>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the cube covering a Cronus global cyber summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >>So Ron, welcome back to the keeps coverage of kronas cyber global cyber summit 2019. I'm John furrier here in Miami beach. Our next guest is Pat Hurley, vice president, general manager of the Americas in sales and customer relationships. Get Debbie Juan. Hey, thanks for having me. Welcome to Miami beach. Lovely place to have an event. So I hear ya. You got a lot of competition going on between the U S America's in the AMIA teens and it's very competitive group. >> The European team is very confident. I think we'll show them tomorrow what we're made of. We've been recruited very hard for some players that are Latin American. I think we'll show them a finger too. You've got a big soccer story there. We do. Yeah. We've, uh, we've got a few sports partnerships that we have across the globe. Uh, some of the first partnerships we had were actually within formula one. >>And we really try to correlate the story of the importance of, uh, data protection and cyber protection in the sporting industry because a lot of people don't think about the amount of data that's actually being generated in the space. A formula one car generates between, you know, two and three terabyte through three gigabytes of data on every lap, tons of telemetry devices that are kicked, collecting information from the car, from the road service, from the, the general environment. They're taking that data and then sending it back to the headquarter, analyzing it and making very small improvements to the car to make sure that they can qualify faster, run a faster lap, make the right type of angle into a turn, uh, which can really differentiate them from being, you know, first, second, third, 10th in a qualifying session. On the soccer side. We do have some partnerships with uh, arsenal, Manchester city, inter Milan, and we just signed a partnership as well with Liverpool. >>So we are very popping in that space here in the U S we have some other sports that we're big fans of. I'm personally a big Boston red Sox fan, being a Boston native and we do have a sports partnership with the red Sox, which has been an unbelievable partnership with them. And learning more about the use cases that they solve and using our technology has been really cool. >> You know, Patty, you bring up the sports thing and we were kidding before we on camera around the trading, you know how people do sports deals and they trade, you know, merchandise for consumer benefit or customer benefits. But really what is happening is sports teams encapsulate really the digital transformation in a nutshell because most sports franchises are, have been traditionally behind. But now with the consumerization of it and digital can go back to 2007 since the mobile phone. >>Really, I mean it's iPhone. Yeah. Since that time, sports and capsulates every aspect of it, consumer business fan experience. And it really has every, every, almost every element of what we see now as a global IOT problem opportunity. So it really encapsulates the use case of an integrated and and needed solution. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the amount of data that's, that's out there today and the fast way that it's growing, you know, the explosion of, uh, of data in the, in the world today, sports have different unique challenges. So obviously they have large fan bases that need to be able to access the data and understand what's going on with their favorite sports teams. Um, for us it's really, you know, these technology partnerships that we have with these guys, it runs through all these different areas of, you know, in many cases we didn't really understand that they were using it for. >>So, you know, the red Sox for example, they've got Fenway park and iconic stadium, you know, the Mecca of baseball. If you haven't been there yet, I suggest all your viewers that they go and check it out, give me a call, we'll try and get you set up there. But, um, you know, the, the, the experience that the fans have there is all around their data experienced there. Right? And it's not just baseball games. It could be hockey games that Fenway park, it could be a concert that they're having. A phone buys a lot of different events. These stadiums are open year round and the ability to move, share access, protect the data in that stadium is really important to how they're functioning as an organization. We talked to their I-Team quite regularly about how they're using our solutions. They're talking about uh, different aspects of artificial intelligence, different ways they can use our products and machine learning. >>Obviously with the new solutions that we have in the market today around cybersecurity or helping them to address other challenges that they face. Um, as an organization, these are realtime challenges in their physical locations, national security issues, terrorist attacks could happen. There are venues, there are public gathering places too. Absolutely. We announced our partnership with them back in may and I was shocked to hear them on the main stage announcing that they had this great partnership with the Kronos was talking about their unique cyber security needs. They started talking about drone technology and I'm thinking, all right, a drone flies in the stadium. Maybe at breaks and it falls on a player and we're paying $20 million for one of these pitchers to be out there on the Hill or an interest, a fan or maybe they're collecting some video data to then share it out. >>And that's red Sox IP. No, they're talking about cybersecurity threats in the sense that a drone, a remotely controlled device could come in and lightened incendiary device in the, in the stadium and that to them as a real security server. And that's frontline for the it guys. That's what keeps them up at night. Yeah. And that's really an attack take time. Oh yeah, absolutely. What are the use cases that are coming out of some of your customers, cause you guys have a unique integrated solution with a platform as an end to end component too. You have a holistic view on data, which is interesting and unique. People are kind of figuring this out, but you guys are ahead of the game. What are some of the use cases that you've seen in the field with customers that highlight the benefits of taking a holistic view of the data? