>> Live from Las Vegas, It's theCube. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is day three of three days live wall to wall coverage of VMworld 2018. This is theCube, I'm Stu Miniman, and my co-host this morning is Justin Warren. How about I welcome back to our program two Cube Alum's from the VMVare storage and availity business unit. Yanbing Li, second time in The Cube this week, is the senior vice president >> Yes. >> and general manager of the group. And Christos Karamanolis, is the fellow and CTO, thank you both for joining us. >> Great to be here. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so first of all, congratulations. A lot of news this week, a lot of excitement around it. And we're talking off cameras, there's so much there that people don't understand some of the work that went into this. And some highlights as to things that I know VMWare thinks will be very game changing over the next couple of years. So, we're excited to dig into this. Yanbing, why don't you start us off with a little bit of an overview from your group as to the news this week. >> Yeah, happy to do that. I think, so, we are seeing a lot of customer energy around what we're doing in storage and availability. You know, there's huge momentum behind product like vSan and our customers are truly embracing HCI in very mainstream use cases, and we've seen customer after customer have gone all in, meaning they're taking HCI and made a determination to run that for all of their virtualized workload. So, very exciting time. But what's more interesting is their expanded view on what HCI is about. Certainly, we started with virtualizing computer and storage together on servers. But we're seeing rapid expansion of that definition. You know, we've been a believer that HCI is foundationally a software lab architecture. I think know, there's more recognition in that. And it's also going from just computers and storage to the full stack of the entire software defined data center. It's expanding into the cloud, as you've seen from VMCI WS. It's expanding to the edge, expanding from just traditional apps to cloud native apps. You know, we've announced beta for vSan to become the storage platform for Kubernetes' Navisphere environment. So, a lot of exciting expansion around how customers want to see HCI. And if you look at HCI, hybrid cloud, SDDC, the boundary around these three is not very very clear. I think they're all converging to work, something that's very common. >> Yeah, Christos? I want you to help unpack this a little bit for us. I remember speaking to you a couple of years ago, and your team. We know how many years of effort went into, set the ground work for vSan. with the underlying things that arrived with the API's, and development with your partner ecosystem. Taking vSan as a foundation... Oh, it's going to work with Kubernetes and cloud and everything. It's not a simple port, like, you know, no offense to the hardware people, but putting it on a new platform? Alright, you need to test it, integrate it, make it a couple tweaks, but. The software level, there's a lot of things that go on here. Talk about what the team's been working on, some of the big architectural things that've been happening. >> Oh, yes, absolutely. There are some fundamental changes. We never stop, we never declare that we have finished what we are doing. Obviously, the world is changing around us. Not only the hardware, as you know. There are many important changes there, with NVMe becoming now very prevalent, and renewed aero-technologies appearing, like persistent memory. But, for us, a focal point the last year or so has been, how do we move our entire software stack data on being outlined earlier, into any type of environment, including public clouds? So, you see now, with a few more clouds in AWS, the customers can run applications there without having to re-platform them. It's the exact same environment. So, a keystone of that environment is the storage. How do you virtualize storage? How do you deal with any type of infrastructure? So, vSan was developed for physical devices, SS disc and magnetic disc, more recently NVMe. Now, what we want to give is the option to our customers to use the cost efficiencies of cloud storage. Without the those sacrificing the semantics, the properties the vSphere stack. So, we did a lot of engineering to make vSan work on top of EBS. So, it may sound simple when you announce it at the keynote of VMWorld, but it took lot of hard engineering to adapt a platform. vSphere and vSan was designed for physical hardware, do not work on virtual storage volume. So, that is just one example, there are more examples. For cloud-native use cases, as you said. >> Yeah, I don't think people quite understand the implications of that. The fact that you can use things in the same way in multiple different locations, the whole idea behind multi-cloud-- If you can operate it in the same way as you can on site as you can in whichever cloud you choose. For enterprises who are used to doing things one way, and have made big investments in VMWare, this just opens up an entire universe of opportunity for them. >> Absolutely, and you get the best of both worlds, right? You have the same operational model, the same characteristics I can run now on Amazon applications that use vSphere, ETSI, or the motion pictures that require cell storage. On the cloud, you do not have cell storage. EBS volumes can be accessed by one host at a time, and like stores that need the networks, and vSan brings those stores their networks and semantics, all in software of course, on the cloud. So, I can run my traditional applications, as well as some new generation applications. And for us, strategically, what we've done with EBS? If you think about that is one step into a much bolder vision where vSan becomes this common storage platform that virtualize any type of storage. Physical, or cloud, or virtual, so we expose the same operational model, and the same store semantics to all those who run these three platforms. And this is, you know, just one step. >> And it's not how you-- there is the common operation model that's very appealing to all the enterprise customers. But we are truly marrying the strength and the capabilities of vSan and vSphere and the VMR platform was what EBS uniquely provide. That's elasticity, scalability, but you know, we have a much richer set of data services that we've already viewed into the whole VMR stack. >> Yeah, Yanbing, you bring up some really interesting points. When we put our critical analysis hat on, when the partnership was announced. It was like, "Well, Amazon's got access to 500,000 "VMWare customers, we're going to start "getting customers comfortable with Amazon. Great, they can start moving over." The thing that really caught a lot our attention is, it's some of the Amazon services that are now coming to the VMWare customers. So, EBS is a really good one. When you talk about, you know, the database capabilities that Amazon has, that now I can do on premises, this is a partnership, a two-way street. Its not, you know, just a one way. Maybe speak a little bit about that maturation, and, you know, definitely want to get from Christos, also. There's questions about some of the technical ways of how that works. >> Yeah, what I'm excited is exactly what you described. This is not a one way street, it's really bi-directional. And the levels of collaboration is not just superficial. It's deep levels of integration and leveraging each other to strength, in terms of both technology as well as customer reach. I think that what make the partnership is, you know, people can see that is taking to whole new level. And Christos has been very deeply involved with the various solution architects, and when we examine how we take RDS back on Prime to a VMR environment, I think he can tell a lot more stories behind that. >> For us, actually, it was a great learning experience, I must admit. Because, obviously, we see strongly the desire for our classroom is to start moving from managing the low level, nitty gritty details of the physical IT infrastructure, which we were, you know, traditionally helping them to do, to moving up the starter. Many of them now, they want to have their own users, their own customers, internal customers, to run all those applications. And what are the most critical components of business critical applications? They are the databases, right? So, how can we make the life of our customers easier, how can we provide them the tools to offer data, databases, as a service to their own users? So, this has been our high level objective, and of course, our partnership with AWS helps us deliver some of those properties. >> Christos, I want you to go one level deeper for us. Because some people it's like, >> I'd be happy to. "Wait, RDS, that's, you know, the cool new databases "in Amazon. Wait, I can do something on--" Is that an extension, am I putting things back and forth? Those of us that lived through the virtualization were getting databases just virtualized took years and a lot of hard work. And, I can't just have a database spanning between these, and moving back and forth. This isn't, you know, -- We haven't broken the laws of physics. >> We have not, because here-- >> Help us explain >> What is and isn't possible today. >> Absolutely. First of all, let me highlight what are the main pain points of customers. It's one thing to set up your application and install it and run it. But then there are all the day two operations, right? How do you patch the software, the operating system, the database? How do you scale it, up or down? How do you, even more to the performance, how do you do data protection, backup, disaster recovery? Those are really painful, difficult tasks, that involve a lot of work from expert database administrators that they'd rather be doing some of the important things that address the business earnings, right? So, our objective is to address this. Now, to your point, how do we, you know? What about those laws of physics? How can we have services on the cloud and service on a premise? What we announce here, this RDS, Relational Database Services, on VMWare, it is a fully stand alone service that runs on VMWare environment on premises. There are no dependencies on the public cloud, you have your data sets on your own data centers, and this is actually a major requirement of customers. Whether it's for compliance reasons, or security, or company policy, we insure that your data stays in your data center, while you still get all the benefits of a managed database that you don't need to do all those, you