>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome to the Fira in Barcelona, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23, day one of that coverage. We have four days of wall-to-wall action going on, the place is going crazy. I'm here with Dave Nicholson, Lisa Martin is also in the house. Today's ecosystem day, and we're really excited to have Manish Singh who's the CTO of the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell Technologies. He's joined by Doug Wolf who's the head of strategy for the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell. Gents, welcome. What a show. I mean really the first major MWC or used to be Mobile World Congress since you guys have launched your telecom business, you kind of did that sort of in the Covid transition, but really exciting, obviously a huge, huge venue to match the huge market. So Manish, how did you guys get into this? What did you see? What was the overall thinking to get Dell into this business? >> Manish: Yeah, well, I mean just to start with you know, if you look at the telecom ecosystem today, the service providers in particular, they are looking for network transformation, driving more disaggregation into their network so that they can get better utilization of the infrastructure, but then also get more agility, more cloud native characteristics onto their, for their networks in particular. And then further on, it's important for them to really start to accelerate the pace of innovation on the networks itself, to start more supply chain diversity, that's one of the challenges that they've been having. And so there've been all these market forces that have been really getting these service providers to really start to transform the way they have built the infrastructure in the past, which was legacy monolithic architectures to more cloud native disaggregated. And from a Dell perspective, you know, that really gives us the permission to play, to really, given all the expertise on the work we have done in the IT with all the IT transformations to leverage all that expertise and bring that to the service providers and really help them in accelerating their network transformation. So that's where the journey started. We've been obviously ever since then working on expanding the product portfolio on our compute platforms to bring Teleco great compute platforms with more capabilities than we can talk about that. But then working with partners and building the ecosystem to again create this disaggregated and open ecosystem that will be more cloud native and really meet the objective that the service providers are after. >> Dave Vellante: Great, thank you. So, Doug the strategy obviously is to attack this market, as Manish said, from an open standpoint, that's sort of new territory. It's like a little bit like the wild, wild west. So maybe you could double click on what Manish was saying from a, from a strategy standpoint, yes, the Telecos need to be more flexible, they need to be more open, but they also need this reliability piece. So talk about that from a strategy standpoint of what you guys saw. >> Doug: Yeah, absolutely. As Manish mentioned, you know, Dell getting into open systems isn't something new. You know, Dell has been kind of playing in that world for years and years, but the opportunity in Telecom that came was opening of the RAN, the core network, the edge, all of these with 5G really created a wide opening for us. So we started developing products and solutions, you know, built our first Telecom grade servers for open RAN over the last year, we'll talk about those at the show. But you know, as, as Manish mentioned, an open ecosystem is new to Telecom. I've been in the Telecom business along with Manish for, you know, 25 plus years and this is a new thing that they're embarking on. So started with virtualization about five, six years ago, and now moving to cloud native architectures on the core, suddenly there's this need to have multiple parties partner really well, share specifications, and put that together for an operator to consume. And I think that's just the start of really where all the challenges are and the opportunities that we see. >> Where are we in this transition cycle? When the average consumer hears 5G, feels like it's been around for a long time because it was hyped beforehand. >> Doug: Yeah. >> If you're talking about moving to an open infrastructure model from a proprietary closed model, when is the opportunity for Dell to become part of that? Is it, are there specific sites that have already transitioned to 5G, therefore they've either made the decision to be open or not? Or are there places where the 5G transition has taken place, and they might then make a transition to open brand with 5G? Where, where are we in that cycle? What does the opportunity look like? >> I'll kind of take it from the typology of the operator, and I'm sure Manish will build on this, but if I look back on the core, started to get virtualized you know, back around 2015-16 with some of the lead operators like AT&T et cetera. So Dell has been partnering with those operators for some years. So it really, it's happening on the core, but it's moving with 5G to more of a cloud-like architecture, number one. And number two, they're going beyond just virtualizing the network. You know, they previously had used OpenStack and most of them are migrating to more of a cloud native architecture that Manish mentioned. And that is a bit different in terms of there's more software vendors in that ecosystem because the software is disaggregated also. So Dell's been playing in the core for a number of years, but we brought out new solutions we've announced at the show for the core. And the parts that are really starting that transition of maybe where the core was back in 2015 is on the RAN and on the edge in particular. >> Because NFV kind of predated the ascendancy of cloud. >> Exactly, yeah. >> Right, so it really didn't have the impact that people had hoped. And there's some, when you look back, 'cause it's not same wine, new bottle as the open systems movement, there are a lot of similarities but you know, you mentioned cloud, and cloud native, you really didn't have, back in the nineties, true engineered systems. You didn't really have AI that, you know, to speak of at the sort of volume of the data that we have. So Manish, from a CTO's perspective, how are you attacking some of those differences in bringing that to market? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean, I think you touched on some very important points there. So first of all, the duck's point, a lot of this transformation started in the core, right? And as the technology evolution progress, the opportunities opened up. It has now come into the edge and the radio access network as well, in particular with open RAN. And so when we talk about the disaggregation of the infrastructure from the software itself and an open ecosystem, this now starts to create the opportunity to accelerate innovation. And I really want to pick up on the point that you'd said on AI, for example. AI and machine learning bring a whole new set of capabilities and opportunities for these service providers to drive better optimization, better performance, better sustainability and energy efficiency on their infrastructure, on and on and on. But to really tap into these technologies, they really need to open that up to third parties implementation solutions that are coming up. And again, the end objective remains to accelerate that innovation. Now that said, all these things need to be brought together, right? And delivered and deployed in the network without any degradation in the KPIs and actually improving the performance on different vectors, right? So this is what the current state of play is. And with this aggregation I'm definitely a believer that all these new technologies, including AI, machine learning, and there's a whole area, host area of problems that can be solved and attacked and are actually getting attacked by applying AI and machine learning onto these networks. >> Open obviously is good. Nobody's ever going to, you know, argue that open is a bad thing. It's like democracy is a good thing, right? At least amongst us. And so, but, the RAN, the open RAN, has to be as reliable and performant, right, as these, closed networks. Or maybe not, maybe it doesn't have to be identical. Just has to be close enough in order for that tipping point to occur. Is that a fair summarization? What are you guys hearing from carriers in terms of their willingness to sort of put their toe in the water and, and what could we expect in terms of the maturity model of, of open RAN and adoption? >> Right, so I mean I think on, on performance that, that's a tough one. I think the operators will demand performance and you've seen experiments, you've really seen more of the Greenfield operators kind of launch. >> Okay. >> Doug: Open RAN or vRAN type solutions. >> So they're going to disrupt. >> Doug: Yeah, they're going to disrupt. >> Yeah. >> Doug: And there's flexibility in an open RAN architecture also for 5G that they, that they're interested in and I think the Brownfield operators are too, but let's say maybe the Greenfield jump first in terms of doing that from a mass deployment perspective. But I still think that it's going to be critical to meet very similar SLAs and end user performance. And, you know, I think that's where, you know, maturity of that model is what's required. I think Brownfield operators are conservative in terms of, you know, going with something they know, but the opportunities and the benefits of that architecture and building new flexible, potentially cost advantaged over time solutions, that's what the, where the real interest is going forward. >> And new services that you can introduce much more quickly. You know, the interesting thing about Dell to me, you don't compete with the carriers, the public cloud vendors though, the carriers are concerned about them sort of doing an end run on them. So you provide a potential partnership for the carriers that's non-threatening, right? 'Cause you're, you're an arms dealer, you're selling hardware and software, right? But, but how do you see that? Because we heard in the keynote today, one of the Teleco, I think it was the chairman of Telefonica said, you know, cloud guys can't do this alone. You know, they need, you know, this massive, you know, build out. And so, what do you think about that in terms of your relationship with the carriers not being threatening? I mean versus say potentially the cloud guys, who are also your partners, I understand, it's a really interesting dynamic, isn't it? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean I think, you know, I mean, the way I look at it, the carriers actually need someone like Dell who really come in who can bring in the right capabilities, the right infrastructure, but also bring in the ecosystem together and deliver a performance solution that they can deploy and that they can trust, number one. Number two, to your point on cloud, I mean, from a Dell perspective, you know, we announced our Dell Telecom Multicloud Foundation and as part of that last year in September, we announced what we call is the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks. The first one we announced with Wind River, and this is, think of it as the, you know, hardware and the cashier all pre-integrated with lot of automation around it, factory integrated, you know, delivered to customers in an integrated model with all the licenses, everything. And so it starts to solve the day zero, day one, day two integration deployment and then lifecycle management for them. So to broaden the discussion, our view is it's a multicloud world, the future is multicloud where you can have different clouds which can be optimized for different workloads. So for example, while our work with Wind River initially was very focused on virtualization of the radio access network, we just announced our infrastructure block with Red Hat, which is very much targeted and optimized for core network and edge, right? So, you know, there are different workflows which will require different capabilities also. And so, you know, again, we are bringing those things to these service providers to again, bring those cloud characteristics and cloud native architecture for their network. >> And It's going to be hybrid, to your point. >> David N.: And you, just hit on something, you said cloud characteristics. >> Yeah. >> If you look at this through the lens of kind of the general world of IT, sometimes when people hear the word cloud, they immediately leap to the idea that it's a hyperscale cloud provider. In this scenario we're talking about radio towers that have intelligence living on them and physically at the base. And so the cloud characteristics that you're delivering might be living physically in these remote locations all over the place, is that correct? >> Yeah, I mean that, that's true. That will definitely happen over time. But I think, I think we've seen the hyperscalers enter, you know, public cloud providers, enter at the edge and they're dabbling maybe with private, but I think the public RAN is another further challenge. I think that maybe a little bit down the road for them. So I think that is a different characteristic that you're talking about managing the macro RAN environment. >> Manish: If I may just add one more perspective of this cloud, and I mean, again, the hyperscale cloud, right? I mean that world's been great when you can centralize a lot of compute capability and you can then start to, you know, do workload aggregation and use the infrastructure more efficient. When it comes to Telecom, it is inherently it distributed architecture where you have access, you talked about radio access, your port, and it is inherently distributed because it has to provide the coverage and capacity. And so, you know, it does require different kind of capabilities when you're going out and about, and this is where I was talking about things like, you know, we just talked, we just have been working on our bare metal orchestration, right? This is what we are bringing is a capability where you can actually have distributed infrastructure, you can deploy, you can actually manage, do lifecycle management, in a distributed multicloud form. So it does require, you know, different set of capabilities that need to be enabled. >> Some, when talking about cloud, would argue that it's always been information technology, it always will be information technology, and especially as what we might refer to as public cloud or hyperscale cloud providers, are delivering things essentially on premises. It's like, well, is that cloud? Because it feels like some of those players are going to be delivering physical infrastructure outside of their own data centers in order to address this. It seems the nature, the nature of the beast is that some of these things need to be distributed. So it seems perfectly situated for Dell. That's why you guys are both at Dell now and not working for other Telecom places, right? >> Exactly. Exactly, yes. >> It's definitely an exciting space. It's transformed, the networks are under transformation and I do think that Dell's very well positioned to, to really help the customers, the service providers in accelerating their transformation journey with an open ecosystem. >> Dave V.: You've got the brand, and the breadth, and the resources to actually attract an ecosystem. But I wonder if you could sort of take us through your strategy of ecosystem, the challenges that you've seen in developing that ecosystem and what the vision is that ultimately, what's the outcome going to be of that open ecosystem? >> Yeah, I can start. So maybe just to give you the big picture, right? I mean the big picture, is disaggregation with performance, right, TCO models to the service providers, right? And it starts at the infrastructure layer, builds on bringing these cloud capabilities, the cast layer, right? Bringing the right accelerators. All of this requires to pull the ecosystem. So give you an example on the infrastructure in a Teleco grade servers like XR8000 with Sapphire, the new intel processors that we've just announced, and an extended array of servers. These are Teleco grade, short depth, et cetera. You know, the Teleco great characteristic. Working with the partners like Marvel for bringing in the accelerators in there, that's important to again, drive the performance and optimize for the TCO. Working then with partners like Wind River, Red Hat, et cetera, to bring in the cast capabilities so you can start to see how this ecosystem starts to build up. And then very recently we announced our private 5G solution with AirSpan and Expeto on the core site. So bringing those workloads together. Similarly, we have an open RAN solution we announce with Fujitsu. So it's, it's open, it's disaggregated, but bringing all these together. And one of the last things I would say is, you know, to make all this happen and make all of these, we've also been putting together our OTEL, our open Telecom ecosystem lab, which is very much geared, really gives this open ecosystem a playground where they can come in and do all that heavy lifting, which is anyways required, to do the integration, optimization, and board. So put all these capabilities in place, but the end goal, the end vision again, is that cloud native disaggregated infrastructure that starts to innovate at the speed of software and scales at the speed of cloud. >> And this is different than the nineties. You didn't have something like OTEL back then, you know, you didn't have the developer ecosystem that you have today because on top of everything that you just said, Manish, are new workloads and new applications that are going to be developed. Doug, anything you'd add to what Manish said? >> Doug: Yeah, I mean, as Manish said, I think adding to the infrastructure layers, which are, you know, critical for us to, to help integrate, right? Because we kind of took a vertical Teleco stack and we've disaggregated it, and it's gotten a little bit more complex. So our Solutions Dell Technology infrastructure block, and our lab infrastructure with OTEL, helps put those pieces together. But without the software players in this, you know, that's what we really do, I think in OTEL. And that's just starting to grow. So integrating with those software providers with that integration is something that the operators need. So we fill a gap there in terms of either providing engineered solutions so they can readily build on or actually bringing in that software provider. And I think that's what you're going to see more from us going forward is just extending that ecosystem even further. More software players effectively. >> In thinking about O-RAN, are they, is it possible to have the low latency, the high performance, the reliability capabilities that carriers are used to and the flexibility? Or can you sort of prioritize one over the other from a go to market and rollout standpoint and optimize one, maybe get a foothold in the market? How do you see that balance? >> Manish: Oh the answer is absolutely yes you can have both We are on that journey, we are on that journey. This is where all these things I was talking about in terms of the right kind of accelerators, right kind of capabilities on the infrastructure, obviously retargeting the software, there are certain changes, et cetera that need to be done on the software itself to make it more cloud native. And then building all the surrounding capabilities around the CICD pipeline and all where it's not just day zero or day one that you're doing the cloud-like lifecycle management of this infrastructure. But the answer to your point, yes, absolutely. It's possible, the technology is there, and the ecosystem is coming together, and that's the direction. Now, are there challenges? Absolutely there are challenges, but directionally that's the direction the industry is moving to. >> Dave V.: I guess my question, Manish, is do they have to go in lockstep? Because I would argue that the public cloud when it first came out wasn't nearly as functional as what I could get from my own data center in terms of recovery, you know, backup and recovery is a perfect example and it took, you know, a decade plus to get there. But it was the flexibility, and the openness, and the developer affinity, the programmability, that attracted people. Do you see O-RAN following a similar path? Or does it, my question is does it have to have that carrier class reliability today? >> David N.: Everything on day one, does it have to have everything on day one? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, like again, the Greenfield operators I think we're, we're willing do a little bit more experimentation. I think the operators, Brownfield operators that have existing, you know, deployments, they're going to want to be closer. But I think there's room for innovation here. And clearly, you know, Manish came from, from Meta and we're, we've been very involved with TIP, we're very involved with the O-RAN alliance, and as Manish mentioned, with all those accelerators that we're working with on our infrastructure, that is a space that we're trying to help move the ball forward. So I think you're seeing deployments from mainstream operators, but it's maybe not in, you know, downtown New York deployment, they're more rural deployments. I think that's getting at, you know, kind of your question is there's maybe a little bit more flexibility there, they get to experiment with the technology and the flexibility and then I think it will start to evolve >> Dave V.: And that's where the disruption's going to come from, I think. >> David N.: Well, where was the first place you could get reliable 4K streaming of video content? It wasn't ABC, CBS, NBC. It was YouTube. >> Right. >> So is it possible that when you say Greenfield, are a lot of those going to be what we refer to as private 5G networks where someone may set up a private 5G network that has more functions and capabilities than the public network? >> That's exactly where I was going is that, you know, that that's why you're seeing us getting very active in 5G solutions that Manish mentioned with, you know, Expeto and AirSpan. There's more of those that we haven't publicly announced. So I think you'll be seeing more announcements from us, but that is really, you know, a new opportunity. And there's spectrum there also, right? I mean, there's public and private spectrum. We plan to work directly with the operators and do it in their spectrum when needed. But we also have solutions that will do it, you know, on non-public spectrum. >> So let's close out, oh go ahead. You you have something to add there? >> I'm just going to add one more point to Doug's point, right? Is if you look on the private 5G and the end customer, it's the enterprise, right? And they're, they're not a service provider. They're not a carrier. They're more used to deploying, you know, enterprise infrastructure, maintaining, managing that. So, you know, private 5G, especially with this open ecosystem and with all the open run capabilities, it naturally tends to, you know, blend itself very well to meet those requirements that the enterprise would have. >> And people should not think of private 5G as a sort of a replacement for wifi, right? It's to to deal with those, you know, intense situations that can afford the additional cost, but absolutely require the reliability and the performance and, you know, never go down type of scenario. Is that right? >> Doug: And low latencies usually, the primary characteristics, you know, for things like Industry 4.0 manufacturing requirements, those are tough SLAs. They're just, they're different than the operator SLAs for coverage and, you know, cell performance. They're now, you know, Five9 type characteristics, but on a manufacturing floor. >> That's why we don't use wifi on theCUBE to broadcast, we need a hard line. >> Yeah, but why wouldn't it replace wifi over time? I mean, you know, I still have a home phone number that's hardwired to align, but it goes to a voicemail. We don't even have handset anymore for it, yeah. >> I think, well, unless the cost can come down, but I think that wifi is flexible, it's cheap. It's, it's kind of perfect for that. >> Manish: And it's good technology. >> Dave V.: And it works great. >> David N.: For now, for now. >> Dave V.: But you wouldn't want it in those situations, and you're arguing that maybe. >> I'm saying eventually, what, put a sim in a device, I don't know, you know, but why not? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, and Dell offers, you know, from our laptop, you know, our client side, we do offer wifi, we do offer 4G and 5G solutions. And I think those, you know, it's a volume and scale issue, I think for the cost structure you're talking about. >> Manish: Come to our booth and see the connected laptop. >> Dave V.: Well let's, let's close on that. Why don't you guys talk a little bit about what you're going on at the show, I did go by the booth, you got a whole big lineup of servers. You got some, you know, cool devices going on. So give us the rundown and you know, let's end with the takeaways here. >> The simple rundown, a broad range of new powered servers, broad range addressing core, edge, RAN, optimized for those with all the different kind of acceleration capabilities. You can see that, you can see infrastructure blocks. These are with Wind River, with Red Hat. You can see OTEL, the open telecom ecosystem lab where all that playground, the integration, the real work, the real sausage makings happening. And then you will see some interesting solutions in terms of co-creation that we are doing, right? So you, you will see all of that and not to forget the connected laptops. >> Dave V.: Yeah, yeah, cool. >> Doug: Yeah and, we mentioned it before, but just to add on, I think, you know, for private 5G, you know, we've announced a few offers here at the show with partners. So with Expeto and AirSpan in particular, and I think, you know, I just want to emphasize the partnerships that we're doing. You know, we're doing some, you know, fundamental integration on infrastructure, bare metal and different options for the operators to get engineered systems. But building on that ecosystem is really, the move to cloud native is where Dell is trying to get in front of. And we're offering solutions and a much larger ecosystem to go after it. >> Dave V.: Great. Manish and Doug, thanks for coming on the program. It was great to have you, awesome discussion. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We're seeing the disaggregation of the Teleco network into open ecosystems with integration from companies like Dell and others. Keep it right there for theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back. (upbeat tech music)

>>Welcome back. Everyone live here at the I'm John Fur, host of the Cube. We got a special insertion here off the program. Jerry Chen Greylock, 10 years with the Cube coming on. 10 years ago when the cube first came here, Jerry, you were in the hallway. We didn't have any guess list. He was like, Hey, you wanna come up in the cube so much. Now we got three sets. We're gonna do hundreds of interviews already. We're gonna have probably over 200 streaming live. Love it Shorts, Instagram reels, data lake. The cubes expanded. You've been there from the whole >>Time. Its like the, its like the, the mcu, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Cube Cinematic universe. You know, it's, its a whole franchise. Congratulations and happy early birthday, John. Thank you very much. Thanks >>For having me. Yeah, you know, I was just graduated high school when I first came to aws. Look, I wanna get your thoughts on, we're gonna do a quick segment here before AMD comes on. Got some great interviews with those guys. You've been here 10 years, you're out in the trenches. Just Andy, Adam Celski, just talked to the VCs, the investment thesis economy. Yeah. This headwinds, tailwinds, depending on which side you're on, you're gonna have a tailwind or headwind. What's the outlook? What's your take of reinvent this year? Aws, the ecosystem and the investment market. >>You know, I think it's, it is a great rebound. The energy's back when it was like pre covid, right? We're saying last year was kind of half the size and you know, be postcode. But I think the show, the energy's great. And Amazon just amazing, right? It's in this economy, what's going on right now in the world. They're still growing, still kicking butt. I think you're gonna see a lot of both enterprise customers and startups start to worry about cost, right? Because I think Amazon's gonna focus like, Hey, how can they help the customers? But the economy for the next year, I think we're gonna see some headwinds. So I think a lot of startups, a lot of customers are gonna worry about cost. >>You're on the board of a lot of startups that are in the cloud, rock sets. One we've covered. I think they're gonna come on here too tomorrow or today. What's your advice on the board level? Go to market. Dial up. Dial down. Sure. What's the strategy marketplace? I mean, how do you give the advice to start? What's the, what's the north star? What's the, what's the advice as the investor? >>Two or three things for most startups, hard roi, like how can you save money? So all the kinda fluffy marketing value you gotta have hard dollar savings, right? Number one, if can save money, you'll do well. Number two, to your point, the marketplace is becoming the channel for startups. These lot of large customers have deals with Amazon through the marketplace. So startup can sell through the marketplace to customers. These lot of CFOs are doing no new vendors, right? It's getting hard, hard to get approved as a startup. So the marketplace become a bigger, bigger deal. >>What about existing ecosystem partners that have been around for the past 10 years? They're independent. They may have their toe in the marketplace, may not, some of them not making their numbers, they're starting to hear things like maybe they'll be re pivoting. People are tooling up. What's the advice for the existing ecosystem partners? Because they're either gonna be like the next data bricks or kind of like maybe >>Everyone's looking for the next data bricks, right? You know, I think for existing partners, you're seeing what's happened. John deals are getting smaller, taking longer to close, right? It's just the reality of what's happening right now. And so for those partners are saying, Hey, focus on the heart roi, be okay with the smaller land and just expand in 23, 24. So just get kind of creative of how you work with customers. And I, like you said, I think Marketplace is is kind of a, a go-to light >>Book. So today, Aruba, the new leader of the, of the partner network, they've merged eight PN with the marketplace. They've now won Coherent organization, not fragmented, I was talking to them last night. They have more startups than ever before coming on board. So the velocity of new venture creation is up, up and to the right still, even in this economy. And as they always say, best time to invest is in a down market. That's like BC 1 0 1, entrepreneurship 1 0 1. What's your advice right now for builders out there looking for that round, trying to get some traction. The agility with the cloud still is there. You can still get time to value. You can still get traction fast. That doesn't go away. What's your advice for the startups? >>Narrow, narrower wedge, right. So I think with like 5,000 startups every single year, there's so much noise. John, look across the floor, a lot of great companies. B, a lot of noise. So I think the more focused wedge you have as a startup and how you can land deliver value, the better land, the very, very sharp wedge expand over time. But just be very specific how you land. >>Awesome. Jerry, great to have you on. I know we wanna make some room on appreciate AMD for squeezing a couple minutes out of their hour and the next hour we're gonna spend with them for your Sage advice final kind of new Insta challenge that Savannah put together, A new host instant challenge, instant challenges. If you had to do an Instagram reel right now, oh, about reinvent this year, what would that Instagram reel be right now? >>I would, I would do the expos scavenger hunt, right? We would have a race of different VCs. You give me a list of five companies, the VCs find the first five companies on the list wins. The wins the race. I think that would be a great challenge. >>All right. What's the most important story this year at Reinvent that you could share with the folks that you could share in terms of what's important, what they should pay attention to, or what's not being told? >>Well, I, I think you talked about your interview with Adam Slosky is the solutions and the what you call the next gen cloud. These high level services. What AWS is doing around these services, it's super interesting. They kind of don't say lead the way, but the responded customers. So they lead the way by kind of following where the customer's going and if, when Slutsky and AWS are doing these solutions, supply chain, et cetera, that tells you kind of where the market's >>Headed. Next Gen Cloud, Jerry, Chad, thanks. Coming on, you're watching The Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. I'm John Furrier. Will be right back with more cube coverages. Day two, day three, here at Reinvent at the short break.