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we look at it as kind of backups dead, right? We have, we've combined the old world of backup and disaster recovery with the new world of cybersecurity and we combine that to a term we're calling cyber protection because it really requires an end to end solution and a lot of different things need to be working properly to prevent these attacks from happening. Uh, you need to be very proactive in how you're going about that. We address it with what we call 'em, the Kronos cyber platform. And what this is, is a unique, multi-tiered multi-tenant offering that's designed specifically for service providers. We have just under 6,000 servers, providers actively selling our cyber protection solutions today and they use this for are for a multiple different aspects. And usually the beachhead has something like backup. Every company needs backup. It's more of a commodity type solutions, a lot of different players in the game out there, but they take it a step further, use that same backup technology to then do disaster recovery. >>They can do files, they can share, they can do monitoring. We have notary solutions based on blockchain technologies. Now, this whole suite of cybersecurity solutions, all of this is with a single pane of glass, one platform that of a service provider can go in and work with their customers and make sure that their data is protected, make sure that their physical machines are virtual machines, they're PCs, their Macs are all protected, that data's protected, it's secure, but it's also accessible, which is an important part of you can take your data wrapping a nice bow buried a hundred feet underground, but then you can't use it, right? So you want to be able to make sure that you can actually, uh, leverage the technology there. Um, we've seen explosive growth, especially in, in my market. I think the numbers are pretty crazy. It's something like 90% of the market today in the U S has served in some capacity by a service provider. >>And this could be a small to medium size business that's served by local service fire to those really big guys that are out there. Let's on with how large your target audience, you mentioned search probably multiple times when you're out selling your target persona, your target audience, and you're trying to reach into, so we touch, everybody know, you equate it to kind of what we do with the red Sox, right? You walk into that city and the 38,000 people that, well, some of those people are just, you know, regular Joe's, right? They, they go to work every day. They have a computer at home, they have a mobile device. They probably have multiple mobile devices. We protect that for them. We call them a consumer. Slash. Prosumers. We work at a lot of very large retail organizations. If you walk into some of those shops today, you'll be able to see our software on a shelf there. >>You work with one of those tech squads where they're starting to attach services to it and you get more of a complete offering there. We then scale up a little bit further to some OEM providers. You work with companies like Honeywell and Emerson that are manufacturing devices that embed our software on there. They white label it and deliver it out. These are connected devices. You think about the, you know the, the explosion of IOT devices in the market today. We're protecting that stuff as well. We work with very large enterprises, so some of the, the major players that you see in the manufacturing space are standing up standardizing on Acronis process control process automation vendors are using our Chronis and we can deliver the solution because of the way it's so flexible in a very consumable way for them. Those enterprises can actually act as a service provider for their employees so we can actually take our technology, deploy the layer in their infrastructure where they have complete control. >>They might not want to be in an Uber cloud, they might not want to work with Chrome OS data center. They want to have and hold that data. They want to make sure it's on site. We enable that type of functionality and then the fastest growing area for us is what I hit on earlier within the service provider community. We're recruiting hundreds of service providers every quarter. We've got some great partners here. Give you an example of a service provider. You mentioned the red size, I'm assuming is that a vendor that might be working within that organization, but still it sounds like that's a supplier to the red Sox. How, how broad is that definition? It gives us many points. Yeah, it's a really good point. So we work with hosting providers. Look, can be regional hosting providers to multinational hosting providers. Some of the very big names that you've, you're probably familiar with. >>We work with, uh, we work with, uh, telco providers who work with ISV providers or sorry, ISP providers, um, kind of regional telco providers that provide a myriad of different services all the way down to your kind of local mom and pop type service providers where you've got a small business, maybe they've got 30 to 50 employees, they're servicing probably 200 to 300 customers and they want to provide a very secure, safe, easy to use complete solution to their customers. Uh, those could be focused on certain verticals so they could be focused on healthcare, financial services, construction, et cetera. Um, we have some that are very niche within like dental services or chiropractice offices, small regional doctor's offices. Uh, and the, the beauty of that, and I was getting the partners earlier, is we have partnerships with companies like ConnectWise where those are tools that service providers are using on a very daily basis. >>So essentially the platform gives you that range and that's the typical typical platform. So you have that broad horizontally scalable capability and the domain expertise either be what solution from you guys or can ISV or someone within your ecosystem is that they get that. Right? Absolutely. And that's what really differentiates us is our ability to integrate into that plat, into our platform, into their platform and make those connections. So you don't need to learn 12, 14, 15 different technologies. You've got a small suite of offerings in a single pane of glass, very easy to use, very intuitive. Um, the integrations that we have with these partners like ConnectWise, like Ingram micro, really differentiate us because what they do is they provide open API capabilities. They provide software development kits where these partners can go ahead and build it the way they want to sell it. >>You know, it's interesting when the cloud came out and as on premise has changed to a much more agile dev ops kind of mindset that forced it to think like a service provider. I think like an operating system, it's an operating environment basically. So that service provides an interesting angle and I want to get your thoughts on this because I think this is where you guys have such a unique opportunity to just integrate solution because you could get into anything and you got ISV to back that up. So I guess the question I would have is for that enterprise that's out there that's looking to refactor and replatform their entire operation, or it could be a large enterprise, it has a huge IOT opportunity or challenge or a service provider is looking at having a