>>Mhm. Yes. Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021 virtual. I'm john for your host of the cube. We're messing my fair principal technologist at AWS amazon Web services messman. Thank you for coming on the cube, appreciate it. Um >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>Great to see you love this amazon integration with doctor want to get into that in a second. Um Been great to see the amazon cloud native integration working well. E. C. S very popular. Every interview I've done at reinvent uh every year it gets better and better more adoption every year. Um Tell us what's going on with amazon E. C. S because you have Pcs anywhere and now that's being available. >>Yeah that's fine, that's correct, join and uh yeah so customers has been appreciating the value and the simplicity of VCS for many years now. I mean we we launched GCS back in 2014 and we have seen great adoption of the product and customers has always been appreciating. Uh the fact that it was easy to operate and easy to use. Uh This is a journey with the CS anywhere that started a few years ago actually. And we started this journey uh listening to customers that had particular requirements. Um I'd like to talk about, you know, the the law of the land and the law um uh of the physic where customers wanted to go all in into uh into the cloud, but they did have this exception that they need to uh deal with with the application that could not move to the cloud. So as I said, this journey started three years ago when we launched outpost. Um and outpost is our managed infrastructure that customers can deploy in their own data centers. And we supported Pcs on day one on outpost. Um having that said, there are lots of customers that came to us and said we love outputs but there are certain applications and certain requirements, uh such as compliance or the fact simply that we have like assets that we need to reuse in our data center uh that we want to use and before we move into into the cloud. So they were asking us, we love the simplicity of Vcs but we have to use gears that we have in our data center. That is when we started thinking about Pcs anywhere. So basically the idea of VCS anywhere is that you can use e c s E C as part of that, you know, and love um uh appreciated the simplicity of using Pcs but using your customer managed infrastructure as the data plane, basically what you could do is you can define your application within the Ec. S country plane and deploy those applications on customer own um infrastructure. What that means from a very practical perspective is that you can deploy this application on your managed infrastructure ranging from uh raspberry pis this is the demo that we show the invent when we pronounce um e c s anywhere all the way up to bare metal server, we don't really care about the infrastructure underneath. As long as it supported, the OS is supported. Um we're fine with that. >>Okay, so let's take this to the next level and actually the big theme at dr Connors developer experience, you know, that's kind of want to talk about that and obviously developer productivity and innovation have to go hand in hand. You don't want to stunt the innovation equation, which is cloud, native and scale. Right. So how does the developer experience improve with amazon ECs and anywhere now that I'm on, on premises or in the cloud? Can you take me through? What's the improvements around pcs and the developer? >>Yeah I would argue that the the what you see as anywhere solved is more for operational aspect and the requirements that more that are more akin to the operation team that that they need to meet. Uh We're working very hard to um to improve the developing experience on top of the CS beyond what we're doing with the CS anywhere. So um I'd like to step back a little bit and maybe tell a little bit of a story of why we're working on those things. So um the customer as I said before, continue to appreciate the simplicity and the easier views of E. C. S. However what we learn um over the years is that as we added more features to E. C. S, we ended up uh leveraging more easy. Um AWS services um example uh would be a load balancer integration or secret manager or Fc. Or um other things like service discovery that uses underneath other AWS products like um clubman for around 53. And what happened is that the end user experience, the developer experience became a little bit more complicated because now customers opportunity easy of use of these fully managed services. However they were responsible for time and watering all uh together in the application definition. So what we're working on to simplify this experience is we're working on tools that kind of abstract these um this verbal city that you get with pcs. Um uh An example is a confirmation template that a developer we need to use uh to deploy an application leveraging all of these features. Could then could end up being uh many hundreds of transformation lines um in the in the in the definition of the service. So we're working on new tools and new capabilities to make this experience better. Uh Some of them are C d k uh the copilot cli, dws, copilot cli those are all instruments and technologies and tools that we're building to abstract that um uh verbosity that I was alluding to and this is where actually also the doctor composed integration with the CS falls in. >>Yeah, I'm just gonna ask you that the doctor piece because actually it's dr khan all the developers love containers, they love what they do. Um This is a native, you know, mindset of shifting left with security. How is the relationship with the Docker container ecosystem going with you guys? Can you take him in to explain for the folks here watching this event and participating in the community, explain the relationship with Docker container specifically. >>Yeah, absolutely. Uh so basically we started working with dR many, many years ago, um uh Pcs was based on on DR technology when we launch it. Uh and it's still using uh DR technology and last year we started to collaborate with dR more closely um when DR releases the doctor composed specification um as an open source projects. So basically doctor is trying to use the doctor composed specification to create uh infrastructure product gnostic, uh way to deploy Docker application um uh using those specification in multiple infrastructure as part of these journey, we work with dr to support pcs as a back end um for um for the specification, basically what this means from a very practical perspective, is that you can take a doctor composed an existing doctor composed file. Um and doctor says that there are 650,000 doctor composed files spread across the top and all um uh lose control uh system um over the world. And basically you can take those doctor composed file and uh composed up and deploy transparently um into E. C. S Target on AWS. So basically if we go back to what I was alluding to before, the fact that the developer would need to author many 100 line of confirmation template to be able to take their application and deploy it into the cloud. What they need to do now is um offering a new file, a um a file uh with a very clear and easy to use dr composed syntax composed up and deploy automatically on AWS. Um and using Pcs Fargate um and many other AWS services in the back end. >>And what's the expectation in your mind as you guys look at the container service to anywhere model the on premise and without post, what does he what's the vision? Because that's again, another question mark for me, it's like, okay, I get it totally makes sense. Um, but containers are showing the mainstream enterprises, not the hyper skills. You guys always been kind of the forward thinkers, but you know, main street enterprise, I call it. They're picking up adoption of containers in a massive way. They're looking at cloud native specifically as the place for modern application development period. That's happening. What's the story? Say it again? Because I want to make sure I get this right e C s anywhere if I want to get on premises hybrid, What's it mean for me? >>Uh, this goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. So there are there are there when we have been discussing here are mostly to or token of things. Right. So the fact that we enable these big enterprises to meet their requirements and meet their um their um checkboxes sometimes to be able to deploy outside of AWS when there is a need to do that. This could be for edge use cases or for um using years that exist in the data center. So this is where e c s anywhere is basically trying, this is what uh pcs anywhere is trying to address. There is another orthogonal discussion which is developer experience, uh and that development experience is being addressed by these additional tools. Um what I like to say is that uh the confirmation is becoming a little bit like assembler in a sense, right? It's becoming very low level, super powerful, but very low level and we want to abstract and bring the experience to the next level and make it simple for developers to leverage the simplicity of some of these tools including Docker compose um and and and being able to deploy into the cloud um and getting all the benefits of the cloud scalability, electricity and security. >>I love the assembler analogy because you think about it. A lot of the innovation has been kind of like low level foundational and if you start to see all the open source activity and the customers, the tooling does matter. And I think that's where the ease of use comes in. So the simplicity totally makes sense. Um can you give an example of some simplicity piece? Because I think, you know, you guys, you know, look at looking at ec. S as the cornerstone for simplicity. I get that. Can you give an example to walk us through a day in the life of of an example >>uh in an example of simplicity? Yeah, supposedly in action. Yeah. Well, one of the examples that I usually do and there is this uh, notion of being served less and I think that there is a little bit of a, of an obsession around surveillance and trying to talk about surveillance for so many things. When I talk about the C. S, I like to use another moniker that is version less. So to me, simplicity also means that I do not have to um update my service. Right? So the way E C. S works is that engineering in the service team keeps producing and keeps delivering new features for PCS overnight for customers to wake up in the morning and consuming those features without having to deal with upgrades and updates. I think that this is a very key, um, very key example of simplicity when it comes to e C s that is very hard to find um in other, um, solutions whether there are on prime or in the cloud. >>That's a great example in one of the big complaints I hear just anecdotally around the industry is, you know, the speed of the minds of business, want the apps to move faster and the iteration with some craft obviously with security and making sure things buttoned up, but things get pulled back. It's almost slowed down because the speed of the innovation is happening faster than the compliance of some sort of old governance model or code reviews. I want to approve everything. So there's a balance between making sure what's approved, whether security or some pipeline procedures and what not. >>So that I could have. I cannot agree more with you. Yeah, no, it's absolutely true because I think that we see these very interesting um, uh, economy, I would say between startups moving super fast and enterprises try to move fast but forced to move at their own speed. So when we when we deliver services based on, for example, open source software uh, that customers need to um, look after in terms of upgrade to latest release. What we usually see is start up asking us can you move faster? There is a new version of that software, can you enable us to deploy that version? And then on the other hand of the spectrum, there are these big enterprises trying to move faster but not so much that are asking us can use lower. Can you slow down a little bit? Right, because I cannot keep that pigs. So it's a very it's a very interesting um, um, a very interesting time to be alive. >>You know, one of the, one of the things that pop up into these conversations when you talk, when I talk to VP of engineering of companies and then enterprises that the operational efficiency, you got developer productivity and you've got innovation right, you've got the three kind of things going on there knobs and they all have to turn up. People want more efficiency of the operations, they want more developed productivity and more innovation. What's interesting is you start seeing, okay, it's not that easy. There's also a team formation and I know Andy Jassy kinda referred to this in his keynote at Reinvent last year around thinking differently around your organizational but you know, that could be applied to technologists too. So I'd love to get your thoughts while you're here. I know you blog about this and you tweet about this but this is kind of like okay if these things are all going to be knobs, we turned up innovation efficiency, operationally and develop productivity. What's the makeup of the team? Because some are saying, you have an SRE embedded, you've got the platform engineering, you've got version lists, you got survival is all these things are going on all goodness. But does that mean that the teams have to change? What's your thoughts on that you want to get your perspective? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that there was a joke going around that um as soon as you see a job like VP of devoPS, I mean that is not going to work, right? Because these things are needs to be like embedded into each team, right? There shouldn't be a DEVOPS team or anything, it would be just a way of working. And I totally agree with you that these knobs needs to go insane, right? And you cannot just push too hard on innovation which are not having um other folks um to uh to be able to, you know, keep that pace um with you. And we're trying to health customers with multiple uh tools and services to try to um have not only developers and making developer experience uh better but also helping people that are building these underneath platforms. Like for example, prod on AWS protein is a good example of this, where we're focusing on helping these um teams that are trying to build platforms because they are not looking themselves as being a giant or very fast. But they're they're they're measured on being secure, being compliant and being, you know, within a guardrail uh that an enterprise um regulated enterprise needs to have. So we need to have all of these people um both organizationally as well as with providing tools and technologies that have them in their specific areas um to succeed. >>Yeah. And what's interesting about all this is that you know I think we're also having conversations and and again you're starting to see things more clearly here at dr khan we saw some things that coop con which the joke there was not joke but the observation was it's less about kubernetes which is now becoming boring, lee reliable to more about cloud native applications under the covers with program ability. So as all this is going on there truly is a flip of the script. You can actually re engineer and re factor everything, not just re platform your applications in I. T. At once. Right now there's a window whether it's security or whatever. Now that the containers and and the doctor ecosystem and the container ecosystem and the The kubernetes, you've got KS and you got six far gay and all the stuff of goodness. Companies can actually do this right now. They can actually change everything. This is a unique time. This window might close are certainly changed if you're not on it now, it's the same argument of the folks who got caught in the pandemic and weren't in the cloud got flat footed. So you're seeing that example of if you weren't in the cloud up during the pandemic before the pandemic, you were probably losing during the pandemic, the ones that one where the already guys are in the cloud. Now the same thing is true with cloud native. You're not getting into it now, you're probably gonna be on the wrong side of history. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, No, I I I agree totally. I I like to think about this. I usually uh talk about this if I can stay back step back a little bit and I think that in this industry and I have gray areas and I have seen lots of things, I think that there has been too big Democratisation event in 90 that happened and occurred in the last 30 years. So the first one was from, you know from when um the PC technology has been introduced, distributed computing from the mainframe area and that was the first Democratisation step. Right? So everyone had access to um uh computers so they could do things if you if you fast forward to these days. Um uh what happened is that on top of that computer, whatever that became a server or whatever, there is a state a very complex stack of technologies uh that allow you to deployment and develop and deploy your application. Right. But that stack of technology and the complexity of that stack of technology is daunting in some way. Right? So it is in a bit access and democratic access to technology. So to me this is what cloud enabled, Right? So the next step of democratisation was the introduction of services that allow you to bypass that stack, which we call undifferentiated heavy lifting because you know, um you don't get paid for managing, I don't know any M. R. Server or whatever, you get paid for extracting values through application logic from that big stack. So I totally agree with you that we're in a unique position to enable everyone um with what we're building uh to innovate a lot faster and in a more secure way. >>Yeah. And what comes out, I totally agree. And I think that's a great historical view and I think let's bring this down to the present today and then bring this as the as the bridge to the future. If you're a developer you could. And by the way, no matter whether you're programming infrastructure or just writing software or even just calling a PS and rolling your own, composing your services, it's programmable and it's just all accessible. So I think that that's going to change the again back to the three knobs, developer productivity or just people productivity, operational efficiency, which is scale and then innovation, which is the business logic where I think machine learning starts to come in, right? So if you can get the container thing going, you start tapping into that control plane. It's not so much just the data control plane. It's like a software control plane. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. The fact that you can, I mean as I said, I have great hair. So I've seen a lot of things and back in the days, I mean the, I mean the whole notion of being able to call an api and get 10 servers for example or today, 10 containers. It would be like, you know, almost a joke, right? So we spent a lot of time racking and um, and doing so much manual stuff that was so ever prone because we usually talk about velocity and agility, but we, we rarely talk about, you know, the difficulties and the problems that doing things manually introduced in the process, the way that you can get wrong. >>You know, you know, it reminds me of this industry and I was like finally get off my lawn in the old days. I walk to school with no shoes on in the snow. We had to build our own colonel and our own graphics libraries and then now they have all these tools. It's like, you're just an old, you know, coder, but joking aside, you know that experience, you're bringing up appointments for the younger generation who have never loaded a Linux operating system before or had done anything like that level. It's not so much old versus young, it's more of a systems thinking, he said distributed computing. If you look at all the action, it's essentially distributed computing with new software paradigm and it's a system architecture. It's not so much software engineering, software developer, you know, this that it's just basically all engineering at this point, all software. >>It is, it is very much indeed. It's uh, it's whole software, there is no other um, there is no other way to call it. It's um, I mean we go back to talk about, you know, infrastructure as code and everything is now uh corridor software in in in a way. It's, yeah. >>This is great to have you on. Congratulations. A CS anywhere being available. It's great stuff. Um, and great to see you and, and great to have this conversation. Um, amazon web services obviously, uh, the world has has gone super cloud. Uh, now you have distributed computing with edge iot exploding beautifully, which means a lot of new opportunities. So thanks for coming on. >>Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure. Okay, cube >>Coverage of Dr Khan 2021 virtual. This is the Cube. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, it's CUBE's live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia, for AnsibleFest 2019, and I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman, my co-host. Our next guest is Massimo Ferrari, product manager with Ansible Security. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks very much. Thank you for having me. >> So, security, obviously, big part of the conversation in automation. >> Obviously. >> Making things more efficient, making security, driving a lot of automation, obviously, job performance, among other things. Red Hat's done a lot of automation in other areas outside of just configuration, network automation, now security looking kind of like the same thing, but security's certainly different and more critical. >> Massimo: It is, it's more time-sensitive-- >> Talk us through the security automation angle, what's going on? >> Well, basically, there are several things going on, right? I believe the main thing is that IT organizations are changing, well, honestly, IT organizations have been changing for the last, probably five years, 10 years, and as a consequence, the infrastructures to be protected are changing as well. And there are a couple of challenges that are kind of common to other areas. As you said, automation is all over the place, so clearly, there are some challenges that are common to IT operations, or network operations, something that is peculiar for the security space. What we are seeing, basically, is that if you think about, there's a major problem of scale, right? If you think about the adoption of technologies like containers, or private and public cloud, if you are a large organization, you are introducing those technologies side by side with, for example, your legacy applications on bare metal or your fantastic digital machines, but what they do actually is introducing a problem of size, a problem of scale, and a problem of complexity connected to that, and a problem of distribution which is just unmanageable without automation. And the other problem is just complexity, that I mentioned before, is, I wasn't specifically referring to the complexity of the infrastructure per se. If we think about adopting best practices or practices like microservices or adopting functions of service, we can easily imagine how an old-school three-tiers application can be re-engineered to become something like with made of 10 hundred components, and those are microcomponents, very focused on single things, but from a security perspective, those are ingress points. And what automation did, what automation proved to be able to do, is to manage complexity for other areas. So you can be successful in IT operations, in network, and clearly, it can be successful in security, but what is unique to security is that professionals are facing a problem of speed, which means different things, but to give you an example, what we are seeing is that more and more cyberattacks are using automation and artificial intelligence, and the result of that is that the velocity and impact of those attacks is so big that you can't cope with human operators, so we are in a classic situation of fighting fire with fire. >> So, this is a great example. We had the service guys on earlier talking about the Automation Platform, and one comment was, "You don't want to boil the ocean over. "Focus on some things you can break down "and show some wins." Security professionals have that same problem, they want to throw automation and AI at the problem, "It's going to solve everything." >> Of course. >> And so, it's certainly very valuable, managing configurations, open ports, S3 buckets, there's a variety of things that are entry points for hackers and adversaries to come in, take down networks. What's the best practice? How would you see customers applying automation? What's the playbook, if you will? What's the formula for a customer to look at security and say, "Okay, how do I direct Ansible "at my security problems, or opportunities, "to manage that?" >> Well, when you discuss security automation with customers, it really depends on the kind of audience that you have. As you know, security organizations tend to be fairly structured, right? And depending on the person you are talking to, they may have a slightly different meaning for security automation. It's a broader practice in general. What we are trying to do with Ansible Security Automation is we are targeting a very specific problem. There is a well-known issue in the security world, which is the lack of integration. What we know is that if you are any large organization, you buy tens, hundred sometime, of security solutions, and those are great, they protect whatever they have to protect, but there is little to no integration between them, and the result of that is that security teams have an incredible amount of manual work to do just to correlate data coming from different dashboards, or to perform an investigation across different perimeters, or at some point, they have to remediate something that is going on and they have to apply this remediation across groups of devices that are sparse. And what we are trying to do with Ansible Security Automation is to propose Ansible as an integrational layer, as a glue, between all those different technologies. On one hand it's a matter of become more efficient, streamline the process. On the other hand is an idea of having, truly, a way to plan, use the automation as your action plan, because security is obiously is time-critical, and so, automation becomes, in this context, become even more important. >> Massimo, with the launch of the Ansible Automation Platform, we see a real enhancement of how the ecosystem's participating here. Where does security fit into the collections that are coming from the partner ecosystem of Ansible? >> Well, in one way, we have been building over the shoulders of our friends in Network Automation. They did an amazing job over four years. They did two major things. The first one is that they expanded for the first time the footprint of Ansible outside the traditional IT operations space. That was amazing. And we did kind of the same thing, and we started working with some vendors that were already working with us for slightly different use cases, and we helped them to identify the right use cases for security, and expand even more what they were capable of doing through Ansible. And what we are doing now is basically working with customers, we have lighthouse customers, we call them, that guide us to understand which is the next step that we are supposed to perform, and we are gathering together a security community around Ansible. Because surprisingly, we all know that the security community has always been there, always been super vocal, but open-sourcing security's a fairly new thing, right? And so we have this ability, the important thing is that we all know that Red Hat is not a security vendor, right? We don't want to be a security vendor. That's not the ambition that we have. We are automation experts, in the case of Ansible, and we are open-source experts across the board. So what we are doing with them, we are helping them to get there, to cooperate in the open-source world. And for security, proven to be very interesting the adoption of collection, because in some way allows them to deliver the content that they want to deliver in a very, I would say, focused way, and since security relies on, again, is a matter of time to market or time to solve the problem, through collection, they have more independence, they are capable to deliver whatever they want to deliver, when they want to deliver, according to their staff needs. >> You know, one of the things you mentioned, glue layer, integration layer, and open source, your expertise on automation. It's interesting, and I want to get your reaction to this, 'cause we did a survey of CISOs in our community prior to the Amazon Web Services re:Inforce conference this past summer. It was their first, inaugural, cloud security, so, yeah, cloud security was a big part of it. But with on-premise and hybrid and multi-cloud here, being discussed, this notion of what cloud and role of enterprise is interesting to the CISOs, chief information security officer. And the trend on the survey was is that CISOs are re-hiring internal development teams to build stacks onsite in their own organizations, investing in their stack, and they're picking a cloud, and then a secondary cloud. So as that development team picks up, that seems to be a