>>How do y'all, and welcome to Dallas, where we're proud to be live from Supercomputing 2022. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined here by my cohost David on the Cube, and our first guest today is a very exciting visionary. He's a leader at Dell. Please welcome Travis Vhi. Travis, thank you so much for being here. >>Thank you so much for having me. >>How you feeling? >>Okay. I I'm feeling like an exciting visionary. You >>Are. That's, that's the ideas why we tee you up for that. Great. So, so tell us, Dell had some huge announcements Yes. Last night. And you get to break it to the cube audience. Give us the rundown. >>Yeah. It's a really big show for Dell. We announced a brand new suite of GPU enabled servers, eight ways, four ways, direct liquid cooling. Really the first time in the history of the portfolio that we've had this much coverage across Intel amd, Invidia getting great reviews from the show floor. I had the chance earlier to be in the whisper suite to actually look at the gear. Customers are buzzing over it. That's one thing I love about this show is the gear is here. >>Yes, it is. It is a haven for hardware nerds. Yes. Like, like well, I'll include you in this group, it sounds like, on >>That. Great. Yes. Oh >>Yeah, absolutely. And I know David is as well, sew up >>The street. Oh, big, big time. Big time hardware nerd. And just to be clear, for the kids that will be watching these videos Yes. We're not talking about alien wear gaming systems. >>No. Right. >>So they're >>Yay big yay tall, 200 pounds. >>Give us a price point on one of these things. Re retail, suggested retail price. >>Oh, I'm >>More than 10 grand. >>Oh, yeah. Yeah. Try another order of magnitude. Yeah. >>Yeah. So this is, this is the most exciting stuff from an infrastructure perspective. Absolutely. You can imagine. Absolutely. But what is it driving? So talk, talk to us about where you see the world of high performance computing with your customers. What are they, what are they doing with this? What do they expect to do with this stuff in the future? >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's a real interesting time and, and I know that the provenance of this show is HPC focused, but what we're seeing and what we're hearing from our customers is that AI workloads and traditional HPC workloads are becoming almost indistinguishable. You need the right mix of compute, you need GPU acceleration, and you need the ability to take the vast quantities of data that are being generated and actually gather insight from them. And so if you look at what customers are trying to do with, you know, enterprise level ai, it's really, you know, how do I classify and categorize my data, but more, more importantly, how do I make sense of it? How do I derive insights from it? Yeah. And so at the end of the day, you know, you look, you look at what customers are trying to do. It's, it's take all the various streams of data, whether it be structured data, whether it be unstructured data, bring it together and make decisions, make business decisions. >>And it's a really exciting time because customers are saying, you know, the same things that, that, that, you know, research scientists and universities have been trying to do forever with hpc. I want to do it on industrial scale, but I want to do it in a way that's more open, more flexible, you know, I call it AI for the rest of us. And, and, and customers are here and they want those systems, but they want the ecosystem to support ease of deployment, ease of use, ease of scale. And that's what we're providing in addition to the systems. We, we provide, you know, Dell's one of the only providers on the on in the industry that can provide not only the, the compute, but the networking and the storage, and more importantly, the solutions that bring it all together. Give you one example. We, we have what we call a validated design for, for ai. And that validated design, we put together all of the pieces, provided the recipe for customers so that they can take what used to be two months to build and run a model. We provide that capability 18 times faster. So we're talking about hours versus months. So >>That's a lot. 18 times faster. I just wanna emphasize that 18 times faster, and we're talking about orders of magnitude and whatnot up here, that makes a huge difference in what people are able to do. Absolutely. >>Absolutely. And so, I mean, we've, you know, you've been doing this for a while. We've been talking about the, the deluge of data forever, but it's gotten to the point and it's, you know, the, the disparity of the data, the fact that much of it remains siloed. Customers are demanding that we provide solutions that allow them to bring that data together, process it, make decisions with it. So >>Where, where are we in the adoption cycle early because we, we've been talking about AI and ML for a while. Yeah. You, you mentioned, you know, kind of the leading edge of academia and supercomputing and HPC and what that, what that conjures up in people's minds. Do you have any numbers or, you know, any, any thoughts about where we are in this cycle? How many, how many people are actually doing this in production versus, versus experimenting at this point? Yeah, >>I think it's a, it's a reason. There's so much interest in what we're doing and so much demand for not only the systems, but the solutions that bring the systems together. The ecosystem that brings the, the, the systems together. We did a study recently and ask customers where they felt they were at in terms of deploying best practices for ai, you know, mass deployment of ai. Only 31% of customers said that they felt that they self-reported. 31% said they felt that they were deploying best practices for their AI deployments. So almost 70% self reporting saying we're not doing it right yet. Yeah. And, and, and another good stat is, is three quarters of customers have fewer than five AI applications deployed at scale in their, in their IT environments today. So, you know, I think we're on the, you know, if, if I, you think about it as a traditional S curve, I think we're at the first inflection point and customers are asking, Can I do it end to end? >>Can I do it with the best of breed in terms of systems? But Dell, can you also use an ecosystem that I know and understand? And I think that's, you know, another great example of something that Dell is doing is, is we have focused on ethernet as connectivity for many of the solutions that we put together. Again, you know, provenance of hpc InfiniBand, it's InfiniBand is a great connectivity option, but you know, there's a lot of care and feeding that goes along with InfiniBand and the fact that you can do it both with InfiniBand for those, you know, government class CU scale, government scale clusters or university scale clusters and more of our enterprise customers can do it with, with ethernet on premises. It's a great option. >>Yeah. You've got so many things going on. I got to actually check out the million dollar hardware that you have just casually Yeah. Sitting in your booth. I feel like, I feel like an event like this is probably one of the only times you can let something like that out. Yeah, yeah. And, and people would actually know what it is you're working >>With. We actually unveiled it. There was a sheet on it and we actually unveiled it last night. >>Did you get a lot of uz and os >>You know, you said this was a show for hardware nerds. It's been a long time since I've been at a shoe, a show where people cheer and u and a when you take the sheet off the hardware and, and, and Yes, yes, >>Yes, it has and reveal you had your >>Moment. Exactly, exactly. Our three new systems, >>Speaking of u and os, I love that. And I love that everyone was excited as we all are about it. What I wanna, It's nice to be home with our nerds. Speaking of, of applications and excitement, you get to see a lot of different customers across verticals. Is there a sector or space that has you personally most excited? >>Oh, personally most excited, you know, for, for credibility at home when, when the sector is media and entertainment and the movie is one that your, your children have actually seen, that one gives me credibility. Exciting. It's, you can talk to your friends about it at, at at dinner parties and things like that. I'm like, >>Stuff >>Curing cancer. Marvel movie at home cred goes to the Marvel movie. Yeah. But, but, but you know, what really excites me is the variety of applications that AI is being used, used in healthcare. You know, on a serious note, healthcare, genomics, a huge and growing application area that excites me. You know, doing, doing good in the world is something that's very important to Dell. You know, know sustainability is something that's very important to Dell. Yeah. So any application related to that is exciting to me. And then, you know, just pragmatically speaking, anything that helps our customers make better business decisions excites me. >>So we are, we are just at the beginning of what I refer to as this rolling thunder of cpu. Yes. Next generation releases. We re recently from AMD in the near future it'll be, it'll be Intel joining the party Yeah. Going back and forth, back and forth along with that gen five PCI e at the motherboard level. Yep. It's very easy to look at it and say, Wow, previous gen, Wow, double, double, double. It >>Is, double >>It is. However, most of your customers, I would guess a fair number of them might be not just N minus one, but n minus two looking at an upgrade. So for a lot of people, the upgrade season that's ahead of us is going to be not a doubling, but a four x or eight x in a lot of, in a lot of cases. Yeah. So the quantity of compute from these new systems is going to be a, it's gonna be a massive increase from where we've been in, in, in the recent past, like as in last, last Tuesday. So is there, you know, this is sort of a philosophical question. We talked a little earlier about this idea of the quantitative versus qualitative difference in computing horsepower. Do we feel like we're at a point where there's gonna be an inflection in terms of what AI can actually deliver? Yeah. Based on current technology just doing it more, better, faster, cheaper? Yeah. Or do we, or do we need this leap to quantum computing to, to get there? >>Yeah. I look, >>I think we're, and I was having some really interesting conversations with, with, with customers that whose job it is to run very, very large, very, very complex clusters. And we're talking a little bit about quantum computing. Interesting thing about quantum computing is, you know, I think we're or we're a ways off still. And in order to make quantum computing work, you still need to have classical computing surrounding Right. Number one. Number two, with, with the advances that we're, we're seeing generation on generation with this, you know, what, what has moved from a kind of a three year, you know, call it a two to three year upgrade cycle to, to something that because of all of the technology that's being deployed into the industry is almost more continuous upgrade cycle. I, I'm personally optimistic that we are on the, the cusp of a new level of infrastructure modernization. >>And it's not just the, the computing power, it's not just the increases in GPUs. It's not, you know, those things are important, but it's things like power consumption, right? One of the, the, the ways that customers can do better in terms of power consumption and sustainability is by modernizing infrastructure. Looking to your point, a lot of people are, are running n minus one, N minus two. The stuff that's coming out now is, is much more energy efficient. And so I think there's a lot of, a lot of vectors that we're seeing in, in the market, whether it be technology innovation, whether it be be a drive for energy efficiency, whether it be the rise of AI and ml, whether it be all of the new silicon that's coming in into the portfolio where customers are gonna have a continuous reason to upgrade. I mean, that's, that's my thought. What do you think? >>Yeah, no, I think, I think that the, the, the objective numbers that are gonna be rolling out Yeah. That are starting to roll out now and in the near future. That's why it's really an exciting time. Yeah. I think those numbers are gonna support your point. Yeah. Because people will look and they'll say, Wait a minute, it used to be a dollar, but now it's $2. That's more expensive. Yeah. But you're getting 10 times as much Yeah. For half of the amount of power boom. And it's, and it's >>Done. Exactly. It's, it's a >>Tco It's, it's no brainer. It's Oh yeah. You, it gets to the point where it's, you look at this rack of amazing stuff that you have a personal relationship with and you say, I can't afford to keep you plugged in anymore. Yeah. >>And Right. >>The power is such a huge component of this. Yeah. It's huge, huge. >>Our customer, I mean, it's always a huge issue, but our customers, especially in Amia with what's going on over there are, are saying, I, you know, I need to upgrade because I need to be more energy efficient. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. I I, we were talking about 20 years from now, so you've been at Dell over 18 years. >>Yeah. It'll be 19 in in May. >>Congratulations. Yeah. What, what commitment, so 19 years from now in your, in your second Dell career. Yeah. What are we gonna be able to say then that perhaps we can't say now? >>Oh my gosh. Wow. 19 years from now. >>Yeah. I love this as an arbitrary number too. This is great. Yeah. >>38 year Dell career. Yeah. >>That might be a record. Yeah. >>And if you'd like to share the winners of Super Bowls and World Series in advance, like the world and the, the sports element act from back to the future. So we can play ball bets power and the >>Power ball, but, but any >>Point building Yeah. I mean this is what, what, what, what do you think ai, what's AI gonna deliver in the next decade? >>Yeah. I, I look, I mean, there are are, you know, global issues that advances in computing power will help us solve. And, you know, the, the models that are being built, the ability to generate a, a digital copy of the analog world and be able to run models and simulations on it is, is amazing. Truly. Yeah. You know, I, I was looking at some, you know, it's very, it's a very simple and pragmatic thing, but I think it's, it, it's an example of, of what could be, we were with one of our technology providers and they, they were, were showing us a digital simulation, you know, a digital twin of a factory for a car manufacturer. And they were saying that, you know, it used to be you had to build the factory, you had to put the people in the factory. You had to, you know, run cars through the factory to figure out sort of how you optimize and you know, where everything's placed. >>Yeah. They don't have to do that anymore. No. Right. They can do it all via simulation, all via digital, you know, copy of, of analog reality. And so, I mean, I think the, you know, the, the, the, the possibilities are endless. And, you know, 19 years ago, I had no idea I'd be sitting here so excited about hardware, you know, here we are baby. I think 19 years from now, hardware still matters. Yeah. You know, hardware still matters. I know software eats the world, the hardware still matters. Gotta run something. Yeah. And, and we'll be talking about, you know, that same type of, of example, but at a broader and more global scale. Well, I'm the knucklehead who >>Keeps waving his phone around going, There's one terabyte in here. Can you believe that one terabyte? Cause when you've been around long enough, it's like >>Insane. You know, like, like I've been to nasa, I live in Texas, I've been to NASA a couple times. They, you know, they talk about, they sent, you know, they sent people to the moon on, on way less, less on >>Too far less in our pocket computers. Yeah. It's, it's amazing. >>I am an optimist on, on where we're going clearly. >>And we're clearly an exciting visionary, like we said, said the gate. It's no surprise that people are using Dell's tech to realize their AI ecosystem dreams. Travis, thank you so much for being here with us David. Always a pleasure. And thank you for tuning in to the Cube Live from Dallas, Texas. My name is Savannah Peterson. We'll be back with more supercomputing soon.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon. theCUBE is live at VMware Explorer. Lisa Martin here in San Francisco with Dave Nicholson. This is our second day of coverage talking all things VMware and it's ecosystem. We're excited to welcome from DXC Technology, James Bion, Hybrid Cloud and Multi Cloud Offering manager to have a conversation next. Welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much. >> Welcome. >> Talk to us a little bit about before we get into the VMware partnership, what's new at DXC? What's going on? >> So DXC is really evolving and revitalizing into more of a cloud orientated company. So we're already driving change in our customers at the moment. We take them on that cloud journey, but we're taking them in the right way, in a structured mannered way. So we are really excited about it, we're kicking off our Cloud First type, Cloud Right sort of story and helping customers on that journey. >> Yesterday in the keynote, VMware was talking about customers are on this Cloud chaos phase, they want to get to Cloud Smart. You're saying they want to get to Cloud Right. Talk to us about what DXC Cloud Right is, what does it mean? What does it enable businesses to achieve? >> That's a very good question. So DXC has come up with this concept of Cloud Right, we looked at it from a services and outcome. So what do customers want to achieve? And how do we get it successfully? This is not a technology conversation, this is about putting the right workloads at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost to get the right value for your business. It's not about just doing it for the sake of doing it, okay. There's a lot of changes it's not technology only you've got to change how people operate. You've got to work through the organizational change. You need to ensure that you have the right security in place to maintain it. And it's about value, really about value proposition. So we don't just focus on cost, we focus on operations of it, we focus on security of it. We focus on ensuring the value proposition of it and putting not just for one Cloud, it's the right place. Big focus on Hybrid and Multi Cloud solutions in particular, we're very excited about what's happening with VMware Cloud on maybe AWS or et cetera because we see there a real dynamic change for our customers where they can transition across to the right Cloud services, at the right time, at the right place, but minimal disruption to the actual operation of their business. Very easy to move a workload into that place using the same skilled resources, the same tools, the same environment that you have had for many years, the same SLAs. Customers don't want a variance in their SLAs, they just want an outcome at a right price and the right time. >> Right, what are some of the things going on with the VMware partnership and anything you know, here we are at this the event called the theme is "The Center of the Multi Cloud Universe", which I keep saying sounds like a Marvel movie, I think there needs to be some superheroes here. But how is DXC working with VMware to help customers that are in Multi Cloud by default, not by design? >> That's a very good one. So DXC works jointly with VMware for more than a thousand clients out there. Wide diversity of different clients. We go to market together, we work collaboratively to put roadmaps in place for our clients, it's a unified team. On top of that, we have an extremely good VMware practice, joint working VMware team working directly with DXC dedicated resources and we deliver real value for clients. For example, we have a customer experience zone, we have a customer innovation zone so we can run proof of concepts on all the different VMware technologies for customers. If they want to try something different, try and push the boundaries a little bit with the VMware products, we can do that for them. But at the end of the day we deliver outcome based services. We are not there to deliver a piece of software, but a technology which show the customer the value of the service that they've been receiving within that. So we bring the VMware fantastic technologies in and then we bring the DXC managed services which we do so well and we look after our customers and do the right thing for our customers. >> So what does the go-to market strategy look like from a DXC perspective? We say that there are a finite number of strategic seats at the customer table. DXC has longstanding deep relationships with customers, so does VMware and probably over a shorter period of time, the Hyper scale Cloud Providers. How are you approaching these relationships with customers? Is it you bringing in your friends from the cloud? Is it the cloud bringing in their friend DXC? What does it look like? >> So we have relationships with all of them, but were agnostic. So we are the people who bring it all together into that unified platform and services that the customers expect. VMware will bring us certainly to the table and we'll bring VMware to the table. Equally, we work very collaboratively with all the cloud providers and we work in deals together. They bring us deals, we bring them deals. So it works extremely well from that perspective, but of course it's a multi-cloud world these days. We don't just deal with one cloud provider, we'll normally have all of the different services to find the right place for our customers. >> Now, one thing that that's been mentioned from DXC is this idea that Cloud First which has been sort of a mantra that scores you points if you're a CIO lately, maybe that's not the best way to wake up in the morning. Why not saying, Cloud First? >> So we have a lot of clients who who've tried that Cloud First journey and they've aggressively taken on migration of workloads. And now that they've settled in a few of those they're discovering maybe the ROI isn't quite what they expected it was going to be. That transformation takes a long time, a very long time. We've seen some of the numbers around averaging a hundred apps can take up to seven years to transition and transform, that's a long time. It makes you almost less agile by doing the transformation quite ironically. So DXC's Cloud Right program really helps you to ensure that you assess those workloads correctly, you target the ones that are going to give you the best business value, possibly the best return on investment using our Cloud and advisory practice to do that. And then obviously off the back of that we've got our migration teams and our run services and our application modernization factories and our application platforms for that. So DXC Cloud Right can certainly help our customers on that journey and get that sort of Hybrid Multi Cloud solution that suits their particular outcomes, not just one Cloud provider. >> So Cloud Right isn't just Cloud migration? >> No. >> People sometimes confuse digital transformation with Cloud migration. >> Correct. >> So to be clear Cloud Right and DXC has the ability to work with customers on not just, oh, here, this is how we box it up and ship it out, but what makes sense to box up and ship out. >> Correct, and it's all about that whole end to end life cycle. Remember, this is not just a technology conversation, this is an end to end business conversation. It's the outcomes are important, not the technology. That's why you have good partners like DXC who will help you on that technology journey. >> Let's talk about in the dynamics of the market the last couple of years, we saw so many customers in every industry race to the Cloud, race to digitally transform. You bring up a good point of people interchangeably talking about digital transformation, Cloud migration, but we saw the massive adoption of SaaS technologies. What are you seeing? Are you seeing customers in that sort of Cloud chaos as VMware calls it? That you're coming in with the Cloud Right approach saying, let's actually figure out, you may have done this because of the pandemic maybe it was accelerated, you needed to facilitate collaboration or whatnot, but actually this is the right approach. Are you seeing a lot of customers in that situation? >> We are certainly seeing some customers going into that chaos world. Some of them are still in the early stages of their journey and are taking a more cautious step towards in particular, the companies that would die on systems to be up available all the time. Others have gone too far, the other are in extreme are in the chaos world. And our Cloud Right program will certainly help them to pull their chaos back in, identify what workloads are potentially running in the wrong place, get the framework in place for ensuring that security and governance is in place. Ensuring that we don't have a cost spend blowout in particular, make sure that security is key to everything that we do and operations is key to everything we do. We have our own intelligent Platform X, it's called, our service management platform which is really the engine that sits behind our delivery mechanism. And that's got a whole lot of AI analytics engines in there to identify things and proactively identify workload placements, workload repairs, scripting, and hyper automation behind that too, to keep available here and there. And that's really some of our Cloud Right story, it's not just sorting out the mess, it's sorting out and then running it for you in the right way. >> So what does a typical, a customer engagement look like for a customer in that situation? >> So we would obviously engage our client right advisory team and they would come in and sit down with your application owners, sit down with the business units, identify what success needs to look like. They do all the discovery, they'll run it through our engines to identify what workloads are in the right place, should go to the right place. Just 'cause you can do something doesn't mean you should do something and that's an important thing. So we will come back with that and say, this is where I think your cloud roadmap journey should be. And obviously that takes an intuitive process, but we then can pick off the key topics early at the right time and that low hanging fruit that's really going to drive that value for the customer. >> And where are your customer conversations these days? I mean from a Cloud perspective, digital transformation, we're seeing everything escalate up the C-suite? Are you engaging the executives in this conversation so that they really want to facilitate, let's do things the right way that's the most efficient that allows us as a business to do what we're best at? >> So where we've seen programs fail is where we don't have executive leadership and brought in from day one. So if you don't have that executive and business driver and business leadership, then you're definitely not going to be successful. So to answer your question, yes, of course we are, but we also working directly with the IT departments as well. >> So you just brought up an insight executive alignment, critically important. Based on what you've experienced in the real world, contrast that with the sort of message to the world that we hear constantly about Cloud and IT, what would be the most shocking thing that you can share with us that people might not be aware of? It's like what shocks you the most about the disconnect between what everybody talks about and the reality on the ground? Don't name any names of anyone, but give us an example of the like, this is what's really going on. >> So, we certainly are seeing that big sort of move into Cloud quickly, okay. And then the big bill shock comes and just moving a workload across doesn't mean you're in Cloud, it's a transition and transformation to the SaaS and power services, it's where you get your true value out of cloud. So the concept that just 'cause it's in Cloud it's cheap is not always the case. Doing it right in Cloud is definitely going to have some cost value, but it's going to bring other additional values to their business. It's going to give them agility, it's going to give them resilience. So if you look at all three of those platforms cost, agility, and resilience and live across all three of those, then you're definitely going to get the best outcomes. And we've certainly seen some of those where they haven't taken all of those into consideration, quite often it's cost is what drives it, not the other two. And if you can't keep operations up working efficiently then you are in a lot of trouble. >> So Cloud wrong comes with sticker shock. >> It certainly does. >> What's on the horizon for DXC? >> We're certainly seeing a big drive towards apps modernization and certainly help our customers on that journey. DXC is definitely a Cloud company, may that be on Hybrid Cloud, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, DXC is certainly leading that edge and pushing it forward. >> Excellent, James, thank you so much for joining us on the program today talking about what Cloud Right is, the right approach, how you're helping customers really get to that right approach with the people, the processes, and the technology. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Our next guest joins us momentarily so don't change the channel. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm basically sitting with the cloud. I got a power panel here with me. You are not gonna wanna miss the segment, please. Welcome, nor Barage I probably did. I do. Okay on that. Great, thank you. VP and GM of cloud solutions at VMware. Thanks for joining us. Field brother tune is back our alumni VP solutions and alliances at NetApp bill. Great to see you in person. Thank you. And Steve Jones, GM SAP, and VMware cloud at Amazon. Welcome guys. Thank you. Pleasure. So we got VMware, NetApp and Amazon. I was telling Phil before we went live, I was snooping around on the NetApp website the other day. And I saw a tagline that said two is the company three is a cloud, but I get to sit with the cloud. This is fantastic. Nora, talk to us about the big news that came out just about 24 hours ago. These three powerhouse, we >>Were super excited. We are celebrating five years of VMware cloud this week. And with three powerhouses here, we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud and AWS with NetApp on tap. We have AWS FSX. And so this solution is now generally available across all global regions. We are super excited with all our joint customers and partners to bring this to the market. >>So Steve, give us your perspective as AWS as the biggest hyperscaler. Talk about the importance of the partnership and the longstanding partnerships that you've had with both NetApp and VMware. >>Yeah, you bet. So first all, maybe I'll start with Ryan and VMware. So we've had a very long standing partnership with VMware for over five years now. One thing that we've heard consistently from customers is they, they want help in reducing the heavy lifting or the, the friction that typically comes with cloud adoption. And VMware's been right in the trenches with us and helping with that over the years with the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And, and now that we've got NetApp, right, the FSX on tap solution, a managed storage solution that is, is been known and trusted in the on-premises world. Now available since September on AWS, but now available for use with VMware cloud is just amazing for customers who are looking for that agility, >>Right? Phil talk about NetApp has done a phenomenal job in its own digital transformation journey. Talk about that as an enabler for what you announced yesterday and the, and the capabilities that NetApp is able to bring to its customers with VMware and with AWS. >>Yeah. You know, it started, it's interesting because we NetApp's always been a company that works very closely with our partners. VMware has been a huge partner of ours since gosh, 2005 probably, or sometime like that. I started working with Amazon back in about 20 13, 20 14, when we first took on tap and brought it to the Amazon platform in the marketplace ahead of what's. Now FSX ends like a dream to bring a fully managed ONAP onto the world's biggest cloud. So that work you you're really looking at about. I mean, it depends how you look at it, 15 years of work. And then as Ryan was saying that VMware was working in parallel with us on being a first party service on Amazon, we came together and, or Ryan and I came together and VMware and NetApp came together about probably about two years ago now with this vision of what we're announcing today and to have so to have GA of this combination for meaning global availability, anybody can try it today. It's just an amazing day. It's really a great day. >>Yeah. It's unbelievable how we have sort of partnered together and hard engineering problems to create a very simple outcome for customers and partners. One of the things, you know, VMware cloud is a very successful service offering with a lot of great consumption and different verticals. Things like cloud migration, you know, transforming your entire, you know, data center and moving to the cloud. Things like, you know, modernizing our apps, disaster recovery now ransomware this week. So really, really exciting uptake and innovation in that whole service. One thing customers always told us that they want more options for storage decouple from compute. And so that really helped customers to lower their total cost of ownership and get to, you know, get even more workloads into VMware cloud. And this partnership really creates that opportunity for us to provide customers with those options. >>Let me give you an example, just I was walking over here just before I walked over here. We were with a customer talking about exactly what Orion's talking about. We were modeling using a TCO calculator that we all put together as well on what we call data intensive workloads, which is in this case, it was a 500 gigabytes per VM. So not a huge amount of data per VM. The, the case study modeled out of 38% cost savings or reduction in total cost, which in the case was like 1.2 million per year of total cost down to 700 million. And just, you could do the, just depends on how many VMs you have and how big odes you have, but that's the kind of cost savings we're talking about. So the, this is a really easy value to talk about. You save a lot of money in it's exactly as nor Ryan said, because we can separate the compute and the storage. Yep. >>Yep. I was just gonna say the reason for