solution. What's the pitch that you would give me if I'm the one of those customers? >>Say, Hey Pat, what's the pitch? So you need a, you need a trusted provider that's been in the business for a number of years that understands the data protection and security markets that Kronos has that brand. We've been doing this for about 16 years. We were founded in Singapore, we're headquartered out of Switzerland and we've got a lot of really smart guys in the back room. Was building good technologies that our partners were able to use. Um, we look at it a lot of different ways. I mentioned our go to market across a lot of different verticals and a lot of different um, kind of routes for those. The way we deliver our solution. It provides the flexibility for an enterprise to a classic reseller to um, you know, a VAR or a service, right? It's delivering services. It can be delivered to those guys how they want to consume it. >>So as an example, we may work with a smaller service provider that doesn't have any colo capabilities. We provide data centers so they could have a very quick turnkey solution, allows them to get up and running with their business, selling backup within minutes to their customers. We can also work with very large enterprises where we can deliver the complete platform to them and then they have complete control over it. We sprinkle in some professional services to make sure that we're giving them the support that they need and then they're running the service for themselves. What we've really seen in terms of a trend is that a lot of these VARs, we have about 4,500 of them in North America and they're starting to look at their businesses differently. Say, I gotta adapt or die here. I gotta figure out what my next business model is. >>How am I going to be the next one that's in the news flash that says, Hey, they've been acquired, or Hey Thoma Bravo made a big investment in me. Right? They need to convert to this services business or Kronos enables that transformation to happen. I mean, I can see you guys really making money for channel partners because they want solutions. They want to touch the customer, they want to maybe add something they could bring into it or have high service gross profits around services. Absolutely. So, yeah, our solution is unique in the sense that allows partners to sell multiple offerings to, you're getting an additional layer of stickiness providing multiple solutions to a customer. You're using the same technology, so your it team is very familiar with what they're using on a daily basis. Um, you're reducing the amount of churn for your customers because you're selling so much additional there that they're really stuck with you. >>That's a good thing. Uh, and beyond that, your increasing ARPU, average revenue per user is a key metric that all of our partners are looking at. And these guys are owner operators, right? They're business owners. They're looking at the bottom line. I mean, it's interesting the operating leverage around the consistent platform just lowers, it gives them software economic model. They can get more profit over time as they make that investment look at at the end of the day, channel partners care about a couple things, money, profit and customer happiness. Absolutely. And it helps to have them want to have a lot of one offs and a lot of, you know, training, you know, anything complicated, anything confusing, anything that requires a lot of resources, they're not going to like a, it's also great to have events like this where you're able to, to press the flesh with these guys and, and being face to face and understand their real world challenges that they're dealing with on a daily basis. >>How has the sport's a solution set that you've been involved in? How has that changed the culture of Acronis? Is that, has that, has that changed as, you know, sports is fun. People love sports, they have real problems. It's a really great use case as well. How's that change the culture? It's been amazing. I, so one from a branding perspective, we are a lot more recognized, right? Um, the most important thing about these partnerships for us is that they're actually using the technology. So, you know, we've got the red Sox here with us today. We've got arsenal represented, we've got Williams, we've got Roush racing, we've got a NASCAR car back here. Um, they use our technology on a daily basis and for each one of them we solve different types of use cases. Whether it's sending them large amount of video data from an essence studio over to Fenway park, or if it's a scout out in the field that needs to send information back and their laptop crashes, how do they recover? >>A lot of these different use cases, you can call them right back to a small business owner. You don't have to be a multibillion dollar sports organization with the same challenge. Well, I'm smiling because we've been called the ESPN of tech to they bring our set. We do let the game day thing. We certainly could love to come join you in all these marquee events that you have. We'd love to have it. Yeah, so if you follow us on social, we're out there and that, that's a big part of it. You mentioned one of ours looking for what our partners looking for. They want a personal relationship too. A lot of that goes away with technology nowadays and being able to really generate that type of a, of a personal relationship. These partnerships enable that to happen and they're very anything, I don't know anything about cars. >>We started partnering with formula one. All of a sudden I know everything about 41 I go to these races. I tell everybody I don't know anything about cars and I ended up being the, the subject matter export for him over over the weekend. So we'd love to have you guys join us. We'd love all of our partners. They get more engaged in the sports aspect of it because for us, it really is something that, um, again, they're using us in real life scenarios. We're not paying to put a sticker on a car that's going 300 miles. It's not traveling as a real partnership. Exactly. Pat, congratulations on your success and good luck on people owning away the numbers. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Just the cube coverage here at the Chronis global cyber summit 2019 I'm John furry. More coverage after this short break.