(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas. It's theCUBE live at AWS re:Invent 2022. We're hearing up to 50,000 people here. It feels like if the energy at this show is palpable. I love that. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, we had the keynote this morning that Adam Selipsky delivered lots of momentum in his first year. One of the things that you said that you were looking in your breaking analysis that was released a few days ago, four trends and one of them, he said under Selipsky's rule in the 2020s, there's going to be a rush of data that will dwarf anything we have ever seen. >> Yeah, it was at least a quarter, maybe a third of his keynote this morning was all about data and the theme is simplifying data and doing better data integration, integrating across different data platforms. And we're excited to talk about that. Always want to simplify data. It's like the rush of data is so fast. It's hard for us to keep up. >> It is hard to keep that up. We're going to be talking with an alumni next about how his company is helping organizations like Cisco Meraki keep up with that data explosion. Please welcome back to the program, Matthew Scullion, the CEO of Matillion and how Hoshang Chenoy joins us, data scientist at Cisco Meraki. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Matthew, we last saw you just a few months ago in Vegas at Snowflake Summits. >> Matthew: We only meet in Vegas. >> I guess we do, that's okay. Talk to us about some of the things, I know that Matillion is a data transformation solution that was originally introduced for AWS for Redshift. But talk to us about Matillion. What's gone on since we've seen you last? >> Well, I mean it's not that long ago but actually quite a lot. And it's all to do with exactly what you guys were just talking about there. This almost hard to comprehend way the world is changing with the amounts of data that we now can and need to put to work. And our worldview is there's no shortage of data but the choke points certainly one of the choke points. Maybe the choke point is our ability to make that data useful, to make it business ready. And we always talk about the end use cases. We talk about the dashboard or the AI model or the data science algorithm. But until before we can do any of that fun stuff, we have to refine raw data into business ready, usable data. And that's what Matillion is all about. And so since we last met, we've made a couple of really important announcements and possibly at the top of the list is what we call the data productivity cloud. And it's really squarely addressed this problem. It's the results of many years of work, really the apex of many years of the outsize engineering investment, Matillion loves to make. And the Data Productivity Cloud is all about helping organizations like Cisco Meraki and hundreds of others enterprise organizations around the world, get their data business ready, faster. >> Hoshang talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Cisco Meraki, how you're leveraging Matillion from a productivity standpoint. >> I've really been a Matillion fan for a while, actually even before Cisco Meraki at my previous company, LiveRamp. And you know, we brought Matillion to LiveRamp because you know, to Matthew's point, there is a stage in every data growth as I want to call it, where you have different companies at different stages. But to get data, data ready, you really need a platform like Matillion because it makes it really easy. So you have to understand Matillion, I think it's designed for someone that uses a lot of code but also someone that uses no code because the UI is so good. Someone like a marketer who doesn't really understand what's going on with that data but wants to be a data driven marketer when they look at the UI they immediately get it. They're just like, oh, I get what's happening with my data. And so that's the brilliance of Matillion and to get data to that data ready part, Matillion does a really, really good job because what we've been able to do is blend so many different data sources. So there is an abundance of data. Data is siloed though. And the connectivity between different data is getting harder and harder. And so here comes the Matillion with it's really simple solution, easy to use platform, powerful and we get to use all of that. So to really change the way we've thought about our analytics, the way we've progressed our division, yeah. >> You're always asking about superpowers and that is a superpower of Matillion 'cause you know, low-code, no-code sounds great but it only gets you a quarter of the way there, maybe 50% of the way there. You're kind of an "and" not an "or." >> That's a hundred percent right. And so I mentioned the Data Productivity Cloud earlier which is the name of this platform of technology we provide. That's all to do with making data business ready. And so I think one of the things we've seen in this industry over the past few years is a kind of extreme decomposition in terms of vendors of making data business ready. You've got vendors that just do loading, you've got vendors that just do a bit of data transformation, you've got vendors that do data ops and orchestration, you've got vendors that do reverse ETL. And so with the data productivity platform, you've got all of that. And particularly in this kind of, macroeconomic heavy weather that we're now starting to face, I think companies are looking for that. It's like, I don't want to buy five things, five sets of skills, five expensive licenses. I want one platform that can do it. But to your point David, it's the and not the or. We talk about the Data Productivity Cloud, the DPC, as being everyone ready. And what we mean by that is if you are the tech savvy marketer who wants to get a particular insight and you understand what a Rowan economy is, but you're not necessarily a hardcore super geeky data engineer then you can visual low-code, no-code, your data to a point where it's business ready. You can do that really quick. It's easy to understand, it's faster to ramp people onto those projects cause it like explains itself, faster to hand it over cause it's self-documenting. But, they'll always be individuals, teams, "and", "or" use cases that want to high-code as well. Maybe you want to code in SQL or Python, increasingly of course in DBT and you can do that on top of the Data Productivity Cloud as well. So you're not having to make a choice, but is that right? >> So one of the things that Matillion really delivers is speed to insight. I've always said that, you know, when you want to be business ready you want to make fast decisions, you want to act on data quickly, Matillion allows you to, this feed to insight is just unbelievably fast because you blend all of these different data sources, you can find the deficiencies in your process, you fix that and you can quickly turn things around and I don't think there's any other platform that I've ever used that has that ability. So the speed to insight is so tremendous with Matillion. >> The thing I always assume going on in our customers teams, like you run Hoshang is that the visual metaphor, be it around the orchestration and data ops jobs, be it around the transformation. I hope it makes it easier for teams not only to build it in the first place, but to live with it, right? To hand it over to other people and all that good stuff. Is that true? >> Let me highlight that a little bit more and better for you. So, say for example, if you don't have a platform like Matillion, you don't really have a central repository. >> Yeah. >> Where all of your codes meet, you could have a get repository, you could do all of those things. But, for example, for definitions, business definitions, any of those kind of things, you don't want it to live in just a spreadsheet. You want it to have a central platform where everybody can go in, there's detailed notes, copious notes that you can make on Matillion and people know exactly which flow to go to and be part of, and so I kind of think that that's really, really important because that's really helped us in a big, big way. 'Cause when I first got there, you know, you were pulling code from different scripts and things and you were trying to piece everything together. But when you have a platform like Matillion and you actually see it seamlessly across, it's just so phenomenal. >> So, I want to pick up on something Matthew said about, consolidating platforms and vendors because we have some data from PTR, one of our survey partners and they went out, every quarter they do surveys and they asked the customers that were going to decrease their spending in the quarter, "How are you going to do it?" And number one, by far, like, over a third said, "We're going to consolidate redundant vendors." Way ahead of cloud, we going to optimize cloud resource that was next at like 15%. So, confirms what you were saying and you're hearing that a lot. Will you wait? And I think we never get rid of stuff, we talk about it all the time. We call it GRS, get rid of stuff. Were you able to consolidate or at least minimize your expense around? >> Hoshang: Yeah, absolutely. >> What we were able to do is identify different parts of our tech stack that were just either deficient or duplicate, you know, so they're just like, we don't want any duplicate efforts, we just want to be able to have like, a single platform that does things, does things well and Matillion helped us identify all of those different and how do we choose the right tech stack. It's also about like Matillion is so easy to integrate with any tech stack, you know, it's just they have a generic API tool that you can log into anything besides all of the components that are already there. So it's a great platform to help you do that. >> And the three things we always say about the Data Productivity Cloud, everyone ready, we spoke about this is whether low-code, no-code, quasi-technical, quasi-business person using it, through to a high-end data engineer. You're going to feel at home on the DPC. The second one, which Hoshang was just alluding to there is stack ready, right? So it is built for AWS, built for Snowflake, built for Redshift, pure tight integration, push down ELT better than you could write yourself by hand. And then the final one is future ready, which is this idea that you can start now super easy. And we buy software quickly nowadays, right? We spin it up, we try it out and before we know it, the whole organization is using it. And so the future ready talks about that continuum of being able to launch in five minutes, learn it in five hours, deliver your first project in five days and yet still be happy that it's an enterprise scalable platform, five years down track including integrating with all the different things. So Matillion's job holding up the end of the bargain that Hoshang was just talking about there is to ensure we keep putting the features integrations and support into the Data Productivity Cloud to make sure that Hoshang's team can continue to live inside it and do all the things they need to do. >> Hoshang, you talked about the speed to insight being tremendously fast, but if I'm looking at Cisco Meraki from a high level business outcome perspective, what are some of those outcomes that a Matillion is helping Cisco Meraki to achieve. >> So I can just talk in general, not giving you like any specific numbers or anything, but for example, we were trying to understand how well our small and medium business campaigns were doing and we had to actually pull in data from multiple different sources. So not just, our instances of Marketo and Salesforce, we had to look at our internal databases. So Matillion helped us blend all of that together. Once I had all of that data blended, it was then ready to be analyzed. And once we had that analysis done, we were able to confirm that our SMB campaigns were doing well but these the things that we need to do to improve them. When we did that and all of that happened so quickly because they were like, well you need to get data from here, you need to get data from there. And we're like, great, we'll just plug, plug, plug. We put it all together, build transformations and you know we produced this insight and then we were able to reform, refine, and keep getting better and better at it. And you know, we had a 40X return on SMB campaigns. It's unbelievable. >> And there's the revenue tie in right there. >> Hoshang: Yeah. >> Matthew, I know you've been super busy, tons of meetings, you didn't get to see the whole keynote, but one of the themes of Adam Selipsky's keynote was, you know, the three letter word of ETL, they laid out a vision of zero ETL and then they announced zero ETL for Aurora and Redshift. And you think about ETL, I remember the days they said, "Okay, we're going to do ELT." Which is like, raising the debt ceiling, we're just going to kick the can down the road. So, what do you think about that vision? You know, how does it relate to what you guys are doing? >> So there was a, I don't know if this only works in the UK or it works globally. It was a good line many years ago. Rumors of my death are premature or so I think it was an obituary had gone out in the times by accident and that's how the guy responded to it. Something like that. It's a little bit like that. The announcement earlier within the AWS space of zero ETL between platforms like Aurora and Redshift and perhaps more over time is really about data movement, right? So it's about do I need to do a load of high cost in terms of coding and compute, movement of data between one platform, another. At Matillion, we've always seen data movement as an enabling technology, which gets you to the value add of transformation. My favorite metaphor to bring this to life is one of iron. So the world's made of iron, right? The world is literally made of iron ore but iron ore isn't useful until you turn it to steel. Loading data is digging out iron ore from the ground and moving it to the refinery. Transformation of data is turning iron ore into steel and what the announcements you saw earlier from AWS are more about the quarry to the factory bit than they are about the iron ore to the steel bit. And so, I think it's great that platforms are making it easier to move data between them, but it doesn't change the need for Hoshang's business professionals to refine that data into something useful to drive their marketing campaigns. >> Exactly, it's quarry to the factory and a very Snowflake like in a way, right? You make it easy to get in. >> It's like, don't get me wrong, I'm great to see investment going into the Redshift business and the AWS data analytics stack. We do a lot of business there. But yes, this stuff is also there on Snowflake, already. >> I mean come on, we've seen this for years. You know, I know there's a big love fest between Snowflake and AWS 'cause they're selling so much business in the field. But look that we saw it separating computing from storage, then AWS does it and now, you know, why not? It's good sense. That's what customers want. The customer obsessed data sharing is another thing. >> And if you take data sharing as an example from our friends at Snowflake, when that was announced a few people possibly, yourselves, said, "Oh, Matthew what do you think about this? You're in the data movement business." And I was like, "Ah, I'm not really actually, some of my competitors are in the data movement business. I have data movement as part of my platform. We don't charge directly for it. It's just part of the platform." And really what it's to do is to get the data into a place where you can do the fun stuff with it of refining into steel. And so if Snowflake or now AWS and the Redshift group are making that easier that's just faster to fun for me really. >> Yeah, sure. >> Last question, a question for both of you. If you had, you have a brand new shiny car, you got a bumper sticker that you want to put on that car to tell everyone about Matillion, everyone about Cisco Meraki, what does that bumper sticker say? >> So for Matillion, it says Matillion is the Data Productivity Cloud. We help you make your data business ready, faster. And then for a joke I'd write, "Which you are going to need in the face of this tsunami of data." So that's what mine would say. >> Love it. Hoshang, what would you say? >> I would say that Cisco makes some of the best products for IT professionals. And I don't think you can, really do the things you do in IT without any Cisco product. Really phenomenal products. And, we've gone so much beyond just the IT realm. So you know, it's been phenomenal. >> Awesome. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you back on the program. Congrats to you now Hoshang, an alumni of theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> But thank you for talking to us, Matthew, about what's going on with Matillion so much since we've seen you last. I can imagine how much worse going to go on until we see you again. But we appreciate, especially having the Cisco Meraki customer example that really articulates the value of data for everyone. We appreciate your insights and we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Privilege to be here. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Pleasure. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. We are live in Chicago. This is day two of Waldo Wall coverage on the cube. John Fhrer here with me. Lisa Martin. John, today's a big news day. Yeah, >>Big time. I mean, we got the chief architect on this segments to be great. We have the lead product management. All the new stuff coming out really is a game changer. It's very cool and relevant. Very key to be relevant. And then, and being a part of the future. This is a changeover you see in the NextGen Cloud developer environment. Open source all coming together. So Ansible we've been covering for many, many years. We've always said they're in the middle of all the action and you're starting to see the picture. Yes. For me. So we're looking forward to a great segment. >>Yes. We've got two alumni back with us to unpack the news and all the great stuff that's going on here. Richard Hensel joins us Senior manager, Ansible Product Management, and Matthew Jones here, fresh from the keynote stage, Chief architect of Ansible Automation. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks >>For having us. Good to be here. >>So this morning was all about event driven Ansible. Unpack that. Talk about the impact that this is gonna have, The excitement, the buzz that you've heard on the show floor today. >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's exciting. We've been working on this for a while. We've been really excited to show this off because it's something that feels like the natural evolution of the platform and where it's going. Really being able to connect the automation with the sources of data and the actions that we know people want to use. We, we came into this knowing everybody here at this conference, this is something that everybody will be able to use. >>Talk about the innovations strategy. Cause we've always had these great conversations with Ansible. Oh yeah. The, the practitioners, they're, they're building the product with you. You guys are very hardcore on that. No secret. This is different. This is like a whole nother level of opportunity that's gonna take the, the community to new heights in terms of what they do in their job and free them up to do more creative development. >>Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, we, we know that people need to bring that sort of reactive and active automation to it. We've, we've done a lot of work to bring automation to everybody, to the masses. Now we need to meet them at the place where they are, where the, the where, where they have to do the most work and, and act in the most strategic and specific ways. >>All right. So now before we get into some of the deep dive, cause a ton of questions. This is really exciting product. Take a minute to explain what was the key announcement? Why, what specifically does this mean for the audience, watching customers and future customers? What's the big deal? To take a minute to explain what was announced. >>So this is about the, the evolution and the maturity of the automation that our users are doing. So, you know, you think about provisioning servers, you know, configuring networks, all that sort of, the stuff that we've established and everybody's been doing for a number of years. And then you go, Well, I've invested in that. I've done the heavy lifting, I've done the things that cost me agility. I think that cost me time. Well now I need to go further. So what can I go further into? And you move further at the stacks. You move away from the infrastructure, please. You move away from infrastructure as code. You move towards through configures code, up to officer's code. And you start to get into, well, I've got, I've got road tasks, I've got repetitive actions that I'm doing. I've got investigations, I've got remediations, I've got responses. >>Well, there's work that I do on a daily basis that is toil. Right. It's not efficient work. Right. Actually, we doing valuable work in the operation space as much as you were doing in, in the build space. And how do we move them up into that space? And it's, this is all based off observation. You can do this today, but how do we make it easier? We've gonna make it easier for them to do that and get, it's all about success. It's about the outcomes we're gonna drive users towards. They need to be successful as quickly as possible. How do we make that >>Happen? And Matt, I remember we talked in 2019 with Ansible, the word platform where we say, Hey, you know, platforms are super important. It's not a tool, tools and platforms as distinctions. You mentioned platform. This is now platform. A lot of people put a lot of work in into this Yeah. Claim what went on behind the scenes. So >>You're exactly right. And we've spent the last couple of years really taking that disparate set of tools that, that we've invested a lot of time in building that platform. It's been exciting to see it come together. We always knew that we wanted to capture more of, more of where people find automation and find they need automation, not just out on the edge, on the end of the, of the, of the actions and tasks that they need to do. They've got a lot of things coming in, a lot of things that they need to take care of. And the community is really what drives this for us. People who have been doing this for years and they've been asking us, Meet me halfway. Give me something. Give me a part of this platform and a capability that enables me to do this. So I I feel like we've done that and you did >>It. Yeah, exactly. For step one. >>And that must feel pretty good too, to be able to deliver what, you know, the masses are looking for and why they're looking >>For it. Yeah. This was, there was no question that we knew this was gonna deliver the kind of real value that people were looking for. >>Take us through the building blocks real quick. I know on stage you went through it in detail. What should people know about the core building blocks of, of this particular event driven >>Piece? Yeah. You know, I think the most important thing to understand at the, at the outset is the sources of data and events that come in. It's really easy to get lost in the details. Like, what do you mean a source? But, you know, we've shown examples using Kafka, but it's not just Kafka, right? It's, it's, it's web hooks, it's CI systems, it's any, any place that you can imagine an evict coming from your monitoring platforms. You can bring those together under the same umbrella. We're not requiring you to pick one or choose or what's your favorite one. You can bring, you can use them all and and condense them down into the, into the same place. >>There's a lot of data events everywhere now. There's more events. Yeah. Is there a standard interface? Is what's the, is there any kind of hook in there? Is what's, what's gonna limit? Or is there any limits? >>I I don't think there is a limit. I, you know, it's, and we can't even imagine where events and data are gonna come from, but we know we need to get them into the system in a way that makes the most sense for the, the customers. And then that, that drives through into the rule books. Like, okay, we have the data now, but what do we do with that data? How do we translate that into, into the action? What are the rules that need to follow? It's giving the, the, the person who is automating, who understands the data that's coming in and understands the task that they need to take. The, the rules are where they map those into it. And then the last part, of course is the playbook, the automation itself, which they already know. They're already experts in the system. So we've, we've, we've built this like eight lane highway. They get some right end of those actions. >>Let's talk about Richard, let's unpack those actions and the really kind of double click on the business outcomes that this is actually gonna enable organizations and any industry to achieve. >>Yeah, so >>I mean, it's, it, like Matt said, it's really hard to encapsulate everything that we see as possible. But if you just think about what happens when a system goes down, right? At that point in time, I'm potentially not making money, right? I'd say it's costing me time, it's costing me, that's a business impact. If I can speed up how quick I can resolve that problem, if I can reduce time in there, that's customer improvement, that's custom satisfaction. That's bottom line money for businesses, right? But it's also, it's also satisfaction for the users. You know, they're not involved in having the stressful get online, get quickly, activate whatever accounts you need to do, go and start doing discovery. You can detect a lot of that information for the discovery use case that we see, respond to an event, scan the system for that same logic that you would normally do as a user, as a human. >>And that's why the rules are important to add into ed. It's like, how do I take that human, that brain part that I would say, well, if I see this bit, oh, I'll go and have a look in this other log file. If I see this piece, I'll go and do something different. How do we translate that into Ansible so that you've got that conditional logic just to be able to say, if this do that, or if I see these three things, it means a certain outcome has happened. And then again, that defined, that's what's gonna help people like choose where it becomes useful. And that's how we, that's how we take that process >>Forward. I'm sure people are gonna get excited by this. I'm not sure the community already knows that, but as it's gonna attract more potential customers, what's different about it? Can you share the differentiation? Like wait minute, I already have that already. Do they have it already? What's different? What makes this different? What's, what's in it for them? >>Yeah. When we step up into a customer situation, an enterprise, an organization, what's really important becomes the, the ability to control where you do some of that work. So the control and the trust, You know, would you trust an automatic system to go and start making changes to hundreds of thousands of devices? And the answer is often not, not straight away. So how do we put this sort of sep the same separation of duties we have between dev and ops and all the nice structures we've done over the last number of years, and actually apply that to that programmatic access of automation that other systems do. So let's say a AIML systems that are detecting what's going on, observability platforms are, are much more intru or intrusive is the wrong word. They're much more observable of what's going on in the systems, right? But at the same time you go, I wanna make sure that I know that any point in time I can decide what, what is there and what can be run and who can run it and when they can run it. And that becomes an important dimension. >>The versatility seems like a big deal too. They can, Yeah. Any team could get >>Involved. And, and that's the, the same flexibility and the same extensibility of Ansible exists in this use case, right? The, the, the ability to take any of those tasks you wanna do in action, string them together, but what the way that it works for you, not the way that it works that we see, but the way that you see and you convert your operational DNA into how you do that automation and how that gets triggered as you see fit. >>Talk about this both of you. I'd like to get your perspectives on event driven Ansible as part of the automation journey that businesses are on. Obviously you can look at different industries and different businesses are, are at different places along that journey, but where does this fit in and kind of plugin to accelerating that journey? That's, >>That's a good question. You know, sometimes this ends up being like that last mile of we've adopted this automation, we've learned how to write automation. We even understand the things that we would need to automate, but how do we carry it over that last topic and connect it to our, our knowledge systems, our data stores, our data lakes, and how do we combine the expertise of the systems that we're managing with this automation that we've learned? Like you, you mentioned the, the, the community and the, the coalescing of data and information, the, the definition of the event rules and, and the event driven architecture. It lives alongside the automation that you've developed in the exact same place where you can feel that trust and ubiquity that we keep talking about. Right? It's there, it's certified. And we've talked a lot about secure supply chain recently. This gives you the ability to sign and certify that the rules and actions that we're taking and the sources that we're communicating with works exactly the same way. Yeah. And >>There's something we didn't, we didn't correlate this when we first started doing the work. We were, we were, we observe teams doing self-healing and you know, extending Ansible. And then over the last 18 months, what we've also seen is this movement, this platform engineering movement, the SRE teams becoming much more prominent. And this just nicely sits in as a type of use case for that type of transformation. You know, we've gotta remember that Ansible at is heart is also a transformative tool. Is like, how do you teach this behavior to a bunch of people? How do you upscale a larger base of engineers with what you want to be able to do? And I think this is such an important part that we, we just one say we stumbled into it, but it was a very, very nice, >>It was a natural progression. >>Exactly. >>Yeah. Yeah. Tom, Tom, when we were talking about Tom yesterday, Tom Anderson and he said, You guys bring up the SRE to you guys when you come on the cube. This is exactly a culture shift that we're talking about. I mean, SRE is really his legacy with Google. We all know that. Everyone kind of knows that, but it's become like a job title. Well they kind of, what does that even mean now if you're not Google, it means you're running stuff. DevOps has become a title. Yeah. So what that means is that's a cultural shift, not so much semantics Yeah. On title. This is kind of what you guys are targeting here, enabling people to run platforms, engineer them. Yeah. Like an architect and enable more co composability coding. >>And, and it's, so that's, that distinction is so important because one of the, you know, we see many customers come from different places. Many users from, you know, all the legacy or heritage of tools that have existed. And so often those processes are defined by the way that tool worked. Right? You had no other way that, that, and the, and it's, it happened 10 years ago, somebody implemented it, that's how it now works. And then they come and try and take something new and you go, well, you can't let the tool define your process. Now your culture and your objective has to define the process. So this is really, you know, how do we make sure we match that ability by giving them a flexible tool that let's say, Well what are you trying to achieve? I wanna achieve this outcome. That's the way you can do it. I >>Mean, that's how we match basically means my mind to get your reaction. It means I'm running stuff at scale. Yep. Engineer, I'm engineering and infrastructure at scale to enable, >>I'm responsible for it. And it's, it's my, it's my baby. It's my responsibility to do that. And how do we, how do we allow people to do that better? And you know, it, it's about, it's about freeing people up to focus on things that are really important and transformative. We can be transformative. And we do that by taking away the complexity and making things work fast. >>And that's what people want. People in their daily jobs want to be able to deliver value to the organization. You wanna feel that. But something Richard that you were talking about that struck me a couple minutes ago is, was a venture of an Ansible. There's employee benefits, there's customer benefits, Those two are ex inextricably linked. But I liked how you were talking about what it facilitates for both Yes. And all the way to the customer satisfaction, brand reputation. That's an important Yeah. Element for any brand to >>Consider. And that, I mean, you know, think about what digital transformation was all about. I mean, as we evolve past all these initial terms that come about, you know, we actually start getting to the meat of what these things are. And that is it connecting what you do with actually what is the purpose of what your business is trying to achieve. And you can't, you can't almost put money on that. That's, that's the, that's the holy grail of what you're trying to get to. So how, you know, and again, it just comes back to how do we facilitate, how do we make it easy? If we don't make it easier, we're not doing it right. We've gotta make it easier. >>Right. Well, exciting news. I want to get your guys' reaction and if you don't mind sharing your opinion or your commentary on what's different now with Ansible this year than just a few years ago in terms of the scope of what's out there, what's been built, what you guys are doing for the, for the customer base and the community. What's changed? Obviously the people's roles looked that they're gonna expand and have more, I say more power, you know, more keys to the kingdom, however you wanna look at it. But things have changed. What's changed now from a few years >>Ago. It's, you know, it, it's funny because we've spent a lot of time over the last couple years setting up the capabilities that you're seeing us deliver right now. Right. We, we look back two or three years ago and we knew where we wanted to be. We wanted to build things like eda. We wanted to invest in systems like Project Wisdom and the, the types of content, the cloud journey that, that now we're on and we're enabling for folks. But we had to make some really big changes. And those changes take time and, and take investment. The move into last year, John, we talked about execution environments. Yeah. And separating the control plane from the execution plane. All of that work that we did and the investment into the platform and stability of the platform leads us now into what >>Cap. And that's architectural decision. That's the long game in mind. Exactly. Making things more cohesive, but decoupled, that's an operating system kind of thinking. >>It, it totally is. It's a systems engineering and system architecture thinking. And now we can start building on top of these things like what comes after ed, what does ED allow us to do within the platform? All of the dev tools that we focused on that we haven't spent a lot of time talking about that from the product side. But being, coming in with prescriptive and opinionated dev tools, now we can show you how to build it. We can show you how to use it and connect it to your systems. Where can we go next? I'm really excited. >>Yeah. Your customer base two has also been part of from the beginning and they solve their own problems and they rolled it up, grow with it, and now it's a full on platform. The question I then ask is, okay, you believe it's a platform, which it is, it's enabling. What do you guys see as that possible dots that could connect that might come on top of this from a creativity standpoint, from an ecosystem standpoint, from an Ansible standpoint, from maybe Red Hat. I mean, wisdom shows that you can go into the treasure trove of IBM's research, pull out some AI and some machine learning. Both that in or shim layered in whatever you do. >>I mean, what I'm starting to see much more, especially as I, the nice thing about being here is actually getting face to face with customers again and you know, actually hearing what they're talking about. But you know, we've moved away from a Ansible specific story where