>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought >>to you by silicon angle. Okay, we're back. Here. Live Cuban Cloud. And this is Dave. Want with my co host, John Ferrier Were all remote. We're getting into the analyst power half hour. Really pleased to have Maribel Lopez here. She's the principal and founder of Lopez Research and Zias Caraballo, who is the principal and founder of ZK research. Guys, great to see you. Let's get into it. How you doing? >>Great. How you been? Good, >>thanks. Really good. John's hanging in there quarantining and, uh, all healthy, So I hope you guys are too. Hey, Mary, But let's start with you. You know, here we are on 2021 you know, just exited one of the strangest years, if not the strangest year of our lives. But looking back in the past decade of cloud and we're looking forward. How do you see that? Where do we come from? Where we at and where we going >>When we obviously started with the whole let's build a public cloud and everything was about public cloud. Uh, then we went thio the notion of private cloud than we had hybrid cloud and multi cloud. So we've done a lot of different clouds right now. And I think where we are today is that there's a healthy recognition on the cloud computing providers that you need to give it to the customers the way they want it, not the way you've decided to build it. So how do you meet them where they are so that they can have a cloud like experience wherever they want their data to be? >>Yes and yes, you've, you know, observed, This is well, in the early days of cloud, you heard a lot of rhetoric. It was private cloud And and then now we're, you know, hearing a lot of multi cloud and so forth. But initially, a lot of the traditional vendors kind of pooh poohed it. They called us analysts. We said we were all cloud crazy, but they seem to have got their religion. >>Well, everything. Everyone's got a definition of cloud, but I actually think we are right in the midst of another transformation of clouds Miracle talked about. We went from, you know, private clouds, which is really hosting the public cloud to multi cloud hybrid cloud. And if you look at the last post that put on Silicon Angle, which was talking about five acquisition of Volterra, I actually think we're in the midst of the transition to what's called distributed Club, where if you look at modernized cloud apps today, they're actually made up of services from different clouds on also distributed edge locations. And that's gonna have a pretty profound impact on the way we build out, because those distributed edges be a telco edge, cellular vagina. Th whatever the services that lived there are much more ephemeral in nature, right? So the way we secure the way we connect changes quite a bit. But I think that the great thing about Cloud is we've seen several several evolutionary changes. So what the definition is and we're going through that now, which is which is pretty cool to think about, right? It's not a static thing. Um, it's, uh, you know, it's a it's an ongoing transition. But I think, uh, you know, we're moving into this distributed Cloudera, which to me is a lot more complex than what we're dealing with in the Palace. >>I'm actually pretty excited about that because I think that this move toe edge and the distribution that you've talked about, it's like we now have processing everywhere. We've got it on devices, we've got it in, cars were moving, the data centers closer and closer to where the action's happening. And I think that's gonna be a huge trend for 2021. Is that distributed that you were talking about a lot of edge discussion? You >>know what? The >>reason we're doing This, too, is we want. It's not just we're moving the data closer to the user, right? And some. If you think you brought up the autonomous vehicle right in the car being an edge, you think of the data that generates right? There's some things such as the decision to stop or not right that should be done in car. I don't wanna transport that data all the way back to Google him back to decide whether I want to stop. You could also use the same data determine whether drivers driving safely for insurance purposes, right? So the same data give me located at the edge or in a centralized cloud for different purposes, and I think that's what you know, kind of cool about this is we're being able to use our data and much different ways. Now. >>You know, it's interesting is it's so complex. It's mind blowing because this is distributed computing. Everyone kind of agrees this is where it is. But if you think about the complexity and I want to get your guys reaction to this because you know some of the like side fringe trend discussions are data sovereignty, misinformation as a vulnerability. Okay, you get the chips now you got gravitas on with Amazon in front. Apple's got their own chips. Intel is gonna do a whole new direction. So you've got tons of computer. And then you mentioned the ephemeral nature. How do you manage those? What's the observe ability look like? They're what's the trust equation? So all these things kind of play into it. It sounds almost mind blowing, just even thinking about it. But how do you guys, this analyst tryto understand where someone's either blowing bullshit or kind of like has the real deal? Because all those things come into play? I mean, you could have a misinformation campaign targeting the car. Let's say Hey, you know that that data is needs to be. This is this is misinformation who's a >>in a lot of ways, this creates almost unprecedented opportunity now for for starts and for companies to transform right. The fundamental tenet of my research has always been share shifts happen when markets transition and we're in the middle of the big one. If the computer resource is we're using, John and the application resource will be using or ephemeral nature than all the things that surrounded the way we secured the way we connect. Those also have to be equal, equally agile, right, So you can't have, you know, you think of a micro services based application being secured with traditional firewalls, right? Just the amount of, or even virtual the way that the length of time it takes to spend those things up is way too long. So in many ways, this distributed cloud change changes everything in I T. And that that includes all of the services in the the infrastructure that we used to secure and connect. And that's a that is a profound change, and you mentioned the observe ability. You're right. That's another thing that the traditional observe ability tools are based on static maps and things and, you know, traditional up, down and we don't. Things go up and down so quickly now that that that those don't make any sense. So I think we are going to see quite a rise in different types of management tools and the way they look at things to be much more. I suppose you know Angela also So we can measure things that currently aren't measurable. >>So you're talking about the entire stack. Really? Changing is really what you're inferring anyway from your commentary. And that would include the programming model as well, wouldn't it? >>Absolutely. Yeah. You know, the thing that is really interesting about where we have been versus where we're going is we spent a lot of time talking about virtual izing hardware and moving that around. And what does that look like? And that, and creating that is more of a software paradigm. And the thing we're talking about now is what is cloud is an operating model look like? What is the manageability of that? What is the security of that? What? You know, we've talked a lot about containers and moving into a different you know, Dev suck ups and all those different trends that we've been talking about, like now we're doing them. So we've only got into the first crank of that. And I think every technology vendor we talked to now has to address how are they going to do a highly distributed management and security landscape? Like, what are they gonna layer on top of that? Because it's not just about Oh, I've taken Iraq of something server storage, compute and virtualized it. I now have to create a new operating model around it. In a way, we're almost redoing what the OS I stack looks like and what the software and solutions are for that. >>So >>it was really Hold on, hold on, hold on their lengthened. Because that side stack that came up earlier today, Mayor. But we're talking about Yeah, we were riffing on the OSC model, but back in the day and we were comparing the S n a definite the, you know, the proprietary protocol stacks that they were out there and someone >>said Amazon's S N a. Is that recall? E think that's what you said? >>No, no. Someone in the chest. That's a comment like Amazon's proprietary meaning, their scale. And I said, Oh, that means there s n a But if you think about it, that's kind of almost that can hang. Hang together. If the kubernetes is like a new connective tissue, is that the TCP pipe moment? Because I think Os I kind of was standardizing at the lower end of the stack Ethernet token ring. You know, the data link layer physical layer and that when you got to the TCP layer and really magic happened right to me, that's when Cisco's happened and everything started happening then and then. It kind of stopped because the application is kinda maintain their peace there. A little history there, but like that's kind of happening now. If you think about it and then you put me a factor in the edge, it just kind of really explodes it. So who's gonna write that software? E >>think you know, Dave, your your dad doesn't change what you build ups. It's already changed in the consumer world, you look atyou, no uber and Waze and things like that. Those absolute already highly decomposed applications that make a P I calls and DNS calls from dozens of different resource is already right. We just haven't really brought that into the enterprise space. There's a number, you know, what kind of you know knew were born in the cloud companies that have that have done that. But they're they're very few and far between today. And John, your point about the connectivity. We do need to think about connectivity at the network layer. Still, obviously, But now we're creating that standardization that standardized connectivity all the way a player seven. So you look at a lot of the, you know, one of the big things that was a PDP. I calls right, you know, from different cloud services. And so we do need to standardize in every layer and then stitch that together. So that does make It does make things a lot more complicated. Now I'm not saying Don't do it because you can do a whole lot more with absolute than you could ever do before. It's just that we kind of cranked up the level of complexity here, and flowered isn't just a single thing anymore, right? That's that. That's what we're talking about here It's a collection of edges and private clouds and public clouds. They all have to be stitched together at every layer in orderto work. >>So I was I was talking a few CEOs earlier in the day. We had we had them on, I was asking them. Okay, So how do you How do you approach this complexity? Do you build that abstraction layer? Do you rely on someone like Microsoft to build that abstraction layer? Doesn't appear that Amazon's gonna do it, you know? Where does that come from? Or is it or is it dozens of abstraction layers? And one of the CEO said, Look, it's on us. We have to figure out, you know, we get this a p I economy, but But you guys were talking about a mawr complicated environment, uh, moving so so fast. Eso if if my enterprise looks like my my iPhone APs. Yes, maybe it's simpler on an individual at basis, but its app creep and my application portfolio grows. Maybe they talk to each other a little bit better. But that level of complexity is something that that that users are gonna have to deal >>with what you thought. So I think quite what Zs was trying to get it and correct me if I'm wrong. Zia's right. We've got to the part where we've broken down what was a traditional application, right? And now we've gotten into a P. I calls, and we have to think about different things. Like we have to think about how we secure those a p I s right. That becomes a new criteria that we're looking at. How do we manage them? How do they have a life cycle? So what was the life cycle of, say, an application is now the life cycle of components and so that's a That's a pretty complex thing. So it's not so much that you're getting app creep, but you're definitely rethinking how you want to design your applications and services and some of those you're gonna do yourself and a lot of them are going to say it's too complicated. I'm just going to go to some kind of SAS cloud offering for that and let it go. But I think that many of the larger companies I speak to are looking for a larger company to help them build some kind of framework to migrate from what they've used with them to what they need tohave going forward. >>Yeah, I think. Where the complexities. John, You asked who who creates the normalization layer? You know, obviously, if you look to the cloud providers A W s does a great job of stitching together all things AWS and Microsoft does a great job of stitching together all things Microsoft right in saying with Google. >>But >>then they don't. But if if I want to do some Microsoft to Amazon or Google Toe Microsoft, you know, connectivity, they don't help so much of that. And that's where the third party vendors that you know aviatrix on the network side will tear of the security side of companies like that. Even Cisco's been doing a lot of work with those companies, and so what we what we don't really have And we probably won't for a while if somebody is gonna stitch everything together at every >>you >>know, at every layer. So Andi and I do think we do get after it. Maribel, I think if you look at the world of consumer APS, we moved to a lot more kind of purpose built almost throwaway apps. They serve a purpose or to use them for a while. Then you stop using them. And in the enterprise space, we really haven't kind of converted to them modeling on the mobile side. But I think that's coming. Well, >>I think with micro APS, right, that that was kind of the issue with micro APS. It's like, Oh, I'm not gonna build a full scale out that's gonna take too long. I'm just gonna create this little workflow, and we're gonna have, like, 200 work flows on someone's phone. And I think we did that. And not everybody did it, though, to your point. So I do think that some people that are a little late to the game might end up in in that app creep. But, hey, listen, this is a fabulous opportunity that just, you know, throw a lot of stuff out and do it differently. What What? I think what I hear people struggling with ah lot is be to get it to work. It typically is something that is more vertically integrated. So are you buying all into a Microsoft all you're buying all into an Amazon and people are starting to get a little fear about doing the full scale buy into any specific platform yet. In absence of that, they can't get anything to work. >>Yeah, So I think again what? What I'm hearing from from practitioners, I'm gonna put a micro serve. And I think I think, uh, Mirabelle, this is what you're implying. I'm gonna put a micro services layer. Oh, my, my. If I can't get rid of them, If I can't get rid of my oracle, you know, workloads. I'm gonna connect them to my modernize them with a layer, and I'm gonna impart build that. I'm gonna, you know, partner to get that done. But that seems to be a a critical path forward. If I don't take that step, gonna be stuck in the path in the past and not be able to move forward. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you do have to bridge to the past. You you aren't gonna throw everything out right away. That's just you can't. You can't drive the bus and take the wheels off that the same time. Maybe one wheel, but not all four of them at the same time. So I think that this this concept of what are the technologies and services that you use to make sure you can keep operational, but that you're not just putting on Lee new workloads into the cloud or new workloads as decomposed APS that you're really starting to think about. What do I want to keep in whatever I want to get rid of many of the companies you speak Thio. They have thousands of applications. So are they going to do this for thousands of applications? Are they gonna take this as an opportunity to streamline? Yeah, >>well, a lot of legacy never goes away, right? And I was how companies make this transition is gonna be interesting because there's no there's no really the fact away I was I was talking to this one company. This is New York Bank, and they've broken their I t division down into modern I t and legacy I t. And so modern. Everything is cloud first. And so imagine me, the CEO of Legacy i e 02 miracles. But what they're doing, if they're driving the old bus >>and >>then they're building a new bus and parallel and eventually, you know, slowly they take seats out of the old bus and they take, you know, the seat and and they eventually start stripping away things. That old bus, >>But >>that old bus is going to keep running for a long time. And so stitching the those different worlds together is where a lot of especially big organizations that really can't commit to everything in the cloud are gonna struggle. But it is a It is a whole new world. And like I said, I think it creates so much opportunity for people. You know, e >>whole bus thing reminds me that movie speed when they drive around 55 miles an hour, just put it out to the airport and just blew up E >>got But you know, we all we all say that things were going to go away. But to Zia's point, you know, nothing goes away. We're still in 2021 talking about mainframes just as an aside, right? So I think we're going to continue tohave some legacy in the network. But the But the issue is ah, lot will change around that, and they're gonna be some people. They're gonna make a lot of money selling little startups that Just do one specific piece of that. You know, we just automation of X. Oh, >>yeah, that's a great vertical thing. This is the This is the distributed network argument, right? If you have a note in the network and you could put a containerized environment around it with some micro services um, connective tissue glue layer, if you will software abstract away some integration points, it's a note on the network. So if in mainframe or whatever, it's just I mean makes the argument right, it's not core. You're not building a platform around the mainframe, but if it's punching out, I bank jobs from IBM kicks or something, you know, whatever, Right? So >>And if those were those workloads probably aren't gonna move anywhere, right, they're not. Is there a point in putting those in the cloud? You could say Just leave them where they are. Put a connection to the past Bridge. >>Remember that bank when you talk about bank guy we interviewed in the off the record after the Cube interviews like, Yeah, I'm still running the mainframe, so I never get rid of. I love it. Run our kicks job. I would never think about moving that thing. >>There was a large, large non US bank who said I buy. I buy the next IBM mainframe sight unseen. Andi, he's got no choice. They just write the check. >>But milliseconds is like millions of dollars of millisecond for him on his back, >>so those aren't going anywhere. But then, but then, but they're not growing right. It's just static. >>No, no, that markets not growing its's, in fact. But you could make a lot of money and monetizing the legacy, right? So there are vendors that will do that. But I do think if you look at the well, we've already seen a pretty big transition here. If you look at the growth in a company like twilio, right, that it obviates the need for a company to rack and stack your own phone system to be able to do, um, you know, calling from mobile lapse or even messaging. Now you just do a P. I calls. Um, you know, it allows in a lot of ways that this new world we live in democratizes development, and so any you know, two people in the garage can start up a company and have a service up and running another time at all, and that creates competitiveness. You know much more competitiveness than we've ever had before, which is good for the entire industry. And, you know, because that keeps the bigger companies on their toes and they're always looking over their shoulder. You know what, the banks you're looking at? The venues and companies like that Brian figure out a way to monetize. So I think what we're, you know well, that old stuff never going away. The new stuff is where the competitive screen competitiveness screen. >>It's interesting. Um IDs Avery. Earlier today, I was talking about no code in loco development, how it's different from the old four g l days where we didn't actually expand the base of developers. Now we are to your point is really is democratizing and, >>well, everybody's a developer. It could be a developer, right? A lot of these tools were written in a way that line of business people create their own APs to point and click interface is, and so the barrier. It reminds me of when, when I started my career, I was a I. I used to code and HTML build websites and then went to five years. People using drag and drop interface is right, so that that kind of job went away because it became so easy to dio. >>Yeah, >>sorry. A >>data e was going to say, I think we're getting to the part. We're just starting to talk about data, right? So, you know, when you think of twilio, that's like a service. It's connecting you to specific data. When you think of Snowflake, you know, there's been all these kinds of companies that have crept up into the landscape to feel like a very specific void. And so now the Now the question is, if it's really all about the data, they're going to be new companies that get built that are just focusing on different aspects of how that data secured, how that data is transferred, how that data. You know what happens to that data, because and and