know, little tedious operational tasks I mentioned earlier. Moreover, we support data protection using, actually, underlying vSphere features. Like ETSI and clustering, or even data protection by creating copies of your database in another available domain within your data center. And this is a lot of work that VMWare did to make this happen, as you can imagine. So, that's a lot of infrastructural work, but we support the full range of features that you get on AWS, without having to go over the wire and, you know, break those laws of physics. >> I don't think people have quite understood how profound that is. We're here at a VMWare show, I've spent a lot of time with developers, and the developers are going to love this. Because, now they can use exactly the same way that they operate in public cloud, which they've loved for many years. Being able to do that on site? The way application development is going to happen inside enterprises, where they want to keep it on site, they want to keep it under they're own control, they want their data secured inside their own data centers. The ability for them to do that, and still develop applications in the same way that they could as cloud-native? Cloud-native now means that it runs on site. This is going to be amazing. >> Absolutely. Our customers explicitly tell us that they want to consume, not storage, but data. Those abstractions that matter to the application. So much so, that they have been asking us already, "Hmmm, what is next?", right? "Can you offer us some of this new generation databases?", you know, "the Mongoose or the Cassandra's of the world? "Can we have some similar experience with those "because they're very painful to deploy "and manage in the data centers." So, I cannot make any commitment, of course, but this is an indication of how much interest there is in this type of services. >> Yeah, it really does show you, I think, some of the strategic intent from VMWare. And this is a very clear move for what is going to be possible for customers to actually be able to do on site, it's really quite exciting. >> And for us, you know. Our role providing all the storage related capability, and we've been strongly expanding our application footprint to cover the Hadoop, the Cassandra, the Mango DV type of application as well as containerize the applications. And, you know, we have introduced a lot of new capability or solution that address exactly like that. >> Containerize the applications, for example, against the announcement, I think, didn't receive the attention, that in my opinion, it deserved is supporting natively in vSphere, and with vSan, specifically, cloud-native use cases. Actually, we're introducing a controlled playing, and expanding our store's controlled playing, to manage natively, container volumes. So, now, the same way today, our customers can visit builders through the UI or API's, and have management workflows for virtual machines and virtual disc, VMDK's. Now, they can also manage volumes of containers. And, as you've heard also, we are working with Kubernetes being our main focal point and with PKS to support natively Kubernetes on vSphere, down the road. >> Yeah, great point. I wonder, since we're talking about storage here, you've talked about Kubernetes, we talked about what's in the cloud and on premises. Give us the updated view how VMWare views and how you're helping customers with-- Data can't-- I can't just move, you know, data anywhere, so. While it's good to have similar frameworks, and different-- similar tools there, but still, where data lives, what I move, how I move it, do I move it, how that whole, kind of, data locality is seen today? >> The answer, we have been very keen in defining what we doing in the broader category of data management. From data mobility to protection to analytics, and to life cycle management, the whole slew of that. And we've been starting by building a lot of-- First of all, our job is to make vSan a storage platform that can enable these different demands of data. So, we've expanded vSan's roll from purely from delivering block storage now to offer file, and down the road, object. Cuz a lot of the new data will be consumed in an object like format. And we've also been painting our roadmap for the broader data management, so. >> Yes, exactly. On one hand, we'll provide the platform for primary storage that serves all the needs of the applications, block, file, object, we may even consider a native file interface, actually, for zero data copies, since you were asking about the technical details. I'm very excited about that, you know. We'll see, some of these things will come in the future. But, then, given that you have the platform, what you are building on top of that is data mobility and data protection workflows that are driven by policies. The very first step in that direction is our disaster recovery as a service we offer for hybrid clouds. There, the new model is that, even how you manage your data is as a service. Not a traditional model of installing software and a hundred different bits and pieces that have to integrate with each other and operate. Very simple, you go to a portal, and you manage your data, in this case, starting with disaster recovery use cases. You specify policies, like recovery point objectives. Down the road you may also give the options for recover time objectives. And, also, specify, by policies, what of your data want to be archived and stay on your data center, what of the data can go to the public cloud through your, you know, the hybrid models of cloud model we offer. So, our goal down the road is quite ambitious in offering comprehensive, uniform data management across clouds, that goes all the way from the edge, your Motofy's, your oil rig, all the way to the enterprise, the Cassandra's, to the hybrid clouds. And data mobility there is, you know, using our data transport, our archival capabilities that are coming with vSan Native Snapshot that we also announced at this VMWorld. These will give you the ability to manage your data across all those environments. >> Alright, so, last thing I just want to say. It's interesting to watch this space because we say there's a lot happening under the scenes that people don't understand. I was seeing some research lately saying where AWS lives in the storage ecosystem. I've written an article, couple a years ago. They were the quiet, billion dollar, you know, storage company. And one analyst firm said,"Oh, they're number 3, "and they'll be number 1 in storage." Wikibon actually published a report this month talking about what we call true private cloud. And in our support where we look at the software ecosystem, Yanbing, do you remember who we had number 1 on the list there when you picked >> Ah, yeah... software plus the ecosystem around there for -- >> I remember it clearly, you said it's VMWare. >> Yeah, so, you know, it surprises some people when you look it there, but I'm sure it's no surprise to you and your team, I'm sure. >> So, you know what we've started with vSan is quickly becoming a big way of how all of vSphere customers consume storage. And certainly, that has been our initial focus. But what we are doing for the cloud, what we are doing for the next generation applications. I think we are re-imagining a lot of the things. And it's great to have people like Christos, who started this journey many many years ago, and continue to expand our horizon. Yeah, this is an exciting time for our business unit, and certainly for VMWare, and our customers. >> Christos, in the end, really appreciate us being able to geek out, dig into some of the really important innovations happening in this space. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, still a full third day live coverage here from VMWorld 2018, thanks for watching theCube.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we're here live in the Cisco DevNet Zone, at Cisco Live 2018. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage. This is Go Live, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman there, here with Suzie Wee who is the CTO and Vice President of Cisco. This is her baby DevNet, the fastest growing developer program in Cisco history, only four years old. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey John good to see you, hey Stu. >> I made that stat, it was only four years old. So DevNet, obviously just for color commentary, really successful developer program, only in it's fourth year or so for Cisco. But it's really changing the face of Cisco. It's showing that a new collaboration, a new co-development, a new developer framework is being built on top of networks and it's on a collision course with Cloud Native. Kay, this is a great path for network engineers. It really changed the show vibe so congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. Yeah, and why do you say collision course? There's like a whole new paradigm, right? And it's pretty amazing, it's pretty amazing. >> Well some of the things that we've been seeing here, obviously CCIE's or 25 years of excellence and stats was out here >> Yes, Yes. >> The key note from the CEO, Chuck Robbins, talks about an old way and new way. Developers are clearly in the driver's seat here and network engineers, Cisco partners, customers technical folks and engineers. They're at the keys to the kingdom and you introduced a concept called Network Dev Ops. >> Yes. >> Okay, a few years ago when we first had you on theCUBE. Where is that now? Where is Network Dev Ops now? What's the vibe internally? Is there a full acceptance to it? Is there embracing it? >> It's amazing and ya know it's like, when we were pushing it we were just saying, "Hey, the network is changing, the network "is gonna be programmable, the network "is going to have API's", and you go back four years and then you're just like, "What was the buzz?" The buzz was SDN, y'know the buzz was SDN. SDN was open flow, it was separation of control plain from data plain. But, it was still kind of research. And what we knew is like, it wouldn't become real until the people who are building and operating the World's networks were ready to adopt it. And so, at first of course, it was like, there were the people who were like, "Okay this network thing, this programmability "is gonna come to the network, but what can we do there?" And since then, people have jumped in, they've like really gotten in. And like here at this Cisco Live, what we're seeing is that people are ready to code. And so the concept of, I'm a networker, now there's software built into my entire network programming portfolio. How do I build the skills? I'm