to that data. But it really has been a journey. Um, when I joined about 11 years ago, now we had this vision, the vision was always a data centric model where we can apply AI to that data and create intelligence. And now we're finally at a volume of data where we can, we can anonymize the data and we can create insights at a level that we just were not able to do 10 years ago. >>One of the things that we've learned, I think fairly recently is that every company has to be a data company regardless of industry. Even I, I, I think about that, like my grocery store has to be a data company. Sure. There's no more, it'd be nice. If we had a data strategy, it would be nice if we actually could glean insights from our data that's table stakes, that's business critical that's differentiating. >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I think what's really interesting in an enterprise software is that as a SAS provider, although we may host the systems, we don't actually own our customer's data. We need to actually have permission to usage of the data. And that was one of the things that Cooper did very early on, about 10 years ago, where we started working with our customers and really building that permission to use into the contracts themselves. And that has really created now this motion of having data that we can now consume and use where a lot of businesses in enterprise software had not really thought about the notion of permission to use and having data available to them. >>That's the power of the community, right? And that's one of the things that clearly sets Cooper apart from its competition. >>Yes, indeed. We have spent so many years on creating this model of how does the community and how does community.ai help each individual customer become more efficient, save more and also do good for the planet in a way that has just never been able to do, if that company was doing it alone by themselves. >>Speaking of good for the planet, let's talk about ESG, your customer conversations. ESG is broad. >>How >>Are customers approaching the topic of it to bring it in as a strategic initiative? Okay. >>You know, I think this is a really great question. So what happened about a few years ago is our customers sat down with us and we said to ourselves, if we were going to make every dollar more sustainable, more inclusive that we're spending, what would we need to do? What would that be? The places within a spend function that you could improve the outcome of that dollar to be more sustainable and inclusive. And we broke it down into so many different features. And over the last three years, we've developed, delivered over 80 different features now available in our BSM sustainable BSM toolkit that our customers can configure Coupa to impact their ESG goals positively. >>So BSM can be a facilitator of ESG or an accelerator, or >>It's definitely an accelerator. And one of the things we're trying to do is democratize the ability to do good, right? So oftentimes the larger organizations are able to invest people into these problems. Well now smaller and smaller organizations are expected to comply with government regulations. How do these businesses do it? They can do it with technology like Kupa. >>Got it. Okay. One of the things I was looking at in my prep for the event was a recent survey that Cooper did just in February. It's just a couple of months ago, 800 decision makers, >>Um, >>Who have overview or responsibility for the supply chain and businesses with over a thousand employees. And this was global. What are some of the improvements that businesses, what did you find that they want to make with respect to ESG? >>You know, I think there was a really great survey that showed businesses, have the intent they want to do good, but the problem is the act secretion of it. How do they actually make it happen? And technology systems have largely failed them or have only looked at a part of the problem without looking at the whole problem. I can give you an example, please >>Do >>So in the scope three emissions, which is on everyone's mind right now, how are we going to comply with scope three emissions? At first on the surface, it looks like a reporting problem. Oh, I'll just create a report. But the real problem is data related the data itself that these organizations have on what they purchased and who they purchased it from is terrible. And so if your data's bad, your report to the government is going to be terrible, right? So you have to look at the problem holistically solving the data problem before you get to the reporting problem. And that's what Coupa really specializes on. >>And the things I was also looking at in the survey was from an overall theme perspective that the availability and reliability of crucial supply chain data is preventing organizations from operationalizing, their corporate purpose with respect to ESG will Kupa solves that problem. >>Absolutely. >>Talk to me about that. >>Yeah. So let's talk about things like third-party risk management. When you are working in a supply chain, you need to know who your suppliers are, not just your suppliers, but their suppliers as well, tier two, tier three, tier four, or even beyond even. Um, and this is everything from anti-bribery and anti-corruption to InfoSec and GDPR and so many different government regulations on knowing who you're doing business with. And Coupa solves that problem of collecting that data from your third parties and then continually monitoring it and passing it into the different systems within your spend processes in order to make sure that the person that is making a decision, how's the data at their fingertips. >>That's critical. And you know, one of the things we've learned in the last two years is that everybody wants things now, instantaneously in real time, it's no longer, oh, that's great to have that. No, I, as a consumer, I want that in business. I want that every company has to be a data company, but if organizations can't be able to extract insights from that data and make smart decisions on it in real time, they're going to be out of business. >>Absolutely. The ability to be able to process data at the time you're making a decision, the best data possible at that moment is critical in order for these companies, really, it's a, it's an ability for this company to thrive and even survive. >>Absolutely. Nobody's going to want one thing, I think we know nobody's going to want less data slot more slowly as time goes on. It's always going to be more data faster, faster, fastest. >>Absolutely. And that's why this model at Kupa has really been formulated over the last 12 years of how do we collect the data across our customer community? How do we pull it together, normalize it, aggregate it, anonymize it, and create insights that are so powerful. Like what we're just announcing now is our ocean freight pricing >>Index. >>So we've collected all of the data from our customers that are sourcing ocean freight and we're taking that data and we're creating a market index for the pricing of ocean freight. So now within Coupa, you can actually see what's happening the price of ocean freight, and we're going to continue to add more and more services. As more data gets processed to Hooper. >>Talk to me about the customer influence and your role. You talk with customers a lot. It used to be on the road a lot. Obviously that's changed. Hopefully that's coming back, but let's talk about one of the things I always know when I, when I come to inspire, I always know I'm going to see a lot of customer logos. I'm going to feel a lot. And on the cube here from the voice of Coupa's customer, talk to me about some of the influence that your customers have been able to have in the last two years alone. >>Absolutely. So our philosophy at Coupa's, uh, none of us is as smart as all of us. And it really is the DNA of this company, the heart of the company. So when the pandemic hit, we just really said to ourselves, okay, how do we continue that collaboration and now a digital world? And that's what we did. We just pivoted really fast into a digital world, but the same volume, the same collaboration, the same conversations were happening with our customer community. And in the last year alone, we probably had over 400 customers over 90% of the features we delivered had customer input into those features. And the model continues around our customers, collaborating with us via the digital channels and our product owners, really working with them as a co innovation team. And not as, you know, product in a ivory tower somewhere. >>I like the co-innovation kind of team part, but it's really what you're describing is that flywheel that you mentioned a few minutes ago, that's really always been there at Coupa for very, very long time. And it's just getting faster and more efficient. And I would say in a nerdy way more, data-driven >>More data, data, data. I will talk data all day long. It's just wonderful. And even this ocean freight thing, I'll tell everyone 10 years ago, this was the dream to have enough data, to be able to create these types of supply chain insights that are just unparalleled. And now as the data continues to increase the next year's insights and the year after are going to just keep improving because as the data increases, the insights get better and in different categories, different ways. >>So when you're in those customer conversations with customers who maybe prospects, I'll say who aren't yet Coupa customers who ha who say Donna, I've got a, we've got a huge data problem. Where do they start? How do you advise them to be able to overcome that? So they can use the data, glean the insights in real time and be competitive? >>You know, the first thing I always say to our customers or prospective customers is start the journey and have conversations with Coupa as a partner and not as a vendor, the more that we can work together and say, help us understand your technology architecture, help us understand your pain points. Where are the, where are the parts of your business that are critically damaged that need us to prioritize. And then let us have a discussion for you as a company that we can make recommendations you based on other customers that have been like you and have those same pain points and then lay it out from that point of view. But it's, it's hard when it's a very, you know, classic old model of we're procurement and you're a vendor and we're going to silo it because what we see is a >>Lot of, >>Well, this is how we used to do it. So we're only asking you questions around how we used to do it. And now how the rest of the, not about how the rest of the community is doing it. So my advice would really be open up the doors, have a conversation, start as a partner, and then let's figure it out from there. >>Well, one of the things that came across in Rob keynote this morning was about Cooper, about we've got to get rid of the silos. Every organization in every industry cannot operate in a silo. And even, even Barbara Corcoran's keynote when she was talking about some of the best ideas. In fact, I think I saw a tweet from her the other day that said she doesn't think she's ever had a really great idea. They've always come from basically collaborating within a group. So not in a silo. >>Absolutely collaboration is key in everything we do. We, none of us is as smart as all of us. And it truly is a key point in technology. These silos that are happening in business that prevents the risk from properly be operationalized. So for example, the risk team may be aware that there is a supplier that has now gone onto a government watch list. Okay? But the payments team is not aware. So the payments team is still issuing payments to that vendor or new orders are going to that vendor or sourcing events. Coupa brings those silos together and says, instead, we're going to employ what we call suite synergy. And we're going to stop the transactions when the risk is increased, routed to the risk team for review before the money goes out the door. >>And how does I love sweet synergy? How does that resonate? Who are you talking to within customers? Are you talking to the C-suite? How does suite synergy resonate that far up the stack? Because the concept is clear. >>Yeah. It's about the collaboration for more value and protecting the brand. The, what the people we speak to are generally the CFO, the CPO, the chief procurement officer and the CIO. Those are generally, um, who we speak to. But increasingly we see the chief sustainability officer, the chief diversity officer, and especially from a notion of how do I not just report on my data? How do I improve it? How do I impact diversity by helping the person, making a spend decisions, giving them diverse options at the time they're doing that spend decision, instead of just reporting on it, throw it, >>Grow it, act on it, take the insights and actually make smart decisions faster. >>Absolutely. And before the money goes out the door, once the money goes out the door, you cannot influence it to be going to a diverse supplier it's already done. >>Right. So I know we're only on day one here. Last question for you is what are its great turnout? All the people behind us. It's great to hear that buzz of, of a conference environment. Once again, what are some of the things that you've heard today that really excite you about the direction that Cooper's going in? >>I think for me, it all started today. And yesterday, yesterday we are a community advisory boards. We had hundreds of customers that were meeting with us and it was just the sense of co-innovation being alive and well. So many customers today, I sat next to ADM, uh, one of our customers and they're working with us on supply chain collaboration and the next generation of supply chain collaboration. And it was just so wonderful to finally meet the people that we've been working with for so long in a digital world. >>That's right. It's always nice. When you look at badges, I know you put video conferencing for two years. You're >>Taller than I thought >>Exactly. I don't get that. I don't get that. You're taller than other >>Taller. No, I'm pretty >>Sure it's been great. Having you on the program, talking about the strategy, the innovation, the direction coop is going and what you've witnessed, the evolution of it in the last 10 years, we congratulate you on your success. And we just look forward to seeing Kupa, continue to evolve and mature. >>Thank you so much. It was wonderful to sit down with you today. Excellent. >>Good. I enjoyed it too. For Donna wheelchairs. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Cooper inspire 22 from Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.

>>Hey guys, and gals. Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here at Coupa inspire 2022 with about 2,500 folks. Very excited to be back in person. I can assure you that is the vibe that is here to be. You joins me next to the managing director at KPMG Toby. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thanks. It's great to be here. >>Isn't it great to be back? I know it feels so normal. We were talking before we went live, that it feels normal. >>It does. It does. And it feels great. And after a great kickoff with, uh, with Rob >>Fantastic, Rob Bernstein has, and Barbara Corcoran, Rob has probably the highest energy of a CEO that I've ever gotten to work with. So you always know you're in for a good high energy conversation. Then Barbara Corcoran coming in, Jon Taffer with bar rescue is it's a, been a great morning so far. So you let's talk about you, you specialize in digital transformation within the procurement and the contract management spaces. Talk to me a little bit about that. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, uh, I love helping folks to re-imagine their, uh, operating models to solve today's challenges. And there are so many challenges coming out in this post COVID world, um, that many of our clients are dealing with. And, and I'm never short on phone calls and, you know, uh, from, from my clients reaching out for help, um, to really figure out how to retool, um, and, and, and really help themselves to transform, to be able to address the, the, the changes to come. >>I heard a really smart description of the last two years today, compressed transformation. We've been talking about digital transformation for years, and then we've also been talking about it's acceleration during the COVID era, but the compressed transformation, I thought that's probably something that's here to stay. Nobody's going to want access to older, less data slower. >>Yep. >>They're just not >>A hundred percent. What >>Are some of the trends that you've observed in your role in the last couple of years? >>Yeah, I, I absolutely believe that folks that took advantage of that digital transformation pre pandemic have actually been able to fare much better than those that have held off on those investments. Um, for whatever reasons, you know, there are always different priorities, but those that have actually gotten that journey started, um, pre pandemic have definitely fared, uh, for, well, I think the trends that I'm seeing today, the CPO's challenge, um, and there are many challenges, um, but you know, the, you know, coming out of the, uh, post COVID era, you are now recovering and ramping up production as a result, your buying activities increasing, right. Um, and, and other ways other than increasing, um, activity. There's also the changing of requirements. So, you know, the folks in the front office are looking at new technologies to innovate new products and services, and that's going to change what the, the mix of the skills and resources that you need in the back office. >>Um, in addition to that, um, there are other requirements like ESG. And so as you're thinking about retooling and being able to, um, buy more sustainably or drive diversity, um, with the spend that you have, that's also changing the skill mix that you have. And I think on top of speak, uh, on top of that, um, the skills and the talent, we are dealing with the, a unfortunate situation that many companies are with the, uh, you know, the great resignation where the talent is, has as quickly exited the workforce. Um, and, uh, and, and with the demand increasing and changing, that puts everyone in a tough spot. And so those are really the big challenges that I've seen with the clients. Most recently, as we're coming out of COVID >>Of your customer conversations, escalated up the C-suite you talk, you mentioned the chief procurement officer. If we think of every company, these days has to be a data company to be successful. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around. Are you noticing that from a supply chain perspective within procurement and contract management, is that escalating the C-suite to be much more of a C-suite or board level initiative? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I think what folks have realized in many of their, even the earlier digital transformation efforts, it was very geared around automating and streamlining transactions and processes, not so much putting data at the core. Yes, you would get intelligence out of that, but we hadn't architected your entire organization around data and good quality data and what is needed, um, to be able to actually translate that data to meaningful insights, to make the decisions or drive, um, visibility within to your, into your supply chain. Um, so when you think about things that are, um, such as ESG, where you really need to know, um, your tier one, tier two tier three suppliers, and all the impacts that that has, um, in order to drive to those, um, ESG objectives that you're telling your investors, you're telling your customers, and you're telling your, um, your employees about it's very important. You have to be centered around data and be able to be able to see their entire supply chain. And if you weren't, if you weren't architected to do so, doing it as an afterthought is very costly because you've already made those investments >>Very costly. And also, I mean, from a business perspective, I think, you know, we, we talk so often Toby and you probably do as well about it, business alignment. It's one of those, it's like digital transformation. It's almost a buzzword if you will, but it's critical because I'm seeing a lot of data and research from, from folks like Gardner that are showing that massive percentages of businesses believe that the technology is really the driver and the fuel of the business going forward. So no longer can it and lines of business be separated. >>Yeah, I, I totally agree. I actually think that when I mentioned about new skills, if you think about the next generation and the new operating models, um, uh, you know, the, the, the new folks coming out of college have to have that skill set because process and technology are, are, are completely linked. Um, and I think that the organizations, the future and the sick, the most successful ones will know how to actually be more human centric and be able to harness the data through the technologies. So I'll actually allow you and I to do what we do best, right, which is collaborate and negotiate deals work on our relationship versus focused on the technology or entering data into forms and all the administrative components that, uh, many of my clients are plagued with today, >>Collaboration, I think has maybe become even more important in the last two years that we've been so limited about how to collaborate. Thankfully, we have a lot of technologies to do that, but when I think of Coupa collaboration, community are two words that jump out. Talk to me a little bit about from an, a partnership perspective alignment there with the collaborative spirit at KPMG. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, for, for us, uh, I recently just presented on a very similar topic that nothing great in business is done by a single person. And it takes partners to be able to drive the innovation needed to solve the new challenges of tomorrow. And, and I see our relationship with that. You know, they offer a platform, they offer a method to get access to the data and simplify it in a way for our clients so that they can focus on the relationships and driving the collaboration with their suppliers. And, and I think that that's, that's the thought leadership, uh, in partnership with, uh, with them that we'd like to bring to the table. >>Speaking of alignment between KPMG and Qubit. Talk to me a little bit about ESG as, as sort of a new initiative within KPMG. Talk to me a little bit about that. And what's some of the high level objectives are >>Absolutely. Um, I wouldn't say that it's, it's, it's new. I think it's always been there and there's always been a focus, but I think the recent events and with the regulatory environment changing as well, and as with consumers, consumer behavior, driving and investor community driving towards, um, uh, ESG, I think that is quickly changing how companies are prioritizing that within the Mo amongst everything else that they have. And as a result, I think the CPO's role in that equation is ever so important when it comes to delivering and operationalizing ESG. >>I imagine it, the CPS role must be a lot more strategic these >>Days >>Because they really have to be kind of a transformation change agent. >>Yeah. And actually in most cases, the CPO is perfect for that because that's been their role, um, in, uh, in, in, uh, in many cases before. Um, and I think, yeah, this is just yet another dimension that they didn't have to attack and, and incorporate into the, uh, into the process of selecting the right partner or the right supplier within their, um, within the, uh, with, with who they want to onboard for, for the company. >>Got it. Okay. Let's talk about advice now for companies that are either in the early stages of the supply chain transformation really digitizing, how do they get started? Is it too late for some? >>No, I don't think it's ever too late. I don't think, I, I think, um, I don't think it's too late, you know, and especially with the very big focus on digital and tech these days, sometimes being the late, being late to the game allows folks to actually work out the kinks for, you know, the bleeding edge technologies. And so that makes it even less risky for them to adopt in, in many cases. Um, that's, that's, uh, that, that's what we've seen, but, you know, I think the advice is get educated, uh, really just understand as much as you can around what other people are doing. Are there other, um, uh, peer group, uh, companies like yours, you know, like themselves that are actually going through the transformation or have gone before and just kind of understand what were the drivers of that strategy and what were the outcomes that you can learn from them, get help from externals. >>Um, and whether they be technology partners, consultants, and actually hiring new skills and bringing in new perspectives to help you to own and drive that strategy important. This is super important and you can't outsource these things, right. This needs to come from within, especially when you think about things as purposeful and impactful as ESG. Um, those, those cannot be outsourced. Um, and I think those would be the, uh, the kind of the two key things. Um, but I always also say, um, take an outward in approach, as you're thinking about your new strategy, focus on what your employees are saying about, you know, your supply chain and how easy it is to actually understand and, and work within your supply chain. Talk to your suppliers, talk to your internal business partners, to really reflect and understand how do you make this process as easy as possible for them to comply with. >>I think one of the things I was reading, uh, in preparation for coming here is that some, some survey, a survey that that Cooper did of about 800 decision makers. And one of the things that was overwhelming as a theme is that a lot of organizations don't feel that they have the right data visibility to drive an ESG strategic initiative. So what Coupa does providing that visibility and the ability to collaborate and share across the community is, seems to be something that's going to be a business critical must have going forward. >>Yeah, a hundred percent, you know, many, uh, many of our clients operate under, you know, uh, not under like mandates or compliance, driven, um, kind of policies in the commercial world, many cases you have to influence the buying behavior. And so you can't do that without data. I'd like to think in this day and age presented with the right supplier options with them at the right point in time, you're able to influence and drive the spend to diverse candidates, sustainable options, you know, and there's, you know, not just savings, not just the lowest cost option, but there's so many other things to consider in this day and age. And I think that's where it's so important to be able to have a platform like Hoopa, to be able to gather that data acquire external sources of data, such as ESG related data and make that to, um, to, to all parties, um, and be that source of truth so that you can drive the >>Here's some truth. And also even something that was talked about this morning during the keynote is accountability. And have you heard Jon Taffer from bar rescue talking this morning, but he was talking about an 120 bar rescues. He goes, I've never met one person that has admitted from day one of the four days. They shoot that I'm responsible for the reason that my business is not successful. He goes, everybody has an excuse. There's no accountability until you really force someone to take probably that hard look in the mirror that they don't want to take, but that accountability within organizations within an overall business is critical. >>Yeah, I think, uh, I absolutely believe that went away to solve that is providing the data and making it available. And, um, and really once again, I think it goes back to driving that behavior that you want. And I think it starts with, uh, with, with leadership and I think the accountability, accountability of leadership, and to be able to drive that type of culture within your organization. Um, but absolutely you need data to be able to do that and, and be able to monitor that as well, you know, as a leader to make sure that that accountability is appropriately distributed. >>Right. But one of the things, I mean, I think patients has been in short supply the last two years have been, we've learned that. I think also that another thing we've learned is that access to real-time data is no longer, oh, then that would be great. It's you've got to have that for your business to be differentiated because the, you know, if we think about the consumer side, the consumers are so vocal on things like social media, if the experience isn't tailored, personalized and instantaneous, We have a very short Rob talked about the very short attention span that his kids have. I'm like three minutes. We don't even have that in business or on the consumer side. I don't think. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I see that in my kids and what he said today was, was spot on. Um, so, you know, when I think about my career and where I'm at, and he said the same thing, I mean, our kids are coming into the, there'll be in procurement organizations very soon, sooner than, you know, then, then I like to admit. Um, and as a result, I think that, um, we talked a bit about talent shortage and the challenge with keeping talent. And I think that what you had just expressed is very important is that that experience for the employee, but you come into a workforce and they expect you to have these quick turnarounds, but you've, you offered them tools that require spreadsheets and old archaic systems to be able to solve today's challenges. I think that you're not going to be able to retain your talent right along. Right. >>That's a great point. That's an absolutely fantastic point. Last question for you before we wrap here is so the changes that organizations need to make with respect to being prepared for ESG reporting requirements that are coming down the pike, obviously being, having a data strategy has got to be one of us. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, I think we, many procurement organizations were really geared around savings and a very compliance, driven manner. And when you think about ESG, I think you gotta be very data-driven. Um, and so that should be a priority focus of how do you retool yourself to be able to acquire mass amounts of data, figuring out where you need to go, um, to get that data, whether they be third parties, whether they be directly from the supplier, um, and be able to aggregate it and provide the insight into those reporting standards that are required. Um, and then to be able to actually measure progress along those sustainability or diversity goals that it might be established at, at, at the leadership level. So I think it's coming down the pike. It's a matter of time. I think it's, I think it's, uh, you know, it's something that I've been waiting for to see. Um, and it's interesting to see how, uh, how quickly that it's, it's come down. Um, but I think with the regulatory compliance coming down, um, this is going to be moving very quick and people need to get ready. >>That's good. They need to be ready. Excellent to be thank you for joining me on the program today, talking about what you were doing at KPMG, what it's doing with Kupa and how organizations really should be thinking about and approaching supply chain, digital transformation. We appreciate your insights. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. All >>Right. For Toby, you I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube in Las Vegas at Cooper inspire 2022 stick around. My next guest will join me shortly.

