>>The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid two thousands permanently changed the way we think about it at the heart of it. The cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs more than half of it, budgets were spent on people. And much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning management, recovery optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut costs, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to simplifying hybrid cloud made possible by Cisco today, we're going to explore hybrid cloud as an operating model for organizations or the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. >>No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure. And it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where it managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing the growth and diversity of applications continues. And now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIO is by enterprise technology. Research ETR indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. >>So the challenge for it managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of it. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next we're going to hear from Maneesh Agra wall and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex, which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment we'll drill into unified compute more than a decade ago. Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS unified compute system. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade, and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. >>Okay. Let's start things off. Gus is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. DD. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, >>Our pleasure here. Uh, look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but um, every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing, um, while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications. Um, and then most modern applications are, um, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, uh, uh, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering a change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across, um, all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, uh, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the bus storage team. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right. Um, back to the origins of UCS, I mean, we widen the networking company, builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So we do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the software for our, um, for our and you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. Um, but the software is called intersite and, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. Um, but then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does go into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, uh, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, uh, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, we brought a platform, I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. Uh, and so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So w tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, um, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, uh, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we took on this ball goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same is the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or on software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how they work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. Um, but it was a pretty big boat patient because, you know, um, the big change with SAS is, is you're, uh, as you're familiar today is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, um, working with, uh, our own companies, security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. Um, so again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but, uh, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compete, I of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business, and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like doing stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right. Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that your intro introducing I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, um, search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants, I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies, and then figure out how to stitch it all together. Cause it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's, that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, um, you know, infrastructure partners like, uh, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, you know, others who want their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are other SAS offerings and software vendors, um, who have now become partners. Like we do not, we did not write to Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, uh, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem, we partnered with a company called ergonomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, uh, you know, w how we have gone about this. >>And, uh, it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the inner side platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, uh, soon coming on, uh, on GC, on, uh, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site is since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage the end in, in a, in an easy to instance. So, >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. Um, so my last question is how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing has become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center. It doesn't matter if they're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades, or they're looking for a consistent operating model. What my crystal ball doesn't mean. There's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So allegations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is