a developer, and the networkers are getting comfortable with understanding that they need to code, they need to understand these skills. But one thing that we did, was we actually separated out, like, the definition of developer. >> Yep. >> Y'know. >> You guys done a good job of really defining a path for the network engineer, who can extend their skill set and solve network problems, be creative, and also do great business outcome oriented things. So, I want you to take a minute to explain the DevNet story because you guys just didn't throw a PowerPoint at this. You dug in, you built it up, and you threw a lot of resources for Cisco, I mean small for Cisco's scale, but you guys dug in, you did the homework and you're doing new things. So take us to the DevNet story and what's happening this year in the momentum. Take us through that little journey. >> Yeah, so the story was back in actually 2013. Cisco was saying, "Hey, we're gonna get into software "we're doing software, we have a software strategy." And all of that is fantastic, either... But the thing that was missing, was like, Hey, we need an ecosystem, like the reason you do software is to have an ecosystem. And in order to have an ecosystem you want people to build upon your stuff. You need to expose your API's. It doesn't happen by itself, you need to have a developer program so that you can actually really let people use all of that and partake in the ecosystem. So we, kind of, I evangelized, evangelized, evangelized, gave a couple hundred pitches, got the okay to start DevNet, and that was in 2014. And then in 2014, then we said okay. So now we got the okay to start a developer program for Cisco. But, y'know, it's still not a sure shot that it would work. >> Yeah. >> And then we said our dream is to have a developer conference at Cisco Live. And so we wanted to have that developer conference at Cisco Live and then three months later, we had it. And we're like okay, 24 hour hack-a-thon, deep dive API sessions, but would the people come? Would they be ready? And then, they came. Like, they came, it was packed. It was just like wall to wall of people, who are excited to learn about software. So now you go and then you fast forward, y'know, four years, and now we just hit 500,000 developers. 500,000 people have registered for DevNet. And you can be like, "Well what does that mean?" We have half a million developers. Is it a real number? Well, my team kept scrubbing the database. Like so, we had hit 400,000 and then our numbers got lower and I was like "Come on guys, stop it!" And they were like, "No, no, no, we have to scrub it, "we gotta out the duplicates." And then finally we got it up and we've grown it. It basically is at 500,000 registered developers. And what that means is like, now we have a community. We have a community of people who are getting up on network API's, we have a community of people who can develop, and once you do that you hit this completely different inflection point. Where at first our mission was just to help networkers be developers, to help the app developers understand that the network has API's and to do stuff there. That's still our goal, to enable developers. But now we have a community, what we can do is really catalyze that community into business and impact. >> Suzie, first of all congratulations. It's been so much fun to be here in the DevNet Zone. It'd been a few years since I'd been to Cisco Live. And y'know, people in these sessions every time. And you go, people are coding, they're white-boarding, they're, y'know building. Playing with Legos, they're doing all sorts of stuff. Over the last five years, y'know, we all knew that, y'know, developers of the new Kingmakers. It's been talked about a lot. But we've seen many infrastructure companies try. They create little developer conferences, they bring in speakers, they'll get some momentum, and then after a year or two, it kind of fizzles out. >> Yes. >> Give us a little bit behind the scenes, as to, y'know is it because networking people are worried about their jobs and they're getting on-board? Is it, y'know, I know part of it is your team and the ecosystem you've built here. But, give is some of the reasons why this has succeeded when so many other have, kind of, come and gone. >> Yeah well, I mean we're very fortunate that we've kind of executed in a way that it has continued to be here and we know that's really hard to do. It takes executive support, it takes the troops, it takes fighting anti-bodies, and kind of all of that kind of stuff. But I think, like, the key has been that we've been working with the community. When we had that first DevNet Zone, that first developer conference at Cisco Live four years ago, people came. And that told Cisco something, right? And then as we've continued to build it out, we've actually been not doing it as a silo within Cisco. We've been doing it with our sales organization, with our partner organization, we've been doing it with our ecosystem and our partners and out there. We've just continuously been doing it based on what their needs are. >> And Suzie, I love that, because there are some of the events I saw, they were like, "Well, the developer "is this special unicorn", and we're gonna have this special area, it's velvet rope, we're gonna treat 'em really well. But, this is the first thing you see when you come in, you're very approachable. The line I've heard from your team is, "We are going to meet them where they are." There are no, y'know, "Gosh I haven't "touched programming in 20 years." No, no, no, you're fine, you're good come on in. I'm not sure if I'm really (mumbles). Well you're not programming, you're coding. So, I think that's part of the success, is these people. Y'know, this is their careers, and you're giving them that path forward. >> It is, and when we look at like, developer programs, you'd think it would be easy to start a developer program. But, there's no formula for it, y'know? And when we did it for Cisco, like as we've grown this, it depends on the products that we have, it depends on the community that we have, the types of solutions, what our customers want. And basically what happens is, we did have a core set of networkers who are scared. And we, instead of making DevNet the elite place for the elite developers, we said it is the place to bring in the community. We're gonna be welcoming, we're bringing them in on the journey, because they're the ones who need to be there. And so we've really tried this more open approach. And if you look at Cisco's community of networkers, they're amazing, like, they are developing and installing and operating networks around the World in every country. They've been dedicated, but they are scared of that transition to software and programmability. And they've been dedicated to us, we're dedicated to them, getting to that next level. >> You just did a good job of bringing that tribe kind of mentality and co-development, co-creation, people who are learning. So you have first time learners kicking the tires on coding and growing and experts. So Cisco Champions coming in; Powerhouse developers. >> Yeah >> Not Cisco employees, it's Cisco Champions, and so a nice balance. So that's a good sign of success. >> And you're right, that's key because it's not just, like just beginners. I mean, first of all, there is a very large stage of new people who are just coming in and then wanting to get started and that's awesome. And in addition, very advanced folks, who are like, y'know, just the most advanced developer you'd find, who also has networking expertise. And then of course, the app developers. We're talking to app developers and cloud developers and DevOps pros, and they're coming in as well. >> Yea, and Suzie you bring up a great point. Cause one of the challenges when you have the cool new innovation stuff, is the business, like well how does that connect back? So help connect the dots, we heard Chuck Robbins on stage. Not only was it just DevNet and 500,000 but the new products that are coming out just tie right into it. >> It's crazy, like yea, it's awesome. Because what happens is, programmability, Cisco, is building programmability into our entire portfolio. It's not that we have one product that has API's, I mean that's where we were a few years ago. But now we look... Our enterprise networking products, y'know, for the data center, for service provider, for wireless. All of those products are programmable. Our security products are programmable. IoT, collaboration, our entire portfolio is now programmable, so it gives you this kind of whole portfolio of programmability to play with, and that cross-domain. Who covers that many domains? And that's really powerful. When we take a look at the programmability, it was like for the network devices themselves. Like those have Asics that are programmable. So if there's like a new protocol that comes up to handle IoT things, we can actually re-program the Asics to get that going at line rates. You can do like, on-board application hosting on those network devices. We have controller levels, so you can hit the network, and then now you have like analytics and insights that you can do to pull out information from the network, and then be able to, y'know, operate at that level as well. >> So a strategic advantage architecturally for Cisco, certainly in the network side and scaling up at the stack with Kubernetes and (mumbles). We saw Google on-stage, kinda giving an indicator of where it's going. I want to ask you about the culture question for DevNet. Obviously people are fascinated with the success of DevNet, we've been great to follow the success through your journey and being part of it. But for the folks that are now seeing the success, and want to join: What can they expect, if I join the DevNet mission? What's the expectation? What's gonna be the vibe? What would you share to someone watching, that's gonna jump in and join the journey, what can they expect? >> Well, I think that first of all, it's going to be very welcoming. Like, they're gonna feel welcome. And I'm just proud of my team, because people come in and they actually say, "Wow, sometimes you go to developer conferences "and it's a little bit intimidating." And yea, you might be intimidated, but here you're going to feel welcome. Because, y'know, we really want things to happen. And then there's gonna be this kind of like, intrigue in terms of what you can build. Because what we're building is different. It's not a well known area, like everyone knows how to build apps for a mobile device. People don't know how to build applications for programmable