trend, one, do you agree with that? And if people want to have their own developers in-house, for security purposes, how does Ansible fit into that glue layer? Because if it's configuring all the gear and all the pipes and plumbing, it makes sense to kind of think about that. So this might be a trend that's helping you? >> So, the trend, there is a general trend in the corporate enterprise world hat more technical people are coming into traditionally, in areas that are traditionally under the purview of other people or domains, right? So, more technical people coming into business lines. We are seeing more developers coming into security, that's certainly a trend. It is a matter of managing scale and complexity. You need to have technical people there. So, in one hand, that help us to create a more efficient and more pervasive community around security. You have developers there, which means that you need to serve that corner case that you are not targeted at the moment, you have talented people that can cooperate with us and build those kinds of things. >> John: And use the open-source software. (laughs) >> Exactly, but that's the entire purpose, right? You want to drive people to contribute. They get the value back, we get the value back, they get the value back, that's the entire purpose. >> So you do see the trend of more developers being hired by enterprises in-house? >> It certainly is, and it's been going on for about, probably three to five years I've seen that, in other areas, mainly in the business area, because they want to gain that agility and want to be self-contained, in some way. Business want to be self-contained, and security, in some sense, is going the same direction. That fits clearly one angle of Ansible, so you have more contribution in the community. On the other hand, what we are trying to make sure is that we support the traditional security teams. Traditional security teams are not super developmental yet, so they want to consume the content. >> Well, DevOps is always, as infrastructure as code implies that the infrastructure has been coded, and if you look at all of the security breaches that have been big, a lot of them have been basic stuff. An exposed S3 bucket, is that Amazon's fault, or is that the operator's fault? Or patches that aren't deployed. You guys are winning with Ansible in these area. This seems to be a nice spot for you guys to come in. I mean, can you elaborate on those points, and is that true, you guys winning in those areas? 'Cause, I mean, I could see automation just solving a lot of those problems. >> Well, I will say something that's not super popular, but as a security community, we've always been horrible at the basics, right? Like any other technical people, we're chasing the latest and greatest, the fun stuff, the basics, we always been bad at that. Automation is a fairly new thing in security, And what we all know that automation does is providing you consistency and reduce human error. Most of this stuff is because somebody forgot to configure something, someone forgot to rotate a secret or something like that. >> They didn't bring their playbook to the game. (laughs) >> So, I'm not trying to guide the priorities here, but the point is that the same benefits that we get from automation-- >> There's just no excuse. If you have automation, you can basically-- >> Exactly. >> Load that patch, or configure that port properly, because a playbook exists. This only helps. >> Absolutely, but those are the basic values of automation. You're communicating a slightly different way to security, because they use different language, and for them, automation is still a new thing. But what you heard during the keynote, so, the entire purpose of the platform is to help different areas in the IT organization to cooperate with each other. As we know, security is not a problem of IT security anymore. It's a broader problem and needs to have a common tool to be solved. >> In the demo in the keynote this morning, I thought that they did a good job showing how the various stakeholders in the organization can all collaborate and work together. I want you to explain how security fits into that discussion, and also, they hadn't added the hardening piece in there, but I would expect for many companies that, I want to flag when I'm creating this image, that it's going to say, "Hey, "have you put the right security policies on top of it," not something that they just, "Oh, it's one of the steps that I do." How do we make sure that everybody follows those corporate edicts that we have? >> Well, it's mainly a matter, I don't want to play the usual card of cultural change, but the fact is that in security, especially, we are looking at two major shifts, and one of these shifts is that pretty much everyone, I would say private organization and government, kind of acknowledge that security, cybersecurity, is not an IT problem anymore, it's a business problem, right? Being a business problem, that means that the stakeholders involved are in all different parts of the organization, and that requires a different level of collaboration. Collaboration starts with training, and enablement of people to understand where the problems are, and understand that they are part of the same process. We used to have security as an highly specialized function of IT, right now, what happens is that, if you think about a data breach, a data breach could be caused by an IT problem, but most of the impact is on the business, right? So right now, a lot of security processes are shifting to give responsibility to the business owners, and if the government is involved, I live in London, and in Europe, for another month, I guess, we have this fantastic thing that you know, it's called GDPR. GDPR forces you to have what is called a data breach notification process, which means that now, if you're investigating a cyberthreat, you want to have legal there to make sure that everything is fine, and if this data breach could become a media thing, you want to have PR there, because you want to have a plan to mitigate whatever kind of impact you may have on your corporate image. You may also want to have there, I don't know, customer care, just to handle the calls from the customer worried for the data. So the point is that this is becoming a process that need to involve people. People needs to be aware that they are part of this process, and what we can do, as an automation provider, we are trying to enable, through the platform, the IT organizations to cooperate with each other. Having workflows, having the ability to contribute to the same process allows you to be responsible for your piece. >> Massimo, the new security track here at the show this year, for those that didn't get to come, or maybe that didn't get to see all of it, some of the highlights you want to share with the audience? >> So, this year, the general message this year is that it's the first time that we have this fantastic security track, and this is not a security conference, it is never going to be a security conference. So what we are trying to do is to enable security teams to talk with the automation experts to introduce automation in that space. So the general message that we have this year is, well, the desire is to create a bridge between the Ansible practitioners, the Ansible heroes, whatever you want to call them, to understand what the problem is, what the problem could be, and have a sort of a common language they can use to communicate. So the message that we have this year is, go back home, and sit down at the same table with your security folks, and make sure that they are aware that there's a new possibility, and you can help them, that you now have a common tool together. We had a couple of very interesting tracks. We have partners, a lot of partners are contributing to security space, we mentioned that before, and most of them have tracks here, and they are showing what they built with us, what are the possibilities of those tools. We have a couple of customer stories that are extremely interesting. I just came out from a session presenting one of our customer stories. And in general, we are trying to show also how you can integrate security in all the broader processes, like the mythical DevSecOps process. >> What's been the feedback from customers specifically around the talk, and the security conversations here at AnsibleFest? >> It wasn't unexpected, but it's going particularly well. We have very good feedbacks. And we have, we kind of-- >> John: What are they saying? >> Well, they are saying some, okay, the best quote that I can give you, the customer told me, "Oh, this year, I learned something new. "I learned that we can do something "in this space that we never thought about." Which is a good feedback to have at a conference. And a lot of people are attending these sessions. We have quite a lot of security professionals, that was kind of unexpected, so all the sessions are pretty full, but we also are seeing people that are just, they're just curious, they're coming in, and they are staying, they are paying attention. So there is the real opportunity, they see the same opportunity that we see, and hopefully, they will bring the message home. >> Massimo, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Certainly, security is a main driver for automation, one of the key four bullet points that we outlined in our opening. Thanks for coming on, and sharing your insights. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> It's theCUBE coverage here at AnsibleFest 2019, where Red Hat's announced their Ansible Automation Platform. I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, here at The Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Lawrence Fong, general manager, information technology at Cathay Pacific; Peter Yen, managing director, Hong Kong Accenture; and Massimo Morin, head world wide business development travel at AWS. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So we're going to be talking about applying blockchain to a travel rewards program at Cathay Pacific, but I want to start with you, Lawrence. Let's describe the business problem that you were trying to solve. The Asia Miles program is already, sort of a world-class program, very competitive. But it still had it's kinks. So, what were you trying to do to make it better? >> Okay, first of all, Asia Miles is a lifestyle, you know, frequent flyer loyalty program, and almost every year they're running over 460 marketing campaign a year. So, you can imagine how much work they have to do. So, from the customer point of view, they have a pin point of whatever activities of redemption or for award, all these kind of thing. It's going to take a long time for them to get their miles. So, from the customer point of view, this is not really ideal. And on the other hand, at the back office, because we're running so many marketing campaign. So, there's a lot of back office operation and lot of, where people work and all this kind of thing. So, it's also not, I think, a very good operation efficiency. So, from the customer point of view, from the back office point of view, so that's the key pinpoint we want to be solved. >> Right. So, it was tedious to operate for both the customer and for the business itself. So, why was blockchain the technology? That could solve it? >> Well, we study one of the key features, or component of blockchain, it's called 'smart contract'. And we could see the smart contract would be able to help bringing our customer and Asia Miles, and also our merchant together. So, by using blockchain, the miles, the redemption, all this will happen almost in a second. >> So, how did this work, Lawrence? I mean, in terms of getting, working together with Cathay Pacific, how did you work together to create this new program? >> Okay. Effectively, it's a very co-create process. It started with a conversation with Lawrence. We had the idea, so Lawrence was courageous enough to let us try. We did a very short, quick pilot. We proved the concept. Then we went into a very rapid development cycle, as well. And then, within weeks, we get the product done, and then we launch and go to the market. >> So, Peter, is that generally the way it goes, in terms of this co-creative process? I mean, we're hearing so much, that Accenture and AWS have these solutions that they can bring to clients, and then, is it sort of happening in the background or are you on the ground together, sort of dreaming up ways to make this better and make the technology work? >> Well, we used to call this the new way of doing things, but I think now this is the way of doing things, right? Because it is the perfect combination. The client has perfect knowledge about the business, we understand the technology, and we have enablement partners like Amazon. So, we just work together and make it happen. >> So, from Amazon, so we hear blockchain you automatically think Bitcoin. You just do. But this is actually a very different kind of use case for blockchain, and it's one that really is so pertinent. Can you talk a little, Massimo, about other uses cases that you're seeing? >> So, indeed that you are right. Blockchain has been very nebulous, and always associated to Bitcoins, but there are actually some uses cases that are much more relevant, especially in the travel industry where you complex transaction, multi-party, where you are actually going to do transparency and data integrity. For example, we had a proof of concept to to read IATA about a one ID project that allows a travel agency to register themselves with this authority and get the key, and then seamlessly doing transaction with travel providers by identifying themselves through blockchain. That allows them to actually be recognized, and you have a seamless process with the new NDC, new distribution capabilities coming along. That is going to be extremely important. This is one type. Another type is when you wanted the immutability of the data. For example, when you have planes an you want to see you getting leases, on and off lease, and you want to see all the maintenance that occur there, and you want that that doesn't change. You want to use a trusted system that is transparent, and that is not changeable. And that provide a lot of value. And the third use case that I personally like, is automatic contract. So, when, for example, you have corporate buyers, that buy travel products from a travel provider, like Cathay Pacific, and you wanted that, you buy the ticket. But when is the airline going to get the money? That reconciliation is like, with the frequent flyer miles, you want to be done as soon as possible. Other cases is, is the passengers flying around? If it doesn't fly, well, what happened to the taxes? Taxes should be actually