does that shift the balance of power about it being out of like, Oh, I've created these data centers with large recommend stack ums that are virtualized thio. A whole other set of you know this is a big software play. It's all about software. >>Well, we just heard from Jim Octagon e You guys talking earlier about just distributed system. She basically laid down that look. Our data architectures air flawed there monolithic. And data by its very nature is distributed so that she's putting forth the whole new paradigm around distributed decentralized data models, >>which Howie shoe is just talking about. Who's gonna build the visual studio for data, right? So programmatic. Kind of thinking around data >>I didn't >>gathering. We didn't touch on because >>I do think there's >>an opportunity for that for, you know, data governance and data ownership and data transport. But it's also the analytics of it. Most companies don't have the in house, um, you know, data scientists to build on a I algorithms. Right. So you're gonna start seeing, you know, cos pop up to do very specific types of data. I don't know if you saw this morning, um, you know, uniforms bought this company that does, you know, video emotion detection so they could tell on the video whether somebody's paying attention, Not right. And so that's something that it would be eso hard for a company to build that in house. But I think what you're going to see is a rise in these, you know, these types of companies that help with specific types of analytics. And then you drop you pull those in his resource is into your application. And so it's not only the storage and the governance of the data, but also the analytics and the analytics. Frankly, there were a lot of the, uh, differentiation for companies is gonna come from. I know Maribel has written a lot on a I, as have I, and I think that's one of the more exciting areas to look at this year. >>I actually want to rip off your point because I think it's really important because where we left off in 2020 was yes, there was hybrid cloud, but we just started to see the era of the vertical eyes cloud the cloud for something you know, the cloud for finance, the cloud for health care, the telco and edge cloud, right? So when you start doing that, it becomes much more about what is the specialized stream that we're looking at. So what's a specialized analytic stream? What's a specialized security stack stream? Right? So until now, like everything was just trying to get to what I would call horizontal parody where you took the things you had before you replicated them in a new world with, like, some different software, but it was still kind of the same. And now we're saying, OK, let's try Thio. Let's try to move out of everything, just being a generic sort of cloud set of services and being more total cloud services. >>That is the evolution of everything technology, the first movement. Everything doing technology is we try and make the old thing the new thing look like the old thing, right? First PCs was a mainframe emulator. We took our virtual servers and we made them look like physical service, then eventually figure out, Oh, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that I could do then I couldn't do before. And that's the part we're trying to hop into now. Right? Is like, Oh, now that I've gone cloud native, what can I do that I couldn't do before? Right? So we're just we're sort of hitting that inflection point. That's when you're really going to see the growth takeoff. But for whatever reason, and i t. All we ever do is we're trying to replicate the old until we figure out the old didn't really work, and we should do something new. >>Well, let me throw something old and controversial. Controversial old but old old trope out there. Consumerism ation of I t. I mean, if you think about what year was first year you heard that term, was it 15 years ago? 20 years ago. When did that first >>podcast? Yeah, so that was a long time ago >>way. So if you think about it like, it kind of is happening. And what does it mean, right? Come. What does What does that actually mean in today's world Doesn't exist. >>Well, you heard you heard. Like Fred Luddy, whose founder of service now saying that was his dream to bring consumer like experiences to the enterprise will. Well, it didn't really happen. I mean, service not pretty. Pretty complicated compared toa what? We know what we do here, but so it's It's evolving. >>Yeah, I think there's also the enterprise ation of consumer technology that John the companies, you know, you look a zoom. They came to market with a highly consumer facing product, realized it didn't have the security tools, you know, to really be corporate great. And then they had to go invest a bunch of money in that. So, you know, I think that waken swing the pendulum all the way over to the consumer side, but that that kind of failed us, right? So now we're trying to bring it back to center a little bit where we blend the two together. >>Cloud kind of brings that I never looked at that way. That's interesting and surprising of consumer. Yeah, that's >>alright, guys. Hey, we gotta wrap Zs, Maribel. Always a pleasure having you guys on great great insights from the half hour flies by. Thanks so much. We appreciate it. >>Thank >>you guys. >>Alright, keep it right there. Mortgage rate content coming from the Cuban Cloud Day Volonte with John Ferrier and a whole lineup still to come Keep right there.

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, this is an episode in the Remote Works Citrix Virtual Series. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCUBE! Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019 brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we're welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni to the program today, Marybel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Maribel, great to have you back! >> I'm excited to be here, excited to be at Synergy! >> This has been a great day, the keynotes kicked off this morning, with really strong messaging around digital workspace, they gave so many stats that I think all of us can understand and digest. One of the things they talked about was, by 2020, which is a few months away, as frightening as that is, 50% of the work force is going to be mobile, we also know that this modern work force has five different generations of varying technology expertise, but one of the things that Keith and I, really struck us this morning was that, I think it was David Henshall that shared a number of seven trillion dollars is wasted every year on lack of output because the employee experiences are challenging and, if employees aren't satisfied and happy, talent attraction retention, out the window. So the future of work really is dramatically changing. Your thoughts on that. You did a lot of research on that, and the employee experience as a catalyst for digital transformation. >> Well I think if we step back and look at where technology's gone, we spend a lot of time just deploying technology, trying to digitize the business, right? That was the digital transformation, and you have to ask yourself what's next, and I think what we've seen is that, on the consumer side, we've seen this whole consumerization of technology, and when you're at home, you've great services. David Henshall actually talked about what you could do as a consumer versus what you can do as an employee. You know, my personal perspective is employees are people too, there's no reason why you need to go to the office, and you shouldn't have a good quality experience. But I think we've spent so much of our journey looking backward, like, okay, we have to take these things we had before and replicate them in the new world, and now I think we're moving with digital workspaces forward, what does it look like to work in 2020 and beyond? So I'm excited about that, 'cause I think it changes how we view it, to being about what should the process be? >> I'm always surprised, whenever I talk to a security professional, and I walk to them and I say, you know what, this customer wants to transfer data from one research institute to another one, what hoops do we have to jump through? >> Right, yeah. >> I'm surprised when they say, none, just have them do it. That is a very forward-thinking organization that's thought through this process. But not every organization has done it. What did you hear, either today on stage, or during your experience working with Citrix, that is reducing that friction between kind of the need for security and the need for frictionless work? If I need to share a file with a community group that I'm working on I just jump on Google or whatever and do it. What is Citrix doing that you've seen to enable that type of frictionless employee experience? >> Okay, so I'd say the first thing that's happened is that technology used to be in these really discrete silos, and you as an organization had to be a systems integrator to make that happen, to make it so you could seamlessly share the files, you had to figure out their identity service, your identity service, permissioning inducts, you had to have similar technologies. I think what companies like Citrix are trying to do is take all that process out, do all that systems integration for you and to actually wrap a layer of security around it at the outset, as opposed to trying to retrofit the security at the back end of it, which is typically what we've done. And so now, you're not trying to figure out how do I macgyver five tools together to make this happen with duct tape and sticky glue, you're basically doing things like saying, I already have a security framework in it, I have to select how much or how little security I want, but all the rest of it, it's baked in, I can just roll it out and have it happen. >> The people element though, when we talk about security, we know that people are the number one biggest threat >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Where security is concerned. >> They'll go around the process. >> Or just take my password. >> Yeah. >> Exactly! >> Or it's written down on that sticky note that MacGyver is going to use to engineer the software. Where do you think Citrix is, in what they talked about today, what digital workspace, security, analytics, in enabling the employee experience to be done in a secure fashion, especially as there's so much distribution of workloads, people, businesses, applications? >> So security has always been a multilayered problem, but the problem that's been the weakest link has been the end user, because you decided that you needed to have a 13-character alphanumeric special characters only these five kind of password environment that changes every 90 days or for different different things, right? Where I think we're moving now, the whole Citrix story around this federated identity, whatever identity tools you're using, you can use those, we'll make that happen, you can get to a point where it's single sign on, you can get to a point where it's multi-factor authentication, where it's a thumb print or a passcode or, you know, choose your own adventure as an organization around how many of these you want. But it means that I as Maribel don't have to memorize 15 different things, which doesn't happen, I write them down, I put them on sticky notes, it's in my desk drawer, right? So, rather than do that, we get to a much more unified environment of I remember one thing, and it allows me access to say, the 500 apps I might have in the organization, 'cause you've found a way to authenticate me in a way that is seamless but also meaningful and secure. >> So, when I'm onsite with another employee I can simply take these devices I can flip that over, grab a pianist, start collaborating with my coworker, that's how ideas are formed. Talk to us about the importance of the partnership between Citrix and Microsoft with the team solution. We are taking this DM-IM tool, marrying it with Office three 65 products and then putting collaboration around that. Where's the value Citrix is bringing to that collaboration? >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple of pieces of value that Citrix brings to the collaboration. One is this concept of contact switching, like how many tools do you want to go to, to figure out what's going on, right? Some people are in this type of messaging, some people are in teams, some people are in emails, some people are in some other social network, right, there's about eight or nine different places any given person could be, or be doing work with somebody because we all have preferences, right, so the question is, if you're someone like Citrix, how do you help somebody unify that, in a way that they can see all of their different touch points, and teams has becoming and increasingly growing part of that touch point community, right, people like that instant on access to other individuals, right, it's become part of our nature in consumers, it's now part Of our nature in business. But that doesn't mean that you might also not want to be looking at your Outlook email. It doesn't mean that there might be something that's in Sales Force that you also need to be cognizant of. So what you look at someone like Citrix is doing, is helping you unify that with the tools you already have, so you can leverage the best of all of them, but they are not so disparate that you can't figure out what's going on. >> When you're having conversations with customers in different industries, where is the employee experience and the intelligence needed to drive a really solid employee experience, where is that in terms of a C Suite imperative? >> So if you asked me that a year ago, I would say it wasn't as high on the list as it is today. I think what's happened in the past year is that, we did a survey actually, and 78% of the C Suite put it in the top three for their list of imperatives. Security actually being obviously one of the key issues of our generation it seems. But in addition to that, people really get now that talent is the competitive differentiation, so employee experience is related to talent, and employee experience is actually many things. You can define it extremely broadly, from the time that you are engaging with a prospect all the way though the time that they become an alumni of the corporation. So employee experience isn't this one-and-done bounded thing, it's not just when you're an employee, it's not just when you're in recruiting, but in general, corporations really get this, and now they're looking for a way to make this happen. And I think there's lots of ways we can make this happen. One of the biggest things that I think is happening is the concept of not just redoing our old experiences, but looking at what work should look like today, and that's what are the devices that they're using, are they owned devices or not, what their physical workspaces look like, how you integrate technology and buildings, what does your digital workspace look like. And not just for employees, but we also have this new gig economy that we're looking at as well, so if you really want talent, part of the employee experience might be that they are only going to be an employee for three month, how do you make sure you get them on board day one? That they can do their job effectively with all the tools that they need? And then when it's time for them to leave, you can turn them off so they can secure your data and content, and be really confident that they didn't take the keys to the kingdom with them, right? So I think that employee experience is a critical board-level topic and I think the biggest challenge now is figuring out how do we define that and what tools do we need in the organization to make that happen. >> So, as I look at this alumni network, married with the gig economy, I'm a former PWC guy, they constantly send me opportunities, like, sure, you don't want to come back and get burnt out again, but there's always opportunities to come back and do... >> Maribel: Project day >> Projects, as talent gets, in my opinion, more and more scarce, especially specialized talent around AI, machine learning, application development, process automation, et cetera, there's going to be a need to go out and extend your search for folks around the globe to do that work. When you think about partnerships and whether it's technology partnerships, partnerships with staffing companies, partnerships with social media, what are some of the trends that are kind of arranging or emerging as companies look to globalize their work force? >> Well I think that you picked up on one of them. Well if I step back for a second, I'd say we have to think of location independence. So a huge trend, particularly in large metros, where talent is very competitive, as people start to think more broadly about are there new locations that we want to create new offices in? If there aren't new locations, are there just easier ways to create a remote work environment where people can work at home? And there's two types of remote work. There's remote work like, I want to work at home maybe two days a week because the commute is terrible, or there's remote work like, I never go to an office, and both of those have to be first-class citizens, and both of them also have to foster a sense of community, because part of the challenge around that is what we call the water cooler problem. How do you give people enough technology that they feel like they're almost in the room with people, that they have the right access to people and information, wherever they are, and that they are part of an environment and a culture, because I think that's really important. So we're seeing location independence being one of the huge trends we're looking at. We're also seeing that trend of they can come and they can go, they might be what I call the part-time employee trend. We're also seeing a trend of use the tool you want. There are many ways you can get a job done. You might be a PC, a Mac, a Surface person. You might want to use big phones, small phones. All these things don't necessarily need be company-owned as well, so how do you get people the tools they want? People are very specific about what collaboration suites they want, what document storage they want, what SAS applications they want, and teams will pick these types of things. So it's really important when people are building the next generation of technology that they allow enough flexibility for choice, so that you can actually say, okay, you want to to use these devices, you want to use these SAS apps, we can find a way to manage and secure that and let you work the way you want to work, because that's attractive to you and that will keep you employed with us. >> When you're having those conversations with businesses about the location independence, which I fully support, I've been doing it for a long time, there's a cultural impact there, whether it's a start-up that has been around for five years, or a legacy corporation like Citrix that's been around for 30. How often does that cultural transformation come up in your customer conversations? And, similar to my question about where employee experience is within the C Suite, are you seeing cultural transformation also elevate to, hey, in order to be really competitive and really successful we've got to modify our culture, maybe to embrace, not just for technologies, but these different ways of working? >> So I've been talking to a lot of organizations about what does the concept of diversity mean, and diversity means a lot of different things. Diversity means diversity of geography, diversity means diversity of opinions, diversity means diversity of technology. It is changing the way you think about culture from being everybody has to be in the building. It's also diversity in terms of how you evaluate an employee's worth. So one of the big cultural changes that people have been talking about is, they felt it was easier when you were sitting in a building from nine to five to know that you were working and now people are working many different hours and many different geographies, and I think the big rethink for organizations is what is the value that you're bringing, and what are the metrics that you're impacting, and how do I focus on that, as opposed to you worked 3.2 hours today because your VPN connection said so. That thinking has to go away. It has to be moved into a meritocracy, but it also has to be very much structured of like we really need to know what we're trying to do and trying to accomplish, so we can create the right goals for our employees, and I think that that concept of going from I saw you therefore you must be working, to you impacted our net promoter score, you impacted sales, something that you can say, this was the business value of employees, so that they feel that they have worth and you understand their worth, is actually a real big change in the future work that's not about the technology, technology can enable you to get there, but it's really about a rethink of how we do business. >> Oh, exciting, I wish we had more time but Maribel thank you for joining Keith and me and sharing your insights and educating us, even on the different ways of looking at diversity, so interesting, thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy day one from Atlanta, Georgia. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering AT&T Spark. (techy music) Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at AT&T's Spark event, it's up in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts. It's really all about 5G, and we're excited to be here, you know, there's been a lot of conversation about 5G for a very, very long time, and we're super excited to have the expert in the field. Maribel Lopez has been following this forever. So Maribel, first off, thanks for stopping by, thanks for hosting a few segments and great to catch up. >> Excited to be here. >> Absolutely, so 5G, you've made a funny comment before we went on. You said, "Jeff, this 5G's been going on "forever and ever and ever, but now it's finally "starting to come to reality, to fruition." >> Yeah, I got to see all the Gs: the 2G, the 3G, the 4G, now the 5G, and you know, for a couple of years we were just talking about standards, and what's really exciting to me is that now people are talking about doing production stuff, you know, not just rolling in a test van and prototype equipment, but actual things that we might be able to see deployed within the coming year. >> Right. >> People are talking about lighting up cities. AT&T announced another five cities that they were going to put, actually seven, I think, on the calendar. >> Up to a dozen, I think, now, then they had another-- >> Yes, they had seven, they added another five-- >> Seven after that, right. >> And then another seven, so we're really starting to see momentum in 5G, it's going to happen. >> Right, so there's a bunch of things with 5G that are fundamentally different than the last G. >> Right. >> And the first one, right, is it wasn't really developed just for faster voice. That was not the objective of 5G. >> Yeah. >> It's really to take advantage of IoT and this whole kind of machine to machine world in which we're in right now. >> Yeah. >> That's a fundamental difference in terms of the applications that it can open up. >> Yeah, we're seeing... To your point, I mean, we talked a lot about bandwidth before. Yes, you get more bandwidth, but you also get lower latency, and that's the thing of how fast something can travel, and that opens up a huge amount of new applications like autonomous driving. If you want a wireless connection in autonomous driving you need 5G so you have that, you know, really sharp response time to make it happen. If you're doing remote medicine, you know, 5G gives you both bandwidth, but also the latency to see if something's happening so that you can do things that are real-time in nature. So, I think it's that real-time in nature with high speed that everybody's talking about. We saw eSports and gaming listed today, and the discussion about how you could now do it on a low-end PC because between your 5G network and new software you've got this huge opportunity with the cloud to just do a whole new, different way of gaming and entertainment, so lots of great applications are coming out with 5G. >> Yeah, it's pretty interesting on that demo, because it was an NVIDIA guy talking about-- >> Yes. >> Having basically an NVIDIA data center to do all the graphic computation back in the cloud at the NVIDIA data center-- >> Yeah. >> And then delivering it to whatever kind of low-end edge device that you had, in this case a laptop. The funny thing about the latency that I thought really kind of struck home for me was they talked about when your audio and your video are slightly out of sync when you're watching a video. >> Exactly. >> When it's just off a little bit. >> Mm-hm. >> Not enough like, "Wait, this is broken," but enough to actually get nausea. >> Yeah. >> You actually have a physical reaction, so I think that was really interesting. That is what's going to go away when we have the better connectivity speeds, everything else with 5G. >> And I think that's when one of the things that's been holding back the immersive nature of new applications like VR, so that disconnect that you talked about is really important to get rid of that, and you can get rid of part of that with wireless and part of it with low latency. So, if we get the headsets a little smaller and we get more content I think we'll start to get a better vision of what's happening there. I also think we're starting to see these things come into the enterprise. You know, the enterprises are really taking 5G seriously. They're looking at doing things like their own private 5G networks in things like manufacturing and robotics, for example. >> Right, right, yeah, the private 5G, interesting, in a lot of conversation, too, about doing it for the first responders to have their own dedicated network, but one of the topics I thought interesting was the commitment to software and the commitment to opensource, and we've kind of seen the rise of the telcos and OpenStack. >> Yeah. >> We've been covering OpenStack, I think since 2013, and you could see with each and every passing year that the telco presence within the OpenStack community just increased and it really seemed to find a home, and here they dedicated a whole keynote session to AT&T's embracing of opensource. >> Yeah, opensource is actually interesting because I think it's counterintuitive to think that a large enterprise customer like AT&T would go so deep into opensource, but when you really think of it, if you want to be innovative and you want to run at, you know, what we now consider cloud speed-- >> Right. >> Digital native speed, then you need to have that concept of opensource and open APIs to build on top of so that really what you're focusing on is the part of your business that differentiates you, not on building the whole stack. So, the days of building, like, your whole stack from scratch are over, and opensource is really important, and what I found really interesting about that was the takeaway that so many companies, even competitors of each other, had all thrown in on this concept of this opensource technology so that they could basically bootstrap their innovation. >> Right, the other kind of theme that kind of came up, which I found really interesting, is if you've ever seen Jeff Bezos speak on his investment in Blue Origin. >> Yeah. >> He talks very specifically that he wants to put a platform in play-- >> Mm-hm. >> Leveraging the winnings that he's gotten from Amazon to enable future entrepreneurs to have an infrastructure in which they can build cool applications-- >> Absolutely. >> In this case for space. We heard the same message here within this kind of 5G, that the concept of, you know, kind of infinite compute, infinite bandwidth-- >> Right. >> And infinite storage asymptotically approaching zero, what applications would you build in that world, and really this constant conversation of experience, whether that be a business experience, a consumer experience-- >> Yeah. >> A first responder experience, is really what's behind kind of the excitement on this 5G conversation. >> I think there was always a disconnect of when you get data, and how quickly you can analyze that data and get it back to somebody to do something meaningful, so this whole experience is about even if you are not holding a 5G handset or some 5G thing in your hand or elsewhere, what that will do is because they've built the 5G infrastructure you get the opportunity to make 4G better for everybody. So, I think people think, "Oh, I've got to wait for 5G." It's like, "No, you're going to see the benefits "of 5G long before everybody's ubiquitously deployed, "long before everybody has 5G devices." >> Right. >> Things are just going to work better, and you can get that data faster and new experiences faster, so I'm excited for it. >> Right, and then the other piece that we hear over and over, right, is AI and machine learning, and again-- >> Absolutely, mm-hm. >> It's not AI and machine learning just for the sake of AI and machine learning. It's baked into all these other applications to make them all work better, and again, that's another big thing that we hear here at the keynotes. >> Yeah, I think the AI and machine learning is interesting because we've had it for a long time, but now everybody has access to it, right? We've got cloud services that give you algorithms, we've got massive compute, and now we've got the ability to take all the data from IoT sensors and other things and get it back to either a centralized place, or to do edge compute on it, which I think is really exciting. >> Right, so just to wrap, get your kind of your final impressions on kind of the show-- >> Yeah. >> And again, you said you'd been here for all the Gs, (laughs) so is a 5G, is this a big difference from our prior step functions? >> I think it is because of that latency that we talked about and the ability to do much more real-time, data intensive apps. So, you've always had this concept of moving to more data, but it had lower latency, it might've had a higher cost. Now we're getting that right kind of combination of cost, bandwidth, real-time nature, so I think every G gets better and 5G is just better than 4G, but in different ways, so-- >> All right, well Maribel, thanks again for stopping by, and also for helping us out guest hosting a few segments. >> Thank you. >> All right, (chuckles) she's Maribel, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AT&T Spark in San Francisco, thanks for watching. (techy music)

>> Narrator: Live, from San Jose. It's theCUBE. Presenting Big Data, Silicon Valley. Brought to you by SiliconAngle Media, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome come back to theCUBE, we are live in San Jose, at our event, Big Data SV. I'm Lisa Martin. And we are down the street from the Strata Data Conference. We've had a great day so far, talking with a lot of folks from different companies that are all involved in the big data unraveling process. I'm excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our extinguished alumni, Maribel Lopez; the founder and principal analyst at Lopez research. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. I'm excited to be here. >> Yeah, so you've been, a startup conference started a couple days ago. What are some the trends and things that you're hearing that are really kind of top of mind for not just the customers that are attending, the companies that are creating or are trying to create solutions around this big data challenge and opportunity? >> Yeah absolutely, I mean I think we talked a lot about data in the years past. How do you gather the data? How do you store the data? How you might want to process the data? This year seems to be all about how do I make something interesting happen with the data? How do I make an intelligent inside? How do I cure prostate cancer? How do I make sure I can classify images? It's a really different show, and we've also changed some of the terminology a lot more in machine learning now, and artificial intelligence, and frankly a lot of discussion around ethics. So it's been very interesting. >> Data ethics you mean? >> Data ethics; how do we do privacy? How do we maintain the right level of data so that we don't have bias in our data? How do we get Diversity Inclusion going? Lots really interesting powerful human topics, not just about the data. >> I love that the human topics especially where you know AI and ML come into play. You talked, data diversity. Or bias that we were just at that women and data science conference a couple of days ago talking to a lot of female leaders in in data science, computer science, both in academia as well as in industry. And one of the interesting topics about the gender disparity, is the fact that that is limiting the analyses on data in terms of, there may be a few perspectives looking on it. So there's an inherent bias there. So that's one issue, and I'd like to get your thoughts on that. Another is with that thought, lack of thought diversity, I guess I would say going into analyzing the data, companies might be potentially limiting themselves on the types of products that they can create, how to monetize the data and actually drive new revenue streams. On the kind of thought diversity will start there. What are some of the things that you're hearing, and what are some of your recommendations for your clients on how to get some of that bias out of data analysis? >> Yes it's interesting. One is trying to find multiple sources of data. So there's data that you have and that you own. But there is a wide range of openly available data now. There's some challenges around making sure that that data is clean before you integrated with your data. But basically, diversifying your data sources with third party data is one big thing that we're talking about. In previous analytical generations, I think we talked a lot about how to have a hypothesis, and you were trying to prove a hypothesis. And now I think we're trying to be a little more open and looser, and not really lead the data where per se, but try to find the right patterns and correlations in the data. And then just awareness in general. Like we don't believe we're biased. But if we have data that's biased who gets put into the system. So we have to really be thoughtful about what we put into the system. So I think that those three things combined have really changed the way people are looking at it. And there's a lot of awareness now around that. Because we assume at some point, the machines might be making certain decisions for us. And we want to make sure that they have the best information to do that. And that they don't limit our opportunities as a society. >> Where are companies in terms of the clients that you see, culturally in terms of embracing the openness? 'Cause you're right! From a scientific scientific method perspective. People go into, I'm going to hypothesize this because I think I'm going to find this. And maybe wanting the data to say this. Where are companies, we'll say enterprises, in becoming culturally more open to not leading the data somewhere and bringing up bias? >> Well, there are two interesting things here, right? I think there are some people that have gone down the data route for a while now, sort of the industry leading companies. They're in this mindset now trying to make sure they don't leave the data, they don't create biases in the data. They have ways to explain how the data and the analysis of the learning came about, not just for regulation, but so that they can make sure they ethically done the right thing. But then I think there's the other 95 percent of companies that they're not even there yet. They don't know that this is a problem yet. So they're still dealing with the "I've got a pool in the data." "I've got to do something with it." They don't even know what they want to do with it let alone if it's biased or not. So we're not quite at the leading the witness point there with a lot of organizations. >> But that's something that you expect to see maybe down the road. >> I'm hoping we'll get ahead of it. I'm really hoping that we'll get ahead of it. >> It's a good positive outlook on it, yeah? >> I think that, I think because the real analysis of the data problem in a big machine learning, deep learning way is so new, and the people are actually out seeking guidance, that there is an opportunity to get ahead of it. The second thing that's happening is, people don't have data scientists, right? So they don't necessarily have the people that can code this. So what they're doing now, is they're depending on the vendor landscape to provide them with an entry level set of tools. So if you're Microsoft, if you're Google, if you're Amazon, you're trying very hard to make sure that you're giving tools that have the right ethics in them, and that can help kickstart people's Machine Learning efforts. So I think that's going to be a real win for us. And we talked a lot today at the Strata conference about how, oh you don't have enough images, you can't do that. Or you don't have enough data, you can't do that. Or you don't have enough data scientists. And some of what came back is that, some of the best and the brightest have coded some things that you can start to use to kickstart that will get you to a better place than you ever could have started with yourself. So that was pretty exciting, you know. Transfer learning as an example of taking you know, image node from Google and some algorithms, and using those to take your images and try to figure out if somebody has Alzheimer's or not. Encode things Alzheimer's or not characteristic. So, very cool stuff, very exciting and nice to see that we've got some minds working on this for us. >> Yeah, definitely. Where you're meeting with clients that don't have a data scientist, or chief analytics officer? Sounds like a lot of the technologies need to or some have built in sort of enablement for a difference data citizen within a company. If you talking to clients that don't have a data scientist or data science team, who are your constituents there? Where are companies that don't maybe have that skill gap? Who do they go to in their organization to start evaluating the data that they have to get to know what and start to understand what their potential is? >> Yeah, there's a couple of places people go. They go to their business decision analytics people. So the people that were working with their BI dashboards, for example. The second place they go is to the cloud computing guys, cuz we're hearing a lot about cloud computing and maybe I can buy some of the stuff from the cloud. I'm just going to roll up and get all my machine learning in the cloud, right? So we're not there yet. So the biggest thing that I talk to people about right now is, what are the realities around Machine Learning and AI? We've made tremendous progress but you know you read the newspaper, and something is going to get rid of your job, and AI's going to take over the world, and we're kind of far from that reality. First of all it's very dystopian and negative. But even if it weren't that, you know what you can do today, is not that. So there's a lot of stages in between. So the first thing is just trying to get people comfortable with. No you can't just buy one product, and throw in some data, and you've got everything you need. >> Right. >> We're not there yet. But we're getting closer. You can add some components, you can get some new information, you could do some new correlations. So just getting a reality and grounding of where we are, and that we have a lot of opportunity, and that it's moving very fast. that's the other thing. >> Right. >> IT leaders are used to all evaluated once a year, evaluated once every couple of years. These things are moving in monthly increments. Like really huge changes in product categories. So you kind of have to keep on top of it to make sure you know what's available to you. >> Right. And if they don't they miss out on not only the ability to monetize data streams, but essentially going out of business. Because somebody will come in may be more nimble and agile, and be able to do it faster. >> Yeah. And we already saw those with the digital native companies that started born in the cloud companies, we used to call them. Well, now, everybody can be using the cloud. So the question then is like what's the next wave of that? The next wave of that is around understanding how to use your data, understanding how to get third-party data, and being able to rapidly make decisions and change models based on that. >> One of the things that's interesting about big data is you know it was a big buzzword, and it seems to be becoming less of a buzzword now. Gartner even was saying I think the number was 85 percent of big data projects and I think that's more in tested environments fail. And I often say, "Failure in a lot of cases is not a bad effort." Because it spawns genesis of new products, new ideas, et cetera. But when you're talking with clients who go, alright, we've embraced Hadoop, we've got this big data lake, now it's turning really swampy. We don't know-- >> We've got lakes, we've got oceans, we've got ponds. Yeah. >> Right. What's the conversation there where you're helping a customer clean that swamp up, get broader visibility across their datasets and enable different lines of business. Not just you know, the BI folks or the cloud folks or IT. But marketing, logistics, sales. What's that conversation like to clean up the swamp and do more enablement for visibility? >> I think one of the things that we got really hung up on was, you know, creating a data ocean, right? We're going to bring everything all in one place, it's going to be this one massive data source. >> It sounded great. >> It's going to be awesome. And this is not the reality of the world, right? So I think the first thing in the cleaning up that we have to do, is being able to figure out what's the source of truth for any given dataset that somebody needs. So you see 15 salespeople walk in and they all have different versions of the data that shouldn't happen. >> Right. >> So we need to get to the point where they know where the source of truth is for that data. The second is sort of governance around the data. We spent a lot of time dumping the data but not a lot of time in terms of getting governance around who can access it, what they can do with it, for how long they could have access to it. Is it just internal? Is it internal and external? So I think that's the second thing around like harassing and haranguing the swamps, and the lakes and the ponds, right? And then assuming that you do that, I think the other thing is, You know, if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Well, in reality you know when you construct things you have nails, you have screws, you have bolts, right? And picking the right tool for the job is something that the IT leadership has to work with. And the only way that they get that right is to work very closely with the different lines of business so they can understand the problem. Because the business leader knows the problem, they don't know the solution. If you put them together which we've talked about forever, frankly. But now I think we're seeing more imperatives for those two to work closely together. And sometimes it's even driven by security, just to make sure that the data isn't leaking into other places or that it's secure and that they've met regulatory compliance. So we're in a much better space than we were two, three, five years ago cuz we're thinking about the real problems now. Not just how do you collect it, and how do you store it. But how do we actually make it an actionable manageable set of solutions. >> Exactly, and make it work for the business. Well Maribel, I wish we had more time, but thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE, sharing the insights that you've seen. Not just at a conference, but also with your clients. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, I'm Lisa Martin, live from Big Data SV, in Downtown San Jose. Get involved in the conversation #BigDataSV. Come see us at the Forager Eatery & Tasting Room, and I'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Fransisco, it's theCUBE covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference live here in San Fransisco, California, Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE media and co-host here at theCUBE's exclusive coverage with Maribel Lopez, Founder and Principle Analyst at Lopez Research, good friend of theCUBE, Cube albumni. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> We see each other all the time at the industry events, usually enterprise and some cloud events. We've been seeing each other a lot at these, kind of consumer events. >> Yeah. >> Sounds like the consumerization of IT is happening. >> Big crossover. Yeah, I don't believe there is any consumer or enterprise, there's just degrees of, you know, how much security, how much management ya get, right? It's got to be a good consumer device to be used by anyone. >> What are some of the analyst reports you guys are putting out now? Obviously, you've been covering apps, to kind of set that up. As you know, we always talk in the past about IoT, >> Maribel: Yeah. >> The intelligent edge, cloud, and the role of app developers that are coming into the enterprise. Every CIO has got a mandate. More app development. Devops. Devops. It's hard. How is this helping? >> You know, I've previously come at this from the concept of mobile enablement in the enterprise, right? And now, it just seems like we're just looking at new applications, new experiences that cross boundaries, right? Is it at your home? Is it in a hotel? Is it on your corporate campus, right? I think the role of the app developer is changing to be more encompassing. I think the big news in all the shows we go to now is like AI and machine learning. That term is just everywhere. It's the IoT of 2017, right? Last year was IoT; this year it's AI and machine learning. So we're seeing a lot of that for the app dev community. >> And now you start to see Augmented Reality, also known as AR, in this space of Samsung and Apple and these new app developers. Augmented Reality core, obviously from a development standpoint, big news here at the Samsung conference. The other big news is ARCore and ARKit, ARKit is the IOT piece. [Maribel] - Mhm. >> So we've been seeing a lot of slowdown in Iot. For instance, everyone is kicking the tires on Iot, but it's industrial Iot that's getting the traction. >> Yeah, I think industrial IoT is getting the traction because they've been at it for years, right? It was M2M before that. If you look at what is happening in consumer IoT, it's still an absolute disaster. So, I think the big news of the day, for Samsung, I mean, obviously, we just talked about how AI was in there, we talked about how ARVR was in there. But, what we didn't talk about is the fact that now we're looking at the SmartThings Cloud. And this is the attempt to say, listen, we've got many different clouds; how do we unify clouds as Samsung? And then, also, how do we let other people participate in the cloud? 'Cause the real challenge is, everybody has their fiefdom right now. >> John: Yeah. >> You know, you're in the Apple fiefdom, you're in the Google fiefdom, you're in the Alexa Amazon fiefdom. How do we get to a point where I can just use my stuff? >> Yeah, this is classic breaking down the silos in the world we talk about in the enterprise. >> Yeah. >> And that's been like a two generation initiative. But you look at the guest I just had on theCUBE, Mary Min and Greg Harris before that. They're a different culture. They don't really give a crap about plumbing. >> Maribel: (laughs) No, no. >> They're producing AR games. they've got security challenges. So their development challenges are very DevOps native. They didn't sign up for DevOps, they just are DevOps cloud native. So, that world is one, then you got the IT guys going, wait a minute, I got to support this new edge device. >> Right. I've got to manage it, I've got to secure it. >> Those worlds are coming together. >> Maribel: Yes, absolutely. >> Your thoughts on Samsung's opportunity; are they poised, do they care about IT; IT care about Samsung? >> You know, Samsung's a big company, right? So it really depends on what division of Samsung you're looking at, whether or not they care about IT. What I would say though, is that they're trying to make moves that will can across the board now, right? Trying to make a cloud that can be secure for your consumer things, but can also be upleveled if you want to make it an enterprise of things cloud as well, right? The AI concept is really about just creating usability. And, I think when we think of DevOps, what we think about is creating better application experiences that can know you, that can respond to you. And this is the whole... we talked about Big Data a few years ago, remember everything was Big Data, right? Well Big Data is now machine learning and AI, which is the natural evolution of it. So, I'm starting to see a lot of things that can be used across Samsung. So, I do think in that regard, they're well positioned. They've got a lot of technology in the home. They've got a lot of presence for the enterprise mobile camp. The IoT camp, I think is a wild card for everybody right now. >> What do you think about Samsung's chances with the cloud they have? Because they sprinkle a little bit of cloud in there. >> Maribel: Yeah. >> They didn't talk about data at all, which I was surprised. They kind of inherently... I mean it's a privacy issue; a security thing. But I love the presentation about the kitchen. >> Maribel: Oh yeah, that was great. >> Because the kitchen is where... >> The family hub for the home, right? >> The family hub, that's where everyone hangs out at the parties, right? Everyone ends up in the kitchen. But it kind of highlights this consumerization trend. They kind of sprinkled cloud, but I'm not seeing cloud... I'm not seeing, like, we're bringing compute to you. So, is that just native for Samsung? Is it a missed opportunity? Are they strong there? What's your thoughts? >> I think you actually started with this whole dialogue of well, does anybody really care about what the background technology is, right? So I think we're definitely a little lighter on the terms and more about what the use cases were. Like, why do you use this? They have semiconductors, they have a cloud, they have security, they have devices. They've got a lot of things, so it's really not about the technology as much as it used to be, right? What I think some of the differences might be is a cloud for what? >> Yeah. >> And they are actually taking the approach of we've got a cloud for things and we know what these things are. So I think they're well positioned in that regard because they will have a specific cloud that's not just a generic cloud. >> I think they want to own the interface. To me, my take away, squithing through the hype is they want to own the interface edge. If you contrast say Samsung to say Alibaba group, which we were just covering them in China, compare them to Amazon, you'll see a contrast in strategies. Obviously, Amazon is just blowing everyone away on a massive scale. And they're not even in China. So, if they were actually in China the numbers would be off the charts. >> Maribel: Yeah, be a different thing, yeah. >> But, lets take Alibaba, for instance, and Samsung. Alibaba's an eCommerce company. But they don't want to be known as an eCommerce company. They're heavily invested in data. That's front and center of their message. Smart cities, they're talking about. They have a big cloud that they're pumping out, so that's much different, for them, they don't have an edge device, ya know? >> Yeah, well.. >> Samsung does, but we don't hear cloud, smart cities. We hear family hubs, smart TV, Bixby. >> But it is an experience world, right? And I think that's been the problem with technology adoption to date. You can't figure out how to use it, right? So the next big evolution of technology isn't necessarily about creating a new thing. It's about being able to use a thing. I think Enjon actually made a great comment when he said we use about 10% of the functionality in our cell phone. Why is that? You don't even know it's there. You don't know how to find it, you don't know how to turn it on and off. Like how do you just simplify what we have today? And if they can do that, that was, or used to be, the hallmark of Apple right? >> John: Right. >> And now people are like, well, even Apple products are kind of of complex compared to what they used to be. So how do we get this back to we can use the stuff that we already have built. >> You're nailing it, Maribel. I totally agree with you 100% because if you look at the big waves of innovation: web 1.0 '90's. Mid '90's, '95. Web 2.0 and then now Blockchain and cloud. >> Absolutely. >> All the winners simplified things, reduced the steps it takes to do something and made it easy to use. >> Yeah. >> That's the magical formula. >> Frictionless. >> FYI, entrepreneurs, simplify, make it easy to use and reduce the steps it takes to find stuff; to do stuff. >> Absolutely. >> That's the magical formula. Okay, so, with that in mind, critical analysis of Samsung and a positive analysis of Samsung, then. What did they do right here and what can they work on? >> Okay, so what they did right: I think they are finally trying to pull together all the different versions of Samsung and allow you to have a couple of things, Bixby and cloud, to go across devices; that's right. What I think they still need to work on is there's still boundaries there. It's not exactly clear like where things start, where things end. And they're a little cryptic on the details right now. >> John: You mean under the hood. >> Under hood, I mean I think devs are here to figure out what's going on. How do I make this happen? So there better be some real serious deep dives in these dev sessions so that they know exactly, when they leave, what they can build with Samsung. And how does it work with non-Samsung things. That's still a huge wild card. >> And obviously, cloud, multi-cloud enterprises, you need infrastructure. >> Yeah. >> I mean, smart cities, smart homes, you need plumbing. You need to have compute power, you need some storage. I'm not hearing any of that here. >> No, I don't think that that was a tone that they were trying to take. I think they've been looking much more high level at, if you're a developer, what experiences could you have. I'd also like to see more about how to help monetization. If you go to IO, you go to WWDC, there's always these big slides about how are we going to make money as developers by using this platform. And so that's something we need to see a little more of. >> I got my Samsung smaller phone. I'm going to have to get the Galaxy, the big one, looking good. The screens are great, the cameras are great. >> The Note 8 is really great. It's a good device. >> They're the one with the pen, that's on the Note. Okay, Maribel, thanks for coming on. Appreciate you sharing your analysis. Quick update, what are you doing now? What are you up to? What are they key research pillars? >> Yeah, everybody's trying to figure out what machine learning and AI mean for them. And then, what are the real use case behind IoT. So, we talked a lot about industrial Iots's, right? Anything else? Is there Iot for GENbiz? We'll have to find out. >> Maribel Lopez, been on theCUBE so many times, she's practically an analyst on theCUBE here. Great to have you come on, really appreciate your insight. Check her out, Lopez Research, the best in the business. Been covering the span of enterprise to IT, to consumerization. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action live here at Moscone West. Exclusive coverage of Samsung Developers Conference. Bringing Augmented reality, virtual reality, all this new user interface to the masses. >> Maribel: All the reality. Everywhere. >> All the reality. This is theCUBE, data reality here on theCUBE, a new TV show. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >> Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called the Supercloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks that's right Supercloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the Supercloud 2 lineup of guests whereas Supercloud 22 in August, was all about refining the definition of Supercloud testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models. Supercloud 2 features practitioners, technologists and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of Supercloud and will expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now the example we'd use if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities they're choosing products they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the Supercloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data storages, databases, Lakehouse, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems, and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at Supercloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Zhamak Dehghani, the founder of Data Mesh is a headliner. Kit Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first Supercloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most current thinking on the topic. Veronika Durgin of Sachs will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and you know what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of Supercloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's Supercloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Warner Media. We've got deep, deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zuk, the founder of Palo Alto Networks focused on security. Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for Supercloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan and so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda, so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail starting with the Walmart Cloud native platform, they call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a Supercloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. "WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source." By the way, they do the same thing with OpenStack. "And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything." And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a Supercloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain, along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its Supercloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next, let's take a look at how Veronica Durgin of SAKS thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for Supercloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. >> How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? You know, I work with data, you know this is what I do. So if you know I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think Supercloud comes to me in my mind, is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network that we can easily share data with each other? >> Now data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Zhamak Dehghani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the Supercloud. Now one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for Supercloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft Exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community's supercloud definition and he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time he came up with the following definition that we're showing here. I'll read it. "A Supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition he's stressed that the Supercloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider eg Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now interestingly in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the supercloud de definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai who is actually building a Supercloud responded as follows to Bob's assertion "We need to avoid creating many Supercloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how Supercloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model and how users will interact with Supercloud?" What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the ladder may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail in Supercloud 2, and of course we'd love to hear what you think platform, architecture, both? Now one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at Supercloud two is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO and he is now working on a system to enable read write data access to any user in any application in any data center or on any cloud anywhere. So think of this company as a Supercloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Flore and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the Supercloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant. "What is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications." So a couple of implications here that will be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture and there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept the further you move up the stack. So the weak, the further you move the stack the weaker the supercloud argument becomes because it's just becoming SaaS. Now this is something we're going to explore to better understand is thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of SaaS is changing and whether or not a new breed of Supercloud apps will emerge. Which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I RIFed with ahead of Supercloud two. Tristan Handy, he's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, "One of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to." A lot of implications to this statement that will explore at Supercloud two versus Jamma Dani's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgin of SAKS and her ideal state for data shearing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union. They got to deal with 200 locations around the world in data privacy issues, data sovereignty how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical. And not to blow your mind but Thomas Hazel and Bob Muglia deposit that to make data apps a reality across the Supercloud you have to rethink everything. You can't just let in memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather you have to get down to really detailed levels even things like how data is laid out on disk, ie flash and think about rewriting applications for the Supercloud and the MLAI era. All of this and more at Supercloud two which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR Eric Bradley and Darren Bramberm to see if they had any data on Supercloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at Supercloud two. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling Supercloud-like capabilities. On the Y axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal accesses market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So netscore versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted now not to steal ETR's thunder but the first point is you really can't have supercloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of Supercloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik. VMware Tanzu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements, is also showing momentum. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program but they're clearly a player here. And we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other call out that we drill down on at Supercloud two is CloudFlare, which actually uses the term supercloud maybe in a different way. They look at Supercloud really as you know, serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at Supercloud two along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend Supercloud two? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services for monetizing data how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a Supercloud you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment there's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of Supercloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them, by the way, are kind of thrown up their hands and saying, Hey, we're going mono cloud. And we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that. And also some of the benefits. You know, there's a question, right? Is Supercloud the same wine new bottle or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to Supercloud.world it's January 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the Supercloud supporters. VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor Chaos Search Proximo, and Alura as well. For contributing to the effort I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and at our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. Thank you all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast. Wherever you listen we really appreciate the support that you've given. We just saw some stats from from Buzz Sprout, we hit the top 25% we're almost at 400,000 downloads last year. So really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or if you want to get ahold of me you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Supercloud two or next time on breaking analysis. (light music)