infrastructure. Like, the fact that hey, your wireless access points now give you location and proximity information. I can write an indoor location app. Sounds simple, but it's awesome. >> Connect a camera to it. >> It's amazing, right? >> Hello! >> And then what happens is, as you're doing that, you have like, connect a camera, you're like put a Playstation into a hospital... The Children's Hospital of L.A came and spoke, and they were talking about the business problem. They had a patient, who was very sick, a young boy. And his wish was to have Playstation so he could play it. And then they had to go to their networkers cause you don't put Playstations in hospitals. They had to make that happen and intent-based networking lets you make that wish, and then activate that in the network, that's now a programmable infrastructure. So the types of problems that you can solve are different, it's amazing. >> The new apps are coming out and you're creating a new, first generation green field of networked apps. >> Yes. (chuckles heartily) >> Like what iPhone did for mobile apps, you guys are doing for networks. >> That's right, that's right. >> So that's awesome, it's super cool. Programmable infrastructure, all DevOps kinda geeky stuff. For the next steps, as you guys are now at the beginning of the next inflection point. >> Yes. >> What're you guys focused on? What's happening with the team? What's happening with some of the initiatives you're doing? Also demos get better and better. The training classes are still going on. What's your focus? >> So with some of the things that are happening now, which is... So we've hit this milestone of half a million developers. But what does that mean? What that means is that, we have half a million people who can use network API's. What that means also, is that they're contributing code. So it's no longer just, "Here I'm gonna help "you use your API", but now it's also like, they're contributors back. And what we're doing, is we're actually embracing that and making that part of the innovation model for networking. So, you're not just taking Cisco's platforms and the innovation there, which is of course growing tremendously, but now you can also add in innovation by the community. And I know it's a straight forward concept for software. It's not a straightforward concept for networking and infrastructure. >> To bring an open-source ethos, to code sharing, co-contributing. >> Exactly, and something that we've released is code exchange, definite code exchange. And what it is, is just a list of curated software. Software that's out of GitHub, that works for our platforms, y'know. But the thing that developers are always like, "Okay there's a lot of software out there, "which one should I use?" and then basically giving them like, the curated list of here's the stuff that you can use. >> So Suzie, it's been fun to watch the transformation of Cisco overall. As we look at... Before, we used to measure in boxes and ports. What's the measurement internally? When you talk about saying, "Okay how are we doing "on our journey to become a software company?" Give us a little insight as to internally how Cisco measures that. >> The way that we measure that now is, we're talking to our customers and our partners and their adoption of API's, of programmability, their ability to execute on that and to be successful in this business. And so, it's really an external looking view. So it's all just like okay, how much do they get it? How much can they use it? How much are they building the skills? So it's really looking at the success of the community and being able to build the skills and use these products and build solutions with them. >> Suzie, congratulations on continuing growing, hitting a major milestone, 500,000 developers, half a million developers, that's a real community. It's just the beginning now, it's the start line. >> (chuckling) The start line, it is. >> One finish line is another start line. >> It is a start line, it's absolutely the start line. >> And you guys had a great event last night at the Mango party, the Mango Cafe. Talk about that, you had a celebration. Turns out a lot of people showed up. It was supposed to be a little private party. >> It was a little private party, yea. So we, y'know, just wanted to thank the team and thank our community. Because, quite honestly, to get to this half a million it wasn't just the people who work for me who got it there. It's the fact that, there's of course our team who's very dedicated to that, but then it's our partners. It's even you guys, right? It's our partners who have like... I understand this mission, I'm gonna jump in, I'm gonna help it happen. It's our systems engineers, it's our partners, it's our innovation folks, it's people from the community who understand the mission and have joined in to push it forward. So we had this party last night at Mango Cafe, you guys were there. The people were callin it kinda the best one. It's really just appreciation for our community and what they've done to get it there. Because it's not us, it's our community who've done it. >> This is the open ethos. Cisco becoming open. What's it like to be on the inside and seeing Cisco open up like this? >> It's, I mean, it's amazing. And what's amazing is like, when I started DevNet you'd think like okay, "I'm gonna run a developer program." The thing that surprises me is just, how hurtful it is to so many people. Like, people, they find a path. They see a new opportunity, they figure out a new way they wanna advance their businesses and their careers. And it's like, all heart. And that's how it grew. Like with the resources, it's just because people who had felt this heart and this connection into this mission and drive, they're taking it to the next level so it's amazing >> Like open-source software, people love to be part of a great project. >> It is, it is. >> And DevNet certainly is. And DevNet Create. Don't forget DevNet Create is your other event that bring the cloud native world with the networking world together. >> It is. >> Great project. >> You were with us at DevNet Create and that's where it's this mixing of communities of like, the app developers with the networkers who are getting out there. And what's funny is, we didn't know how those communities would interact. And they're mixing, they're getting it. They're just like "Okay, I have this location software, "I need to work together with the guys "who are gonna install the network and then "we can make this amazing experience." And they're mixing and when they do it the right things happening. >> Very complimentary, there's love going wild. >> App guys love the network guys to take care of the network and the network guys love the app guys that take care of the apps. >> Exactly! Exactly. >> It's a win-win. Great stuff, congratulations. Again, a new way to program. Just like we saw the iPhone creating the app store. Networking now is programmable. We expect to see a lot of great creativity, new problems, new things being created. And that's an opportunity for all. We're here at theCUBE bringing you all the action from the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live. More live coverage. Day three, stay with us, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris. Welcome to another Cube Conversation from our beautiful studio here in Palo Alto, California, and once again I'm joined by Eric Herzog. Eric is the CMO and vice president of channels in IBM Sports Group, Eric? >> Well thank you, we love coming to see theCUBE. And by the way, I'm a Palo Alto native! >> Hey, I've heard that! You know, I don't think we're going to get into that today. Maybe some other time we can talk about that. But what I do want to talk about is, storage has historically been way down in the food chain of strategy, of business strategy. >> Eric: Right. >> Now we're talking about digital business. And digital business at least from our perspective, and I think you would agree, is predicated on the idea that you use data as an asset. In fact, Wikibon says that the difference between business and digital business is that digital businesses use data as an asset. Now, since storage is where you put that data, and is responsible for availability, throughput, reliability, flexibility, in how you do things differently with data, that kind of elevates storage's position as part of a strategic digital business capability. But nobody talks about it. So, as a smart guy in the storage community, I'd like to talk to you about that. First off, do you agree with my proposition? >> Ah yeah, I would posit that in today's digital business world build around private clouds, storage is, if not the critical foundation, one of the top two critical foundations you have to rely for your digital business. So if you're the CEO or you're the CFO and you know you're gone digital business, if the storage goes down or the storage is slow, your digital business and the value of that data you're driving both internally and for your customers just dramatically shrank. So it's critical, critical. Just as when you're building a giant building in downtown San Francisco or downtown New York or downtown Singapore, if you don't have that foundation right, the building literally can fall right down. >> And in San Francisco, one of the big buildings is actually starting to lean about two or three degrees. It's got a bunch of people pretty freaked out. But let's talk about, therefore what are the strategic digital business capabilities that are associated with storage that CXOs have to start thinking about? You mentioned one, we call it true private cloud. >> Right. >> The idea that you're still going to need some capacity where the data has to be. Because you're not going to be able to put everything in the public cloud. So a true private cloud is going to be one of them. >> Eric: Right. >> What's another one? >> So I think the big thing here is modern data protection. In the modern data protection scheme, because you're a digital business, which means you probably have test guys, you have some DevOps guys, inside, that are constantly playing with your own code or commercial code that you've bought. To optimize for your digital business, you've got to be able to give them real data sets to work with. Now that doesn't mean you can't track it in case there's a data leak or whatever, but the bottom-line is you want those developers to be A, always be able to get it, B, have it to be self service, because the IT guys are keeping your digital business up and going, they can't be bothered with hey can you get me real data set? The quality of the data that