most as the data moving data is the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be located with the data that's on the edge. We on the air colo public cloud doesn't matter, but, um, basically you're gonna see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific, I think sovereign is going to play a huge role. Uh, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it goes to making, you know, a good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, whether it's, gonna play control, um, and then distributed cloud also on edge, um, is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way, every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workload data, um, you know, upgrading your liability concerns. That's really what, what we are trying to enable for our customers. >>Uh, you know, I think I agree with doing that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world, uh, a solid open, flexible platform, and it's flexible in terms of the technology flexible in how they want to consume it at some customers are fine with a SAS software. What if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team now that does not work so how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, our perspective sovereignty, we talked about it. So, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. Um, but the last thing I would mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage into some of those, um, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex. Um, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right, thanks DDL. It was a pleasure to have you in the queue. Great to see you. You're welcome in a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where HyperFlex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>>It's my pleasure to be one of the hosts of the cube on cloud and the startup showcase brought to you by AWS. This is Dave Vellante and for years, the cube has been following the trail of data. And with the relentless March of data growth, this idea of a single version of the truth has become more and more elusive. Moreover data has become the lifeblood of a digital business. And if there's one thing that we've learned throughout the pandemic, if you're not digital, you're in trouble. So we've seen firsthand the critical importance of reliable and trusted data. And with me to talk about his company and the trends in the market is many sued as the CTO and co-founder of Reltio Maneesh. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Okay. Let's start with, let's go back to you and your co-founders when you started Reltio it was back in the early days of the big data movement cloud was kind of just starting to take off, but what problems did you see then and what are enterprises struggling with today, especially with, with data as a source of digital innovation. >>They, if you look at the changes that have taken place in the landscape over the course of the last 10 years, when we started Reltio in 2011, there were a few secular trends that were coming to life. One was a cloud compute type of capabilities being provided by vendors like AWS. It was starting to pick up steam where making, uh, compute capabilities available at scale to solve large data problems was becoming real impossible. The second thing that we saw was, uh, this big trend of, uh, you know, you can not have a wall to wall, one single application that solves your entire business problem. Those visions have come and gone. And, uh, we are seeing more of the best of breed application type of a landscape where even if you look within a specific function, let's say sales or marketing, you have more than a dozen applications that any company is using today. >>And that trend was starting to emerge where we knew very well, that the number of systems that we would have to work with would continue to increase. And, uh, that created a problem of where would you get the single source of truth or the single best version of a customer, a supplier, a product that you're trying to sell those types of critical pieces of information that are core to any business that's out there today. And, um, you know, that created the opportunity for us at Reltio to think about the problem at scale for every company out there, every business who needed this kind of a capability and for us to provide this capability in the cloud as a software, as a service, uh, uh, offering. So that's where, uh, you know, the foundation of Reltio started. And the core problem that we wanted to solve was to bridge the gap that was created by all these data silos and create a unified view of the core critical information that these companies run on. >>Yeah. I mean, the cloud is this giant, you know, hyper distributed system data by its very nature is distributed. It's interesting what you were sort of implying about, you know, the days of the monolithic app are gone by my business partner years ago, John furrier and the cube said data is going to become the new development kit. And we've certainly seen that with the, the pandemic, but tell us more about Reltio and how you help customers deal with that notion of data, silo, data silos, data fragmentation, how do you solve that problem? >>So, data fragmentation is what exists today. And, um, you know, with the Reltio, uh, software as a service offering that we provide, we allow customers to stitch together and unify the data coming from these different fragmented, siloed, uh, applications or data sources that they have within their enterprise at the same time. Um, there's a lot of dependence on the third party data. You know, when you think about, uh, different problems that you're trying to solve, you have, uh, for B2B type of information that in Bradstreet type of data providers in life sciences, you have IQ via type of data providers. Um, you know, as you look at other verticals, there is a specialized third-party data provider for any, and every kind of information that most of the enterprise businesses want to combine with their in-house data or first party data to get the best view of who they're dealing