(digital music) >> Hello everyone. And welcome to theCUBE where we're covering the recent news from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Making Moves and Storage. And with me are Omer Asad, Vice President and General Manager for Primary Storage, HCI and Data Management at HPE and Sandeep Singh who's the Vice President of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you both. >> Dave its a pleasure to be here. >> Always a pleasure talking to you Dave thank you so much. >> Oh, it's my pleasure. Hey, so we just watched HPE make a big announcement and I wonder Sandeep, if you could give us a quick recap. >> Yeah, of course Dave. In the world of enterprise storage there hasn't been a moment like this in decades, a point at which everything is changing for data and infrastructure and it's really coming at the nexus of data, cloud and AI that's opening up the opportunity for customers across industries to accelerate their data-driven transformation. Building on that we just unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates the data driving transformation for customers edge to cloud. And to pay that off we introduce a new data services platform that consists of two game-changing innovations. First it's a data services cloud console which is a SaaS based console that delivers cloud operational agility for customers. And it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud services. Though our second announcement is HPE Electra. HPE Electra is a cloud native data infrastructure portfolio to power your data edge to cloud. It's managed natively with data services cloud console and it brings that cloud operational model to customers wherever their data lives. These innovations are really combined with our industry leading AIOPS platform which is HPE InfoSight and combine these innovations radically simplify and bring that cloud operational model to customers our data and infrastructure management. And it gives the opportunity for streamlining data management across the life cycle. These innovations are making it possible for organizations across the industries to unleash the power of data. >> That's kind of cool. There're a lot of the stuff we've been talking about for all these years is sort of this unified layer across all clouds on-prem, AI injected in I could tell you're excited and it sounds like you you can't wait to get these offerings in the hands of customers, but I wonder we get back up a minute. Omer, maybe you could describe the problem statement that you're addressing with this announcement. What are customers really pain points? >> Excellent question, Dave. So in my role, as the General Manager for Data Management and Storage here at HPE I get the wonderful opportunity to talk to hundreds of customers in a year. And, you know, as time has progressed as the amount of data under organizations' management has continued to increase, what I have noticed is that recently there are three main themes that are continuously emerging and are now bubbling at the top. The first one is storage infrastructure management itself is extremely complex for customers. While there have been lots of leaps and down progress in managing a single array or managing two arrays with a lot of simplification of the UI and maybe some modern UIs are present but as the problem starts to get at scale as customers acquire more and more assets to store and manage their data on premise the management at scale is extremely complex. Yes, storage has gotten faster, yes, flash has had a profound effect on performance availability and latency access to the data but infrastructure management and storage management as a whole has become a pain for customers and it's a constant theme as storage lifecycle management comes up storage refresh has come up and deploying and managing storage infrastructure at scale comes up. So that's one of the main problems that I've been seeing as I talk to customers. Now, secondly, a lot of customers are now talking about two different elements. One is storage and storage deployment and life cycle management. And the second is the management of data that is stored on those storage devices. As the amount of data grows the silos continue to grow a single view of life cycle management of data doesn't, you know, customers don't get to see it. And lastly, one of the biggest things that we see is a lot of customers are now asking, how can I extract a value from this data under my management because they can't seem to parse through the silos. So there is an incredible amount of productivity lost when it comes to data management as a whole, which is just fragmented into silos, and then from a storage management. And when you put these two together and especially add two more elements to it which is hybrid management of data or a multicloud management of data the silos and the sprawl just continues and there is nothing that is stitching together this thing at scale. So these are the three main themes that constantly appear in these discussions. Although in spite of these a lot of modern enhancements in storage >> Well, I wonder if I could comment guys 'cause I've been following this industry for a number of years and you're absolutely right, Omer. I mean, if you look at the amount of money and time and energy that's spent into or put into the data architectures people are frustrated they're not getting enough out of it. And I'd note that, you know, the prevailing way in which we've attacked complexity historically is you build a better box. And well, while that system was maybe easier to manage than the predecessor systems all it did is create another silo and then the cloud, despite its impaired simplicity that was another disconnected siloed. So then we threw siloed management solutions at the problem and we're left with this collection of point solutions with data sort of trapped inside. So I wonder if you could give us your thoughts on that and you know, do you agree, what data do you have around this problem statement? >> Yeah, Dave that's a great point. And actually ESG just recently conducted a survey of over 250 IT decision makers. And that actually brings one of the perfect validations of the problems that Omer and you just articulated. What it showed is that 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management, that complexity is impeding their digital transformation. On average, the organizations have over 23 different data management tools which just typifies and is a perfect showcase of the fragmentation and the complexity that exists in that data management. And 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management that complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them. And actually top five for 67% of the respondents. So it's a great validation across the board. >> Well, its fresh in their minds too, because pre pandemic there was probably, you know, a mixed picture, right. It was probably well there's complacency or we're not moving fast enough, we have other priorities, but they were forced into this. Now they know what the real problem is it's front and center. Yeah, I liked that you're putting out there in your announcement this sort of future state that you're envisioning for customers. And I wonder if we could sort of summarize that and share with our listeners that vision that you unveiled what does it look like and how are you making it real? >> Yeah, overall, we feel very strongly that it's time for our customers to reimagine data management. And our vision is that customers need to break down the silos and complexity that plagues the distributed data environments. And they need to experience a new data experience across the board that's going to help them accelerate their data-driven transformation and we call this vision Unified DataOps. Unified DataOps integrates data-centric policies across the board to streamline data management, cloud-native control and operations to bring that agility of cloud and the operational model to wherever data lives. And AI driven insights and intelligence to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a whole new experience to customers to radically simplify and bring the agility of cloud to data and data infrastructure, streamlined data management and really help customers innovate faster than ever before. And we're making the promise of Unified DataOps real by transforming the entire HPE storage business to a cloud native software defined data services and that's through introducing a data services platform that expands HPE GreenLake. >> I mean, the key word I take away there Sandeep, is invisible. I mean, as a customer I want you to abstract that complexity away that underlying infrastructure complexity I just don't want to see it anymore. Omer, I wonder if we could start with the first part of the announcement maybe you can help us unpack data services, cloud console. I mean, you know, people are immediately going to think it's just another software product to manage infrastructure. But to really innovate, I'm hoping that it's more than that. >> Absolutely, Dave, it's a lot more than that. What we have done fundamentally at the root of the problem is we have taken the data and infrastructure control away from the hardware and through that, we provided a unified approach to manage the data wherever it lives. It's a full blown SaaS console which our customers get onto and from there they can deploy appliances, manage appliances, lifecycle appliances and then they not only stop at that but then go ahead and start to get context around their data. But all of that (indistinct) available through a SaaS platform, a SaaS console as every customer onboards themselves and their equipment and their storage infrastructure onto this console then they can go ahead and define role-based access for different parts of their organization. They can also apply role-based access to HPE GreenLake management personnel so they can come in and do and perform all the operations for the customers via the same console by just being another access control methodology in that. And then in addition to that, as you know, data mobility is extremely important to our customers. How do you make data available in different hyperscaler clouds if the customer's digital transformation requires that? So again, from that single cloud console from that single data console, which we are naming here as data services console customers are able to curate the data, maneuver the data, pre-positioned the data into different hyperscalers. But the beautiful thing is that the entire view of the storage infrastructure, the data with its context that is stored on top of that access control methodologies and management framework is operational from a single SaaS console which the customer can decide to give access to whichever management entity or authority comes into help them. And then what this leads us into is then combining these things into a northbound API. So anybody that wants to streamline operational manageability can then use these APIs to program against a single API which will then control the entire infrastructure on behalf of the customer. So if somebody dare what this is it is bringing that cloud operational model that was so desired by each one of our customers into their data centers and this is what I call an in-place transformation of a management experience for our customer by making them seamlessly available on a cloud operational model for their infrastructure. >> Yeah, and you've turned that into essentially an API with a lot of automation, that's great. So, okay. So that's kind of how you're trying to change the game here you're charting new territory. I want you to talk, you talked to hundreds and hundreds of customers every year I wonder if you could paint a picture from the customer perspective how does their experience actually change? >> Right, that's a wonderful question, Dave. This allows me to break it down into bits and bytes further for you and I love that, right. So the way you look at it is, you know, recently if you look at the storage management, as we talked about earlier, from an array perspective or maybe two arrays perspective has been simplified I mean, it's a solved problem. But when you start to imagine deploying hundreds of arrays and these are large customers, they have massive amounts of data assets, storage management hasn't scaled along as the infrastructure scales. But if you look at the consumer world you can have hundreds of devices but the ownership model is completely (indistinct). So the inspiration for solving this problem for us actually was inspired from consumerization of IT and that's a big trend over here. So now we're changing the customer's ownership model, the customer's deployment model and the customer's data management model into a true cloud first model. So let me give some of the examples of that, right. So first of all, let's talk about deployment. So previously deployment has been a massive challenge for our customers. What does deployment in this new data services console world looks like? Devices show up, you rack them up and then you plug in the power cable, you plug in the network cable and then you walk out of the data center. Data center administrator or the storage of administrator they will be on their iPad, on their data services console, or iPhone or whatever the device of their choice is and from that console, from that point on the device will be registered, onboarded, its initial state will be given to it from the cloud. And if the customer has some predefined States for their previous deployment model already saved with the data console they don't even need to do that we'll just take that and apply that state and induct the device into the fleet that's just one example. It's extremely simple plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and the data center operational manager just walks out. After that you could be on the beach, you could be at your home, you could be driving in a car and this don't, I advise people not to fiddle with their iPhones when they're driving in a car, but still you could do it if you want to, right. So that's just one part from a deployment methodology perspective. Now, the second thing that, you know, Sandeep and I often bounce ideas on is provisioning of a workload. It's like a science these days. And is this array going to be able to absorb my workload, is the latency going to go South does this workload latency profile match this particular piece of device in my data center? All of this is extremely manual and it literally takes, I mean, if you talk to any of the customers or even analysts, deploying a workload is a massive challenge. It's a guesswork that you have to model and, you know basically see how it works out. I think based on HPE InfoSight, we're collecting hundreds and millions of data points from all these devices. So now to harness that and present that back to a customer in a very simple manner so that we can model on their behalf to the data services console, which is now workload of it, you just describe your workload, hey, I'm going to need these many IOPS and by the way, this happens to be my application. And that's it. On the backend because we're managing your infrastructure the cloud console understands your entire fleet. We are seeing the statistics and the telemetric coming off of your systems and because now you've described the workload for us we can do that matching for you. And what intent based provisioning does is describe your workloads in two or three clicks or maybe two or three API construct formats and we'll do the provisioning, the deployment and bringing it up for you on your behalf on the right pieces of infrastructure that matched it. And if you don't like our choices you can manually change it as well. But from a provisioning perspective I think that took days can now come down to a couple of minutes of the description. And lastly, then, you know, global data management distributed infrastructure from edge to cloud, invisible upgrades, only upgrading the right amount of infrastructure that needs the upgrade. All of that just comes rolling along with it, right. So those are some of the things that this data services console as a SaaS management and scale allows you to. >> And actually, if I can just jump in and add a little bit of what Omer described, especially with intent-based provisioning, that's really bringing a paradigm shift to provisioning. It's shifting it from a LAN-centric to app-center provisioning. And when you combine it with identity management and role-based access what it means is that you're enabling self-service on demand provisioning of the underlying data infrastructure to accelerate the app workload deployments. And you're eliminating guesswork and providing the ability to be able to optimize service level objectives. >> Yeah, it sounds like you've really nailed that in an elegant way that provisioning challenge. I've been saying for years if your primary expertise is deploying logical unit numbers you better find some other scales because the day is coming that that's just going to get automated away. So that's cool. There's another issue that I'm sure you've thought about but I wonder if you could address, I mean, you've got the cloud, the definition of cloud is changing that the cloud is expanding to on-prem on-prem expand to the cloud. It's going out to the edge, it's going across clouds and so, you know, security becomes a big issue that threat surface is expanding, the operating model is changing. So how are you thinking about addressing those security concerns? >> Excellent question, Dave. So, you know, most of the organizations that we talked to in today's modern world, you know almost every customer that I talk to has deployed either some sort of a cloud console where they're either one of the customers were the hyperscalers or you know, buy in for SaaS-based applications or pervasive across the customer base. And as you know, we were the first ones to introduce the automatic telemeter management through HPE InfoSight that's one of the largest storage SaaS services in production today that we operate on behalf of our customers, which has, you know, Dave, about 85% connectivity rate. So from that perspective, keeping customer's data secure, keeping customer's telemetry information secure we're no stranger to that. Again, we follow all security protocols that any cloud operational SaaS service would do. So a reverse handling, the firewall compliancy security audit logs that are published to our customers and published to customers' chief information security officers. So all of those, you know what I call crossing the T's and dotted the I's we do that with security expert and security policies for which each of our customers has a different set of rules. And we have a proper engagement model that we go through that particular audit process for our customers. Then secondly, Dave the data services cloud console is actually built on a fundamental cloud deployment technology that is not sort of that new. Aruba Central which is an Aruba management console which is also an HPE company it's been deployed and it's managing millions of access points in a SaaS framework for our customers. So the fundamental building blocks of the data storage console from a basic enablement perspective come from the Aruba Central console. And what we've taken is we've taken those generic cloud-based SaaS services and then built data and storage centric SaaS services on top of that and made them available to our customers. >> Yeah, I really like the Aruba. You picked that up several years ago and it's same thing with InfoSight the way that you bring it to other parts of the portfolio those are really good signs to watch of successful acquisitions. All right, there's a lot here. I want to talk about the second part of the announcement. I know you're a branding team you guys are serious about branding that new product brand. Maybe you could talk about that. >> So again, so delivering the cloud operational model is just the first piece, right. And now the second part of the announcement is delivering the cloud native hardware infrastructure which is extremely performing to go along with this cloud operational model. So what we have done Dave, in this announcement is we've announced HPE Electra. This is our new brand for our cloud native infrastructure to power your data and its appliances from core to the edge, to the cloud, right. And what it does is it takes the cloud operational model and this hardware is powered by that, it's completely wrapped around data. And so HPE Electra is available in two models right now, the HB electron 9,000 which is available for mission critical workloads for those high intensity workloads with a hundred percent availability guarantee where no failure is ever an option. And then it's also available as HPE Electra, 6,000 which is available for general purpose, business critical workloads generally trying to address that mid range of the storage market. And both of these systems are full 100% NBME front and back. And they're powered by the same unified cloud management operational experience that the data cloud console provides. And what it does is it allows our customers to simplify the deployment model, it simplifies their management model and really really allows them to focus on the context, the data and their app diversity whereas data mobility, data connectivity, data management in a multicloud world is then completely obstructed from them. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Sandeep: And Dave. >> Dave: Go ahead, please. >> Just to jump in HPE Electra combined with data services cloud console is delivering a cloud experience that makes deploying and scaling the application workloads as simple as flipping a switch. >> Dave: Nice. >> It really does. And you know, I'm very comfortable in saying this you know, like HPE InfoSight, we were the first in the industry to bring AI-based elementary and support enabled metrics (indistinct). And then here with data services console and the hardware that goes with it we're just completely transforming the storage ownership and a storage management model. And for our customers, it's a seamless non-disruptive upgrade with fully data in place upgrade. And they transform to a cloud operational model where they can manage their infrastructure better where they are through a complete consumer grade SaaS console is again the first of its kind when you look at storage management and storage management at scale. >> And I like how you're emphasizing that management layer, but underneath you got all the modern hardware technologies too which is important because it's a performance got to be, you know, a good price performance. >> Absolutely. >> So now can we bring this back again to the customers what are the outcomes that this is going to enable for them? >> So I think Dave, the first and the foremost thing is as they scale their storage infrastructures they don't have to think it's really as simple as yeah, just send it to the data center, plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and up it comes. And from that point onwards the life cycle and the device management aspect are completely abstracted by the data services console. All they have to focus is I just have new capacity available to me and when I have an application the system will figure it out for me where they need to deploy. So no more needing the guesswork, the Excel sheets of capacity management, you know the chargeback models, none of that stuff is needed. And for customers that are looking to transform their applications customers looking to refactor their applications into a hyperscaler model or maybe transform from VM to containers, all they need to think about and focus is on that the data will just follow these workloads from that perspective. >> And Dave, just to almost response here as I speak with customers one of the things I'm hearing from IT is that line of business really wants IT to deliver that agility of cloud yet IT also has to deliver all of the enterprise reliability, availability, all of the data services. And what's fantastic here is that through this cloud operational model IT can deliver that agility, that line of business owners are looking for at the same time they've been under pressure to do a lot more with less. And through this agility, IT is able to get time back be able to focus more on the strategic projects at the same time, be able to get time back to spend more time with their families that's incredibly important. >> Omer: Right >> Well, I love the sort of mindset shift that I'm seeing from HPE we're not talking about how much the box weighs (laughing) we're talking about the customer experience. And I wonder, you know, that kind of leads me, Sandeep to how this kind of fits in to this new really, to me, I'm seeing the transformation before our eyes but how does it fit into HPE's overall mission? >> Well, Dave, our mission overall is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company with HPE GreenLake, being the key to delivering that cloud experience. And as Omer put it, be able to deliver that cloud experience wherever the customer's data lives. And today we're advancing HPE GreenLake as a service transformation of the HPE storage business to a software defined cloud data services business overall. And for our customers, this translates to how to operational and ownership experience that unleashes their agility, their data and their innovation. So we're super excited >> Guys, I can tell you're excited. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and summarizing the announcements, congratulations and best of luck to both of you and to HPE and your customers. >> Thank you Dave. It was a pleasure. (digital music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, Bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Recent survey data from ETR shows that enterprise tech spending is tracking with projected US GDP growth at six to 7% this year. Many markers continue to point the way to a strong recovery, including hiring trends and the loosening of frozen IT Project budgets. However skills shortages are blocking progress at some companies which bodes well for an increased reliance on external IT services. Moreover, while there's much talk about the rotation out of work from home plays and stocks such as video conferencing, VDI, and other remote worker tech, we see organizations still trying to figure out the ideal balance between funding headquarter investments that have been neglected and getting hybrid work right. In particular, the talent gap combined with a digital mandate, means companies face some tough decisions as to how to fund the future while serving existing customers and transforming culturally. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE's Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we welcome back Erik Porter Bradley of ETR who will share fresh data, perspectives and insights from the latest survey data. Erik, great to see you. Welcome. >> Thank you very much, Dave. Always good to see you and happy to be on the show again. >> Okay, we're going to share some macro data and then we're going to dig into some highlights from ETR's most recent March COVID survey and also the latest April data. So Erik, the first chart that we want to show, it shows CIO and IT buyer responses to expected IT spend for each quarter of 2021 versus 2020, and you can see here a steady quarterly improvement. Erik, what are the key takeaways, from your perspective? >> Sure, well, first of all, for everyone out there, this particular survey had a record-setting number of participation. We had a 1,500 IT decision makers participate and we had over half of the Fortune 500 and over a fifth of the Global 1000. So it was a really good survey. This is seventh iteration of the COVID Impact Survey specifically, and this is going to transition to an overlarge macro survey going forward so we can continue it. And you're 100% right, what we've been tracking here since March of last year was, how is spending being impacted because of COVID? Where is it shifting? And what we're seeing now finally is that there is a real re-acceleration in spend. I know we've been a little bit more cautious than some of the other peers out there that just early on slapped an eight or a 9% number, but what we're seeing is right now, it's at a midpoint of over six, about 6.7% and that is accelerating. So, we are still hopeful that that will continue, and really, that spending is going to be in the second half of the year. As you can see on the left part of this chart that we're looking at, it was about 1.7% versus 3% for Q1 spending year-over-year. So that is starting to accelerate through the back half. >> I think it's prudent to be cautious (indistinct) 'cause normally you'd say, okay, tech is going to grow a couple of points higher than GDP, but it's really so hard to predict this year. Okay, the next chart here that we want to show you is we asked respondents to indicate what strategies they're employing in the short term as a result of coronavirus and you can see a few things that I'll call out and then I'll ask Erik to chime in. First, there's been no meaningful change of course, no surprise in tactics like remote work and holding travel, however, we're seeing very positive trends in other areas trending downward, like hiring freezes and freezing IT deployments, a downward trend in layoffs, and we also see an increase in the acceleration of new IT deployments and in hiring. Erik, what are your key takeaways? >> Well, first of all, I think it's important to point out here that we're also capturing that people believe remote work productivity is still increasing. Now, the trajectory might be coming down a little bit, but that is really key, I think, to the backdrop of what's happening here. So people have a perception that productivity of remote work is better than hybrid work and that's from the IT decision makers themselves, but what we're seeing here is that, most importantly, these organizations are citing plans to increase hiring, and that's something that I think is really important to point out. It's showing a real following, and to your point right in the beginning of the intro, we are seeing deployments stabilize versus prior survey levels, which means early on, they had no plans to launch new tech deployments, then they said, "Nope, we're going to start." and now that stalling, and I think it's exactly right, what you said, is there's an IT skills shortage. So people want to continue to do IT deployments 'cause they have to support work from home and a hybrid back return to the office, but they just don't have the skills to do so, and I think that's really probably the most important takeaway from this chart, is that stalling and to really ask why it's stalling. >> Yeah, so we're going to get into that for sure, and I think that's a really key point, is that accelerating IT deployments, it looks like it's hit a wall in the survey, but before we get deep into the skills, let's take a look at this next chart, and we're asking people here how our return to the new normal, if you will, and back to offices is going to change spending with on-prem architectures and applications. And so the first two bars, they're Cloud-friendly, if you add them up, it's 63% of the respondents, say that either they'll stay in the Cloud for the most part, or they're going to lower their on-prem spend when they go back to the office. The next three bars are on-prem friendly. If you add those up it's 29% of the respondents say their on-prem spend is going to bounce back to pre-COVID levels or actually increase, and of course, 12% of that number, by the way, say they've never altered their on-prem spend. So Erik, no surprise, but this bodes well for Cloud, but isn't it also a positive for on-prem? We've had this dual funding premise, meaning Cloud continues to grow, but neglected data center spend also gets a boost. What's your thoughts? >> Really, it's interesting. It's people are spending on all fronts. You and I were talking in the prep, it's like we're in battle and I've got naval, I've got air, I've got land, I've got to spend on Cloud and digital transformation, but I also have to spend for on-prem. The hybrid work is here and it needs to be supported. So this is spending is going to increase. When you look at this chart, you're going to see though, that roughly 36% of all respondents say that their spending is going to remain mostly on Cloud. So that is still the clear direction, digital transformation is still happening, COVID accelerated it greatly, you and I, as journalists and researchers already know this is where the puck is going, but spend has always lagged a little bit behind 'cause it just takes some time to get there. Inversely, 27% said that their on-prem spending will decrease. So when you look at those two, I still think that the trend is the friend for Cloud spending, even though, yes, they do have to continue spending on hybrid, some of it's been neglected, there are refresh cycles coming up, so, overall it just points to more and more spending right now. It really does seem to be a very strong backdrop for IT growth. >> So I want to talk a little bit about the ETR taxonomy before we bring up the next chart. We get a lot of questions about this, and of course, when you do a massive survey like you're doing, you have to have consistency for time series, so you have to really think through what the buckets look like, if you will. So this next chart takes a look at the ETR taxonomy and it breaks it down into simple-to-understand terms. So the green is the portion of spending on a vendor's tech within a category that is accelerating, and the red is the portion that is decelerating. So Erik, what are the key messages in this data? >> Well, first of all, Dave, thank you so much for pointing that out. We used to do, just what we call a Net score. It's a proprietary formula that we use to determine the overall velocity of spending. Some people found it confusing. Our data scientists decided to break this sector, break down into what you said, which is really more of a mode analysis. In that sector, how many of the vendors are increasing versus decreasing? So again, I just appreciate you bringing that up and allowing us to explain the reasoning behind our analysis there. But what we're seeing here goes back to something you and I did last year when we did our predictions, and that was that IT services and consulting was going to have a true rebound in 2021, and that's what this is showing right here. So in this chart, you're going to see that consulting and services are really continuing their recovery, 2020 had a lot of the clients and they have the biggest sector year-over-year acceleration sector wise. The other thing to point out on this, which we'll get to again later, is that the inverse analysis is true for video conferencing. We will get to that, so I'm going to leave a little bit of ammunition behind for that one, but what we're seeing here is IT consulting services being the real favorable and video conferencing having a little bit more trouble. >> Great, okay, and then let's take a look at that services piece, and this next chart really is a drill down into that space and emphasizes, Erik, what you were just talking about. And we saw this in IBM's earnings, where still more than 60% of IBM's business comes from services and the company beat earnings, in part, due to services outperforming expectations, I think it had a somewhat easier compare and some of this pent-up demand that we've been talking about bodes well for IBM and other services companies, it's not just IBM, right, Erik? >> No, it's not, but again, I'm going to point out that you and I did point out IBM in our predictions when we did in late December, so, it is nice to see. One of the reasons we don't have a more favorable rating on IBM at the moment is because they are in the process of spinning out this large unit, and so there's a little bit of a corporate action there that keeps us off on the sideline. But I would also want to point out here, Tata, Infosys and Cognizant 'cause they're seeing year-over-year acceleration in both IT consulting and outsourced IT services. So we break those down separately and those are the three names that are seeing acceleration in both of those. So again, at the Tata, Infosys and Cognizant are all looking pretty well positioned as well. >> So we've been talking a little bit about this skills shortage, and this is what's, I think, so hard for forecasters, is that in the one hand, There's a lot of pent up demand, Scott Gottlieb said it's like Woodstock coming out of the COVID, but on the other hand, if you have a talent gap, you've got to rely on external services. So there's a learning curve, there's a ramp up, it's an external company, and so it takes time to put those together. So this data that we're going to show you next, is really important in my view and ties what we were saying at the top. It asks respondents to comment on their staffing plans. The light blue is "We're increasing staff", the gray is "No change" and the magenta or whatever, whatever color that is that sort of purplish color, anyway, that color is decreasing, and the picture is very positive across the board. Full-time staff, offshoring, contract employees, outsourced professional services, all up trending upwards, and this Erik is more evidence of the services bounce back. >> Yeah, it's certainly, yes, David, and what happened is when we caught this trend, we decided to go one level deeper and say, all right, we're seeing this, but we need to know why, and that's what we always try to do here. Data will tell you what's happening, it doesn't always tell you why, and that's one of the things that ETR really tries to dig in with through the insights, interviews panels, and also going direct with these more custom survey questions. So in this instance, I think the real takeaway is that 30% of the respondents said that their outsourced and managed services are going to increase over the next three months. That's really powerful, that's a large portion of organizations in a very short time period. So we're capturing that this acceleration is happening right now and it will be happening in real time, and I don't see it slowing down. You and I are speaking about we have to increase Cloud spend, we have to increase hybrid spend, there are refresh cycles coming up, and there's just a real skills shortage. So this is a long-term setup that bodes very well for IT services and consulting. >> You know, Erik, when I came out of college, somebody told me, "Read, read, read, read as much as you can." And then they said, "Read the Wall Street Journal every day." and so I did it, and I would read the tech magazines and back then it was all paper, and what happens is you begin to connect the dots. And so the reason I bring that up is because I've now taken a bath in the ETR data for the better part of two years and I'm beginning to be able to connect the dots. The data is not always predictive, but many, many times it is. And so this next data gets into the fun stuff where we name names. A lot of times people don't like it because they're either marketing people at organizations, say, "Well, data's wrong." because that's the first thing they do, is attack the data. But you and I know, we've made some really great calls, work from home, for sure, you're talking about the services bounce back. We certainly saw the rise of CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, well before people were talking about that, same thing with video conferencing. And so, anyway, this is the fun stuff and it looks at positive versus negative sentiment on companies. So first, how does ETR derive this data and how should we interpret it, and what are some of your takeaways? >> Sure, first of all, how we derive the data, are systematic survey responses that we do on a quarterly basis, and we standardize those responses to allow for time series analysis so we can do trend analysis as well. We do find that our data, because it's talking about forward-looking spending intentions, is really more predictive because we're talking about things that might be happening six months, three months in the future, not things that a lot of other competitors and research peers are looking at things that already happened, they're looking in the past, ETR really likes to look into the future and our surveys are set up to do so. So thank you for that question, It's a enjoyable lead in, but to get to the fun stuff, like you said, what we do here is we put ratings on the datasets. I do want to put the caveat out there that our spending intentions really only captures top-line revenue. It is not indicative of profit margin or any other line items, so this is only to be viewed as what we are rating the data set itself, not the company, that's not what we're in the game of doing. So I think that's very important for the marketing and the vendors out there themselves when they take a look at this. We're just talking about what we can control, which is our data. We're going to talk about a few of the names here on this highlighted vendors list. One, we're going to go back to that you and I spoke about, I guess, about six months ago, or maybe even earlier, which was the observability space. You and I were noticing that it was getting very crowded, a lot of new entrants, there was a lot of acquisition from more of the legacy or standard players in the space, and that is continuing. So I think in a minute, we're going to move into that observability space, but what we're seeing there is that it's becoming incredibly crowded and we're possibly seeing signs of them cannibalizing each other. We're also going to move on a little bit into video conferencing, where we're capturing some spend deceleration, and then ultimately, we're going to get into a little bit of a storage refresh cycle and talk about that. But yeah, these are the highlighted vendors for April, we usually do this once a quarter and they do change based on the data, but they're not usually whipsawed around, the data doesn't move that quickly. >> Yeah, so you can see some of the big names in the left-hand side, some of the SAS companies that have momentum. Obviously, ServiceNow has been doing very, very well. We've talked a lot about Snowflake, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all very positive, as well as several others. I guess I'd add some things. I mean, I think if thinking about the next decade, it's Cloud, which is not going to be like the same Cloud as the last decade, a lot of machine learning and deep learning and AI and the Cloud is extending to the edge and the data center. Data, obviously, very important, data is decentralized and distributed, so data architectures are changing. A lot of opportunities to connect across Clouds and actually create abstraction layers, and then something that we've been covering a lot is processor performance is actually accelerating relative to Moore's law. It's probably instead of doubling every two years, it's quadrupling every two years, and so that is a huge factor, especially as it relates to powering AI and AI inferencing at the edge. This is a whole new territory, custom Silicon is really becoming in vogue and so something that we're watching very, very closely. >> Yeah, I completely, agree on that and I do think that the next version of Cloud will be very different. Another thing to point out on that too, is you can't do anything that you're talking about without collecting the data and organizations are extremely serious about that now. It seems it doesn't matter what industry they're in, every company is a data company, and that also bodes well for the storage goal. We do believe that there is going to just be a huge increase in the need for storage, and yes, hopefully that'll become portable across multi-Cloud and hybrid as well. >> Now, as Erik said, the ETR data, it's really focused on that top-line spend. So if you look on the right side of that chart, you saw NetApp was kind of negative, was very negative, right? But it is a company that's in transformation now, they've lowered expectations and they've recently beat expectations, that's why the stock has been doing better, but at the macro, from a spending standpoint, it's still stout challenged. So you have big footprint companies like NetApp and Oracle is another one. Oracle's stock is at an all time high, but the spending relative to sort of previous cycles are relative to, like for instance, Snowflake, much, much smaller, not as high growth, but they're managing expectations, they're managing their transition, they're managing profitability. Zoom is another one, Zoom looking negative, but Zoom's got to use its market cap now to transform and increase its TAM. And then Splunk is another one we're going to talk about. Splunk is in transition, it acquired SignalFX, It just brought on this week, Teresa Carlson, who was the head of AWS Public Sector. She's the president and head of sales, so they've got a go-to-market challenge and they brought in Teresa Carlson to really solve that, but Splunk has been trending downward, we called that several quarters ago, Erik, and so I want to bring up the data on Splunk, and this is Splunk, Erik, in analytics, and it's not trending in the right direction. The green is accelerating spend, the red is in the bars is decelerating spend, the top blue line is spending velocity or Net score, and the yellow line is market share or pervasiveness in the dataset. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, first I want to go back. There's a great point, Dave, about our data versus a disconnect from an equity analysis perspective. I used to be an equity analyst, that is not what we do here. And the main word you said is expectations, right? Stocks will trade on how they do compare to the expectations that are set, whether that's buy-side expectations, sell-side expectations or management's guidance themselves. We have no business in tracking any of that, what we are talking about is the top-line acceleration or deceleration. So, that was a great point to make, and I do think it's an important one for all of our listeners out there. Now, to move to Splunk, yes, I've been capturing a lot of negative commentary on Splunk even before the data turns. So this has been a about a year-long, our analysis and review on this name and I'm dating myself here, but I know you and I are both rock and roll fans, so I'm going to point out a Led Zeppelin song and movie, and say that the song remains the same for Splunk. We are just seeing recent spending attentions are taking yet another step down, both from prior survey levels, from year ago levels. This, we're looking at in the analytics sector and spending intentions are decelerating across every single group, and we went to one of our other slide analysis on the ETR+ platform, and you do by customer sub-sample, in analytics, it's dropping in every single vertical. It doesn't matter which one. it's really not looking good, unfortunately, and you had mentioned this is an analytics and I do believe the next slide is an information security. >> Yeah, let's bring that up. >> And unfortunately it's not doing much better. So this is specifically Fortune 500 accounts and information security. There's deep pockets in the Fortune 500, but from what we're hearing in all the insights and interviews and panels that I personally moderate for ETR, people are upset, that they didn't like the strong tactics that Splunk has used on them in the past, they didn't like the ingestion model pricing, the inflexibility, and when alternatives came along, people are willing to look at the alternatives, and that's what we're seeing in both analytics and big data and also for their SIM and security. >> Yeah, so I think again, I pointed Teresa Carlson. She's got a big job, but she's very capable. She's going to meet with a lot of customers, she's a go-to-market pro, she's going to to have to listen hard, and I think you're going to see some changes there. Okay, so sorry, there's more bad news on Splunk. So (indistinct) bring this up is Net score for Splunk and Elastic accounts. This is for analytics, so there's 106 Elastic accounts in the dataset that also have Splunk and it's trending downward for Splunk, that's why it's green for Elastic. And Erik, the important call out from ETR here is how Splunk's performance in Elastic accounts compares with its performance overall. The ELK stack, which obviously Elastic is a big part of that, is causing pain for Splunk, as is Datadog, and you mentioned the pricing issue, well, is it pricing in your assessment or is it more fundamental? >> It's multi-level based on the commentary we get from our ITDMs teams that take the survey. So yes, you did a great job with this analysis. What we're looking at is the spending within shared accounts. So if I have Splunk already, how am I spending? I'm sorry if I have Elastic already, how am I spending on Splunk? And what you're seeing here is it's down to about a 12% Net score, whereas Splunk overall, has a 32% Net score among all of its customers. So what you're seeing there is there is definitely a drain that's happening where Elastic is draining spend from Splunk and usage from them. The reason we used Elastic here is because all observabilities, the whole sector seems to be decelerating. Splunk is decelerating the most, but Elastic is the only one that's actually showing resiliency, so that's why we decided to choose these two, but you pointed out, yes, it's also Datadog. Datadog is Cloud native. They're more dev ops-oriented. They tend to be viewed as having technological lead as compared to Splunk. So a really good point. Dynatrace also is expanding their abilities and Splunk has been making a lot of acquisitions to push their Cloud services, they are also changing their pricing model, right? They're trying to make things a little bit more flexible, moving off ingestion and moving towards consumption. So they are trying, and the new hires, I'm not going to bet against them because the one thing that Splunk has going for them is their market share in our survey, they're still very well entrenched. So they do have a lot of accounts, they have their foothold. So if they can find a way to make these changes, then they will be able to change themselves, but the one thing I got to say across the whole sector is competition is increasing, and it does appear based on commentary and data that they're starting to cannibalize themselves. It really seems pretty hard to get away from that, and you know there are startups in the observability space too that are going to be even more disruptive. >> I think I want to key on the pricing for a moment, and I've been pretty vocal about this. I think the old SAS pricing model where you essentially lock in for a year or two years or three years, pay up front, or maybe pay quarterly if you're lucky, that's a one-way street and I think it's a flawed model. I like what Snowflake's doing, I like what Datadog's doing, look at what Stripe is doing, look at what Twilio is doing, you mentioned it, it's consumption-based pricing, and if you've got a great product, put it out there and damn, the torpedoes, and I think that is a game changer. I look at, for instance, HPE with GreenLake, I look at Dell with Apex, they're trying to mimic that model and apply it to infrastructure, it's much harder with infrastructure 'cause you've got to deploy physical infrastructure, but that is a model that I think is going to change, and I think all of the traditional SAS pricing is going to come under disruption over the next better part of the decades, but anyway, let's move on. We've been covering the APM space pretty extensively, application performance management, and this chart lines up some of the big players here. Comparing Net score or spending momentum from the April 20th survey, the gray is, sorry, the gray is the April 20th survey, the blue is Jan 21 and the yellow is April 21, and not only are Elastic and Datadog doing well relative to Splunk, Erik, but everything is down from last year. So this space, as you point out, is undergoing a transformation. >> Yeah, the pressures are real and it's sort of that perfect storm where it's not only the data that's telling us that, but also the direct feedback we get from the community. Pretty much all the interviews I do, I've done a few panels specifically on this topic, for anyone who wants to dive a little bit deeper. We've had some experts talk about this space and there really is no denying that there is a deceleration in spend and it's happening because that spend is getting spread out among different vendors. People are using a Datadog for certain aspects, they are using Elastic where they can 'cause it's cheaper. They're using Splunk because they have to, but because it's so expensive, they're cutting some of the things that they're putting into Splunk, which is dangerous, particularly on the security side. If I have to decide what to put in and whatnot, that's not really the right way to have security hygiene. So this space is just getting crowded, there's disruptive vendors coming from the emerging space as well, and what you're seeing here is the only bit of positivity is Elastic on a survey-over-survey basis with a slight, slight uptick. Everywhere else, year-over-year and survey-over-survey, it's showing declines, it's just hard to ignore. >> And then you've got Dynatrace who, based on the interviews you do in the (indistinct), one-on-one, or one-on-five, the private interviews that I've been invited to, Dynatrace gets very high scores for their roadmap. You've got New Relic, which has been struggling financially, but they've got a really good product and a purpose-built database just for this APM space, and then of course, you've got Cisco with AppD, which is a strong business for them, and then as you mentioned, you've got startups coming in, you got ChaosSearch, which Ed Walsh is now running, leave the data in place in AWS and really interesting model, Honeycomb is getting really disruptive, Jeremy Burton's company, Observed. So this space is it's becoming jumped ball. >> Yeah, there's a great line that came out of one of them, and that was that the lines are blurring. It used to be that you knew exactly that AppDynamics, what they were doing, it was APM only, or it was logging and monitoring only, and a lot of what I'm hearing from the ITDM experts is that the lines are blurring amongst all of these names. They all have functionality that kind of crosses over each other. And the other interesting thing is it used to be application versus infrastructure monitoring, but as you know, infrastructure is becoming code more and more and more, and as infrastructure becomes code, there's really no difference between application and infrastructure monitoring. So we're seeing a convergence and a blurring of the lines in this space, which really doesn't bode well, and a great point about New Relic, their tech gets good remarks. I just don't know if their enterprise level service and sales is up to snuff right now. As one of my experts said, a CTO of a very large public online hospitality company essentially said that he would be shocked that within 18 months if all of these players are still standalone, that there needs to be some M and A or convergence in this space. >> Okay, now we're going to call out some of the data that really has jumped out to ETR in the latest survey, and some of the names that are getting the most queries from ETR clients, many of which are investor clients. So let's start by having a look at one of the most important and prominent work from home names, Zoom. Let's look at this. Erik is the ride over for Zoom? >> Ah, I've been saying it for a little bit of a time now actually. I do believe it is, and we'll get into it, but again, pointing out, great, Dave, the reason we're presenting today Splunk, Elastic and Zoom, they are the most viewed on the ETR+ platform. Trailing behind that only slightly is F5, I decided not to bring F5 to the table today 'cause we don't have a rating on the data set. So then I went one deep, one below that and it's pure. So the reason we're presenting these to you today is that these are the ones that our clients and our community are most interested in, which is hopefully going to gain interest to your viewers as well. So to get to Zoom, yeah, I call Zoom the pandemic bull market baby. This was really just one that had a meteoric ride. You look back, January in 2020, the stock was at $60 and 10 months later, it was like 580, that's in 10 months. That's cooled down a little bit into the mid-300s, and I believe that cooling down should continue, and the reason why is because we are seeing huge deceleration in our spending intentions. They're hitting all-time lows, it's really just a very ugly dataset. More importantly than the spending intentions, for the first time, we're seeing customer growth in our survey flatten. In the past, we knew that the deceleration of spend was happening, but meanwhile, their new customer growth was accelerating, so it was kind of hard to really make any call based on that. This is the first time we're seeing flattening customer growth trajectory, and that in tandem with just dominance from Microsoft in every sector they're involved in, I don't care if it's IP telephony, productivity apps or the core video conferencing, Microsoft is just dominating. So there's really just no way to ignore this anymore. The data and the commentary state that Zoom is facing some