returning back to the customer. So, with automatic contracts, you would be able actually to reconcile that behind the scene. These are use cases that are very valuable in travel industry. >> So, does this immediate reconciliation and this trust, I mean , trust is such an important, thick concept right now. What are you hearing? From both the clients' side and the provider's side. I mean, where are we? >> Yeah, that's true. I think trust is one of the key elements of, you know, doing reconciliation. So, what we are doing now is still within our legal system. So, we trust each other. But, looking forward, I think one of the key areas that blockchain will help a lot, is the entire supply chain. But, when we talk about the supply chain, there's so many stakeholder. So, building a trust, of course, of domestic holder will be a challenge. I think that's something, you know, of course the industry has to put more thought onto it. >> What are we seeing so far? So, this was implemented in April of this year. What has been the return on investments so far? >> It's phenomenal. For those marketing campaign, we're using blockchain. These new capabilities, we had a triple digit growth, in terms of our sales, and also, because we also use kind of a game to gamify the whole thing. So, we create a lot of traction in there, you know? A lot of excitement. So, the number of people and the number of customer engaged in those marketing campaigns also have more than, you know, more than double, you know, growth. >> Peter, what's most exciting to you about this process? >> The most exciting thing is that, as you heard from Lawrence, is indeed generating performance and results. And the process of co-creating a successful solution is a very rewarding experience. >> So, I mean, and then AWS is, in terms of the co-creative process, where does AWS fit into this? >> So, we are their neighbor, and I'm glad that you're able, Cathay Pacific and Accenture, as using AWS for this. So, we have standard templates, blockchain templates that actually take away all the heavy lifting of putting place to platform to found the blockchain. So, actually, the customer and the partner can focus on the business need that they have attend. And this is all open-source, so you can see how it works. And it's so transparent, that we are very glad to enable our customer to do transformative things like this. >> So, the word is out that blockchain is not just for Bitcoin anymore. So, where do we go from here? We're talking about the travel industry, but are the learnings that Cathay Pacific has had and Accenture, in terms of how applicable are they to other industries? And how are you sharing what you've learned in a collaborate, co-creative process? >> Well, all of that, in Asia Miles, now we are taking what we learned from the blockchain, we are going to apply to the cargo industry, and also apply to the airport operation. Particular, the baggage, the consideration baggage between different people, of course they're all the blockchain. >> Great. >> Actually, many clients are now talking about this Cathay Pacific case, and they have very creative ideas, how to borrow the concept and apply to their own business. So, we should see more and more application of this solution. >> And we are seeing acceleration of adoption of cloud technology throughout the travel industry, with airline, and technology providers out there. And I'm very glad that there are taught leadership, for example, from Cathay Pacific, to take this hypothetical use cases and taking the lead on showing how it is done and sharing with the industry. We are looking for those travel leaders that will help the industry to move forward. >> That's true. >> Because it's very challenging industry with very low margin, and any improvement in customer service is going to go a long way. And we are glad to be part of that. >> And is that what it is? I mean, as you said, it sort of seen, even the incremental improvement and how that can be, just, so transformational for a company's bottom line. >> Yep. >> Yes. >> Yep. Absolutely. >> Well, Massimo, Peter, Massimo, Peter, Lawrence, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. It's been a really fun conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (thrilling music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering Inforum DC 2018 brought to you by Inforum. >> Well we are back here at Inforum 2018 in Washington DC John Walls with Dave Vellante. We are in the nation's capital and joined right now by Massimo Capoccia who is SVP of Info OS and Rick Rider, product director at for common at Infor. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us, >> Thank you >> Good to see you both. >> Thank you for having us >> Thank you >> Let's start first off good job by the way >> Welcome to keynote.. thanks stage this morning we had some time to shine out there. Your thoughts about the show in general so far? We've been a couple of days in now, how is it going for you? >> Yeah, very very well the customers have received the Infor OS and the technology innovation and what we do with the AI very very well. You know lots of people in the hub, lots of sessions, so lots of interest on the technology innovation for Infor OS and for Infor as well. >> Sure, Rick for you? >> Yeah, its been great, it's been interesting. What we are finding out is getting a lot of this out in front of customers and partners is bringing up some interesting opportunities for us moving forward. So it is not everyday we get the opportunity to get in front of these many people within our network, so it's been great. >> So we'll be hearing from folks Let's talk about AI, especially for those who maybe don't know, haven't embraced it yet. What are the Hesitation, reservations, I mean what are you hearing from them as far as what's going to trigger them to make a decision? >> Yeah, to be honest I think they have been hesitant in the past just because it hasn't really been clear. We have talked about AI in the technology community, it's been hard to define. Some people might in fact define incorrectly, because we are making assumptions about what technology can and can't do. I think what we are uncovering. I feel we've got a pretty unique approach to what we are doing here with Infor OS and common connected to it. We are working directly with customers to identify use cases on how we can apply AI. Rather than just starting at the top and saying, "hey we should be doing all these great things and let's see how we can make it work for our customers." It's kind of we are flipping the script and starting backwards and saying, "hey what are the issues? What are the opportunities the customers have? How can we build the technology using AI to make it meaningful?" So we have business impact they want. And by doing that, I think it's a lot more understandable, it's a lot more relatable, it's a lot more trust able from our customers. >> We from in theCUBE here, watch and observe the ascendancy of the hype and so called big data. And which is sort of moderated now. But in data is plentiful, insights aren't. and so we feel we have come to the conclusion that the innovation recipe, if you will, for the next decade or so, is data, applying machine intelligence, that data and having a cloud to be able to scale it. Having cloud economics to be able to track innovation. You guys seem to have all three >> Yeah >> Of those pieces But AI without the data is just.. I don't know what it is? >> Right? Excited. >> Data without the ability to extract (laughs)...you know insights... What good is it? >> Right >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Then you got to have cloud to scale it. Your thoughts on from a platform perspective with that means? >> Yeah, Absolutely. So I was seeing the interview that you were doing with Charles, says we build this platform from the beginning. And one of the big element is that we have you know, made it possible to synchronize you know real time all this data that the applications will generates, into a single place called the data lake. So when you have the data and data lake then you can do many many things and not only analytics and reporting, which is the classical use case, but now it allows you to do AI. And the difference is we don't have one domain of the data. So some of the vendors have only CRM data or ACM data or financial data. With Infor we have all different domains of data. So we can go from ACM from financials, to asset management, to IoT readings for IoT devices, to ERP and CRM also. So when you combine when you can cross and combine the relationship with this data, then your AI is much more smart and intelligent. When you have only the AI focused on a domain, is less intelligent. So that's actually the power that we do. And our Coleman will take advantage of that, you know that you know rich data lake. >> Okay and we talked a lot to someone earlier about the stack. and that the bottom layer, is the OS >> Yes >> So everybody is familiar with what the operating system does in computer science. How is your OS similar and different? What's the function that it does if we can double-click on that? >> Yeah, so we.. It's in for operating service and we call it a service. Because it's not actually in the database and operating system level, right? So we believe... We are more in the application technology. We are the layer that takes you know the bare technology and makes it usable for a business, for an enterprise. And we build applications on top of it. So what we believe at Infor, when you have an architecture with this composite of a suite of applications. Or even the new Microsoft architecture that developers built. You still have to deliver a uniform user experience, a uniform business process, uniform security and data management and even AI. So if you look at services like Facebook or Netflix, they have maybe the entire Microsoft architecture thousands of that, but the experience is one.alright? Thus what we want to bring it to the enterprise. Infor OS big.. that unify the experience both from the end user and business process, to the enterprises. And we do it for all the cloud suites. Infor OS is all the cloud suites not just one but all of them the same services. >> So, I love the Netflix example, because if you think about digital... digital transformation, digital business. My experience with Netflix is just with Netflix I don't have a... There's no marketing department, sales department service department. I do have a problem, I go to Netflix on my app(laughs) I interact with... >> Absolutely >> So that's... I considered that what's called a product. So Rick, how does this capability get translated into product? >> Yeah. You know one thing that you brought up a lot earlier is, with all this interconnectivity and how we have to package things. So we've got all these different services that OS offer. So we've got the data lake, we've got the API gateway. We've got the integration platform, and... All those pieces is what bring this together to where, we can actually deliver something to our customers. In my case, it's an AI model or it's RPA, because of all these things are packaged together. So they don't actually see what's happening, because it's already packaged for them. >> Okay, so... what I was saying the Charles, you probably you might have seen it, is when we first discovered Infor was like, "What do you guys do?" It wasn't clear exactly what you guys were doing. But he said, and I believe him, was always our vision to have a platform. Now that... the... it's not opaque anymore, the platform is pretty clear. Now you've added the Birst Analytics, you've added Coleman AI on top of that. So you know Andy Jassy AWS always talks about the flywheel effect. So I suspect that you're entering this flywheel phase. What is that phase? What does it kind of mean for you guys, for customers, in terms of innovation? >> Yeah, is a very good question. Actually I worked for years with... We started with this platform, this journey with Charles and we start really with... okay, what's the first first issue. You know, we want to solve the integration promise. We want to give an integration platform. Then we build that. Then we start to say, okay, we want to unify the experience. We build a unified portal with a single sign on. Then we say, okay, we want to unify the data, we build a data lake. So we continue to build out the platform. We are now at the level we have a platform and its unique platform because you can say it fits in one Magic Quadrant. Because yeah, it does the iPass in the past. So with all these magic quadrants. But it doesn't fit in one, it's in all of them, right? So and in... The analyst looks at that and say, Okay, we have a platform doesn't fit in one, if it's in all of them, right? >> The Magic Quadrant is now becoming outdated, because... >> Exactly. >> Because its as you said... I don't need 15 stove pipes... >> Exactly. >> With the stove pipe thinking. >> Exactly. So.. >> With all due respect to my friends at Gartner (laughs) >> But the Fly wheel is... Yeah, the platform is going to become more and more important, relevant. The customers that... you know are in the cloud, are not in the cloud, they will use the platform to get to the cloud. It's going to be a new enabler for those customers are still on premises, to go to the cloud. We the Infor OS is enabler for hybrid process. So some some application can be in the on premises or in the cloud. With the OS they can take the journey and get to the cloud and their own place. >> So architecturally, you don't care. >> We don't care what the application side, >> Okay. But you've certainly done a lot of work to optimize AWS, you know, we're AWS customer, we know it's, it's not trivial, you have to, you know work it. It's simple, developers love it, but to really take advantage of it, integrate it with your processes will take some work. But architectural, you don't care. But it's not. That's not a that's not an offering statement, is it? I mean, today, can I run that multi cloud, run their software anywhere? >> Well >> Doing that? >> Well, today, we have a mix off, we use open source library, but we do utilize AWS, the data lake is built on S3. On AI, we use Laks, or Sagemaker for the training on the models. So we do a lot of AWS, Because it gives you our computing power and any out of the box solution for certain certain pieces. What we do we build interfaces to our application, so that our customers doesn't need to take care of all the plumbing, it's all interconnected and done. So that's, that's one of the power of Infor OS. It brings that application technology layer, between the business application and you know, the basic, you know, technologies >> And the customer doesn't want to think