with, who are they working with, you know, who are the customers that they're serving and use that information also as a starting point for the digital transformation that they want to get to. >>Um, and that's where Reltio fits in as the only platform that can help stitch together, this kind of, uh, information and create a 360 degree view that spans all the data silos and provides that for real-time use for BI and analytics to benefit from, for data science to benefit from. And then this emerging notion of, uh, data in itself is a, um, you know, key starting point that is used by us, uh, in order to make any decisions, just like, uh, we go, you know, if I, they wanted to look at information about you, I would go to places like LinkedIn, look up the information. And then our, my next set of decisions with that information, if somebody wanted to look up information on Reltio, they would go to, let's say Crunchbase as an example, and look up, uh, who are the investors? How much money have we raised all those details that are available? It's not a CRM system by itself, but it is an information application that can aid and assist in the decision-making process as a starting point. And that user experience on top of the data becomes an important vehicle for us to provide, uh, as a part of the Reltio platform capabilities. >>Awesome. Thank you. And I want to get into the, to the tech, but before we do, maybe we just cut to the chase and maybe you can talk about some of the examples of, of Reltio and action. Some of the customers that you can talk about, maybe the industries that are, that are really adopting this. W what can you tell us there, Maneesh, >>Um, we work across a few different verticals, some of the key verticals that we work in our life sciences, um, and travel and hospitality and financial services, insurance, um, S uh, retail, as an example, those are some of the key verticals for us, but, uh, to give you some examples of, uh, the type of problems that customers are solving with Reltio as the data unification platform, um, let's take CarMax as an example, CarMax is a customer who's in the business of, uh, buying used cars, selling used cars, servicing those used cars. And then, um, you know, you as a customer, don't just transact with them. Once you, you know, you've had a car for three years, you go back and look at what can you trade in that car for, but in order for CarMax to provide a service to you that, uh, goes across all the different touch points, whether you are visiting them at their store location, uh, trying to test drive a car or viewing, uh, information about the various vehicles on their website, or just, uh, you know, punching in the registration number of your car, just to see what is the appraisal from them in terms of how much will they pay for your car? >>This requires a lot of data behind the scenes for them to provide a seamless journey across all touch points and the type of information that they use, uh Reltio for aggregating, unifying, and then making available across all these touch points is all of the information about the customers, all of the information about, uh, the, uh, household, uh, you know, the understanding that they're trying to achieve because, uh, life events can, uh, be buying signals, uh, for, uh, consumers like uni, as well as, uh, who was the, um, associate who helped you either in the selling of a car buying of a car, because business is all about building relationships for the longer term lifetime value that they want to capture. And in that process, um, making sure that they're providing continuity of relationship, they need to keep track of that data. And then the vehicle itself, the vehicle that you buy yourself, uh, there is a lot of information in order to price it, right, that needs to be gathered, uh, from multiple sources. So the continuum of data all the way from consumer to the vehicle is aggregated from multiple sources, unified inside Reltio, and then made available, uh, through API APIs or through other methods, and means to the various applications can be either built on top of that information, or can consume that information in order to better aid and assist the processes, business processes that those applications have to run end to end. Well, it sounds like >>That's come along. Sorry. >>I was just going to say it that's one example and, uh, you know, across other verticals that are other similar examples of how companies are leveraging, Reltio >>Just say, can come a long way from simple linear clickstream analysis of a website. I mean, you're talking about really rich information and, and, you know, happy to dig into some other examples, but, but I wonder how does it work? I mean, what's the magic behind it? What's the, the tech look like, I mean, obviously you leveraging AWS, maybe you could talk about how so, and maybe some of the services there and some of your unique IP. >>Yeah. Um, you know, so the unique opportunity for us when we started in 2011 was really to leverage the power of the cloud. We started building out this capability on top of AWS back in 2011. And, uh, you know, if you think about, uh, the problem itself, uh, the problem has been around as long as you have had more than one system to run your business, but the magnitude of the problem has expanded several fold. Um, you know, for example, I have been in this area was, uh, responsible for creating some of the previous generation capabilities and, uh, most of the friction in those previous generation MDM or master data management type of solutions, um, as the, you know, the technical term that is used to refer to this area, uh, was that those systems could not keep pace with the increasing number of sources or the depth and breadth of the information that, uh, customers want to capture, whether it is, uh, you know, about a patient or a product, or let's say a supplier that you're working well. >>Uh, there is always additional information that you can capture and, uh, you know, use to better inform the decisions for the next engagement and, uh, that kind of model where the number of sources