I'm talking about how I, I was always, I was looking to automate, I was looking to go to Ansible. Well now I've got the automation capability. Now we've enhanced the automation. Capabil wisdom enhances the automation capability further. What about all those, those broader set of management solutions that I've got that I would like to start connecting to each other. So we're starting to take the same like, you know, you mentioned as then software architecture, software design principles. We'll apply those same application design principles, apply them to your IT management because we've got data center with the pressures on there. We've got the expansion into cloud, we've got the expansion to the edge, right? Each adding a new layer of complexity and a new layer of, you know, more that you have to then look after. But there's still the same >>Number of people. So a thousand flower blooms kind of situation. >>Exactly. And so how do I, how do I constrain, how do I tame it, right? How do I sit there and go, I, I can control that now I can look after that. I contain that. I can, I can deal with what I wanna do. So I'm focusing on what's important and we are getting stuff done. >>We, we've been quoting Andy Grove on the cube lately. Let chaos, rain and then rain in the chaos. Yes. Right? I mean that's kind of every inflection point has complexity before it gets simpler. >>Yeah, that's right. >>Yeah. You can't, there's answer that one. That's >>Perfectly. >>Yeah. Yeah. What do you expect to see chief ar you gotta have the vision. What's gonna pop out? What's that low, low hanging fruit? What's gonna bloom first? What do you think's gonna come? >>I, you know, my overarching vision is that I just want to be able to automate more. Where, where can we bring back, So edge cloud, right? That's obvious, but what things run in the cloud and and on the edge, right? Devices, you heard Chad in the keynote this morning talk about programmable logic controllers, sensors, fans, motors, things like that. This is the, the sort of, this is the next frontier of automation is that connecting your data centers and your systems, your applications and needs all the way out to where your customers are. Gas stations, point of sale systems. >>It's instant. It's instant. It is what it is. It's like just add, Just >>Add faster and bigger. Yeah. >>But what happens if, I'll give you a tease. What I think is, is what happens if this happens? So I've got much more rich feature, rich diverse set of tools looking after my systems, observing what's going on. And they go through a whole filtering process and they say such and such has happened, right? Wisdom picks that up and decides from that natural language statement that comes outta the back of that system. That's the task I think is now appropriate to run. Where do you run that? You need a secure execution capability. Pass that to an support, that single task. And now we run inside the automation platform at any of those locations that you just mentioned, right? Stitching those things together and having that sequence of events all the way through where you, you predefine what's possible. You know, you start to bias the system towards what is your accepted standard and then let those clever systems do what you are investing in them for, which is to run your IT and make it >>Easier. Rich here was on earlier, I said, hey, about voice activated it. Provision the cluster. Yeah. >>Last question guys, before we run out of time for this. For customers who take advantage of this new frontier, how can they get started with the bench of an what's? >>That's a good question. You know, we, we've engaged our community because they trust us and we trust them to build really good products. ansible.com/events. Oh man, >>I did have the, I >>Had the cup, the landing page. >>Find somebody find that. >>Well it's on GitHub, right? GitHub It is. >>Yeah it >>Is. Absolutely ansible.com. It's probably a link somewhere if I on the front page. Exactly. On GitHub. The good code too. >>Right? Exactly. And so look at there, you can see where we're going on our roadmap, what we're capable of today. Examples, we're gonna be doing labs and blogs and demonstrations of it over the next day, week, month. Right. You'll be able to see this evolve. You get to be the, the sort of vanguard of support and actions on this and >>Cause we really want, we really want users to play with it, right? Of course. We've been doing this for a while. We've seen what we think is right. We want users to play with it. Tell us whether the syntax works, whether it makes sense, how does it run, how does it work? That's the exciting part. But at the same time, we want the partners, you know, we, we don't know all the technologies, right? We want the partners that we have that work with us already in the community to go and sort of, you know, do those integrations, do those triggers to their systems, define rules for their stuff cuz they'll talk to their customers about it as >>Well. Right? Right. It'll be exciting to see what unfolds over the next six to nine months or so with the partners getting involved, the community getting involved. Guys, congratulations on the big announcements. Sounds like a lot of work. I can tell. We can tell. Your excitement level is huge and job well done. Thank you so much for joining us on the Cube. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our pleasure. Just All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be right back with our next guest of Stay tuned.

(Upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage day two Snowflake Summit '22 live from Caesar's forum in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante, bringing you wall to wall coverage yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We're excited to welcome Matthew Carroll to the program. The CEO of Immuta, we're going to be talking about removing barriers to secure data access security. Matthew, welcome. >> Thank you for having me, appreciate it. >> Talk to the audience a little bit about Immuta you're a Snowflake premier technology partner, but give him an overview of Immuta what you guys do, your vision, all that good stuff. >> Yeah, absolutely, thanks. Yeah, if you think about what Immunta at it's core is, we're a data security platform for the modern data stack, right? So what does that mean? It means that we embed natively into a Snowflake and we enforce policies on data, right? So, the rules to be able to use it, to accelerate data access, right? So, that means connecting to the data very easily controlling it with any regulatory or security policy on it as well as contractual policies, and then being able to audit it. So, that way, any corporation of any size can leverage their data and share that data without risking leaking it or potentially violating a regulation. >> What are some of the key as we look at industry by industry challenges that Immuta is helping those customers address and obviously quickly since everything is accelerating. >> Yeah. And it's, you're seeing it 'cause the big guys like Snowflake are verticalizing, right? You're seeing a lot of industry specific, you know, concepts. With us, if you think of, like, where we live obviously policies on data regulated, right? So healthcare, how do we automate HIPAA compliance? How do we redesign clinical trial management post COVID, right? If you're going to have billions of users and you're collecting that data, pharmaceutical companies can't wait to collect that data. They need to remove those barriers. So, they need to be able to collect it, secure it, and be able to share it. Right? So, double and triple blinded studies being redesigned in the cloud. Government organizations, how do we share security information globally with different countries instantaneously? Right? So these are some of the examples where we're helping organizations transform and be able to kind of accelerate their adoption of data. >> Matt, I don't know if you remember, I mean, I know you remember coming to our office. But we had an interesting conversation and I was telling Lisa. Years ago I wrote a piece of you know, how to build on top of, AWS. You know, there's so much opportunity. And we had a conversation, at our office, theCUBE studios in Marlborough, Massachusetts. And we both, sort of, agreed that there was this new workload emerging. We said, okay, there's AWS, there's Snowflake at the time, we were thinking, and you bring machine learning, at time where we were using data bricks, >> Yeah. >> As the example, of course now it's been a little bit- >> Yeah. Careful. >> More of a battle, right, with those guys. But, and so, you see them going in their different directions, but the premise stands is that there's an ecosystem developing, new workloads developing, on top of the hyper scale infrastructure. And you guys play a part in that. So, describe what you're seeing there 'cause you were right on in that conversation. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> It's nice to be, right. >> Yeah. So when you think of this design pattern, right, is you have a data lake, you have a warehouse, and you have an exchange, right? And this architecture is what you're seeing around you now, is this is every single organization in the world is adopting this design pattern. The challenge that where we fit into kind of a sliver of this is, the way we used to do before is application design, right? And we would build lots of applications, and we would build all of our business logic to enforce security controls and policies inside each app. And you'd go through security and get it approved. In this paradigm, any user could potentially access any data. There's just too many data sources, too many users, and too many things that can go wrong. And to scale that is really hard. So, like, with Immuta, what we've done, versus what everyone else has done is we natively embedded into every single one of those compute partners. So ,Snowflake, data breaks, big query, Redshift, synapse on and on. Natively underneath the covers, so that was BI tools, those data science tools hit Snowflake. They don't have to rewrite any of their code, but we automatically enforce policy without them having to do anything. And then we consistently audit that. I call that the separation of policy from platform. So, just like in the world in big data, when we had to separate compute from storage, in this world, because we're global, right? So we're, we have a distributed workforce and our data needs to abide by all these new security rules and regulations. We provide a flexible framework for them to be able to operate at that scale. And we're the only ones in the world doing it. >> Dave Vellante: See the key there is, I mean, Snowflake is obviously building out its data cloud and the functions that it's building in are quite impressive. >> Yeah. >> Dave Vellante: But you know at some point a customer's going to say, look I have other stuff, whether it's in an Oracle database, or data lake or wherever, and that should just be a node on this global, whatever you want to call it, mesh or fabric. And then if I'm hearing you right, you participate in all of that. >> Correct? Yeah We kind of, we were able to just natively inject into each, and then be able to enforce that policy consistently, right? So, hey, can you access HIPAA data? Who are you? Are you authorized to use this? What's the purpose you want to query this data? Is it for fraud? Is it for marketing? So, what we're trying to do as part of this new design paradigm is ensure that we can automate nearly the entire data access process, but with the confidence and de-risk it, that's kind of the key thing. But the one thing I will mention is I think we talk a lot about the core compute, but I think, especially at this summit, data sharing is everything. Right? And this concept of no copy data sharing, because the data is too big and there's too many sets to share, that's the keys to the kingdom. You got to get your lake and your warehouse set with good policy, so you can effectively share it. >> Yeah, so, I wanted to just to follow up, if I may. So, you'd mentioned separating compute from storage and a lot of VC money poured into that. A lot of VC money poured into cloud database. How do you see, do you see Snowflake differentiating substantially from all the other cloud databases? And how so? >> I think it's the ease of use, right? Apple produces a phone that isn't much different than other competitors. Right? But what they do is, end to end, they provide an experience that's very simple. Right? And so yes. Are there other warehouses? Are there other ways to, you know you heard about their analytic workloads now, you know through unistore, where they're going to be able to process analytical workloads as well as their ad hoc queries. I think other vendors are obviously going to have the same capabilities, but I think the user experience of Snowflake right now is top tier. Right? Is I can, whether I'm a small business, I can load my debt in there and build an app really quickly. Or if I'm a JP Morgan or, you know, a West Farmer's I can move legacy, you know monolithic architectures in there in months. I mean, these are six months transitions. When think about 20 years of work is now being transitioned to the cloud in six months. That's the difference. >> So measuring ease of views and time to value, time to market. >> Yeah. That's it's everything is time to value. No one wants to manage the infrastructure. In the Hudup world, no one wants to have expensive customized engineers that are, you know, keeping up your Hudup infrastructure any longer. Those days are completely over. >> Can you share an example of a joint customer, where really the joint value proposition that Immuta and Snowflake bring, are delivering some pretty substantial outcomes? >> Yeah. I, what we're seeing is and we're obviously highly incentivized to get them in there because it's easier on us, right? Because we can leverage their row and com level security. We can leverage their features that they've built in to provide a better experience to our customers. And so when we talk about large banks, they're trying to move Terra data workloads into Snowflake. When we talk about clinical trial management, they're trying to get away from physical copies of data, and leverage the exchanges of mechanism, so you can manage data contracts, right? So like, you know, when we think of even like a company like Latch, right? Like Latch uses us to be able to oversee all of the consumer data they have. Without like a Snowflake, what ends up happening is they end up having to double down and invest on their own people building out all their own infrastructure. And they don't have the capital to invest in third party tools like us that keep them safe, prevent data leaks, allow them to do more and get more value out of their data, which is what they're good at. >> So TCO reduction I'm hearing. >> Matthew Carroll: Yes, exactly. >> Matt, where are you as a company, you've obviously made a lot of progress since we last talked. Maybe give us the update on you know, the headcount, and fundraising, and- >> Yeah, we're just at about 250 people, which scares me every day, but it's awesome. But yeah, we've just raised 100 million dollars- >> Lisa Martin: Saw that, congratulations. >> Series E, thank you, with night dragon leading it. And night dragon was very tactical as well. We are moving, we found that data governance, I think what you're seeing in the market now is the catalog players are really maturing, and they're starting to add a suite of features around governance, right? So quality control, observability, and just traditional asset management around their data. What we are finding is is that there's a new gap in this space, right? So if you think about legacy it's we had infrastructure security we had the four walls and we protect our four walls. Then we moved to network security. We said, oh, the adversary is inside zero trust. So, let's protect all of our endpoints, right? But now we're seeing is data is the security flaw data could be, anyone could potentially access it in this organization. So how do we protect data? And so what we have matured into is a data security company. What we have found is, there's this next generation of data security products that are missing. And it's this blend between authentication like an, an Okta or an AuthO and auth- I'm sorry, authorization. Like Immuta, where we're authorizing certain access. And we have to pair together, with the modern observability, like a data dog, to provide an a layer above this modern data stack, to protect the data to analyze the users, to look for threats. And so Immuta has transformed with this capital. And we brought Dave DeWalt onto our board because he's a cybersecurity expert, he gives us that understanding of what is it like to sell into this modern cyber environment. So now, we have this platform where we can discover data, analyze it, tag it, understand its risk, secure it to author and enforce policies. And then monitor, the key thing is monitoring. Who is using the data? Why are they using the data? What are the risks to that? In order to enforce the security. So, we are a data security platform now with this raise. >> Okay. That, well, that's a new, you know, vector for you guys. I always saw you as an adjacency, but you're saying smack dab in the heart >> Matthew Carroll: Yes. Yeah. We're jumping right in. What we've seen is there is a massive global gap. Data is no longer just in one country. So it is, how do we automate policy enforcement of regulatory oversight, like GDPR or CCPA, which I think got this whole category going. But then we quickly realized is, well we have data jurisdiction. So, where does that data have to live? Where can I send it to? Because from Europe to us, what's the export treaty? We don't have defined laws anymore. So we needed a flexible framework to handle that. And now what we're seeing is data leaks, upon data leaks, and you know, the Snowflakes and the other cloud compute vendors, the last thing they ever want is a data leak out of their ecosystem. So, the security aspects are now becoming more and more important. It's going to be an insider threat. It's someone that already has access to that and has the rights to it. That's going to be the risk. And there is no pattern for a data scientist. There's no zero trust model for data. So we have to create that. >> How are you, last question, how are you going to be using a 100 million