about the plumbing these days, right? >> Right. >> To most customers, infrastructure is irrelevant, you know, again, apologies to my hardware, friends, but they don't care about hardware, right? I mean, >> Yeah. >> It's interesting, Charles said in the keynote yesterday, when we were an onPrem software company, we didn't manage servers for our customers. Customers didn't care really about the server, and any more than they care about the plumbing today, right? >> Right. Yeah. And if I want to relate that to the AI space, all the training, all the science, all the highly computational things that we have to do, customers don't really want to know what that means or how to use that. So what we're actually doing is in conjunction with some of the AI services we're working with, with AWS is we've built a modeling platform to where they're operating in one location. They've got no concept of where this is hosted, what's going on behind the scenes, and then we connect it, we expose an API, and they can do any sort of RPI that they want to. >> So...I mean you are talking about when you talk about your customers, and they don't care about, you know, what's behind the curtain, they just wanted it to handle, maybe something up front, but yet, you have to understand what they can do. Right? You have to understand their potential. So how do you do that, when you're dealing with different companies, different sizes, different priorities, different challenges, they're different technology stages. How do you all address them individually and help them get to that better place? >> Yeah, I think, you know, it's never a one size fits, all right. So we try to give them what we've called citizen developer tool sets in the past. And I've even started to try to say, citizen data science tool set. So how can we make it more consumable by all types of users? So yes, we can provide templates, we can create these things that might work somewhat out of the box. But each one of these customers their data is, is just slightly different than need to make tweaks. So we really want to be able to, you know, provide all that flexibility. And it gets back to we start with our use cases. And then we build from there. So we get all that feedback, and make sure we're making we're hitting those key points. >> So I want to pick up on something you said about citizens, citizen data scientists. I've used that term before in front of data scientists some of them don't like it, right. That denigrates what they do. And it's true, a data scientist is a math whiz, maybe a stats, was there a data hacker they can code, Okay. And that's not every business person, right? Clearly. However, when you think about things like our RPA, I mean, you really want to enable business users. You don't want to repeat the same problem that we had for years with things like decision support, where you had two people in the company that knew how to build a Cube. And you had to have line up with an ask, please can you build my cube, I have a deadline while everybody else does too. Just there wasn't effective. So things like our RPA and low code, citizen data scientists spread that technology throughout. Now, part of that is having a platform that is I vision a studio, whereas a user, I can actually create some kind of process and code that in software, you know, code it. It is something that's repetitive that I don't have to do every day. I do it every day, I do it the same way. Somebody gave the example might have been Soma, I know somebody else, expense report approval? >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> I've never not approved and expense report. I don't crack them open. Look, I don't know, maybe every now and then somebody does. Somebody does, by the way. (laughs) >> (shouts) So don't get any idea here. >> I always press the approval button, right? Why can't a robot do that and look for anomalies and say, Oh, a $300 scotch? That's... >> Yeah Yeah. Absolutely... So is that a capability that you're working on, that you have today. That what I'm envisioning a studio and then I imagine this got some orchestrator... >> Yeah. So yeah, so if you look at throughout all Infor OS, is completely Model Driven. So either you, you build a new integration, or a workflow, or a, an AI model, or a even, we have a platform as a service Mongols, where you build with low code applications. So you can take it to end to end where you you train models in AI, us suppose as an API. You can build your own app on top of it with low code and then, you know, give it to your business users. Very, very simple and in the cloud. You know, in the browser and you can do every customer can do it. So that's very important for us. We work from the beginning with this model to give you know, the tools to everybody, not only an elite of people that can do and then you know, there is the rest of the people that cannot do it. Every new computer science engineer that comes out gets you know, AI out of the box. When I did computer science, Yeah, I got some AI, you know, but it was not really like today. So every everybody can program AI now. And we want to give this tools to every developer and not just went to an elite. >> Yeah. And the workflow prediction model that you've been talking about. If you want to come join us down there, we've actually got a model that we're working on for that exact use case. >> Oh, cool. >> Yeah. So yeah. Giving the ability for those business users, as you say to... it's almost like lowering the barrier to entry to a lot of this AI technology. It's not devaluing or anything, data science, because we've got those advanced tool sets, to where if you want to do something in our studio, bring it over into the Coleman AI platform. You certainly can, we're not devaluing that. But you know, what, if we want to start and take little bites off and you want to give this in the hands of the business users, we've got a great solution for that. >> So this is all the cool stuff. This is stuff that business users care about? I mean, do they... My question is, do people care about what's under the covers? I mean, are they asking you or what's the database? And how does this work? How does that work? Or they just really want to focus on that functionality that they're getting in the business impact? >> Yeah, with the advent of the cloud, you know, people, just those questions like we sh... you know, operating system database, which technology you use? it just went away, right? So people just want to know, the functionality and the value. You know, maybe there are companies that I have more, you know, an IT architects and they want to know, more, you know, that's what they want to go down into the details, then you go into the architecture of the OS, of the application, we integrate with AWS. So we do that as well. We, you know, we talk to customers about it. But most of them, they just want to know, okay, "how can I use this platform to make my business better," right. So it runs the cloud suit, but I now I can connect to other cloud services, I can connect to the other application, I can build my own app and bring it in. So they want that business value immediately. And that's why we built this Infor OS, so that they can run the cloud suite and add business value. >> You guys at last year's analyst meeting, gave a little glimpse of some of the architecture and it was very useful, actually, analysts love that kind of stuff. I didn't get the invite this year, maybe something the some smarmy questions I ask. (laughs) But I found that actually quite impressive in terms of the tech behind it and the RND that you guys are doing there. But ultimately, it comes down to what products you can build and what business impact that has, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think where we're heading with this, we really don't have many limitations for what we're seeing right now. We're built in a way to where we can apply to every single industry, every single cloud suite. We have the unique, you know, possibility to where we can go through all these different industries and create these sort of value. So we've got a very unique future ahead of us. >> So. Yeah, So how much better or can you give us an idea of a road map a little bit about what you think Coleman can go? >> Yeah so, we're starting to play in the image recognition space a little bit. Maybe looking at how we can utilize things like drone technology and do inspection reports, those sort of things. It's maybe and at least my opinion, I think others kind of express the same, it's maybe the least developed area and we want to make sure we have something that works for customers the way that they're going to see value immediately. But also we're starting look at edge AI. So how can.... not necessarily just an IoT, but how can we how can we build something in the cloud? How can we create a model, then deploy that for our onprem customers who aren't quite ready, so that they can get that AI experience as well, and that predictive insight. >> It's dvallante@Siliconangle.com Is that right? Your email for the invitation >> David.valante... >> (laughs) to make sure... so what will exchange information later. >> We'll invite you (laughs) >> I'm sure this is not your territory. (laughs) >> Its on me. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Its been a pleasure. Thank you for the time we appreciate that. Back with more here from Washington DC right after this. You're watching theCUBE.

(bright music) >> Well, hi everybody. John Walls here on theCUBE, continuing our coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 with Tom Anderson, the Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat. And Tom, you've been the answer, man, for theCUBE here over the last a week, 10 days or so. Third cube appearance, I hope we haven't worn you out. >> No, you haven't John, I love it, I love doing it. So that's great to have you have you at the event. >> Thank you for letting us be a part of that. It's been a lot of fun. Let's let's go and look at the event now. As far as big picture here, major takeaways that you think that have been talked about, that you think you'd like people, customers to go home with. If you will, though, a lot of this has been virtual obviously, but when I say go home, I made that figuratively, but what, what do you want people to remember and then apply to their businesses? >> Right. So being a product guy, I want to talk about products usually, right? So the big kind of product announcements from this year's event have been the rollout, and really, the next generation of the Ansible automation platform, which is really a rearchitecture turning it into a cloud native application an automation application itself that scales to our customer needs. So a lot of big announcements around that. And so what does that do for customers? That's really bringing them the automation platform that they can scale from the data center, to the cloud, to the Edge and everywhere in between, across a single platform with a single easy to use automation language. And then secondly, on that, as automation starts to shift left, we always talk about technology shifting left towards the developer, as automation is also shifting left towards the developer and other personas in an organization we're really happy about the developer tools and the tooling that we're providing to the customers with the new automation platform too, that brings development of content automation content. So the creation, the testing, the deployment and the management of that content across an enterprise far easier than it's ever been. So it's really kind of, it's a little bit about the democratization of automation. We see that shifting left, if you will. And I know I've said that already, but we see that shifting left of automation into other parts of the organization, beyond the domain experts, the network engineers or the storage experts, et cetera, pushing that automation out into the hands of other personas in the organization has been a big trend that we've seen and a lot of product announcements around that. So really excited about the product announcements in particular, but also the involvement and the engagement of our ecosystem, our upstream community. So important to our product and our success, our ecosystem partners, and obviously last but not least our customers and our users. >> So you hit a lot of big topics there. So let's talk about the Edge. You know, that seems to be a, you know, a fairly significant trend at this point, right? 'Cause trying to get the automation out there where the data besides, and that's where the apps are. Right? So where the data is, that's where things are happening out there on the Edge. So maybe just dive into that a little bit and about how you're trying to facilitate that need. >> Yeah. So a couple of trends around the Edge, obviously it's the architecture itself with lower capacity or lower capability devices and compute infrastructure at the Edge. And whether that's at the far edge with very low capacity devices, or even at near edge scenarios where you don't have, you know, data center, IT people out there to support those environments. So being able to get at those low capability, low capacity environments remotely Ansible is a really good fit for that because of our agentless architecture, the agentless architecture of Ansible itself allows you to drive automation out into the devices and into the environments where there isn't a high capacity infrastructure. And the other thing that the other theme that we've seen is one of the commonalities that no matter where the compute is taking place and the users are, there always has to be network. So we see a lot of network automation use cases out at the Edge and Ansible is, you know, the defacto network automation solution in the market. So we see a lot of our customers driving Ansible use cases out into their Edge devices. >> You know, you talk about development too, and just kind of this changing relationship between Ansible and DevOps and how that has certainly been maturing and seems to be really taking off right now. >> Yeah. So for, you know, what we've seen a lot of, as you know, is becoming frictionless, right? How do we take the friction out of the system that frees developers up to be more productive for organizations to be more agile, to roll out applications faster? How do we do that? We need to get access to the infrastructure and the resources that developers need. We need to get that access into their hands when they need it. And in our frictionless sort of way, right? So, you know, all of the old school, traditional ways of developers having to get infrastructure by opening a help desk ticket to get servers built for them and waiting for IT ops to build