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. (techy music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost Joep Piscaer, and this is Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London, England. Always happy to have a customer on the program, and even more when we've got a CIO, the ones that are sitting in the hot seat. Bob Brown, who's the CIO of information, communication, and technology with Manchester Gov. Thank you for having, you know, the show in your home country, and a pleasure to talk with you. >> Great, thanks for letting me be joining your panel today. >> So, Bob, you know, I've been an analyst for about, coming up on nine years now, and the role of the CIO is something that just gets, you know, looked at under a microscope. It's, you know, how's the role changing, you know, is there a future for the CIO? Does everything does just go away? Does the CMO take it, who takes your budget? So, I'm sure in your role things are, you know, nice and mellow. You kind of sit in a comfy chair, everybody comes and asks you for things nicely and throws money at you, did I get things right? >> That's completely at the different end of the scale of where my business is. >> Yeah. >> Completely untrue. >> Yeah. >> There's no comfy chair, to start with. Let's be honest, right? (chuckling) Our business is 24 by seven, so within the context of what most people think of local government, we're providing critical services that are fundamentally helping our entire 600,000 residents in Manchester to interact with our council services, and they need to do that at a time that's convenient for them. >> Yeah. >> So, it's constantly evolving, constant challenges, and inevitably public sector life, financially, hugely difficult for us to balance the books. >> You know, bring us insight to this. You've got 600,000 customers, you know. >> Yeah. >> Are they all stopping you at the, you know, local grocery and being, like, you know, "Hey, I need this done," or "This isn't working right?" What are, you know, some of the big things that are, you know, impacting you? What's happening in your space? >> Yeah, okay, well look, we've got 7,500 colleagues that work at the council, and we're supporting 600,000 people, nearly 600,000 people that live in the area, and they live in the area for all sorts of reasons, okay. Some of them are part of the digital transformation that is going on, some of them are moving to the area because of the economic buoyancy that we have within the region. I think outside of London, Manchester is the place that people want to be, and they're seeing a big explosion of new jobs and innovation, and we've got big brands, Google are there, Amazon have just launched new services that they're bringing, 600 new, high quality digital jobs into the area. We've got Microsoft there, this is an enormous digital economy that's constantly evolving, and inevitably, those people that are studying at our big universities want to live and work in an environment that is conducive for their personal development, their career direction, but they live in the city, they want to be using services in a way that is more modern than ever before, and they want to take the experiences that they perhaps had in different cities and different countries and know that they can get those, and beyond, in Manchester. >> And so, you know, if people... You know, I'm betting they have different expectations now. So, you know, it used to be you go up to an office, you get a ticket, and you ask your question, right? I'm assuming that experience has changed as well for Manchester, for the government, so servicing your customers in a more digital way, basically? >> Yeah, very much so. Look, I've been at Manchester City Council now just over three years, and in that time I think it's true to say that the services weren't quite where they needed to be. There was some element of investment that was needed, and we've had to pull, really, a good transformation approach together. We've had to up skill many of the team. We've had to look to attract some new people with some new experiences into the group, and we've had to fundamentally change the relationship between what was the technology function, and somewhat isolated from frontline business into it being a critical enabler of transformation for our entire council. That's really what we've had to do. >> I love that, Bob, you've kind of teed up the digital transformation story, which has been, you know, at the heart of a lot of the discussions we've been having for the last couple of years. I wonder if you can help us walk through that a little bit, you know, what have you done kind of on the, you know, foundational platform infrastructure layer to change-- >> Yeah. >> What's happening on the applications on top of that, and then the people side, of course, is you know, immensely-- >> Yeah, of course. >> Important that you raise. >> Look, in our world I think it's helpful, I think, to firstly, set the agenda, and our agenda is predicated on service and availability of our services being our number one priority, so therefore, any down time, any lack of availability, any service failure has a core direct relationship impact with the people who are using our services. When you work in local authority terms, some of your others may be aware of this, or maybe others that are listening to this today, we're not dealing with inconvenience factors if services fail. This isn't an ATM card not working to give you £20 from the hole in the wall. Whilst that's hugely frustrating, I get that, in my world, if certain services aren't available, we're not helping some of the most vulnerable people that need our services to work. We could be making decisions that affect their lives. We could be making decisions that are also helping people to process, unfortunately, those that have passed away. Our coroner's service, a critical service that we provide at the council. You must remember, we're dealing with, truly, the lives of the people who use our services, and those, not just that emotional connection that we therefore have as residents, it really extends beyond technology. Technology, for me, is an enabling function for us that has got to be always available, hence why we make some of the decisions that we do around the core infrastructures that we have. So, for me, the core infrastructure is our foundation level, of which we build our reputation, we build our services on, we build the reliance that we have as an organization. Our use of Nutanix as a technology enables us to be able to build greater levels of resilience, also, so that if we do have a failure, the reality is that our user base will likely never know it's happened, only my team may, but for us, that foundation level gives us the ability to then start more strategic conversations with our business. It's very difficult to have a strategic relationship about change when you fundamentally can't provide the core service, so you've got to start there. >> So, tell us a little about, you know, what is your use of Nutanix. How do you use it and how does it improve that foundational level to actually deliver those services to your customers? >> Well, for us, our journey started about six months ago, and we're already transitioning, in fact, nearly getting to the end of the first stage of our journey of transitioning into the hyperconverged infrastructure, which is critical for us for many, many different reasons. Our fundamental business case was around our