we're always going to increase the depth and breadth of information was always going to increase. The previous generation systems were not geared to handle that. So we decided that not only would we use at scale compute capabilities in the cloud, um, with the products like AWS as the backbone, but also solve some of the core problems around how more sources of information can be unified at scale. And then the last mile, which is the ability to consume such rich information, just locking it in a data warehouse has been sort of the problem in the past. And you talked about the clickstream analysis, uh, analytics has a place, but most of the analytics is a rear view mirror picture of the, uh, you know, work that you have to do, versus everybody that we talked to, uh, as a potential customer, wanted to solve the problem of what can we do at the point of engagement, how can we influence decisions? >>So, you know, I'll give you an example. I think, uh, everybody's familiar with Quicken loans, um, as the mortgage lender and, uh, in the mortgage lending business, uh, Quicken loans is the customer who's using Reltio as the customer data, um, unification platform behind the scenes. But every interaction that takes place, their goal is that they have a very narrow time window, um, you know, anywhere from 10 minutes to about an hour, where if somebody expresses an interest in refinancing or getting a mortgage, they have to close that, uh, business within that, uh, Hart window, the conversion ratios are exponentially better in that hot window versus waiting for 48 hours to come back with the answer of what will you be able to refinance your mortgage, uh, at. And, uh, they've been able to use this notion of real time data, where as soon as you come in through the website, or if you come in through the rocket mortgage app, or you're talking to a broker by calling the one 800 number, they are able to triangulate that it's the same person coming from any of these different channels and respond to that person, whether an offer, uh, ASAP so that, uh, there is no opportunity for the competition to get in and present you with a better offer. >>So those are the types of things where the time to, uh, conversion or the time to action is being looked at. And everybody's trying to shrink that time down, uh, that ability to respond in real time with the capabilities was sort of the last mile missing out of this equation, which didn't exist with previous generation capabilities. And now customers are able to benefit from that. >>That is an awesome example. I know at firsthand, I'm a customer of Quicken and rocket, and when you experience that environment, it's totally different than anything you've ever seen before. So it's helpful to hear you explain, like what's behind that because it's, it's truly disruptive. And I, and I'll tell you, the other thing that, that sort of triggered a thought was that we use the word realtime a lot, and we try to develop years ago. We said, what does real-time really mean? And the, the answer we CA we landed on was before you lose the customer, and that's kind of what you just described. Uh, and that is what gives as an example, a quick and a real advantage again, having experienced it firsthand. It's, it's pretty, pretty tremendous. So that's a nice, that's a, that's a nice reference. Um, so, and the other thing that struck me is that what I wanted to ask you, how it's different from sort of legacy master data management solutions, and you sort of described that they've seized to me, they got to take their, their traditional on-prem stack, rip it out, stick it in the cloud is okay, we got our stack in the cloud. >>Now your technical approach is dramatically different. You had the advantage of having a clean sheet of paper, right? I mean, from a, from an CTO's perspective, what's your, >>Yeah. The clean sheet of paper is the luxury that we have, you know, having seen this movie before having, um, you know, looked at solving this problem with previous generation technologies, it was really the opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper and define a cloud native architecture for solving the problem at scale. So just to give you an example, um, you know, across all of our customers, we are today managing, um, uh, about 6.5 billion consolidated profiles of people, organizations, product locations, um, you know, assets, uh, those kinds of details. And these are, these are the types of, uh, crown jewels of the business that every business runs on. You know, for example, if you wanted to, um, let's say you're a large company, like, uh, you know, Ford and you wanted to figure out how much business are you doing, where the, uh, you know, another large company, because the other large company could be a global organization, could be spread across multiple geographies, could have multiple subsidiaries associated with it. >>It's been a very difficult answer to understand what is the total book of business that they have with that other, um, big, uh, customer and, uh, you know, being able to have the right, uh, unified, uh, relevant, rich clean as the starting point that gives you visibility to that data, and then allows you to run precise analytics on top of that data, or, uh, you know, drive, uh, any kind of, uh, conclusions out of the data science type of algorithms or MLAI algorithms that you're trying to run. Um, you have to have that foundation of clean data to work with in order to get to those answers. >>Nice. Uh, and then I had questions on just the model is this, it's a SAS model. I presume, how, how is it priced? Do you have a, do you have a freemium? How do I get started? Maybe you could give us some color. >>Yeah, we are a SAS provider. We do everything in the cloud, uh, offer it as a SAS offering, um, for customers to leverage and benefit from our pricing is based on the volume of, uh, uh, consolidated profiles. And the, I use the word profiles because this is not the traditional, uh, data model where you have rows columns, foreign keys. This is a, you know, a profile of a customer, regardless of