raised in series E funding, which you mentioned, how are you going to be leveraging that investment to turn the volume up on data security? >> Well, and we still have also another 80 million still in the bank from our last raise, so 180 million now, and potentially more soon, we'll kind of throw that out there. But, the first thing is M and A I believe in a recessing market, we're going to see these platforms consolidate. Larger customer of ours are driving us to say, Hey, we need less tools. We need to make this easier. So we can go faster. They're, even in a recessing market, these customers are not going to go slower. They're moving in the cloud as fast as possible, but it needs to be easier, right? It's going back to the mid nineties kind of Lego blocks, right? Like the IBM, the SAP, the Informatica, right? So that's number one. Number two is investing globally. Customer success, engineering, support, 24 by seven support globally. Global infrastructure on cloud, moving to true SaaS everywhere in the world. That's where we're going. So sales, engineering, and customer success globally. And the third is, is doubling down on R and D. That monitor capability, we're going to be building software around. How do we monitor and understand risk of users, third parties. So how do you handle data contracts? How do you handle data use agreements? So those are three areas we're focused on. >> Dave Vellante: How are you scaling go to market at this point? I mean, I presume you are. >> Yeah, well, I think as we're leveraging these types of engagements, so like our partners are the big cloud compute vendors, right? Those data clouds. We're injecting as much as we can into them and helping them get more workloads onto their infrastructure because it benefits us. And then obviously we're working with GSIs and then RSIs to kind of help with this transformation, but we're all in, we're actually deprecating support of legacy connectors. And we're all in on cloud compute. >> How did the pivot to all in on security, how did it affect your product portfolio? I mean, is that more positioning or was there other product extensions that where you had to test product market fit? >> Yeah. This comes out of customer drive. So we've been holding customer advisory boards across Europe, Asia and U.S. And what we just saw was a pattern of some of these largest banks and pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies in the world was, hey we need to understand who is actually on our data. We have a better understanding of our data now, but we don't actually understand why they're using our data. Why are they running these types of queries? Is this machine, you know logic, that we're running on this now, we invested all this money in AI. What's the risk? They just don't know. And so, yeah, it's going to change our product portfolio. We modularized our platform to the street components over the past year, specifically now, so we can start building custom applications on top of it, for specific users like the CSO, like, you know, the legal department, and like third party regulators to come in, as well as as going back to data sharing, to build data use agreements between one or many entities, right? So an SMP global can expose their data to third parties and have one consistent digital contract, no more long memo that you have to read the contract, like, Immuta can automate those data contracts between one or many entities. >> Dave Vellante: And make it a checkbox item. >> It's just a checkbox, but then you can audit it all, right? >> The key thing is this, I always tell people, there's negligence and gross negligence. Negligence, you can go back and fix something, gross negligence you don't have anything to put into controls. Regulators want you to be at least negligent, grossly negligent. They get upset. (laughs) >> Matthew, it sounds like great stuff is going on at Immuta, lots of money in the bank. And it sounds like a very clear and strategic vision and direction. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE this morning. >> Thank you so much >> For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of day two, Snowflake Summit '22, coming at ya live, from the show floor in Las Vegas. Be right back with our next guest. (Soft music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage of day. One of snowflake summit 22 fourth annual. We're very happy to be here. A lot of people here, Lisa Martin with Dave Valante, David's always great to be at these events with you, but me. This one is shot out of the cannon from day one, data, data, data, data. That's what you heard of here. First, we have two guests joining us next, please. Welcome Matthew Scalian. Who's an alumni of the cube CEO and founder of Matillion and Jer staying chief data architect and global head of data engineering from Western union. Welcome gentlemen. Thank >>You. Great to be here. >>We're gonna unpack the Western union story in a second. I love that, but Matthew, I wanted to start with you, give the audience who might not be familiar with Matillion an overview, your vision, your differentiators, your joint value statement with snowflake, >>Of course. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the cube. Again, Matillion S mission is to make the world's data useful, and we do that by providing a technology platform that allows our customers to load transform, synchronize, and orchestrate data on the snowflake data cloud. And on, on the cloud in general, we've been doing that for a number of years. We're co headquartered in the UK and the us, hence my dat accents. And we work with all sorts of companies, commercial scale, large end enterprises, particularly including of course, I'm delighted to say our friends at Western union. So that's why we're here today. >>And we're gonna talk about that in a second, but I wanna understand what's new with the data integration platform from Matillion perspective, lots of stuff coming out, give us an overview. >>Yeah, of course, it's been a really busy year and it's great to be here at snowflake summit to be able to share some of what we've been working on. You know, the Matillion platform is all about making our customers as productive as possible in terms of time to value insight on that analytics, data science, AI projects, like get you to value faster. And so the more technology we can put in the platform and the easier we can make it to use, the better we can achieve that goal. So this year we've, we've shipped a product that we call MDL 2.0, that's enterprise focused, exquisitely, easy to use batch data pipelines. So customers can load data even more simply into the snowflake data cloud, very excitingly we've also launched Matillion CDC. And so this is an industry first cloud native writer, head log based change data capture. >>I haven't come up with a shorter way of saying that, but, and surprise customers need this technology and it's been around for years, but mostly pre-cloud technology. That's been repurposed for the cloud. And so Matillion has rebuilt that concept for the cloud. And we launched that earlier this year. And of course we've continued to build out the core Matillion ETL platform that today over a thousand joint snowflake Matillion customers use, including Western union, of course we've been adding features there such as universal connectivity. And so a challenge that all data integration vendors have is having the right connectors for their source systems. Universal connectivity allows you to connect to any source system without writing code point and click. We shape that as well. So it's been a busy year, >>Was really simple. Sorry. I love that. He said that and it also sounded great with your accent. I didn't wanna >>Thank you. Excellent. Javier, talk about your role at Western union in, in what you've seen in terms of the evolution of the, the data stack. >>So in the last few years, well, a little bit of Western union, a 70 or 170 year old company, pretty much everybody knows what Western union is, right? Driving an interesting synergy from what Matthew says, when data moves money moves, that's what we do when he moves the da, he moves the data. We move the money. That's the synergy between, you know, us and the organization that support us from data move perspective. So what I've seen in the last few years is obviously a shift towards the cloud, but, you know, within the cloud itself, obviously there's a lot of players as well. And we as customers have always been wishing to have a short, smaller footprint of data so that the movement becomes a little lesser. You know, interestingly enough, in this conference, I've heard some very interesting stuff, which kind of helping me to bring that footprint down to a manageable number, to be more governed, to be more, you know, effective in terms of delivering more end results for my customers as well. >>So Matillion has been a great partner for us from our cloud adoption perspective. During the COVID times, we were a re we are a, you know, multi-channel organization. We have retail stores as well, our digital presence, but people just couldn't go to the retail stores. So we had to find ways to accelerate our adoption, make sure our systems are scaling and making sure that we are delivering the same experience to our customers. And that's where, you know, tools like Matillion came in and really, really partnered up with us to kind of bring it up to the level. >>So talk specifically about the stack evolution. Cause I have this sort of theory that everybody talks about injecting data and, and machine intelligence and AI and machine learning into apps. But the application development stack is like totally separate from the, the data analytics and the data pipeline stack. And the database is somewhere over here as well. How is that evolving? Are those worlds coming together? >>Some part of those words are coming together, but where I still see the difference is your heavy lifting will still happen on the data stack. You cannot have that heavy lifting on the app because if once the apps becomes heavy, you'll have trouble communicating with, with, with the organizations. You know, you need to be as lean as possible in the front end and make sure things are curated. Things are available on demand as soon as possible. And that's why you see all these API driven applications are doing really, really well because they're delivering those results back to the, the leaner applications much faster. So I'm a big proponent of, yes, it can be hybrid, but the majority of the heavy lifting still needs to happen down at the data layer, which is where I think snowflake plays a really good role >>In APIs are the connective tissue >>APIs connections. Yes. >>Also I think, you know, in terms of the, the data stack, there's another parallel that you can draw from applications, right? So technology is when they're new, we tend to do things in a granular way. We write a lot of code. We do a lot of sticking of things together with plasters and sticky tape. And it's the purview of high end engineers and people enthusiastic about that to get started. Then the business starts to see the value in this stuff, and we need to move a lot faster. And technology solutions come in and this is what the, the data cloud is all about, right? The technology getting out of the way and allowing people to focus on higher order problems of innovating around analytics, data applications, AI, machine learning, you know, that's also where Matillion sit as well as other companies in this modern enterprise data stack is technology vendors are coming in allowing organizations to move faster and have high levels of productivity. So I think that's a good parallel to application development. >>And's just follow up on that. When you think about data prep and you know, all the focus on data quality, you've got a data team, you know, in the data pipeline, a very specialized, maybe even hyper specialized data engineers, quality engineers, data, quality engineers, data analysts, data scientist, but they, and they serve a lot of different business lines. They don't necessarily have the business, they don't have the business context typically. So it's kind of this back and forth. Do you see that changing in your organization or, or the are the lines of business taking more responsibility for the data and, and addressing that problem? It's, >>It's like you die by thousand paper cuts or you just die. Right? That's the kind >>Of, right, >>Because if I say it's, it's good to be federated, it comes with its own flaws. But if I say, if it's good to be decentralized, then I'm the, the guy to choke, right? And in my role, I'm the guy to choke. So I've selectively tried to be a pseudo federated organization, where do I do have folks reporting into our organization, but they sit close to the line of business because the business understands data better. We are working with them hand in glove. We have dedicated teams that support them. And our problem is we are also regional. We are 200 countries. So the regional needs are very different than our us needs. Majority of the organizations that you probably end up talking to have like very us focused, 50 per more than 50% of our revenue is international. So we do, we are dealing with people who are international, their needs for data, their needs for quality and their needs for the, the delivery of those analytics and the data is completely different. And so we have to be a little bit more closer to the business than traditionally. Some, some organizations feel that they need >>To, is there need for the underlying infrastructure and the operational details that as diverse, or is that something that you bring standardization to the, >>So the best part about this, the cloud that happened to us is exactly that, because at one point of time, I had infrastructure in one country. I had another infrastructure sitting in another country, regional teams, making different different decisions of bringing in different tools. Now I can standardize. I will say, Matillion is our standard for doing ETL work. If this is the use case, but then it gets deployed across the geographies because the cloud helps us or the cloud platform helps us to manage it. Sitting down here. I have three centers around the world, you know, Costa Rica, India, and the us. I can manage 24 7 sitting here. No >>Problem. So the underlying our infrastructure is, is global, but the data needs are dealt with locally. Yep. >>One of the pav question, I was just thinking JVE is super well positioned funds for you, which is around that business domain knowledge versus technical expertise. Cause again, early in technology journeys tend, things tend to be very technical and therefore only high end engineers can do it, but high end engineers are scar. Right? Right. And, and also, I mean, we survey our hundreds of large enterprise customers and they tell us they spend two thirds of their time doing stuff they don't really want to do like reinventing the wheel, basic data movement and the low order staff. And so if you can make those people more productive and allow them to focus on higher value problems, but also bring pseudo technical people into it. Overall, the business can go a lot faster. And the way you do that is by making it easier. That's why Matillion is a low code NOCO platform, but Jer and Western union are doing this right. I >>Mean, I can't compete with AWS and Google to hire people. So I need to find people who are smart to figure the products that we have to make them work. I don't want them to spend time on infrastructure, Adam, I don't want them to spend time on trying to manage platforms. I want them to deliver the data, deliver the results to the business so that they can build and serve their customers better. So it's a little bit of a different approach, different mindset. I used to be in consulting for 17 years. I thought I knew it all, but it changed overnight when I own all of these systems. And I'm like, I need to be a little bit more smarter than this. I need to be more proactive and figure out what my business needs rather than what just from a technology needs. It's more what the business needs and how I can deliver that needs to them. So simple analogy, you know, I can build the best architecture in the world. It's gonna cost me an arm and leg, but I can't drive it because the pipeline is not there. So I can have a Ferrari, but I can't drive it. It's still capped at 80, 80 miles an hour. So rather than spend, rather than building one Ferrari, let me have 10 Toyotas or 10 Fs, which will go further along and do better for my cus my, for my customers. >>So how do you see this whole, we hearing about the data cloud. We hear about the marketplace, data products now, application development inside the data cloud. How do you see that affecting not so much the productivity of the data teams. I don't wanna necessarily say, but the product, the value that, that customers like you can get out >>Data. So data is moving closer to the business. That's the value I see, because you are injecting the business and you're injecting the application much more closer to the data because it, in the past, it was days and days of, you know, churn the data to actually clear results. Now the data has moved much closer. So I have a much faster turnaround time. The business can adapt and actually react much, much faster. It took us like 16 to 30 days to deliver, you know, data for marketing. Now I can turn it down in four hours. If I see something happening, I'll give you an example. The war in Ukraine happened. Let is shut down operations in Russia. Ukraine is cash swamp. There's no cash in Ukraine. We have cash. We roll out campaign, $0 money, transferred to Ukraine within four hours of the world going on. That's the impact that we have >>Massive impact. That's huge, especially with such a macro challenge going on, on the, in, in the world. Thank you so much for sharing the Matillion snowflake partnership story, how it's helping Western union really transform into a data company. We love hearing stories of organizations that are 170 years old that have always really been technology focused, but to see it come to life so quickly is pretty powerful. Guys. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks >>Guys. Thank you, having it. Thank >>You >>For Dave Velante and our guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes live coverage of snowflake summit 22 live from Las Vegas. Stick around. We'll be back after a short break.