the servers and to deploy them and to send them back a message, all that is gone now. These, you know, subsystem owners, whether that's compute or cloud or network or storage, their ability to use Ansible to expose their resources for consumption by other personas, developers in this case, makes developers happy and more efficient because they can just use those automation playbooks, those Ansible playbooks to deploy the infrastructure that they need to develop, test and deploy their applications on. And the actual subsystem owners themselves can be assured that the usage of those environments is compliant with their standards because they've built and shared the automation with those developers to be able to consume when they want. So we're making both sides happy, agile, efficient developers and happy infrastructure owners, because they know that the governance and compliance around that system usage is on point with what they need and what they want. >> Yeah. It's a big win-win and a very good point. I always like it when we kind of get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about what a customer is really doing. Yeah. And because if we could talk about hypotheticals and trends and developing and maturity rates and all those kinds of things, but in terms of actual customers, you know, what people really are doing, what do you think have been a few of the plums that you'd like to make sure people were paying attention to? >> Yeah. I think from this year's event, I was really taken by the JP Morgan Chase presentation. And it really kind of fits into my idea of shifting left in the democratization of automation. They talked about, I think the number was around 7,000 people, associates inside that organization that are across 22 countries. So kind of global consumption of this. Building automation playbooks and sharing those across the organization. I mean, so gone are the days of, you know, very small teams of people doing, just automating the things that they do and it's grown so big. And, so pervasive now, I think JP Morgan Chase really kind of brings that out, tease that out, that kind of cultural impacts that's had on their organization, the efficiencies that have been able to draw off from that their ability to bring the developers and their operations teams together to be working as one. I think their story is really fantastic. And I think this is the second year. I think this is the second year that JP Morgan Chase has been presenting at Fest and this years session was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed that. So I would encourage, I would encourage anybody to go back and look at the recording of that session and there's game six groups, total other end of the spectrum, right? Financial services, JP Morgan Chase, global company to Gamesis, right? These people who are rolling out new games and need to be able to manage capacity really well. When a new game hits, right? Think about a new game hits and the type of demand and consumption there is for that game. And then the underlying infrastructure to support it. And Gamesis did a really great presentation around being able to scale out automation to scale up and down automation, to be able to spin up clusters and deploy infrastructure, to run their games on an as-needed basis. So kind of that business agility and how automation is driving that, or business agility is driving the need for automation in these organizations. So that that's just a couple of examples, but there was a good ones from another financial services that talked about the cultural impacts of automation, their idea of extreme automation. In fact, one of the sessions I interviewed Joe Mills, a gentlemen from this card services, financial services company, and he talked about extreme automation there and how they're using automation guilds in communities of practice in their organization to get over the cultural hurdles of adopting automation and sharing automation across an organization. >> Hm. So a wide array obviously of customer uses and all very effective, I guess, and, you know, and telling their own story. Somewhat related to that, and you, as you put it out there too, if you want to go back and look, these are really great case studies to take a look at. For those who, again, who maybe couldn't attend, or haven't had a chance to look at any of the sessions yet, what are some of the kinds of things that were discussed in terms of sessions to give somebody a flavor of what was discussed and maybe to tease them a little bit for next year, right? And just in case that you weren't able to participate and can't right now, there's always next year. So maybe if you could give us a little bit of flavor of that, too. >> Yeah. So we kind of break down the sessions a little bit into the more kind of technical sessions and then the sort of less technical sessions, let's put it that way. And on the technical session front, certainly a couple of sessions were really about getting started. Those are always popular with people new to Ansible. So there's the session that aired on the 29th, which has been recorded and you can rewatch it. That's getting started Q and A with the technical Ansible experts. That's a really, really great session 'cause you see that the types of questions that are being asked. So you know, you're not alone. If you're new to Ansible, the types of questions are probably the questions that you have as well. And then the, obviously the value of the tech Ansible experts who are answering this question. So that was a great session. And then for a lot of folks who may want to get involved in the community, the upstream community, there's a great session that was also on the 29th. And it was recorded for rewatching, around getting started with participation in the Ansible community and a live Q and A there. So the Ansible community, for those who don't know is a large, robust, vibrant, upstream community of users, of software companies, of all manners of people that are contributing and contributing upstream to the code and making Ansible a better solution for them and for everybody. So that's a great session. And then last but not least, almost always the most popular session is the roadmap sessions and Massimo Ferrari, gentleman on my team did a great session on the Ansible roadmap. So I do a search on roadmap in the session catalog, and you can see the recording of that. So that's always a big deal. >> Yeah, roadmaps were great, right? Because especially for newcomers, they want to know how I'm down here at 0.0. And, I've got a destination in mind, I want to go way out there. So how do I get there? So, to that point for somebody who is beginning their journey, and maybe they have, you know, they're automated with the ability to manually intervene, right? And now you've got to take the hands off the wheel and you're going to allow for full automation. So how, what's the message you want to get across to those people who maybe are going to lose that security blanket they've been hanging on to, you know, for a long time and you take the wheels off and go. >> No John, that's a great question. And that's usually a big apprehension of kind of full automation, which is, you know, that kind of turning over the reins, if you will, right to somebody else. If I'm the person who's responsible for this storage system, if I'm the person responsible for this network elements, these routers, these firewalls, whatever it might be, I'm really kind of freaked out about giving controls or access to those things, from a configuration standpoint, to people outside of my organization, who don't have the same level of expertise that I do, but here's the deal that in a well implemented well architected Ansible automation platform environment, you can control the type of automation that people do. Who does that against what managing that automation as code. So checking in, checking out, version control, deployment access. So there's a lot of controls that can be put in place. So it isn't just a free-for-all automated. Everybody automating everything. Organizations can roll out automation and have access to different kinds of automation, can control and manage what their organizations can use and see and do with Ansible. So there's lots of controls built-in for organizations to put in place and to make those subsystem owners give them confidence that how people are accessing their subsystems using Ansible automation can be controlled in a way that makes them comfortable and assures compliance and governance around those resources. >> Well, Tom, we appreciate the time. Once again, I know you've been a regular here on theCUBE over the course of the event. We'll give you a little bit of time off and let you get back to your day job, but we do appreciate that and I wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much. And we'll see you again next year. >> You bet. Thank you, Tom Anderson, joining us Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat, talking about AnsibleFest, 2021. I'm John Walls, and you're watching theCUBE. (lively instrumental music)

>>Hey, everyone. I want to welcome you back. This is our intermission. And let me tell you what a morning we've had for those of you that don't know. I'm, Hayma Ganapati, I'm in product marketing at Docker. And I would just want to quote, actually someone who was in one of the chat rooms and this, I think encapsulates exactly how I feel today, because this is my first Docker con and the quote was from. And he said, I feel like a kid in an ice cream store where I don't know which flavor to choose. I want to go to all of the sessions and I got to tell you that's how I felt. And, you know, um, I want to just do some specific call-ups. Um, first of all, Dana way to keep it real in your interview. I love the cube interview. If you miss that, um, it was really great. >>She talks a lot about, uh, CI CD pipeline and you know, what to do with GoodHub. It was great. Um, I also want to say that I was, uh, slipping back and forth between the community rooms and way to go Brazil obrigado until all of the people who participate in the Brazil room, we had about 250 plus people in that room. And the, the chat window was just going crazy and in the French community room, Vive left hall. So if you've a uncle funny, uh, we had about 150 plus people in that room. So I just want to say that, you know, we've been seeing a lot of participation and I just want to thank everyone for attending and for participating on people have been so kind in the chat rooms, we just want to remind you to stay kind, you know, presenters put a lot of effort into their presentations, so just, you know, offer some positive and supportive critique to them. >>And the other thing I want to mention is all of the countries that we're seeing, all of the participation. So I'm just going to call out a few. We have people from the Netherlands, from Canada, from South Africa, Akron, Ohio, Belgium, Austria, yeah, Ecuador, New Zealand. And he cut up Westchester. Like, I mean, it just goes list goes on and on and on. And I think this really speaks to the power of Docker community. And it's a real testimony to how people from all over the world are in love with Docker technology and are excited to be here. And so I just wanted to thank everyone again and want to remind you that we want to leverage the power of community. And we have a fundraising campaign going on to help, uh, people who are affected by COVID. And you know, some of our big communities, especially in India and Brazil are, have been really affected by COVID. >>So we're asking you to contribute and we'd really like you to participate. Um, we have, uh, the, the link you can see here, Docker donates, you can tweet about it and would love to see the numbers go up for those donations, because, you know, I've personally been affected, had some family members pass away from COVID in India, and I'm sure other people may have stories that firsthand or secondhand. So please do that and let's show what the power of Docker community can do. And before I hand over to, to Peter, I'm just going to read out some of the tweets we've been getting, okay, this Brett and Peter, these are great. Uh, one of the, one of the tweets said dev environments is one of the most exciting features in the past few years. Super excited to try this out. Great, great, great tweet. Yeah. >>I agree to, um, another loving the content that was not your tweets. You can, you can slip me the 20 bucks later. Um, there's another tweet that says loving the content from hashtag Docker con so far fascinating use cases and interesting progress and future directions love that. And then there's another one I'm trying to find it here. Uh, I've been waiting for this so long Docker builds now work on Intel and M one. So keep those tweets coming. We love getting this kind of feedback and we love reading the chat room. So, um, Peter, you know, I attended your, your panel and I love that we were talking about a security and that moving, moving it left. So how did that go for you? >>Uh, it was, it was, uh, it was extremely fun. And for those that are, uh, I think my parents might be watching, so they probably watched it and were like, w this is the most boring thing I've ever seen, but, um, you know, you get a bunch of geeks and, uh, Brett has told me I should use geek instead of nerd, but I, I liked, uh, geek. So you get a bunch of geeks talking about security and coding and, um, what, what, what containers actually are, what vulnerabilities are. Yeah, it was, it was extremely fun. The panel was fantastic. They were very engaging the chat. I mean, I couldn't keep up with the chat. Right. It would just kept flying by, uh, luckily I had a helper to pull off questions, but, um, yeah, it's super exciting. You can, I know we're all remote, but you can just feel that energy, right. It was, it was great. It was great. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's super >>Connected. I felt that with your panel to Brett as well, sorry to talk over you there, but yeah. How did, how did it go for you? I, there was a lot of engagement in your session. >>Uh, ditto, like it was just, uh, there was so many questions. We only got to get a fraction of them. I tried to pick themes because, uh, when you talk about continuous testing and integration and all the things that take a part of that, um, you, you end up with lots of, well, what I like is the discussion around opinions, because so much of these pipelines from code on your machine, into production and everything in between, it's really, uh, it's a culture. It turns out to be the description of your culture and how you all perceive testing, how you, what you value in testing. And so that really started to come out as a theme, um, throughout that show. And we, we ran at a time. I was also watching Peters and it was fantastic, but like you think an hour is enough time to cover a topic, but it's just tipping tip of the iceberg kind of stuff. So I think it was super helpful. I learned some things, um, I really enjoyed watching Peters and, uh, yeah, can't wait for the next one. There's >>More than that. And likewise, great. I mean, I know, I know we're w maybe we pat chose it, but it, it was, it was super exciting to watch your panel. They were very Nikos, one of my favorite people in the world, uh, a fellow Austinite, but, um, yeah, I love that too. How you, uh, you were talking about opinions right. And playing off each other. It's, it's always interesting to hear smart people, uh, how they think, right. Yeah. I learned from how they think, right. Yeah. A hundred percent. >>So, all right. So we're, we're, um, what's next? Like, we, we gotta keep this thing going, so I've got to remember that. >>I want to, so I want to talk a bit about some of the panels that are, or the sessions that are coming up and just want to remind people that happened this afternoon. I'm all about use cases. You know, I was a developer for many decades, and it's great to hear how other developers are using the tools. But, uh, as a developer, I always wanted to know how are, what are the end user applications? And so we have two exciting sessions at 1:00 PM. We have sneak and red ventures, and they're going to be talking about how they used Docker containers. The title of the, uh, uh, session is great. An ounce of prevention, curing, insecure, container images. So check that out. And we also have another one at one 30 with Massimo, from AWS and Dexter Legaspi from Sirius XM. And they're going to be talking about a real world application using Docker containers. So I really want you to, to encourage you to attend those. >>Yeah. Um, can I say one really quick? Cause I'm Sue and a shout out to Eric Smalling. He's giving the red ventures talk with our partners. He's awesome. Go check out his, uh, but I'm really excited about Matt. Jarvis's sneak talk around. Uh, I think we might've talked about it earlier. My container image has 500 vulnerabilities vulnerabilities now what, right. I mean, I think as developers, as we're coming into this and dev ops and everybody right. You scan and then you see all these vulnerabilities just shoot by. And you're like, well, what do I do? So Matt, Matt will be addressing that. And he is fantastic. I can go on. There's a bunch of them. >>Yeah. There's a whole bunch of coming up and right up after this, I'm on a live stream with a bunch of panels on get ops. And then after that, Peter will be back. And so stay tuned and thanks for watching during the intermission. And we'll see you soon. >>I'm also leading the women in tech panel attend that. Don't forget to do that. >>Absolutely. Yep. All right. Ciao. Ciao >>For me like my first, oh, I get it about Docker was when I used a SQL server container on my neck book for the first time >>Being able to install Docker desktop, which was the first thing that I did and be able to build this without worrying about any of my software versions that I currently had on my machine. It was >>Awesome. One of the things, because I love the most about Docker is because I write books and I do video training courses to help a lot of people take their first steps with Docker and containers and to get a connection with those people and for them to come back to me and say, do you know what this is so cool, so easy, and it's going to change both my job. And, but also my organization, my team, all of that kind of stuff, change the experience that our customers have with our applications and what our business really puts a smile on my face. If >>You want to use containers, then Docker is the first toys, especially with tools like the mark Docker, compose, you can, uh, easily do your day-to-day job as a developer, or even if you're an ops person, then there are the books of the cloud and other things. So yeah, the idea is that we can go the simplicity one simple task, uh, to, uh, Daugherty mate and make that reuse as many times. Uh, that is one of the cool things I like about my >>Favorite part about Docker is using it as a developer tool. I using Docker desktop, really easy to install, really easy to run. >>Every time I come back to DACA, I love the simplicity of the way that it works, especially on things like security, which I find frustrating and hard. It's just done so seamlessly. And so my favorite thing about DACA is not just that it changed the world in the way that we develop in and ship and build applications and put that. It's just so easy that even the guy, like, I think >>It really is all about finding that aha moment, that hook where Docker really makes sense to you because once you have that moment, then all of a sudden, you, you know, you are on your way to being a Docker power user. >>We need for people to understand this technology better before they can, uh, actually dive deep into that. And Docker makes it easier to explain things, to explain the concept of containers, to explain how containers will work, how you can split your environments, how you can, uh, standardize all your pipelines and so on. It's important that we also take the time to help other people. And I think it's very important that we also give back and that's part of the motto of open sources. How do we give back to other people and how we help other people learn? And I think that's what I'm really passionate about. This whole thing is continuing, uh, giving back to the community. I just >>Hope and has fun at Docker con. And I know that there's a lot of great speakers coming and I will be watching the talks, even though they're happening at 3:00 AM and in my local time zone, um, I'm pretty excited to watch and, uh, hopefully watch more than later on streaming or YouTube or wherever they're going to be. So I hope everyone has fun and learn something and yeah, I don't see how you couldn't have fun.

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019. Lisa Martin with John Furrier, in San Francisco. This is an internal R&D innovation off site that VMware does, lots of innovation going on here from engineers from all over the globe. We're pleased to welcome Joe Baguley, the CTO from EMEA, from VMware. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> So we've been having some great conversations this morning about this tremendous amount of innovation, I mean the potential is massive. Not just from Radio, but from all the other innovation programs that VMware has, really speaks very strongly to the culture of innovation that VMware has had. But of course all this innovation has to be able to be harnessed to deliver what customers need. Talk to us about that, you're in the field, field CTO. What is that connection with the innovation that happens within VMware? How do customers help influence that and vice versa? >> Yeah, I think we're very unique in the structure that we've put around that to drive that innovation over the years. So my job as field CTO is, I call it sort of 50, 50. So 50% is Chief Technology Officer, which is this kind of stuff for Radio and 50% is Chief Talking Officer, which is out with our customers and presenting at conferences, et cetera. But the general remit is connecting R&D in the field. And so for eight years now I've been connecting R&D in the field at VMware, I actually did at my previous company as well. And what we've done is, we've built a series of programs over the years to do that, and one of the biggest ones is the CTO Ambassadors. And so that was, you know, you get to a point, you get to a growth size, I've been here eight years, and suddenly you need someone else to help you because I can't be everywhere. And the original role was, back in the day I was hired to scale Steve Herrod, because Steve Herrod couldn't be in Europe all the time, I was like mini Steve Herrod that could be there when needed. But then eventually I can't be in every European country and our major regions as we get bigger and bigger, and we've grown dramatically. So the CTO Ambassadors is to support that. And that's really, we've got 140 of our top customer facing techies from around the globe in this program called the Ambassadors. And they have to be customer facing, and they have to be individual contributors, so like a pre-sales manager or something doesn't count. They're a massively active community, there's a whole bunch of them here at Radio as well. And their job is really that conduit, that source of information, and also a sounding board, a much shorter range sounding board for R&D. So if R&D want to get a feel of what's going on, they don't have to ask everyone they can bounce off the Ambassadors, which is part of what we do, and that makes it easier. >> So like a filter too, they're also also filtering input from the field, packaging it up for R&D. >> Totally. Yeah, and when you're at an organization of our scale, filtering is really important. Because obviously, you can't have every customer directly talking to every engineer, it's never going to work. (laughs) >> I mean another radio project stay right there, a machine learning based champion CTO to go through all the feedback. >> Yeah, so I started my career, with my previous company doing that, I was the filter. So I'd get a hundred questions a day from various people in the field, and 99 of those I'd bounce right back because I knew the answer. But there was the one that I was like, uh. Then I'd turn around to R&D and ask them. But the great thing was that R&D knew that if I was asking then it was a real question, it wasn't the 99. So the CTO Ambassadors, and what we do in Octo Global field is really a method of scaling that. >> I want to ask you about that because that's a great example of here reputation comes in. Because your reputation is on the line if you go back and pull the fire alarm, if you will, send too many lame requests back, you're going to be lame. So you've got to kind of check, balance there. So that begs the question, how do you do the filtering for the champions that work for you? Is there a high bar? Is there a certain line? Like being a kid, you've got to be this tall to ride the roller coaster. Is there criteria? Is there certification? Take us through the filtering there. >> The Ambassador program is a rotating nomination system. So essentially there's a two year tenure. So what happens is, if you're in the field and you want to be an ambassador, which is a really prestigious thing, then you nominate yourself or get nominated and then people vote on you and you put forward your case, et cetera. Essentially it's a democratic process based on your peers and other people in the company. And then after you're allowed a maximum of two years. Sorry, two tenures so you get four years, if that makes sense, I'm not confusing you. >> John: So term limits? >> Yeah there's term limits, right, we have term limits. And after two terms you have to go out for a year to give someone else a chance because otherwise it will just glub- >> It'll turn into the US government. (laughs) >> But no, it's important to maintain freshness, maintain diversity and all those kind of things. And so it comes back to that filter piece we were talking about before. The reputation is massive, of the CTO Ambassadors. I mean when we started this six years ago as a program, most of R&D were like, who are these Ambassador guys? What value are they going to add? Now, if you're in R&D, one of the best things you can say, if you want to get something done, is what the CTO Ambassador said. I mean, literally it is, you can go and we have- >> John: The routine approach to that. Talk about how you guys add in a new category. So, for instance kubernetes, we saw this years ago when KubeCon was started, theCUBE was there present at the creation of that trend we kind of got it right away. Now Gelsinger and the team sees this as a massive traction layer. So that would be an example, where we need an Ambassador. So do you like just create one or how does that work? >> They create themselves, that's the best thing. So we have an annual conference which is in February, held in Paolo Alto where we all get together along with all the chief technologists, which is the level below me. And the principles, which the most senior field people. So literally the best of the best get together. It's about 200 plus get together for a week. And we are an hour and a half on on one with Pat for example, so Pat's there with all of us in a room. But one of the sessions we do is the shark tank, and there's two of them. One of them is, come up with your really cool, crazy, wacky ideas, and the other one is the acquisition shark tank. So there we get the MNA team, include our E-staff sit in, and the Ambassadors, as teams, will come in and present. We think we should acquire, uh because that's making a big difference. The great thing is, not nine times out of 10 but probably seven times out of 10, the E-staff are going, yeah we know about that, when actually we can't really tell you what's going on but yeah we know about them. But there's the two or three times out of 10 that people are like, oh yeah, so tell me more about them. And it might be a company that's just coming up, it might be 2013 and there's this company called Docker that no one's heard of, but the Ambassadors are shouting about Docker, and saying it's a big, you know. So there's that- >> So white space is too emerging you can see it's a telemetry, literally feedback from the field to direct management on business strategy. >> And our customers are pushing our field in directions faster than maybe R&D get pushed if you know what I mean. >> You guys deserve a lot of credit because Pat Gelsinger was just on this morning with Lisa and me, and we were talking about that. He just came back from the Sales President's club cruise, and one of the comments he said was the sales executive said, hey, who does strategy? Because everything's fitting together beautifully. Which kind of highlights how radiance this all progresses, not like magic, there's a process here, and this kind of points to your job is to fit that pieces in, is that correct? >> Yeah. People always say, as a CTO do you all sit down once a week and talk about strategy? And that's not what you do. There's a hive mind, there's a continual interaction, there's conference calls, there's phone calls, there's meetings, there's get togethers of various different types, groups, and levels. And what happens is there's themes that emerge over that. And so my role specifically, as the EMEA CTO is to represent Europe, Middle East, and Africa's voice in those conversations. And maybe the nuances that we might