Hello and welcome back to Supercloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s. My name is Dave Vellante. Our Supercloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Sanjeev Mohan is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjeev Mohan. And Keith Townsend is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today. Good to see you. >> Okay, great. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks. Let me start, Maribel, with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of Supercloud the other day. And he said, "Dave, I like the work, you got to simplify this a little bit." So he said, quote, "A Supercloud is a platform." He said, "Think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." And then Nelu Mihai said, "Well, wait a minute. This is just going to create more stove pipes. We need more standards in an architecture," which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on. Is supercloud an architecture, a platform? Or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? >> Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword. And then we could just kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to supercloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So, having said this, I think we've been talking about Supercloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks to that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And some of the question is where that lives. And you could call that an abstraction layer. You could call it cross-cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. What is that layer? And maybe that's what the supercloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with supercloud is. What are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the supercloud layer? Is a supercloud just another variant of what AWS, GCP, or others do? You spoken to Walmart about its cloud native platform, and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, I do think it's something. I think we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about supercloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that supercloud evolves. >> So thank you, Maribel. Keith, Brian Gracely, Gracely's law, things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture. Of course, the drawback is then you get a a bunch of stove pipes architectures. But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? >> So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's distribution of lineage managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, servers, .NET, databases, Oracle. We think of those as platforms, things that are fundamental we can build on top. Supercloud isn't today that. It is a framework or idea, kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmarts that's kind of supersized the idea of supercloud, or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize cloud native infrastructure, AWS multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a supercloud. >> Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a supercloud example, and now would presumably would be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture, maybe more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for supercloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show. At least currently, there's not a lot of cross-cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier. But how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? >> So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot. But even we don't talk about MongoDB in this like, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, it's a centralized proprietary platform. And they are building the capabilities that are needed for supercloud. So they're building things like you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite. Data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, Supercloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user. And I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud. Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model? Maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need server hybrid, cross-cloud, data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. Like Maribel and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill is tens of millions of lines, tens of millions 'cause there are over thousand teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about supercloud, we've got multiple clouds, and hybrid, on-prem, and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. >> It's interesting. Maribel, Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud. but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point as Sanjeev was making about hybrid. It's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? >> It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically, the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that. But how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanjeev's point. We're in a real struggle now where one hand we want to have best of breed services and on the other hand we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like geospatial analytics and big query, you're going to have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now, we're kind of layering this concept of supercloud on it. And some people think supercloud's about basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet. But it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data. And this gets back to cross-cloud services like Snowflake. Why did they even exist? They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go, though, Dave. >> Keith, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, And you're right, Maribel, cloud hasn't really been about just about cost savings. But I reached out to the ETR, guys, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far, their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances, or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, "Could you go look and see if you can find it?" Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot. You hear people whispering as analysts, "You better look into that repatriation trend." It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmarts in the world, maybe even not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talk to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? >> Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with (indistinct) who is an analyst over at GigaHome. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there. Whether they're completely on-premises data centers, and they own assets, or they're partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera, they have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud, and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explore. And we can talk about this a little bit later on. But our customers, net new, not a lot that were born in the cloud. And they get to this point where their workloads are static. And they look at something like a Kubernetes, or a OpenShift, or VMware Tanzu. And they ask the question, "Do I need the scalability of cloud?" I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason? No, I think internal IT operations are just naturally come to this realization. Hey, I have these resources on premises. The private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it rightsizing for the operating model that I have. >> Makes sense. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> If I missed something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation. I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud costs a lot and moving it back to on-premises. I mean, take like Capital One as an example. They got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now, the number one killer use case is FinOps. >> Maribel, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what are we seeing here? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak. The second thing is, some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about, if they were more static workloads, if it was already there? So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally, from a trend standpoint, these things aren't binary. Everybody, for a while, everything was going to go to the public cloud and then people are like, "Oh, it's kind of expensive." Then they're like, "Oh no, they're going to bring it all on-prem 'cause it's really expensive." And it's like, "Well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads." So I'm going to put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on site, then I'm going to do that there 'cause that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. >> A a number of practitioners leading up to Supercloud2 have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in monocloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. You're like, "In my group, we use AWS, or my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. We just kind of keep it separate." Are you guys hearing this in your view? Is that risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap best of breed? What do you guys think about that? >> Everybody thinks they're monocloud. Is anybody really monocloud? It's like a group is monocloud, right? >> Right. >> This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think your monocloud and you go like three doors down and figure out the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of monocloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources. So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on, and that they try to optimize. And we still have forked workloads. Somebody decides, "Okay, this SAP runs really well on this, or these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud." And maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peaked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual monocloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. >> Yeah, we're- >> Sorry, go ahead, Keith. >> Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS service every day. Just in your inbox, learn about a new AWS service cursory. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of monocloud, I'm in filing agreement with Maribel on this that, yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud. And that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried the licensed Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle Cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether be it M&A, licensing, data sovereignty. I am forced into a multi-cloud management style. But I do agree most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud whether you want to or not via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. >> Thank you. Sanjeev, you had a comment? >> Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is monocloud, at least if it's a large organization. Large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the program arises. As Keith said, the 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS, but then say let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see monocloud as being predominant because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider, and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi-cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks. And then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured, the identities in active directory are federated. And you can just start using a database in one cloud, which is OCI, and an application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's is unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. >> Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or if it was off camera so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying, "With AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my Snowflake." He said, "I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools." So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit. Some of the vendor talked that, "Oh yeah, we're so customer-focused." Not to pick on Google, but I mean everybody will say that. And then you say, "If you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do a ABC?" So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Keith, at our first supercloud event, that was on August 9th. And it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included said, "All right, cuts are coming." Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's Supercloud 22 and presumably VMware Explore, the company really... Well, certainly the US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explore Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Hawk Tan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services/supercloud? >> So I think our friend and Cube, along host still be even more offended at this statement than he was when I sat in the Cube. This was maybe five years ago. There's no company better suited to help industries or companies, cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard that VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem, even more so than the US data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU. Try being a company in Switzerland and having the Swiss data solvency issues. And there's no local cloud presence there large enough to accommodate your data needs. They had very serious questions about this. I talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads, my projects that are building around Kubernetes, and the CNCF infrastructure? Why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on-premises? I don't want to deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of the problem, I think, we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially. 4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is a unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross-cloud great? >> Yeah. So, VMware, obviously, to your point. OpenStack is another way of it. Actually, OpenStack, uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud, or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack. As you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps. And Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, it maybe even on-prem. And the machine polls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes. No human involvement. Today, you're on a CRM system, you're inputting, you're doing forms, you're, you're automating processes. We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does supercloud fit? >> So great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Duggan started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not is analogous to data products. Data products, basically, are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals, or it may be a retail data product, it may be an investment data product. So it's a pre-packaged extraction of data from different sources. But now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added. And it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data. Who is using that data? Based on the usage of the data, I may have a new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be supercloud where I am making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction. And then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products. And then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream. But it's starting this year. >> A subprime mortgages were a data product, definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the supercloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, Hashi, IBM, CloudFlare. There's many others. cohesive rubric. Keith, I wanted to start with CloudFlare because they actually use the term supercloud. and just simplifying what they said. They look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the CloudFlare infrastructure. You don't have to spin up containers, you don't go to provision instances. CloudFlare worries about all that infrastructure. What are your thoughts on CloudFlare this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? >> As Larry Ellison said famously once before, the network is the computer, right? I thought that was Scott McNeley. >> It wasn't Scott McNeley. I knew it was on Oracle Align. >> Oracle owns that now, owns that line. >> By purpose or acquisition. >> They should have just called it cloud. >> Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. >> Easier. >> Get ahead. >> But if you think about the CloudFlare capability, CloudFlare in its own right is becoming a decent sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of CloudFlare and points of presence, literally across the globe, you have all of this excess computer, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation talking about data. When they say we're going to give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about supercloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from CloudFlare. And now, I've disrupted this roach motel data structure, and that I'm freely giving away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of CloudFlare's serverless approach or supercloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model, or a compute heavy model, or a network heavy model, CloudFlare is taken away those knobs. and I'm just giving code and allowing that to run. CloudFlare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the CloudFlare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While Server List is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Cognito, or RDS, or all these other services that make AWS, GCP, and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start. It's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers, but kind of hiding the compute behind the surplus architecture is a really unique approach. >> Yeah. And they're dipping their toe in the water. And they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got to wrap. So I wonder, Sanjeev and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeev, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds, and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds. And to the extent that you can simplify that for users, it seems to be a logical strategy. Maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been. But are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game , or ones that you think are a good model for the future? >> Yes, Snowflake, definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much, and Keith mentioned a little bit, was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now, I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lakehouse, and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark forest. Oracle seems to have revived its Cloud Mojo to some extent. And it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is the other one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lakehouse, unity, data catalog, and some of those pieces. But they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of supercloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. >> Yeah. One of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM. I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes. But Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? >> Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you want to do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you want to try to do a more cross-cloud, multi-cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing, I think, could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they want to differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they want to be like the person that is really transformative, they talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads, then maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with, but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered, either startups or more established independent companies, but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. >> I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes. I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? I could argue both sides of that. But it was quite a gift to the industry. And there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. And I'd throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player and Kubernetes. And Hashi Corp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment, and terraform, or cross-clouds, and there are many, many others. I know we're leaving lots out, but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in Supercloud2. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content from Supercloud2.