(upbeat music) >> Live on the floor in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here for the next two days getting all the action back in person. We're at AWS re:Invent, a few months ago. Now we're back, events are coming back and we're happy to be here with theCUBE. Bring all the action, also virtual, we have a hybrid cube. Check out theCUBE.net, siliconangle.com for all the coverage. After the event we've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, Director of Solutions Architecture with Innovation Solutions, the booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, I'm glad to be here. >> So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee, we were chatting before you came on camera. It's great that be back to events. >> It's amazing, this is the first summit I've been to in what two, three years. >> It's awesome, we'll be at the AWS Summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going, distributed computing you got on-premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything, Dev sec Ops, everyone kind of sees that, you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out, and the edge is with the action is. You guys are number one premier partner at SMB for edge. >> That's right. >> Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and what you do. >> That's right, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around especially the edge public cloud. For us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. We are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it-- >> Give an example. >> Example would be Panama. We have a customer there that needs to deploy some financial tech, data and compute is legally required to be in Panama but they love AWS, and they want to deploy AWS services in region. So they've taken EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and snowball in region, inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >> You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering AWS since 2013 with theCUBE about their events, and we watched the progression. Andy Jassy was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam Slepsky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't want to say trying to avoid. Of course Amazon listens to customers, they work backwards from the customers, we all know that. But the real issue is they're bread and butters, EC2 and S3. And then now they got tons of services, and the cloud is obviously successful, and we're seeing that. But the edge brings up a whole nother level. >> It does. >> Computing. >> It does. >> That's not set centralized in the public cloud. Now they got regions, so what is the issue with the edge? What's driving the behavior? Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, operational technologies and IT merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got 5G, so it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS? >> Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best Outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers, on location or in the field like with media companies. >> Outpost is interesting, we always used to rip on theCUBE 'cause it's basically Amazon in a box pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff. But now cloud native operations are becoming the standard. You're starting to see some standard, Deepak Singh's group is doing some amazing work with opensource, Raul's team on the AI side. Obviously you got Swam who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, Outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did Outpost do its job? 'Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say Outpost? >> Yeah, I think Outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at Outpost really consider, do I want to invest in this hardware? Do I want to have this Outpost in my data center? Do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were not a good fit for Outposts, they weren't a good fit in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're going to meet you where you are with 5G. We're going to meet you where you are with wavelength. We're going to meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about Outposts and it's really increased, we can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up Outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption for sure. >> All right so you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative as that, you have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and doing that outside of the availability zone and regions for AWS. Customers in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, they want to have modernization, modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI all part of that. What's the main product or gap that you're filling for AWS outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key? Is it they don't have a footprint? Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap, why are you so successful? >> So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They want to focus on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS you take the infrastructure you take some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware, that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >> So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges? >> Matthew: Correct. >> For companies. >> Matthew: Correct. >> Mainly because the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's low latency type requirements, and then they still work with the regions, it's all tied together, is that how it works? >> And our customers, even the ones in the edge they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone because we're always going to have a failback scenario. If we're going to deploy FinTech in the Caribbean we're going to talk about hurricanes. And we're going to talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >> All right so I got to ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, now, I won't say underserved but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that requirement. It makes total sense, we're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's an outlier, it's actually growing. >> Matthew: Yeah. >> There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama. And you mentioned FinTech in the islands, there are a lot of web three happening. What's your view on the web three world right now relative? >> We have some customers actually deploying crypto especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's top of my mind right now, we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. So it's up and coming. I have some personal views that crypto is still searching for a use case. And I think it's searching a lot and we're there to help customers search for that use case. But crypto as a to technology lives really well on the AWS edge. And we're having more and more people talk to us about that. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and putting them out there on-- >> It's interesting. I mean, first of all we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little projects going on. But if you go talk to all the crypto people they say, look we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's a lot of overhead. It's not really very technical already but it's a cultural shift but there's underserved use cases around use of money but they're all using the blockchain just for smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. They all, don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened if decentralized? >> Yeah, and that's a conversation. >> It's a performance issue. >> Yeah and it's a cost issue and it's a development issue. So I think more and more as some of these currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on AWS and what does it look like to build decentralized applications but with AWS hardware and services. >> All right so take me through a use case of a customer, Matthew, around the edge. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Hey, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my app. And I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I want to migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer? >> Yeah big thing is industrial manufacturing. That's one of the best use cases. Inside industrial manufacturing we can pull in many of the AWS edge services, we can bring in private 5G so that all the equipment inside that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5G. It's better than wifi for the industrial space. When we take computing down to that industrial area because we want to do pre-processing on the data. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with regular commercially available hardware, running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the robotics depending on what we're manufacturing, right? And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back to the AWS availability zone, the standard-- >> John: For data lake, or whatever. >> To the data lake, yeah data lake house, whatever it might be. And we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. But a lot of that just in time business decisions, just in time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's one of the best use cases that we're seeing. >> And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on theCUBE for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. But also compute, going to the data that saves that cost on the data transfer but also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching, don't move the data unless you have to, but there's new things are developing. So I want to ask you what new are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything, right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. But now what does that change in the core cloud? There's a system element here, what's the new pattern? >> There's actually an organizational element as well. Because once you have to start making the decision do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. So not only are you changing your architecture you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. So now you say, okay, this can take place here. And maybe this decision can wait. And then how do I visualize that? >> By the way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You got observability going right. But you got to change the database architecture in the backs. There's new things developing. You've got more benefit. >> There are, there are. And we have more and more people that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about, customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. For the past maybe decade, it's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. >> I mean, this is a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps. Actually is not the case. You look at Databrick, Snowflake and other successes out there. And even Time Series Data which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. >> Matthew: Yep. >> So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did, a whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training, things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business benefits. There's all kinds of new scale. >> There are. And we have many customers that are running petabyte level. They're essentially data factories on premises, right? They're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay we could analyze this in the cloud. We could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud or we can run computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data, transition those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS, run 'em through machine learning. And we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >> So I got to end the segment on a kind of a fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, AWS cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What does this mean? You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out? >> Kind of, so I was-- >> You jumped out? >> I was teaching skydiving before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a skydiving instructor. I was teaching skydiving. And I heard out of the corner of my ear a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, hey, this is what I went to school for. I'd love to, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So I started and the first day there we had a discussion, EC2 had just come out and-- >> This is amazing. >> Yeah and so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And that totally revolutionized that business, that led to, that guy actually still owns skydiving airport. But through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud. And now it feels like almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and apply those lessons in those services to on premises. >> It's such a great story, is going to, the whole growth mindset, pack your own parachute. >> Matthew: Exactly. >> The cloud in the early days was pretty much will the chute open? >> Matthew: Yeah. >> It was pretty much you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you jump out a plane you got to make sure that parachute is going to open. >> And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was still, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. But it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when-- >> It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. But a lot of this cutting edge stuff is like jumping out of an airplane. You got the right equipment. You got to do the right things. >> Exactly. >> John: Matthew, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. >> Thanks for having me, thank you. >> Okay theCUBE's here live in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We'll be at AWS Summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all theCUBE action at theCUBE.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. 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>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, two guests joining me next. Matt Morgan is here. Vice-president cloud infrastructure business group at VMware and Steven Jones joins us as well. Director of services at AWS gentlemen. That's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>Glad to see everyone's doing well. Here we are virtual. So we are just around the four year anniversary of VMware cloud on AWS. Can't believe it's been 20 17, 4 years. Matt talked to us about VMware AWS partnership and how it's progressed over that time. >>The partnership has been fantastic and it's evolved. We announced VM-ware cloud on AWS general availability all the way back at VMworld, 2017, we've been releasing new features and capabilities every other week with 16 major platform releases and 300 features as customers have requested. So it's been an incredible co-engineering relationship with AWS. We've also expanded our go to market by announcing a resale program in which AWS can resell VMware cloud on AWS. We did that back in 2019 and in 2020, we've announced that AWS is VMware's preferred public cloud partner for vSphere based workloads. And VMware is AWS's preferred service for vSphere based workloads. >>So as you said, Matt, a tremendous amount of evolution and just a short four year timeframe. Stephen talked to me about the partnership through AWS, this lens. >>Yeah. You bet. Look, I agree with Matt that the partnership has been fantastic and it's just amazing to see how fast four years has gone. I really think that AWS and VMware really are a really good example of how two technology companies can work together for them. The benefit of our mutual customers, um, as Matt indicated, VM-ware is our preferred service for vSphere based workloads. And we're broadly working together as a single team across both engineering and go-to-market functions to help customers drive business value from the, the, the investments they made over the years. And then also as they work to transform their businesses into the future with cloud technology, >>Let's talk about digital transformation. That is a term we've been, we've been talking about that for many years on this program. And at every event we've all been at, right. What we've seen in the last year and a half is a massive acceleration. Now talk to me about how VMware and AWS are helping customers facilitate that digital transformation. >>So our customers see modern it infrastructure as the core pillar of a digital transformation strategy and public cloud has been a digital transformation enabler for organizations. And that's because they have so many benefits when they embraced the public cloud, including the ability to elastically consume infrastructure. That's required the ability to employ a pay as you go financial model and the ability to reduce operational overhead, which helps save both monetary costs, but also provides more flexibility. But the big driver now is the ability to embrace innovative cloud services and those services help accelerate application development, deployment and management VMware cloud on AWS is a prime example of such an offering, which not only provides these benefits, but enhances them with operational consistency working the same way their it architecture works today, giving them familiarity and enterprise robustness that VMware technologies are known for, but being able to maximize the power of the global AWS cloud >>And every year from a customer adoption perspective, that's doubling Steven walked through a couple of customer examples that really highlight the value of VMC on AWS. >>Yeah, I've got a couple here. I think, uh, Kiko Milano is a good one. There a then our Italian company, they sell cosmetics and beauty products through about 900 retail stores in 27 different markets. So quite large, but they found that their on premises data center and outsourcing partner was just too inflexible for the changing needs of their company. And within four months, uh, Kiko actually migrated all of their core workloads to Amazon. Is he too, and particularly surprised how easy it was to migrate over 300 servers to the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And this is, this is key because the actually leveraging the same platform that they were used to, which was BMR. Uh, the Kiko team actually didn't have to perform any testing or modify any other existing applications. They also, they didn't have to actually train their teams again, because again, they were already up-skilled with being able to leverage the BMR technology. >>So again, we think it's the best of both worlds customers like Kiko can come and use VMware cloud on AWS, consolidate their server footprint and also take advantage of, of a hyperscale platform. That's pretty cool. Another customer, uh, SAP global ratings that our company provides a high quality market intelligence in the form of credit ratings, research, and thought leadership to help educate market participants to make better financial decisions who doesn't want to make a better financial decision. Right? So in order to accelerate their business growth and globalization really meet new business capabilities, they knew they needed to move a hundred percent to the cloud and wanted to know how they're actually going to do that. Now they also have an aging data center system outages, which are becoming more frequent, which to them actually concerned that they actually might, um, uh, face in the future, some penalties from the sec. >>So they didn't want to do that. So over the period of about eight months, think about this eight months, they moved to 150 financial apps to AWS leveraging VMware on AWS. Uh, pretty impressive. They reduce technical debt, uh, from legacy systems that were hosted on sun Solaris, Oracle excavator, and a X. And then now actually able to meet the goal demands of their business. The fun part here is they're actually meeting their uptime, uh, needs a hundred percent of the time since it actually moves these workloads to the VMware cloud on AWS. So pretty exciting. See customers link this kind of journey, >>Absolutely impressive journeys. Also short time periods to do a massive change there. It sounds like the familiarity with VMware in the console is a huge facilitator of the speed of migration and folks being able to get up and running. Stephen talked to me about some of the trends that you were seeing in organizations like the customers that you just mentioned. >>Yeah. So there are some emergency transfer store and a lot of customers want to leverage the same cloud operating models, but also in their own data centers. So they can take advantage of agility and innovation of cloud will also meeting requirements that they sometimes have that keep them from