those developers produce for you goes way up, so you have less downtime which by the way, if you're a digital business you don't want to have any downtime. >> Peter: Right. >> And it gets it faster. So if you're playing with some commercial software writing your own that you're using in a digital business, you want to get there before your competitors do. >> Peter: Right. >> So you want those DevOps guys constantly working, and you want to be able to do that. Yet at the same time the IT guy can focus on what they need to do. And by the way, they can track where all those copies of the real data sets are. So everybody wins and it makes it work well. >> So in other respects, what you're saying is that availability, which used to be associated with the performance of an individual application, is now associated with digital business strategy. Because you need to be able to test new business ideas, pursue new business ideas, be fast in bringing things to market. And the whole notion of availability extends beyond just making sure the data is where you need it to be, or where the application says it needs to be, to now using availability as a metric for ensuring that the data can be where it needs to be within the business, so the business can make the appropriate changes and adjustments and extensions to what its strategy is. >> Well, think of this as you've got a data set. The more you use that data set, not just for the primary storage that's used by the end users that are coming to your digital business, but for everything else. Back it up, okay great. Check box. Okay, interface with common API so the DevOps guys can use it. Another check box. Making sure that the test guys can test real data sets, not faux ones, guess what? Faster test time, more accurate test time, boom, better impact for your digital business. So extending the value of the data from just primary storage throughout your entire digital software development process is critical. And in today's world, that's what you can do with the modern data protection that, for example, we have with our IBM solutions. >> So let me build on top of that, because I think another capability might be increasing the association with speed of development. It used to be, again, that storage was very closely aligned with what your server needed. Increasingly, we're starting to see the concept of data protection and the concept of data availability actually start to mean something very, very different to developers. Are we now seeing developers and the developer ecosystem start to drive more of what's required in storage? >> Well, you've got to look at it, the developer wants to be able to spin things up quickly on their own. So in the old world, you do a ticket, you give it to the VMaura guy, the HyperV guy, the IT guy, takes a week or so. You don't want to do that. So with our stuff, for example, you could check in and check out, it integrates with all their APIs, they can quickly do their work. It's a real data set, not using fake data, so that makes it better from a reliability perspective, and it gets done faster and they know how it really is going to work when you deploy that in your digital business. They can check it in and check it out themselves, so it happens way faster. So all that means for you as a digital business guy is better time and faster time to market with more reliable products for your end users and your clients. >> And that's kind of a key, that's kind of what the goal is. So we've got three thus far. This notion of true private cloud, where we need resources where the data demands. This notion of modern data protection, which is to say that the notion of availability is beyond just backup and restore, >> Right. >> Peter: So now the multiple ways to use it. New communities are going to be more closely associated with storage capabilities like the developer world. >> Eric: Right, the DevOps. >> Are there multi-cloud? Are there other kind of strategic business capabilities that CXOs have to think about as they envision their digital business strategy and the role that storage is going to play in either constraining it or facilitating it? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. First of all, you can look at it in three buckets. Item one is that your storage infrastructure, you still may have some of your older tuff. You still may be using Oracle, not yet using Hadoop. And using an Oracle data warehouse versus Hadoop big data analytic workload. >> I hear there's some customers out there that still have z-series installed, running things. >> So, you've got to be able to take the thing and cut costs on your traditional infrastructure, and your traditional applications workloads and use cases, while you're going to the next generation and modernizing. So you want to be able to handle the older workloads and cut their costs, at the same time invest more in things like Hadoop and Spark and Mango. And Cassandra. You want to be able to do both. At the same time, as you create your private cloud infrastructure, you want to be able to use new paragons, such as containers. And if you're going to do that, you want a set of storage solutions, both software and array infrastructure that can support that. And that's a critical element, is being able to A, modernize and cut costs of your older while you're moving to the new. For all your new stuff you want to be out that it's optimized and the DevOps guys can work it and you've got all the right APIs. And then, for the true private cloud, you're going to containerize model just like the public cloud guys do, because you want every advantage for your own digital business that the public does, and we can do all of that, but it's critical that you do all of that continuum, from the newest of the new, to the application in the middle, but you still have the old stuff while you're getting the new stuff up and running. So it's critical, if I'm the CEO, to make sure that my storage does all of that. 'Cuz if I fall down on the old stuff, well that's a problem. I can't bill, I can't invoice, I can't ship things. >> Right. >> If I fall down on the new stuff, guess what? I'm completely uncompetitive. >> Mm hm. >> Right? If I fail on the container world, what I'll call the refactoring of my infrastructure, I've totally lost the game because I'm not making it fast, I'm not making it resilient, I'm not cutting my costs, because everything is cost competitive. If data is the value, everything is built around that data, that doesn't mean you want your data to be super expensive, got to figure a way to do it cost-effectively, yet still deliver the value in your digital business that the end user wants. >> And it's got to be flexibility across the board. Okay, so we've got some strategic capabilities that CXOs have to think about that storage is going to enable. It's February 2018, we're looking at say, October 2019, next 18 months. What's going to be the one or two biggest changes in the storage world do you think? >> Ah, okay. First thing is going to be the automation of storage software across the board. Not just for the storage guy, not that all storage companies don't love the storage guy, but increasingly there's a move to DevOps and other functions. So, while each company is managing eons and eons and eons of more storage capacity, they're not adding eons and eons of storage admins. So you've got to have the docker guy, you've got to have the application guy, be able to backup, be able to optimize their workloads, be able to go ahead and spin up a new container without calling the IT guy, because the IT guys are overworked. So that's item one, is integration with all the coming APIs, automation, self-service are critical. The more it's automated the more self-serve is is, the more you can factor in the non-storage guys into creating a true digital business. That's on number one. Second thing you've got is a new technology known as NVME. This is a very high performance storage interface, it's new to the market, all the big storage vendors are working on it including IMB. We did an announcement on February 20th all about NVME. The value there is more and more applications and workloads, because the performance of the system itself, which is already highly resistant, highly available, and highly capable of handling any failure mode, is it's super fast, which means you can put more and more applications and workloads on a physical infrastructure, which saves you time and saves you money. So those are two critical things. The rise of this automation paradime, and the self-service paired across all of your storage software, and integrating it with your application layer, being able to use real data sets, right, as modern did, and then this new high-performance storage interface that will dramatically allow more workloads for every ounce of storage you buy, saving you money, and also making highly performing to meet your digital business SLAs. >> I think those are two great ones. I'm going to add one more and I'm sure we're going to be talking more about this. I think over the course of the next year and a half we're going to see even greater understanding of the relationship between storage and data, and new rules, new conventions, new approaches to how to think about that relationship so that all this great stuff that's happening when the storage actually does become a strategic business capability. >> Yeah, you could say that storage managing software will morph into data management, or at least a hybrid of partially managing the storage but actually also managing the data. And things like what is the metadata and how can you use metadata to more effectively manage your business. And we're going a whole bunch of that with IBM and we've already announced several things around that, so that's an actually great observation. >> And it's not too far from there to say digital asset management. Not in a traditional marketing sense, but overall how it works. Eric Herzog, CMO, vice president of channels, IMB storage, once again thanks for coming theCUBE and talking to us about some of the things that are going to happen over the next 18 months in the storage world. >> Great, thank you very much, we always apprecite being with you, and thanks again. >> I'm Peter Burris, once again this has been a Cube conversation from our Palo Alto studios with Eric Herzog of IBM. Until next time. (upbeat music)