that is it used to be with VMware cloud on AWS. If you wanted more storage for your workload, you would have to add another node. So with another node, you would get another compute node. You would get the compute, you'd get the memory and the storage, but now we've actually decoupled the ability to expand the storage footprint from the compute, allowing customers to really expand as their needs grow. And so it's, it's just a lot more flexibility. Yep. That customers had. Yeah. >>Flexibility is key. Every customer needs that they need to be agile. There's always a competitor waiting in the rear view mirror behind any business, waiting to take over. If, if they can't innovate fast enough, if they can't partner with the best of the best to deliver the infrastructure that's needed to enable those business outcomes, I wanna get your perspective, Steve, what are some of the outcomes that when you're talking to customers, you talked about fill the TCO. Those are huge numbers, very compelling. What are some of the other outcomes that customers can expect to achieve from this solution? >>That's a great question. I think customers want the flexibility. We talked about customers absolutely wanna be able to move fast. They're also very demanding customers who have had an experience with solutions like NetApp on tap on premises, right? So they've come to expect enterprise features like thin provisioning, snapshoting cloning, rapid cloning, right? And even replication of data given that customers now can leverage this type of functionality as well through the NetApp solution with VMC, they're getting all those enterprise class features from, from the storage in combination with what they already had with vs a and, and VMC. >>Steve earlier mentioned the word we used, we kind of took it from VMware or from Amazon was friction is so many workloads run in VMware VMs today to be able to just simply pick them up as is move them to Amazon makes cloud adoption. Just, I mean, frictionless is an extreme word, but it's really lowers the friction to cloud adoption. And as Steve said, then you've get all these enterprise features wherever you need to run. >>Just brings speed. >>I was just about to say, it's gotta be the speed. It has to be a huge factor here. Yep, >>Yep. Yeah. >>Sure. One of the things that we've seen with VMware cloud is operational consistency as, as a customer value because when customers are thinking about, you know, complex enterprise apps, moving that to the cloud, they need that operational consistency, which drives down their costs. They don't have to relearn new skills. They're used to VMware, they're used to NetApp. And so this partnership really fosters that operational consistency as a big customer value, and they can reuse those skills and really reapply them in this cloud model. The other thing is the cloud model here is super completely managed. If you think about that, right, customers have to do less VMware, AWS and NetApp is doing more for them. That's true in this model. >>So you're able to really deliver a lot of workforce efficiency, workforce productivity across the stack. >>Absolutely. >>And that's definitely true that it just, as it gets more complex, how do you manage it? Just continue, hear everybody talking about this, right. So when a completely managed service by VMware and Amazon is such a savings in com in management complexity, which then gets back to speed. How do I grow my plant faster? >>I mean, and really at the end of the day, customers are actually able to focus on what differentiate differentiates them, obviously versus the management of the underlying infrastructure and storage and all those, those things that are still critical, but exactly, but >>For, for the customer to be able to have to abstract the underlying underlying technology layer and focus on what differentiates them from the competition. That's like I said, right back here, right. That's especially if there's anything we've learned in the last couple of years, it's that it, that is critical for businesses across every industry, no industry exempt from this. >>None. One other thing, just an example of what you're talking about is we all work a lot on modernization techniques like using Kubernetes and container technologies. So with this, if you think about this, you, this solution, you can move an app as is modernize on the cloud. You can modernize, you can modernize and then move. You can, the flexibility that this enables like. So it's sort of like move to the cloud at your rate is a really big benefit. >>And we've seen so many customer examples of migrating modernize is how we like to summarize it, where customers are, you know, migrating, modernizing at their own pace. Yep. And the good, good thing about the platform and the service is that it is the home for all applications, virtual machines containers with Kubernetes backed by local storage, external storage options. The level of flexibility for all applications is really immense. And that drives down your TCO even more. >>What, from a target customer perspective, Noran, talk about that. Who, who is the target? Obviously I imagine VMware customers, it's NetApp customers, it's AWS, but is there, are there any targets kind of within that, that are really prime candidates for this solution? >>Yeah. A great question. First of all, the, the easy sort of overlap between all of us is our shared customer pool. And so VMware and NetApp have been partners for what, 20 years, something like that. And we have thousands of customers using our joint solutions in the data center. And so that's a very clear target for this solution, as they're considering use cases such as, you know, cloud migration, disaster recovery, virtual desktops, application modernization. So that's a very clear target and we see this day in and day out, obviously there are many other customers that would be interested in this solution, as well as they're considering, you know, AWS and we provide a whole range of consumption options for them. Right. And I think that's one of the, sort of the, the good things about our partnership, including with AWS, where customers can purchase this from VMware can purchase this from AWS and all of these different options, including from our partners really makes it very, very compelling. >>Talk a little bit about from each of your perspectives about the what's in it. For me as a partner of these companies, Steve, we'll start with you. >>I mean, what's in it for me is that it's what my customers have been asking for. And we, we have a long history, I think of providing managed services again, to remove that heavy lifting that customers often just don't want to have to do. Having seen the, the adoption of managed storage offerings, including the, the NetApp solution here and now being able to bring that into the VMware space where they're already using it in an on-premises world, and now they're moving those, those workloads being able to satisfy that need that a customer's asking for is awesome. >>We, every time we're at an AWS event, we are always talking about it's absolute customer obsession, and I know NetApp and VMware well, and know that that is a shared obsession across the three companies. >>Hey, Lisa, let me add one more thing. It's interesting, not everybody sees this, but it's really obvious that the NetApp on-prem installed base with VMware, which is tens of thousands of customers. This is an awesome solution. Not quite as obvious is that every on-prem VMware customer gets that TCO benefit. I mentioned that's not limited to the NetApp on-prem installed base. So we're really excited to be able to expose all the market that hasn't used our products on-prem to this cloud solution. And, and it's really clear customers are adopting the cloud, right? So we're, that's one of the reasons we're so excited about this is it opens up a huge new opportunity to work with new customers for us. Talk >>About those customer conversations, Phil, how, where are they happening at? What level are you talking with customers about migration to cloud? Has it changed in the last couple >>Of years? Oh yeah. You know, I've been working on this for years and a lot of the on-prem conversation, it's been a little bifurcated that on-prem is on-prem and cloud developers or cloud developers. And Amazon's done a huge amount to break that down. VMware getting in the game, a lot of it's networking complexities, those have gone down. A lot of people are cross connected and set up today, which that wasn't so true five years ago. So now it's a lot of conversations about, I hear carbon footprint reduction. I hear data all in around data center reduction. The cloud guys are super efficient operators of data center infrastructure. We were talking about different use cases like disaster recovery. It's it's everybody though. It's small companies, it's big companies. They're all sort of moving into this, it call it at least hybrid world. And that's why when I say we're get really excited about this, because it does get rid of a lot of friction for moving loads in those directions, at the rate, the customer wants to do it. >>And that one last really quick thing is I was using NetApp as an example, we have about 300 enterprise workloads. We wanna move to the cloud two, right? And so they're all running VMware, like most, most of the world. And so this solution is, looks really good to us and we're gonna do the exact, I was just out with our CIO. We're going, looking at those 300, which do we just lift and move? Which do we refactor? And how do we do that? In fact, that Ryan was out to dinner with us last night, talking about >>This it's more and more it's being driven top down. So in the early days, and I've been with Amazon for 10 years now. Yep. Early days, it was kind of developer oriented, often initiated projects. Now it's top level CIOs. Exactly. I >>Are two mandates today talking to customers. >>I think of reinvent as an it conference. Now in the way, some of these top down mandates are driven, but listen, I mean, we got great customer interest. We have been in preview for three to six months now, and we've seen a lot of customers were not able to drag their entire data center workloads because of different reasons of PCO data, intensive workloads, et cetera. And we've seen tremendous amounts of interest from them. And we're also seeing a lot of new customers in the pipeline that want to consider VMware cloud now that we have these great storage options. >>So there's a pretty healthy Tam I'm hearing. >>Absolutely. >>I think so. Yeah. It's interesting. Another, just both like WWT and Presidio, channel partners, big, huge channel partners. It takes no selling to explain. We, we just say, Hey, we're doing this. And they start building services. Presidio is here with us talking about a customer win that they got. So this is it. It's easy for people to see why this is a cool, a cool solution. >>The value prop is there >>Definitely >>There's no having appeal the onion to >>Find it. No, the money savings. It's just in what or Ryan said, a lot of people have seen the, the seen an obstacle of cost. Yeah. So the TCO benefit, I mentioned removes that obstacle. And then that opens the door to all the features Steve was talking about of the advanced storage features and things on the platform. >>So is there a customer that's been in beta on this solution that you can talk about in, in terms of what they were looking for, the challenges that you helped them erase and the outcomes they're achieving? >>Yeah, sure. I can. I can provide one example. A large financial customer was looking at this during the preview phase and you know, for, for, for reasons before that were already a customer, but they were not able to attract a lot of their other workloads from other business units. And with this solution, now the service is a much better candidate for those workloads and those business units that had not considered VMware cloud. So we're really excited to see new workloads coming from that particular customer, given this particular solution and the whole TCO math for them was very, very straightforward and simple. And this became a more attractive option for that particular customer. >>Is there a shadow it elimination factor here in this technology and who you're selling to? >>Not real, I, don't not intent. Wouldn't intentionally. I wouldn't say yeah, not intentionally. I, it was funny with the customers I was thinking is yes. The question, the customers that are in the preview are seeing the benefits that we're talking about. The, one of the reasons we started the project on our side a number of years ago was this very large cement company was looking for carbon CO2 reduction. Part of that was moving disaster recovery to the cloud. There was a lot of friction in the solution prior to this, the, the customers have done some of the things we're talking about, but there's a, it takes a lot of skill. And we were looking at working with that customer going, how could we simplify this? And that was from our point of NetApp's point of view, it, it drove us to VMware and to AWS saying, can't we pull some of the friction of this out. And I think that that's what we've seen in the, in the previews. And it's, that's what I meant. It's so exciting to go from having say, I know we have about 20 previews right now, going to the globe today is the, is the exciting news today. >>And is the solution here in booze that it can be demoed and folks can kind of get their hands on it. >>Yeah. Yeah. They can go to the VMware cloud booth at the expo and they can get their hands on their demo and they can take it for a test drive. >>Excellent. >>You can run TCO calculators and do your own math and see what you're gonna all this, the all that's integrated today. We >>Also have pilots where we can help walk customers through a scenario of their own. >>Yep. Excellent. Is there, is there a, a joint website that you guys have, we should drive folks to? >>Yeah, it's >>Actually talk about the press release. It's >>It's yours. So >>It's it's prominently on our website. Okay. VMware cloud. It is onc.vmware.com where we also have the other, you know, our corporate marketing websites that have this vmware.com is a great starting point. Yeah. And we feature the solution. Prominently customers can get started today and they can even participate in the hands on labs here and take the solution for a test drive. >>All right. Last question, nor Ryan, we'll start with you on this. Here we are. I love the theme of this event, the center of the multicloud universe. Does it not sound like a Marvel movie? I feel like there should be some, is there any superheroes running around? Cause I really feel like there should be, how is this solution an enabler of allowing customers to really extract the most of value from their multi-cloud world that they're living in? >>Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, our mission is to build, run, managed, secure applications in any cloud, right. And regu has been talking about this with the keynote this morning as well. You know, at least with NetApp, we share a very good joint vision of enabling customers to, you know, place applications with really good TCO across clouds. And so it's really good story I feel. And I think this is a really good step in that direction where customers have choice and flexibility in terms of where they put their applications in the TCO value that they get. >>Awesome. Guys, you gotta come back next with a customer would love to dig. Maybe at reinvent sounds, we can dig into more and to see a great story of how a customer came together and is really leveraging that the power that is sitting next to me here. Thank you all so much for joining me and having this great conversation. Congratulations on the announcement and it being GA. >>Thank you. Awesome. >>Thank you. Thanks Lisa. All right. Fun conversation. I told you power panel for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, keep it right here for more live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 from downtown San Francisco. We'll be right back with our next guest.

>>Hey everyone. It's the cube live at VMware Explorer, 2022. We're at Mascone center and lovely, beautiful San Francisco. Dave Volante is with me, Lisa Martin. Beautiful weather here today. >>It is beautiful. I couldn't have missed this one because you know, the orange and the pure and VA right. Are history together. I had a, I had a switch sets. You >>Did. You were gonna have FOMO without a guest. Who's back. One of our longtime alumni V Stewart, VP of global technology alliances partners at pure storage one. It's great to have you back on the program, seeing you in 3d >>It's. It's so great to be here and we get a guest interviewer. So this >>Is >>Fantastic. Fly by. Fantastic. >>So talk to us, what's going on at pure. It's been a while since we had a chance to talk, >>Right. Well, well, besides the fact that it's great to see in person and to be back at a conference and see all of our customers, partners and prospects, you know, pure storage has just been on a tear just for your audience. Many, those who don't follow pure, right? We finished our last year with our Q4 being 41% year over year growth. And in the year, just under 2.2 billion, and then we come outta the gates this year, close our Q1 at 50% year over year, quarter quarterly growth. Have you ever seen a storage company or an infrastructure partner at 2 billion grow at that rate? >>Well, the thing was, was striking was that the acceleration of growth, because, you know, I mean, COVID, there were supply chain issues and you know, you saw that. And then, and we've seen this before at cloud companies, we see actually AWS as accelerated growth. So this is my premise here is you guys are actually becoming a cloud-like company building on top of, of infrastructure going from on-prem to cloud. But we're gonna talk about that. >>This is very much that super cloud premise. Well, >>It is. And, and, but I think it's it's one of the characteristics is you can actually, it, you know, we used to see companies, they go, they'd come out of escape velocity, and then they'd they'd growth would slow. I used to be at IDC. We'd see it. We'd see it. Okay. Down then it'd be single digits. You guys are seeing the opposite. >>It's it's not just our bookings. And by the way, I would be remiss if I didn't remind your audience that our second quarter earnings call is tomorrow. So we'll see how this philosophy and momentum keeps going. See, right. But besides the growth, right? All the external metrics around our business are increasing as well. So our net promoter score increased right at 85.2. We are the gold standard, not just in storage in infrastructure period. Like there's no one close to us, >>85. I mean, that's like, that's a, like apple, >>It's higher than apple than apple. It's apple higher than Tesla. It's higher than AWS shopping. And if you look in like our review of our products, flash rate is the leader in the gardener magic quadrant for, for storage array. It's been there for eight years. Port works is the leader in the GIGO OME radar for native Kubernetes storage three years in a row. Like just, it's great to be at a company that's hitting on all cylinders. You know, particularly at a time that's just got so much change going on in our >>Industry. Yeah. Tremendous amount of change. Talk about the, the VMware partnership from a momentum of velocity perspective what's going on there. And some of the things that you're accelerating. >>Absolutely. So VMware is, is the, the oldest or the longest tenured technology partner that we've had. I'm about to start my 10th year at pure storage. It feels like it was yesterday. When I joined, they were a, an Alliance partner before I joined. And so not to make that about me, but that's just like we built some of the key aspects around our first product, the flash array with VMware workloads in mind. And so we are a, a co-development partner. We've worked with them on a number of projects over years of, of late things that are top of mind is like the evolution of vials, the NV support for NVMe over fabric storage, more recently SRM support for automating Dr. With Viv a deployments, you know, and, and, and then our work around VMware ex extends to not just with VMware, they're really the catalyst for a lot of three way partnerships. So partnerships into our investments in data protection partners. Well, you gotta support V ADP for backing up the VMware space, our partnership within Nvidia, well, you gotta support NVA. I, so they can accelerate bringing those technologies into the enterprise. And so it's it, it's not just a, a, a, you know, unilateral partnership. It's a bidirectional piece because for a lot of customers, VMware's kind of like a touchpoint for managing the infrastructure. >>So how is that changing? Because you you've mentioned, you know, all the, the, the previous days, it was like, okay, let's get, make storage work. Let's do the integration. Let's do the hard work. It was kind of a race for the engineering teams to get there. All the storage companies would compete. And it was actually really good for the industry. Yeah, yeah. Right. Because it, it went from, you know, really complex, to much, much simpler. And now with the port works acquisition, it brings you closer to the whole DevOps scene. And you're seeing now VMware it's with its multi-cloud initiatives, really focusing on, you know, the applications and that, and that layer. So how does that dynamic evolve in terms of the partnership and, and where the focus is? >>So there's always in the last decade or so, right. There's always been some amount of overlap or competing with your partnerships, right. Something in their portfolios they're expanding maybe, or you expand you encroach on them. I think, I think two parts to how I would want to answer your question. The retrospective look V VMware is our number one ISV from a, a partner that we, we turn transactions with. The booking's growth that I shared with you, you could almost say is a direct reflection of how we're growing within that, that VMware marketplace. We are bringing a platform that I think customers feel services their workloads well today and gives them the flexibility of what might come in their cloud tomorrow. So you look at programs like our evergreen one subscription model, where you can deploy a consumption based subscription model. So very cloud-like only pay for what you use on-prem and turn that dial as you need to dial it into a, a cloud or, or multiple clouds. >>That's just one example. Looking forward, look, port works is probably the platform that VMware should have bought because when you look at today's story, right, when kit Culbert shared a, a cross cloud services, right, it was, it was the modern version of what VMware used to say, which was, here's a software defined data center. We're gonna standardize all your dissimilar hardware, another saying software defined management to standardize all your dissimilar clouds. We do that for Kubernetes. We talk about accelerating customers' adoption of Kubernetes by, by allowing developers, just to turn on an enable features, be its security, backup high availability, but we don't do it mono in a, you know, in a, in a homogeneous environment, we allow customers to do it heterogeneously so I can deploy VMware Tansu and connect it to Amazon EKS. I can switch one of those over to red head OpenShift, non disruptively, if I need to. >>Right? So as customers are going on this journey, particularly the enterprise customers, and they're not sure where they're going, we're giving them a platform that standardizes where they want to go. On-prem in the cloud and anywhere in between. And what's really interesting is our latest feature within the port works portfolio is called port works data services, and allows customers to deploy databases on demand. Like, install it, download the binaries. You have a cus there, you got a database, you got a database. You want Cassandra, you want Mongo, right? Yeah. You know, and, and for a lot of enterprise customers, who've kind of not, not know where to don't know where to start with port works. We found that to be a great place where they're like, I have this need side of my infrastructure. You can help me reduce cost time. Right. And deliver databases to teams. And that's how they kick off their Tansu journey. For example. >>It's interesting. So port works was the enabler you mentioned maybe VMware should above. Of course they had to get the value out of, out of pivotal. >>Understood. >>So, okay. Okay. So that, so how subsequent to the port works acquisition, how has it changed the way that you guys think about storage and how your customers are actually deploying and managing storage? >>Sure. So you touched base earlier on what was really great about the cloud and VMware was this evolution of simplifying storage technologies, usually operational functions, right? Making things simpler, more API driven, right. So they could be automated. I think what we're seeing customers do to today is first off, there's a tremendous rise in everyone wanting to do every customer, not every customer, a large portion of the customer bases, wanting to acquire technology on as OPEX. And it, I think it's really driven by like eliminate technical debt. I sign a short term agreement, our short, our shortest commitment's nine months. If we don't deliver around what we say, you walk away from us in nine months. Like you, you couldn't do that historically. Furthermore, I think customers are looking for the flexibility for our subscriptions, you know, more from between on-prem and cloud, as I shared earlier, is, is been a, a, a big driver in that space. >>And, and lastly, I would, would probably touch on our environmental and sustainability efforts. You saw this morning, Ragu in the keynote touch on what was it? Zero carbon consumption initiative, or ZCI my apologies to the veer folks. If I missed VO, you know, we've had, we've had sustainability into our products since day one. I don't know if you saw our inaugural ESG report that came out about 60 days ago, but the bottom line is, is, is our portfolio reduces the, the power directly consumed by storage race by up to 80%. And another aspect to look at is that 97% of all of the products that we sold in the last six years are still in the market today. They're not being put into, you know, into, to recycle bins and whatnot, pure storage's goal by the end of this decade is to further drive the efficiency of our platforms by another 66%. And so, you know, it's an ambitious goal, but we believe it's >>Important. Yeah. I was at HQ earlier this month, so I actually did see it. So, >>Yeah. And where is sustainability from a differentiation perspective, but also from a customer requirements perspective, I'm talking to a lot of customers that are putting that requirement when they're doing RFPs and whatnot on the vendors. >>I think we would like to all, and this is a free form VO comment here. So my apologies, but I think we'd all like to, to believe that we can reduce the energy consumption in the planet through these efforts. And in some ways maybe we can, what I fear in the technology space that I think we've all and, and many of your viewers have seen is there's always more tomorrow, right? There's more apps, more vendors, more offerings, more, more, more data to store. And so I think it's really just an imperative is you've gotta continue to be able to provide more services or store more data in this in yesterday's footprint tomorrow. A and part of the way they get to is through a sustainability effort, whether it's in chip design, you know, storage technologies, et cetera. And, and unfortunately it's, it's, it's something that organizations need to adopt today. And, and we've had a number of wins where customers have said, I thought I had to evacuate this data center. Your technology comes in and now it buys me more years of time in this in infrastructure. And so it can be very strategic to a lot of vendors who think their only option is like data center evacuation. >>So I don't want to, I, I don't wanna set you up, but I do want to have the super cloud conversation. And so let's go, and you, can you, you been around a long time, your, your technical, or you're more technical than I am, so we can at least sort of try to figure it out together when I first saw you guys. I think Lisa, so you and I were at, was it, when did you announce a block storage for AWS? The, was that 2019 >>Cloud block store? I believe block four years >>Ago. Okay. So 20 18, 20 18, 20 18. Okay. So we were there at, at accelerate at accelerate and I said, oh, that's interesting. So basically if I, if I go back there, it was, it was a hybrid model. You, you connecting your on-prem, you were, you were using, I think, priority E C two, you know, infrastructure to get high performance and connecting the two. And it was a singular experience yeah. Between on-prem and AWS in a pure customer saw pure. Right. Okay. So that was the first time I started to think about Supercloud. I mean, I think thought about it in different forms years ago, but that was the first actual instantiation. So my, my I'm interested in how that's evolved, how it's evolving, how it's going across clouds. Can you talk just conceptually about how that architecture is, is morphing? >>Sure. I just to set the expectations appropriately, right? We've got, we've got a lot of engineering work that that's going on right now. There's a bunch of stuff that I would love to share with you that I feel is right around the corner. And so hopefully we'll get across the line where we're at today, where we're at today. So the connective DNA of, of flash array, OnPrem cloud block store in the cloud, we can set up for, for, you know, what we call active. Dr. So, so again, customers are looking at these arrays is a, is a, is a pair that allows workloads to be put into the, put into the cloud or, or transferred between the cloud. That's kind of like your basic building, you know, blocking tackling 1 0 1. Like what do I do for Dr. Example, right? Or, or gimme an easy button to, to evacuate a data center where we've seen a, a lot of growth is around cloud block store and cloud block store really was released as like a software version of our hardware, Ray on-prem and it's been, and, and it hasn't been making the news, but it's been continually evolving. >>And so today the way you would look at cloud block store is, is really bringing enterprise data services to like EBS for, for AWS customers or to like, you know, is Azure premium disc for Azure users. And what do I mean by enterprise data services? It's, it's the, the, the way that large scale applications are managed, on-prem not just their performance and their avail availability considerations. How do I stage the, the development team, the sandbox team before they patch? You know, what's my cyber protection, not just data protection, how, how am I protected from a cyber hack? We bring all those capabilities to those storage platforms. And the, the best result is because of our data reduction technologies, which was critical in reducing the cost of flash 10 years ago, reduces the cost of the cloud by 50% or more and pays for the, for pays more than pays for our software of cloud block store to enable these enterprise data services, to give all these rapid capabilities like instant database, clones, instant, you know, recovery from cyber tech, things of that nature. >>Do customers. We heard today that cloud chaos are, are customers saying so, okay, you can run an Azure, you can run an AWS fine. Are customers saying, Hey, we want to connect those islands. Are you hearing that from customers or is it still sort of still too early? >>I think it's still too early. It doesn't mean we don't have customers who are very much in let's buy, let me buy some software that will monitor the price of my cloud. And I might move stuff around, but there's also a cost to moving, right? The, the egress charges can add up, particularly if you're at scale. So I don't know how much I seen. And even through the cloud days, how much I saw the, the notion of workloads moving, like kind of in the early days, like VMO, we thought there might be like a, is there gonna be a fall of the moon computing, you know, surge here, like, you know, have your workload run where power costs are lower. We didn't really see that coming to fruition. So I think there is a, is a desire for customers to have standardization because they gain the benefits of that from an operational perspective. Right. Whether they put that in motion to move workloads back and forth. I think >>So let's say, let's say to be determined, let let's say they let's say they don't move them because your point you knows too expensive, but, but, but, but you just, I think touched on it is they do want some kind of standard in terms of the workflow. Yep. You you're saying you're, you're starting to see demand >>Standard operating practices. Okay. >>Yeah. SOPs. And if they're, if they're big into pure, why wouldn't they want that? If assuming they have, you know, multiple clouds, which a lot of customers do. >>I, I, I I'll assure with you one thing that the going back to like basic primitives and I touched it touched on it a minute ago with data reduction. You have customers look at their, their storage bills in the cloud and say, we're gonna reduce that by half or more. You have a conversation >>Because they can bring your stack yeah. Into the cloud. And it's got more maturity than what you'd find from a cloud company, cloud >>Vendor. Yeah. Just data. Reduction's not part of block storage today in the cloud. So we've got an advantage there that we, we bring to bear. Yeah. >>So here we are at, at VMware Explorer, the first one of this name, and I love the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe. Doesn't that sound like a Marvel movie. I feel like there should be superheroes walking around here. At some point >>We got Mr. Fantastic. Right here. We do >>Gone for, I dunno it >>Is. But a lot of, a lot of news this morning in the keynote, you were in the keynote, what are some of the things that you're hearing from VMware and what excites you about this continued evolution of the partnership with pure >>Yeah. Great point. So I, I think I touched on the, the two things that really caught my attention. Obviously, you know, we've got a lot of investment in V realize it was now kind of rebranded as ay, that, you know, I think we're really eager to see if we can help drive that consumption a bit higher, cuz we believe that plays into our favor as a vendor. We've we've we have over a hundred templates for the area platform right now to, you know, automation templates, whether it's, you know, levels set your platform, you know, automatically move workloads, deploy on demand. Like just so, so again, I think the focus there is very exciting for us, obviously when they've got a new release, like vSphere eight, that's gonna drive a lot of channel behaviors. So we've gotta get our, you know, we're a hundred percent channel company. And so we've gotta go get our channel ready because with about half of the updates of vSphere is, is hardware refresh. And so, you know, we've gotta be, be prepared for that. So, you know, some of the excitements about just being how to find more points in the market to do more business together. >>All right. Exciting cover the grounds. Right. I mean, so, okay. You guys announce earnings tomorrow, so we can't obviously quiet period, but of course you're not gonna divulge that anyway. So we'll be looking for that. What other catalysts are out there that we should be paying attention to? You know, we got, we got reinvent coming up in yep. In November, you guys are obviously gonna be there in, in a big way. Accelerate was back this year. How was accelerate >>Accelerate in was in Los Angeles this year? Mm. We had great weather. It was a phenomenal venue, great event, great partner event to kick it off. We happened to, to share the facility with the president and a bunch of international delegates. So that did make for a little bit of some logistic securities. >>It was like the summit of the Americas. I, I believe I'm recalling that correctly, but it was fantastic. Right. You, you get, you get to bring the customers out. You get to put a bunch of the engineers on display for the products that we're building. You know, one of the high, you know, two of the highlights there were, we, we announced our new flash blade S so, you know, higher, more performant, more scalable version of our, our scale and object and file platform with that. We also announced the, the next generation of our a I R I, which is our AI ready, AI ready infrastructure within video. So think of it like converged infrastructure for AI workloads. We're seeing tremendous growth in that unstructured space. And so, you know, we obviously pure was funded around block storage, a lot around virtual machines. The data growth is in unstructured, right? >>We're just seeing, we're seeing, you know, just tons of machine learning, you know, opportunities, a lot of opportunities, whether we're looking at health, life sciences, genome sequencing, medical imaging, we're seeing a lot of, of velocity in the federal space. You know, things, I can't talk about a lot of velocity in the automotive space. And so just, you know, from a completeness of platform, you know, flat flash blade is, is really addressing a need really kind of changing the market from NAS as like tier two storage or object is tier three to like both as a tier one performance candidate. And now you see applications that are supporting running on top of object, right? All your analytics platforms are on an object today, Absolut. So it's a, it's a whole new world. >>Awesome. And Pierce also what I see on the website, a tech Fest going on, you guys are gonna be in Seoul, Mexico city in Singapore in the next week alone. So customers get the chance to be able to in person talk with those execs once again. >>Yeah. We've been doing the accelerate tech tech fests, sorry about that around the globe. And if one of those align with your schedule, or you can free your schedule to join us, I would encourage you. The whole list of events dates are on pure storage.com. >>I'm looking at it right now. Vaon thank you so much for joining Dave and me. I got to sit between two dapper dudes, great conversation about what's going on at pure pure with VMware better together and the, and the CATA, the cat catalysis that's going on on both sides. I think that's an actual word I should. Now I have a degree biology for Vaughn Stewart and Dave Valante I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 22. We'll be right back with our next guest. So keep it here.