adopting cloud. Uh, you can think of workloads that sometimes have low latency requirements, right? Or they need to process large volumes of data locally. Uh, other times customers tell us they really need the flexibility to run data workloads, um, in a particular area that has data sovereignty or residency requirements. So when, as we talk about customers, um, they tell us that not only do they want to minimize their, their need to actually manage and operate infrastructure, um, and focus on business innovation is sometimes need to do this, um, in a, in a data center this close to them, if that makes sense. So they're looking for the best again of both worlds. >>Got it. The best of both worlds and Matt, you have some breaking news to share. What is it? >>So today we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud on AWS outposts. >>Awesome. Congratulations. Tell me about that. Let's dig into it. >>So for customers looking to extend their AWS centric model to an on-premise location, that data center edge location via more cloud on AWS, outposts delivers the agility and innovation of AWS cloud, but on premises and VMware cloud on AWS outpost is based on VMware cloud, a jointly engineered service. So together we're delivering this service on premises as a service. This gives us the capability to integrate VMware's enterprise class architecture and platform with next generation dedicated Amazon nitro based ECE to bare metal instances. It provides a deeply integrated hybrid cloud operating environment that extends from a customer's data center to these particular services running on premises in the data center, the edge, or to the public cloud and having a unified control plane between all of it. >>A unified control plan is absolutely critical. Uh, Stephen eight, >>We have a detailed plan to offer integrated AWS services, and that capability really enhances the innovation angle for customers as they embraced the modernization of their applications. >>Another great example of how deep the partnership is Steven AWS outpost was announced at reinvent, I think 2019, which was the last time I was at an event in person. So coming up on a couple of years here, when GA talked to me about some of the key use cases that you're seeing, where it really excels. >>Yeah. So Matt, Matt highlighted a number of these, right. And you're right. It was 2019. Uh, we were all together back then and hopefully we can do that, uh, very soon here, um, quickly on apple. So overall, since, since we're talking about outposts, uh, VMware cloud on a post as well. So the thing here and Matt highlighted this is that without posts, we actually live we've leveraged, leveraged literally the same hardware and control plane technology that we leverage in our own data centers so that the customers will come to know and love and expect about the AWS platform and VMC on AWS, uh, uh, is, is, is the exact same thing that we'll be able to get with the Apple's technology. I'll give you a couple of customer examples. I think that that actually speaks to the use cases best. So, um, you remember, I talked a little bit about data locality and residency requirements. >>So first ABI Dhabi bank, uh, is the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, right? And they were offering corporate investment and personal banking service, and they wanted to deliver a digital banking service, including email and mobile payments, but they had to follow a specific residency and data retention requirements and they had to do it in the UAE. And so what they've done is they've actually leveraged multiple AWS outposts in the UAE to allow them to provide business continuity while also leveraging the same API APIs that they had to come to know about, uh, and love about the AWS services in region, right? Phillips healthcare is another really good example. Um, you can imagine that, uh, what they do every day is, is, uh, very important things like predictive analytics for preventative treatments. And so outposts Phillips has actually taken those and that developed cloud applications, again, deployed on the same infrastructure they were used to within region. Now they can actually do this in clinics at hospitals, and they're in managing that the same tools providing, uh, same end-to-end, um, view and to their own providers, 19 administrators. And so they actually estimate they have over 70,000 servers now distributed across 12,000 locations or 1200 locations. Excuse me. So that's an example of, again, just two use cases that really broadened the reach and the flexibility of customers to run workloads in the cloud, but in a on-premise fashion. Does that make sense? >>Yes, it does. And you mentioned two great stories there. One in financial services, the other one healthcare, two industries that have had to massively pivot in the last 18 months amongst many others, but let's talk a little bit more Steven, about some of the things that you're hearing from some of the early customers of BMC on outpost. What are some of the near term opportunities that you're uncovering? >>Yeah, I've got to say here too, that, uh, customers are VMware customers have been asking us for this for quite some time. I'm sure Matt would agree. Um, so look from, uh, go back to some of the use cases we've discussed low latency compute requirements. So one of our higher education customers today who has migrated workloads to be more cloud on AWS, um, is looking at, uh, extending the same capability to an on-premise experience specifically for, um, uh, school applications that require a low latency, um, uh, integration, um, from a local data processing perspective. Again, one of our VMware on AWS top biopharmaceutical companies, uh, here again in the U S um, is planning to use VMware cloud on AWS outposts for health management applications with patient records that need to be retained locally at the hospital hospital sites. And then finally you can kind of going back to the story around data residency. We have a large telco provider in Europe that is planning to use this particular offering for their applications that need to remain on premises to meet regulatory requirements. So again, you know, we're just super pleased with the amount of interest, not only in VMware cloud on AWS, but also in this new run that we're announcing today. And we're really excited to be able to support the VMware cloud experience really on the AWS Apple's platform for a of these use cases. >>One of the things we've talked about for many years with both VMware and AWS is the dedication to listening to the voice of the customer. Not obviously this is a great example, Steven, as you said, VMware customers have been asking for this for awhile. So while customers have a ton of choice, I want you guys to unpack what the differentiators are of this service. And Matt, if we can start with you to bring you back into the conversation, we'd love to get your, your input on those differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So people have to look at this for the service that's delivered and on the VMware side of the equation, we're delivering the full VMware cloud infrastructure capability. This is delivered as a service as a cloud service on premises. So why is this valuable? Well, it relieves the it burden of infrastructure management and fully maximizes the value of a fully managed cloud service, giving an organization, the capability to unlock the renovation, budgets, and start to invest truly an innovation. This is all about continuous life cycle management, ongoing service monitoring, automated processes to ensure the health and security the infrastructure. And of course, this is backed by expert VMware site recovery and reliability engineers, to ensure that everything works perfectly. We also enable organizations to leverage best in class enterprise grade capabilities that we've talked about in our compute storage and networking for best-in-class resiliency auto-scaling and intrinsic availability. >>So there's no long procurement cycles to set up these environments. And that means it's developer ready right out of the box. We're also deeply integrated with what customers do today. So end to end hybrid cloud usually requires end-to-end hybrid processes. And with this integration into those processes is instant, no reconfiguration, no conversion, no refactoring, no rearchitecture of existing applications using VMware HDX or B motion organizations can move applications to leverage this cloud service instantly. It allows you to use established on premises governance, security, and operational policies, and ensures that that workload portability I mentioned goes both ways. It's bi-directional as customers need to have portability to meet their business requirements. As we mentioned earlier, there's a unified hybrid control plane with a single pane of glass to manage resources across the end-to-end hybrid cloud environment. And we're giving direct access to 200 plus native AWS services. And that enables an organization to truly modernize their applications, starting where they are today. And so that gives you the real capability to deliver a unique service. One that gives you an organization, the ability to migrate without any downtime have fast, fast cost effective capabilities and a low risk to their hybrid cloud strategy. >>Excellent. That's a pretty jam packed list of differentiators there, but one of the things that it really sounds like not from what you said is how much work has gone on to make the transition smooth for customers, give them that flexibility and that portability that they need. Those are marketing terms you and I know are used very frequently, but it really seems like the work that you've done here will be done straight to that. I want to ask you Stephen, that same question from AWS's perspective, what really differentiates the solution. >>It is a good question. I'll just, uh, I'll agree that there has been a ton of work first that is, has gone, gone into actually making this happen. Right. Um, and to, to all the points that Matt made. And I would just add that again. 80 was outpost is built on the same AWS nitro system and infrastructure. The customers have already come to love in the cloud. And so gone really are the days where customers have to worry about procuring and racking and stacking their own gear layer on all the benefits, the map outline from a VMware perspective. And again, we, we really believe the customers are getting the best of both worlds here. Um, with, with specifically with the compute that comes in the outpost rack, um, customers actually get getting kind of built in redundancy and resiliency, hard security, all those things that customers don't know, they need certain things. >>The customers know they need to pay attention to, but also want some help with. And so we've, we, we put a lot of thought and effort into this. Um, but could I just, uh, explain a little bit about the customer experience, um, when a customer orders and AWS outposts rack, right? AWS actually signs up, uh, to do a fully managed experience here. Like we'll bring people in to actually do site assessments. Um, we'll manage the hardware, setup, the installation and the maintenance of that gear over time. Well, VM-ware also manages the, the software defined data center construct as well as, um, the, the single point for, uh, for support questions. And so together, we really thought through how customers is met, but it get an end to end experience from hardware all the way up through application modernization. It's pretty exciting, >>Very deep partnership there. And we're out of time, but I do want to ask you guys, where can customers go, who are interested in learning more about this new service? >>So at VM world, there are a collection of DMR cloud, AWS sessions, including sessions, dedicated to VMware cloud on AWS outpost. We encourage everyone who's attending VMworld to look up those sessions and you'll learn all about the hardware, the service, the capabilities, the procurement, and how to get started. In addition, on vmware.com, we have a web portal for you to gain additional knowledge through a digital consumption. That's vmware.com/vmc-outposts. >>Awesome. Matt, thank you. I'm sure folks will be just drinking up all of this information at the sessions at VMworld 2021. And I hope to see you in person at next year's VM. I'm crossing my fingers. Great to see you guys Format Morgan and Steve Jones. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cubes coverage of the em world to 2021.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got three great guests here to talk about IBM Cloud Satellite and AI operations. Laura Guio, GM of Global Cisco Alliance. Matthew Angelstad, IBM Partner, Lead Client Partner for Canada, Financial Services. And Kuberan Kandasamy, VP of Personal Insurance at Economical Insurance. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE, this great panel on Cloud Satellite and AI ops. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John, good to see you. >> Well, first, let's start with you. There's the General Manager for the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid and it's pretty much determined that's the standard and multicloud is right around the corner. The programmability of the infrastructure is critical. And so, obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that. Take us through the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. >> Absolutely, so John, as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25-year relationship between IBM and Cisco, long-standing. Now, if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company. But with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around a supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kyndryl, our spin-off of what we were previously calling NewCo, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the Red Hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three-way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our Satellite product, which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all of this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So, we're super excited about this. >> Real quick while I have you, you brought up a couple of key points. I just want to get to, I know we're going to get to it later, but the operating model has shifted. You mentioned with the NewCo and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and APIs are critical. This new cloud operating model is really the center of that equation. How does that relate into all that? >> So, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically. And you take what Cisco's doing, and you know, we've got a client here with us today, Kuberan who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client. What are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place? And then what are all those surrounding elements around software, managing the ops and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco couple together, really great value. >> Kuberan, you got teed up beautifully there. So, I want to go to you and then I'll go to Matthew after. But, okay, tell us more about this IBM-Cisco dynamic. You guys are a hot growth company doing very well and continuing to grow. And sure, post-pandemic is looking good too. So, take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco. >> Sure. Sure, John, thank you. You know, to appreciate how we got here and why we asked IBM and Cisco to help us, let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet, an MVP. Sonnet is our fully automated, direct-to-customer digital channel, where customers can quote and buy home and auto policies online without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Then in 2018, we launched Vyne, another MVP. Vyne is our simplified self-serve and digitized broker channel, where our broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers, again, without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Both Sonnet and Vyne have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch, we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences. Given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And, you know, we maintain the platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro level. And the way we did the enhancements where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered desired results for our business, but as our excitement grew for our upcoming IPO and our business started ramping up their growth plans, we needed to increase our focus on fine-tuning key components, which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our Sonnet and Vyne platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level, so that we can monitor the pulse of, you know, every component of our user's journey across both Sonnet and Vyne, and we needed help with this. And this is where we engaged IBM and Cisco to help us through this journey. >> On that vision real quick. How does the AI fit in? More on the automation side or on the app side? I mean, I can imagine with that growth in the IPO, you think in automation, I'm assuming, can you elaborate quickly? >> Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get, like it's all digitized, so we have a lot of data in there. And this is where, you know, the ability to be able to actually mine that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting, having predictability and all that, that's where the AI ops comes in. But that's part of our journey through this. >> Yeah, it's good. I mean, the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the Financial Services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics with your clients and how are you responding? How is IBM participating? >> Yeah, absolutely. And Kuberan was touching on this from Economical's perspective. They already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in Vyne with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that end-to-end digital experience. So, our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient, right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco AppDynamics around hybrid, multicloud and AI. >> So, if you don't mind, if you don't mind following up on that AppDynamics point. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that evolved? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, this was based, again, on our long-standing relationship with Cisco AppDynamics that Laura was speaking about. And then the unique to what Kuberan in Economical was seeking of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture but leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that AppDynamics brings to this scenario here, is a market-leading solution that does bring together those multiple data sets but contextualizes them in a business context. So, you can understand from a user perspective that end-to-end journey right from initiation in the application, all the way through the technical infrastructure. And it becomes very preventative in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >> So, AppD and these IBM services work well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's. >> Absolutely, and that's, the point is bringing together the best combination of solutions and services on behalf of our customer set. And this where AppDynamics and IBM and our other partners work incredibly well together. >> Well, we'll talk about the dynamics again. This is, again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned. What can other clients expect? I mean, this is going to be the playbook. (laughs) I mean, you got the Cloud Satellite. Take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll start, and maybe even Laura can add as needed. But from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're going to work with our partner ecosystem in the hybrid multicloud world. So, we've really evolved whether it's IBM Cloud, AWS, as some of our clients, including Economical and others. Microsoft Azure, Google. It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together. And again, stitching together the data across those application sets to drive value out of it. This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM and our partner ecosystem, and the evolution of IBM services as well. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco's trying to do, they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring the elements to the solution when you look at networking. We look at some of the security. And then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for the client. >> I love the end-to-end story. I see hybrid as distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multicloud as subsystems and all is going to have to be operated together. And the software that makes that happen. And I can see tons of head room opportunity there. Kuberan, talk about what you guys are seeing as results now. Because this is where you start to see the conversation shift to. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really what people want to see. Can you share what you're seeing as a result and where do you go from there? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time the team which really was composed of a cross-functional and a highly collaborative group of people, they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line of sight into what's going on for a business solution. And, you know, the implemented scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster. It's helping us to reduce defect linkage through our quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where implementations are driven by predetermined scope. We are changing the mindset, specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together. And our vision is to navigate continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So, you know, to be able to have a robust self-healing capability. And this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability, because now you can actually enable the self-healing capabilities and with AppDynamics bringing in the dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Sonnet and Vyne, where it was a fully digitized end-to-end solution that provides services and value for, excuse me, for our customers. Right? So, hopefully that kind of stitches the picture for you. >> That's awesome, great insight. Laura, Matthew, Kuberan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. In the last minute that we have, let's go down the line. Laura, Matthew and Kuberan, we'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco's relationship with the Cloud Satellite and AI. What should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >> So, as IBM invest more and more in these strategic hybrid cloud solutions industry-focused, it's really bringing an industry-focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you've heard from Kuberan here, I mean, we're bringing that value to our customers. >> All right. Matthew? >> Yeah, I'd just like to add, and this is a great example here of being able to co-innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, Economical in this case, to evolve these solutions. And as Kuberan has stated, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come. >> Kuberan, take us home, final word. >> Thank you. What I would say is, what we've learned from this is really standing this stuff in more like a garage style kind of a situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing ROI very quickly. So, that's the benefit I've seen. >> Awesome, great points. IBM and Cisco better together. This ecosystem, the co-creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on, thanks for sharing the insights. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John. >> Okay, IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (cheerful music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is "theCUBE's" ongoing coverage, where we go out to the events, in this case, of course, virtually, to extract the signal from the noise. And now we're going to talk about the shifts in customer employee experiences and channels. The past year, obviously, has exposed gaps in both of those areas. The shift to digital channels, something that hit every industry. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So, there's huge demand for better, a.k.a. less frustrating, and hopefully superior, customer experiences. That's never been higher. It puts a lot of pressure on companies and their marketing departments to deliver. And with me to talk about these trends are two great guests. Alex Shootman, the General Manager of Adobe Workfront. Alex was CEO of Workfront, which Adobe acquired last year. And Matthew Candy, Global Managing Director of IBM iX. Gentleman, welcome. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> Matt, let's start with you. Maybe you could talk to the shifts that I talked about earlier, in the past year, and customers' expectations, and how they changed, and how you guys responded. >> Yes, so, Dave, I mean, it's been, my goodness, what a year, right? If we'd gone back and thought, we never would have seen this coming. And certainly, I guess, for the clients, I run the digital customer experience business, the services business, here at IBM, and certainly, we have been very busy helping clients, across just about every industry, accelerate their digital transformation efforts. And I think what has been absolutely clear, is digital, mobile, all of these ways of engaging with customers through channels, has been an absolutely critical way in which businesses have kept going, and survived over this time. And certainly, we've seen that transformation accelerate, right? And companies shifting from face-to-face interactions from a B2B sales perspective, into a kind of online B2B commerce, et cetera. So, really it's become digital by default. And I think customers really demanding personalized experiences, and wanting to make sure that these companies really know you in how they deal with you. >> You know Matt, I mean, our business, you think about our business, it was predominantly going out to events, live events, and then overnight, our entire industry had to shift to virtual. And what it was is, you had all these physical capabilities, and people trying to shove it into virtual, and it was really hard. There was a lot of unknowns, and really different. I imagine there's some parallels within marketing organizations. And I wonder if you could talk, Matt, about what kind of barriers you saw about delivering those kind of digital interactions and experiences. >> Yes. So, I guess, we've seen kind of five core challenges that companies have been facing. So, firstly, around volume and velocity of content. So, as we're putting more demand into organizations, right, for more content at a greater pace, right, this causes challenges for companies in terms of being able to get content out there, and surface it through their digital channels, right? Whether that's kiosks, or voice, web, mobile, et cetera. And that pace is not slowing down. Second thing is this demand for personalization. So, as companies and individuals are touching through all of these touch points across marketing sales and service, the need to be able to interact in the right way, showing that you know me, using personal data to match the right offer at the right time, critically important. Thirdly, the martech stack, right. Across many of these organizations, this explosion in marketing technology over the last 10 years has been absolutely incredible. And so one of the big challenges companies have is how we tie all of these different components of the stack together, to build this seamless experience. Fourth challenge, right? Additional communication channels. So, as we need more content and personalization, and we've got to join up across all these different systems, how do we make this consistent across all of these channels, right, whether it's digital or physical, is a true test of many organizations' ability to respond. And the fifth point is the coordination needed across departments within companies. And so, how the marketing department deals with legal, with regulatory approvals, with sales. How they go out to their agency partners. And this has certainly got a lot more complex across geographies, and across boundaries, within companies and outside. And so we see, absolutely, this need to put in place, basically, the marketing system of record that helps manage this. And this is where we see huge opportunity together with Adobe. >> Yeah, so, Alex, maybe you could talk about this a little bit. I mean, you guys are well-known for deep expertise and leadership, and orchestrating marketing workflows and the like. Matt talked about the martech stack. What's your take on this? And how are IBM iX and Adobe Workfront working together? >> What has occurred in response to what Matt talked about, is that companies started realizing that work was a tier one asset inside the marketing team. You know, they looked at, if you go back in time, and you look at financials in a company, people thought, "Wow, this is really important to us. We should put a system in place to manage financials." They realized their customers were really important, so they said, "We should put a system in place to manage our customers." People are important. They bought Workday to make sure that they could manage their people. And all of this complexity that Matt talked about caused enterprises to realize that the work of marketing was as important as some of those other activities in the organization. And so they started investing in a marketing system of record, like Workfront. >> You know, that's interesting. Just a quick aside. I mean, if you think about a lot of the problems we have in data and big data, typical to talk about stovepipe. You just mentioned three examples, finance, HR, and now marketing, where we've contextualized the system. In other words, the domain experts, the people in finance, and HR, and marketing, they're the ones who know the data the best. They don't have to go, necessarily, to some big data team, and data scientist, and all this stuff. They know what they want and they know it. And that's really what you guys are serving in your streamlining. This notion, Alex, of a marketing system of record is really interesting. I mean, it's relatively new, isn't it? So, why does it matter so much to marketers? >> Yeah, if you think about it, we've been able to serve 3,000 enterprises around the globe. We serve all 10 of the top 10 brands. Half of the Fortune 100. And what has created the need for the new, if you think about it, are the challenges that start arising when you implement the concepts that Matt talked about. Consider one of the largest private credit card issuers on the planet. And you think about delivering that personalized experience all the way to an end customer. You've got a private credit card issuer. They do business with hundreds of thousands of companies. Their account managers are interacting with those companies, and all of that lands back on a marketing organization that has to jointly plan promotions with those companies to drive the private credit card business. That marketing team needs visibility to the work that's happening. Or consider a major medical manufacturer who's trying to get medical products out the door. And the marketing team is trying to coordinate with the product team, with the regulatory team, with the supply chain team, with the legal team. And they're trying to orchestrate all of that work, so that they can get products out the door more quickly. Or maybe a financial services organization that's also trying to get new products out the door, and they're trying to get all the approval about the content that goes with those products, and it's all about speed to market. That's what's creating the need for the new, as you phrased it, Dave. >> Yes. Excellent. Thank you. So, then Matt, paint a picture. A lot of people may not be familiar with IBM iX. Maybe how you guys... You got creators, you got deep expertise in this area. So, maybe talk about where you add value, and how you work with Adobe. >> Okay, so IBM iX, so, we sit within the services business at IBM. As you said, Dave, right, we have designers, experienced strategists, engineers, basically able to deliver kind of end-to-end digital and customer experience solution, right from the creative, all the way through to the technology platforms, and the operations. Adobe is one of our key strategic partners across IBM, and certainly within my part of the business. And so, we couldn't have been more delighted when Workfront joined Adobe, through the acquisition there. So, we already had a strong relationship with the Workfront team. And so now seeing that as part of the Adobe platform and family there, really opens up massive opportunities. We're working with several major airlines, automotive companies, retailers, using Adobe technology to transform the customer experiences that they have. Putting in place new digital platforms, and new ways of engaging with those customers. But what is absolutely clear, as Alex was talking about, this need for a marketing systems of record, as this landscape becomes more complex, as the velocity of change increases the need to not just focus on the customer experience, and how a customer interacts with the brand, but the need to get the workflows and the processes within the organization that sit behind that, organized, executing in the correct way, in an efficient way, in order to make sure that you can deliver on that customer promise. And so this is absolutely critical, effectively, to drive this kind of workflow improvement, the productivity improvement, and put intelligence and automation into these processes, across the organization. So there is, certainly, we believe a huge opportunity together in the market, to help clients transform, and to deliver the value in this space. >> Got it. Alex, maybe you can just, at a high level, share some examples of how Adobe, and drawing on your experiences from Workfront, how you've helped companies where they had to get content out, they had to automate the processes, and the outcomes that you saw, that you hope to share with other clients. >> You know what, what Matt's talking about is the need for intelligent workflows within a marketing organization. Because a marketing organization is trying to solve one of two challenges. Either they're trying to be more efficient because they can't get more resources to do the work that they need to do, or they're trying to operate with speed. And so what our breakthrough thinking was, Dave, in terms of solving these problems, and then I'll give an example, is the realization that while it seemed like work should be different in different enterprises, ultimately, all work has five elements to it. The first thing is, you decide to do something, or I ask you to do something. So, we have to have the strategic planning around the intake of work. Then we have to plan out the work. Then we actually have to execute the work. We have to understand who's doing what. We have to have transparency to whether or not that work is getting done, or if people need help in that work. Then that work needs to be approved by somebody. And then finally, especially in marketing, then we have to actually deliver that work to a technology like ADM, where we're going to publish it on the web. So, if you take the case of a major financial, a financial company that serves consumers, that financial company is constantly bringing new products to market. Now, if you're bringing new products to market, if you think about the United States, you have to make sure that you have supported the regulatory approval that's necessary for a product. So, that product has to be able to go to the right investor. That product, if it's in a certain state, has to have oversight to it. So, now you're a marketing team, in a financial services organization that's supporting getting new product to market, and in a particular customer, it used to take 'em 63 days to go through all of the approvals necessary to just get content out the door. Now that they are effectively intaking the work, planning the work, executing the work reviewing the work, and delivering the work digitally, that's down to eight days. >> And with the martech platform, you have the data. So, you know what content you want to get out, and you can make decisions much better. I mean, my big takeaway is, you got the art of marketing, and those with the marketing DNA, I don't have that gene, but it's intersecting with the science and automation, and the data, and the workflows, and driving efficiency, and ultimately driving results and revenue. So, that's my big takeaway from this conversation, but Alex, maybe you could give us your takeaway, and then Matt, you can bring us home. >> Yeah. I mean, my takeaway is in this new economy, marketing is a tier one corporate activity. Marketing is a peer activity to manufacturing, to distribution, to sales, and to finance. And every one of those disciplines are managed with a system. Marketing needs its own system, because it's as important as any other organization. And so to me, Dave, it's no more complicated than that. That marketing is now as important as every other function. And it needs to be managed as every other function. And Workfront is the application that marketing manages the workflows, and the business of marketing. >> All right, Matt. Give us your final thoughts, please. >> Yep, no. My final thought, building on what Alex said, so, we've put together a joint point of view with Adobe, and with Workfront, called "Intelligent Content Transformation," right. That is our strategic framework to help clients accelerate on this journey, both of delivering these amazing customer outcomes, but how we transform the processes within the marketing organization. And I think that yes, you can continue to focus on delivering amazing digital experiences for customers, and it's absolutely critical, and that's critical to revenue growth, but actually, what's also critical, is to drive efficiency in these workflows across the enterprise, right? And that is not only going to enable the revenue growth, it's going to enable you to deliver on that promise. But it's also going to result in significant cost and efficiency improvements for these companies, by focusing on marketing in the same way as we have done for procurement transformation, supply chain transformation, finance transformation, HR transformation, right? There's a lot of effort gone into the efficiency of those workflows. We've got to do the same for marketing. So, massive opportunity, Dave, massive. >> It is massive. Every company has to, in some way, shape, or form, put high-quality content in front of their customers to engage with them. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right- >> See you again. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE." You're watching IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. We'll be right back. (bright music) ♪ Da, de, de, da, da, de, da, la ♪ (bright music)