headwinds. >> Well, plus you've pointed out to me that a lot of your private conversations with buyers says that, "Hey, we're, we're using the freebie version of Zoom, and we're not paying them." And that combined with Teams, I mean, it's... I think, look, Zoom, they've got to figure out how to use their elevated market cap to transform and expand their TAM, but let's move on. Here's the data on Pure Storage and we've highlighted a number of times this company is showing elevated spending intentions. Pure announced it's earnings in May, IBM just announced storage, it was way down actually. So still, Pure, more positive, but I'll on that comment in a moment, but what does this data tell you, Erik? >> Yeah, right now we started seeing this data last survey in January, and that was the first time we really went positive on the data set itself, and it's just really continuing. So we're seeing the strongest year-over-year acceleration in the entire survey, which is a really good spot to be. Pure is also a leading position among its sector peers, and the other thing that was pretty interesting from the data set is among all storage players, Pure has the highest positive public Cloud correlation. So what we can do is we can see which respondents are accelerating their public Cloud spend and then cross-reference that with their storage spend and Pure is best positioned. So as you and I both know, digital transformation Cloud spending is increasing, you need to be aligned with that. And among all storage sector peers, Pure is best positioned in all of those, in spending intentions and adoptions and also public Cloud correlation. So yet again, to start another really strong dataset, and I have an anecdote about why this might be happening, because when I saw the data, I started asking in my interviews, what's going on here? And there was one particular person, he was a director of Cloud operations for a very large public tech company. Now, they have hybrid, but their data center is in colo, So they don't own and build their own physical building. He pointed out that during COVID, his company wanted to increase storage, but he couldn't get into his colo center due to COVID restrictions. They weren't allowed. You had 250,000 square feet, right, but you're only allowed to have six people in there. So it's pretty hard to get to your rack and get work done. He said he would buy storage, but then the colo would say, "Hey, you got to get it out of here. It's not even allowed to sit here. We don't want it in our facility." So he has all this pent up demand. In tandem with pent up demand, we have a refresh cycle. The SSD depreciation cycle is ending. SSDs are moving on and we're starting to see a new technology in that space, NVMe sorry, technology increasing in that space. So we have pent up demand and we have new technology and that's really leading to a refresh cycle, and this particular ITDM that I spoke to and many of his peers think this has a long tailwind that storage could be a good sector for some time to come. >> That's really interesting, thank you for that extra metadata. And I want to do a little deeper dive on storage. So here's a look at storage in the industry in context and some of the competitive. I mean, it's been a tough market for the reasons that we've highlighted, Cloud has been eating away that flash headroom. It used to be you'd buy storage to get more spindles and more performance and we're sort of forced to buy more, flash, gave more headroom, but it's interesting what you're saying about the depreciation cycle. So that's good news. So ETR combines, just for people's benefit here, combines primary and secondary storage into a single category. So you have companies like Pure and NetApp, which are really pure play primary storage companies, largely in the sector, along with Veeam, Cohesity and Rubrik, which are kind of secondary data or data protection. So my quick thoughts here that Pure is elevated and remains what I call the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, but that's positive tailwinds there, so that's good news. Rubrik is very elevated but down, it's big competitor, Cohesity is way off its highs, and I have to say to me, Veeam is like the Steady Eddy consistent player here. They just really continue to do well in the data protection business, and the highs are steady, the lows are steady. Dell is also notable, they've been struggling in storage. Their ISG business, which comprises servers and storage, it's been softer in COVID, and during even this new product rollout, so it's notable with this new mid range they have in particular, the uptick in Dell, this survey, because Dell is so large, a small uptick can be very good for Dell. HPE has a big announcement next month in storage, so that might improve based on a product cycle. Of course, the Nimble brand continues to do well, IBM, as I said, just announced a very soft quarter, down double digits again, and they're in a product cycle shift. And NetApp, it looks bad in the ETR data from a spending momentum standpoint, but their management team is transforming the company into a Cloud play, which Erik is why it was interesting that Pure has the greatest momentum in Cloud accounts, so that is sort of striking to me. I would have thought it would be NetApp, so that's something that we want to pay attention to, but I do like a lot of what NetApp is doing, and other than Pure, they're the only big kind of pure play in primary storage. So long-winded, intro there, Erik, but anything you'd add? >> No, actually I appreciate it as long-winded. I'm going to be honest with you, storage is not my best sector as far as a researcher and analyst goes, but I actually think that a lot of what you said is spot on. We do capture a lot of large organizations spend, we don't capture much mid and small, so I think when you're talking about these large, large players like NetApp not looking so good, all I would state is that we are capturing really big organization spending attention, so these are names that should be doing better to be quite honest, in those accounts, and at least according to our data, we're not seeing it in. It's longterm depression, as you can see, NetApp now has a negative spending velocity in this analysis. So, I can go dig around a little bit more, but right now the names that I'm hearing are Pure, Cohesity. I'm hearing a little bit about Hitachi trying to reinvent themselves in the space, but I'll take a wait-and-see approach on that one, but pure Cohesity are the ones I'm hearing a lot from our community. >> So storage is transforming to Cloud as a service. You've seen things like Apex in GreenLake from Dell and HPE and container storage. A little, so not really a lot of people paying attention to it, but Pure bought a company called Portworx which really specializes in container storage, and there's many startups there, they're trying to really change the way. David Flynn, has a startup in that space, he's the guy who started Fusion-io. So a lot of transformations happening here. Okay, I know it's been a long segment, we have to summarize, and let me go through a summary and then I'll give you the last word, Erik. So tech spending appears to be tracking US GDP at 6 to 7%. This talent shortage could be a blocker to accelerating IT deployments, so that's kind of good news actually for services companies. Digital transformation, it remains a priority, and that bodes, well, not only for services, but automation. UiPath went public this week, we profiled that extensively, that went public last Wednesday. Organizations that sit at the top face some tough decisions on how to allocate resources. They're running the business, growing the business, transforming the business, and we're seeing a bifurcation of spending and some residual effects on vendors, and that remains a theme that we're watching. Erik, your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm going to go back quickly to just the overall macro spending, 'cause there's one thing I think is interesting to point out and we're seeing a real acceleration among mid and small. So it seems like early on in the COVID recovery or COVID spending, it was the deep pockets that moved first, right? Fortune 500 knew they had to support remote work, they started spending first. Around that in the Fortune 500, we're only seeing about 5% spend, but when you get into mid and small organizations, that's creeping up to eight, nine. So I just think it's important to point out that they're playing catch up right now. I also would point out that this is heavily skewed to North America spending. We're seeing laggards in EMEA, they just don't seem to be spending as much. They're in a very different place in their recovery, and I do think that it's important to point that out. Lastly, I also want to mention, I know you do such a great job on following a lot of the disruptive vendors that you just pointed out, with Pure doing container storage, we also have another bi-annual survey that we do called Emerging Technology, and that's for the private names. That's going to be launching in May, for everyone out there who's interested in not only the disruptive vendors, but also private equity players. Keep an eye out for that. We do that twice a year and that's growing in its respondents as well. And then lastly, one comment, because you mentioned the UiPath IPO, it was really hard for us to sit on the sidelines and not put some sort of rating on their dataset, but ultimately, the data was muted, unfortunately, and when you're seeing this kind of hype into an IPO like we saw with Snowflake, the data was resoundingly strong. We had no choice, but to listen to what the data said for Snowflake, despite the hype. We didn't see that for UiPath and we wanted to, and I'm not making a large call there, but I do think it's interesting to juxtapose the two, that when snowflake was heading to its IPO, the data was resoundingly positive, and for UiPath, we just didn't see that. >> Thank you for that, and Erik, thanks for coming on today. It's really a pleasure to have you, and so really appreciate the collaboration and look forward to doing more of these. >> Yeah, we enjoy the partnership greatly, Dave. We're very happy to have you on the ETR family and looking forward to doing a lot, lot more with you in the future. >> Ditto. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you have to do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcast, and please subscribe to the series. Check out ETR website it's etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me, david.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me on Twitter @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. I could see you in Clubhouse. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Porter Bradley for the CUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to The CUBE where we're covering the recent news from Hewlett Packard enterprise, making moves and storage. And with me are Omar Assad, vice president and general manager for Primary Storage, HCI and data management at HPE. And Sandeep Singh, who's the vice president of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome back to the CUBE Great to see you both. >> David, it's pleasure to be here. >> Always a pleasure talking to you David, thank you so much. >> Oh, it's my pleasure. Hey, so we just watched HPE make a big announcement and I wonder Sandeep if you could give us a quick recap. >> Yeah, of course, Dave. In the world of enterprise storage, there hasn't been a moment like this in decades upon at which everything is changing for data and infrastructure. And it's really coming at the nexus of data cloud and AI that's opening up the opportunity for customers across industries to accelerate their data-driven transformation. Building on that, we just unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates the data driving transformation for customers edge to cloud. And to pay that off, we introduce a new data services platform that consists of two game-changing innovations. First it's a data services cloud console which is a SAS based console that delivers cloud operational agility for customers. And it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud services. Then our second announcement is HPE Electra. HB Electra is a cloud native data infrastructure portfolio to power your data edge to cloud. It's managed natively with data services cloud console and it brings that cloud operational model to customers wherever their data lives. These innovations are really combined with our industry leading AI ops platform which is HPE in foresight, and combine these innovations radically simplify and bring that cloud operational model to customers or data and infrastructure management. And it gives the opportunity for streamlining data management across the life cycle. These innovations are making it possible for organizations across the industries to unleash the power of data. >> That's kind of cool, I mean, a lot of the stuff we've been talking about for all these years is sort of this unified layer across all clouds on prem, AI injected in, I could tell you're excited and it sounds like you you can't wait to get these offerings in the hands of customers. But I wonder if we get back up a little a minute. Omer, maybe you could describe the problem statement that you're addressing with this announcement. What are customers really, what are their pain points? >> Excellent question, Dave. So in my role, as the general manager for data management and storage here at HPE, I get the wonderful opportunity to talk to hundreds of customers in a year. And as time has progressed, as the amount of data under organizations management has continued to increase. What I have noticed is that recently there are three main themes that are continuously emerging and are now bubbling at the top. The first one is storage infrastructure management itself is extremely complex for customers. While there have been lots of leaps and down progress in managing a single array or managing two arrays with a lot of simplification of the UI and maybe some modern UI are present. But as the problem starts to get at scale, as customers acquire more, and more assets to store and manage their data on premise, the management at scale is extremely complex. Yes, storage has gotten faster. Yes, flash has had a profound effect on performance availability and latency access to the data but infrastructure management and storage management as a whole has become a pain for customers and it's a constant theme as storage lifecycle management comes up, storage refresh has come up and deploying and managing storage infrastructure at scale comes up. So that's one of the main problems that I've been seeing as I talk to customers. Now, secondly, a lot of customers are now talking about two different elements. One is storage and storage deployment and life cycle management. And the second is the management of data that is stored on those storage devices. As the amount of data grows the silos continue to grow, a single view of life cycle management of data customers don't get to see it. And lastly, one of the biggest things that we see is a lot of customers are now asking, how can I extract a value from this data under my management because they can't seem to parse through the silos. So there is an incredible amount of productivity lost when it comes to data management as a whole, which is just fragmented into silos and then from a storage management. And when you put these two together and especially add two more elements to it which is hybrid management of data or a multi-cloud management of data, the silos and the sprawl just continues and there is nothing that is stitching together this thing at scale. So these are the three main themes that constantly appear in these discussions. Although in spite of these, a lot of modern enhancements in storage. >> Well, I wonder if I could comment guys. Is I've been following this industry for a number of years and you're absolutely right Omer. I mean, if you look at the amount of money and time and energy that's spent into or put into the data architectures, people are frustrated, they're not getting enough out of it. And I'd note that, the prevailing way in which we've attacked complexity historically is you build a better box. And well, that system was maybe easier to manage than the predecessor systems. All it did is create another silo and then the cloud, despite its inherent simplicity, that was another disconnected siloed. So then we threw siloed management solutions at the problem, and we're left with this collection of point solutions with data sort of trapped inside. So I wonder if you could give us your thoughts on that and do you agree? What data do you have around this problem statement? >> Yeah, Dave that's a great point. And actually ESG just recently conducted a survey of over 250 IT decision makers. And that actually brings one of the perfect validations of the problems that Omer, and you just articulated. What it showed is that 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management, that complexity is impeding their digital transformation. On average, the organizations have over 23 different data management tools which just typifies and is a perfect showcase of the fragmentation and the complexity that exists in that data management. And 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management, that complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them. And actually top five for 67% of the respondents. So it's a great validation across the board. >> Well, it's fresh in their minds too, because pre pandemic there was probably a mixed picture, right? It was probably well there's complacency or we're not moving fast enough, we have other priorities, but they were forced into this. Now they know what the real problem is. It's front and center. I liked that you're putting out there in your announcement, this sort of future state that you're envisioning for customers. And I wonder if we could sort of summarize that and share with our listeners that vision that you unveiled, what does it look like and how are you making it real? >> Yeah, overall, we feel very strongly that it's time for our customers to reimagine data management. And our vision is that customers need to break down the silos and complexity that plagues the distributed data environments. And they need to experience a new data experience across the board. That's going to help them accelerate their data-driven transformation. And we call this vision unified data ops. Unified data ops integrates data centric policies across the board to streamline data management, cloud native control and operations, to bring that agility of cloud and the operational model to wherever data lives. And AI driven insights and intelligence to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a whole new experience to customers to radically simplify and bring the agility of talent to data and data infrastructure. Streamlined data management, and really help customers innovate faster than ever before. And we're making the promise of unified data ops real by transforming the entire HPE storage business to a cloud native software defined data services. And that's through introducing a data services platform that expands HPE GreenLake. >> I mean, the key word I take away there Sandeep is invisible. I mean, as a customer I want you to abstract that complexity away that underlying infrastructure complexity is. I just don't want to see it anymore over. Omer, I wonder if we could start with the first part of the announcement. Maybe you can help us unpack data services, cloud console. I mean, people are immediately going to think it's just another software product to manage infrastructure. But to really innovate, I'm hoping that it's more than that. >> Absolutely, David, it's a lot more than that. What did we have done fundamentally at the root of the problem is we have taken the data and infrastructure control away from the hardware and through that, we provided a unified approach to manage the data wherever it lives. It's a full blown SAS console, which our customers get onto. And from there they can deploy appliances, manage appliances, lifecycle appliances and then they're not only stop at that, but then go ahead and start to get context around their data. But all of that is available through a SAS platform, a SAS console. 'Cause as every customer onboard themselves and their equipment and their storage infrastructure onto this console, then they can go ahead and define role-based access for different parts of their organization. They can also apply role-based access to HPE GreenLake management personnel, so they can come in and do and perform all the operations for the customers. We at the same console, by just being another access control methodology in that. And then in addition to that, data mobility is extremely important to our customers. How do you make data available in different hyperscaler clouds? If the customer's digital transformation requires that. So again, from that single cloud console, from that single data console, which we are naming here as data services console, customers are able to curate the data, maneuver the data, pre-position the data into different hyperscalers. But the beautiful thing is that the entire view of the storage infrastructure, the data with its that is stored on top of that access control methodologies and management framework is operational from a single SAS console which the customer can decide to give access to whichever management entity or authority comes into help them. And then what this leads us into is then combining these things into a northbound API. So anybody that wants to streamline operational manageability can then use these APIs to program against a single API which will then control the entire infrastructure on behalf of the customer. So if somebody, they, what this is, is it is bringing that cloud operational model that was so desired by each one of our customers into their data centers. And this is what I call an in-place transformation of a management experience for our customer by making them seamlessly available on a cloud operational model for their infrastructure. >> Yeah, and you've turned that into essentially an API with a lot of automation, that's great. So, okay. So that's kind of how you're trying to change the game here. You're charting new territory. You've talked to hundreds and hundreds of customers every year. I wonder if you could paint a picture from the customer perspective. How does their experience actually change? >> Wonderful, Dave. This allows me to break it down into bits and bites further for you. And I love that, right? So the way you look at it is, recently, the storage management from an, as we talked about earlier from an array perspective or maybe two arrays perspective has been simplified. I mean, it's a solved problem. But when you start to imagine deploying hundreds of arrays and these are large customers, they have massive amounts of data assets, storage management hasn't scaled along as the infrastructure scales. But if you look at the consumer world, you can have hundreds of devices, but the ownership model is completely set. So the inspiration for solving this problem for us actually lied, was inspired from consumerization of IT. And that's a big trend over here. So now we're changing the customer's ownership model, the customer's deployment model and the customer's data management model into a true cloud first model. So let me give some of the examples of that, right? So first of all, let's talk about deployment. So previously deployment has been a massive challenge for our customers. What does deployment in this new data services console world looks like? Devices show up, you rack them up and then you plug in the power cable, you plug in the network cable, and then you walk out of the data center. Data center administrator or the storage administrator, they will be on their iPad, on their data services console or iPhone or whatever the device of their choices, and from that console, from that point on, the device will be registered, onboarded. Its initial state will be given to it from the cloud. And if the customer has some predefined states for their previous deployment model already saved with the data console, they don't even need to do that. We'll just take that and apply that state and induct the device into the fleet. That's just one example. It's extremely simple. Plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and the data center operational manager just walks out. After that you could be on the beach, you could be at your home, you could be driving in a car and this don't, I advise people not to fiddle with their I-phones when they're driving in a car, but still you could do it if you want to. So that's just one part from a deployment methodology perspective. Now, the second thing that Sandeep and I often bounce ideas bond is is it is provisioning of a workload. It's like a science these days. And is this array going to be able to absorb my workload? Is the latency going to go South? Does this workload latency profile match this particular piece of device in my data center? All of this is extremely manual. And it literally takes, I mean, if you talk to any of the customers or even analysts, deploying a workload is a massive challenge. It's a guesswork that you have to model and basically see how it works out. I think based on HPE info site, we're collecting hundreds and millions of data points from all these devices. So now to harness that and present that back to a customer in a very simple manner so that we can model on their behalf to the data services console, which is now workload of it. you just describe your workload. Hey, I'm going to need these many IOPS. And by the way, this happens to be my application. And that's it. On the backend, because we're managing your infrastructure, the cloud console understands your entire fleet. We are seeing the statistics and the telemetric coming off of your systems. And because now you've described the workload for us we can do that matching for you. And what intent based provisioning does is, describe your workloads in two or three clicks or maybe two or three API construct formats and we'll do the provisioning, the deployment and bringing it up for you on your behalf on the right pieces of infrastructure that matched it. And if you don't like our choices, you can manually change it as well. But from a provisioning perspective, a thing that took days can now come down to a couple of minutes of the description. And lastly then, global data management, distributed infrastructure from edge to cloud, invisible upgrades, only upgrading the right amount of infrastructure that needs the upgrade. All of that just comes rolling along with it, right? So those are some of the things that this data services console as a SAS management and scale allows you to do. >> And actually, if I can just jump in and add a little bit. What Omer described, especially with intent based provisioning, that's really bringing a paradigm shift to provisioning. It's shifting it from a long centric to app centric provisioning. And when you combine it with identity management and role-based access, what it means is that you're enabling self-service on demand provisioning of the underlying data infrastructure to accelerate the app workload deployment. And you're eliminating guesswork and providing the ability to be able to optimize service level objectives. >> Yeah, it sounds like you've really nailed in an elegant way that provisioning challenge. I've been saying for years if your primary expertise is deploying logical unit numbers you better find some other skills because the day is coming that that's just going to get automated away. So that's cool. There's another issue that I'm sure you've thought about, but I wonder if you could address. I mean, you've got the definition of cloud is changing, the cloud is expanding to on prem expand. The cloud is going out to the edge, it's going across clouds. And so security becomes a big issue that threat surface is expanding. The operating model is changing. So how are you thinking about addressing those security concerns? >> Excellent question, Dave. So most of the organizations that we've talked to... In today's modern world, almost every customer that I've talked to has deployed either some sort of a cloud console where they're either one of the customers for the hyperscalers or buy in for SAS based applications are pervasive across the customer base. And as you know, we were the first ones to introduce the automatic telemeter management through HPE info site. That's one of the largest storage SAS services in production today that we operate on behalf of our customers, which has, Dave, about 