foreign welcome back to thecube's coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here at Moscone West we're with about seven to ten thousand folks here so really good attendance at this first event since 2019 and the First with the new name Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jeff seraki the senior director of product management at Lumen as our next guest Jeff great to have you thank you for having me welcome so looked at the website I always love to see what taglines are and and lumen's website says welcome to the platform for amazing things talk to the audience a little bit about Lumen it's Mission Vision value prop would love to so much like a lot of the Enterprises that are out there today in the market lumens in the process of transforming we're transforming to a technology company from our Network routes but we also have roots in the I.T infrastructure business so we're bringing those together and creating that platform for amazing things uh we believe that our purpose is if you further human progress through technology and how we do that is we're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution so moving in to the digital age where everything is it's all about data it's about real-time use of that data you machine learning artificial intelligence autonomous Cars Smart cities so the key tenet that we have around the fourth Industrial Revolution is data you need to acquire it and once you acquire it you need to analyze it then you need to act upon it because when you think about it data is just growing and growing and growing from the phones in your pocket to the devices that are sitting in front of us it's not going to stop and information that data is critical to driving business value and outcomes for customers so um so with that the I totally lost my train of thought sorry um uh the ability to to leverage that is critical um you know driving driving the revenue from that so for example like machine learning you can't have machine learning without data to feed the machine so they can start learning so they can look at pictures like oh look this is a picture of a dog this is a picture of a kangaroo so that's what our platform enables and that's what we're building we're building it brand new sitting on top of the Lumen networking capabilities of Global Network one of the largest IP backbone providers so we're super excited about what we have so these days every company has to be a data company to be competitive to you know well even to survive talk a little bit about enabling lumens customers to become data companies while enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution those two seem to be hand in hand yes so with the services that we provide particularly with our partnership with VMware we provide private cloud services that we can deploy on the customer premises or so whether it's a corporate office manufacturing facility a you know logistical facility so we can provide compute there or we can provide it in one of our plus 60 Edge data centers that are located in plus 60 metros so you don't have to put equipment on premises that's all connected by the Lumen Network Dynamic networking capabilities that connect from a customer Prem to Edge data center third party data center all the way into the public Cloud so we can stitch all of that together so I know you mentioned that you know you're you're you know based on your history you're moving further up the value chain with your customers but I'm still fascinated by kind of the history of lumen and when you when you refer to this Lumen Network um tell us a little more about that because that that's kind of a secret sauce ingredient to what you're doing yes so roots and Telecom roots and fiber and we have one of the largest fiber networks in the world and with that comes not only breath but also capillarity going to the markets we have over a hundred and eighty thousand fiber fed Enterprise buildings so with that imagine if your compute's there or if it's in a one of our Edge data centers how quickly you can transmit information from that Prem to the compute all the way into the cloud to acquire analyze and act on that data so that's really kind of the secret sauce we have that as you mentioned is that is that fiber backbone so I'm going to use the word capillarity at least once a day for the next week that's one of my favorite words awesome awesome word in it because and it actually it's evocative of exactly what I know you're what you're referencing but so you you guys are experts in latency bandwidth throughput those underpinnings of making sure that you can get data where it needs to be you can communicate between between environments um you've got that you've got that down so that's a very very strong Foundation to build off of is I guess the point that I wanted to see if I was correct definitely understanding and um just with that capability it really it comes down to outside the data is the user experience and with application performance you know one of the levers you can pull to drive application performance is is network but also location so you can put more bandwidth at it you can take put it on a network with less hops that's one of the advantages of our large backbone or you move the compo compute closer to the point of digital interaction which is what we're doing with our Edge platform so whether it's an edge data center on-prem yeah one thing one thing at the cube that we like to do is we we dive into those things that sometimes people think are inane and banal because we know how important they are we have a whole series on the question of does Hardware matter and so so we understand that you're delivering higher value to your customers but we also want to acknowledge just how important it is for you to have that Foundation yes underneath yeah and we're I mean the customers that in the marketplace they're expecting more and more services up this stack they don't want to have to worry about speeds and feeds well the way we're looking at it is the network has compute endpoints on it and everything has compute customers want to run their applications they don't want to worry about everything underneath it so that's why we're moving up so we want to be able to create that platform you worry about your applications you worry about development and execution of your applications and we'll take care of everything else talk a little bit about the VMware partnership I see Lumen Edge private Cloud on VCF talk a little bit about that how you guys are working together and some of the value of what's in it for me as a customer okay we've been working with for VMware for decades they're one of our best partners and our Flagship private Cloud product is based upon the cloud Foundation and it's a tried and true platform that the market understands and they have confidence in so it's something that they can relate to and they already have experience in so they're not trying to learn something new like trying to go out and find resources that can manage kubernetes like that's probably one of the hottest jobs out there probably took the wrong career path but anyways it's it's new it's emerging whereas VMware people know it there's a lot of people that know it so why spend time as an Enterprise retooling and learning and going to a different platform so with that VMware brings that foundation and the security of that that cohesive ecosystem that comes with VCF so we can provide that dedicated solution to our customers that they know and they Trust trust is critical right I mean it's it's table Stakes for businesses and their vendors and suppliers you know here we are at the VMware explore event that called uh the center of the multi-cloud universe which just sounds like a Marvel movie to me haven't seen any superheroes yet but there's got to be somebody around here in a costume in any event talk about how Lumen and VMware are enabling customers to navigate the the multi-cloud world that they're in by default and really turn it into a strategic advantage uh sure it's tied to the network um as much as I'm trying to say we opsificate it but it's um network is the critical part to it because you do have to physically connect things and the cloud is their computer somewhere so there is a physical behind everything but with the connectivity that we have and the partnership with VMware and the ability to take that platform and either from on-prem Edge data center third party data center or we can also provide that service with uh vmc and AWS we can provide it in the cloud so you have a ubiquitous platform that looks and feels the same no matter where it is and then that's critical to our customers again that the switching costs of learning it's it's a great product VMware is a great partnership to help bring that all together so what is a delighted customer sound like you're interacting with a delighted customer they're not gonna they're not going to pick up the phone and tell you you know what I love your network what what are they going to be what are they going to tell you they're happy about a delighty customer wouldn't talk about our infrastructure at all our virtual machines work our applications work our software Engineers they can develop against it our costs are optimized that's what they're going to care about if they start talking about oh our virtual machines or servers and that means there's probably something wrong so we need to make sure that platform that we're providing as a service and managing works so it's really if your application if you want to talk to me about your application that's what's top of mind for you we're doing our job now you share that love with the folks in your organization responsible for making sure that that infrastructure works right yes you let them know it's like look no no one is no one is touting what you do but it really still is important it is very you want to make sure keep those folks happy yes very important talk a little bit Jeff about how your customer conversations have evolved over the last couple of years as we saw you know two and a half years ago businesses in every industry scrambling to go digital have you seen priorities shift up the c-suite stock over to the board in terms of the infrastructure and the network that powers these organizations yeah I mean over the past couple years with the proliferation of public cloud you know the edicts of got to go to the cloud we got to go Cloud go to the go to the cloud so everything goes to the cloud it's great it's good for a lot of applications but not for all applications and the customer conversations were having a lot of it are okay what what comes back because with Cloud cream and costs it just yeah if you're looking at a permanent VM basis you know public Cloud works but when you have an entire ecosystem of virtual machines and applications to support entire Enterprise that cost can get out of hand pretty quickly are you saying that we we yeah we hear the term repatriation yes used are you saying a fair fair amount of that yes we're seeing that then the other part that we're seeing is getting out of the data center business that's expensive especially if an Enterprise has their own like that's you're talking about 10 million dollars per megawatt just of capital cost there so and then if they're in a third party you still have physical space and power you have servers there you have to assume someone's optimizing those servers and even if you have a hypervisor sitting on top of it that's a lot of work that's a lot of resources and human capital that our private Cloud solution with VMware takes away so that they can again they can worry about their applications providing business value providing customer experience versus is there anything on this server or not does somebody need this virtual machine what are all these public Cloud spend items we have how's this out of control it allows them to focus so that's kind of how things have have evolved and changed over the years one of the things that VMware talked about this morning in terms of the journey the cloud journey is going from cloud chaos which is where a lot of businesses are now to Cloud smart how does Lumen facilitate that transition of a business from cloud chaos to Cloud smart what is a cloud smart strategy from lumen's lens look like first of all you have to have a strategy as an Enterprise you'd be surprised how many of those that are out there that they don't know what to do and part of not knowing what to do is do we even have the right people looking at this and so what Lumen what we bring is that consultative capability to start breaking down some of those issues so maybe they do have a hybrid Cloud strategy okay have you implemented it no why not we don't have enough people okay those are resources we can bring in because not only you provide network and infrastructure but we also have managed surface capabilities managed Services capabilities we can sit on top of that we have Cloud migration practices we have centers of excellence around sap and other services so let us help dissect your problem let's take a let's look at the landscape you have out there find out where everything's buried and dig it up and then we figure out okay how do we move from one place the other you don't just lift and shift and so that those are the other services that Lumen brings in and that's how we help them and our private Cloud product we have it sitting on our Edge right in those 60 metros they can spin up a private Cloud instance tomorrow and they can start moving virtual machines from their data center to that cloud as a staging point to either keep it there you know move it to another place or move it into the public Cloud if that's where the application needs to live I'm curious about lumen's go to market strategy customers have a finite number of strategic seats at the table when it comes time to planning things out like what you just were referencing you know what what do we do next uh what's lumen's path to a seat at that table are you are you generally seeking to directly engage separately with that end user customer or are you going in partnering with others what does that look like in the real world in the real world it's Partners working together no one single entity can provide everything we have to work together and with our infrastructure layer we want to find the right partners that can help provide vertical specific Solutions that then you know they can be Hardware Partners they can be software Partners but then we can collectively go talk to the market talk to our customers about what we can help them with and then with our managed Services capabilities that's how we can kind of glue it all together so that's the direction we're going in so be very focused we're focused on manufacturing you're focused on retail because we see the largest opportunities there that's where we have a strong customer base strong customer relationships and that's how we're doing it we don't want to have an infrastructure conversation we want to outcome and application conversation that's what every customer is talking about it's all about outcomes is there Jeff a favorite customer story in manufacturing or retail that you think really articulates the value of what Lumen and VMware are delivering together yeah it's a yeah we kind of use this one a lot but it's it's uh it's a really good one um and we've seen um uh clones of this and and other opportunities manufacturing smart manufacturing you need to have the equipment that takes that information again that data from all the iot devices analyze it operate your manufacturing facility because most of it's all automated now so you can run that facility at optimal production with that compute you don't necessarily want that compute you know a thousand miles away you want it as close as possible particularly if you look at what if there's a fiber cut your network goes down okay then your factory goes down that's millions of dollars so with that compute there we allow that smart manufacturing capabilities and that's running on Lumen private cloud based upon VMware on vcloud foundation and it's working great and it's it's an opportunity for us to continue to expand I've seen similar use cases in logistics it's yeah I mean it's phenomenal what we can do when you're in conversations with prospects what's the why what's the pitch that you give them about why they should be working with Lumen to help them really maximize the value of their Edge Solutions it's really the resources we bring to bear like you know we we keep talking a lot about Network and uh trying to get away from the sniper that's my cousin the network is is key to the value proposition but it's not what people look at first but it's those other resources the ability to to manage I.T infrastructure which have been doing for decades a lot of people don't know that but we've been doing this a very long time and then with those areas of expertise managed Services it's providing that all together and with lumen's history the Partnerships we have I mean we have a lot of Partnerships so we have the ability to bring all these resources to provide the best solution for the customer and we like to use the term best execution venue so each application has an optimal place to live and we'll help help customers find that out and it's really I mean it's that simple we just need to sit down and have a conversation we can figure out where we can help you and we can get started as soon as the customer is ready so obviously some some changes coming up for VMware in the next few months or so what are you excited about as you continue this long-standing partnership and evolving it forward I'm most excited about us working together even more because we have not only do we have our private Cloud products uh we're leveraging them for kubernetes but also our sassy product we're partnered with VMware on that so we're really tight at the hip with these Cutting Edge Products that we're taking to Market to help customers solve those problems that we were just talking about so I'm just looking forward us coming together more and just getting out there and helping people threatening of the partnership excellent Jeff thank you for joining Dave and me on the program talking about what's going on with Lumen how you're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution enabling customers to really become data companies we appreciate your time on your insights thank you for Jeff saraki and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022. you're watching thecube the leader in Live tech coverage [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2022. We are at Moscone West. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. Excited, really excited, whereas they were saying in the VMware keynote, pumped and jacked and jazzed to be back in-person with a lot of folks here. Keynote with standing room only. We've just come from that. We've got a couple of guests here from Expedient, going to unpack their relationship with VMware. Please welcome Brian Smith, the Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Expedient. And Brent Meadows, the Vice President of Advanced Solution Architecture at Expedient. Guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Appreciate it bringing us on. >> Yep, welcome. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> It is phenomenal to be back. >> So let's talk about obviously three years since the last, what was called VMworld, so many dynamics in the market. Talk to us about what's going on at Expedient, we want to dig into Cloud Different, but kind of give us a lay of the land of what's going on and then we're going to uncrack the VMware partnership as well. >> Sure, so Expedient we're a full stack cloud service provider. So we have physical data centers that we run and then have VMware-based cloud and we've seen a huge shift from the client perspective during the pandemic in how they've really responded from everything pre-pandemic was very focused with Cloud First and trying to go that route only with hyper scaler. And there's been a big evolution with how people have to change how they think about their transformation to get the end result they're looking for. >> Talk about Cloud Different and what it's helping customers to achieve as everyone's in this accelerated transformation. >> Yeah. So, Cloud Different is something that Expedient branded. It's really about how the transformation works. And traditionally, companies thought about doing their transformation, at first they kept everything in house that they were doing and they started building their new applications out into a hyper scale cloud. And what that really is like is, a good analogy would be, it's like living in a house while you're renovating it. And I know what that's like from my relationship versus if you build a new house, or move to a new property that's completed already. And that's really the difference in that experience from a Cloud Different approach from transformation is you think of all the things that you have internally, and there's a lot of technical debt there, and that's a lot of weight that you're carrying when you're trying to do that transformation. So if you kind of flip that around and instead look to make that transformation and move all that technical debt into a cloud that's already built to run those same types of applications, a VMware-based cloud, now you can remove all of that noise, move into a curated stack of technology and everything just works. It has the security in place, your teams know how to run it, and then you can take that time you really reclaim and apply that towards new applications and new things that are strategic to the business. >> That's really critical, Brent, to get folks in the IT organization across the business, really focused on strategic initiatives rather than a lot of the mundane tasks that they just don't have time for. Brent, what are you hearing in the last couple of years with the dynamics we talked about, what are you hearing from the customer? >> Right. So, one of the big things and the challenges in the current dynamic is kind of that staffing part. So as people have built their infrastructure over the years, there's a lot of tribal knowledge that's been created during that process and every day more and more of that knowledge is walking out the door. So taking some of that technical debt that Brian mentioned and kind of removing that so you don't have to have all that tribal knowledge, really standardizing on the foundational infrastructure pieces, allows them to make that transition and not have to carry that technical debt along with them as they make their digital transformations. >> We heard a lot this morning in the keynote guys about customers going, most of them still being in cloud chaos, but VMware wanting them to get to cloud smart. What does that mean, Brian, from Expedient's perspective? What does cloud smart look like to Expedient and its customers? >> Yeah, we completely agree with that message. And it's something we've been preaching for a couple years in part of that Cloud Different story. And it's really about having a consistent wrapper across all of your environments. It doesn't matter if it's things that you're running on-premises that's legacy to things that are in a VMware-based cloud, like an Expedient cloud or things that are in a hyper scale, but having one consistent security, one consistent automation, one consistent cost management, really gives you the governance so that you can get the value out of cloud that you are hoping for and remove a lot of the noise and think less about the technology and more about what the business is getting out of the technology. >> So what does that look like as a practical matter? I imagine you have customers whose on-premises VMware environments look different than what you've created within Expedient data centers. I'm thinking of things like the level of adoption of NSX, how well a customer may embrace VSAN on-prem as an example. Is part of this transmogrification into your data center, kind of nudging people to adopt frameworks that are really necessary for success in the future? >> It's less of a nudge because a lot of times as a service provider, we don't talk about the technology, we talk more about the outcome. So the nice thing with VMware is we can move that same virtual machine or that container into the platform and the client doesn't always know exactly what's underneath because we have that standardized VMware stack and it just works. And that's part of the beauty of the process. I dunno if you want to talk about a specific client or... >> Yeah, so one of the ones we worked with is Bob Evans Foods. So they were in that transformation stage of refreshing, not only their office space and their data center, but also their VMware environment. So we helped them go through and first thing is looking at their existing environment, figuring out what they currently have, because you can't really make a good decision of what you need to change until you know where you're starting from. So we worked with them through that process, completely evacuated their data center. And from a business perspective, what that allowed them to do as well is have more flexibility in the choice of their next corporate office, because they didn't have to have a data center attached to it. So just from that data center perspective, we gave them some flexibility there. But then from an operations perspective, really standardize that process, offloaded some of those menial tasks that you mentioned earlier, and allow them to really look more towards business-driving projects, instead of just trying to keep those lights on, keeping the backups running, et cetera. >> Brian, question for you, here we are, the theme of the event is "The Center of the Multi-cloud Universe" which seems like a Marvel movie, I haven't seen any new superheroes yet, but I suspect there might be some here. But as customers end up and land in multi-cloud by default not by strategy, how does Expedient and VMware help them actually take the environment that they have and make it strategic so that the business can achieve the outcomes, improving revenue, finding new revenue streams, new products, new routes to market to delight those customers. How do you turn that kind of cloud chaos into a strategy? >> Yeah. I'd say there's a couple different components. One is really time. How can you give them time back for things that are creating noise and aren't really strategic to the business? And so if you can give that time back, that's the first way that you can really impact the business. And the second is through that standardization, but also a lot of times when people think of that new standard, they're only thinking if you're building from scratch. And what VMware has really helped is by taking those existing workloads and giving a standard that works for those applications and what you're building new and brings those together under a common platform and so had a really significant impact to the speed that somebody can get to that cloud operating model, that used to be a multi-year process and most of our clients can go from really everything or almost everything on-prem and a little bit in a cloud to a complete cloud operating model, on average, in four to six months. >> Wow! >> So if I have an on-premises environment and some of my workloads are running in a VMware context, VMware would make the pitch in an agnostic way that, "Well, you can go and deploy that "on top of a stack of infrastructure "and anybody and anywhere now." Why do customers come to you instead of saying, "Oh, we'll go to "pick your flavor of hyper scale cloud provider." What's kind of your superpower? You've mentioned a couple of things, but really hone it in on, why would someone want to go to Expedient? >> Yeah. In a single word, service. I mean, we have a 99% client retention rate and have for well over a decade. So it's really that expertise that wraps around all the different technology so that you're not worried about what's happening and you're not worried about trying to keep the lights on and doing the firefighting. You're really focused on the business. And the other way to, I guess another analogy is, if you think about a lot of the technology and the way people go to cloud, it's like if you got a set of Legos without the box or the instructions. So you can build stuff, it could be cool, but you're not going to get to that end state-- >> Hold on. That's how Legos used to work. Just maybe you're too young to remember a time-- >> You see their sales go up because now you buy a different set for this-- >> I build those sets with my son, but I do it grudgingly. >> Do you ever step on one? >> Of course I do. >> Yeah, there's some pain involved. Same thing happens in the transformation. So when they're buying services from an Expedient, you're buying that box set where you have a picture of what your outcome's going to be, the instructions are there. So you also have confidence that you're going to get to the end outcome much faster than you would if you're trying to assemble everything yourself. (David laughing) >> In my mind, I'm imagining the things that I built with Lego, before there were instructions. >> No death star? >> No. Nothing close with the death star. Definitely something that you would not want your information technology to depend upon. >> Got it. >> Brent, we've seen obviously, it seems like every customer these days, regardless of industry has a cloud first initiative. They have competitors in the rear view mirror who are, if they're able to be more agile and faster to market, are potential huge competitive threat. As we see the rise of multi-cloud in the last 12 months, there's also been a lot of increased analyst coverage for alternate specialty hybrid cloud. Talk to us about, Expedient was in the recent Gartner market guide for specialty cloud. How are these related? What's driving this constant change out in the customer marketplace? >> Sure. So a lot of that agility that clients are getting and trying to do that digital transformation or refactor their applications requires a lot of effort from the developers and the internal IT practitioners. So by moving to a model with an enterprise kind of like Expedient, that allows them to get a consistent foundational level for those technical debt, the 'traditional workloads' where they can start focusing their efforts more on that refactoring of their applications, to get that agility, to get the flexibility, to get the market advantage of time to market with their new refactored applications. That takes them much faster to market, allows them to get ahead of those competitors, if they're not already ahead of them, get further ahead of them