(motivating electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-host and co-founder of Silicon Angle Media. We're here for a CUBE Conversation in our studios in Palo Alto, California. Here with two great guests inside the industry, to help illuminate the cloud computing conversation, really around what's coming up with Amazon re:Invent. But more importantly, the major advances happening in the digital transformation around IT and around developers and around cloud, and how that's impacting business. Our guests are Chris Comings, who's with the Chasm Group, consult and they help people, and former industry executive at NetApp, and (mumbles) the storage company. Peter Smails, the CMO of Datos.io data, and then he's the CMO there. Now, new progressive solutions. So guys, great solution. And Peter, I know you got news. We're gonna do another segment on your big news coming out, so we're gonna hold that off. >> Cool. >> The game has changed, right? >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> And we talked, with Chris and I had a one on one about this. But the industry conversation, there's people that are in the know, and people who are trying to figure out what's happening and how it impacts their business. CIO, CEOs, CDOs, chief data officers, chief security officers. There's a lot of things on the plate of businesses. >> Right. >> Big time. >> Right. >> So let's unpack this, and let's illuminate what it means. So cloud computing, Peter, what's your take on this, because Datos just takes a unique approach? I love your solution. A lot of people are liking this solution, but it's nuanced, because it's cloud-- >> Yeah. >> That's driving you. >> Yeah. >> What's the big driver? >> So the big driver, you said at the top of the discussion, the big driver is digital transformation. Digital transformation. Organizations are trying to be more data-driven. Okay, this is completely throwing, throwing traditional IT amok, because we're not living in the traditional world anymore of all my data sits within a single data center, I run my traditional monolithic applications. That's changed. The world is no longer running in a traditional four wall data center, and the world's moved away from the traditional view of scale-up architectures to elastic compute, shared nothing, elastic storage environment. So what's happening is, you've got the challenge of trying to essentially support traditional transformation initiatives, and it's just throwing all the underlying infrastructure foundations that an entire generation of IT professionals has known (laughs) into disarray. So everything's a little bit caddywhompus right now. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative), Chris? >> Well, and like you said, those people all have gone from being implementers to, they're moving to being developers. >> Right. >> And it completely changes their, it has to be a big change in their mindset. And it changes the management folks, the CIOs, the CDOs, the people that you interact with on a daily basis, right? >> Absolutely. >> Because these people are all trying to kind of come up to the next generation and get there. >> So you talked about, we got re:Invent coming up in a couple of weeks and, I think reinvent's a perfect term for this entire conversation, because everybody is reinventing themselves. The customer's reinventing themselves, the IT organizations are reinventing themselves, the individual roles within organizations are changing, and the whole evolution of dev ops versus traditional roles, so it is really-- >> And the vendors are all trying to reinvent themselves, too. >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. >> Well there's a lot of noise, so the customer's being bombarded with pitches. And if I here one more digital transformation pitch, without substance, I still don't understand. So in the spirit of trying to understand, first of all, I believe in digital transformation, but you can't just say the word, you gotta to prove it. But there's hard to prove a new approach or they've never seen it before. It's kind of like Steve Jobs would say, "If you want a Blackberry, that's a phone, "but the iPhone's not what you've seen before." But everyone loved it, changed the industry. That dynamic's happening in the cloud where for instance, your solution, some might not have seen before, but it's highly relevant to the user behavior expectations of the new environment. Okay, so this is the issue. What is the new environment specifically around digital transformation? Because I have an investment in storage. If I'm a customer, I bought a zillion drives from NetApp and EMC. I got data domain backup and, I got a perimeter, I have all this stuff, and now I've got this cloud thing bursting, and I got some analytics running there, and then I got the hot shot young developers banging out apps, and they want to put it in the cloud and... and security, I mean, what's going on? >> You wanna take that one first? And then I'll jump in. >> Can't I just buy more storage? >> Yeah. (Men laugh) Hey, just, no John, you don't just buy more storage, you upgrade from spinning to flash. I mean, that's really, >> There you go. >> That's really, really cutting edge right there. No I think what a lot of you see what they're doing is basically saying listen, for all this secondary, tertiary, quaternary, I mean, I didn't even know what that word was. But your second, your third, your fourth cuts of that data, move that all to the cloud, get that out of my environment. I'm not gonna be submersed in dealing with all of that anymore. Then maybe I can clear out some of my headaches, so I can actually focus on that primary cut, and what do I do about that primary cut? And that's where these completely new approaches come into play, and I, Peter I don't know if you call that hybrid, or multi-aire or what? But it is basically just trying to get some of that noise out of their system, so they can focus on the thing that's most valuable. >> So the way I would make that tangible John, is sort of, to us it all rolls down to the notion of the modern IT stack, okay? So essentially, the way you respond to digital transformation which, is all about being more agile, and some of the buzzwords you hear, but they're trying to be more, customers are trying to be, vendors are trying to be, or excuse me, customers or organizations are trying to be more customer-centric. They're trying to be more business driven, more data driven, okay great. If that's their initiative-- >> That's a mission. That's a mission. >> That's a mission. >> Yep. >> What that means for IT specifically is a fundamental rearchitecture of the underlying stack, okay, along a couple vectors, which is, organizations are building these new applications. They're fundamentally rearchitecting applications. What used to be a monolithic-oriented, traditional, relational, on-prem database is now running in a microservices, highly distributed configuration. That's vector number one, implication. Implication number two is we're absolutely in the mainstream of hybrid cloud, okay? You may be running all your apps on-prem, but you're still connected in some way to the cloud, for archiving, for BI, for TASDAV, whatever the case may be. And number three is the world just moved completely to an elastic, compute, shared nothing world. So we call that the modern IT stack. So the modern IT stack, modern infrastructure today-- >> Share nothing, you said? >> Shared nothing, the cloud is-- >> Oh, shared nothing. >> Yeah, shared nothing, shared nothing storage, shared nothing compute, that's that's, those are the foundations of a cloud based architecture. >> Is that called serverless? >> You could call it serverless as well. >> Okay. >> But, if you look at the modern IT stack, so to your point, the modern IT stack, modern infrastructure today is EC2. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Modern storage is S3. It could be object prem, object storage sitting on-prem. You know, modern applications are IOT. Modern, or our customer 360, IOT. Modern databases are dynamo DB. It's MongoDB, it's the number two-- >> Right. >> database in the cloud. So to answer your question very specifically, to make it tangible, that's to us the fundamental indication is, that new modern IT stack, throws storage into disarray, it throws data management into disarray-- >> It's an operational disruption. >> It's an operational disruption. >> All right, so let's backup for a second, because I think you nailed the thread I was trying to connect on. So let's take MongoDB, your reference to that being, where'd that come from? We all know why, the LAMP stack, it was one of the drivers. But developers drove that. >> That's right. >> So it wasn't the IT department recommending Mango. >> Right (laughs). >> so the developers were driving that because of ease of use. Now there's some scalability with Mango, we all know about, but what that means is, no one gives a crap if it can scale, because you already hit your product market fit. Then you could rearchitect, so you're seeing this use case of developers driving some of the behavior. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Hence containers, docker containers, and the role of Kubernetes. >> Kubernetes, yep. >> So if that's the case, how does an enterprise customer deal with that vector? Because now the developers are dictating the stacks. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Well, I-- >> Is it a free-for-all right now? I mean, this is... >> I think both of those guys are, think of it as they used to be warring factions, dev and ops, and the fact that we say the word dev ops right now is kind of a, it's kind of an oxymoron, right? Because they don't actually know each other and actually don't naturally talk to one another, and they go, "That's the other guy who's holding me back." >> Yeah, it's the old-- >> They look at, yeah, yeah. >> Goes over the fence. >> And so now, you've got folks that are really trying to, trying to bring it together a little bit more on that front and I think that, we're starting to see some technologies where people can say, "Not only can I use that "to accelerate my developments," so meets the dev criteria, but also the ops people say, "You know what, that stuff's not so bad. "I could actually work with that." >> Right, and then there's IT going, "Uh-oh," because they're basically sitting there on the catcher's side, so to your point it's, the dev ops, it is very much of an application-led environment. The tip of the spear for the new IT stack is absolutely application-led. And IT is challenged with essentially aligning to that, collaborating with that, and keeping up with that pace of change. >> And John, on this point, I think this is where, back to re:Invent, and really the role of AWS. This all started because of that. When a developer can just say, "I don't even know who those IT people are over there, "But I can spin up my S3 instance, "and I can start working against it." They start moving down the path, they show it to somebody, someone says, "Wow, that's great stuff, I want that." >> John: Yeah, right. >> Guess what? We need to make sure that that's enterprise class and scalable and then that's where that whole thing starts, and then it becomes that pull-ya-apart, "Oh God, what did these developer people do? "I'm gonna inherit this? "What the heck am I gonna do with it?" Now it's, we've gotta move that to be more symbiotic up front. >> I remember talking to both Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy years ago, I think maybe five years ago, and I asked the question, "What enables developers?" What is enabling point? Does infrastructure dictate developer behavior? Or do developers dictate infrastructure behavior? This was years ago, when the dev ops was an early-on movement. Clearly the vote is there. Developers are driving infrastructure. Hence the dev ops infrastructure, >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> as code model, that's proven. Jassy was interesting because he looked at it that way and said, "Yeah, we saw the same thing," and they've never wavered, Amazon's stayed on the course, and they've just been running like a machine, like a, just pounding it out. I asked Pat Gelsinger, he once positioned the AWS as the developer cloud. Kinda in, I wouldn't say depositioning them, but he was basically pointing out, they have a developer cloud. Now Amazon's the enterprise cloud. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Because they've developers are now a big driver of that, and the scale with data is actually turning out to be a better security environment. >> Right. >> For cyber. >> Right, it might just-- >> So it's cloud's winning. >> Cloud is winning and just sort of just take that one step further. It's always ultimately, the winner's going to, it's Darwinism, it's like the winner's gonna be the one with the richest ecosystem. And AWS is becoming that enterprise eco. And you could argue, I mean, GCP's fighting to be in there, Oracle's not going to go quietly into that dark night. You've got multiple public cloud vendors. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> But the reality is that he who has the biggest, he or she who has the biggest ecosystem is gonna win, and that's right now is AWS driving that bus. >> All right, so I need to see those glasses for a second, and then want to go into another line of question here. (men laugh) >> You may use those. >> Oh who's, oh you put them on, all right good, as long as he's wearing them. >> He that wear-- >> You know, on that front too, on that front too, I would think we started back where VM was the big new thing, and here we go with VM's, and then all of a sudden we're coming up and we're saying, "Yeah, now there's containers." And so now we're gonna see this move to, we want to micro-package these services, and be able to aggregate them. Well you know the average IT shop that I would be talking to out there is just still trying to figure out, how do they put together their on-prem and their AWS instance? So this notion of hybrid is where most of these large enterprises are. We see a lot of terminology out there and a lot of vendors talking about multi-cloud. But multi-cloud is really just taking an option on the future and saying, "I'm not locked into you, AWS, "even though I am locked into you 100% right now. "I don't want to be forever in the future." >> It's a value statement that they're gesturing. >> That's right. >> Good segue. >> Chris: But it's not a practical implementation piece. >> I got my nerd glasses on so-- >> Peter: Strap in for something, here we go. I got my nerd glasses, so next question, we'll go a little nerdy, because this is important one. I put out at my crowd chat for Amazon, so to crowdchat.net/awsreinvent it's open, I have a lot of questions on there. Feel free to weigh in, it's an influencer-only chat, so no consumers, so I asked the question, and this is to the value statement, because multi-cloud is basically telegraphing lock-in. We don't want lock-in. >> Right. >> But we want love choice. If you have good choice and good value, we'll go there so it's a value equation. So the question I said is, where do you, this is a question I put on crowd-chat, I'll ask you guys. Where do you see the value that cloud creates for customers in the next 24 months? #cloud So the first response was from Subbu Allamaraju, who's the CIO at Expedia. He writes, "Agility from the service "ecosystem and rapid second-order architecture "architectural changes thereby clearing technical debt." And the second one from Grant Chase, "Born on the cloud apps already here. "Next wave migrating of existing apps." And then Maddoux Tsukahara said, "Legacy SASS applications will be disrupted "by cloud microservices, serverless, "and AI and machine learning." So we start to see the pattern. Your thoughts? Value creation, in the cloud, is gonna be what? >> So I think they're hitting on the right trends. I would go back to the first one which is "How do I get this on-prem stuff "that's driving me crazy, consuming all of my resources "in terms of maintenance and upgrades? "And then optimizing my environment for that." Which ones of those are core? And which ones of those are really kind of ancillary? I've gotta have them, but I really don't want them. If I didn't have to use them, I'd get rid of them. Take all, just do that homework. Separate the two cleanly. Move ancillary to the cloud, and move on. >> Peter: Yeah, yeah. >> So service ecosystem he nailed, I love, by the way, I agree with you, that was my favorite answer. And rapid second-order architecture changes. This speaks to what datos.io is doing. Because you guys, what you're in, the tornado that you're in, kind of just a play on the Chasm group here. You guys have a solution that has got visibility into some of the real dynamics of the environmental environment. >> Check. >> People, tech, stack, et cetera. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So what are some of the things that you're seeing that point to these second or level architectural changes? >> Well you mentioned, a couple different things, which is, you mentioned the notion of technical debt, which is indirectly what you were just talking about, the ability to get rid of my technical debt. It's an easy way, it eliminates my barrier to answering to creating net new applications. So without having to sort of, I avoid the innovator's dilemma if you will, because I can build these net new applications, which are the things I have to to drive my digital transformation, et cetera. I can do that in a very cost-effective and agile way. Meanwhile, sort of ignoring the old world. Then what I'll do is I'll go back, and I'll worry about the old stuff, and I'll start migrating some of that old stuff to the cloud. So in the context of, yeah, so what we see from a Datos IO perspective, in the context of data management, is that one, applications drive the stack, like you said earlier, it's absolutely, the application's at the tip of the spear, driving the stack. Organizations are building net new applications that are cloud native, okay? And they're built on the new modern IT stack, and at the same time, they're also taking their legacy application, so I like that second answer as well which is, modern cloud applications are here. The interesting thing is, you say modern cloud apps, modern cloud apps don't have to run in the cloud. >> That's right. >> We've got customers that are running their next gen app-- >> It's an operating model. >> It's an operating model. We've got customers running 100% on-prem. Their econ number stuff runs on-prem, then you have people that run in the cloud. So it's a mindset, it's an operating model. So you've got folks absolutely deploying these cloud-native apps. >> Well, it's an architectural model too, it's how they are deploying and servicing apps. >> And ultimately, it comes down to the architectural model. That's what shifted, and that world is very infrastructure. The other thing I would add to the cloud thing is if you do it right, the cloud actually can give you architectural independence and cloud independence, but you can't be focused on the infrastructure level. You've gotta focus at the application level, because then you can be agnostic, until they're online. >> So Peter you, you guys are disrupting a very large space, backup and recovery in the cloud which you guys are doing. >> Check. >> And the application database layer is a very progressive solution. So I love your approach, but you're talking about disrupting the data domains of the world. We're talking about big whales. >> Yeah. >> Big incumbents that are built around four walls in the data center. >> Check. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep. >> What are you seeing? What's the makeup? What's the personnel of the customers look like? If dev ops is happening, which we agree it is, and the the evidence is there clearly, they're not 50 year old backup and recovery guys. They're young guns, they're probably not thinking about waking up every day with their coffee, say, "Hmm, what am I gonna do with backup today?" >> Yeah. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> They're waking up saying, "Hey, I'm gonna drive some more machine learning "and AI in my apps." >> Yep. >> "And I'm gonna provide workflow movement to--" >> And you said breakfast was some, you said that. >> Adopt this microservice. >> I had the craziest dream last night. It was microservices, what? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, so I can answer that two ways. There's the technology side of it. Fun little tidbit, average age of the traditional backup and recovery software architecture, about 20 years. >> Hmm. >> Architected well before the mainstream advent of the cloud or certainly modern applications. >> Hold on, the person's 20 years old? Or it's 20 years of architecture? >> No, the architecture of the software. >> Okay. >> The solutions, or come up, the point is they've been around for awhile. >> It's old. It's old. >> It's old, fair enough. >> Yeah, and 20 years-- >> So on the technology side, that's a dilemma. On the persona side, you're absolutely right as well. These are, it's the application folks that are driving the conversation, that our applications dictate the IT stack. They're building these new architectures, which have all these implications on the infrastructure. >> All right, so I'm gonna play devil's advocate, just because I want to connect the dots. And again, illuminate what I think the problem is that you have. One is, okay I'm a CIO. Hey, he's my storage guy. Who the hell are you, young gun? Complaining about your backup and recovery. He recommends all flash arrays in the data center provisioned in a VSAN environment, whatever that's going on. Who are you? You're just nothing to me. You don't make that decision. >> I'm the guy that can give you all the visibility to your data to make you smarter and more agile as a company. I can save you money. I can make this company more market-- >> So what do I need to do differently? If I'm the CIO, I don't want to make these, or these architectural calls based upon old dogma or old reporting lines. This is an example. I go to him, he's my storage guy. Who are you? I already built you the dev ops environment. He runs storage and so, you're impacted as a developer. So how do you guys talk to that guy? What does the CXO have to do differently to adapt to the new environment? >> I'll take that and then you can-- >> Please. >> You know, jump in. So I think what you see is, you see the proliferation of new personas. Like you see chief transformation officers, you see chief digital officers. You see system architects and DBAs getting a more prominent role in the conversation. So the successful CIOs and technology officers are the ones that are essentially gonna get the cowboys and the Indians to collaborate more closely, because they have to, because the folks that were over in the corner that used to get laughed at, building these, oh mangos and these new applications and such, they're the ones holding the keys to the future. So the successful technologists are gonna be the ones that marry those personas from the application side of the house with the traditional storage, infrastructure folks as well. You successfully do that, then you can be more, then you can move more quickly forward. >> Yeah, that's right. >> What do you think? >> Well I think some of it's gonna come back down to economics, too. And I agree with that move which is, I talked to over a hundred CIOs and their staff in the last year. I had one conversation where the person said, "You know what? "The chief complaint about me as CIO "is I'm not spending enough money." And I thought to myself, "Sounds like a company that I should put some bucks into, "because they must be doing really, really well." Everybody else is looking at it saying, "You know what? "I'm under pressure to adopt the cloud, "because there's a belief out there "that the cloud is gonna be so much less expensive "than what they've done in the past." And then I think they find that it's not, that it's not just the one size fits all answer to that. >> Right. >> And so as a consequence, you're gonna have people say, Listen, this money printing operation, or this funnel out the door to, whether it's EMC or NetApp 4, or whatever it may be, whatever storage vendor for backup architecture, they've got to stop that funnel. Because they've got to take what they were spending there and move it to the things that are going to make money for them, not just gonna hold on to it, and de-risk their enterprise. >> I'm here with two industry leaders, Chris Comings and Peter Smails, talking about the impact of infrastructure technologies, and app development in the cloud for businesses. It's a great conversation, and our final point, I wanna just get to, I know we're running on some time here but we wanna go a little further. I think this is awesome. That's for taking the time to share it out. >> It's great. >> One of my other questions I put on my crowd chat was, a true or false and comment question. Here's the statement: Serverless computing will become mainstream, will come to mainstream private cloud, true or false, comment. Subbu said, "False, adoption and success "of serverless patterns depend almost entirely "on the strength of the ecosystem "that the data center lacks." Interesting comment. I was kinda leaning, I go, "I was leaning towards true." But I don't have enough insight on this, because I'm waffling between true or false. I love serverless, I love the idea of, notion of resources that are just programmable. But what is the state of serverless? I mean, is he right? Is that that there's not enough ecosystem in the data center areas or... >> You wanna go first? >> Well, I'd just say that I would, I would just call out two things on that front. One is, I think you need a lot more germination of microservices that are out there in order to be able to put that all together. That's one aspect. We're seeing that growth come rapidly. The other thing is, now your security is beholden to the lowest common denominator. The security of that individual microservice. So I think you're gonna have some fits and starts here as we move down that path because, boy oh boy, the last thing I wanna do is get all modern but at the same time, put myself at a greater amount of risk. >> I thought the comment at the end was, I think it's true. I thought it was interesting what he said at the end. He said, "The ecosystem that the data center lacks." I would contend that potentially, the ecosystem that the cloud has would support that. >> Yeah. >> Because the cloud, by definition is, it's a shared-nothing world. >> Right. >> You know? >> So, he also comments, someone said, Lambda, "My Expedia is that Lambda's growth "is almost entirely due to the power "of the ecosystem of services, "which is one of the key points," and he points to his blog post. Stu Miniman, our Wikibon analyst weighed in, because Stu's on this big time. "Service will definitely be used for edge applications. "Currently don't see use case for general data center usage." >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> So edge of the network. Again, good point? This edge of the network thing helps you, because most people are using cloud for edge. >> Peter: Right. >> So this IOT, which is, an iterative things, is an edge of the network. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Whether it's devices, sensors, industrial equipment, or people's devices on their bodies. >> Yeah. >> It's a huge data source. >> Absolutely. >> Cloud's rolling that up. Or a cloud-like infrastructure. >> Well but it's not necessarily rolling it up. It's just connecting all the dots as to where you can put storage and you can put compute where the data is. Or you can move the data to where the storage and the compute is. So it's not, I mean, yes there's core and edge, that's absolutely true, but the notion of rollup isn't necessarily true. It's not necessarily the cloud enables me to do all this colossal aggregation. It's I basically distribute my compute, I distribute my storage. >> Well, when I say rollup, I'm assuming there's some sort of architectural thing. >> Okay, fair. >> But this fits into your wheelhouse, I think. But I just connecting the dots. That's why it's a question for you is, it would make sense for a solution like DATOS to be there because, That's a application so you-- >> Absolutely. >> You back up IOT? >> Oh absolutely. We backup IOT, but we basically backup any modern cloud application. And by definition, what does that mean? >> So IOT's and app for you. >> IOT, absolutely IOT's-- >> Not necessarily a-- >> So the technically where we plug in is, we plugin at the database level. And the databases basically, are the underlying infrastructure that support the applications. So in the case of IOT, those are typically very highly distributed across GIOS, absolutely we protect them. >> So we were just talking earlier about the words flexibility, manageability, agility. That's kind of vanilla words that everyone uses these days. But in essence, you're actually really doing it. Right, so. >> Thanks for that setup. Yes, we actually do all those buzz words. >> So Chris recommends, I recommend that you call it, hyper flexibility. >> Yeah. >> Or microflexibility. >> Or ultra. >> Or ultra flexibility. >> Or go mega. Just go mega right now. Or uber and steal a little of that, although that's kind of out of favor right now. >> Not, uber is-- >> Uber we wanna let that one kind of fly by. >> But remember we also talked before, we thought we were spot on with our product being branded RecoverX. We thought we were really in the spot with the whole, you know. >> Your name is awesome. RecoverX is a great brand. >> So we're gonna stick with that for now before we-- >> Good branding, RecoverX, Data IOS. Chris, thanks for coming on. Final comment, any words on the storage industry as it evolved? You mentioned earlier, just call it flash. Certainly, all flash arrays are doing well. Pure Storage went public. Flash is a standard. >> Yeah. >> It has benefits. Where does the flash storage go with all this cloud value coming over the top? >> Well I think, you know, there's gonna be a couple. I have one comment on that which is, we see what flash is doing at the array level, and now we're gonna see what NVME does at the cash layer, for allowing this access to information. You think about, I want to run a singular query, but some of that data is here, there, everywhere, but I've gotta have a level of performance that allows me to actually run it, and get an answer from it. And so that's where that comes into play. I think we're gonna see a whole host of folks flooding into that space, to try and improve performance, but not only improve performance, but enable that whole distribution model. >> Yeah, and I would just pick up on more persona-centric thing which is, the message to the traditional IT shops is it is all about collaboration. The folks over in the corner, the application folks, it is absolutely all about getting more closely aligned, because cloud is here. >> Yeah. >> Multicloud, hybrid cloud, call it whatever you want, is here. The traditional IT stack is absolutely being disrupted, and it's all about embracing this application-centric, data-driven view of the world. That's the future, traditional IT's got to align with that, and collaborate and drive that whole thing forward. >> That's a great, I agree 100% what you guys just said, great comment. I would just say Wikibon calls it unigrid, which is, I'll rename it hypergrid, meaning it's just one system, to your point. Private, public, it's all cloud-like. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, it doesn't matter where it goes. Okay guys, thanks for the thought leadership. Peter Smails and Chris Cummings here, breaking down the industry landscape on storage infrastructure, application developers, in context the cloud. This is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (motivating electronic music)