have around particular product requirements or whatever, to remind people that maybe sit in a bubble in Silicon Valley. >> John: I'm sure you raised your hand on privacy and GDPR? (laughs) >> Just a couple of times, yeah. Yeah, now and again. >> The canary in the coal mine is a really big point that helps companies, if they're not listening to the signals coming in. >> Well you do, and you see a lot. There's a lot of the tech companies that I see, it's often defined as the three bubbles, or your Massimo Re Ferrè, who's now at Amazon. When he was here, did this fantastic blog post talking about the first bubble is Silicon Valley, and the second bubble is North America, and the third bubble is everywhere else. And so you kind of watch these things emerge. And my job is to jump over that pop into the Silicon Valley bubble before something happens and say, no you should be thinking about X, you should think about Y. At an event like Radio I've got a force multiplier because I've got 40 plus Ambassadors with me all popping up at all these little booths you see behind you, and the shows, and the talks. >> And the goal here is not to be a bubble, but to be completely one hive mind. >> And the diversity at VMware just blows my mind, it really does. I think a lot of people comment on it quite often, and in fact I've been asked to be a non-exec director of other companies, to help them advise on their culture. Which is not in tech, in culture, which is quite interesting. And so the diversity that we have here is really infusing people to innovate in a way that they've not done before. It's that diverse set of opinions really helps. >> Well it does. And this, from what we've heard, Radio is a very, there's a lot of internal competition, it's like a badge of honor to be able to respond to the call for papers, let alone get selected. Touch on the synergies, the symbiosis that I feel like I'm hearing between the things that are presented here, the CTO Ambassadors and the customers. Like maybe a favorite example of a product or service that came from, maybe a CTO Ambassador, to Radio, to market. >> Yeah, I'm just trying to think of any one specific one. There are always bits and pieces, and things here and there. I think I should have thought of that before I came on really. I think what you're looking at here is, it's much more about an informed conversation and so it's those ideas around the fact. And also, quite often someone will have a cool idea, and they'll go to the Ambassadors, can you find me five customers that want to try this? Bang, we've got it. So if you're out there on a customer, and someone comes to you as an ambassador and says, I've got a really cool thing I'd like you to try. It might be before, we have a thing called Fling, so it might even be before it's made a fling. You probably heard from Morney how that process goes. Then engage fast, because you're probably getting that conduit direct into the core of R&D. So a lot of the features that people see and functions and products et cetera, that people see. A lot of the work you see, we're doing with the next version if you realized our management platform, a lot of that has been driven by work that's been done by Ambassadors in the field, and what we're doing there. All the stuff you'll see, I've got my jacket over there with NANO EDGE written on it. A lot of the EDGE stuff that you see, a lot of the stuff around ESXi on Arm, a lot of the stuff around that is driven specifically around a particular product range. So a really good example is, a few years ago, probably around four, myself and Ray sat down and had a meeting in VMware Barcelona, with a retail customer, and the retail customer was talking about could we get them an STDC, but small enough to fit in every store. They didn't say that at the time, but that's how we kind of got to it. So that started off a whole process in our minds, and then I went back and we, the easiest actual way for me to do it was to then get a bunch of the Ambassadors to present that as one of their innovation ideas, which became NANO EDGE. I originally called it VX Nook, because we were going to do it on intel Nooks. (laughs) Unfortunately the naming committee wouldn't allow VX Nook, so it became NANO EDGE. And that drove a whole change within the company, I think within R&D. So if you think up until that point, four years ago, most of what we were doing was, how do we run things bigger and faster? It was all like Monster VM, remember that? All those kinds of things, right? How do we get these SAP HANA 12 terabyte VMs running? And really NANO EDGE was not necessarily a product, per se but it was more of a movement driven by a particular individual, Simon Richardson, who had got promoted to Principle as a result, through the Ambassador program. That was driven through our R&D to get them to think small as well as big, you know. So next time you're building that thing, how small can you run your SX, how small can we get an SX? >> John: Small, at scale. Which is EDGE, right? >> And, you know, so get small, at scale, which was EDGE. And so suddenly everyone starts talking about EDGE, and I'm like, hang on I've been talking about this for a while now, but we just didn't really call it that. And then along comes technology like Kubernetes, which is how do you manage thousands of small things. And it's kind of, these things come together. But yes, totally, you can almost say our EDGE strategy, and a lot of the early EDGE work was done and driven out of stuff that was done from CTO Ambassadors. It's just one of the examples. >> What are some of the Kubernetes service mesh? Because one of the things we heard from Pat, and we've heard this before, but most recently at Dell Technologies World, in the last couple of weeks, was don't look down, look up. Which basically means we're automating the infrastructure. I get that, I've covered ad nauseam. But looking up the stack means you're talking about kubernetes app developers, you've got cloud native, you've got services meshes, microservices, new kinds of challenges around instrumentation. How are you guys inside Radio looking at that trend? Because there's some commercial impact, You've got Heptio, you've got Craig and the team, some of the original guys. >> Yeah, yeah. >> As well as you have a future state coming out, with state, pun intended, data, stateless. (laughs) These are new dynamics. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What's the R&D take on this? >> So there's two ways that I really talk to people about this. The first one is, I've got a concept that I talk about called application chromatography. Which sounds mental, but you remember from high school probably, chromatography was where you had that really special paper and you put the dot of liquid on and it spread it to all it's constituent parts. That's actually what's happening with our applications right now. So, we've gone through a history of re-platform. You know, mainframe, blah blah blah blah blah. So then when we got to x86, everything's on x86, along comes cloud, and as you know John, for the last 10 years it's been everything's going to cloud because we think that's the next platform. It's not, but then everything's not going to SAS, it's not all going to paths, it's not all going to Functions, it's not all going to containers. What you're seeing is those applications are coming off that one big server, and they're spreading themselves out to the right places. So I talk to customers now and they say, okay, well actually I need a management plan, and a strategy and an architecture for infrastructure as a service, containers as a service, functions as a service platform as a service and SAS, and I need a structure for that on premises and off premises. So that's truly driving R&D thinking is not how do we help our customers get from one of those to the other? They're going to all of them. >> It sounds like a green screen for media. >> It is, and then the other side of that is I've just had a conversation with some of the best, you know, what these events are like? Some of the best conversations in the water cooler, in the- >> In the hallway, yup exactly. >> I've just had a fascinating conversation with one of our guys has been talking about, oh it's really cool if we got kubernetes cause I could use it right down at the edge. I could use it to manage thousands as a tiny EDGE things. And as I'm talking to him and sort of saying, you know what he's doing, I suddenly went, hang on a second, how does a developer talk to that? He's like, well I've not really thought about that. I said, well that's your problem. We need to stop thinking about things from how can that framework help me? But how can I extend that framework? And so a lot of that- >> Moving beyond just standing up kubernetes, for what purpose? Or is that what you know, the why, what? >> So if the developers there, it shouldn't be all. I'm going to use this new framework to solve my problem or the EDGE if an R&D person would, but people like myself are there to drive them to think of the bigger picture. So ultimately at some point a developer in the future is going to want to sit there and through an API, push out software SQL server, a bit of Mongo over here, some stuff on AWS, go and use the service on our Azure at the same time pushing stuff into their own data center and maybe push a container to every store if they're a retailer and they want to do that through one place. That's what we're building. And you know, driving that, all these bits and pieces you see behind you pulling those all together into this sort of consistent operations model. As I'm sure you've heard many of- >> And it's dynamics not static, so it's not like provisioning the old way. You got to track what's being turned on and off because how do you log off? What goes turns on? What services get turned on? Turned off, turned on. >> If you don't get a theme of really, I suppose not only Radio, but our industry of the last few years, people have always said if that cliche change is constant, right? Oh, change is constant. Yet still architects build systems that are static, right? You guys that just, I'm designing an architect in this new system for the next three years. I'm like, that's stupid. What you need to do is design a system that you know is going to change before you've even finished starting it. More or less started going half way through it. So actually, as I see, I was in a fantastic session yesterday with the Architects around ESXi and VCenter, which might be boring to most, but where we architecting that for scale at a huge way. >> Well, I think that's the key thing I mean this is, first of all, we'd love this conversation because, if you can make it programmable with API and have data available, that's the architecture because it's programmable, it's not static. So you let it morph into however the application, because I think I mentioned green screen, you know chroma keys as we have those concepts here, but that's what you're saying. The apps are going to have this notion of, I need an app right now and then it goes away. Services are going to be provisioning and turning on and off. >> There is a transience, there's a transience to infrastructure, there's a transience to applications, there's a transience to components that traditional mechanisms aren't built to do. So if you look at actually, what are we building here? And what's that sort of hive mind message? It's how do we provide that platform going forward that supports transience? that allows customers to come, I mean people used to use the term agile, but it's been over years and it's not right. It's the fact that literally it's a situation of constant change. And what your deploying onto, it's constantly changing and what you're deploying is constantly changing. So we're trying to work out how do we put that piece in the middle, that is also changing but allows you some kind of constancy in what you're doing, right? So we can plug new things in the bottom, a new cloud here, a new piece of software there, a new piece of hardware there or whatever. And at the same time, there's new ways of doing architecture coming on top. That's the challenge of this, the software defined data centers, almost like an operating system for clouds or the future operating system for all apps on all clouds and all of- >> It's a systems thinking for sure, absolutely. >> Let's put your Chief Talking Officer hat on for a second as we look- >> I thought I've been doing that for the last fifteen minutes. (laughs) >> At VMWorld 2019, which is just around the corner. Any cool ANEA customers that are going to be on stage that we should be excited to hear about it? >> Actually, I was having a meeting yesterday morning about that, so I can't really say, but there's some exciting stuff we're lining up right now. We're obviously now is the time we start thinking about the keynotes, now at the time you start thinking about who's on stage. Myself and a few others are responsible for what those demos are, you know the cool demos you see on stage every year. So we literally had the meeting yesterday morning at Radio to discuss what's going to be the wow at VMWorld this year. So I'm not going to give anything away to you. I'll just say make sure you're there to watch it because it's going to be good. And we're also making sure there's a big difference between what we're doing in Moscone now and what we're going to be doing it in Barcelona when we- >> And when expand theCUBE outside of the United States certainly, we'd love to have you guys plug in and localize some of these unique challenges. Like you said, I agree bubble now the west of the world has different challenges content different. >> Definitely, I think to that end, multicloud is probably more of a thing in Europe than it was necessarily in, in North America for a longer time because those privacy laws you talked about before, people have always been looking at the fact that maybe they had to use a local cloud for some things. You know, a German cloud run by German people in a German data center and they could use another cloud like Amazon for other things. And you know, we have UK cloud who provide a specific government based cloud, et cetera. Whereas in America there was, you could use an American cloud and that was fine. So I think actually in Europe we've already been at the forefront of that multicloud thinking for a while. So it's worth watching. >> It is worth watching, I wish we had more time to, so you're just going to have to come back. >> Definitely, anytime tell me when. >> We look forward to seeing you at VMWorld. We thank you for sharing some insights with John and me on theCUBE today. >> Cool, thank you. >> For John Ferrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)