85% connectivity rate. So from that perspective, keeping customers data secure, keeping customers telemetry information secure, we're no stranger to that. Again, we follow all security protocols that any cloud operational SAS service would do so. Reverse tunneling, the firewall compliancy security audit logs that are published to our customers and published to customers chief information security officers. So all of those, what I call crossing the T's and dotted the I's, we do that with security expert and security policies for which each of our customers has a different set of rules. And we have a property engagement model that we go through that particular audit process for our customers. Then secondly, Dave, the data services cloud console is actually built on a fundamental cloud deployment technology that is not, sort of new. Aruba central, which is an Aruba management console which is also an HPE company it's been deployed, it's managing millions of access points in a SAS framework for our customers. So the fundamental building blocks of the data storage console from a basic enablement perspective come from the Aruba central console. And what we've taken is we've taken those generic cloud-based SAS services and then built data and storage centric SAS services on top of that and made them available to our customers. >> Yeah, I really like the Aruba. You picked that up several years ago . And it's same thing with, with info site, the way that you bring it to other parts of the portfolio. Those are really good signs to watch of successful acquisitions. All right, there's a lot here. I want to talk about the second part of the announcement. I know your branding team, you guys are serious about branding. That new product brand, maybe you could talk about that. >> So again, so delivering the cloud operational model is just the first piece, right? And now the second part of the announcement is delivering the cloud native hardware infrastructure which is extremely performance to go along with this cloud operational model. So what we have done Dave, in this announcement is we've announced HPE Electra. This is our new brand for our cloud native infrastructure to power your data and its appliances from core to the edge, to the cloud. And what it does is it takes the cloud operational model and this hardware is powered by that. It's completely wrapped around that. And so HPE Electra is available in two models right now, the HB electron 9,000, which is available for mission critical workloads, for those high intensity workloads with a hundred percent availability guarantee where no failure is ever an option. And then it's also available as HPE Electra 6,000, which is available for general purpose, business critical workloads, generally trying to address that mid range of the storage market. And both of these systems are full 100% NBME front and back. And they're powered by the same unified cloud management operational experience that the data cloud console provides. And what it does is it allows our customers to simplify the deployment model. It simplifies their management model and really, really allows them to focus on the context, the data and the app diversity, whereas data mobility, data connectivity, data management in a multi-cloud world is then completely obstructed from them. >> [Sandeep And Dave-- >> Go ahead, please. >> Just to jump in. HPE Electra combined with data services cloud console is delivering a cloud experience that makes deploying and scaling the application workloads as simple as flipping a switch. >> It really does. It really does. And I'm very comfortable in saying this, like HPE in foresight, we were the first in the industry to bring AI based elementary and support enabled metrics to work. And then here with data services console and the hardware that goes with it, we're just completely transforming the storage ownership and a storage management model. And for our customers, it's a seamless, non-disruptive upgrade with fully data in place upgrade. And they transform to a cloud operational model where they can manage their infrastructure better where they are through a complete consumer grade SAS console, is again the first of its kind, when you look at storage management and storage management at scale. >> And I like how you're emphasizing that management layer, but underneath you've got all the modern hardware technologies too which is important, because it's a performance it's got to be, a good price performance. So now can we bring this back again to the customers? What are the outcomes that this is going to enable for them? >> So I think Dave, the first and the foremost thing is as they scale their storage infrastructures, they don't have to think. It's really as simple as yeah, just send it to the data center, plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and up it comes. And from that point onwards, the life cycle and the device management aspect are completely abstracted by the data services console. All they have to focus is I just have new capacity available to me and when I have an application, the system will figure it out for me where they need to deploy. So no more needing the guesswork, the Excel sheets of capacity management, the charge back models, none of that stuff is needed. And for customers that are looking to transform their applications, customers looking to refactor their applications into a hyperscaler model, or maybe transform from VM to containers, all they need to think about and focus is on that. The data will just follow these workloads from that perspective. >> And David, just to almost response here. As I speak with customers, one of the things I'm hearing from IT is that line of business really wants IT to deliver that agility of cloud. Yet IT also has to deliver all of the enterprise reliability, availability, all of the data services. And what's fantastic here is that through this cloud operational model, IT can deliver that agility, that line of business owners are looking for. At the same time they're been under pressure to do a lot more with less. And through this agility, IT is able to get time back, be able to focus more on the strategic projects, at the same time, be able to get time back to spend more time with our families. That's incredibly important. >> Well, I love the sort of mindset shift I'm seeing from HPE. We're not talking about how much the box weighs, we're talking about the customer experience. And I wonder, you know, that kind of leads me, Sandeep to how this kind of fits in to this new. Really to me, I'm seeing the transformation before our eyes but how does it fit into HPE's overall mission? >> Well Dave, our mission overall is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company with HPE GreenLake, being the key to delivering that cloud experience. And as Omer put it, be able to deliver that cloud experience wherever the customer data lives. And today we're advancing HPE GreenLake as a service transformation of the HPE storage business to a software defined cloud data services business overall. And for our customers, this translates to our operational and ownership experience that unleashes their agility, their data and their innovation. So we're super excited. >> Guys, I can tell you're excited. Thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and summarizing the announcements, congratulations and best of luck to both of you and to HPE and your customers. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a pleasure. >> Thanks, Dave. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome back to the Cube on Cloud. We're talking about developers. And while so many people remember the mean from 2010 of Steve Balmer jumping around on stage development developers and developers, uh, many people know what really important is really important about developers. They probably read the 2013 book called The New King Makers by Stephen O. Grady. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program. Rachel Stevens, who is an industry analyst with Red Monk who was co founded by the aforementioned Stephen O. Grady. Rachel, Great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. >>Well, I've had the opportunity, Thio read some of what you've done. We've interacted on social media. We've got to talk events back when we used to do those in people. And >>I'm so >>glad that you get to come on the program especially. You were the ones I reached out. When we have this developer track, um, if you could just give our audience a little bit about your background. You know, that developer cred that you have Because as I joke, I've got a closet full of hoodies. But, you know, I'm an infrastructure guy by training I've been learning about, you know, containers and serverless and all this stuff for years. But I'm not myself much of developer. I've touched a thing or two in the years. >>Yeah. So happy to be here. Red Monk has been around since 2002 and have kind of been beating that developer drum ever since then, kind of as the company, The founder, Stephen James, notice that the decision making that developers was really a driver for what was actually ending up in the Enterprise. And as even more true, as cloud came onto, the scene is open source exploded, and I think it's become a lot more of a common view now. But in those early days, it was probably a little bit more of a controversial opinion, but I have been with the firm for coming up on five years now. My work is an industry analyst. We kind of help people understand, bottoms up technology, adoption trends, so that that's where I spend my time focusing is what's getting used in the enterprise. Why, what kind of trends are happening? So, yeah, that's where we all come from. That's the history of Red Monk in 30 seconds. >>Awesome. Rachel, you talk about the enterprise and developers For the longest time. I just said there was this huge gap you talk about. Bottoms up. It's like, well, developers use the tools that they want If they don't have to, they don't pay for anything. And the general I t. And the business sides of the house were like, I don't know, We don't know what those people in the corner we're doing, you know, it's important and things like that. But today it feels like that that's closed a bunch. Where are we? In your estimation, you know, our developers do they have a clear seat at the table? The title we have for this is whether the Enterprise Developer is its enterprise development oxymoron. In 2020 and 2021 >>I think enterprise developers have a lot more practical authority than people give them credit for, especially if you're kind of looking at that old view of the world where everything is driven by a buyer decision or kind of this top down purchasing motion. And we've really seen that authority of what is getting used and why change a lot in the last year. In the last decade, even more of people who are able to choose the tools that meet the job bring in tools, regardless of whether they maybe have that official approval through the right channels because of the convenience of trying to get things up and running. We are asking developers to do so much right now and to go faster and thio shifting things left. And so the things that they are responsible for incorporating into the way they are building APS is growing. And so, as we are asking developers to do more and to do more quickly, um, the tools that they need to do those, um, tasks to get these APS built is that the decision making us fall into them? This is what I need. This is what needs to come in, and so we're seeing. Basically, the tools that enterprise is air using are the tools that developers want to be using, and they kind of just find their way into the enterprise. >>Now I want to key off what you were talking about. Just developers were being asked to do Mawr and Mawr. We've seen these pendulum swings in technology. There was a time where it was like, Well, I'll outsource it because that'll be easier and maybe it'll be less expensive. And number one we found it necessarily. It wasn't necessarily cheaper. And number two, I couldn't make changes, and I didn't understand what was happening. So when when I talked to Enterprises today, absolutely. I need to have skills that's internally. I need to be able to respond to things fast, and therefore I need skills that I need people that can build what they have. What what do you see? What are those skill sets that are so important today? Uh, you know, we've talked so many times over the years is to you know, there's there's the skills gap. We don't have enough data scientists. We don't have enough developers way. We don't have any of these things. So what do we have and where things trending? >>Yeah, it's It's one of those things for developers where they both have probably the most full tool set that we've seen in this industry in terms of things that are available to them. But it's also really hard because it also indicates that there is just this fragmentation at every level of the stack. And there's this explosion of choice and decisions that is happening up and down the stack of how are we going to build things? And so it's really tricky to be a developer these days and that you are making a lot of decisions and you are wiring a lot of things together and you have to be able to navigate a lot of things. E think. One of the things that is interesting here is that we have seen the phrase like Full stack developer really carried a lot of panache, maybe earlier this decade and has kind of fallen away. Just because we've realized that it's impossible for anybody to be ableto spanned this whole broad spectrum of all of the things we're asking people to dio. So we're seeing this explosion of choice, which is meaning that there is a little bit more focused and where developers are trying to actually figure out what is my niche. What is it that I'm supposed to focus on. And so it's really just this balancing of act of trying to see this big picture of how to get this all put together and also have this focused area realizing that you have to specialize at some point. >>Rachel is such a great point there. We've actually seen that Cambrian explosion of developer tools that are out there. If you go to the CFCF landscape and look at everything out there or goto any of your public cloud providers, there's no way that anybody even working for those companies no good portion of the tools that are out there so nobody could be a master of everything. How about from a cloud standpoint, you know, there is the discussion of, you know what do I shift? Left What? You know, Can I just say, Okay, this piece of it, it could be a manage service. I don't need to think about it versus what skills that I need to have in house. What is it that's important. And obviously, you know, a zoo analyst. We know it varies greatly across companies, but you know what? What are some of those top things that we need to make sure that enterprises have skill set and the tools in house that they should understand. And what can they push off to their platform of choice? >>Yeah, I think your comment about managed services is really pressing because one of the trends that we're watching closely, it's just this rise of manage services. And it kind of ties back into the concept you had before about like, what an I team. That's they have, like the Nicholas Carr. I t doesn't matter, and we're pushing this all the way. And then we realized, Oh, we've got to bring that all back. Um, but we also realize that we really want as enterprises want to be spending our time doing differentiated work and wiring together, your entire infrastructure isn't necessarily differentiated for a lot of companies. And so it's trying to find this mix of where can I push my abstraction higher or to find a manage service that can do something for me? And we're seeing that happen in all levels of the stack. And so what we're seeing is this rise of composite APS where we're going to say, Okay, I'm gonna pull in back end AP ice from a whole bunch of tools like twilio or stripe or all zero where algo Leah, all of those things are great tools that I can incorporate into my app. And I can have this great user, um, interface that I can use. And then I don't have to worry quite so much about building it all myself. But I am responsible for wiring at all together. So I think it's that wire together set of interest that is happening for developers as the tool set that they are spending a lot of time with. So we see the manage services being important. Um played an important role in how absent composed, and it's the composition of that APs that is happening internally. >>What one of the one of the regular research items that I see a red monk is you know what languages you know. Where are the trends going? There's been relative stability, but then something's changed. You know, I look at the tools that you mentioned Full stack developer. I talked to a full stack developer a couple of years ago, and he's like like like terror form is my life and I love everything and I've used it forever. And that was 18 months, Andi. I kind of laugh because it's like, OK, I managed. I measure a lot of the technology that I used in the decades. Um, not that await. This came out six months ago and it's kind of mature. And of course, you know, C I C d. Come on. If it's six weeks old, it's probably gone through a lot of generations. So what do you see? Do you have any research that you can share as to looking forward? What are the You know what the skill sets we need? How should we be training our force? What do >>we need to >>be looking at in this kind of next decade of cloud? >>Yeah. So when when you spoke about languages, we dio a semi annual review of language usage as a sign on get hub and in discussion as seen on stack overflow, which we fully recognize is not a perfect representation of how these languages are used in the broader world. But those air data sets that we have access to that are relatively large and open eso just before anyone writes me angry letters that that's not the way that we should be doing it, Um, but one of the things that we've seen over time is that there is a lot of relative stability in those top tier languages in terms of how they are used, and there's some movement at the bottom. But the trends we're seeing where the languages are moving is type safety and having a safer language and the communities that are building upon other communities. So things like, um, we're seeing Scotland that is able to kind of piggyback off of being a jvm based language and having that support from Google. Or we're seeing typescript where it can piggyback off of the breath of deployment of JavaScript, things like that. So those things where were combining together multiple trends that developers are interested in the same time combined with an ecosystem that's already rich and full. And so we're seeing that there's definitely still movement in languages that people are interested in, but also, language on its own is probably pretty stable. So, like as you start to make language choices as a developer, that's not where we're seeing a ton of like turnover language frameworks on the other hand, like if you're a JavaScript developer and all of a sudden there's just explosion of frameworks that you need to choose from, that may be a different story, a lot more turnover there and harder to predict. But language trends are a little bit more stable over >>time, changing over time. You know, Boy, I I got to dig into, you know, relatively Recently I went down like the jam stack. Uh, ecosystem. I've been digging into a serverless for a number of years. What's your take on that? There's certain people. I talked to him. They're like, I don't even need to be a code. Or I could be a marketing person. And I can get things done when I talked to some developers there like a citizen developers. They're not developers. Come on, you know, I really need to be able to do this, so I'll give you your choices, toe. You know, serverless and some of these trends to kind of ext fan. You know who can you know? Code and development. >>Yeah. So for both translate jam stack and serve Ellis, One of the things that we see kind of early in the iteration of a technology is that it is definitely not going to be the right tool for every app. And the number of APS that they approach will fit for will grow as the tool develops. And you add more functionality over time and all of these platforms expand the capability, but definitely not the correct tool choice in every case. That said, we do watch both of those areas with extreme interest in terms of what this next generation of APS can look like and probably will look like in a lot of cases. And I think that it is super interesting to think about who gets to build these APs, because I e. I think one of the things that we probably haven't landed on the right language yet is what that what we should call these people because I don't think anyone associates themselves as a low code person. Like if you're someone from marketing and all of a sudden you can build something technical, that's really cool, and you're excited about that. Nobody else on your team could build. You're not walking around saying I am a low code marketing person like that, that that's that's that's demeaning. Like you're like. No, I'm technical. I'm a technical market, or look what I just did. And if you're someone who codes professionally for a living like and you use a low code tool to get something out the door quickly and >>you don't >>wanna demean and said, Oh, that was I did a low code that just like everybody, is just trying to solve problems. And everybody, um, is trying to figure out how to do things in the most effective way possible and making trade offs all the time. And so I don't think that the language of low code really is anything that resonates with any of the actual users of low code tools. And so I think that's something that we as an industry need toe work on finding the correct language because it doesn't feel like we've landed there yet. >>Yeah, Rachel, what? Want to get your take on just careers for developers now to think about in 2020 everyone is distributed. Lots of conversations about where we work. Can we bring the remote? Many of the developers I talked to already were remote. I had the chance that interview that the head of remote. Forget lab. They're over 1000 people and they're fully remote. So, you know, remote. Absolutely a thing for developers. But if you talk about careers, it is no longer, you know. Oh, hey, here's my CV. It's I'm on git Hub. You can see the code I've done. We haven't talked about open source yet, so give us your take on kind of developers today. Career paths. Andi. Kind of the the online community there. >>Yeah, this could be a whole own conversation. We'll try to figure out my points. Um, so I think one of the things that we are trying to figure out in terms of balance is how much are we expecting people to have done on the side? It's like a side project Hustle versus doing, exclusively getting your job done and not worrying too much about how many green squares you have on your get hub profile. And I think it's a really emotional and fraught discussion and a lot of quarters because it can be exclusionary for people saying that you you need to be spending your time on the side working on this open source project because there are people who have very different life circumstances, like if you're someone who already has kids or you're doing elder care or you are working another job and trying to transition into becoming a developer, it's a lot to ask. These people toe also have a side hustle. That said, it is probably working on open source, having an understanding of how tools are done. Having this, um, this experience and skills that you can point to and contributions you can point Teoh is probably one of the cleaner ways that you can start to move in the industry and break through to the industry because you can show your skills two other employers you can kind of maybe make your way in is a junior developer because you worked on a project and you make those connections. And so it's really still again. It's one of those balancing act things where there's not a perfect answer because there really is to correct sides of this argument. And both of those things are true. At the same time where it's it's hard to figure out what that early career path maybe looks like, or even advancing in a career path If you're already a developer, it's It's tricky. >>Well, I want to get your take on something to you know, I think back to you know, I go back a decade or two I started working with about 20 years ago. Back in the crazy days were just Colonel Daughter Warg and, you know, patches everywhere and lots of different companies trying to figure out what they would be doing on most of the people contributing to the free software before we're calling it open source. Most of the time, it was their side Hustle was the thing they're doing. What was their passion? Project? I've seen some research in the last year or so that says the majority of people that are contributing to open source are doing it for their day job. Obviously, there's a lot of big companies. There's plenty of small companies. When I goto the Linux Foundation shows. I mean, you've got whole companies that are you know, that that's their whole business. So I want to get your take on, you know, you know, governance, you know, contribution from the individual versus companies. You know, there's a lot of change going on there. The public cloud their impact on what's happening open source. What are you seeing there? And you know what's good? What's bad? What do we need to do better as a community? >>Yeah. E think the governance of open source projects is definitely a live conversation that we're having right now about what does this need to look like? What role do companies need to be having and how things are put together is a contribution or leadership position in the name of the individual or the name of the company. Like all of these air live conversations that are ongoing and a lot of communities e think one of the things that is interesting overall, though, is just watching if you're if you're taking a really zoomed out view of what open source looks like where it was at one point, um, deemed a cancer by one of the vendors in the space, and now it is something that is just absolutely an inherent part of most well tech vendors and and users is an important part of how they are building and using software today, like open source is really an integral tool. And what is happening in the enterprise and what's being built in the enterprise. And so I think that it is a natural thing that this conversation is evolving in terms of what is the enterprises role here and how are we supposed to govern for that? And e don't think that we have landed on all the correct answers yet. But I think that just looking at that long view, it makes sense that this is an area where we are spending some time focusing >>So Rachel without giving away state secrets. We know read Monk, you do lots of consulting out there. What advice do you give to the industry? We said we're making progress. There's good things there. But if we say okay, I wanna at 2030 look back and say, Boy, this is wonderful for developers. You know, everything is going good. What things have we done along the way? Where have we made progress? >>Yeah, I think I think it kind of ties back to the earlier discussion we were having around composite APS and thinking about what that developer experience looks like. I think that right now it is incredibly difficult for developers to be wiring everything together and There's just so much for developers to dio to actually get all of these APs from source to production. So when we talk with our customers, a lot of our time is spent thinking, How can you not only solve this individual piece of the puzzle, but how can you figure out how to fit it into this broader picture of what it is the developers air trying to accomplish? How can you think about where your ATF, It's not on your tool or you your project? Whatever it is that you are working on, how does this fit? Not only in terms of your one unique problem space, but where does this problem space fit in the broader landscape? Because I think that's going to be a really key element of what the developer experience looks like in the next decade. Is trying to help people actually get everything wired together in a coherent way. >>Rachel. No shortage of work to do there really appreciate you joining us. Thrilled to have you finally as a cube. Alumni. Thanks so much for joining. >>Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >>All right. Thank you for joining us. This is the developer content for the cube on cloud, I'm stew minimum, and as always, thank you for watching the Cube.