ability to be able to clearly change our whole dynamics around resilience, but also reduce our carbon footprint, reduce the number of servers that we have to power so our power consumption has changed. We're already delivering on some of those business case values in a very, very short space of time, so for us, the ability to pick up our infrastructure and be able to now put that in a new environment has created, already, a significant change for our organization, and one that we can build on. >> Okay, yeah, Bob, since it's so recent, you know, give us, paint us a little picture kind of the before and after, like did it reduce the amount of people that needed to focus specifically on infrastructure? Did you have to do some rescaling? You said you've done some, you know, changes in personnel and hiring and training recently. Help us understand. >> Yeah. Yeah, look, in our case, we needed to look at technology enabling us to be able to demonstrate and deliver on our core strategic objectives. So, for me, our data center is very much about how we house and how we service with keeping our data safe and secure and always available. That enables us to be able to also support some elements of our social value, so for us, the ability to be working with a partner who are absolutely strategically aligned with where our strategic direction is as an organization is fundamental for us, and our ability to be able to therefore then no longer need some of those personnel who were providing day-to-day services around the data center, because those skills now can be used elsewhere within my service. We've got a situation where we can now be confident that the resilience of that new infrastructure is such that we no longer need to have an individual babysitting those services, now where that technology enables us to be able to do it automatically. >> All right, you mentioned that you're finishing phase one, so maybe can you step back and whatever you're allowed to share, a little bit of-- >> Sure. >> What is the phased approach, you know, where do you go with Nutanix and the surrounding solutions with it? >> Well, look, our use of Nutanix and our ability to be able to partner with what is clearly a recognized Gartner Magic Quadrant, top right organization, enables us to be able to get access to some further elements of innovation. The difficulty in the public sector of having an R&D function is frankly, it's impossible. Our relationship with our partners is how we leverage, frankly, innovation, and where we get some of that from. So, the first stage for us was very much about getting some of the core foundations there, but beyond that it's about how they can help us also unlock other elements of our strategic goals and objectives, and one of those is about how we can use our new relationships. In Manchester we have devolved budgets from central government, enabling our health colleagues and our local authority colleagues come closer together, for us to share information, share data, and for us to be able to make even greater, richer decisions about the care and support of people. In some cases, that is going to enable us to be able to use assisted living technology that's going to be housed and run in our new data center environment that is going to fundamentally change the way that we provide healthcare services in the future. That's a real strategic aim for us. >> You know, how does IoT fit into your future plans? I don't know if it's tied with, if you've talked to Nutanix about what they're doing there. >> Yeah. >> But it's been something I've found a lot of governments similar to yours are looking in that space. >> Look, I think IoT is inevitably something that people like me have to consider and think about. I guess I would say that IoT is, at one level, a whole bunch of individual devices that work on their own platforms that don't talk to each other, and in the healthcare space, that ain't going to work for us. That's just not going to be it. We're going to have to have a platform by which those that are providing the healthcare services, using technology that's deployed in a patient, and now a resident scenario, to fundamentally change that dial from it's providing what is a reactionary healthcare service and being much more proactive, so those data sets have got to come together, and that ability for us, then, to be able to use that data to help us do predictive analytics in the future, and for us to be able to stop the ability for somebody to get so ill they have to go back into the acute care scenario is crucial, and that's, again, for us is how we think IoT has to, for us, develop a relationship with our various partners who discretely provide those services by bringing those things together, and that's where I think our relationship with Nutanix will help us unlock, and really discover, how we might be able to manage that and deliver some of those things quickly. >> So, one of the things that you do as a CIO is, you know, think about the hybrid cloud strategies, right? So, you're talking about these separate data silos that you and your partners have now, so what is your strategy to, you know, combine those data sets, or open them up so that you as a government can actually leverage that data from, you know, no matter where it runs, no matter where it is stored? >> Yeah, I think we're at early stages of our data strategy for the council. We certainly have a federated business model that is evident for all to see, and most local authorities are somewhat similar. I think the challenge for us in the future's going to be how we unlock the power of the data that we capture and the relationships that we have today. At the council, one of the key strategic objectives over the next few years is for us to deliver a new customer relationship management function. That will fundamentally enable us to change the way that we are structured internally, the way our organization responds to the way that the different interactions are going to come. Roughly, today, about 50% of our interactions with our customers, with our residents of Manchester, are through a digital channel. That means there's about 50% that have a different experience, and we know we need to change that. So, you know, for us, by really having a strategic vision in terms of where our data strategy needs to be is it enables us to think about that technology that's going to enable us to get there in the future. >> All right, Bob, last thing I want to ask you is it sounds like you've got a lot of moving pieces. If you could go to kind of the vendor ecosystem, so not just Nutanix, but you know, other companies you work with, you know, what could they be doing to make your life easier? >> Look, I think that's a double-edged sword, right? I think the first thing as a public sector, we've got to learn how to get the best from our partners. I think we've got to also create that situation where