attribution or any other details that you want to capture. And, um, you know, that just as an example is what we consider as a profile. So number of consolidated profiles under management is the key vector of pricing. Uh, customers can start small and they can grow from there. We have customers who manage anywhere from a few hundred thousand profiles, uh, you know, off these different types of data domains, customer, patient provider, uh, product, uh, asset, those types of details. But, uh, then they grow and some of the customers, uh, HP Inc, as a customer is managing close to 1.5 billion profiles of B2B businesses at a global scale of B2C consumers at global scale. And they continue to expand that footprint as they look at other opportunities to use the single source of truth capabilities provided by Reltio. >>And your relationship with AWS you're, you're obviously building on top of AWS, you're taking advantage of the cloud native capabilities. Are you in the AWS marketplace? Maybe you could talk about AWS relationship a bit. >>Yeah. AWS has been a key partner for us, uh, since the very beginning, uh, we are now on the marketplace. Uh, customers can start with the free version of the product, um, and start to play with the product, understand it better, uh, and then move into the paid tier, um, you know, as they bring in more data, uh, into Reltio. And, uh, you know, we also, uh, have, uh, the partnership with AWS where, uh, you know, customers can benefit from the relationship where they are able to, um, uh, use the, the spend against Reltio to offset the commitment credits that they have for AWS, um, you know, as a cloud provider. So, uh, you know, we are working closely with AWS on key verticals, like life sciences, travel and hospitality as a starting point. >>Nice that love, love, those credits, um, company update, uh, you know, head count funding, revenue trajectory, what kind of metrics are you comfortable sharing? >>So, uh, we are currently, uh, at about, um, you know, slightly North of 300 people, uh, overall at rail queue, we will, uh, grow from 300 to about 400 people this year, uh, itself. Uh, we are, uh, uh, you know, we just put out a press release, uh, where we mentioned some of the subscription ARR we finished last year at about $74 million in ARR. And we are, uh, looking at, uh, crossing the a hundred million dollar ARR, um, uh, threshold, uh, later this year. So we're on a great growth trajectory and, uh, the businesses, uh, performing really well. And we are, uh, looking at working with more customers and helping them solve this, uh, uh, you know, data silo, fragmentation of data problem by having them leverage the Reltio capability at scale across their enterprise. >>That's some impressive growth. Congratulations, w w we're, I'm sure adding a hundred people you're hiring all over the place, but where we get some of your priorities. >>So, um, you know, the, as the business is growing, we are spending equally both on the R and D side of the house, uh, investing more there, but at the same time, also on our go to market, uh, so that we can extend our reach, make sure that, uh, more people know about, uh, Reltio and can start leveraging the benefit of, uh, the technology that we have built on top of, uh, AWS. >>Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you've obviously nailed product market fit, and now you're, you know, scaling and scaling the go to market. You moved from CEO into the CTO role. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Why, why, what was prompted that move >>Problems of luxury, uh, you know, as I like to call them, uh, once you know, that you're on a great growth trajectory and, uh, the business is performing well, it's all about, uh, figuring out ways of, uh, you know, making sure that you can drive harder and faster towards that growth, uh, milestones, uh, that you want to achieve. And, uh, you know, for us, uh, the story is no different. Uh, the team has done a wonderful job of, uh, making sure that we can build the right platform, um, you know, work towards this opportunity, that PC, which by the way, um, they just to share with you, uh, MDM or master data management has always been underestimated as a, uh, you know, yes, there is a problem that needs to be solved, but the market sizing was, uh, in a, not as clear, but some of the most recent, uh, estimates from analysts like Gartner, but the, uh, you know, sort of the new incarnation of, uh, data unification and master data management at about a $30 billion, uh, you know, uh, Tam or this market. >>So with that comes the responsibility that we have to really make sure that we are able to bring this capability to a wide array of customers. And with that, uh, I looked at, uh, you know, how could we scale the business faster and have the right team to work, uh, help us maximize the opportunity. And that's why, uh, you know, we decided, uh, that it was the right point in time for me to bring in somebody who's, uh, worked, uh, at, uh, the stretch of, you know, taking a company from just a a hundred million dollars in ARR to, uh, you know, half a billion dollars in ARR and doing it at a global scale. So Chris Highland, uh, you know, has had that experience and having him take on the CEO role, uh, really puts us on a tremendous, uh, our path to tremendous growth and achieving that, uh, with the right team. >>Yeah. And I think I appreciate your comments on the Tam. I love to look at the Tam and to do a lot of Tam analysis. And I think a lot of times when you define the future Tam based on sort of historical categories, you sometimes under count them. I mean, to me, you guys are in the, the, the digital business business. I mean, the data transformation, the company transformation business, I mean, that could be order of magnitude even bigger. So I think the future is bright for your company. Reltio Maneesh. And thank you so much for coming on the program really appreciate. >>Well, thanks for having me, uh, really enjoyed it. Thank you. >>Okay. Thank you for watching. You're watching the cubes startup showcase. We'll be right back.