>> Commentator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE's conversation with Dell Technologies. I'm Lisa Martin and today I'm talking with Mark Sanders, the VP of Global Presales from the Data Protection Division at Dell Technologies. Mark, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa. >> Great to meet you virtually in this new world that we're all operating in. So I want to understand a couple of things, when you were in the field talking with customers, as I'm sure you are on a daily basis, now virtually. But, in terms of value, I think nowadays for businesses to understand the value that technology decisions and longterm benefits can make to their environments is critical as budgets are changing, they're shrinking, et cetera. Validate the Value or VTV is a methodology that Dell EMC has pioneered. Tell me about that and what does it actually mean? >> Yeah, I mean, when was the last time a customer said, "Hey, I need to do more with less", right? It just doesn't happen. So, the reality is customers are under extreme pressure when they make us an investment, to validate that what they planned it to solve, like, what's the outcome they're looking for actually came true. And, you know, we pioneered this process where we go back in after a solution has been implemented, and it's, you know, been installed for a little bit of time and go in and pull a bunch of stats from the system so we can objectively provide data to the customer that says, this is the actual performance, this is the actual outcome that you receive for the solution that you invested in. And then, you know, what's really transpired once we created that process is customer really loved seeing this information, so they wanted to see it on a frequent basis and it kind of evolved into a process where we can quickly identify key KPIs with a dashboard view, DU proficiency, time to back up, time to restore, success, failure rates and as systems evolve continually provide an update to the customer on the value of the system that they have from us is providing to them and keep in front of mind and then, you know, nowadays we not only show them the stats of the system, but also then validate the actual Cost to Serve, meaning the amount of data they're holding versus the investment they've made, you do the math, you can come up with a cost per Gigabyte to that store on the system, which are key metrics that customers like to see. >> Well, that quantification is critical, right? Because there's a lot of competitors in the market that do similar things, but being able to not just show metrics from a survey or an analyst report, but actual customer metrics. These are the numbers that we're generating for you on a weekly or a monthly basis. That sounds pretty differentiating. >> It sure is. The reality is, if you can show a customer not only the performance of their system and validate it to that level, that really puts a lot of the noise in the system from different competitors who are claiming other things, you know, puts it to rest when the real data, it's really performing, the cost of service is exceptional. When they compare that to another solution that they're looking at, it's a no brainer that why they continue to invest in and stay with Dell EMC. The other point of this is you can show an Automatized B2B to potential customer to show, hey, this is a customer, the same vertical you are, who's doing the same things that you're talking about doing with us. Here are the stats that they're seeing, it's a real proof points and what I've found in the market is those who can truly show the value that their system can do and validate it do, and those who just rely on Marchitecture and PowerPoint slides and handshakes, they don't talk about these things and, you know, if you scan the market, I don't hear any other vendor talking about validate the value or showing objective stats after implementation and actually doing the cost and serve math for them. And you should be asking yourself as a customer who's considering us, why aren't the other guys talking about this? It's because their numbers aren't as good as ours. If you had better stats than us, I guarantee you'd be talking about it all day long, twice on Sunday. >> So validate the value, how does that synergize with TCO and ROI some of the other metrics that we're often used to hearing? Is this a kind of like a trifecta where you can really show customers a number of significant statistics to show what they're in real time achieving with your technologies? >> Yeah, so there's a number of stats that are covered in a value to value, the amount of data that's protected and mandated your storing, how long it takes to back data up, how many systems are being protected and then, you know, we factor that into the original investment that you made, come up with your cost to serve. So those key metrics then validate the ROI or the return on investment that you're looking for, you know, are you able to meet the current demand need that you sized the system for? Therefore you don't have to invest more and so the actual projection on that TCO is true. You can continually validate that along the way and a normal customer will look at a B2B and their stats on a quarterly or six month basis, a rolling basis just to make sure that ROI, TCO, that they were, you know, that you modeled in the beginning is actually coming through. See what happens is a lot of times people think they have ROI, but then the reality is whoever sold them something didn't sell them enough, and then they have to invest more in, and so that ROI gets thrown out of whack and they don't go back and validate that they actually did meet the ROI. So one of the things we really pride ourselves on is sizing, being able to deliver a solution that performs as designed, you stand behind it and then we continually validate that we're being able to meet those milestones to hit that ROI. >> Can you give me a customer example in any industry that you think really, highlights and underscores the hallmark of what VTV actually means and delivers? >> Yeah, so we've done so many of these last year, just to give you an example, we did something like 33,000 Value to Values across all the different customers that we have. And so you see some very common statistics when you look at these as many of them as I do. So a common statistic will be, you know, 99% success rate, that means that 99% of the time, all the backups complete and finish a hundred percent, there's no issues. And then another common statistic is that, you know, about 80 to 90% of the backups finish in less than an hour. That means that out of all the thousands of clients that you have, almost, you know, almost all of your backups are actually happening in less than an hour, showing the performance of our system. And then the typical stats we see on a deduplication are anywhere from 20 to 100 to 1, it just depends on how many backups you're doing a day and what your intention is, but we see significant value on the deduplication of timeline. And then the last bit I'll tell you that's pretty typical is the actual, you know, replication window, how much data you have to replicate, right? There's three stats that show up here, the daily DD Break, the weekly DD Break and the overall. We typically show the overall, and that gives you your cost to serve, which is typically pennies a gig but what's very interesting is that daily DD Break is the amount of data you have to replicate. And that is consistently super low due to a high DD Break which drives that TCO that you were talking about before, who said drives ROI, right? If you have to invest in more bandwidth because the solution you have does not perform and you constantly are sending way more data than was advertised to you, you know, pipes are expensive, dedicated connections become costly, and it is opening up a new link becomes a real burden to an enterprise. >> So as organizations are evolving every day and especially in the COVID situation, when there's so much acceleration going on at the same time as there's budgets that are shrinking or being depleted or being eliminated, customers are also in this multi-cloud hybrid world in which they live, where they're trying to manage pretty much every organization that a suite of traditional technologies and they're taking on emerging technologies, whether it's Cloud Native, SaaS, 5G or Kubernetes. So how does Dell EMC help customers manage and protect this critical data across traditional technologies and those emerging and really be able to manage all of that, from a single pane of glass, ensuring that everything is protected from any type of accidental or malicious incident? >> Well, that's a lot, but let's go kind of unpack that real fast, right? So there's a couple of things that Dell does, which makes us unique in this current market that we live in where Multicloud you have both proven workloads that have been around for a while that still need protecting, plus you're looking at modern workloads, whether it's containers, Kubernetes or you can have stuff in Azure, Amazon, Google, you know, multiple clouds or you have your own private cloud. The reality is most customers have multiple applications in a life cycle management situation where they may have some older applications they're going to be around for several years while they're still doing modern apps at the same time. And so Dell's really got, you know, what we categorize is, you know, proven in modern and then coexistence. And the reality is, is that we have both proven technology that delivers a fantastic performance, fantastic ROI, fantastic cost to serve, and really protects that application tool set that's been out there in the market for a long time that customers still have. At the same time we now have modern capabilities that address things like Kubernetes and Multicloud and the ability to manage that all from a single pane of glass, click and launch, single sign on, everything's HTML5, simple and easy to do, the same time delivering full API transparency. A lot of customers have both the need for UI and full automation through an API and so it's this value that we unlock by allowing the customer to have a single vendor that protects both proven in modern capabilities and proven in modern workloads across all the different cloud environments that they need. So they don't need another vendor and I know we were talking earlier about the study that we've done at Dell, the Global Data Protection Index, done it multiple years in a row and it consistently shows that companies who have multiple data protection vendors to protect their workloads, tend to lose more data when they have a data loss, those data loss events take longer to recover and they cost more than a customer who's running a single vendor to protect all their workloads. Now, what happens when you partner with somebody who doesn't have that proven and modern coexistence capability for you to tap into? You're forced to then have another vendor in your mix to help you protect that modern workload or another vendor to stay with you, to help protect it, a proven workload that's not going anywhere for anytime soon. Plus entering more risks, more costs into your environment. Dell's really in a unique position with our proven and modern coexistence strategy, allowing our customers to remove that risk and have all the value unlocked so that they don't really have to worry about, hey, I got another use case. I'm going to Azure, I'm going to Amazon, I'm going to Google, I want it to back up on Chrome and want to replicate to the cloud. All that's covered with our solutions. There's no other vendors required. >> In that 2020 Global Data Protection Index research survey that you mentioned, an interesting stat that popped out to me is that about 80% of the respondents and I think there was about a thousand IT decision makers who have responded, over 80% said, we are using multiple data protection solutions. So presumably a big market opportunity for you guys. How do you go in, walk me through the strategy of helping a customer, either extract existing data protection solutions or maybe even coexist? >> Yeah. >> I'll use that word in a different route, What is that typical scenario like? If I can ask you to take something, I'm sure that's very broad, but maybe standardize it a bit? >> Yeah, so there are, you know, Dell's, in addition to this coexistence proven and modern strategy that we offer our customers, we have multiple ways for them to consume that strategy. One is software defined, another is integrated with our integrated data protection appliance and then we also have purpose-built technology. And so our ability to walk into a customer's environment and immediately add value by replacing one of the things that they use for data protection and our ability to support third-party allows them to easily transition off of something that they've been using for a while and onto our single vendor strategy. So we have, you know, the ability to deliver that capability right out of the gate, give them some value and then transition them over to a single vendor across all their work use cases. The other thing that you pointed out, is the opportunity is huge, you know, we have a number one share, according to IDC's recent poll for last year, but you know, the percentage of market share is, you know, we still have a lot of room to grow. So there's a lot of customers for us to continue to go help. And because of that, you know, it's all about getting to the customer with the message that, hey, I can help you now, I can help you remove risk and I can help you transition off of these multiple solutions to a single vendor. Some customers want to go really quickly, some want to go over time, and we are in a position to give them multiple options to make that journey happen. >> In this very interesting 2020 year that's unfolding, are you seeing more customers with the need to accelerate? As they have now, an expanding multi-cloud organization with, you know, traditional and emerging technologies. Are they coming to you saying help me actually get off of these multiple solutions? I understand the stats about the risks and the POS, is that acceleration point to me that you're seeing it as a trend? >> For sure, there's several things that happen in when you have a stress factor like we're dealing with now where, you know, the need to do more with less and to save money is more paramount now than it's ever been and so kind of some of the old things that stopped IT professionals from really transforming to get true cost savings if they go down this journey, you know, all those blockers are now kind of off the table and people are seriously looking at how do I reduce risks? How do I get myself in a situation where I'm partnered with a quality vendor? And then, how do I save money at the same time? And so we've done several things to help our customers with that process. One is we released a new a cloud subscription model that allows our customers to consume all of our functionality for much less than if they paid for all those individual piece parts, allowing them to take advantage of prepaying it upfront or paying on an annual basis so they can get some more cash to spend on other investments. And then our efficiencies have increased this year as well so systems that used to take up multiple racks can now be fit into a single rack and actually can store more data. So we're finding more value in the data center, while continuing to evolve that Cost to Serve strategy, then try to drive costs out of the environment and what we tend to find is when you consolidate multiple platforms, there's a lot of inefficiency in that. So there is a lot of savings initially if you go to one vendor, but then you know, when we go to our existing customers already done that, how do we then continue to save them more money, right? And, that's really the value that we're doing here. Now, the other thing I will tell you is in this pandemic, we're also seeing a real fight to security. And some of the value that we've unlocked for our customers with our cyber recovery solutions is also another key technology wave they've really gripped onto, with less physical people on site to help solve, you know, cyber recovery issue where they've maybe got impacted. They're really looking for vendor solutions that have that full coverage that can easily be implemented to allow them to quickly recover from an event. So, you know, when you combine those things together, we're really delivering some value and helping our customers both save money, transition and remove risk from their environments, which are key in this current market that we're in. >> Absolutely and I think the theme of this interview, Mark would be quantification. It really sounds like what Dell is able to do is show customers the hard numbers about significant benefits to their environment. So we thank you so much for walking us through that. There's a lot to unpack there, but this has been a great conversation. We appreciate your time, Mark. >> Thank you for having me. >> From Mark Sanders, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE with Dell technologies. Thanks for watching. (upbeat acoustic music)

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to Vegas, Lisa Martin with John farrier. We are live at AWS reinvent in the expo hall at the sands convention center. There's tons of people in here. You could probably hear some of the background AWS expecting 65,000 or so folks. John, how many of those 65,000 and have you talked to in the last two days? >>Well, I can hear all the conversations happening at once. It's about hybrid cloud, IOT edge data, machine learning. my head's going to come. >>I was going to say lots of cool stuff. John and I are pleased to be joined by Greg Coralville, the VP of products and strategy for Blackberry Q. Next group. Welcome to the program >>to be here with 65,000 of our closest friends. >>His friends. Exactly. So Blackberry, cute X. What's it all about? >>What's it all about? Well, we do software. We do embedded software for mission critical systems at this event, at the AWS reinvent over showing a software and a really cool car, a karma, and we're connecting it to the AWS IOT backend services and showing some really, really cool use cases. Some of which are near term summer, which are a bit longer term are pretty exciting. Take a quick minute to describe Kunis. Is background acquired by Blackberry system history legacy? Exactly. Just take a quick minute to explain that. So we were founded in 1980 and then developing software for mission critical devices and medical, industrial. And then we started developing software for automotive in 1998 so we've been in automotive for about 20 years and developing originally an infotainment and then digital instrument clusters, telematic systems, gateways, safety systems, acoustics systems, pretty much becoming the software platform in the car because in the car, the car, the software is to be reliable, safe, secure. >>So we're trusted to deliver that. In automotive, we were acquired by Blackberry in 2010 and we're bringing the best of Blackberry and automotive and all of our other markets. So Lisa and I always talk about IOT is RPA automation. All this stuff's going on. But one of the things that comes up is we're trying to grok what's the software development environment in the cloud, in the car, and a Amazon one by having great API APIs. Yep. That was one of their core design principles. Is there a similar design principle from a car standpoint? Because if I'm an app developer, I just love, I have my mobile app sit on the car, right? But I don't want to have to become an expert on all the nuances of is there a connector? So is there going to be multiple platforms? What's the, what's the principle? Can you explain that a great question and great observation. >>So cars traditionally have been proprietary, pretty much closed systems and started open up with CarPlay and Android auto or all of a sudden you saw your mobile device being able to communicate with the car and now I could run Android apps, I could run iOS apps and started to open it up a bit. And now what you've seen is cars are becoming more connected, they're becoming more automated, eventually autonomous. Um, they're definitely, and what you're seeing in the car is in order for that car to really evolve and to offer connected services and shared mobility and the electrification that's occurring, the automotive industry is going through a disruption. We've all heard that and it really is true. So to the point where the electronics in the car, the networks in the car, the software in the car, it's getting completely redesigned and you're seeing a lot more high end processors. >>You're seeing safety critical systems, which have always been in cars, but now you're seeing a lot more complexity. And that speaks to exactly what we do. So where that car's going, if you think about it, is moving to more of a software platform. You have applications and mobile devices. Why? Because you've got Android and you've got iOS. That car is moving to that sort of a common platform where with the help of AWS connected services, the cubix Blackberry Punic software platform in the car, all of a sudden that'll open the door to that kind of environment to applications, to connected services. And that's exactly where it's going. So connectivities, it's here and it's going to be predominant through a pretty much all the vehicles coming off the line in the coming years. So you're going to see the connectivity and now we can bring the services and the apps to that vehicle. But at the same time you got to keep it safe, got to keep it secure. Gotta keep it reliable. You know, it's the classic mobile device, bingo literal device on wheels, right of two ton mobile device on wheels. >>Doc disruption sounds really cool and it's consumers. We just had this expectation that we can have whatever I want, the whole experience I want. And obviously as everything evolves, we want it to be safer and safer. And as there's laws and regulations that govern, Hey, you're going to get hefty fines if you're seeing with this device and you're driving. But disruption is really challenging, right? We talked, we got some great examples yesterday on stage with Andy Jassy of Goldman Sachs, right? How many years old are they and how they have leveraged disruption to revolutionize their consumer business or healthcare revolutionizing. I'd love to get your perspective on what are some of the automakers that are bleeding edge going, we get it. We want to work with you guys so that they understand that this the, you know, the, the mobile devices, the connected device on wheels is going to be transformative for their business. >>Good point. So first of all, every automaker we work with and we work, we work with almost 50 auto makers and we're over a hundred. We're in over 150 million vehicles and multiple systems in the cars. They're all putting safety first. That's never really changed. But that remains primary, primary objective. And to your point is how do you maintain that safety net reliability while at the same time opening the door to connectivity, making sure that vehicle is secure and resilient to attacks and whatnot. And you've seen some of those attacks in the past. And the industry is learning. Um, but that's, that's exactly what, that's what speaks to us and what we do. Same thing with AWS. If you think about what we do, we're plumbers. We, we build plumbing in the car, AWL splits, plumbing in the cloud. And I've had that call, those conversations with AWS and they're like, yeah, we're plumbers. >>And I said, so are we, we're going to get along great. But to your point, we have to keep our eye on security. Our definitely our eye on privacy and safety. And that's exactly what we do. As much as we all want the consumer apps and the connected experience at the same time, we can't compromise on that. So the good thing in automotive is there's a automotive safety standards, ISO two, six, two, six, two and whatnot, which we've certified our products to and we're going to keep doing that and keep delivering that software in the car. But that's awesome for 0.2 ton mobile device on wheels. So we got to always be aware of that. Great opportunity. People want more conduct and safety too. And that's a huge thing. Security and safety. I want to get to that in a second, but I got to ask you, um, what is the relationship that you guys have with Amazon? >>Could you explain that? And what are you guys doing at reinvent this year? Is your leg a presentation demo? Take a minute to explain the relationship between queen Nixon and Amazon web services and what you're showing here. Well, we're in the connected home exhibit. In fact, we're in the quote unquote garage where we've got a vehicle, a beautiful karma Rivero GT. And I was told it's the first time there's actually a car at reinvent. So that was pretty cool. And it's a cool car if you get a chance, come on over. And what we've done is we've taken the karma vehicle and we've actually connected it to AWS IOT. So if you think about what we do, we do software in the car, as I was saying earlier. And then we worked with the Amazon team, with the AWS team to say, okay, what can we do? So one of the things we're doing is we're doing battery monitoring and prediction in terms of the life of the battery. >>That's one of the things that we're doing. The other thing we're doing is personalized cockpit, which is, which is pretty exciting. And, and the last thing we're doing is kind of a business to business demonstration, um, where it's data orchestrations. If you think about the vehicle, there's a lot of sensors on the vehicle, a lot of information available on the vehicle. And what we're doing with AWS is pulling information from the vehicle, putting it in the cloud. And then we've got a few examples that we're using. So one of them is an application for an auto detailing company where they might want, you might want to have your vehicle detailed where we can make the position of your vehicle available, GPS, the VIN number. So the identify the identification of the vehicle. Um, and then you could actually contract with that expert detailings what we called them to come to your vehicle, clean the vehicle, detail your vehicle within a finite period of time securely. >>And then you'll get notified when it's done and whatnot. We're doing facial recognition in the vehicle and we also put some ML in machine learning in the car. We're actually showing gesture recognition where I can fold the mirrors with a, with a peace sign or victory signs. I could have the mirrors fold in. Uh, I can, I can interact with the infotainment system. I can personalize the music and whatnot. So really personalizing the cockpit. But all through the power of AWS. Sorry, what are we going to have to the car flying cars? Come on Jetsons flyers. I love this coming. Maybe not the flying carpet. Wow. Okay. Flying cars. Fine. I mean, I always say anything else that's in star Trek or star Wars will be invented. So I'm respecting some flying vehicles. All fun aside. Yeah. Now the serious conversation is safety and security. >>Worst case scenario, my car is hacked. Take over. This is a fear. Again, it's the worst. It's a doom season here. Those stories are straight. All IOT device. It's a car. How do you guys view the security posture? Um, good question. This is concerned. It might be on people's mind. Yeah. And that's what really speaks to where our company has been for almost four decades now. You know, when people would ask me, Hey, where would I find Punic software? Blackberry Punic software, I'd say almost everywhere, but the desktop. So where things have to be reliable, safe, secure work all the time. That's where you'll find our software. So factory floor, we're in laser eye surgery. Machines are in patient monitoring devices, MRI machines. And so essentially those areas which are safety critical, where safety, security and reliability, you know, our top real really industrial IOT thing, big time, big time. >>And that's the cool thing about walking around reinvent. There's all kinds of industrial devices and control. So if you go to the car now, if you think about the vehicle, same fundamental needs, reliability, safety, security, and we're trusted to deliver an automotive. So security is one of those things. It's not static. So when you, when you, when you make something that's secure, you're really building something that's resilient to attacks. So you'd be as resilient as possible to prevent attacks. And then you do whatever you can to prevent any malicious act or actions on that. So we will monitor what's going on in the system. We'll monitor any communications going to the car, for instance. So the minute we detect something a bit of normal, we can take action based on that. So that, that's absolutely key, especially given the cars connected and more and more becoming connected. >>What's the opportunity is in a trucking industry, when I think of the number of sensors on trucks, the regulations that you know for drivers safety in terms of how many hours they actually have to be able to can drive. What's the opportunity there for Q next? >>Good question. So everything we're doing in the car, which I should generalize and say a vehicle applies to trucks. So if you think about trucking or vehicles or drones or anything like that, you have multiple sensors that you have to interact with. You have to interpret that information, you have to take action based on that information. So if we look at trucking specifically, everybody knows a major shortage of truck truck, truck drivers. So when people ask me about autonomous cars and Hey, when are we going to see autonomy's vehicles? I always look at trucking and we're working with companies, trucking companies that are using our technology. And one of the first use cases that they're putting forward is something called platooning, where you'll actually have the first truck on the road with a driver and any other trucks on the road. We'll be operating autonomously essentially following like a train if you want on a highway, and then they'll have a starting location and a drop off location and that all of a sudden becomes a real world scenario, which makes use of the same sensors, LIDAR, radar cameras, et cetera. >>So from a trucking perspective, we look at it very similar to a car and automotive perspective because they need the same fundamental technologies. So pretty exciting. Like I said, what we do applies all over the place and again, all going to be connected. But grant, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate, I want to get your final thoughts, at least from my perspective on developers. When you see deep racer, you see that trend. It's kind of, they've got LIDAR, it's kind of a toy, but people geeking out on this. And so I would imagine that we're going to see an emergence of a software development environment where as a controlled sandboxes, cause yeah, they've got the concern with the industrial equipment. Exactly. Yeah. How do you balance that old school industrial mindset of, you know, IOT with the new rapid agile product development? Yeah. And to your point, we're going through that transition now. >>So this is where things like Sage maker come into play where I can develop out and develop and refine machine learning models in the cloud. You still have those tight control loops that you need and there's tools for that. So that's the deeply embedded stuff that's controlling actuators and whatnot. You still need that. But to your point, you need to be more iterative. You need to be more agile, need to develop according to the safety standards and the various industries that they might be in. So it's that is evolving and it's evolving at exactly the right pace. Really glad to see that evolution. But to your point, all of these devices are going to become interconnected. There's going to be new opportunities. And from a developer perspective, you know, we can't hire enough developers. No one can. It's really exciting whether it's IOT cloud developers or embedded developers. >>There's such an exciting future ahead. And I got to ask, this is just popped in my head. So I want to ask, cause I'm curious, um, spectrum and RF power is great, but you need connectivity to make an IOT device work, right? How do you guys, how does the car folks look at conductivity? Just when they get to a spot they can connect. So is it managing the spectrum? How are cars thinking about the connectivity? So we work very closely with the modem vendors. For instance, in today in cars you'll see Bluetooth, you'll see wifi, you'll see 4g. Obviously there's the emergence of 5g. Um, vehicle to vehicle communications is through something called DSRC. Essentially wifi 5g is going to come along, so now you're going to be able to have throughput and also what's called low latency. So quick turn around on your messages and the information being exchanged. >>So that too is evolving from a, from a QA software perspective, we'll make use of whatever modems there. But to your point, we also have to deal with the cases where I've lost connectivity. I still need that V vehicle to operate safely. And especially if you consider that the systems might be, um, uh, the systems might be connected or we don't want to make, make it such that they're dependent on that connectivity. So you have to have fail over scenarios and whatnot, but cars will become connected, devices will become connected. We're going to take advantage of that connectivity, but not be dependent on that connectivity. >>Well, Greg, please let me know when that, uh, personalized service is available so that my car can be found and detailed. They'd find it right in my driveway going lady, please. It's been a pleasure, a really cool stuff. Blackberry Kunis thank you for joining John. We'll be, we'll have to go check out that car for John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live in Vegas at AWS. Reinvent 19. Thanks for watching.