our partners meet with leadership on a regular basis, and that they've got the opportunity to then talk about, not just the contracts and the SLA and the regular series performance stuff, but much more beyond that. I think as a public sector we've got to open ourselves up to having those conversations more, and I would like our partners to push us to deliver that, if I'm honest. I had our partner event yesterday. We shared a lot about what's going on in the city, a lot about the challenges, but it's true to say today that I'm probably one of, if not the only, local authority doing that. I think I'd like more local authorities to be doing that, and I'd like our partners to be pushing us. It's true in that environment I saw yesterday Nutanix mixing with people from Google, mixing with people from Dell, mixing with people from other brands, for them to be able to also recognize how they can collaborate to bring solutions through to us. >> Well, Bob, really appreciate you sharing with our community what's going on. Congratulations on what you're doing, and wish you the best of luck. >> Many thanks, great tea time, thank you. >> All right, for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Fortinet Accelerate 18. Brought to you by Fortinet. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our continuing coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. We're excited to be here. I'm Lisa Martin with Peter Burris, and we're excited to talk to one of the Keynotes the big cheese from the main stage session this morning, John Maddison. >> I say, small cheese I would say. >> SVP of Products and Solutions at Fortinet. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here again. >> So two things I learned about you when you started off your Keynote. One you're a Man City Fan, Manchester City. >> Manchester City Blue. >> Okay. >> Through and through, for many years. >> Premier League all the way. And you have the best job at Fortinet. >> I do indeed. >> Wow. >> That is to announce the new products of course. >> So let's talk about that. So you talked about some exciting announcements today. Tell us about, start with a Security Fabric. What's new there, what's going on, what's exciting? >> Well the core of the Security Fabric is FortiOS 6.0, that's our network operating system. That's the core of he Fabric and when we do a big release like this, many different features, new functionalities. Also we have tighter integration now between all our products in the Fabric. Bus, as I said, new features as well. Things like SD-WAN has been improved, we now have probably estimate of breed SD-WAN security. The Fabric integration itself is going on. We built out some new connectors with cloud. Now we have connectors for all the public clouds. All the public clouds. We have a new CASB connector, acronym city, of course, as usual, CASB is cloud access security broker, API access the SaaS clouds. And so we've got that not only in it's standalone form but also very much integrated inside the Fabric. We've also introducing some new FortiGuard service as part of FortiOS 6.0, a new security rating which is based on a bunch of new practices or best practices that all our customers have said this is great best practices, can you put this together and apply these to our network overall. That's just skimming the surface as I say, I think I said there's 200 plus new services I could have stood up there for like six hours or whatever. But great new services are 6.0 big announcement for us. >> We just chatted with your America's Channel Chief Jon Bove, talk to us about. >> Who's an Arsenal fan by the way. >> What. >> And we beat him Sunday three nil in the Cup final. >> Excellent. >> Just to make sure you get this. >> I'm sure. >> Write that down. >> Jot that down. >> So what excitement are you hearing in, from your perspective, in the channel with respect to all of the new announcements that you made today? >> Great feedback, so this obviously is a big channel partner event here. You know what a lot of channel partners are saying is that I need to make sure I provide more of a solution to the customers. In the past, you know maybe they sell a point product, it's hard to kind of keep that relationship going with that customer. But if they sell a solution with one or two products that's part of that solution or managed and some services as part of that, it's much stickier for the partners and gives them a bit more of an architectural approach to their customers network. They really like the Fabric as I said. The Fabric doesn't have to be everything inside the Fabric, they can be components. It's what we've seen far from a Fabric components. Our partners really latched on to the network plus the advanced threat protection, plus the management or plus the access points. But they definitely prefer to sell a complete solution. It's hard for them to manage 40 different security vendors, the skill sets, the training and everything else. Now they're not saying there needs to be one security vendor, much as we would like it to be Fortinet, but they need to be reduced to maybe a set of 10 or 12 and really, our Fabric allows them to do that. >> That's a key differentiator. >> Absolutely key differentiator and as I said, you know it's very hard to build a Fabric. It's a mesh network, all these products talk to each other. You can only really do that if you build those products organically, step-by-step, alongside the network operating system. It's no good acquiring lots of bits and pieces and trying to bolt it together, it's not going to work. We spent a long time, 10 years, building out this Fabric organically to make sure it integrates but also putting the best of breed features and things like SD-WAN and CASB. >> What is the product? In this digital world what is a product? >> A security product? >> Any kind of product. As a guy who runs product management, what's a product, can we talk about what is a security product? >> I think in the past you know product management used to be very focused on I've got a box that comes out, or I've got a piece of software that comes out, these days it could be virtual machine or cloud, but it's doing a single instance, there's a single thing that it's doing inside, inside the network from a security perspective. What we believe in is that multifunction, now consolidation, multiple threat vectors I refer to this that like the digital attack surface. The digital transformation, security transformation. The biggest issue though, is that digital attack surface. That's just expanded enormously, it's very dynamic. Things are coming on on off the network was spinning up virtual machines and applications here and there. A point product these days just can't cope, can't cope. You need solutions against specific threat vectors that are applied in a dynamic way using the Fabric. >> But arguably it's even beyond solutions. You need to be