(gentle upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone, to "theCUBE"'s live stage performance here in Palo Alto, California at "theCUBE" Studios. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, kicking off our first inaugural Supercloud event. It's an editorial event, we wanted to bring together the best in the business, the smartest, the biggest, the up-and-coming startups, venture capitalists, everybody, to weigh in on this new Supercloud trend, this structural change in the cloud computing business. We're about to run the Ecosystem Speaks, which is a bunch of pre-recorded companies that wanted to get their voices on the record, so stay tuned for the rest of the day. We'll be replaying all that content and they're going to be having some really good commentary and hear what they have to say. I had a chance to interview and so did Dave. Dave, this is our closing segment where we kind of unpack everything or kind of digest and report. So much to kind of digest from the conversations today, a wide range of commentary from Supercloud operating system to developers who are in charge to maybe it's an ops problem or maybe Oracle's a Supercloud. I mean, that was debated. So so much discussion, lot to unpack. What was your favorite moments? >> Well, before I get to that, I think, I go back to something that happened at re:Invent last year. Nick Sturiale came up, Steve Mullaney from Aviatrix; we're going to hear from him shortly in the Ecosystem Speaks. Nick Sturiale's VC said "it's happening"! And what he was talking about is this ecosystem is exploding. They're building infrastructure or capabilities on top of the CapEx infrastructure. So, I think it is happening. I think we confirmed today that Supercloud is a thing. It's a very immature thing. And I think the other thing, John is that, it seems to me that the further you go up the stack, the weaker the business case gets for doing Supercloud. We heard from Marianna Tessel, it's like, "Eh, you know, we can- it was easier to just do it all on one cloud." This is a point that, Adrian Cockcroft just made on the panel and so I think that when you break out the pieces of the stack, I think very clearly the infrastructure layer, what we heard from Confluent and HashiCorp, and certainly VMware, there's a real problem there. There's a real need at the infrastructure layer and then even at the data layer, I think Benoit Dageville did a great job of- You know, I was peppering him with all my questions, which I basically was going through, the Supercloud definition and they ticked the box on pretty much every one of 'em as did, by the way Ali Ghodsi you know, the big difference there is the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats- got open versus closed, not to apply that to either one side, but you know what I mean! >> And the similarities are probably greater than differences. >> Berkely, I would probably put them on the- >> Yeah, we'll put them on the Democrat side we'll make Snowflake the Republicans. But so- but as we say there's a lot of similarities as well in terms of what their objectives are. So, I mean, I thought it was a great program and a really good start to, you know, an industry- You brought up the point about the industry consortium, asked Kit Colbert- >> Yep. >> If he thought that was something that was viable and what'd they say? That hyperscale should lead it? >> Yeah, they said hyperscale should lead it and there also should be an industry consortium to get the voices out there. And I think VMware is very humble in how they're putting out their white paper because I think they know that they can't do it all and that they do not have a great track record relative to cloud. And I think, but they have a great track record of loyal installed base ops people using VMware vSphere all the time. >> Yeah. >> So I think they need a catapult moment where they can catapult to the cloud native which they've been working on for years under Raghu and the team. So the question on VMware is in the light of Broadcom, okay, acquisition of VMware, this is an opportunity or it might not be an opportunity or it might be a spin-out or something, I just think VMware's got way too much engineering culture to be ignored, Dave. And I think- well, I'm going to watch this very closely because they can pull off some sort of rallying moment. I think they could. And then you hear the upstarts like Platform9, Rafay Systems and others they're all like, "Yes, we need to unify behind something. There needs to be some sort of standard". You know, we heard the argument of you know, more standards bodies type thing. So, it's interesting, maybe "theCUBE" could be that but we're going to certainly keep the conversation going. >> I thought one of the most memorable statements was Vittorio who said we- for VMware, we want our cake, we want to eat it too and we want to lose weight. So they have a lot of that aspirations there! (John laughs) >> And then I thought, Adrian Cockcroft said you know, the devs, they want to get married. They were marrying everybody, and then the ops team, they have to deal with the divorce. >> Yeah. >> And I thought that was poignant. It's like, they want consistency, they want standards, they got to be able to scale And Lori MacVittie, I'm not sure you agree with this, I'd have to think about it, but she was basically saying, all we've talked about is devs devs devs for the last 10 years, going forward we're going to be talking about ops. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things I learned from this day and looking back, and some kind of- I've been sauteing through all the interviews. If you zoom out, for me it was the epiphany of developers are still in charge. And I've said, you know, the developers are doing great, it's an ops security thing. Not sure I see that the way I was seeing before. I think what I learned was the refactoring pattern that's emerging, In Sik Rhee brought this up from Vertex Ventures with Marianna Tessel, it's a nuanced point but I think he's right on which is the pattern that's emerging is developers want ease-of-use tooling, they're driving the change and I think the developers in the devs ops ethos- it's never going to be separate. It's going to be DevOps. That means developers are driving operations and then security. So what I learned was it's not ops teams leveling up, it's devs redefining what ops is. >> Mm. And I think that to me is where Supercloud's going to be interesting- >> Forcing that. >> Yeah. >> Forcing the change because the structural change is open sources thriving, devs are still in charge and they still want more developers, Vittorio "we need more developers", right? So the developers are in charge and that's clear. Now, if that happens- if you believe that to be true the domino effect of that is going to be amazing because then everyone who gets on the wrong side of history, on the ops and security side, is going to be fighting a trend that may not be fight-able, you know, it might be inevitable. And so the winners are the ones that are refactoring their business like Snowflake. Snowflake is a data warehouse that had nothing to do with Amazon at first. It was the developers who said "I'm going to refactor data warehouse on AWS". That is a developer-driven refactorization and a business model. So I think that's the pattern I'm seeing is that this concept refactoring, patterns and the developer trajectory is critical. >> I thought there was another great comment. Maribel Lopez, her Lord of the Rings comment: "there will be no one ring to rule them all". Now at the same time, Kit Colbert, you know what we asked him straight out, "are you the- do you want to be the, the Supercloud OS?" and he basically said, "yeah, we do". Now, of course they're confined to their world, which is a pretty substantial world. I think, John, the reason why Maribel is so correct is security. I think security's a really hard problem to solve. You've got cloud as the first layer of defense and now you've got multiple clouds, multiple layers of defense, multiple shared responsibility models. You've got different tools for XDR, for identity, for governance, for privacy all within those different clouds. I mean, that really is a confusing picture. And I think the hardest- one of the hardest parts of Supercloud to solve. >> Yeah, and I thought the security founder Gee Rittenhouse, Piyush Sharrma from Accurics, which sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, former head of product at VMware. >> Right. >> Who's now an investor kind of looking for his next gig or what he is going to do next. He's obviously been extremely successful. They brought up the, the OS factor. Another point that they made I thought was interesting is that a lot of the things to do to solve the complexity is not doable. >> Yeah. >> It's too much work. So managed services might field the bit. So, and Chris Hoff mentioned on the Clouderati segment that the higher level services being a managed service and differentiating around the service could be the key competitive advantage for whoever does it. >> I think the other thing is Chris Hoff said "yeah, well, Web 3, metaverse, you know, DAO, Superclouds" you know, "Stupercloud" he called it and this bring up- It resonates because one of the criticisms that Charles Fitzgerald laid on us was, well, it doesn't help to throw out another term. I actually think it does help. And I think the reason it does help is because it's getting people to think. When you ask people about Supercloud, they automatically- it resonates with them. They play back what they think is the future of cloud. So Supercloud really talks to the future of cloud. There's a lot of aspects to it that need to be further defined, further thought out and we're getting to the point now where we- we can start- begin to say, okay that is Supercloud or that isn't Supercloud. >> I think that's really right on. I think Supercloud at the end of the day, for me from the simplest way to describe it is making sure that the developer experience is so good that the operations just happen. And Marianna Tessel said, she's investing in making their developer experience high velocity, very easy. So if you do that, you have to run on premise and on the cloud. So hybrid really is where Supercloud is going right now. It's not multi-cloud. Multi-cloud was- that was debunked on this session today. I thought that was clear. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think- >> It's not about multi-cloud. It's about operationally seamless operations across environments, public cloud to on-premise, basically. >> I think we got consensus across the board that multi-cloud, you know, is a symptom Chuck Whitten's thing of multi-cloud by default versus multi- multi-cloud has not been a strategy, Kit Colbert said, up until the last couple of years. Yeah, because people said, "oh we got all these multiple clouds, what do we do with it?" and we got this mess that we have to solve. Whereas, I think Supercloud is something that is a strategy and then the other nuance that I keep bringing up is it's industries that are- as part of their digital transformation, are building clouds. Now, whether or not they become superclouds, I'm not convinced. I mean, what Goldman Sachs is doing, you know, with AWS, what Walmart's doing with Azure connecting their on-prem tools to those public clouds, you know, is that a supercloud? I mean, we're going to have to go back and really look at that definition. Or is it just kind of a SAS that spans on-prem and cloud. So, as I said, the further you go up the stack, the business case seems to wane a little bit but there's no question in my mind that from an infrastructure standpoint, to your point about operations, there's a real requirement for super- what we call Supercloud. >> Well, we're going to keep the conversation going, Dave. I want to put a shout out to our founding supporters of this initiative. Again, we put this together really fast kind of like a pilot series, an inaugural event. We want to have a face-to-face event as an industry event. Want to thank the founding supporters. These are the people who donated their time, their resource to contribute content, ideas and some cash, not everyone has committed some financial contribution but we want to recognize the names here. VMware, Intuit, Red Hat, Snowflake, Aisera, Alteryx, Confluent, Couchbase, Nutanix, Rafay Systems, Skyhigh Security, Aviatrix, Zscaler, Platform9, HashiCorp, F5 and all the media partners. Without their support, this wouldn't have happened. And there are more people that wanted to weigh in. There was more demand than we could pull off. We'll certainly continue the Supercloud conversation series here on "theCUBE" and we'll add more people in. And now, after this session, the Ecosystem Speaks session, we're going to run all the videos of the big name companies. We have the Nutanix CEOs weighing in, Aviatrix to name a few. >> Yeah. Let me, let me chime in, I mean you got Couchbase talking about Edge, Platform 9's going to be on, you know, everybody, you know Insig was poopoo-ing Oracle, but you know, Oracle and Azure, what they did, two technical guys, developers are coming on, we dig into what they did. Howie Xu from Zscaler, Paula Hansen is going to talk about going to market in the multi-cloud world. You mentioned Rajiv, the CEO of Nutanix, Ramesh is going to talk about multi-cloud infrastructure. So that's going to run now for, you know, quite some time here and some of the pre-record so super excited about that and I just want to thank the crew. I hope guys, I hope you have a list of credits there's too many of you to mention, but you know, awesome jobs really appreciate the work that you did in a very short amount of time. >> Well, I'm excited. I learned a lot and my takeaway was that Supercloud's a thing, there's a kind of sense that people want to talk about it and have real conversations, not BS or FUD. They want to have real substantive conversations and we're going to enable that on "theCUBE". Dave, final thoughts for you. >> Well, I mean, as I say, we put this together very quickly. It was really a phenomenal, you know, enlightening experience. I think it confirmed a lot of the concepts and the premises that we've put forth, that David Floyer helped evolve, that a lot of these analysts have helped evolve, that even Charles Fitzgerald with his antagonism helped to really sharpen our knives. So, you know, thank you Charles. And- >> I like his blog, by the I'm a reader- >> Yeah, absolutely. And it was great to be back in Palo Alto. It was my first time back since pre-COVID, so, you know, great job. >> All right. I want to thank all the crew and everyone. Thanks for watching this first, inaugural Supercloud event. We are definitely going to be doing more of these. So stay tuned, maybe face-to-face in person. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante now for the Ecosystem chiming in, and they're going to speak and share their thoughts here with "theCUBE" our first live stage performance event in our studio. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to Supercloud 22, this is the cube studio's live performance. We streaming virtually@siliconangledotcomandthecube.net. I'm John for host the cube at Dave Alane with a distinguished panel talking about securing the Supercloud all cube alumni G written house was the CEO of Skyhigh security, Peter Sharma founder of, of QX sold to tenable and Tony qua who's investor. Co-founder former head of product at VMware chance. Thanks for coming on and to our, in all girls super cloud pilot event. >>Good to see you guys big topic. >>Okay. So before we get into secure in the cloud, one of the things that we were discussing before we came on camera was how cloud, the relationship between cloud and on premise and multi-cloud and how Supercloud fits into that. At the end of the day, security's driving a lot of the conversations at the op side and dev shift left is happening. We see that out there. So before we get into it, how do you guys see super cloud Tony? We'll start with you. We'll go down the line. What is Supercloud to you? >>Well, to me, super cloud is really the next evolution, the culmination of the services coming all together, right? As a application developer today, you really don't need to worry about where this thing is. Sit sitting or what's the latency cuz cuz the internet is fast enough. Now I really wanna know what services something provides. What, how do I get access to it now? Security. We'll talk about that later. That that becomes a, a big issue because of the fragmentation of how security is implemented across all the different vendors. So to me it's an IP address I program to it and you know, off we go, but there's a lot of >>You like that pipe happens >>Iceberg chart, right? Like I'm the developer touching the APIs up there. There's a bunch of other things. BU service. >>Okay. Looking forward again. Gee, what's your take? Obviously we've had many conversations on the cube. What's your super cloud update. >>Yeah, so I, I view it as just an extension of what we see today before like maybe 10 years ago we were mashing up applications built on other SAS applications and whatnot. Now we're just extending that down to further primitives, not, we don't really care where our mashup resides, what cloud platform, where it sits to Tony's point, as long as you have an IP address. But beyond that, we're just gonna start to get little micro services and deeper into the applications. >>BP, what should you take? >>I think, I think super cloud to me is something that don't don't exist. It exists only on my laptop. That's the super cloud means to me. I know it takes a lot behind the scene to get that working of and running. But, but essentially, essentially that the everything having be able to touch physically versus not being able to touch anything is super cloud to me. >>So we, what Victoria was saying. Yeah, we see serverless out there, all these cool things happening. Exactly. And you look at the, some of the successful companies that have come in, I call V two cloud. Some are, some are saying the next gen, they're all building on top of the CapEx. I mean, if, why would you not wanna leverage all that work AWS is doing and now Azure, and obviously Google's out there and you got other, other, other clouds out there. But in terms of AWS as a hyperscaler, they're spending all the money and they're getting better. They're getting lower level. We're talking about some of that yesterday, data bricks, snowflake, Goldman Sachs there's industry clouds that could be powerhouse service providers to themselves and their vertical. Then you got specialty clouds. Like there could be a data cloud, there could be an identity cloud. So yeah. How does this sort itself out? How do you guys see that? Because can they coexist? >>But I think they have to right, because I, I think, you know, eventually organizations will get big enough where they can be strong and really market leading in multiple segments. But if you think about what it takes to really build a massive scaled out database company that, that DNA doesn't just overnight translate to identity or translate to video, it takes years to build that up. So in the meantime, all these guys have to understand that they are one part of the service stack to power the next gen solutions. And if they don't play well with each other, then you're gonna have a problem. >>So security, I think is one of the hardest problems of, of super cloud. And not only do you have too many tools and a lack of talent, but you've now got this new first line of defense, which is the cloud. And the problem is you've got multiple clouds. So you've got multiple first lines of defense with multiple cloud provider tools. And then the CISO, I guess, is the next line of defense with the application development team. You know, there to be the pivot point between strategy and execution. And I guess audit is the third line of the defense. So it's an even more complicated environment. So gee, how do you see that CSO role changing and, and can there actually be a unified security layer in Supercloud? >>Yeah, so I believe that that they can be, the role is definitely changing because now a CSO actually has to have a basic understanding of how clouds work, the dependency of clouds on the, on the business that they serve. And, and this is to your point, not only do we have these new lines and opening up in a tax surface, but they're coupled together. So we have supply chain type connections between this. So there's a coherence across these systems that a CISO has to kind of think about not only these Bo cloud boundaries, but the trust boundaries between them. So classic example visibility, wh what, where are these things and what are the dependencies in my business then of course you mentioned compliance. Am I regulatory? And then of course protecting and responding to this, >>You know? Yeah. The, the, the supply chain piece that you just mentioned. I mean, I feel like there's like these milestones stocks, net was a milestone, you know, obvious obviously log four J was another one, the supply chain hack with solar winds. Yep. You know, it's just, the adversary just keeps getting stronger and stronger and, and, and more agile. So, so is this a data? Do we solve this as a data problem? Is it, you know, you can't just throw more infrastructure at it. What are your thoughts >>For it? I think, you know, great, great point that you're brought up. We need to look at things very fundamentally. What is happening is security has the most difficult job in the cloud, especially super cloud. The poor guys are managing some, managing something or securing something that they can't govern, right? Your, your custodian of the cloud as your developers and DevOps, they are the ones who are defining, creating, destroying things in the cloud. And that guy sitting at the end of the tunnel, looking at things that what he gets and he has to immediately respond. That's why it has to be fundamentally solve. Number one, we talked about supply chain. We talked about the, the, the stuck net to wanna cry, to sort of wins, to know the most recent one on the pipeline. Once the interesting phenomena is that the way industry has moved super cloud, the attackers are also moving them super attackers, right? They have stopped. They have not stopped, but they have started slowly moving to the left, which is the governance part. So they have started attacking your source code, you know, impersonating the codes, replacing the binary, finding one is there. So if they can, if the cloud is built so early, why can't I go early and, and, and inject myself. >>So super hackers is coming to super thinking Hollywood right now. I mean, that brings up a good point. I mean, this whole trust thing is huge. I mean, I hear zero trust. I think, wait a minute, that's not the conference I was just at, we went to, we managed, we work with DockerCon and they were talking about trust services. Yeah. So supply chain source code has trust brokering going on. And yet you got zero trust, which is which are they contextually different? I mean, what, what, >>What, from my perspective, though, the same in that zero trust is a framework that starts with minimum privileges and then build up those privileges over time. Normally in today's dialogue, zero trust is around access. I'm not having a broad access. I'm having a narrow access around an application, but you can also extend those principles to usage. What can, how much privilege do I have within an application? I have to build up my trust to enhance and, and get extended privileges within an application. Of course you can then extend this naturally to applications, APIs, applications, talking with each other. And so by you, you have to restrict the attack surface that is based on a trust model fundamentally. And then to your point, I mean, there's always this residual that you have to deal with afterwards. >>So, so super cloud implies more surface area. You're talking about