>>law from Las Vegas. It's the two covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners, >>everyone welcome to the Cubes Live coverage in Las Vegas For AWS Reinvent 2019 starts Seventh year of the Cube coverage. Watching the big wave of Amazon continue to pound the pound the beach with more announcements. I'm John Ferrier instructing the seal for the new ways with my partner, David Dante, our next guest. Brian Hall, vice president. Product market for all of AWS >>Brian. Thanks for coming on. The Cube is >>really a pleasure to be here. We've had ready, eh? We've >>had many conversations off camera around opportunities, innovation and watching Andy Jackson Kino, which is a marathon. Three hours, 30 announcements. He's hit his mark. Live music, well done. But he got a ton of stuff in there. Let's unpack the key points. Tell us what you think people should pay attention to. Of all the announcements, one of the three major or one of the major areas that are that stand out that are most notable that you wanna highlight. >>Okay, I'll give you I'll give you four areas that I think are most notable from the keynote. First is we continue to be very focused on how do we give the deepest and broadest platform for all the different things people want to be able to do with computing. And we had a big announcements around new instance instances of easy to that air based on custom design silicon that that we built one of them is called IMF one. These are instances that are focused on machine learning inference. Where it turns out, up to 90% of the cost for machine learning often is. And so we have. We have a brand new set of instances reduce costs by up to 90% for people doing inference in the cloud. We also last year announced a armed chip that we developed called Graviton, and we announced today grab it on two and that their new instances that are running on gravity on thio, including our general purpose computer instances, are compute intensive instances and high memory instances, and people will get up to 40% price performance improvement by using the instances that are based on the >>method of the messages faster more inexpensive. But also there's an architectural shift going on with Compute Way. Heard that with the I. O. T. And the Outpost stuff where computer is moving to the data because moving around is well recognized and now affirmed its expensive. Yeah, this is a big part of it. You got local zone. What's that local zone? Was it a local >>s? So they're kind of two ways that we're addressing that the first is but making it so that our infrastructure is closer to customers. We have outposts for customers that want to run a WS in their own environments. We announced today local zones which are essentially taking the computer storage database capabilities and putting it closer to metro areas where people want to have a single digit Leighton see for applications when going to the clouds over video rendering for gaming and like, that's gonna be very helpful. Is >>that gonna be like a regional point of presence was gonna be installed, Eleni, on any premise anyone wants, I could put my >>outpost can be put in any environment where you have the right power network infrastructure. Local zones are managed by Amazon, so I don't have to have it. I don't have to manage any data center. Anything. I could just choose to deploy to an environment that is geographically very >>smaller than a region. >>Small isn't an ability. Oh, yeah, >>Right. Okay. That's like a mini zone. Yeah, and and so what about the the availability component? It's sort of up to the customer to figure that out There >>it is connected to a region. So, for instance, we're releasing in Los Angeles with availability now, and that's connected to the US West region. So all of the data backup redundancy application duplication of people want to be able to do could do be done, do the region. >>All right, So graviton processor got onto those early press reports that leaked out prior to reinvent. I noticed that didn't match kind of what was announced. Just clarify what the grab it on ship is doing. What was the key? Grab it on a piece of the news here >>s O gravitas to is a arm based process lor designed and built by a W s. It is powering three different instance. Types are for those who know the types the see instances am instances and are instances on dhe available starting today with M six, which is one of our general purpose computing platforms. And so it gives up to 40% better price performance. And there's a whole ecosystem of platforms and APS Little run unarmed today. >>Are you pushing the envelope on computer? Which is great you continue to do That's the core of jewels of AWS, which we love and storage and everything else. Warm story. I get that a second, but I want your thoughts on the stage maker. A lot of time was spent on stage maker kind of levels of the stack infrastructure, machine, learning stage maker and tools. And a I service is. But the big announcement was this new I d frame environments, not a framework. You're taking an environment like an i d for all the different frameworks. Where did this come from? How I mean so obvious. Now, looking back that no one has this this was a big party announcement. You explain this. >>Yeah. So what you're referring to is sage Makers studio. One of the things that people have really liked about sage maker is it takes the whole process of building a model training a model ended up deploying a model and gives you the steps to do it, but there it hasn't been brought together into one environment before. And so sage maker Studio is a integrated development environment for machine learning that lets you spin up. No books. Run experiments test how your models performing. Deploy your model of detective. Your model is drifting all from one place, which gives me essentially a single dashboard for my whole machine learning work. Look, what do >>you think the impact's gonna be on this? Because if I'm just looking at that obvious awesomeness, it's like, OK, that means anyone can get start using machine learning, you know, be a guru or a total math. >>That's that's fundamentally a lot of what we're doing is trying to reduce the barrier for developers or anyone who has who has a desire to start using machine learning to be able to do that and say, you maker studios just another way that we're doing it. Another one we announced on Monday or on Sunday night, of course, a machine learning powered musical keyboard. Everyone knew that was coming right? That's that's just a example like Deep Racer, where we're taking machine learning. We're making it immediately practical and even fun. And then giving people a way to start experimenting does that they'll eventually become developers who are using machine learning for much >>things. Have a question. As you simplify machine learning, people are concerned about explain ability. You guys, I think, have some ways of helping people understand what's going on inside the algorithm. So that's not a pure black box. Is that correct interpretation? >>It is. It is way announced. Today s age maker experiments, which is one of the one of the things about machine learning, is your kind of constantly tuning the different variables that you're using in your model tow. Understand what works? What doesn't. That's all black box. It's really hard to tell with sage major studio and experiments in particular. Now I can see how models perform differently based on tweaking variables, which starts making it much easier to explain what's happening. >>I think you guys got it right, and he laid out the databases. Multiple databases pick your database. It's okay that multiple databases just create some abstracted layers on top. I totally agree with that philosophy and I think that's gonna be a nice haven for opportunity. We agree. >>Used to be that because so much of running a database was all of the operational expertise it took that you wouldn't wanna have too many databases because that's that many database administrators and people doing the undifferentiated heavy lifting now with the cloud. If you have a data set that's better suited for something like a uh uh, workload in Cassandra, we announced the Manage Cassandra service today. You can just been up that service, load your data and start going. And so it creates a lot more opportunity >>talk about quantum because I know you guys yesterday, which is always a signal from Amazon and didn't make the keynote cut, but a ray relevant quantum announcement, the joke was, is gonna be a quantum supremacy messaging. But no, is more of a humble approach from you guys is more. Hey, we're gonna put some quantum out there setting expectations on the horizon, not over playing your hand on that. But you also have an institute with Caltech humble academic thing going on. What's the quantum inside Inside conversation like an Amazon? What's the what's going on with you. What can we expect? >>We're really excited about what quantum computing's going to be able to do for customers, and we say a lot of Amazon on many things. It's date one, which means it's really early. When we look at Quantum somewhere between zero and one, we're not quite sure where. So just live saying it's really early days. And so what we're doing is providing a platform, a partnership with Caltech, to advance the state of the art and then also a Quantum Solutions lab to help customers start to experiment. To figure out how might. This enabled me to solve problems that I couldn't do before >>you? No one can ask. So Andy talked in a keynote about most of the spend is still on. So the early days of cloud were about, you know, infrastructures of service, storage, computer networking, and it seems like we're entering This era of this data is really sort of the driver where you're applying analytics and machine learning. Data's everywhere, and it seems to be driving sort of new forms of compute. It's not just in this sort of stovepipe anymore. You see that you see that sort of new emergence of new compute were close. >>Yeah. Yeah, we definitely do. And in particular, the way that people are starting to use data lakes, which is essentially a way of saying, Hey, I have my data and one place in a bunch of different formats. And I want different analytical tools, different machine learning tools, different applications toe all be able to build on that same data. And once you do that, you start unlocking opportunities for different application developers, different lines of business to take advantage of it. Brian, >>Thanks for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate your VP of all product. Mark. You get the keys to the kingdom, you kind of see what's going on. Take us home and finish the exit interview out by by talking about the best. Now that Jesse Safer last. The best for last was the outpost G A and the five G wavelength with CEO of Arise on. Yeah, I mean, that's gonna bring five G to stadiums for drones, immersive experiences. I mean, that's a big vision. Yeah, I think it's home >>people. People are rightfully excited about five G for having faster connections, but the thing that we're also very excited about is the fact that all these devices will have much lower laden see and the ability to run interactive applications that having a W s with AWS wavelength hosted with the five G providers is gonna give developers chances to melt. >>Brian Hall with With AWS I'm John David Lot. They were here on the Cube studios, sponsored by Intel's Our Signature sponsors of the Intel's Cube Studios. When it's to a shoutout for Intel to them for supporting our mission, bringing the best content from events and extracting the signal from the noise will be back with more after this short break.

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host still minimun hi and welcome to a special cube conversation here in our Boston area studio I'm Stu minimun and we're getting towards the end of 2019 where we've had a bevy of cloud conferences I've - I've attended Microsoft ignite cube con cloud native con and the big the Super Bowl for industry AWS reinvent is right on the horizon and happy to talk about some of the data protection items related to cloud welcoming back to our program RIA a touch Barrett who is the vice president of marketing in the data protection group at Dell EMC Fria great to see you great to see you Stu nice to be back alright so RIA you know obviously cloud has had such a huge impact on our entire industry you know transforming what's happening there bring us inside how some of those trends are really impacting your organization in your customers yeah definitely I think one of the things that no one would be surprised about is that organizations today are managing seven times the data that they were managing just two years ago so last year in 2018 there was a study done by Vanson Bourne and analyst firm it's called the global data protection index study where they surveyed over 2,200 IT decision-makers and they asked specifically about their data protection challenges one interesting data point is more than 76 percent of the surveyed had placed some sort of data disruption in the last 12 month the preceding 12 months before the survey and 30 close to 30 percent are twenty seven to be exact had lost data costing upwards of millions based on that disruption so before you even get into some of the market trends that's complicating protection I think a lot of customers are still very challenged with their data protection just in any regular environment now the challenge are on data protection and even more broadly data management because again there's the 80/20 rule a lot of your data is actually in the tertiary secondary copies of your data it's getting more complex so a couple of big trends that you and I talk about all the time data growth we kind of talked about that data distribution data is more distributed than ever you have it across multiple clouds you have data hungry technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning that's basically generating data volumes that's unprecedented and that will be generating data volumes that are unprecedented and obvious and some of these technologies are actually also fueling data growth at the edge so I think that I saw a number or I think Michael Dell was talking about how the data at the edge is actually going to surpass data in all of the clouds combined in the near future then you have application transformation so that's where cloud really comes in a lot of our customers are speeding their time to market and their exchanges and interactions with their customers by really transforming their application development and using cloud native you know application deployment to really fuel how they're how they're developing apps and that's requiring new ways of data protection then you bring into effect all the regulatory rules there's one coming up very shortly I think in January so you have increasing governmental regulations you have increasing privacy laws and and mandates so again data protection is getting into this area where you would say it's in the eye of the storm yeah so many challenges what we've really loved to document over the last few years is the opportunity around data your business is creating new business value creating new lines of business and really extracting information use the word information even you know we've really defined is what defines a company that has successfully gone through digital transformation is it as data that is driving decisions and companies there so you've talked to a lot of customers you've got some survey data or you bring us inside you know what are some of those leading-edge customers what differentiates kind of the leaders and ones that become winners in this world compared to before data was at the center of what they were doing absolutely three the power of three again I think the the companies that are really doing things well or have seem to have a handle around their ever-changing data protection needs are doing have three things in common I think the first thing is pretty evident and you talk to it just now Stu they value data they see data as capital so the amount of attention they give to data is really significantly different than a lot of the other companies so they really ranked when they talked about how they see data as the most important capital you know one of the most important capitals in their in their environment they looked at productivity apps as a significant area of importance they looked at AI machine learning business intelligence and analytics as some of the most critical applications including the new cloud native applications they are gaining significant importance in the eyes of these companies so first and foremost they really value data and they want to make sure that they are protecting it in a way that really meets what they need to the second thing that's really interesting that they're doing is they're investing in a single vendor for all of their data protection needs again this is based on the global data protection index study of the 2,200 IT decision makers and GDP I found that companies that are using at least two vendors are 35 percent more likely to experience some sort of disruption and when they talk about disruption they talked about downtime ransomware and they talked about data loss as the number most frequently cited disruptions in their environment and multiple vendor solutions really really lead to increased complexity there's just more touch points disparate management tools especially when you're in a recovery type situation it just adds a lot of complexity to it including service and support experience that you're going to get from multiple vendors so again investing in a single solution across a very diverse portfolio of application deployment choices physical virtual multi-cloud including extent to cloud use cases as well as cloud native protection really makes sense from core to edge to cloud and I think it will increase decrease the complexity as well as minimize the downtime associated with any type of disruption so that's the second trend so we talked about they value data the second one was that they really have investing in a single partner in their data protection solutions the other one is that they prioritize the third one they have some fundamental needs that they prioritize for their multi cloud so they prioritize scale efficiency as well as ease of management for their multi cloud data protection needs so while cloud computing gives us a lot of flexibility agility it can also bring with it complexity unknown costs and increased risk if not managed appropriately and if this extends to your data protection environment so you need data protection solutions that basically can manage that are easy to scale easy to deploy and deliver efficiency and resiliency across this multi cloud environment so those are the three things that are really doing differently still all right yes so many so many things that customers need to think about now living in that multi cloud world cloud native infiltrating the application environment so as we look forward to 2020 here what are those new requirements so you know what a customers need to really think about when they're they're shaping the future of building their environments yeah that's that's a great question and all of the new requirements start with the fundamentals if you don't have the fundamentals and your requirements will fall short and if anything the fundamentals are becoming more and more critical so we already talked about what those companies that are doing well really do differently so they value scale efficiency performance and when they look at those environments they look at it across a distributed deployment model so you're talking about global scale performance at a global level you know if efficiency across the cloud as well as the cloud resources that you're utilizing so if when you talk about efficiency and performance and scale it takes on a brand-new meaning in the new set of requirements and then there's some real new new requirements so for protection we're seeing protection for cloud native applications so we were at kubernetes and we had our kubernetes cube con and we were showcasing our container data protection kubernetes container data protection so we're doing a tech preview of that that got really well received because a lot of companies are struggling with how they're going to be protecting containers and then you have protection for modern apps SAS based applications MongoDB cloud era type applications that now need protection so it used to be a wide range of different applications now there's new modern apps that need the same level of protection and they have new requirements one of the last ones is again protection of traditional because you're going to still have a big traditional deployment and cloud native applications at what we're calling global scale so what does global scale mean it means you have visibility and reporting to ensure protection across health compliance efficiency across core edge and multi cloud right those are going to be some of the new requirements and then data reuse is another one that we see coming up more and more so there's so much investment in making sure your data is protected and companies want to actually get additional value out of their protection data and they want to drive that value through innovation through being able to leverage that data for app dev and test analytics type work so really they want to be able to do that on their secondary and tertiary copies so that's another set new set of requirements that we're seeing so it starts with the fundamentals and then you need to be able to scale and drive these new requirements yeah absolutely in many ways some of these requirements echo what we had in the past you know go back 20 years ago was spreading a crawl you know mainframe UNIX and Linux and Windows and now it's multi cloud and SAS and hybrid environments so really exciting stuff you know your team you know just give us a look for 2020 you know you know seeing Dell EMC show up not only at of course Dell technology's world but you know cube Colin and reinvent and some of these cloud shows yeah yes more and more Dell to be announced I'll tech cloud last year so it's a big focus for the company what we're doing in partnership with VMware so there's a lot of exciting things that are happening and data protection is really becoming critical to all of these conversations so it's going to be a very exciting year I think it's going to be a defining year for us next year and you're gonna see innovation like you've never seen before from Dell EMC all right exciting stuff definitely so much opportunity innovation happen in the clouds Rhea thank you so much for the updates looking forward to seeing the team with lots of you know over 50,000 of everybody's friends in Las Vegas for AWS thank you thanks for having us - all right be sure to check out the cube net for all of the AWS reinvent content as well as all the other shows we've done this year and look forward to 2020 also I'm Stu minimun thanks for watching the Q

>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 brought to you by Cooper. >>Hey, welcome to the cube. At least the Martin on the ground in London, a Coupa inspire 19 and I'm really excited to be joined by my last guest of the day. Save the best for last. We have Roger Hamoud, the EVP of products from Kupo Russia. Welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming here. Of course, it's been great. We've had a, we've had a great day. Lots of buzz and excitement in the expo hall. The lights are jammed. It's happy hours. Happy hour for time for the Q during happy hour. So I know your keynote is tomorrow, so we'll get to that since we won't cover that. But talk to me about some of the new product innovations that Cuba announced today. The last time we spoke at inspire Las Vegas was only a few months ago. So what's new? Wow. A lot is new. It's, it's hard to believe. >>It's only been three months since then. It's been so close. Um, we very much continue our, um, focus on our community. Powered, uh, capabilities. Uh, this has been an incredible focus for us. Uh, so most recently we've added to all of the announcements we talked about at, uh, Vegas, uh, the, um, next waves of source together the opportunity to bring our community to come and source, uh, using their collective spent power and lots of new enhancements in that area. And also we're taking our supplier insights to the next level. One of the exciting capabilities our customers loved is that being part of a community member, I can come in and I can look at insights across all of my suppliers, uh, from the entire community. What we have, we've been working with them on is constantly adding more and more information to that. So now we have diversity data. >>So you can come in and you can search for suppliers that meet your women. Exactly. Exactly. Those are increasingly becoming more and more important. And then we can help companies source with the right suppliers much more easily right off the bat. Um, other areas that we've announced today was a coupon pay for expenses in early access program. Uh, we also announced invoice thing. Um, going on GA, when we talked in Vegas, it was still in the early access program, uh, capabilities and opening up our platform, Coupa as a platform. >> Uh, tell me about that, cause I wasn't quite clear when Rob was talking about it this morning. I thought I wanna dig in that with you. Kupa as a platform. What is that? What does it look like? So what's exciting about this is, so from our inception as a company, we were always had this old in Cooper about being open as an ally for the entire ecosystem that our customers might have. >>Our vision has always been, we want to be the, ultimately the business screen for everything business spend management related for our customers. So over years we kept taking the level of openness with our partners through different, um, different levels. If you say, if you will, for example, we started with just integrations in the beginning and we certify these integrations with coupon link. Um, we've taken it most recently where we allow partners to embed their mini apps within Cooper. So, for example, um, you can see in one of our partners EcoVadis now they have the capability to embed their supplier diversity data sustainability data right on the supplier record. Okay. And what's beautiful about this is that our customers, when they look at it, it looks a one beautiful unified experience and bringing all the data in context for what they want. Um, today, this morning, uh, Rob shared one example from Amadeus for, uh, trip integrations. >>So right on the homepage, I can see right within Cooper, I can see all their bookings that I've done with the travel provider, Mike pre-approvals, expense reports, all within one unified experience. But ultimately where we want to take coop as a platform is to become this app directory that, uh, third party partners and platform developers start building applications to extend Copa to bring more choice and value to our customers. Okay. Wow. Is that one of the things I saw Rob shared this morning was integration with Slack. Yes. So business folks can review, approve, or reject, like expenses for example, right from within Slack without even having to go into the platform. Yes, yes. That you hit on a very important concept, which we call the best UI is no