or catch up the ones that may have already made that transition. >> And I would add that the analyst coverage you've seen in the last 9 to 12 months, really accelerate for our type of cloud because before everything was hyper scale, everything's going to be hyper scale and they realized that companies have been trying to go to the cloud really for over a decade, really 15 years, that digital transformation, but most companies, when you look at the analysts say they're about 30% there, they've hit a plateau. So they need to look at a different way to approach that. And they're realizing that a VMware-based cloud or the specialty cloud providers give a different mode of cloud. Because you had of a pendulum that everything was on-premises, everything swung to cloud first and then it swung to multi-cloud, which meant multiple hyper scale providers and now it's really landing at that equilibrium where you have different modes of cloud. So it's similar like if you want to travel the world, you don't use one mode of transportation to get from one continent to the other. You have to use different modes. Same thing to get all the way to that cloud transformation, you need to use different modes of cloud, an enterprise cloud, a hyper scale cloud, working them together with that common management plan. >> And with that said Brian, where have customer conversations gone in the last couple of years? Obviously this has got to be an executive level, maybe even a board level conversation. Talk to us about how your customer conversations have changed. Have the stakeholders changed? Has things gone up to stack? >> Yeah. The business is much more involved than what it's been in the past and some of the drivers, even through the pandemic, as people reevaluate office space, a lot of times data centers were part of the same building. Or they were added into a review that nobody ever asked, "Well, why are you only using 20% of your data center?" So now that conversation is very active and they're reevaluating that and then the conversation shifts to "Where's the best place?" And that's a lot of, the conference also talks about the best place for your application for the workload in the right location. >> My role here is to dive down into the weeds constantly to stay away from business outcomes and things like that. But somewhere in the middle there's this question of how what you provide is consumed. So fair to assume that often people are moving from CapEx model to an OPEX model where they're consuming by the glass, by the drink. What does that mean organizationally for your customers? And do you help them work through that journey, reorganizing their internal organization to take advantage of cloud? Is that something that Expedient is a part of, or do you have partners that help them through that? How does that work? >> Yeah. There's some unique things that an enterprise doesn't understand when they think about what they've done on-prem versus a service provider is. There's whole models that they can purchase with us in consumption, not just the physical hardware, but licensing as well. Do you want to talk about how clients actually step in and start to do that evaluation? >> Sure. So it really kind of starts on the front end of evaluating what they have. So going through an assessment process, because traditionally, if you have a big data center full of hardware, you've already paid for it. So as you're deploying new workloads, it's "free to deploy." But when you go to that cloud operating model, you're paying for each drink that you're taking. So we want to make sure that as they're going into that cloud operating model, that they are right sized on the front end. They're not over-provisioned on anything that they're going to just waste money and resources on after they make that transition. So it's really about giving them great data on the front end, doing all that collection from a foundational level, from a infrastructure level, but also from a business and IT operations perspective and figuring out where they're spending, not just their money, but also their time and effort and helping them streamline and simplify those IT operations. >> Let's talk about one of the other elephants in the room and that is the remote hybrid workforce. Obviously it's been two and a half years, which is hard to believe. I think I'm one of the only people that hates working from home. Most people, do you too? Okay, good. Thank you, we're normal. >> Absolutely. (Lisa laughing) But VMware was talking about desktop as a service, there was so much change and quick temporary platform set up to accommodate offsite workers during the pandemic. What are some of the experiences that your clients are having and how is Expedient plus VMware helping businesses adapt and really create them the right hybrid model for them going forward? >> Sure. So as part of being that full sack cloud service provider, desktop in that remote user has to be part of that consideration. And one of the biggest things we saw with the pandemic was people stood up what we call pandemic VDI, very temporary solutions. And you saw the news articles that they said, "We did it in 10 days." And how many big transformational events do people plan and execute in 10 days that transform their workforce? So now they're having to come back and say, "Okay, what's the right way to deploy it?" And do you want to talk about some of the specifics of what we're seeing in the adjustments that they're doing? >> Sure. So it is, when you look at it from the end user perspective, it's how they're operating, how they're getting their tools through their day to day job, but it's also the IT administrators that are having to provide that service to the end users. So it's really kind of across the board, it's affecting everyone. So it's really kind of going through and helping them figure out how they're going to support their users going forward. So we've spun up things like VMware desktop as a service providing that multi-tenant ability to consume on a per desktop basis, but then we've also wrapped around with a lot of security features. So one of the big things is as people are going and distributing where they're working from, that data and access to data is also opened up to those locations. So putting those protections in place to be able to protect the environment and then be able, if something does get in, to be able to detect what's going on. And then of course, with a lot of the other components, being able to recover those environments. So building the desktops, the end user access into the disaster recovery plans. >> And talk more, a little bit Brent, about the security aspect. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years, ransomware is a household word. I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that means, to some degree. Where is that in customer conversations? I can imagine in certain industries like financial services and healthcare with PII, it's absolutely critical to ensure that that data is, they know where it is. It's protected and it's recoverable, 'cause everyone's talking about cyber resilience these days. >> Right. And if it's not conversation 1, it's conversation 1A. So it's really kind of core to everything that we do when we're talking to clients. It's whether it's production DR or the desktops, is building that security in place to help them build their security practice up. So when you think about it, it's doing it at layers. So starting with things like more advanced antivirus to see what's actually going on the desktop and then kind of layering above there. So even up to micro-segmentation, where you can envelop each individual desktop in their own quasi network, so that they're only allowed kind of that zero trust model where, Hey, if you can get to a file share, that's the only place you should be going or do I need web apps to get my day to day job done, but really restricting that access and making sure that everything is more good traffic versus unknown traffic. >> Yeah. >> And also on the, you asked about the clouds smarter earlier. And you can really weave the desktop into that because when you're thinking of your production compute environment and your remote desktop environment, and now you can actually share storage together, you can share security together and you start to get economies of scale across those different environments as well. >> So as we are in August, I think still yeah, 2022, barely for a couple more days, lot of change going on at VMware. Expedient has been VMware America's partner of the year before. Talk to us about some of the things that you think from a strategic perspective are next for the partnership. >> That it's definitely the multi-cloud world is here. And it's how we can go deeper, how we're going to see that really mature. You know, one of the things that we've actually done together this year was we worked on a project and evaluated over 30 different companies of what they spend on IT. Everything from the physical data center to the entire stack, to people and actually build a cloud transformation calculator that allows you to compare strategies, so that if you look at Strategy A over a five year period, doing your current transformation, versus that Cloud Different approach, it can actually help quantify the number of hours difference that you can get, the total cost of ownership and the speed that you can get there. So it's things like that that help people make easier decisions and simplify information are going to be part of it. But without a doubt, it's going to be how you can have that wrapper across all of your different environments that really delivers that cloud-like environment that panacea people have been looking for. >> Yeah. That panacea, that seems like it's critical for every organization to achieve. Last question for you. When customers come to you, when they've hit that plateau. They come to Expedient saying, "Guys, with VMware, help us accelerate past this. "We don't have the time, we need to get this done quickly." How do you advise them to move forward? >> Sure. So it goes back to that, what's causing them to hit that plateau? Is it more on the development side of things? Is it the infrastructure teams, not being able to respond fast enough to the developers? And really putting a plan in place to really get rid of those plateaus. It could be getting rid of the technical debt. It could be changing the IT operations and kind of that, the way that they're looking at a cloud transformation model, to help them kind of get accelerated and get them back on the right path. >> Back on the right path. I think we all want to get back on the right path. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on theCUBE today, talking about Expedient Cloud Different, what you're seeing in the marketplace, and how Expedient and VMware are helping customers to succeed. We appreciate your time. >> Yep. >> Thanks for having us. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer '22, stick around, Dave and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (gentle upbeat music)

[Music] okay welcome back everyone it's thecube's coverage here in monaco i'm john furrier host of thecube monaco crypto summit presented by digital bits uh media partners coin telegraph in the cube a lot of great stuff going on here digital bits and the ecosystem around the world come together to talk about the next generation uh nft environments metaverse uh blockchain all the innovations going up and down the stack of the decentralized world that will be soon a reality for everybody we have a great guest david lutzkach here who's the co-founder of aftermath islands metaverse which i got a little sneak preview of but david thanks for joining me thanks john great to be here uh we had dinner the other night at nobu it's great to know you get to know your background you've got a stellar uh pedigree um you've run public companies you've been involved in tech media across the board again this is a ship we're seeing like we've never before perfect storm technology change cultural change business model transformation all around deep decentralization crypto token economics decentralized applications metaverse i mean come on we haven't digital identity there was identity which you're involved in take us through what are you working on take a minute to explain what you're working on and then we'll get into it so aftermath islands is is really a culmination of three things uh digital identity the ability to prove who you are because we think the internet and i think everyone would agree the internet's broken you know um nefarious actors bad actors can be anywhere um hacks fake spots so by being able to prove that you're a real person not necessarily verifying your identity but prove that you're a real person um can add a lot of benefits to everyone in the ecosync system second thing is we combine that with avatars nfts and credentials because i'd like to represent myself as a little more buff than i am and maybe a little taller and then the third thing is we put it in a unreal engine so real realistic photo realistic game engine metaverse that requires no downloading it's all pixel streaming just like you'd stream netflix you can stream the game i want to ask because this is i know it's a hard problem because i've asked a lot of people the same question the unreal engine is really powerful and the imagery is amazing like gaming we all know what it looks like it's hard it's not everyone's getting it right what makes it so special how are you guys cracking the code well i think it's our experience i mean we've worked for major entertainment companies major technology companies major sports companies so um as i just use your word because it being i want to be humbled by this but we do have a great pedigree we've also brought great people to the table so having a platform isn't enough we've got great creators and uh we've got great storytellers so we've got the anisiasa brothers one mariano is is a illustrator and former special editor uh project center at marvel and his brother fabian is our storyteller who's the co-creator of deadpool so we've got great people and with unreal engine 5 we've really taken it from the ground up we've looked at it and and we've really combined it with new gpu cloud serving and pixel streaming so that you're so the individual that's that's involved engaged immersed is now really playing it without having to download a graphics package yeah and also you drop some names there and some and some brands i know there's a lot more at dinner we've talked a lot about them you you know all the top creators and again i love the creator culture i mean that's the new buzzwords around but ultimately it's artists people building stuff application developers in the software world movies and film art art and code is kind of coming together it's the same kind of thing media and coding it's like the same mindset you know creative exactly crazy good smart in a good way in the blockchain it's harder because you've got all this underlying infrastructure and stuff to provision and build often created say oh man it's like doing chores it's like i just want to build cool stuff i don't want to get in the weeds of all the tech right this is like whoever cracks the code can unleash that heavy lifting so the artist can like feel good about kicking ass well i'm i'm being a slot a little sly here because we've sort of broken it into three areas and we've used blockchain to book and the platform so we still think that that gaming in the interactive platform has to have centralization it has to have decision making we have a great community um between twitter and discord we have over 30 000 people and we have organizations that have already um spawned um themselves up or spun up to manage our landowner ownership and some of our guilds for some of our professions but at the same time they're allowing us to make decisions based on what the community wants i mean i've heard recently um i don't want to say it's a horror story but it's been difficult that consensus-based models for development have to get consensus and not everybody agrees you still need the leadership i mean you still need sort of a captain on a ship to make sure that the dictatorships are work and well and linux um tried that and they've worked for a while but when they moved over to we're going to make some decisions have an opinion right whether it's centralization it's faster yeah consensus systems can be diverse and time-consuming well they can be political as well i mean you can you can it can become problems so at the front end we've got digital identity and that's all blockchain based and at the back end we have over 20 services including dids and did com which is decentralized identifier communication and all our services are blockchain based but in the middle um connected to nft's blockchain and everything else and to our teacher identity we have a game or a game platform or a open world platform that is centralized built in unreal engine so that we can make those decisions that spur on individual development it's an architecture it is i mean this is essentially an operating environment exactly you can have the benefits of the decentralized all your data on your identity okay and then have the middle be the playground and built right now that has to get done faster and you're constantly iterating exactly so you need to have that exactly so what are people saying about this to me i think that makes a lot of sense people are very intrigued um we're getting a lot of traction first of all unreal engine in the middle um brands love it because it provides a realistic view of a brand brands have spent you know hundreds of millions of dollars building brand equity and they don't necessarily want a cartoon representation of their brand so brands love it um uh we showed a video here at the monaco crypto summit of some and our videos available online on youtube but we're showing realistic we can create realistic avatars so people are really excited about what we're doing you know david i think one of the things i've had controversy statements in the past that got all the purists going back to 2018 you know throwing tomatoes at me but other halfs like loving it because at that time there was dogma around block change got to be done you know it was slow and gas so why i can use a database now we use the blockchain for smart contracts right which you that's what you want to do you want to have that locked in you want immutability so again this opportunity is to advance faster and not have to get stuck in the dogma but maybe get it back to it later database is a great example i agreed i think i think over time the community will take over the entire platform but i think at the beginning you have to have again you have to have a rudder on a ship to make it go somewhere it's called product market fit exactly you got to get to the market exactly with a product you've got that i want that exactly i mean unreal engine is hard i know what are some of the people you worked with because i think i think what i like about what you're working on is that you are and i think a great poster child of in terms of the organization of a group of people that are pros that want to do great work in a new world with the kind of experience and tools that they had in their old world right faster cheaper better more control when we were there at web one we're there at web two and now with web three we have the ability to fix some of the things that we thought were wrong with web one and two so and move into the ownership economy and and really um for us we've got a great team of people you know around the world that we work with and we're starting to bring in larger organizations to support us i mean our digital identity we're really working with the backbone at ibm and digital identity is very different in blockchain than is crypto and we're working with great people in crypto now we announced today that we're minting our native token dubs with digital bits so we're really excited about that yeah yeah let me ask you a question because i love the fact that you brought multiple ways of innovation again i've mentioned on that with shared experience there different different ride for different waves what have you learned and shared to folks who are going to dip their toe and get on their surfboard so to speak use the california metaphor for both californians what is web3 wave like how's it different from two what's the learnings can you share scar tissue experience observation anything around what you're doing now so they can get insight into this wave well you know web 1 and web 2 were broken i mean you could never go in i think we had this discussion you could never go into an electronic store in the real world write your information down on a piece of paper and expect that you'd walk out of the store with the purchase but we can type in information that is non-verified until i could take my friend's credit card know where they live and use it by using digital identity at a front end we create one user one account that user can have thousands of verifiable credentials around them and hundreds of avatars so i think what we've really learned is the ability to progress in a way that that really puts data back in the hands of consumers and makes them the owner of their identity by starting there we have a world in front of us that is valuable to marketers valuable to brands and valuables to individuals and whether it's education whether it's government services whether it's retail everything can be built on that simple premise that i am myself it's interesting there's a constant technology we're called presence you know you're present at an event you're present at a store you're present and some reality physically and you have credentials around that presence contextually exactly you're saying you can have one nft one digital identity or identity and have multiple identities that have contacts all stored i'll store it in an avatar it's like changing your suit hey i'm going into the apple store i'm now my apple john and and think of it this way um brands can now connect with you and give you promos give you product based on the information that you're willing to share with them about your real person and your avatar becomes your intermediary so your payment information stored within your digital identity and your avatar not at the retail level so this is a concept we've been working on for a long time i think we're talking about dinner but i want to bring this up for you for you to come and get a reaction to is that if what you just said is true that means if i'm the user and i have power to control my data the script flips now i'm brokering my data to the brand exactly not the other way around exactly or some intermediary i'm in control exactly and i could demand based on what my contextual relevance is to the brand and the brand is willing to pay for that because if you think about it today um social media unfortunately is plagued by fake accounts you know and issues and and so brands are spending all this money and they're getting slippage and breakage and that's spent if they know your real person they're more likely to want to give you an incentive to engage with them because it's a one-to-one transaction that creates value that's a great point you mentioned twitter earlier look at elon musk uncovered all the bots on twitter um and if they ever did the facebook i'm sure there's a ton of different accounts on facebook but you know it's out there these walled gardens have nefarious bad actors man it's not truth isn't what's the truth i mean gaming has this right now it's like you're anonymous you can go down or you got to go real name so we've got a hybrid you can do anonymously verified so because we use biometrics to verify that you're a real person so you can stay anonymous but we know you're a real person because your biometrics belong to you well david great to have you on thecube you got a great insight and experience thanks for sharing thank you john uh what's next for you guys you want to put a plug in for what you're working on you're looking for people funding more action what are you guys doing right well we've we've self-funded to date and we're we're finally going to be releasing um opportunities for people to engage with us in tokenomics and that's why we've we're working with digital bits but we're also looking for great people and great partners we're creating an interoperable open um uh world where we want to bring partners to the table so anyone who's interested reach out to us all right david guys thanks for going on thecube all right more coverage here on thecube we're all over this area going back to 2018 we brought thecube to all the events been covered on siliconangle.com since 2010 and watching this wave just get better the reality is here it's a metaverse world it is a decentralized world happening to everyone monaco crypto summit here in monaco thanks for watching we'll be right back with more after this short break you

>>Hello, buddy. And welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of Snowflake Data Cloud Summer 2020. We're tracking the rise of the data cloud and fresh off the keynotes. Hear Frank's Luqman, the chairman and CEO of Snowflake, and Anita Lynch, the vice president of data governance at Disney Streaming Services. Folks. Welcome E Need a Disney plus. Awesome. You know, we signed up early. Watched all the Marvel movies. Hamilton, the new Pixar movie Soul. I haven't gotten to the man DeLorean yet. Your favorite, but I really appreciate you guys coming on. Let me start with Frank. I'm glad you're putting forth this vision around the data cloud because I never liked the term Enterprise Data Warehouse. What you're doing is is so different from the sort of that legacy world that I've known all these years. But start with why the data cloud? What problems are you trying to solve? And maybe some of the harder challenges you're seeing? >>Yeah, I know. You know, we have We've come a long way in terms of workload execution, right? In terms of scale and performance and, you know, concurrent execution. We really taking the lid off sort of the physical constraints that that have existed on these types of operations. But there's one problem, uh, that were not yet, uh solving. And that is the silo ing and bunkering of data. Essentially, you know, data is locked in applications. It's locked in data centers that's locked in cloud cloud regions incredibly hard for for data science teams to really, you know, unlocked the true value of data. When you when you can address patterns that that exists across data set. So we're perpetuate, Ah, status we've had for for ever since the beginning off computing. If we don't start Thio, crack that problem now we have that opportunity. But the notion of a data cloud is like basically saying, Look, folks, you know, we we have to start inside, lowing and unlocking the data on bring it into a place where we can access it. Uh, you know, across all these parameters and boundaries that have historically existed, it's It's very much a step level function. Customers have always looked at things won't workload at that time. That mentality really has to go. You really have to have a data cloud mentality as well as a workload orientation towards towards managing data. Yeah, >>Anita is great here in your role at Disney, and you're in your keynote and the work. You're doing the governance work, and you're you're serving a great number of stakeholders, enabling things like data sharing. You got really laser focused on trust, compliance, privacy. This idea of a data clean room is really interesting. You know, maybe you can expand on some of these initiatives here and share what you you're seeing as some of the biggest challenges to success. And, of course, the opportunities that you're unlocking. >>Sure. I mean, in my role leading data to governance, it's really critical to make sure that all of our stakeholders not only know what data is available and accessible to them, they can also understand really easily and quickly whether or not the data that they're using is for the appropriate use case. And so that's a big part of how we scale data governance. And a lot of the work that we would normally have to do manually is actually done for us through the data. Clean rooms. >>Thank you for that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the role of data and how your data strategy has evolved and maybe discuss some of the things that Frank mentioned about data silos. And I mean, obviously you can relate to that having been in the data business for a while, but I wonder if you could elucidate on that. >>Sure, I mean data complexities air going to evolve over time in any traditional data architecture. Er, simply because you often have different teams at different periods in time trying thio, analyze and gather data across Ah, whole lot of different sources. And the complexity that just arises out of that is due to the different needs of specific stakeholders, their time constraints. And quite often, um, it's not always clear how much value they're going to be able to extract from the data at the outset. So what we've tried to do to help break down the silos is allow individuals to see up front how much value they're going to get from the data by knowing that it's trustworthy right away. By knowing that it's something that they can use in their specific use case right away, and by ensuring that essentially, as they're continuing to kind of scale the use cases that they're focused on. They're no longer required. Thio make multiple copies of the data, do multiple steps to reprocess the data. And that makes all the difference in the world, >>for sure. I mean, copy creep, because it be the silent killer. Frank, I followed you for a number of years. You know, your big thinker. You and I have had a lot of conversations about the near term midterm and long term. I wonder if you could talk about you know, when you're Kino. You talk about eliminating silos and connecting across data sources, which really powerful concept. But really only if people are willing and able to connect and collaborate. Where do you see that happening? Maybe What are some of the blockers there? >>Well, there's there's certainly, ah natural friction there. I still remember when we first started to talk to to Salesforce, you know, they had discovered that we were top three destination off sales first data, and they were wondering, you know why that was. And and the reason is, of course, that people take salesforce data, push it to snowflake because they wanna overlay it with what data outside of Salesforce. You know, whether it's adobe or any other marketing data set. And then they want to run very highly skilled processes, you know, on it. But the reflexes in the world of SAS is always like, no, we're an island were planning down to ourselves. Everybody needs to come with us as opposed to we We go, you know, to a different platform to run these type of processes. It's no different for the for the public club. Venter Day didn't mean they have, you know, massive moats around there. Uh, you know, their stories to, you know, really prevent data from from leaving their their orbit. Eso there is natural friction in in terms off for this to happen. But on the other hand, you know, there is an enormous need, you know, we can't deliver on on the power and potential of data unless we allow it to come together. Uh, snowflake is the platform that allows that to happen. You know, we were pleased with our relationship with Salesforce because they did appreciate you know why this was important and why this was necessary. And we think you know, other parts of the industry will gradually come around to it as well. So the the idea of a data cloud has really come, right? People are recognizing, you know, why does this matters now? It's not gonna happen overnight, And there's a step global function of very big change in mentality and orientation. You know, >>it's almost as though the SAS ification of our industries sort of repeated some of the application silos, and you build a hardened top around it. All the processes are hardened around it, and Okay, here we go. And you're really trying to break that, aren't you? Yeah, Exactly. Anita. Again, I wanna come back to this notion of governance. It's so it's so important. It's the first role in your title, and it really underscores the importance of this. Um, you know, Frank was just talking about some of the hurdles, and and this is this is a big one. I mean, we saw this in the early days of big data. Where governance was this after thought it was like, bolted on kind of wild, Wild West. I'm interested in your governance journey, and maybe you can share a little bit about what role Snowflake has played there in terms of supporting that agenda. Bond. Kind of What's next on that journey? >>Sure. Well, you know, I've I've led data teams in a numerous, uh, in numerous ways over my career. This is the first time that I've actually had the opportunity to focus on governance. And what it's done is allowed for my organization to scale much more rapidly. And that's so critically important for our overall strategy as a company. >>Well, I mean a big part of what you were talking about, at least my inference in your your talk was really that the business folks didn't have to care about, you know, wonder about they cared about it. But they're not the wonder about and and about the privacy, the concerns, etcetera. You've taken care of all that. It's sort of transparent to them. Is that >>yeah, right. That's right. Absolutely. So we focus on ensuring compliance across all the different regions where we operate. We also partner very heavily with our legal and information security teams. They're critical to ensuring, you know, that we're able Thio do this. We don't We don't do it alone. But governance includes not just, you know, the compliance and the privacy. It's also about data access, and it's also about ensuring data quality. And so all of that comes together under the governance umbrella. I also lead teams that focus on things like instrumentation, which is how we collect data. We focus on the infrastructure and making sure that we've architected for scale and all of these air really important components of our strategy. >>I got. So I have a question. Maybe each of you can answer. I I sort of see this our industry moving from, you know, products. So then the platforms and platforms even involving into ecosystems. And then there's this ecosystem of of data. You guys both talked a lot about data sharing. But maybe Frank, you could start in Anita. You can add on to Frank's answer. You're obviously both both passionate about the use of of data and