private. So here we go. So how, and by the way, the AWS was supposed to be at this conference. They said they couldn't make it. They had a schedule issue, but they wanted to be here, but I would ask them, how do you differentiate AWS going forward? Do you go IAS all the way? Do you release the pass layer up? How does this solve? Because you have native clouds that are doing great, the complexity on super cloud, and multi-cloud has to be solved. >>Let me offer maybe a different argument. So if you think about we're all old enough to see the history sort of re pendulum shift and it shifting back in a way, if you're arguing that this culmination of all these services in the form of cloud today, essentially moving up stack, then really this is a architectural pattern that's emerging, right? And therefore there needs to be a super cloud, almost operating system. So operating systems, if you build one before you need a scheduler, you need process handler, you need process isolation, you need memory storage, compute all that together. Now that is our sitting in different parts of the internet. And, and there is no operating system. Yes. And that's the gap, right? And so if you don't even have an operating system, how do you implement security? And that's the pain. Yeah, because today it's one off, directly from service to service. Like how many times can you set up SAML orchestration? You can have an entire team doing that, right. If that's, that's what you have to do. So I think that's ultimately the gap and, and we're sort of just revolving around this concept that there's missing an operating system for superpower. >>It's like Maribel Lopez said in the previous panel that Lord of the rings, there will be no one ring rule the ball. Right. Probably there is needs one. Oh yeah. But, but, but, so what happens? So again, security's the hardest problem. So Snowflake's gotta implement its security, you know, data bricks with an open source model has to implement its security. So there's these multiple security models. You talk about zero trust, which I, if, if I infer what you said, gee, it's essentially, if you don't have privilege access, you don't get access. Yeah. Right. If you, okay. Okay. So that's the framework. Fine. And then you gotta earn it over time. Yeah. Now companies like Amazon, they have the, the talent and the skills to implement that zero trust framework. Exactly. So, so the, the industry, you, you guys with the R and D have to actually ultimately build that, that super cloud framework, don't you? >>Yeah. But I would just look all of the major cloud providers, the ones you mentioned and more will have their own framework within their own environment. Right? Yeah. The problem is with super cloud, you're extending it across multiple ones. There's no standards. There's no easy way to integrate that. So now all of that is left to the developer who is like throwing out code as fast as they can >>Is their, their job is to abstract that, I mean, they've gotta secure the, the run time, they gotta secure the container. >>You have to >>Abstract it. Right. Okay. But, but they're not security pros or ops. >>Exactly. They're haves. >>But to, but to G's point, right. If everyone's implementing their own little Z TNA, then inherently, there's a blind trust between two vendors. Right. That has to >>Be, >>That has to be >>Established. That's implicit. You're saying, >>Yeah. But, but it's, it's contractual, it's not technology. Right. Because I'm turning something out in my cloud, you're turning out something in your cloud that says we've got something, some token exchange, which gives us trust. But what happens if that breaks down and whatever happens to the third party comes in? I think that's the problem. >>Yeah. In fact, in fact, the, if I put the, you know, combine one of those commons, the zero trust was build, keeping identity authentication, then authorization in mind, right? Yeah. This needs to be extended because the zero test definition now probably go into integrity. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. I authenticated. I worked well with Tony in the past, but how do I know that something has changed on the Tony's side? Yeah, exactly. Right, right. That, that integrity is going to be very, very foundational. Given developers are building those third party libraries, those source code pumping stuff. The only way I can validate is, Hey, what has changed? >>And then throw edge into the equation, John and IOT and machine to machine. Exactly. It's just, >>Well, >>Yeah. I think, I think we have another example to build on Tony's operating system model. Okay. And that is the cloud access service broker model for SAS. So we, we have these services sitting out there, we've brokered them together. They're normally on user policies. What I can have access to what I can do, what I can't do, but that can be extended down to services and have the same kind of broker arrangement all through APIs. You have to establish that trust and the, and the policies there, and they can be dynamic and all of this stuff. But you can from an, either an operating system or a SAS interaction and integration model come to these same kind of points. So who >>Builds the, the, the secure Supercloud? Is it new guys like you? Is it your old company giants like Palo Alto? Who, who actually builds the and secures the Supercloud it sounds like it's an ecosystem. >>Yeah. It is an ecosystem. Absolutely. It's an ecosystem. >>Yeah. There's no one security Supercloud >>As well. No, but I, I do think there's one, there's one difference in that historically security has always focused on that shiny object. The, the, the, a particular solution to a particular threat when you're dealing with a, a cloud or super cloud, like the number of that is incalculable. So you have to come into some sort of platform. And so you will see if it's not one, you know, a finite number of platform type solutions that are trying to solve this on behalf of the >>Customer. That to your point, then get connected. >>I think it's gonna be like Unix, right? Like how many flavors of Unix were there out there? All of them 'em had a scheduler. All of them had these processes. All of them had their little compilers. You can compile to that system, target to that system. And for a while, it's gonna be very fragmented until multiple parties decide to converge. >>Right? Well, this is, this is the final question we have one minute left. I wish we had more time. This is a great panel. We'll we'll bring you guys back for sure. After the event, what one thing needs to happen to unify or get through the other side of this fragmentation than the challenges for Supercloud. Because remember the enterprise equation is solve complexity with more complexity. Well, that's not what the market wants. They want simplicity. They want SA they want ease of use. They want infrastructure risk code. What has to happen? What do you think each of you? >>So I, I can start and extending to the previous conversation. I think we need a consortium. We need, we need a framework that defines that if you really want to operate in super cloud, these are the 10 things that you must follow. It doesn't matter whether you take AWS slash or GCP, or you have all, and you will have the on-prem also, which means that it has to follow a pattern. And that pattern is what is required for super cloud. In my opinion, otherwise security is going everywhere. They're like they have to fix everything, find everything and so on. So forth, it's not gonna be possible. So they need a, they need a framework. They need a consortium. And it, this consortium needs to be, I think, needs to led by the cloud providers, because they're the ones who have these foundational infrastructure elements and the security vendor should contribute on providing more severe detections or findings. So that's, in my opinion is, should be the model. >>Well, thank you G >>Yeah, I would think it's more along the lines of a business model we've seen in cloud that the scale matters. And once you're big, you get bigger. We haven't seen that coals around either a vendor, a business model, whatnot, to bring all of this and connect it all together yet. So that value proposition in the industry I think is missing, but there's elements of it already available. >>I, I think there needs to be a mindset. If you look again, history repeating itself, the internet sort of came together around set of I ETF, RSC standards, everybody embraced and extended it. Right. But still there was at least a baseline. Yeah. And I think at that time, the, the largest and most innovative vendors understood that they couldn't do it by themselves. Right. And so I think what we need is a mindset where these big guys like Google, let's take an example. They're not gonna win at all, but they can have a substantial share. So how do they collaborate with the ecosystem around a set of standards so that they can bring, bring their differentiation and then embrace everybody >>Together. Guys, this has been fantastic. I mean, I would just chime in back in the day, those was proprietary nosis proprietary network protocols. You had kind of an enemy to rally around. I'm not sure. I see an enemy out here right now. So the clouds are doing great. Right? So it's a tough one, but I think super OS super consortiums, super business models are gonna emerge. Thanks so much for spending the time. Great conversation. Thank you for having us to bring, keep going hour superclouds here in Palo Alto, live coverage stream virtually I'm John with Dave. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage. This break.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The term Supercloud is somewhat new, but the concepts behind it have been bubbling for years, early last decade when NIST put forth a definition of cloud computing it said services had to be accessible over a public network essentially cutting the on-prem crowd out of the cloud conversation. Now a guy named Chuck Hollis, who was a field CTO at EMC at the time and a prolific blogger objected to that criterion and laid out his vision for what he termed a private cloud. Now, in that post, he showed a workload running both on premises and in a public cloud sharing the underlying resources in an automated and seamless manner. What later became known more broadly as hybrid cloud that vision as we now know, really never materialized, and we were left with multi-cloud sets of largely incompatible and disconnected cloud services running in separate silos. The point is what Hollis laid out, IE the ability to abstract underlying infrastructure complexity and run workloads across multiple heterogeneous estates with an identical experience is what super cloud is all about. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon cube insights powered by ETR and this breaking analysis. We share what we hope to learn from super cloud 22 next week, next Tuesday at 9:00 AM Pacific. The community is gathering for Supercloud 22 an inclusive pilot symposium hosted by theCUBE and made possible by VMware and other founding partners. It's a one day single track event with more than 25 speakers digging into the architectural, the technical, structural and business aspects of Supercloud. This is a hybrid event with a live program in the morning running out of our Palo Alto studio and pre-recorded content in the afternoon featuring industry leaders, technologists, analysts and investors up and down the technology stack. Now, as I said up front the seeds of super cloud were sewn early last decade. After the very first reinvent we published our Amazon gorilla post, that scene in the upper right corner here. And we talked about how to differentiate from Amazon and form ecosystems around industries and data and how the cloud would change IT permanently. And then up in the upper left we put up a post on the old Wikibon Wiki. Yeah, it used to be a Wiki. Check out my hair by the way way no gray, that's how long ago this was. And we talked about in that post how to compete in the Amazon economy. And we showed a graph of how IT economics were changing. And cloud services had marginal economics that looked more like software than hardware at scale. And this would reset, we said opportunities for both technology sellers and buyers for the next 20 years. And this came into sharper focus in the ensuing years culminating in a milestone post by Greylock's Jerry Chen called Castles in the Cloud. It was an inspiration and catalyst for us using the term Supercloud in John Furrier's post prior to reinvent 2021. So we started to flesh out this idea of Supercloud where companies of all types build services on top of hyperscale infrastructure and across multiple clouds, going beyond multicloud 1.0, if you will, which was really a symptom, as we said, many times of multi-vendor at least that's what we argued. And despite its fuzzy definition, it resonated with people because they knew something was brewing, Keith Townsend the CTO advisor, even though he frankly, wasn't a big fan of the buzzy nature of the term Supercloud posted this awesome Blackboard on Twitter take a listen to how he framed it. Please play the clip. >> Is VMware the right company to make the super cloud work, term that Wikibon came up with to describe the taking of discreet services. So it says RDS from AWS, cloud compute engines from GCP and authentication from Azure to build SaaS applications or enterprise applications that connect back to your data center, is VMware's cross cloud vision 'cause it is just a vision today, the right approach. Or should you be looking towards companies like HashiCorp to provide this overall capability that we all agree, or maybe you don't that we need in an enterprise comment below your thoughts. >> So I really like that Keith has deep practitioner knowledge and lays out a couple of options. I especially like the examples he uses of cloud services. He recognizes the need for cross cloud services and he notes this capability is aspirational today. Remember this was eight or nine months ago and he brings HashiCorp into the conversation as they're one of the speakers at Supercloud 22 and he asks the community, what they think, the thing is we're trying to really test out this concept and people like Keith are instrumental as collaborators. Now I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that mot everyone is on board with the Supercloud meme, in particular Charles Fitzgerald has been a wonderful collaborator just by his hilarious criticisms of the concept. After a couple of super cloud posts, Charles put up his second rendition of "Supercloudifragilisticexpialidoucious". I mean, it's just beautiful, but to boot, he put up this picture of Baghdad Bob asking us to just stop, Bob's real name is Mohamed Said al-Sahaf. He was the minister of propaganda for Sadam Husein during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he made these outrageous claims of, you know US troops running in fear and putting down their arms and so forth. So anyway, Charles laid out several frankly very helpful critiques of Supercloud which has led us to really advance the definition and catalyze the community's thinking on the topic. Now, one of his issues and there are many is we said a prerequisite of super cloud was a super PaaS layer. Gartner's Lydia Leong chimed in saying there were many examples of successful PaaS vendors built on top of a hyperscaler some having the option to run in more than one cloud provider. But the key point we're trying to explore is the degree to which that PaaS layer is purpose built for a specific super cloud function. And not only runs in more than one cloud provider, Lydia but runs across multiple clouds simultaneously creating an identical developer experience irrespective of a state. Now, maybe that's what Lydia meant. It's hard to say from just a tweet and she's a sharp lady, so, and knows more about that market, that PaaS market, than I do. But to the former point at Supercloud 22, we have several examples. We're going to test. One is Oracle and Microsoft's recent announcement to run database services on OCI and Azure, making them appear as one rather than use an off the shelf platform. Oracle claims to have developed a capability for developers specifically built to ensure high performance low latency, and a common experience for developers across clouds. Another example we're going to test is Snowflake. I'll be interviewing Benoit Dageville co-founder of Snowflake to understand the degree to which Snowflake's recent announcement of an application development platform is perfect built, purpose built for the Snowflake data cloud. Is it just a plain old pass, big whoop as Lydia claims or is it something new and innovative, by the way we invited Charles Fitz to participate in Supercloud 22 and he decline saying in addition to a few other somewhat insulting things there's definitely interesting new stuff brewing that isn't traditional cloud or SaaS but branding at all super cloud doesn't help either. Well, indeed, we agree with part of that and we'll see if it helps advanced thinking and helps customers really plan for the future. And that's why Supercloud 22 has going to feature some of the best analysts in the business in The Great Supercloud Debate. In addition to Keith Townsend and Maribel Lopez of Lopez research and Sanjeev Mohan from former Gartner analyst and principal at SanjMo participated in this session. Now we don't want to mislead you. We don't want to imply that these analysts are hopping on the super cloud bandwagon but they're more than willing to go through the thought experiment and mental exercise. And, we had a great conversation that you don't want to miss. Maribel Lopez had what I thought was a really excellent way to think about this. She used TCP/IP as an historical example, listen to what she said. >> And Sanjeev Mohan has some excellent thoughts on the feasibility of an open versus de facto standard getting us to the vision of Supercloud, what's possible and what's likely now, again, I don't want to imply that these analysts are out banging the Supercloud drum. They're not necessarily doing that, but they do I think it's fair to say believe that something new is bubbling and whether it's called Supercloud or multicloud 2.0 or cross cloud services or whatever name you choose it's not multicloud of the 2010s and we chose Supercloud. So our goal here is to advance the discussion on what's next in cloud and Supercloud is meant to be a term to describe that future of cloud and specifically the cloud opportunities that can be built on top of hyperscale, compute, storage, networking machine learning, and other services at scale. And that is why we posted this piece on Answering the top 10 questions about Supercloud. Many of which were floated by Charles Fitzgerald and others in the community. Why does the industry need another term what's really new and different? And what is hype? What specific problems does Supercloud solve? What are the salient characteristics of Supercloud? What's different beyond multicloud? What is a super pass? Is it necessary to have a Supercloud? How will applications evolve on superclouds? What workloads will run? All these questions will be addressed in detail as a way to advance the discussion and help practitioners and business people understand what's real today. And what's possible with cloud in the near future. And one other question we'll address is who will build super clouds? And what new entrance we can expect. This is an ETR graphic that we showed in a previous episode of breaking analysis, and it lays out some of the companies we think are building super clouds or in a position to do so, by the way the Y axis shows net score or spending velocity and the X axis depicts presence in the ETR survey of more than 1200 respondents. But the key callouts to this slide in addition to some of the smaller firms that aren't yet showing up in the ETR data like Chaossearch and Starburst and Aviatrix and Clumio but the really interesting additions are industry players Walmart with Azure, Capital one and Goldman Sachs with AWS, Oracle, with Cerner. These we think are early examples, bubbling up of industry clouds that will eventually become super clouds. So we'll explore these and other trends to get the community's input on how this will all play out. These are the things we hope you'll take away from Supercloud 22. And we have an amazing lineup of experts to answer your question. Technologists like Kit Colbert, Adrian Cockcroft, Mariana Tessel, Chris Hoff, Will DeForest, Ali Ghodsi, Benoit Dageville, Muddu Sudhakar and many other tech athletes, investors like Jerry Chen and In Sik Rhee the analyst we featured earlier, Paula Hansen talking about go to market in a multi-cloud world Gee Rittenhouse talking about cloud security, David McJannet, Bhaskar Gorti of Platform9 and many, many more. And of course you, so please go to theCUBE.net and register for Supercloud 22, really lightweight reg. We're not doing this for lead gen. We're doing it for collaboration. If you sign in you can get the chat and ask questions in real time. So don't miss this inaugural event Supercloud 22 on August 9th at 9:00 AM Pacific. We'll see you there. Okay. That's it for today. Thanks for watching. Thank you to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE. Does some really wonderful editing. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And you can email me at David.Vellantesiliconangle.com or DM me at Dvellante, comment on my LinkedIn post. Please do check out ETR.AI for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next week in Palo Alto at Supercloud 22 or next time on breaking analysis. (calm music)