UI in many ways. And the idea there is um, we always put ourselves in the user's shoes and ask ourselves how do we get them what they need with the least friction? >>In some cases that might involve a user experience because you need to ask them questions and make cases. We can automate the whole thing. So we just do it. And in many cases it means we go to them to where they are such as in Slack, I'm going to ask you to leave Slack, go somewhere else right then and there you should be able to approve or reject why you have to go anywhere else. Is that what, what Cuba means by no UI is the best UI, correct. Best UI is no UI. So ultimately wherever there is effort, we, we want to involve people only when they need to add value. That's it. And as much as we're able to automate, that's great. So we take that off of their table and we also adjust to the type of experience they need. Sometimes just a text message is enough sometimes to bring the data to me into a collaboration applications that I want. >>Um, sometimes we, we help them approve right from, um, a button. You don't even go into Kupa in order to do that. So always thinking of how we drive adoption, drive adoption. And it's an important concept, not just on the employee side of companies, it's even more so on the supplier side as well. Now when you think of any or like large organizations, they have tens of thousands of thousands of suppliers, many have hundreds of thousand suppliers. And the supplier ecosystem is everything from very small contractor, mom and pop shop, maybe two people or even one person all the way to very, very large companies. Okay. So as you look at that whole spectrum, you have to really think what does every audience need? And so in many cases, these people, um, they may need to do everything very quickly straight from an email without having to remember a user ID and a password to log into something. >>So eliminates friction at every step of the process for them. Wow. So let's talk about that Vic community insights. As we look at some of the, uh, the data that KUKA has gotten from finance leaders of the UK, that was like a survey that you guys, yes, I did recently have 253 decision makers and finance and some of the numbers were glaring. Like, wow, 96% of these decision makers said we don't have complete visibility correct. Of all of our spent. And then I was talking to a customer today who said, we've got now gotten 95% of all of our business men going through Coupa and that was within less than a year. Yes. So the opportunity there to deliver that visibility and those insights back to the community is, is pumped, is incredibly exciting. It's incredibly exciting. We're starting to see more and more the sentiment that's in key, loud and clear and um, by working constantly on the AE, the accelerated and coupon, we work on getting more and more of the spend for each and every customer under management. >>Um, we, when we start to projects for customers right off the bat, uh, we use our AI classification tools before they even start with Copa, where we start helping them get visibility onto all of their existing spent so that as they start into their Coupa journey, they are always looking at it holistically. Okay. So we know them, realize all of that data and provide them insights and reports right off the bat as well. Tell me about the customer interactions that you have as the EVP of product, lot of customers on the platform, a lot of data there. How are customers influential? Yes, yes. The direction. Like for example, you know, obviously I won't give a secret sauce, but for Cooper inspire 20, 20, what are some of the things that we might see customers influencing in terms of your roadmap that direction? Partnerships? Yes. Yes. >>Um, in general, the way, um, we've always worked, uh, at Coupa with our customers and we call them like our community members really is an inc very incredibly tight partnership. Um, we have three releases a year, January, may and September. Each of them packed with roughly about anywhere 72, 19 new features and capabilities. And all of these capabilities are touched either conceived by customers, with customers or touched by customers in the form of working with them on early access validation and all of that. And for me, one of my most favorite things I get to enjoy about working in SAS and, and uh, being at Cooper is that as soon as you are rolling out these capabilities and turning them on in the cloud, customers are using them. So even though like for example right now my entire team has just finished the walkthroughs of all our may release for inspire. >>And when we come back from this trip, uh, we will start the, you know, the, these, the design and, and um, definition. Um, often we might hear of new requirements that might come up and because we are InsightSquared able to, um, here at just what it makes sense and actually be incredibly responsive to what we see. >> How do you do that? How do you look through all the different responses and correlate that data and determine what makes sense to stack? Rank in terms of priorities for new features and new capabilities. So it's definitely an art and a science for sure. Um, but there's a framework that, uh, we follow, uh, since the beginning and we continue to follow and continues to serve us really well. Uh, which is always balancing between three drivers of customers, market and innovation. So the customer one is the obvious one of course, where and many events like this and one on ones and online community. >>We're talking to customers and they're specifically coming and asking for help in areas. Now, we may not build the feature exactly as they asked, but we listened to the pain beneath it and late using the latest technologies, we think of what is the best approach to solve the real pain that they have. So that's one part of the planning for every release cycle. The other is overall market. So for example, as we grow into more regions, uh, newer areas, new spend categories, um, new adjacent powered applications that our customers are needing, um, we started expanding in that area as well. Um, for example, we, right now in London, um, a lot of, uh, when I joined Cooper back in 2012, uh, we were just starting the, uh, entry into the, uh, Mel market and a lot of the product capabilities were market driven in the sense that we were spending a lot of time on compliance and different regulations and all of that. >>And the third is innovation. And what is always one of the things as we bring people on board at Cooper and talk about the framework, um, innovation for us is what we call pragmatic innovation. And it's comes from deep understanding what are the customer problems, what are the market problems? And then we ask ourselves using everything, the latest technologies, what is the best way? So you'll never hear us talk about AI for AI sake and blockchain and all of that would always talking about do we deeply understand the problem and what is the most appropriate? Um, so we call them CMI customer innovation. Uh, within my products organization, every product managers usually has a vision for their product and they have a full release roadmap. And in each full release roadmap, they are listing things as C M I in many cases the same capability is C and M and I, so it becomes an art and a science of balancing those types of things. >>But ultimately when we look at our collective release of CMI, we're asking ourselves, how much does this release accelerate the success goals of our customers? Right. And generally that's the framework that we use. Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you for explaining that. In terms of acceleration, some of the numbers that Rob shared this morning, we're, I think your customers are collectively approving invoices 30% faster than last year. I said medium, mid size market, customers are getting lot going live on Kupa in about four months. Correct. And mid large enterprises and about eight months. So. Right. And I've talked to a number of customers today about the speed of which they're able to get onto the platform and actually start seeing business value. So that's a free coupon for acceleration was well dissected today. Yes. Yes. It's definitely, yeah. Um, these are the vision areas that Rob talked about today. >>And in each of these vision areas, we're always asking ourselves, how do we continue to accelerate? So that's actually how one of the ideas was born around the turtle is I'm the hair, which is we want to accelerate cycle times, cycle times, and what are the different ways we can do this? What can we borrow from um, the, uh, our consumer lives to do this? And that's where the game unification came. Yes. And sure enough, it was one of those things that got people super excited and, and they're putting more attention into it. Well, the consumer side of our lives is we're so demanding because we can get anything that we want. We can buy products and services, we can pay bills with a clicker swipe. And so the B to C side from a payments perspective has innovated far more rapidly than the B2B side has. >>Correct. A lot more challenged there on the B2B side. But as consumers, we want a simple experience. One of the customers I spoke to who said when he was looking for technology, he's on what something that looks like Amazon marketplace. Yeah. Because from an adoption perspective, my teams will understand it. You so that the consumerization always interests me because we are those pretty much, you know, 12 plus hours a day and to see how software companies like KUKA are taking and meeting the needs of those customers, obviously it's not an overnight process. It gets people excited. It gets its absolutely is you right. That always fascinated me also how I've seen so many companies, um, like people almost have two personalities. Like they go into their personal life, they have a personality, they go into their professional lives and like, Oh, it's okay. It's like a backend system. >>This and this and this. Um, but increasingly the new generation is no longer tolerating and the drive is starting to just go find those shifts that happen changing, right? Yes, yes. But I can't, if I can have this in my personal life, then I need to be able to transact. Exactly. Exactly. Why does it take 45 days? Exactly. Exactly. Five days. Um, so last question for you. Since your keynote is tomorrow. Yes. What are some of the strategic visionary elements that you're going to leave the audience with? So I'm going to leave the audience with the key pillars of our strategy. Um, latest innovations we've done towards them and where we are taking them in the years ahead. One of the things I've always done over the years at inspire is we always share at preview of what, um, the community has been talking to us about and we're working with. >>And usually at the end of it, a lot of new community members might come in and ask to participate in some of the development because it means a lot to them for their own business. And then usually by the following inspire, we start showing these things actually live and, and, um, executed on. So the, um, the three strategic pillars I'll be sharing and talking about are all around the pipe that Trump talked about. Yep. How do I capture more and more spend under management? So we'll be talking about the consumerizing experiences voice using voice use Copa using facial recognition in Cooper. Uh, we'll be talking about new concepts around travel, around the group card school, applying all of it around the theme, focused on the um, end users and delight them, blow them away with consumer experiences. And then now that we do all of that, we can jump into the power users because we are increasing that spend under management. >>The theme by far is all around suite synergy suite synergy. So we seriously, this doesn't exist in the market. The market overall was all siloed applications. We're creating a new category and we've created these beautiful, elegant flows for our customers today. But there's also a wonderful long journey ahead in what we are taking up. Well maybe we'll get to talk about synergy at inspire 20 slowly. I will, we would love to have you again. Excellent. We're going to in Vegas for the afternoon. Best of luck in your keynote tomorrow and we'll see you the next inspire. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for Raja Hamoud. I, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Coupa inspire 19 from London. Bye for now.

>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Kupa inspire 19 PVR after you by Cooper. >>Hi. Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Kupa inspire 19 please do welcome back to the cube Ravi talker, the SVP, a business acceleration that Cooper won't be welcome back. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. Likewise. So lots of, lots of buzz around us. Everyone's eating lunch, but there's a lot of folks here in London, a lot of exciting news coming out in this morning. Lot of customers and fused in Rob's keynote. I lost count of how many great customer examples were showed. Talk to us a little bit about Kupa pay and some of the innovations that you guys are delivering now. >>Yeah, absolutely. So pay pays a great new area for Coupa. We call it the fourth pillar and Rob's analogy of the pipe procurement, invoicing, payment and expenses. And so actually we started this journey a really last year at this event where we announced virtual card for purchase orders and a strategic relationship with Barclaycard. And over that past year we've done some amazing things with relationships with JP Morgan, Citibank, and we just announced a great relationship with American express to provide American express virtual cards on the Coupa pay platform. So we've been working hard at it. We've seen some really good success early success with customers. Uh, we announced some other great innovations in our Vegas conference just a few months ago where we announced invoice payments is generally available along with partnerships with Stripe and PayPal. So it's been really busy. >>It has been the B2B payments space. It's a big market, 1.2, I think trillion global and global volume. But it's also challenging because on the consumer side, on the BDC side, it's so easy for us to do transactions right on our phone, tablet watches, and we had this expectation that we can pay for anything. We can find anything, we can pay bills so easily. But on the B2B side there's a lot more complexity. The BDB hasn't, payments hasn't been able to innovate nearly as quickly as on the consumer side. But I'd love to get your thoughts on what is Cooper able to leverage with Coupa pay that's maybe going to start meeting some of the demands of those business folks who in their consumer lives have this expectation of a swipe or a click to do a transaction. >>Yeah, it's a completely different ball game consumer versus B2B, whole avenues around risk profiles of your suppliers. You know if you pay a supplier that's doing illegal business are doing place and where the government doesn't allow it puts your brand and your reputation at risk. Very serious risks. And so we incorporate a lot of what we do with the community. So you heard Rob talk about that in his keynote. A lot of things around community intelligence. So for us being able to rely on thousands of customers of data, millions of transactions, being able to see things across all of our customers and really create alerts and transactional efficiencies for our customers in B2B payments. That's a big change for our customers and we're just starting to get to see some of those transactional elements. I think the second thing that we've seen with B2B payments, and it's interesting money, 2020 is one of the largest, uh, payment conferences, uh, in the world. And it happened I think last week or the week before in Vegas. And this year has been a lot of talk about B2B payments, whereas last year is mostly B to C. and so we feel we've been making an impact in the entire payments area because to us it's bringing together all of the different payment rails, whether it's virtual card or bank transfers or cross border, but being able to do it across dozens and hundreds of countries and it global fashion. That's a big game changer for large enterprises. >>So one of the things that was a theme this morning during the keynote was trust. I had the opportunity to speak with Rachel Botsman trust expert who did a keynote this morning. And as we look at some of the numbers that Rob shared, you mentioned a few of over a thousand plus customers using Coupa. I think he's shared over 5 million suppliers on the platform. You talked about this community, this massive community that you are co creating with. Talk to me about Coupa pay and its ability to help deliver that trust so that Coupa can be that trusted advisor that it wants to be with. It's not just its customers but as partners too. >>No, absolutely. And Rachel's presentation this morning was fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, uh, my background actually I Kupa for a decade I ran customer success. So I engaged with C level executives at all of our customers. And as part of that process, a trust was a big factor in that when we said something we would deliver that. And over the course of the years that coop has been around about 1314 years we've held very true. That stands in our number one core value of ensuring customer success. And when you look at all of the customers that are willing to put their six, what we call success metrics, how much they've spent saved the spend that they have under management when they are publicly talking about it. That's trust that we've created with them in this partnership because they believe in what our ability to deliver says we decided to go into payments or we're trust and payments is a very big deal as mentioned earlier. Right? You don't get necessarily fired for screwing up our purchase order or an invoice, but if you send money to the wrong supplier to the wrong country, you know, there's a lot of risk associated with that. So we take that very, very seriously and how we've been developing and creating solutions around Kupa pay. And so it's just the overall Avenue that we work with our, we treat them as partners, not as a vendor supplier relationship. And because of that we have this mutual trust that we're both in this together in this large community. >>Yeah. And Rachel Botsman talk about sort of that balance between, uh, trust and risk. Yeah. Which was very interesting concept. Um, talk to me about, I'm just thinking like even from a fraud on a supplier perspective, one of the things I know that Cuba is able to do is alert a customer, Hey, there's a supplier that has a history of whatever it happens to me that's, that's my inflict risk on that customer. Tell me a little bit about that. From a trust risk kind of balanced perspective, what you guys are delivering there. >>It's a great area that we're just really starting to get into as well. And so being able to leverage the community of buyers and suppliers and having everything in a single code system code platform allows us to do a number of these things. And so for providing our customers, not the necessarily the, the exact thing that they should do, but providing them the relevant information in order for them to make the right decisions. Yeah. There's an old adage that I go by which is trust but verify. And so it's the same similar concept here. It's our goal to provide these prescriptions to our customers on what is the supplier doing or how can you improve your processes. And with these prescriptions, as Rob mentioned this morning, it's, it's up to our customers to choose what they want to do with those prescriptions. Sometimes they may take it, sometimes they may not >>and he gave a number, I want to say 22,000 prescriptions and he gave a time period in the past 12 months. That's what I thought as well. So a lot of insight literally coming out of that community. Love to chat though about the community in terms of the B2B payment space, not only we talked about how it's being influenced by consumers, but the changing role of procurement and finance. Yeah, a lot of just disruption there. We talked about that a few months ago and didn't get a lot of opportunity for financial leaders to become much more strategic and a lot of the examples that Rob shared showed how impactful company wide the impact that procurement folks, finance folks can make. Talk to me about how the Coupa is leveraging that community to help them get more visibility on how that procurement role is changing and how Coupa can help it be much more strategic. You know what I, that's a great question. And >>what I respond with that is, what's the name of our conference? It's inspire, right? We want to inspire this community to really go to that next level and really look deep inside themselves. It, Rob talks about all these different adjectives of Brown, all the different, what we call spend setters. It's a great initiative that we've created because we're giving our community of voice and that's always the biggest thing in how you affect change. How do you give people a voice? How do you give someone a story that they can grasp onto such that they can make it their own, such as they can take those facts and that relevance and apply it to their own day to day jobs. And that's a big thing that we're looking to do. But it requires going back to trust. It requires a little bit of trust in what we're doing. And by providing those stories, it gives these, our customers, our champions, uh, the ability to fall back on those, have that foundation for how to make change, how to disrupt their organizations. You know, Rob gave that great example of Telenor. You know, their seep, their chief procurement officer created a blueprint and a plan to provide mobile service. I think it was an India is a great example of what an individual can do and when you're that individual and you have visibility and tall your supply base into all of the spend going across your company, it's very, very powerful. >>I saw a survey that Cuba did recently have, I think 253 financial decision makers in the U K and some of the stats were quite shocking that 96% I believe said we do not have complete visibility over our entire spend. Right. Wow. Right. That's because one, some of the things that Rob shared this morning was the massive, massive savings that companies can achieve, but not having that visibility. You've got blinders on. There's a lot of risk there. There's a lot of expenses that probably should be going into procurement, but that was really 96% saying we don't have complete visibility. What's Cooper's answer to that? >>You know, it's, it's an interesting statistic. Right? And I, I gave a presentation I think seven, eight years ago, and I started off that presentation with saying, you know, if you are an HR and you didn't have track of all your employees, you'd be fired. If you're a head of sales and you didn't have an understanding of all of your open opportunities for business, you'd be fired. So why is that different for spend? Right? Why not have visibility and have access to all of the different spin that's happening across your company? And your Rob said it best in his keynote. We talked about what's actually happening in the world today. It's not necessarily around customer relationship management software, CRM, right? It's not necessarily around human capital management, but it's the well capitalized businesses of the world today. And today's day and age and this uncertainty of Brexit, uncertainty of the global climate, us, China trade relations, who's well capitalized to make and withstand what could be some, you know, unsettling times. Now there's another very interesting thing we saw with that same survey. Excuse me. Along with some of the things we saw with the wall street journal with some surveys we did with them, these finance professionals, they want to have that visibility and our answer to them come talk to us. >>So speaking of influence, inspiring, tell me a little bit about how the Coupa community influenced or is influencing the evolution of Coupa pay for example was Hey, we've got to have Amex virtual cards integrated with Coupa pay. Was that something that came from the voice of the community? Yeah, so we, >>you know, all across Koopa ever since the inception of the company, it's always around partnering with our customers, with our community to really listen and understand what they, what they're looking for. But doing it in the guy in the, within the framework of our core values as a customer, as a company. And the first one that I mentioned earlier, ensuring customer success. So we want to listen to our customers, we want to better understand them. So around virtual cards, you know, how do we choose to do an Amex or a Barclaycard? And to us it's actually pretty simple. We wanted to make sure that we're able to cover 80 to 90% of our customers with these large issuers. And we've been able to do that over the past year in negotiating these agreements, figuring out the technology components. And so we've been executing and delivering on that over the past, uh, over the past year. >>And if I understand that the press release correctly, KUKA pay with Amex virtual court integration is launching first in the UK and Australia. Correct. Can you tell me a little bit about those markets and what were some of the deciding factors? They said, Hey, well we'll go, we'll parlay on your title of acceleration. Is this, are these the right markets to launch and to accelerate copay? >>Yeah. Um, you know, there's obviously a lot of different ways and opportunities that American express has to go to market, massive company, great company to partner with. And so what we saw with them is from a technology standpoint, starting off in the UK and Australia made the most sense. We also have existing demand with customers that are ready to get going and really help us make sure that we create the right experience. You know, we expect this partnership to be really big and so as part of that, we want to make sure that we're able to deliver in certain markets first before we expand this and make this a much bigger thing. American express has a very prestigious brand. We want to respect and support that and we have our own brand that we want to support with our customers. We want to make sure we do it right. >>Well, Ravi, last question. I know that you're keynoting tomorrow. Yes. What are the couple of takeaways that you're going to leave the audience with tomorrow during your keynote? >>Yeah, it's a great, good question. I think the, the takeaways for tomorrow is we want to share some stories. You know, going back to inspiration, it's all about storytelling. Do we have stories to tell our customers such that they can relate to it and fall back on that? So we have three great customer speakers tomorrow. Really excited about the stories that they're going to share about Cooper pay and their journey with it. And my take away for our are the audiences. How do those stories relate to your business and is there a way that we can help you streamline your payment process? >>Awesome. Robbie, it's been a pleasure. You back on the cube. Best of luck at your keynote tomorrow and we'll see you at the next inspire. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. All right. For Ravi talker, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from London. Coupa inspire 19.