trying to do so in a responsible way. That's critical, but it's also gonna have business impact. Frank, where's this passion come from? On your side. And how are you putting in tow action in your own organization? >>Well, you know, I'm really gonna date myself here, but, you know, many, many years ago, you know, I saw the first glimpse off, uh, multidimensional databases that were used for reporting. Really, On IBM mainframes on debt was extraordinarily difficult. We didn't even have the words back then. In terms of data, warehouses and business. All these terms didn't exist. People just knew that they wanted to have, um, or flexible way of reporting and being able Thio pivot data dimensionally and all these kinds of things. And I just whatever this predates, you know, Windows 3.1, which, really, you know, set off the whole sort of graphical in a way of dealing with systems which there's not a whole generations of people that don't know any different. Right? So I I've lived the pain off this problem on sort of been had a front row seat to watching this This transpire over a very long period of time. And that's that's one of the reasons um, you know why I'm here? Because I finally seen, you know, a glimpse off, you know, also as an industry fully fully just unleashing and unlocking the potential were not in a place where the technology is ahead of people's ability to harness it right, which we've We've never been there before, right? It was always like we wanted to do things that technology wouldn't let us. It's different now. I mean, people are just heads are spinning with what's now possible, which is why you see markets evolved very rapidly right now. Way we were talking earlier about how you can't take, you know, past definitions and concepts and apply them to what's going on the world. The world's changing right in front of your eyes right now. >>Sonita. Maybe you could add on to what Frank just said and share some of the business impacts and and outcomes that air notable since you're really applied your your love of data and maybe maybe touch on culture, your data culture. You know any words of wisdom for folks in the audience who might be thinking about embarking on a data cloud journey similar to what you've been on? >>Yeah, sure, I think for me. I fell in love with technology first, and then I fell in love with data, and I fell in love with data because of the impact the data can have on both the business and the technology strategy. And so it's sort of that nexus, you know, between all three and in terms of my career journey and and some of the impacts that I've seen I mean, I think with the advent of the cloud, you know before, Well, how do I say that before the cloud actually became, you know, so prevalent in such a common part of the strategy that's required? It was so difficult, you know, so painful. It took so many hours to actually be able to calculate, you know, the volumes of data that we had. Now we have that accessibility, and then on top of it with the snowflake data cloud, it's much more performance oriented from a cost perspective because you don't have multiple copies of the data, or at least you don't have toe have multiple copies of the data. And I think moving beyond some of the traditional mechanisms for for measuring business impact has has only been possible with the volumes of data that we have available to us today. And it's just it's phenomenal to see the speed at which we can operate and really, truly understand our customers, interests and their preferences, and then tailor the experiences that they really want and deserve for them. Um, it's It's been a great feeling. Thio, get to this point in time. >>That's fantastic. So, Frank, I gotta ask you if you're still in your spare time, you decided to write a book? I'm loving it. Um, I don't have a signed copy, so I'm gonna have to send it back and have you sign it. But you're I love the inside baseball. It's just awesome. Eso really appreciate that. So But why did you decide to write a book? >>Well, there were a couple of reasons. Obviously, we thought it was an interesting tale to tell for anybody you know who is interested in, You know what's going on. How did this come about, You know, where the characters behind the scenes and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, from a business standpoint, because this is such a step function, it's so non incremental. We felt like, you know, we really needed quite a bit of real estate to really lay out what the full narrative and context is on. Do you know we thought books titled The Rise of the Data Cloud. That's exactly what it ISS and We're trying to make the case for that mindset, that mentality, that strategy. Because all of us, you know, I think is an industry or were risk off persisting, perpetuating, You know, where we've been since the beginning off computing. So we're really trying to make a pretty forceful case for Look, you know, there is an enormous opportunity out there, The different choices you have to make along the way. >>Guys, we got to leave it there. Frank. I know you and I are gonna talk again. Anita. I hope we have a chance to meet face to face and and talking the Cube live someday. You're phenomenal, guest. And what a great story. Thank you both for coming on. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. You're watching the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit on the Cube.

>> Hello everybody. And welcome back to, theCUBE coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2020. We're tracking the rise of the Data Cloud, and fresh off the keynotes here, Frank Slootman, the Chairman and CEO of Snowflake and Anita Lynch, the Vice President of data governance at Disney streaming services. Folks Welcome. >> Thank you >> Thanks for having us Dave. >> Anita Disney plus awesome. You know, we signed up early, watched all the Marvel movies, Hamilton, the new Pixar movie soul. I haven't gotten it to the Mandalorian yet, your favorite. But really appreciate you guys coming on. Let me start with Frank. I'm glad you're putting forth this vision around the Data Cloud, because I never liked the term enterprise data warehouse. What you're doing is so different from the sort of that legacy world that I've known all these years. But start with why the Data Cloud? What problems are you trying to solve? And maybe some of the harder challenges you're seeing. >> Yeah, you know, we have a, we've come a long way in terms of workload execution. Right? In terms of scale and performance, and concurrent execution. We've really taken the lid off, sort of the physical constraints that have existed on these type of operations. But there's one problem that we're not yet solving, and that is the siloing and bunkering of data. And essentially, data is locked in applications, it's locked in data centers, it's locked in cloud, cloud regions. Incredibly hard for data science teams to really unlock the true value of data, when you can't address patterns that exist across data sets. So where we perpetuate a status we've had for forever since the beginning of computing. If we don't start to crack that problem now we have that opportunity. But the notion of a Data Cloud is like basically saying, "Look folks, we have to start on siloing and unlocking the data, and bring it into a place, where we can access it across all these perimeters, and boundaries that have historically existed. It's very much a step level function. Like the customers have always looked at things, one workload at a time, that mentality really has to go. You really have to have a Data Cloud mentality, as well as a workload orientation towards managing data. >> Anita, it was great hearing your role at Disney and in your keynote, and the work you're doing, the governance work. and you're serving a great number of stakeholders, enabling things like data sharing. You got really laser focused on trust, compliance, privacy. This idea of a data clean room is really interesting. Maybe you can expand on some of these initiatives here, and share what you're seeing as some of the biggest challenges to success, and of course, the opportunities that you're unlocking. >> Sure. In my role leading data governance, it's really critical to make sure that all of our stakeholders not only know what data is available and accessible to them. They can also understand really easily and quickly, whether or not the data that they're using is for the appropriate use case. And so that's a big part of how we scale data governance, and a lot of the work that we would normally have to do manually is actually done for us through the data clean rooms. >> Thank you for that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the role of data and how your data strategy has evolved and maybe discuss some of the things that Frank mentioned about data silos. And I mean, obviously you can relate to that having been in the data business for a while, but I wonder if you can elucidate on that. >> Sure. I mean, data complexities are going to evolve over time in any traditional data architecture simply because you often have different teams at different periods and time trying to analyze and gather data across a whole lot of different sources. And the complexity that just arises out of that is due to the different needs of specific stakeholders. There are time constraints and quite often, it's not always clear how much value they're going to be able to extract from the data at the outset. So what we've tried to do to help break down those silos is allow individuals to see upfront how much value they're going to get from the data by knowing that it's trustworthy right away. By knowing that it's something that they can use in their specific use case right away. And by ensuring that essentially as they're continuing to kind of scale the use cases that they're focused on, they're no longer required to make multiple copies of the data, do multiple steps to reprocess the data. And that makes all the difference in the world. >> Yeah, for sure. I'm a copy Creek because it'd be the silent killer. Frank I followed you for a number of years, you're a big thinker, you and I have had a lot of conversations about the near-term, mid-term and long-term, I wonder if you could talk about, in your keynote you're talking about eliminating silos and connecting across data sources. Which is really powerful concept but really only if people are willing and able to connect and collaborate. Where do you see that happening? Maybe what are some of the blockers there? >> Well, there's certainly a natural friction there. I still remember when we first started to talk to, Salesforce, you know, they had discovered that we were a top three destination of Salesforce data and they were wondering why that was, and the reason is of course, that people take Salesforce data push it to snowflake because they want to overlay it with what data outside of Salesforce. Whether it's Adobe or any other marketing dataset. And then they want to run very highly scaled processes on it. But the reflexes in the world of SaaS is always like no, we're an Island, we're a planet down to ourselves. Everybody needs to come with us, as opposed to we go to a different platform to run these types of processes. It's no different for the public cloud vendor. They didn't only, they have massive moats around their storage to really prevent data from leaving their orbit. So there is natural friction in terms for this to happen. But on the other hand there is an enormous need. We can't deliver on the power and potential of data unless we allow it to come together. Snowflake is the platform that allows that to happen. We were pleased with our relationship with Salesforce because they did appreciate why this was important and why this was necessary. And we think, other parts of the industry will gradually come around to it as well. So the idea of a Data Cloud has really come, right. When people are recognizing why this matters now. It's not going to happen overnight. It is a step while will function a very big change in mentality and orientation. >> Yeah. It's almost as though the the SaaS suffocation of our industry sort of repeated some of the application silos and you build a hardened top around it, all the processes are hardened around it and okay, here we go. And you're really trying to break that, aren't you? >> Yep, exactly. >> Anita, again, I want to come back to this notion of governance. It's so it's so important. It's the first role in your title and it really underscores the importance of this. You know, Frank was just talking about some of the hurdles and this is a big one. I mean, we saw this in the early days of big data where governance was just afterthought. It was like bolted on the kind of wild wild West. I'm interested in your governance journey. And maybe you can share a little bit about what role snowflake has played there in terms of supporting that agenda and kind of what's next on that journey. >> Sure. Well, I've led data teams in numerous ways over my career. This is the first time that I've actually had the opportunity to focus on governance and what it's done is allowed for my organization to scale much more rapidly. And that's so critically important for our overall strategy as a company. >> Well, I mean, a big part of what you were talking about at least my inference in your talk was really that the business folks didn't have to care about, you know, wonder about they cared about it, but they don't have to wonder about, and about the privacy concerns, et cetera. You've taken care of all that it's sort of transparent to them. Is that right?| >> Yea That's right absolutely. So we focus on ensuring compliance across all of the different regions where we operate. We also partner very heavily with our legal and information security teams. They're critical to ensuring that we're able to do this. we don't do it alone. But governance includes not just the compliance and the privacy, it's also about data access, and it's also about ensuring data quality. And so all of that comes together under the governance umbrella. I also lead teams that focus on things like instrumentation, which is how we collect data. We focus on the infrastructure and making sure that we've architected for scale and all of these are really important components of our strategy. >> I got a...So I have a question maybe each of you can answer. I sort of see this, our industry moving from products, to then, to platforms and platforms even evolving into ecosystems. And then there's this ecosystem of data. You guys both talked a lot about data sharing but maybe Frank, you can start, Anita you can add on to Frank's answer. You're obviously both passionate about the use of data and trying to do so in a responsible way. That's critical but it's also going to have business impact. Frank, where's this passion come from on your side. And how are you putting into action in your own organization? >> Well, you know I'm really going to date myself here, but many, many years ago, I saw the first glimpse of multidimensional databases that were used for reporting really on IBM mainframes. And it was extraordinarily difficult. We didn't even have the words back then in terms of data warehouses and business. All these terms didn't exist. People just knew that they wanted to have a more flexible in way of reporting and being able to pivot data dimensionally and all these kinds of things. And I just bought whatever this predates windows 3.1, which really, set off the whole sort of graphical, way of dealing with systems which there's now a whole generations of people that don't know any different right? So I've lived the pain of this problem and sort of had a front row seat to watching this transpire over a very long period of time. And that's one of the reasons, why I'm here, because I finally seen, a glimpse of, I also, as an industry fully, fully just unleashing and unlocking to potential. We're now in a place where the technology is ahead of people's ability to harness it. Which we've never been there before. It was always like, we wanted to do things that technology wouldn't let us. It's different now. I mean, people are just, their heads are spinning with what's now possible, which is why you see markets evolve, very rapidly right now we were talking earlier about how you can't take past definitions and concepts and apply them to what's going on in the world. because the world's changing right in front of your eyes right now. >> So Anita maybe you could add on to what Frank just said and share some of the business impacts and outcomes that are notable since you've really applied your your love of data and maybe, maybe touch on, on culture. Data culture, any words of wisdom for folks in the audience who might be thinking about embarking on a Data Cloud journey, similar to what you've been on. >> Yeah sure. I think for me, I fell in love with technology first and then I fell in love with data. And I fell in love with data because of the impact that data can have on both the business and the technology strategy. And so it's sort of that nexus, between all three. And in terms of my career journey and some of the impacts that I've seen. I mean, I think with the advent of the cloud, before, well, how do I say that. Before the cloud actually became so prevalent and such a common part of the strategy that's required it was so difficult, you know, so painful. It took so many hours to actually be able to calculate the volumes of data that we had. Now we have that accessibility, and then on top of it, with the snowflake Data Cloud it's much more performance oriented from a cost perspective because you don't have multiple copies of the data, or at least you don't have to have multiple copies of the data. And I think moving beyond some of the traditional mechanisms for for measuring business impact, has only been possible with the volumes of data that we have available to us today. And it's just, it's phenomenal to see the speed at which we can operate. And really, truly understand our customer's interests and their preferences and then tailor the experiences that they really want and deserve for them. It's, been a great feeling to get to this point in time. >> That's fantastic. So, Frank, I got to ask you this. So in your spare time you decided to write a book, I'm loving it. I don't have a signed copy so I'm going to have to send it back and have you sign it. But, and you're, I love the inside baseball. It's just awesome. So really appreciate that. So, but why did you decide to write a book? >> Well, there were a couple of reasons, obviously we thought of as an interesting tale to tell for anybody, who is interested in what's going on, how did this come about? Who are the characters behind the scenes and all this stuff. But from a business standpoint because this is such a step function it's so non incremental, we felt like, we really needed quite a bit of real estate to really lay out what the full narrative and context is. And, we thought, the books titled the "Rise of the Data Cloud." That's exactly what it is. And we're trying to make the case for that mindset, that mentality, that strategy because all of us, I think as an industry, were at risk of, persisting, perpetuating where we've been since the beginning of computing. So we're really trying to make a pretty forceful case for a look. There's an enormous opportunity out there but there's some choices you have to make along the way. >> Guys, we got to leave it there. Frank, I know you and I are going to talk again Anita, I hope we have a chance to meet face to face and talk in theCUBE live someday. You're phenomenal guests and what a great story. Thank you both for coming on. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. You're watching the, Snowflake Data Cloud Summit, on theCUBE.

>>Hello, buddy. And welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of Snowflake Data Cloud Summer 2020. We're tracking the rise of the data cloud and fresh off the keynotes. Hear Frank's Luqman, the chairman and CEO of Snowflake, and Anita Lynch, the vice president of data governance at Disney Streaming Services. Folks. Welcome E Need a Disney plus. Awesome. You know, we signed up early. Watched all the Marvel movies. Hamilton, the new Pixar movie Soul. I haven't gotten to the man DeLorean yet. Your favorite, but I really appreciate you guys coming on. Let me start with Frank. I'm glad you're putting forth this vision around the data cloud because I never liked the term Enterprise Data Warehouse. What you're doing is is so different from the sort of that legacy world that I've known all these years. But start with why the data cloud? What problems are you trying to solve? And maybe some of the harder challenges you're seeing? >>Yeah. You know, we have We've come a long way in terms of workload, execution, right? In terms of scale and performance and concurrent execution. We really taking the lid off. Sort of the physical constraints that that have existed on these types of operations. But there's one problem, uh, that were not yet, uh solving. And that is the silo ing and bunkering of data essentially in the data is locked in applications. It's locked in data centers. It's locked in cloud cloud regions incredibly hard for for data science teams to really unlock the true value of data when you when you can address patterns that that exists across data set. So we're perpetuate, uh, status we've had for for ever since the beginning off computing. If we don't start Thio, crack that problem now we have that opportunity. But the notion of a data cloud is like basically saying, Look, folks, you know, we we have to start inside, lowing and unlocking the data on bring it into a place where we can access it. Uh, you know, across all these parameters and boundaries that have historically existed, it's very much a step level function. Customers have always looked at things won't workload at that time. That mentality really has to go. You really have to have a data club mentality as well as a workload orientation towards towards managing data. >>Anita is great here in your role at Disney and you're in your keynote and the work you're doing the governance work and you're you're serving a great number of stakeholders, enabling things like data sharing. You got really laser focused on trust, compliance, privacy. This idea of a data clean room is really interesting. You know, maybe you can expand on some of these initiatives here and share what you're seeing as some of the biggest challenges to success. And, of course, the opportunities that you're unlocking. >>Sure, I mean, in my role leading data to governance, it's really critical to make sure that all of our stakeholders not only know what data is available and accessible to them, they can also understand really easily and quickly whether or not the data that they're using is for the appropriate use case. And so that's a big part of how we scale data governance. And a lot of the work that we would normally have to do manually is actually done for us through the data Clean rooms. >>Thank you for that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the role of data and how your data strategy has evolved and maybe discuss some of the things that Frank mentioned about data silos. And I mean, obviously you can relate to that having been in the data business for a while, but I wonder if you could elucidate on that. >>Sure, I mean data complexities air going to evolve over time in any traditional data architecture. Er, simply because you often have different teams at different periods in time trying thio, analyze and gather data across Ah, whole lot of different sources. And the complexity that just arises out of that is due to the different needs of specific stakeholders, their time constraints. And quite often, um, it's not always clear how much value they're gonna be able to extract from the data at the outset. So what we've tried to do to help break down the silos is allow individuals to see up front how much value they're going to get from the data by knowing that it's trustworthy right away. By knowing that it's something that they can use in their specific use case right away, and by ensuring that essentially, as they're continuing to kind of scale, the use cases that they're focused on their no longer required Thio make multiple copies of the data, do multiple steps to reprocess the data. And that makes all the difference in the world, >>for sure. I mean, copy creep, because it be the silent killer. Frank, I've followed you for a number of years. Your big thinker. You and I have had a lot of conversations about the near term midterm and long term. I wonder if you could talk about you know, when you're Kino. You talk about eliminating silos and connecting across data sources, which really powerful concept. But really only if people are willing and able to connect and collaborate. Where do you see that happening? Maybe What are some of the blockers there? >>Well, there's there's certainly, ah, natural friction there. I still remember when we first started to talk to to Salesforce, you know, they had discovered that we were top three destination off sales first data, and they were wondering why that was. And the reason is, of course, that people take salesforce data, push it to snowflake because they wanna overlay it with what data? Outside of Salesforce, you know, whether it's adobe or any other marketing data set and then they want to run very highly skilled processes, you know, on it. But the reflexes in the world of SAS is always like, No, we're an island were planning down to ourselves. Everybody needs to come with us as opposed to we We go, you know, to a different platform to run these type of processes. It's no different for the for the public club. Better day didn't mean they have, you know, massive moats around there. Uh, you know, their stories to, you know, really prevent data from from leaving their their orbit. Eso there is natural friction in, uh, in terms off for this to happen. But on the other hand, you know, there is an enormous need, you know, we can't deliver on on the power and potential of data unless we allow it to come together. Uh, snowflake is the platform that allows that to happen. Uh, you know, we were pleased with our relationship with Salesforce because they did appreciate you know why this was important and why this was necessary. And we think you know, other parts of the industry will gradually come around to it as well. So the the idea of a data cloud has really come, right? Uh, people are recognizing, you know, why does this matter now? It's not gonna happen overnight. There's a step global function of very big change in mentality and orientation. >>Yeah. It's almost as though the SAS ification of our industry sort of repeated some of the application silos and you build a hardened top around it. All the processes are hard around. OK, here we go. And you're really trying to break that, aren't you? Yeah, Exactly. Anita. Again, I wanna come back to this notion of governance. It's so it's so important. It's the first role in your title, and it really underscores the importance of this. Um, you know, Frank was just talking about some of the hurdles, and this is this is a big one. I mean, we saw this in the early days of big data. Where governance was this after thought it was like, bolted on kind of wild, Wild West. I'm interested in your governance journey. And maybe you could share a little bit about what role snowflake has played there in terms of supporting that agenda. Bond. Kind of What's next on that journey? >>Sure. Well, you know, I've I've led data teams in a numerous, uh, in numerous ways over my career. This is the first time that I've actually had the opportunity to focus on governance. And what it's done is allowed for my organization to scale much more rapidly. And that's so critically important for our overall strategy as a company. >>Well, I mean a big part of what you were talking about. At least my inference in your talk was really that the business folks didn't have to care about, you know, wonder about they cared about it. But they're not the wonder about and and about the privacy, the concerns, etcetera. You've taken care of all that. It's sort of transparent to them. Is that >>yeah, right. That's right. Absolutely So we focus on ensuring compliance across all of the different regions where we operate. We also partner very heavily with our legal and information security teams. They're critical to ensuring, you know, that were ableto do this. We don't we don't do it alone. But governance includes not just, you know, the compliance and the privacy. It's also about data access, and it's also about ensuring data quality. And so all of that comes together under the governance umbrella. I also lead teams that focus on things like instrumentation, which is how we collect data. We focus on the infrastructure and making sure that we've architected for scale and all of these air really important components of our strategy. >>I got. So I have a question. Maybe each of you can answer. I I sort of see this our industry moving from, you know, products toe, then two platforms and platforms, even involving into ecosystems. And then there's this ecosystem of data. You guys both talked a lot about data sharing, But maybe Frank, you could start in Anita. You can add on to Frank's answer. You're obviously both both passionate about the use of data and trying to do so in a responsible way. That's critical, but it's also gonna have business impact. Frank, where's this passion come from? On your side. And how are you putting in tow action in your own organization? >>Well, you know, I'm really gonna date myself here, but, you know, uh, many, many years ago, uh, I saw the first glimpse off, uh, multidimensional databases that were used for reporting really on IBM mainframes on git was extraordinarily difficult. We didn't even have the words back then in terms of data, warehouses and all these terms didn't exist. People just knew that they wanted to have, um, or flexible way of reporting and being able Thio pivot data dimensionally and all these kinds of things. And I just whatever this predates, you know, Windows 3.1, which really set off the whole sort of graphical in a way of dealing with systems which there's not a whole generations of people that don't know any different, Right? So I I've lived the pain off. This problem on sort of had a front row seat to watching this this transpire over a very long period of time. And that's that's one of the reasons you know why I'm here. Because I finally seen a glimpse off. You know, I also as an industry fully fully just unleashing and unlocking the potential were not in a place where the technology is ahead of people's ability to harness it right, which we've never been there before, right? It was always like we wanted to do things that technology wouldn't let us. It's different now. I mean, people are just heads are spinning with what's now possible, which is why you see markets evolved very rapidly right now. We were talking earlier about how you can't take, you know, past definitions and concepts and apply them to what's going on the world. The world's changing right in front of your eyes right now. >>Sonita. Maybe you could add on to what Frank just said and share some of the business impacts and and outcomes that are notable since you're really applied your your love of data and maybe maybe touch on culture, data, culture, any words of wisdom for folks in the audience who might be thinking about embarking on a data cloud journey similar to what you've been on? >>Yeah, sure, I think for me. I fell in love with technology first, and then I fell in love with data, and I fell in love with data because of the impact the data can have on both the business and the technology strategy. And so it's sort of that nexus, you know, between all three and in terms of my career journey and some of the impacts that I've seen. I mean, I think with the advent of the cloud you know before. Well, how do I say that before the cloud actually became, you know, so prevalent and such a common part of the strategy that's required It was so difficult, you know, so painful. It took so many hours to actually be able to calculate, you know, the volumes of data that we had. Now we have that accessibility, and then on top of it with the snowflake data cloud, it's much more performance oriented from a cost perspective because you don't have multiple copies of the data, or at least you don't have toe have multiple copies of the data. And I think moving beyond some of the traditional mechanisms for for measuring business impact has has only been possible with the volumes of data that we have available to us today. And it's just it's phenomenal to see the speed at which we can operate and really, truly understand our customers, interests and their preferences, and then tailor the experiences that they really want and deserve for them. Um, it's it's been a great feeling. Thio, get to this point in time. >>That's fantastic. So, Frank, I gotta ask you if you're still in your spare time. You decided to write a book? I'm loving it. Um, I don't have a signed copy, so I'm gonna have to send it back and have you sign it. But your love, the inside baseball, it's just awesome. Eso really appreciate that. So but why did you decide to write a book? >>Well, there were a couple of reasons. Obviously, uh, we thought it was an interesting tale to tell for anybody who's interested in, you know what's going on. How did this come about, You know, where the characters behind the scenes and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, from a business standpoint, because this is such a step function, it's so non incremental. We felt like, you know, we really needed quite a bit of real estate to really lay out what the full narrative in context is on. Do you know, we thought books titled The Rise of the Data Cloud. That's exactly what it iss. And we're trying to make the case for that mindset, that mentality, that strategy. Uh, because all of us, you know, I think it's an industry were risk off, you know, persisting, perpetuating. Uh, you know, where we've been since the beginning off computing. So we're really trying to make a pretty forceful case for Look, there's an enormous opportunity out there. The different choices you have to make along the way. >>Guys, we got to leave it there. Frank. I know you and I are gonna talk again. Anita. I hope we have a chance to meet face to face and and talking the Cube live someday. You're phenomenal guests. And what a great story. Thank you both for coming on. Thank you. All right, you're welcome. And keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back for the next guest right after this short break and we're clear. All right. Not bad.