(upbeat music) >> On August 9th at 9:00 am Pacific, we'll be broadcasting live from theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California. Supercloud22, an open industry event made possible by VMware. Supercloud22 will lay out the future of multi-cloud services in the 2020s. John Furrier and I will be hosting a star lineup, including Kit Colbert, VMware CTO, Benoit Dageville, co-founder of Snowflake, Marianna Tessel, CTO of Intuit, Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, Adrian Cockcroft, former CTO of Netflix, Jerry Chen of Greylock, Chris Hoff aka Beaker, Maribel Lopez, Keith Townsend, Sanjiv Mohan, and dozens of thought leaders. A full day track with 17 sessions. You won't want to miss Supercloud22. Go to thecube.net to mark your calendar and learn more about this free hybrid event. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

[Music] welcome to the great super cloud debate a power panel of three top technology industry analysts maribel lopez is here she's the founder and principal analyst at lopez research keith townsend is ceo and founder of the cto advisor and sanjeev mohan is principal at sanjmo super cloud is a term that we've used to describe the future of cloud architectures the idea is that super clouds are built on top of hyperscaler capex infrastructure and the idea is it goes beyond multi-cloud the premise being that multi-cloud is primarily a symptom of multi-vendor or m a or both and results in more stove we're going to talk about that super cloud's meant to connote a new architecture that leverages the underlying primitives of hyperscale clouds but hides and abstracts that complexity of each of their respective clouds and adds new value on top of that with services and a continuous experience a similar or identical experience across more than one cloud people may say hey that's multi-cloud we're going to talk about that as well so with that as brief background um i'd like to first welcome our painless guys thanks so much for coming on thecube it's great to see you all again great to be here thank you to be here so i'm going to start with maribel you know what i just described what's your reaction to that is it just like what like cloud is supposed to be is that really what multi-cloud is do you agree with the premise that multi-cloud has really been you know what like chuck whitten from dell calls it it's been multi-cloud by default i call it a symptom of multi-vendor what's your take on on what this is oh wow dave another term here we go right more more to define for people but okay the reality is i agree that it's time for something new something evolved right whether we call that super cloud or something else i you know i don't want to really debate the term but we need to move beyond where we are today in multi-cloud and into if we want to call it cloud 5 multi-cloud 2 whatever we want to call it i believe that we're at the next generation that we have to define what that next generation is but if you think about it we went from public to private to hybrid to multi and every time you have a discussion with somebody about cloud you spend 10 minutes defining what you're talking about so this doesn't seem any different to me so let's just go with super cloud for the moment and see where we go and you know if you're interested after everybody else makes their comments i got a few thoughts about what super cloud might mean as well yeah great so i and i agree with you when we like i said in a recent post you could call it cl cloud you know multi-cloud 2.0 but it's something different is happening and sanjeev i know you're not a you're not a big fan of buzz words either but i wonder if you could weigh in on this topic uh you mean by the way sanjeev is at the mit cdo iq conference a great conference uh in boston uh and so he's it's a public place so we're going to have i think you viewed his line when he's not speaking please go ahead yeah so you know i come from a pedigree of uh being an analyst of uh firms that love inventing new terms i am not a big fan of inventing new terms i feel that when we come up with a new term i spend all my time standing on a stage trying to define what it is it takes me away from trying to solve the problem so so i'm you know i find these terms to be uh words of convenience like for example big data you know big data to me may not mean anything but big data connotes some of this modern way of handling vast volumes of data that traditional systems could not handle so from that point of view i'm i'm completely okay with super cloud but just inventing a new term is what i have called in my previous sessions tyranny of jargons where we have just too many jargons and uh and they resonate with i.t people they do not resonate with the business people business people care about the problem they don't care about what we and i t called them yeah and i think this is a really important point that you make and by the way we're not trying to create a new industry category per se yeah we leave that to gartner that's why actually i like super cloud because nobody's going to use that no vendor's going to use the term super cloud it's just too buzzy so so but but but it brings up the point about practitioners and so keith i want to bring you in so the what we've talked about and i'll just sort of share some some thoughts on the problems that we see and and get keith get your practitioner view most clouds most companies use multiple clouds we all kind of agree on that i think and largely these clouds operate in silos and they have their own development environment their own operating environment different apis different primitives and the functionality of a particular cloud doesn't necessarily extend to other clouds so the problem is that increases friction for customers increases cost increases security risk and so there's this promise maribel multi-cloud 2.0 that's going to solve that problem so keith my question to you is is is that an accurate description of the problem that practitioners face today do what did i miss and i wonder if you could elaborate so i think we'll get into some of the detail later on why this is a problem specifically around technologies but if we think about it in the abstract most customers have their hands full dealing with one cloud like we'll you know through m a and such and you zoom in and you look at companies that have multiple clouds or multi-cloud from result of mma mna m a activity you'll see that most of that is in silos so organizationally the customer may have multiple clouds but sub orchid silos they're generally a single silo in a single cloud so as you think about being able to take advantage of of tooling across the multicloud of what dave you guys are calling the super cloud this becomes a serious problem it's just a skill problem it's too much capability uh across too many things that look completely different than another okay so dave can i pick up on that please i'd love i was gonna just go to you maribel please chime in here okay so if we think about what we're talking about with super cloud and what keith just mentioned remember when we went to see tcp ip and the whole idea was like how do we get computers to talk to each other in a more standardized way how do we get data to move in a more standardized way i think that the problem we have with multi-cloud right now is that we don't have that so i think that's sort of a ground level of getting us to your super cloud premise is that and and you know google's tried it with anthony's like everybody every hyperscaler has tried their like right one to run anywhere but that abstraction layer you talk about what whatever we want to call it is super necessary and it's sort of the foundation so if you really think about it we've spent like 15 years or so building out all the various components of cloud and now's the time to take it so that cloud is actually more of an operating model versus a place there's at least a base level of it that is vendor neutral and then to your point the value that's going to be built on top of that you know people been trying to commoditize the basic infrastructure for a while now and i think that's what you're seeing in your super cloud multi-cloud whatever you want to call it the infrastructure is the infrastructure and then what would have been traditionally that past layer and above is where we're going to start to see some real innovation but we still haven't gotten to that point where you can do visibility observability manageability across that really complex cloud stack that we have the reason i the reason i love that tcpip example hm is because it changed the industry and it had an ecosystem effect in sanjiv the the the example that i first example that i used was snowflake a company that you're very familiar with that is sort of hiding all that complexity and right and so we're not there yet but please chime in on this topic uh you gotta you gotta view it again uh after you building upon what maribel said you know to me uh this sounds like a multi-cloud operating system where uh you know you need that kind of a common uh set of primitives and layers because if you go in in the typical multi-cloud process you've got multiple identities and you can't have that you how can you govern if i'm if i have multiple identities i don't have observability i don't know what's going on across my different stacks so to me super cloud is that call it single pane of glass or or one way through which i'm unifying my experience my my technology interfaces my integration and uh and i as an end user don't even care which uh which cloud i'm in it makes no difference to me it makes a difference to the vendor the vendor may say this is coming from aws and this is coming from gcp or azure but to the end user it is a consistent experience with consistent id and and observability and governance so that to me makes it a big difference and so one of floyer's contribution conversation was in order to have a super cloud you got to have a super pass i'm like oh boy people are going to love that but the point being that that allows a consistent developer experience and to maribel's earlier point about tcp it explodes the ecosystem because the ecosystem can now write to that super pass if you will those apis so keith do you do do you buy that number one and number two do you see that industries financial services and healthcare are actually going to be on clouds or what we call super clouds so sanjeev hit on a really key aspect of this is identity let's make this real they you love talk about data collaboration i love senji's point on the business user kind of doesn't care if this is aws versus super cloud versus etc i was collaborating with the client and he wanted to send video file and the video file uh his organization's access control policy didn't allow him to upload or share the file from their preferred platform so he had to go out to another cloud provider and create yet another identity for that data on the cloud same data different identity a proper super cloud will enable me to simply say as a end user here's a set of data or data sets and i want to share a collaboration a collaborator and that requires cross identity across multiple clouds so even before we get to the past layer and the apis we have to solve the most basic problem which is data how do we stop data scientists from shipping snowballs to a location because we can't figure out the identity the we're duplicating the same data within the same cloud because we can't share identity across customer accounts or etc we we have to solve these basic thoughts before we get to supercloud otherwise we get to us a turtles all the way down thing so we'll get into snowflake and what snowflake can do but that's what happens when i want to share my snowflake data across multiple clouds to a different platform yeah you have to go inside the snowflake cloud which leads right so i would say to keith's question sanjeev snowflake i think is solving that problem but then he brings up the other problem which is what if i want to share share data outside the snowflake cloud so that gets to the point of visit open is it closed and so sanji chime in on the sort of snowflake example and in maribel i wonder if there are networking examples because that's that's keith's saying you got to fix the plumbing before you get these higher level abstractions but sanji first yeah so i so i actually want to go and talk a little bit about network but from a data and analytics point of view so i never built upon what what keith said so i i want to give an example let's say i am getting fantastic web logs i and i know who uh uh how much time they're spending on my web pages and which pages they're looking at so i have all of that now all of that is going into cloud a now it turns out that i use google analytics or maybe i use adobe's you know analytics uh suite now that is giving me the business view and i'm trying to do customer journey analytics and guess what i now have two separate identities two separate products two separate clouds if i and i as an id person no problem i can solve any problem by writing tons of code but why would i do that if i can have that super pass or a multi-cloud layout where i've got like a single way of looking at my network traffic my customer metrics and i can do my customer journey analytics it solves a huge problem and then i can share that data with my with my partners so they can see data about their products which is a combination of data from different uh clouds great thank you uh maribel please i think we're having a lord of the rings moment here with the run one room to rule them all concept and i'm not sure that anybody's actually incented to do that right so i think there's two levels of the stack i think in the basic we're talking a lot about we don't have the basic fundamentals of how do you move data authenticate data secure data do data lineage all that stuff across different clouds right we haven't even spoken right now i feel like we're really just talking about the public cloud venue and we haven't even pulled in the fact that people are doing hybrid cloud right so hybrid cloud you know then you're talking about you've got hardware vendors and you've got hyperscaler vendors and there's two or three different ways of doing things so i honestly think that something will emerge like if we think about where we are in technology today it's almost like we need back to that operating system that sanji was talking about like we need a next generation operating system like nobody wants to build the cloud mouse driver of the 21st century over and over again right we need something like that as a foundation layer but then on top of it you know there's obviously a lot of opportunity to build differentiation like when i think back on what happened with cloud amazon remained aws remained very powerful and popular because people invested in building things on amazon right they created a platform and it took a while for anybody else to catch up to that or to have that kind of presence and i still feel that way when i talk to companies but having said that i talked to retail the other day and they were like hey we spent a long time building an abstraction layer on top of the clouds so that our developers could basically write once and run anywhere but they were a massive global presence retailer that's not something that everybody can do so i think that we are still missing a gap i don't know if that exactly answers your question but i i do feel like we're kind of in this chicken and egg thing which comes first and nobody wants to necessarily invest in like oh well you know amazon has built a way to do this so we're all just going to do it the amazon way right it seems like that's not going to work either but i think you bring up a really important point which there is going to be no one ring to rule them all you're going to have you know vmware is going to solve its multi-cloud problem snowflake's going to do a very has a very specific you know purpose-built system for it itself databricks is going to do its thing and it's going to be you know more open source i would companies like aviatrix i would say cisco even is going to go out and solve this problem dell showed at uh at dell tech world a thing called uh project alpine which is basically storage across clouds they're going to be many super clouds we're going to get maybe super cloud stove pipes but but the point is however for a specific problem in a set of use cases they will be addressing those and solving incremental value so keith maybe we won't have that single cloud operating you know system but we'll have multiple ones what are your thoughts on that yeah we're definitely going to have multiple ones uh the there is no um there is no community large enough or influential enough to push a design take maribel's example of the mega retailer they've solved it but they're not going to that's that's competitive that's their competitive advantage they're not going to share that with the rest of us and open source that and force that upon the industry via just agreement from everyone else so we're not going to get uh the level of collaboration either originated by the cloud provider originated from user groups that solves this problem big for us we will get silos in which this problem is solved we'll get groups working together inside of maybe uh industry or subgroups within the industry to say that hey we're going to share or federate identity across our three or four or five or a dozen organizations we'll be able to share data we're going to solve that data problem but in the same individual organizations in another part of the super cloud problem are going to again just be silos i can't uh i can't run machine learning against my web assets for the community group that i run because that's not part of the working group that solved a different data science problem so yes we're going to have these uh bifurcations and forks within the super cloud the question is where is the focus for each individual organization where do i point my smart people and what problems they solve okay i want to throw out a premise and get you guys reaction to it because i think this again i go back to the maribel's tcpip example it changed the industry it opened up an ecosystem and to me this is what digital transformation is all about you've got now industry participants marc andreessen says every company is a software company you've now got industry participants and here's some examples it's not i wouldn't call them true super clouds yet but walmart's doing their hybrid thing with azure you got goldman sachs announced at the last reinvent and it's going to take its tools its software its data and which is on-prem and connect that to the aws cloud and actually deliver a service capital one we saw sanjiv at the snowflake summit is is taking their tooling and doing it now granted just within snowflake and aws but i fully expect them to expand that across other clouds these are industry examples capital one software is the name of the division that are now it's to the re reason why i don't get so worried that we're not solving the lord of the rings problem that maribel mentioned is because it opens up tremendous opportunities for companies we got like just under five minutes left i want to throw that out there and see what you guys think yeah i would just i want to build upon what maribel said i love what she said you're not going to build a mouse driver so if multi-cloud supercloud is a multi-cloud os the mouse driver would be identity or maybe it's data quality and to teach point that data quality is not going to come from a single vendor that is going to come from a different vendor whose job is to to harmonize data because there might be data might be for the same identity but it may be a different granularity level so you cannot just mix and match so you need to have some sort of like resolution and that is is an example of a driver for multi-cloud interesting okay so you know octa might be the identity cloud or z scaler might be the security cloud or calibre has its cloud etc any thoughts on that keith or maribel yeah so let's talk about where the practical challenges run into this we did some really great research that was sponsored by one of the large cloud providers in which we took all we looked at all the vmware cloud solutions when i say vmware cloud vmware has a lot of products across multi-cloud now in the rock broadcloud portfolio but we're talking about the og solution vmware vsphere it would seem like on paper if i put vmware vsphere in each cloud that is therefore a super cloud i think we would all agree to that in principle what we found in our research was that when we put hands on keyboard the differences of the clouds show themselves in the training gap and that skills gap between the clouds show themselves if i needed to expose less our favorite friend a friend a tc pip address to the public internet that is a different process on each one of the clouds that needs to be done on each one of the clouds and not abstracted in vmware vsphere so as we look at the nuance yes we can give the big controls but where the capital ones the uh jp morgan chase just spent two billion dollars on this type of capability where the spin effort is done is taking it from that 80 percent to that 90 95 experience and that's where the effort and money is spent on that last mile maribel we're out of time but please you know bring us home give us your closing thoughts hey i think we're still going to be working on what the multi-cloud thing is for a while and you know super cloud i think is a direction of the future of cloud computing but we got some real problems to solve around authentication uh identity data lineage data security so i think those are going to be sort of the tactical things that we're working on for the next couple years right guys always a pleasure having you on the cube i hope we see you around keith i understand you're you're bringing your airstream to vmworld or vmware explorer putting it on the on the floor i can't wait to see that and uh mrs cto advisor i'm sure we'll be uh by your side so looking forward to that hopefully sanjeev and maribel we'll see you uh on the circuit as well yes hope to see you there right looking forward to hopefully even doing some content with you guys at vmware explorer too awesome looking forward all right keep it right there for more content from super cloud 22 right back [Music] you