able to demonstrate to the customer that there is an outcome that's consistent and that you will help achieve that outcome, You'll take some responsibility for it. In many respects, we move from a product to a solution, to an outcome orientation. Does that resonate with you and if so, how does that influence the way you think and the way that you're guiding Fortinet and partners? >> Yes, definitely. You know one of the first things they're very worried about is you know can they see that digital attack surface. It's very large now and it's moving around. Their outcome, first outcomes to say, do I know my risk on my attack surface? That's the very first out. Is it visible, can I see it, or can I protect it or can I apply the right threat protection against that. That outcome to them is they can see everything, protect everything, but as I said also, now they're moving into this more detection environment. Where you've got machine learning, artificial intelligence because you need to apply that. The bad guys these days are very smart in that they know they can morph things very quickly and provide you know targeted attacks, zero-day attacks, we probably haven't seen it before. I hate this analogy where we say somebody else got to get infected before everyone else gets protected. It shouldn't be that way. With, you know, with technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, we should be able to protect everybody from day one. >> Kind of pivoting on, you brought up the word outcome, and I want to go off that for a second. When you're talking with customers and you mentioned, I think, before we went live that you visited, talked to over 300 customers last year. Who is at the table, at a customer, in terms of determining the outcome we need to have? Are we talking about the CSO's team, what about folks in other organizations, operational technology departments. Who are you now seeing is in this conversation of determining this outcome. >> A new job role which I think been coming for a while, it's the security architect. Two years ago, I'll go into a room and there would be the networking team on one side of the table, this InfoSec team security side, on this side of the table, the CIO over here and the CSO over here and they be debating. I would be almost invisible in the room. They'll be debating what's going to happen because you know the CIO wants to build out more agile business applications, wants to move faster. The security team has got to answer to the Board these days, and they got to make sure everything's secure. What's their risk factor? And what I see is a new job function called the security architect, that kind of straddles a bit the networking team, understands what they're building out from an SDN, architecture, cloud perspective, but also understands the risks when you open up the network. The security architect provides more holistic, long-term architecture view for the customer, versus, I've got to fix this problem right now I've got a hold of a bucket, I've got to fix it, then we move on to the next. They're building a system on architecture long term. We have something called a Network Security Expert, it's our training education capability. We have an NSC eight, we have around 100 thousand people certified in the last two years on NSC between one and eight. And about 100 people on eight, because eight's a very high level architect level across all the security technologies. But we definitely see a lot of partners who want to get their people trained to NCE level eight because they would like to provide that security architect that's in the customer now, that advice on what should be that holistic security architecture. The big change to me is that the networking team and the security team have realized they can't just keep fixing things day to day, they need a more holistic long-term architecture. >> Let's talk about that holistic approach. At Wikibon we talk a lot about SiliconANGLE Wikibon, we talk a lot about how the difference between business and digital business is the role that data assets play in the digital business. I think it's a relatively interesting, powerful concept, but there's not a lot of expertise out there about thinking how is a data asset formed. I think security has a major role to play in defining how a data assets structured because security in many respects is the process of privatizing data so that it can be appropriated only as you want it to. What does the security architect do? Because I could take what you just said and say the security architect is in part responsible for defining and sustaining the data asset portfolio. >> Yes and you know, if you go back a few years, there's data leakage prevention was a big area, big marketplace, DLP is the best thing. Their biggest problem that they did was they couldn't tag the assets. They didn't know what assets were so then when it came to providing data protection they go well, what is it, I don't know where it's from, I don't know what it is. And so that a whole marketplace kind of just went away. We're still there a bit, but everyone's really struggling with it still. The 6.0 introduced something called tagging technology. It's inherent already inside routing systems and switching systems, SDN systems. The tagging technology allows you to look at data or devices or interfaces or firewalls from a higher level and say this is the business relationship between that device, that data and what my business objectives are. We talked about intent based network security and the ability long term is to say, hey, if I've got a user and I want to add that user to this network at security level six to that application, I say that, then it gets translated into bits and bytes and network comport and then gets translated end-to-end across the network. The tagging technology from my mind is the first step in a to be able to kind of tag interfaces and data and everything else. Once you've got that tagging done then you can apply policies as a much higher level which are data centric and business aware centric. >> I'm going to ask you a question related to that. Historically, networks in the IT world were device was the primary citizen right. Then when we went to the web the page became a primary citizen. Are we now talking about a world in which data becomes the primary citizen we're really talking about networks of data? >> I think to some extent. If you look at the users today, they have like maybe three or four devices. Because students, universities, there's something on with those lectures, they've got an iPad, their iPhone, three devices attaching there. I think the definition of one user and one device has gone away and it's multiple devices these days. And you know a lot of devices attaching that no one has any clue about. I don't think it's going to be completely data centric because I still think it's very very hard to tag and classify that data completely accurately as it's moving around. I think tends to be a part of it, I think devices going to be part of it, I think the network itself, the applications, are all going to be part of this visibility. In our 6.0 we provide this topology map where you can see devices users. You can see applications spin up, you can see the relationship between those things and the policies, the visibility is going to be extremely important going forward and then the tagging goes along with that and then you can apply the policy. >> With respect to visibility, I wanted to chat about that a little bit in the context of customers. One of the things that Ken talked about in his keynote was. >> Ken? >> Ken. >> Ken Xie. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Ken who? >> That guy? The guy that steals slides from you in keynotes. >> He did as usual. >> I know, I saw that. >> Tells me like two minutes before tells me John, I need that slide. (Peter laughing) >> That's why you have the best job. Everybody wants to copy you. In terms of what what the CEO said, that guy, that Fortinet protects 90% of the global S&P 100. There were logos of Apple, Coca-cola, Oracle, for example. In terms of visibility, as we look at either, a giant enterprise like that or maybe a smaller enterprise where they are, you mentioned this digital tax surface is expanding because they are enabling this digital business transformation, they've got cloud, multi-cloud, mobile, IoT, and they also have 20, north of 20, different security products in their environments. How did they get visibility across these disparate solutions that don't play together. How does Fortinet help them achieve that visibility, so they can continue to scale at the speed they need to? >> Well I think they use systems like SIM systems we have a Forti SIM as well where you can use standard base sys logs and SNMP to get information up there so they can see it that way. They're using orchestration systems to see parts of it, but I think long term, I think I speak to most customers they say, although there's specific, new vendors maybe for specific detection capabilities, they really want to reduce the number of vendors inside their network. You say 20, I sometimes I hear 30 and 40. It's a big investment for them. But they also realize they can't maintain it long term. Our recommendation to customers is to, if you've got some Fortinet footprint in there, look at what's the most obvious to build out from a Fortinet perspective. Sometimes we're in the data centers or sometimes we expand into the WAN and sometimes we expand into the cloud. Sometimes we'll add some advanced threat protection. We're not saying replace everything obviously with Fortinet, we're saying build what's most obvious to you and then make sure that you've got some vendors in that which are part of our Fabric alliance. We have 42 vendors now, security vendors, from end point to cloud to management that can connect in through those different APIs. And when we click them through those APIs they don't get you know the full Fabric functionality in terms of telemetry and visibility but they apply a specific functionality. A good example would be an endpoint vendor connecting through our sandbox not quite sure about files, entered our sandbox we'll give them a recommendation back. As soon as we know about that, all the Fabric knows about it instantly across the whole network because time is of the essence these days. When something gets hacked, it's inside a network. It's less than 60 seconds for something for the whole network. That's why segmentation, interim segmentation, is still a very important project for our customers to stop this lateral movement of infections once they get inside the network. >> But, very quickly, it does sound as though that notion of the security architect, this increasing complexity inside the network and I asked the question about whether data is going to be the primary decision, you get a very reasonable answer to that. But it sounds like increasingly, a security expert is going to have to ask the question how does this data integrate? How am I securing this data? And that, in many respects, becomes a central feature of how you think about security architecture and security interactions. >> Yeah but I think people used to build a network and bolt on security as an afterthought. I think what they're saying now is we need for the networking people and security people to work together to build a holistic security architecture totally integrated day one, not some afterthought that goes on there. That's why we know, we've been building the Fabric all these years to make sure it's a totally integrated Fabric end-to-end segmentation architecture where you can also then connect in different parts of the network. It has to be built day one that way. >> Last question, is sort of, I think we asked your CSO this, the balance between enabling a business to transform digitally at speed and scale. I think it was one of you this morning, that said that this is going to be the year of security transformation. Could've been that guy, that other guy, that you know, steals your slides. But how do how does a company when you're talking with customers, how do they get that balance, between we are on this digital transformation journey. We've got a ton of security products. How do they balance that? It's not chicken and egg to be able to continue transforming to grow profit, you know be profitable, with underpinning this digital business with a very secure infrastructure. >> As I said, I think most of them got that now. They kind of go, they've got this five-year plan versus a one-year plan or a six-month plan on the security side. It's integrated into the network architecture plan long term and that's the way they're building it out and that's the way they've got a plan to get, you know, you look at financial organizations who want to provide internet access or branch offices. They've got a plan to roll it out, that's safe going forward, or they want to add broadband access to their internet, like 5G or broadband interconnection, they've got a plan for it. I think people are much more aware now that when I build something out whether it be on the data side on the network side, it has to be secure from day one. It can't be something I'll do afterwards. I think that's the biggest change I've seen in my customer interactions is that they absolutely, essential is absolutely essential that they build out a secure network from day one, not an afterthought going forward. >> Well, we'll end it there, secure network from day one. John, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE, congratulations on the announcements and we hope you have a great show. >> Great thanks. >> Thank you for watching, we are theCUBE, live from Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Peter Burris. Stick around, we'll be right back.