>> Hello everybody and welcome back to the cubes coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2020. We're tracking the rise of the Data Cloud, and fresh off the keynotes here, Frank Slootman, the chairman and CEO of Snowflake and Anita Lynch, the vice president of Data Governance at Disney Streaming Services. Folks, welcome. >> Thank you Thanks for having us, Dave, >> I need a Disney plus awesome. You know, we signed up early, watched all the Marvel movies, Hamilton, the new Pixar Movie saw, I haven't gotten into the Mandalorian yet, your favorite, but, (woman laughing) really appreciate you guys coming on. Let me start with Frank. I'm glad you're putting forth this vision around the data cloud, because I never liked the term Enterprise Data Warehouse, what you're doing is so different from the sort of that legacy world that I've known all these years, but start with why the Data Cloud, what problems are you trying to solve? And maybe some of the harder challenges you're seeing. >> Yeah I know, you know we've come a long way in terms of workload execution, right? In terms of scale and performance, you know, concurrent execution, we really taken the lid off sort of the physical constraints that have existed on these types of operations. But there's one problem, that we're not yet solving. And that is the siloing and bunkering of data. And especially in a data is locked in application it is locked data centers, is locked in cloud regions, incredibly hard for data science teams to really, you know, unlock the true value of data. When you can address patterns that exist across a data set. So we're perpetuate, a status we've had forever since the beginning of computing. If we don't start to crack that problem now we have that opportunity. But the notion of a Data Cloud is like basically saying, look folks, you know, we have to start unsiloing and unlocking the data, and bring it into a place, you know, where we can access it, you know, across all these parameters and boundaries that have historically existed. It's very much a step level function. Now the customers have always looked at things one workload at a time, that mentality really has to go. You really have to have a Data Cloud mentality, as well as a workload orientation towards managing data. >> Anita was great hearing your role at Disney, and your keynote, and the work you're doing, the governance work, and you're serving a great number of stakeholders, enabling things like data sharing, you got really laser focused on trust, compliance, privacy. Is this idea of a data clean room is really interesting. You maybe you can expand on some of these initiatives here and share what you're seeing as some of the biggest challenges to success. And of course, the opportunities that you're unlocking. >> Sure. I mean, in my role, leading Data Governance, it's really critical to make sure that all of our stakeholders, not only know what data is available and accessible to them, they can also understand really easily and quickly, whether or not the data that they're using is for the appropriate use case. And so, that's a big part of how we scale data governance, and a lot of the work that we would normally have to do manually, is actually done for us through the data clean rooms. >> Thank you for that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the role of data and how your data strategy has evolved and maybe discuss some of the things that Frank mentioned about data silos, and obviously you can relate to that, having been in the data business for awhile, but wonder if you can elucidate on that. >> Sure. I mean, data complexities are going to evolve over time in any traditional data architecture, simply because you often have different teams at different periods in time, trying to analyze and gather data across a whole lot of different sources. And the complexity that just arises out of that, is, due to the different needs of specific stakeholders. There are time constraints, and quite often it's not always clear, how much value they're going to be able to extract from the data at the outset. So what we've tried to do to help break down those silos, is, allow individuals to see upfront how much value they're going to get from the data, by knowing that it's trustworthy right away . By knowing that it's something that they can use in their specific use case right away. And by ensuring that essentially, as they're continuing to kind of scale the use cases that they're focused on, they're no longer required to make multiple copies of the data, do multiple steps to reprocess the data. And that makes all the difference in the world. >> Yeah, for sure. I mean copy creek, cause it'd be the silent killer. Frank I followed you for a number of years. You're a big thinker. You and I have had a lot of conversations about the near term, mid term and long term. I wonder if you could talk about, you know, when your keynote, you talked about eliminating silos, and connecting across data sources, which really powerful concept, but it really only, if people are willing and able to connect and collaborate, where do you see that happening? Maybe what are some of the blockers there? >> Well, there's certainly a natural friction there. I still remember when we first started to talk to Salesforce, you know, they had, discovered that we were a top three destination of Salesforce data and they were wondering, you know, why that was? And the reason is of course that people take Salesforce data, push it to Snowflake, because they want to overlay it with data outside of Salesforce. You know what it is Adobe or any 6other marketing dataset. And then they want to run very highly skilled processes, you know, on it. But the reflexes in the world of SAS, is always like, no, we're an Island, we're a planet onto ourselves. Everybody needs to come with us as opposed to, we go to a different platform to run these types of processes. It's no different for thee public cloud vendor. They did only, they have, you know, massive moats around, you know, their storage to, you know, to really prevent data from leaving their orbit. So there is natural friction in terms of for this to happen. But on the other hand, you know, there is an enormous need, you know, we can't deliver on the power and potential of data, unless we allow it to come together. Snowflake is the platform that allows that to happen. You know, we were pleased with our relationship with Salesforce because they did appreciate, you know, why this was important and why this was necessary. And we think, you know, other parts of the industry will gradually come around to it as well. So the idea of a Data Cloud has really come. Right, people are recognizing, you know, why does this matters now. It's not going to happen overnight. It is a step what will function a very big change in mentality and orientation. You know? >> Yeah. It's almost as though the sussification of our industry sort of repeated some of the application silos, and build a heart on to and all the processes of(mummers) Okay, here we go. And you're really trying to break that aren't you? >> Yep, exactly. >> Anita, again, I want to come back to this notion of governance. It's so important. It's the first rule in your title, and it really underscores the importance of this. You know, Frank was just talking about some of the hurdles and this is a big one. I mean we saw this in the early days of big data where governance was this afterthought. It was like bolted on kind of wild west. I'm interested in your governance journey. And maybe you can share a little bit about what role Snowflake has played there in terms of supporting that agenda, and kind of what's next on that journey. >> Sure. Well, you know, I've led data teams, in numerous ways over my career, this is the first time, that I've actually had the opportunity to focus on governance. And what it's done, is allowed for my organization to scale much more rapidly. And that's so critically important for our overall strategy as a company. >> Well, I mean, a big part of what you were talking about, at least my inference in your talk, was really that the business folks didn't have to care about, your wonder about they cared about it, but they don't have to wonder about, and about the privacy concerns, et cetera, you've taken care of all that. It's sort of transparent to them. >> Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. So we focus on ensuring compliance across all of the different regions where we operate. We also partner very heavily with our legal and information security teams. They're critical, to ensuring you know, that we're able to do this. We don't do it alone. But governance includes not just, you know, the compliance and the privacy. It's also about data access. And it's also about ensuring data quality. And so all of that comes together under the governance umbrella. I also lead teams that focus on things like instrumentation, which is how we collect data, we focus on the infrastructure, and making sure that we've architected for scale , and all of these are really important components of our strategy. >> So I have a question maybe each of you can answer it. I sort of see this, our industry moving from products to then, to the platforms and platforms even evolving into ecosystems. And then there's this ecosystem of data. You guys both talked a lot about data sharing, but, but maybe Frank, you can start and Anita you can add onto Frank's answer. You obviously both passionate about the use of data and trying to do so in a responsible way, that's critical, but it's also going to have business impact. Frank, where's this passion come from on your side? And how are you putting into action in your own organization? >> Well, you know, I'm really going to date myself here, but you know many years ago, you know, I saw the first glimpse of multidimensional databases that were used for reporting really on IBM mainframes. And it was extraordinarily difficult. We didn't even have the words back then in terms of data, warehouses and business, all these terms didn't exist. People just knew that they want to have a more flexible way of reporting and being able to pivot data, dimensionally, all these kinds of things. And I just by whatever this predates, you know, windows 3.1, which really, you know, set off the whole sort of graphical, you know, way of dealing with systems, which there's not whole generations of people that don't know any different. Right? So I've lived the pain of this problem, and sort of had a front row seat, to watching this transpire over a very long period of time. And that's one of the reasons, you know, why I'm here because I finally seen, you know, a glimpse of, you know, I also, as an industry fully, just unleashing and unlocking the potential. We're not at a place where the technology is ahead of people's ability to harness it. Right. Which we'd never been there before. Right. It was always like we wanted to do things and technology wouldn't let us, it's different now. I mean, people are just, heads are spinning with what's now possible, which is why you see Marcus evolve, you know, very rapidly right now, we were talking earlier about how you can't take, you know, past definitions and concepts and apply them to what's going on in the world. The world's changing right in front of your eyes right now, >> So Anita maybe you could add on to what Frank just said and share some of the business impacts, and outcomes that are notable since you've really applied your love of data and maybe touch culture, data culture. Any words of wisdom for folks in the audience who might be thinking about embarking on a Data Cloud journey, similar to what you've been on. >> Yeah Sure. I think for me, I fell in love with technology first, and then I fell in love with data and I fell in love with data because of the impact that data can have, on both the business, and the technology strategy. And so it's sort of that nexus between all three. And in terms of my career journey and some of the impacts that I've seen. I think with the advent of the Cloud, you know, before, well, how do I say this? Before the cloud actually became so prevalent and such a common part of the strategy that's required, it was so difficult, you know, so painful. It took so many hours to actually, be able to calculate, you know, the volumes of data that we had. Now we have that accessibility. And then on top of it, with the Snowflake Data Cloud, it's much more performance oriented from a cost perspective because you don't have multiple copies of the data, or at least you don't have to have multiple copies of the data. And I think, moving beyond some of the traditional mechanisms for measuring business impact, has only been possible with the volumes of data that we have available to us today. And it's just, it's phenomenal to see the speed at which we can operate and really, truly understand our customer's interests and their preferences, and then tailor the experiences that they really want and deserve for them. It's been a great feeling to get to this point in time. >> That's fantastic. So, Frank, I got to ask you to do so in your spare time you decided to write a book am loving it. I have a signed copy, so I'm going to have to send it back and have you sign it. But, and I love the inside baseball. It's just awesome. So really appreciate that. So, but why did you decide to write a book? >> Well, there were a couple of reasons. Obviously we thought it was an interesting tale to tell for anybody, you know, who is interested in, you know, what's going on? How did this come about? You know, or the characters behind the scenes and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, from a business standpoint, you know, because this is such a step function, it's so non incremental, we felt like we really needed quite a bit of real estate to really lay out, what the full narrative and context is. And, you know, we thought, you know, books titled the rise of the Data Cloud. That's exactly what it is. And we're trying to make the case for that mindset, that mentality, that strategy, because all of us, you know, I think as an industry we're at risk of, you know, persisting, perpetuating, you know, where we've been since the beginning of computing. So we're really trying to make a pretty forceful case for look, you know, there's an enormous opportunity out there, but there's some choices you have to make along the way. >> Guys, we got to leave it there. Frank. I know you and I are going to talk again, Anita, I hope we have a chance to meet face to face and in the cube live someday, your phenomenal guest and what a great story. Thank you both for coming on. Thanks Dave, >> Thank you >> You're welcome to keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with the next guest right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Live from San Diego, California. It's the cube covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem. >>Welcome back to the queue bumps to men. And my cohost is John Troyer and you're watching the cube here at CubeCon, cloud-native con 2019 in beautiful and sunny San Diego today. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Tom Willkie, who's vice president of product ECRO funnel labs. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. All right, so it's on your tee shirt. We've been hearing, uh, customers talking about it and the like, but, uh, why don't you introduce the company to our audience in a, where you fit in this broad landscape, uh, here at the CNCF show. Thank you. Yes. So Grafana is probably the most popular open source project for dashboarding and visualization. Um, started off focused on time series data on metrics, um, but really recently has branched out into log analysis and tracing and, and all, all of the kinds of aspects of your observability stack. >>Alright, so really big, uh, you know, broad topic there. Uh, we know many of the companies in that space. Uh, there's been many acquisitions, uh, you know, uh, recently in this, um, where, where do you fit in your system? I saw like databases, like a big focus, uh, when, when I, when I look at the company website, uh, bring us inside a little bit. Yeah. As a product to the offering. The customers most, um, >> most, most vendors in this space will sell you a monitoring product that includes the time series database normally includes visualization and some agent as well where pharma Lampson Griffon open source projects, very focused on the visualization aspects. So we are data source agnostic and we have back ends for more than 60 different data sources. So if you want to bring together data from let's say Datadog and combine it with some open source monitoring from, you can do that with. >>Uh, you can, you can have the dashboards and the individual panels in that dashboard combined data from multiple different data sources and we're pretty much the only game in town for that. You can, you can think of it like Tableau allows you to plug into a whole bunch of different databases for your BI with that. But for monitoring and for metrics. Well, so Tom, maybe let's, before we get into the exit products and more of the service and the, and the conference here, let's talk a little well on the front page of your website, you use the Oh 11, why word? So we've said where it's like monitoring here we use words like management, we use words like ops. Observability is a hot topic in the space and for people in a space that has some nuances. And so can you just maybe let the viewers and us know a little bit about what, how the space is looking at this and how you all feel about observability and what everybody here who's running some cloud native apps needs to actually function in production. >>Yeah. So I think, um, you can't talk about observability without either being pro or, or for, um, uh, the three pillars, right? So people talk about metrics, logs and traces. Um, I think what people miss here is that it's more about the experience for the developer, you know, Gruffalo and what we're trying to achieve is all about giving engineers and developers the tools they need to understand what their applications and their infrastructure doing, right? So we're not actually particularly picky about which pillars you use and which products you use to implement those pillars. But what we want to do is provide you with an experience that allows you to bring it all into a single, a single user interface and allows you to seamlessly move between the different sources of data and, and hopefully, uh, combine them in your analysis and in your root cause of any particular incident. >>And that for me is what observability means. It's about helping you understand the behavior of your application in particular. I mean, I'm, I'm a, I'm a software engineer by trade. I'm still on call. I still get paged at 3:00 AM occasionally. And, and having the right tools at 3:00 AM to allow me to as quickly as possible, figure out what happened and then dive into a fix. That's what we're about over funnel labs. All right. So Tom, one of the things we always need to understand and show here. There's the project and there's the company. Yep. Help us just kind of understand, you know, definitely a difference. The products, the, the, the mission of the company and how that fits with the project. So the Gruffalo project predates the company and it was started by taco. Um, he, you know, he saw a spot for like needing a much better kind of graphical editing of dashboards and making, making the kind of metrics way more accessible to your average human. >>Um, the final lab started really to focus on the it and, uh, monitoring observability use cases of profanity and, but the project itself is much broader than that. We see a lot of use cases in industrial, in IOT, even in BI as well. But Grafana labs is a company we're focused on the monitoring side of things. We're focused on the observability. So we also offer, we mean, like most companies, we have an enterprise version of. It has a few data sources for commercial vendors. So if you want to, you want to get your data dog or your Splunk into Grafana, then there's a commercial auction for that. But we also offer a hosted observability platform called Grafana clown. And this is where we take the best open source projects, the best tools that we think you need as an engineer to understand your applications and we host them for you and we operate them for you. >>We scale them, we upgrade them, we fix bugs, we sacrifice the clouds predominantly are hosted from atheists, our hosted graphite and our hosted Loki, our log aggregation system, um, all combined and brought together with uh, with the Gruffalo frontend. So yeah, like two products, a bunch of open source projects for final labs, employees, four of the promethium maintainers. And I'm one of the promethium maintainers. Um, we am employee graphite maintainers. Obviously a lot of Gryffindor maintainers, but also Loki. Um, I'm trying to think, like there's just so many open source projects. We, uh, we get involved with that. Really it's about synthesizing, uh, an observability platform out of those. And that's what we offer as a product. So you recently had an announcement that Loki is now GA. can you talk just a little bit about Loki and aggregation and logs and what Loki does? >>Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah. Um, a year ago in Seattle actually we announced the Loki project. Um, it was super early. I mean I just basically been finishing the code on the plane over and we announced it and no one I think could have predicted the response we had. Um, everyone was so keen and so hungry for alternative to traditional log aggregation systems. Um, so it's been a year and we've learned a hell of a lot. We've had so much feedback from the community. We've built a whole team internally around, around Loki. We now offer a hosted version of it and we've been running it in production now for over a year, um, doing some really great scale on it and we think it's ready for other people to do the same. One of the things we hear, especially at shows like this is I really, I really, you know, developers and the grassroots adopters come to us, say, we really love Loki. >>We really love what you're doing with it. Um, but my boss won't let me use it until it goes to be one. And so really yesterday we announced it's Don V. one, we think it's stable. We're not going to change any of the APS on you. We, uh, we would love you to use it and uh, and put it into production. All right. Uh, we'd like to hear a little bit more about the business side of things. So, um, I believe there was some news around funding, uh, uh, you know, how many people you have, how many, you know, can you parse for us, you know, how many customers have the projects versus how many customers have, uh, you know, the company's products. Well, we don't, we don't call them customers of the projects that users, yes, yes, we, uh, but I'm from a company where we have hundreds of customers. >>Um, I don't believe we make our revenue figures public and, uh, so I'm probably not going to dive into them, but I know, I know the CEO stands up at our, our yearly conference and, and discloses, you know, what our revenue the last year was. So I'll refer you to that. Um, the funding announcement, that was about a month ago. We, uh, we raised a great round from Lightspeed, um, 24 million I believe. Um, and we're gonna use that to really invest in the community, really invest in our projects and, and build a bit more of a commercial function. Um, the company is now about 110 people. I think, um, it's growing so quickly. I joined 18 months ago and we were 30 people and so we've almost quadrupled in size in, in the last year and a half. Um, so keeping up is quite a challenge. Uh, the two projects, uh, products I've already touched on a few hundred customers and I think we're, you know, we're really happy with the growth. >>We've been, uh, we've never had any institutional funding before this. The company is about five years old. So we've been growing based on organic revenue and, and, and, and, you know, barely profitable, uh, but reinvesting that into the company and, and it's, yeah, it's going really well. We're also one of the, I mean it's not that unique I guess, but we're remote first. We have a more than 50% of our employees work from home. I work from my basement in London. We have a few tiny like offices, one in Stockholm and one in New York, but, but we're really keen to hire the best people wherever they are. Um, and we invest a lot in travel. Uh, we invest a lot in, um, the, the right tools and getting the whole company together to really make that work. Actually a really fun place to work. What time? >>We're S we're still in the business here and I don't know how much time you've spent at the booth this year, but I don't, can you compare, I mean, we've been talking about the growth of this community and the growth of this conference. Can you compare say this year to last year, the, the people coming up, their maturity, the maturity of their production, et cetera. Are they, are they ready to buy? Are they still kicking? Are they still wondering what this Cooper Cooper need easy things is, you know, where, where is everybody this year and how does that, how has it changed? Yeah, and that's a good question where we're definitely seeing people with a lot more sophisticated questions. The, the, the conversations we're having at the booth are a lot longer than they've been in previous years. The um, you know, in particular people now know what key is. We only announced it a year ago and gonna have a lot of people asking us very detailed questions about what scale they can run it at. >>Um, otherwise, yeah, I think there is starting to be a bit more commercial intent at the conference, some few more buying decisions being made here. It's still predominantly a community oriented conference and I think the, the, I don't want that to go away. Like, that's one of the things that makes it attractive to me. And, and I bring my whole team here and that's one of the things that makes it attractive to them. But there is a little bit more, I'm a little more sales activity going on for sure. Any updates to the, to the tracing and monitoring observability stories of the projects here at CNCF this year since you as you're part of the promethium project? >> Yes. So we actually, we had the promethium conference in Munich two weeks ago and after each committee conference, the maintainers like to get together and kind of plan out the next six months of the project. >>So we started to talk about um, adding support for things like exemplars into Prometheus's. This is where each histogram bucket, you can associate an example trace that goes, that contributed towards that, that history and that latency. And then you can build nice user interfaces around that. So you can very quickly move from a latency graph to example traces that caused that. Um, so that's one of the things we're looking to do in Prometheus. And of course Jaeger graduated just a week ago. I think. Um, we're big users of Jaeger internally at for final amps. And actually on our booth right now, uh, we're showing a demo of how we're integrating, um, visualization of distributed tracing, integral foreigner. So you can, you know, using the same approach we do with metrics where we support multiple backends, we're going to support Yeager, we're going to support Zipkin, we're going to support as many open source tracing projects as we can with the Grafana UI experience and being able to seamlessly kind of switch between different data sources, metrics all the way to logs all the way to traces within one UI. >>And without ever having to copy and paste your query and make mistakes and kind of translate it in your head. Right. >> Tom, give us a little bit, look forward. Uh, you know, a lot of activities as the thing's going to, you know, graduating and pulling things together. So what should your users be looking for kind of over the next six to 12 months? >> That's a great question. Yeah, I think we do a yearly release cycle for foreigners. So the next one we're, we're aiming towards is for seven, like for me to find a seven's going to be all about tracing. So I really want to see the demo we're doing. I want to see that turned into like production ready code support for multiple different data sources, support for things like exemplars, which we're not showing yet. Um, I want to see all of that done in Grafana in the next year and we've also massively been flushing out the logging story. >>I'm with Loki, we've been adding support for uh, extracting metrics from the logs and I really think that's kind of where we're going to drive Loki forward in the future. And that really helps with systems that aren't really exposing metrics like legacy systems where the only kind of output you get from them is the logs. Um, beyond that. Yeah, I mean the welds are kind of oyster. I think I'm really keen to see the development of open telemetry and um, we've just starting to get involved to that project ourselves. Um, I'm really interested to kind of talk to people about what they need out of a tracing system. We, we see people asking for a hosted tracing systems. Um, but, but IMO is very much like pick the best open source ones. I don't think that's, that's emerged yet. I don't think people know which is the best one yet. >>So we're going to get involved in all of them. See which one's a C, which one's a community kind of coalesces around and maybe start offering a hosted version of that. >> You know, our final thing is, uh, you know, what advice do you have for users? Obviously, you know, you like the open source thing, but you know, they're hearing about observability everywhere there are, you know, the, the whole APM market is moving this direction. There's acquisitions as we talked about earlier. Um, there's so many moving pieces and a lot of different viewpoints out there. So just, you know, from a user, how do you know, how will things ma, what makes their lives easier and what advice would you give them? Yeah, no, definitely. I think a lot of vendors will tell you like to pick a, pick a vendor who's going to help you with this journey. >>Like I would say like, pick a vendor you trust who can help you make those decisions. Like find someone impartial who's gonna not make, not try and persuade you to buy their product. So we would, uh, you know, I would encourage you to try things out to dog food and to really like invest in experimentation. There's a lot going on in, uh, in, in the observability world and in the cloud native world. And you've got to, you've got to try it and see what fits. Like we embrace this, uh, composability of the, uh, of the observatory of, of the observability ecosystem. So like, try and find which, which choices work best for you. Like I, uh, whenever, whenever I talk to him, you still have to lick all the cupcakes in 2019. I think. I mean, I would, it depends on your level of kind of maturity, right? >>And sophistication. Like, I think if, uh, if, if this is really important to you, you should go down that approach. You should try them all. If this is not one of your core competencies that may be going with a vendor that helps you is a better approach. But, but I'm, I come from the open source world and, uh, you know, I like to see the, um, the whole ecosystem and all the different players and all the different, new and exciting ways to solve these problems. Um, so I'm, I'm always going to encourage people to have a play and try things out. All right, Tom, final word, Loki. Explain to us, uh, you know, when you're coming up with it, how you ended, uh, are you the God of mischief? Well, so the official line is the Loki is the, um, is the North mythology equivalent of Prometheus's, uh, in Greek mythology and, and lochia logging project is, is, is Prometheus's inspired logging. So we've tried to take the operational model from, from atheists, the query language from, from atheists and, and the kind of a cost efficiency from, from atheists and apply it to logs. Um, but I will admit to being a big fan of the Marvel movies. All right, Tom Willkie. Thank you so much for sharing the updates on, on the labs. Uh, we definitely look forward to hearing updates from you and thank you. All right, for, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Madmen back with more coverage here from San Diego. Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching the cube.

(upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to another CUBEConversation where we go in-depth into the topics that are most important to the technology industry with the thought leaders who are actually getting the work done. I'm Peter Burris, and we've got a great conversation today, and it all starts with the idea of how do you get smart people outside of your organization, in-service organizations to help you achieve your outcomes? It's a challenge because as we become more dependent upon services, we discover that service companies are often trying to sell us bills of goods or visions that aren't solving our exact problem. There's a new breed of service company that's really fascinated by your problem, and wants to sell it. Starts with engineering, starts with value add, and then leads to other types of potential relationships and activities. So what do those service companies look like? Well, to have that conversation, we've got Greg Tinker, who is the CTO and founder of Serene IT. Greg, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much Peter, glad to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about Serene IT. >> So Serene IT is a, well we call it a next generation bar. So what do I mean by that? We mean that we are an engineering-first firm, so our staff is big, we're across the U.S., we have multiple branches and we just went international into Canada, with Serene IT Canada. We have other international branches that we coming online next year. So with that being said though, the key to our growth, the key to our success is the fact that we're an engineering firm first. We have very few sales staff. Our sales staff are more of an account management style, more of a nurturer or a farmer, we would call it, versus a hunter that means someone going out, because the customers are coming to us with their problems because they need a smart engineering bench to help them. They're not looking for somebody else's to bring them askew, or resell them a product. That can be easily done by some of the large conglomerates that are already out there, not to mention, spend 30 seconds on Google, you can pretty much buy anything you want. >> Yeah, and you know Fred Brookes said a million years ago, when I was, even before I got into computer science, wrote "The Mythical Man Month", and made the observation that the solution to a hard problem typically, is not more people, >> Right. >> It's working smarter, and working more with the right people. So tell a little about how you're able to find the right people from the industry, and bring them together to turn them into the right team. >> It's a great question, Peter, so I've been very fortunate. I loved my career at Hewlett Packard. I left on good terms because I saw a problem in the industry that I wanted to go and tackle head-on. It's easy for people to sit back and talk about it, it's more difficult to actually go and try to solve the problem, and I'm trying to solve the problem. The problem is, there's a lot of orders out there that bring very low value today, they bring a lot of resale. And that's great for those clients that just know what they want. The vast majority of customers don't know what they want today because the technologies are so advanced, they need help to get from where they were, a legacy model, to a more modern software-defined ecosystem. >> And the business problems are so complex. >> Yes. >> It's that combination of complex business problems, 'cause your competitions and your customers are pushing you, and now advanced technologies that have to be marshaled to solve those problems. >> That's exactly right, so with that being said, I set out build an engineering firm and resale would be something later, but we sell through the engineering consulting firms to solve those business problems for our clients. And so our engineering bench is comprised of engineers from Cisco, from Dell, from HPE, from a lot of big conglomerates that everybody all knows. But when you work in this industry, in the labs of these big conglomerates, me coming from HPE, when you do that, you get a lot of friends across the pillars. >> Sure. >> You build networks. >> You build networks. And quite frankly, it's the Marvel lab guys that own today Q-Logic. We all know each other, and with that being said, some of these guys want to go out and try to solve these big problems with companies like myself, and so with that being said, that's how we're building Serene IT, is engineering-first, and we have a very large technical bench today. Just think about it, the company came online in 2017 with just two, so today, we are significantly bigger than that. We're approaching a 50-plus headcount, and we continue to expand with multiple branches, and our growth rate is almost double every six months. And it's something I'm having a great deal of fun doing. The key thing here though is solving business problems and helping customers. >> Well let's talk about that, because every IT organization faces the challenge that they've been so focused on the hardware assets for so long, or the application assets. Now they're trying to focus on the data assets, but they find themselves often in conflict with the business They're not doing a particularly good job of translating a business opportunity into a technology solution still. >> True. >> You've got these great engineers. How are you getting them to also speak business, so that you facilitate that domain expertise about the business so it can be turned into a technology-reliable solution? >> Like any good engineering firm, you have to have levels right? So we have a knock all the way to level four, and our level four engineers are our master technologists that are usually patent published or some varied nature thereof, with usually a multitude of master ASC certification structures to be able to state the fact that they are level four. We also have some college kids that are coming up that are wanting to learn with us, which is good. But I want to tell you on that same point though, is we only allow those elite, the level three, the level four guys, to be in front of our clients, because they've been in this industry a long time. Like myself, we can understand the business problems, as well as the technology problems, and help a client go from zero to hero. That's what we do well. >> So you're bringing in people who have been business people, but have strong engineering backgrounds >> Correct. >> In product domains, in service domains, in the industry, and you're bringing them together and saying, let's go back to being engineers, that can still talk business. >> That's exactly it, that's the key differentiator with us, is the fact that we're not talking just essays, a lot of ours, in our mindsets have essays they call engineers. We don't hire anyone that can't put fingers on a keyboard. If they can't make magic happen on a keyboard, they're of no value to us, they're of no value to our clients, which is what they need help with. So if we're not able to sit down and have a conversation and pull out a laptop and make some some magic happen with, name it, Ansible, Puppet, Shell, Saltstack, that's just in automation CodeLogics, C-code we've got all the cool stuff in that space. But if we can't sit down and write Python, Ruby on Rails and whatnot, and make something tangible to a client in very short order, we didn't do our job. >> So a lot of companies that I've experienced, a lot of customers I've talked to, have what I would call the "goldilocks" problem with their service providers. By that I mean, some of their service providers don't have the technical chops to just throw numbers at it, so they're too cold. Some of their service providers are too smart, or pushing too hard and they get suspicious of them. How do you be that just right, stay focused on the problem bringing the other team, the engineers or the IT folks that you're working with along with you, so you get that natural technology transfer so the business gets the capability that it can run and you can go do something else? >> So that's a good point, Peter. I mean, we're still working out some of those details, I'll tell you, to be honest with you on that stuff. >> Everybody is. >> Yeah. We're getting better at it, you know customers. If we get to aggressive, and tell the customers this is what's wrong with your problem, this is where you need to go, we call their baby ugly, it puts a lot of contention right on the onset, so it causes problems. So we have to be very cognitive of what they have, and where they want to go, and show them where we're going and why we're doing it, and not just focus on "You did it the wrong way". We don't want to focus on that. That's already done, that ship's already sailed, why bash it? I tell my engineers don't talk negative, there's no good going to come of it. Focus on what you have, and where you need to go with it, and how we're going to get there. Keep it a positive message, and you'll find it'd be more receptive, and it's working for our team. >> Well I'll tell you, one of the things I've heard about Serene IT is that you guys especially developed competencies in technologies that have worked in the past. >> You can say that. >> It seems as though one of the things you're able to do is you're able not to make something so new and so distinct that the client can't see how they can possibly operate it without you. You're taking a lot of open-source, a lot of established tried-and-true technologies and using your smarts to put them together in new and interesting ways so the customer says, "Oh that was smart, that was smart. "I can do that, oh yes, now I get it". Is that, am I mis-characterizing your guys? >> No, you're not, you're actually spot-on. We actually have one of the largest ZFS file systems on the planet right now with 142 million users hitting it and-- >> ZFS? >> Yeah, it's old school. >> With 142 million, okay. >> Yeah, it's old-school But if what's old is new again, we're just putting a new wrapper around it. It worked great in its day, but you put that old technology, the file system itself that's been around for a long time, one of the biggest file systems at 128 bit. You take that file system and you put that on today's Red Hat, Caldera, SUSE, name your favorite. You put that on a big machine, a Linux machine today, a large scale like an HPDL380 with NVME drives with a back-end data store, like a 3PAR or Primäre, or name whatever you want on the back end with a big fiber channel, you'd be surprised what we can do with that thing. So we're able to keep customers' costs down by showing them we can take a old-school technology and make it far bigger than you ever imagined, and give you more horsepower and at less cost, and customers are really receptive to that. Now is that perfect for every footprint? No, that was a unique situation. Not everybody's got 142 million users.(chuckles) >> Well, that's true. And so let me build on that, because the other thing that the CIOs I talk to and senior IT people and also business people, increasingly, is they want to make sure that the solution works now, but that it's not going to end-of-life options for them. >> Yeah. >> How do you do this using tried-and-true technologies combined into new and interesting ways, in a way that still nonetheless gives customers future growth options or future application options? >> I'm not a fan of vendor-locking, I'm not a fan of Franken-monsters. Our team of engineers, we have a mandate that they do not build anything like that, I won't approve it. Because I don't want to have a customer locked in to Serene IT. That was never the intent. We want them to choose us, we want them to come to our team and get our value, so we can show them how to grow their business, and do it in a nice, sustainable way, so we can show their staff how to support it. That takes us into our managed services component. Most of the big things we design and do, we're what we call an adaptive managed services, an AMS model. What do I mean by that statement? We're not a WITO. What's a WITO, you ask? It's a "Walk In, Take Over". That's the big boys, that's the DXEs of the world, that's the Assentras, that's what they do. And they do that well. We're not here to compete with that. But what we're here to do is say, to a company or business, whoever they might be, you probably don't need us to take over everything in your IT shop, and really, we're not going to be the best at that, nor are they in some cases, the other vendors. I'll tell you, you know your business the best. We know infrastructure the best, and we can show you where you can build your skillsets up and get better at it. We can automate a lot of it and show you how to manage the automation, and there'll be certain key points that maybe you guys don't want to own for various reasons, and we will manage just that key component, and we do that today with a lot of our big clients. >> Greg Tinker, CTO and founder of Serene IT, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again, I want to thank you for participating in this CUBEConversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)

you live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering you I pat forward America's 2019 brought to you by uipath welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas Nevada I'm your host Rebecca night co-hosting alongside Dave Volante we are joined by Gavin Jackson he is the senior vice president and managing director amia at uipath thanks so much for coming you are brand spanking new to brands thanking you AWS for four years yeah joined UI paths in September yeah I want to start this conversation by having you talk a little bit about what what appealed to you about UI path and what more do you want to make the leap after four years at AWS yeah so I had the privilege to be west of really having a really close proximity to enterprise customers and getting the opportunity to listen to what they really wanted when they were talking about their digital transformation journeys and as it turns out the sort of cloud first in the automation first eras if you will are operating models at to two sides of the same coin if you think about what the that the cloud proposition has been over the last number of years it's really been about sort of reducing or eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting so that builders can build and then that turned into an operating model principle and it became sort of cloud first it's the same thing for the automation world you know we are reducing and eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting of Tata a product of business processes and tasks and everything else whether they're complex tasks or simple tasks removing that so that builders can build and business people can innovate and given them the freedom to do what they need to do as business owners think about AWS we obviously follow them very closely yeah anybody but it strikes you didn't thank you such are filters yeah what's the analog so what I think we again I would say that we are we are providing tools so the builders could build but at the same time our our products that works across the entire business stack whether that is sort of automation first as an operating principle across all businesses or whether it's across a business persona whether it's a CFO or somebody in accounts or a salesperson or whatever might be we're building tools that take the mundane tasks away from those users so that they have the freedom to go and serve their customers or or innovate within finance or do the do the job that they really love doing and that's really important for the business it turns out there's not a lot of value and a lot of the work that people do every day so if we can remove some of that then innovation will have an exponential curve of progress and that's what we're focused on today yes yeah again there are similarities there so if I understand the you're shifting one date asked allowing people freeing them up to do so that they can have a strategic impact in their business yes yeah yeah I think it is so if you look at even the technology paradigms and how cloud and AWS evolved and then also the layer on how uipath is evolving in the same way so you have computing and compute power started really with the mainframe and went to distributed servers and then to virtual machines and then from virtual machines it went to hosted virtual machines in the cloud and then from then it went to containers and now we're in this world of server lists we're in the cloud right so effectively the logic lives in server lists and the infrastructure sort of disappears and that provides massive scale in the automation world you started off with big monolithic processes you then had sort of network processes with software and data in the middle of all of that networked RPA really came in as an early sort of tool to help automate a lot of that a lot of processes and now in the realms of sort of automation as a function where in the end like the end game really is where automation is the application and the the applications themselves the data sources the processes really disappear so that the best done analogy I can come up with a metaphor acting um up with is I'm a Marvel fan I'm a geeky kind of Marvel fan of my favorite character is his Iron Man or Tony Stark and more specifically the Jarvis AI so what's happening all the time with with Tony Stark in the Jarvis a is he's interacting with his AI user interface all the time and what's happening in the background is that Java she's working with probably you know a hundred different applications and a hundred different data sources and everything else and rather than having you know a human go and do what the integration work that robots are doing that for him and it's just coming back as a as an outcome yeah I'm gonna keep pushing on this yeah similarities and differences because where it seems to break down is where our PA is focusing on the citizen developer the the end-user I'm afraid of AWS I won't go near it I see that console I call it my techies hey you know AWS is you know you got to be you know pretty technical to actually leverage it at the same time I'm thinking well maybe not maybe my builders are building things that I can touch but help us square that circle yeah so I think you the world is trending towards as much automation as possible so if it can be automated or if you can reduce the the burden to get to innovation I think you know technology is moving that way even in coding I think the transit we're seeing whether it's AWS or anyone else is low to no code and so we we occupy a world within the RPA space or the intelligent automation space where we're providing tools for people that don't need a requirement or or a skill set to code and they can still manufacture a few world their own automations and particularly with a release that we're just announcing today which is Studio X it really kind of reduces the friction from a business user where's zero understanding of how to code to build their own automations whether it's kind of recording a process or just dragging and dropping different components into a process even like even I could do that and that's saying something I can tell you yes exactly yeah this idea of democratizing the the automation the building that you said yeah very much so what will this mean I mean what what does what does that bode for the future of how work gets done because that is at the core of what you're doing is typically understanding how and where work gets done or the bottlenecks where the challenges and how can our PA fix this so I think ultimately like a lot of technologies it's really about the the exponential curve of productivity and whether you're looking at a national level a global level a company level a human level every level productivity has declined really over the last number of years and technology hasn't done a great job to improve that and you can say that some technologies have done a good job again I'd use a TBS is a good job in terms of the proliferation or the how prolific you can get more code out and more more progress there but overall productivity has declined so our sort of view of the world is if you can democratize automation if you can use or add a digital workforce to your to your to your teams then you'll have an exponential curve of productivity which a human level is important company level is important a national level is important and probably at global level is important you know you guys might be right place right time as well yeah because I remember you know all the spending in the 80s said receive growth everywhere except the Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow yeah [Laughter] [Music] you guys are hitting it right at the right time yeah you be able to take credit for a lot of it but yeah your thoughts on that in terms of productivity depending yeah I think it is pent up I think that is where where we're at right now and it's ready to be unleashed and I think that these technologies are are the technologies that will unleash it I think really what's happened over the last number of decades probably is that the six trillion dollar IT industry they exist today has largely kind of increased productivity or performance of other technologies it hasn't really increased output so whether it's sort of you know the core networking when Cisco started core networking there was a big increase I would imagine in connectivity and outputs then the technologies that were laid on top of that maybe less so and it was just really kind of putting bad band-aids on problems so it was really technology solving technology problems rather than technology solving human output problems and so I think that this is now the most tangible technology category that really is turning technology into value and productivity for technology really unlocking a lot of value one of the things that your former boss Jeff Bezos said was bet on dreamy businesses that have unlimited upside these these dreamy businesses customers love them they grow to very large sizes they have strong returns on capital and they can endure for decades I wonder if you could put you iPad in that context of a dreamy business what does he know right I mean nobody right I mean so and this is one of the reasons I was attracted by the way to DUI path because I think I think that the robots themselves if you can just kind of look at the subcategory of the robot I think it's on a similar curve to how Gordon Moore was talking about the Intel microprocessor in 1965 and the exponential curve of progress I think we were on that similar curve so when I sort of project five years from now I just think that the amount the robots will be able to do the cognitive kind of capabilities it will be able to do are just phenomenal so and customers customers give us feedback all the time about to two things they love and they value what we do the value is important because it's very empirical for the first time they can actually deploy a technology and see almost an immediate return on their technology whether it's a point technology solving one process or a group of processes they can see an immediate empirical return the other thing that I like to measure I quite like is that they value it so they think they love it they love and value it so they love it meaning it actually induces an emotion so when you when you watch the robots in action and they watch something that has been holding your team back or there's been stifling productivity or whatever it is people get giddy about it it's quite fascinating to see comment about Gordon Moore and Ty that's a digital transformation when I think of digital transformation I think of data yeah what's the difference in a business in a digital business it's how they use data yeah they put data at the core and four years we march to the cadence of Moore's law and that's changed its that that's not what the innovation the engine is today it's it's machine intelligence it's data and it's cloud for scale where do you guys fit I mean obviously AI is a piece of that but but maybe you could add some color to where our PA fits in that equation so I think that's an important point because there's a lot of miscommunication I think about really what it means when you talk about digital transformation and what it means to be digitally transformed and really to see transformed you're really talking about a category of customers which are large more institutional enterprises and governments because they have something to transform what they're transforming into is more of a digital native sort of set of attributes more insurgent mindsets and these companies are to your point they're very data hungry they harvest as much data as they can from from value from data they're very customer centric they focus on the customer experience they use other people's resources oh the cloud being one great example of that and the missing point from what you said is they automate everything they've to meet it so part of the digital transformation journey is if it can be automated it will be automated and anything that's new will be born automated so let me ask a follow-up on that is there a cultural difference in amia versus what you're seeing in North America in terms of the receptivity to automation I mean there are certain parts of of Europe which are you know more protective of jobs do you see a cultural difference or are they kind of I mean we do see even some resistance here but when you talk to customers they're like no it's it's wonderful I love it what are you seeing in Europe so I don't I don't see much of a cultural difference there and I see don't I don't see yet I haven't seen any feedback yes Peres I'm very new still but I haven't seen anybody talk about really that this technology is a technology to take jobs out I think most people see this technology as a way of getting better performance out of humans you know pivoting them towards more so I would say like in some markets in my in my in my prior life in in many prior lives I would say that there's some countries like France for example that would have been a little bit more stayed within their approach to new technologies and adoption not so with regards to automation they see this as a real and game productivity increase thank you I think that's true for people who have tasted it yeah but I do think there's still some reticence in the ranks until they actually experience it that's why we'll talk to some customers about it they'll have bought a Thon's and just a yeah to educate people and what's possible to let them try to build their own robots and then people then the light bulbs go off that it's taking away the aggravations the frustrations the mundi the drudgery and then you said people get giddy about those things you don't have to do that yeah but then the question is also so so what creative things are you doing now so how are you spending your time what are you doing differently that makes your job more interesting more compelling yeah and and and I think that's the real question - so what is the okay yes receiving some money and people aren't having to do those mundane tasks but then what are what is the value add that the employees are now bringing to the table yeah so in actually sit and it takes made the right point as well in terms of the mechanism for doing that is the the part of the battle here is to spark the imagination just like anything really just let you like it back in the Amazon wild it's all of our spark in the imagination if you can if you can imagine it you can build it it's the same thing really with within our world now is figuring out with customers what think what tasks do they do that they hate doing either a user level or a downstream level what are the things that they really want to do that they need our help to harvest and so we do the same sort the same sort of things that we would have done with AWS where we did lots of hackathons and you bought lots of technology partners in with us and we would sort of building all of this we do exactly the same thing with the RP a space it's exactly the same this is really important because creativity is going to become an increasingly important because if productivity goes up it means you can do the same amount of work with less people so it is going to impact jobs and people are gonna have to be comfortable to get out of their comfort zone and become creative and find ways to apply these technologies to really advance but you know drive value to their organizations and actually I look at this as well as a long term technology whereas a long term technology is something that's important for my children I've three and they're still very young so twelve ten and six but eventually they will go into the workplace with these skills embedded they will just know the how you get work done is you have your robot do a whole load of tasks for you here and your your job is to build and to be creative and to harvest data and to manipulate data and and serve customers and focus on the customer experience that's really what it's all about the real brain works I've been a pleasure having you on the show at uipath thank you so much appreciate it i'm rebecca night for j4 day Volante please stay tuned for more from the cubes live coverage of uipath coming up in just a little bit