>>from >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by >>IBM. Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is the cubes ongoing coverage where we go out to the events in this case of course virtually to extract the signal from the noise. And now we're gonna talk about the shifts in customer employee experiences and channels the past year obviously is exposed gap gaps in both of those areas. The shift to digital channels, I mean hit every industry if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So there's huge demand for better a. K. A less frustrating and hopefully superior customer experiences that's never been higher. It puts a lot of pressure on companies and their marketing departments to deliver. And with me to talk about these trends are two great guests Alex shooting in. The general manager of adobe work front Alex was ceo of Work front, which Adobe acquired last year and Matthew Candy Global managing director of I. B. M. I. X. Gentlemen welcome thanks for coming on, >>thanks for having us speaking >>matt, let's start with you. Maybe you could talk to the shifts that I talked about earlier and in the past year and customers expectations and how they changed and how you guys responded >>Yes, today, I mean it's been my goodness, what a year, right. Um you know, if we've got back and and thought yeah, we never would have seen this coming. Um and certainly I guess for the clients, you know, I run the digital customer experience business, the services business here at IBM and certainly, you know, we have been very busy helping clients across just about every industry accelerate their digital transformation efforts. And I think you know what has been absolutely clear is you know, digital mobile um you know, all of these ways of engaging with customers through channels has been an absolutely critical way in which businesses have kept going and survived over this time. And and certainly, you know, we've seen that transformation accelerate right? And and companies shifting from face to face interactions from a B two B sales perspective, um you know, into, you know, into a kind of online, B two B commerce etcetera. So really it's become digital by default and I think customers really demanding personalized experiences and wanting to make sure that these companies really know you and how they deal with you. >>You know, matt, I mean our business to think about our business, it was predominantly going out to events, live events and then overnight our entire industry had to shift to virtual and what it was is you had all these physical capabilities that people try to shove it into virtual. And it was really hard. It was it was a lot of unknowns really different. I imagine there's some parallels within marketing organizations and I wonder if you could talk about what kind of barriers you saw about delivering those kind of digital interactions and experiences. >>Yes, so I guess, you know, we've seen kind of five core challenges that companies have been facing. So firstly around volume and velocity of content. So, you know, as we're putting more demand into organizations right for more content to the greater pace. This causes challenges for companies in terms of being able to get content out there and surface it through their digital channels, right? Whether that's kiosks or voice, web mobile etcetera. And that pace is not slowing down. Second thing is this demand for personalization. So, you know, as companies and individuals are touching through all of these touchpoints across kind of marketing, sales and service, the need to be able to kind of interact in the right way, showing that, you know, me using personal data to match the right offer at the right time, critically important. Thirdly, the Martek stack across across many of these organizations is explosion in marketing technology over the last 10 years has been absolutely incredible. And so one of the big challenges companies have is how we tie all of these different components for stack together to build their seamless experience. Fourth challenge, right, additional communication channels. Um, so as we need more content and personalization and we've got to join up across these, all these different systems, how do we make this consistent across all of these channels? Right. Whether it's digital or physical, um, you know, is a true test of many organizations ability to respond. And the 5th point is the coordination needed across departments within companies. And so, you know how the marketing department deals with legal with regulatory approvals with sales, how they go out to their agency partners. And and and and this has certainly got a lot more complex across geography and across boundaries within companies and outside. And so we see, you know, absolutely this need to put in place and marketing, you know, basically the marketing system of record that helps kind of manage this and this is where we see huge opportunity together with adobe. >>Yeah, so Alex, maybe you could talk about this a little bit. I mean you guys are well known for deep expertise and leadership and orchestrating, you know, marketing workflows and the like Matt talked about the Martek stack. What's your take on this and how R R I B M I X and an adobe work front working together >>at what has occurred in response to what matt talked about is that companies started realizing that work was a tier one asset inside the marketing team. You know, they looked at, if you go back in time and you look at financials in a company, people thought, wow this is really important to us. We should put a system in place to manage financials. They realized their customers were really important, so we should put a system in place to manage our customers. People are important. They bought work day to make sure that they could manage their people. And all of this complexity that matt talked about caused enterprises to realize that the work of marketing was as important as some of those other activities in the organization. And so they started investing in a marketing system of record like work from. >>You know, that's interesting. Just a quick aside, I mean, if you think about a lot of the problems we have in in, you know, data and big data that people talk about stovepipe, you just mentioned three examples Finance HR and now marketing where we've contextualized the system, in other words, the domain experts, the people in finance and HR and marketing, they're the ones who know the date of the best. They don't have to go necessarily to some big data team and data scientists and all the stuff they know what they want and they know it and that's really what you guys are serving in your streamlining this this notion, Alex of a marketing system of record is really interesting. I mean, it's it's relatively new, isn't it? And so why does it matter so much to marketers >>if you think about it? We uh we've been able to serve 3000 enterprises around the, around the globe. We serve all 10 of the top 10 brands. Half of the fortune 100. And what what has created the need for the new if you think about it, are the challenges that start arising when you, when you implement the concepts that matt talked about, consider one of the largest private credit card issuers on the planet. Uh, and you think about delivering that personalized experience all the way to an end customer. You've got a private credit card issuer. They do business with hundreds of thousands of companies. Their account managers are interacting with those companies. And all that lands back on a marketing organization that has to jointly plan promotions with those companies to, uh, to, to drive the private credit card business. That marketing team needs visibility to the work that's happening. Or consider a major medical manufacturer who's trying to get medical products out the door. And the marketing team is trying to coordinate with the product team with the regulatory team, with the supply chain team, with the legal team and they're trying to orchestrate all of that work so that they can get products out the door more quickly. Or maybe a financial services organization that's getting new. Also trying to get new products out the door and they're trying to get all the approval about the content that goes with those products and it's all about speed to market. That's what's creating the need for the new, uh, kind of, as you phrased it Dave. >>Excellent. Thank you. So no matter paint a picture sort of, uh, you know, people may not be familiar with I. B. M. I X. Maybe how you guys, you got, you got creators, you've got deep expertise in this area. So maybe talk about how where you add value and how you work with adobe. >>So IBM so we sit within the services business at IBM um as you said, Dave Right, we have, you know, designers, experienced strategists, engineers, um you know, basically able to deliver kind of end to end digital customer experience solution right from the creative all the way through to the technology platforms. Um And the operations adobe is, you know, one of our key strategic partners across IBM and certainly within my part of the business. And so, you know, we couldn't have been more delighted when work front joined adobe through the acquisition there. So we already had a strong relationship with the work front team. Um and so now seeing that as part of the adobe kind of platform um and and family, they're really opens up massive opportunities. You know, we're working with several major airlines, automotive companies, retailers, um using adobe technology to transform the customer experiences that they have, putting in place new digital platforms, a new ways of engaging with those customers. But but what is absolutely clear, you know, and as Alex was talking about this need for a marketing systems of record, as this landscape becomes more complex, as the velocity of change kind of increases the need to not just focus on the customer experience and how a customer interacts with the brand, but the need to get the workflows and the processes within the organization that sit behind that, you know, organized executing in the correct way, uh you know, in an efficient way in order to make sure that you can deliver on that customer promise. And so this is absolutely critical effectively to get to get to drive this kind of workflow improvement of productivity improvement and put intelligence and automation into these processes across the organization. So there is a you know, certainly we know we believe a huge opportunity together in in in the market um to help clients transform um and to deliver the value in this space. Got >>it Alex, maybe you can just at a high level share some examples of how adobe and from your drawing on your experience from from work front, how you've helped companies where they had to get you know content out, you had to automate the processes and and the kind of outcomes that you saw that you hope to share with other clients. >>You know what that's talking about is the need for intelligent workflows within a marketing organization. Because the marketing organization is trying to solve one of two challenges. Either they're trying to be more efficient because they can't get more resources to do the work that they need to do or they're trying to operate with speed and so what our breakthrough thinking was there in terms of solving these problems. And then I'll give you an example is the realization that while it seems like work should be different in different enterprises. Ultimately all work has five elements to it. The first thing is you decide to do something or I ask you to do something. So we have to have this strategic planning around the intake of work. Then we have to plan out the work. Then we actually have to execute the work. We have to understand who's doing what we have to have transparency to whether or not that work is getting done or people need help in network, then network needs to be approved by somebody. And then finally, especially in marketing, then we have to actually deliver that work to a technology like Am where we're going to publish it on, on the web. So if you take the case of a major financial, uh, a financial company that serves consumers, that financial company is constantly bringing new products to market. Now, if you're bringing new products to market, if you think about the United States, you have to, you have to make sure that you have, uh, supported the regulatory approval that's necessary for a product. So that product has to be able to go to the right investor. That product, if it's in a certain state, has to have oversight to it. So now you're, you're a Marketing team in a financial services organization that supported getting new product to market. And in a particular customer used to take them 63 days to go through all of the approvals necessary to just get content out the door. Now that they are effectively uh in taking the work, Planning the work, executing the work, reviewing the work and delivering the work digitally. That's down to eight days. >>And with the Martek platform, you have the data so you know what content you want to get out and you can make decisions. Much about. My big takeaway is you got the art of of of of marketing. And those were the marketing D. N. A. I don't have that, you know that that gene uh but it's intersecting with with the science and automation and the data and the workflows and driving efficiency and ultimately driving results in in revenue. So that's kind of my big takeaway from this conversation. But but Alex maybe you can give us your take away and then matt, you can bring us home. >>Yeah, I mean my takeaway is in this new economy, marketing is a is a tier one corporate activity. Marketing is a pure activity to manufacturing, to distribution to sales into finance. And every one of those disciplines are managed with a system. Marketing needs its own system because it's as important as any other organization. And so to me, David is no more complicated than that, that marketing is now as important as every other function and it needs to be manages every other function. And work front is the application that marketing manages the workflows in the business of marketing. >>Alright. Matt, give us your final thoughts please. >>Yeah, no, my final thought, building on what building what Alex said. So we've put together a joint point of view with with Adobe in with Work front called intelligent content transformation. Right? That is our strategic framework to help clients accelerate on this journey, both of delivering these amazing customer outcomes. But how we transform the processes within the marketing organization and I think you know that yes, you can continue to focus on delivering amazing digital experiences for customers. And it's absolutely critical and that's critical to revenue growth. But actually what's also critical is to drive efficiency in these workflows across the enterprise. Right? And that is not only going to enable the revenue growth is going to enable you to deliver on that promise, but it's also going to result in significant cost and efficiency improvements for these companies by focusing on marketing in the same way as we have done for procurement, transformation, supply chain transformation, finance transformation, HR transformation, right? There's a lot of effort garment into, into the efficiency of those work clothes. We've got to do the same for marketing. Um so massive opportunity, massive. It is >>massive. Every company has to in some way, shape or form, put high quality content in front of their customers to engage with them. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Yeah, Thanks for having us. >>All right, and thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. You're watching IBM think 2021. The virtual edition. We're right back. >>Mhm.

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think Virtual 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got three great guests here talking about IBM cloud satellite and AI operations, Lori G O G M of Global SisQo Alliance, Matthew, Engelstad, IBM partner. Lead client partner for Canada financial services and cooper on Kent Asami VP of personal insurance. That economical insurance folks. Thanks for coming on the cube. This great panel on cloud satellite and Ai Ops. Thanks for joining me. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you john. Good to see you. >>Well, first let's start with you. There's a general manager for the IBM Cisco Strategic Partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid. It's pretty much determined that's the standard and multi clouds right around the corner. The program ability of the infrastructure is critical and so obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that take us through the IBM Cisco strategic partnership. >>Mhm. Absolutely. So john as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25 year relationship between IBM and Cisco longstanding. Now if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company, but with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kendrell, our spin off of what we were previously calling Newco, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the red hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our satellite product which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So we're super excited about this >>real quick. Why have you brought up a couple key points? I just want to get too. I know we're gonna get to it later, but the operating model has shifted, you mentioned with the new co and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and mps are critical. This new cloud operating model is really a center of of that. That that equation, how does that relate into all that? >>So, the, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically and you take what Cisco is doing and you know, we've got a client here with us Today programme who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client, what are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place And then what are all those surrounding elements around software managing the apps and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco coupled together. Really bring value >>cooper. You got teed up beautifully there so I want to go to you then go to Matthew after but okay, tell us more about this IBM. Cisco dynamic. You guys are hot growth company um doing very well and continuing to grow and sure, post pandemic. It's looking good too. So take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco? >>Sure, sure john thank you. Um you know, to appreciate how we got here and why? We asked IBM and Cisco to help us. Let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet and M. V. P. Uh Sonnet is a fully automated director customer digital channel where customers can quote and buy home and all of his online without the need to engage anyone at economical. Then in 2018, we launched by another m. v. p. Wine is our simplified self serve and digitized broker channel where broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers again, without the need to engage anyone at economical. Both uh some wine have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences, given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And you know, we maintained platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro macro level. We we and and the way we did the enhancement where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered design results for our business. But as our excitement grew for our upcoming I. P. O. And our business started ramping up their growth plans. We needed to increase our focus on fine tuning key components which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our sonnet and wine platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level so that we can monitor the pulse of uh you know, every component of our users journey uh across both solid and wine. And we need to help with this. And this is where we engage idea Francisco to help us through this journey >>on that vision real quick. How does the A. I. Fit in more on the automation side or on the upside? I mean I can imagine what that growth in the I. P. O. You're thinking automation I'm assuming. Can you elaborate quickly? >>Absolutely. So I mean if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get like it's all digitized so we have a lot of data in there and this is where you know the ability to be able to actually mined that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting having predictability and all that. That's where the Ai Ops comes in but that's part of our journey through this. >>Yeah that's good. I mean the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the financial services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics uh with your clients and how are you responding? House IBM participating? >>Yeah, absolutely. And cooper and was touching on on this from economical perspective, they already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in vine with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year or so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that and then digital experience. So our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient. Right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco appdynamics around high hybrid, multi cloud and AI. >>So, if you don't mind if I don't mind following up on that app dynamics point, um can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that involved? >>Yeah, absolutely. So first off this was based again on our longstanding relationship with Cisco appdynamics that laura was speaking about and then unique to what cooper and and economical was seeking. Of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture. But leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that app dynamics brings to this scenario here is a market leading solution that does bring together those multiple datasets, but contextual ISeS them in a business context. So you can understand from a user perspective that end to end journey right from initiation in the application all the way through the technical infrastructure and it becomes very preventative uh in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >>So empty and this IBM services worked well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's >>absolutely. And that's the point is bringing to bear the best combination of, of solutions and services on behalf of our customers set. And this is where appdynamics and IBM uh, and our other partners work incredibly well together. >>We'll talk about the dynamics. Again, this is again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned, um what can other clients expect? I mean, this is gonna be the playbook. I mean you got the cloud satellite take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >>Yeah, absolutely. I'll start and maybe even laura can can add as as needed, but from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're gonna work with our partner ecosystem um in the hybrid, multi cloud world. So uh we've really evolved whether it's IBM cloud aws as some of our clients, including economical and others Microsoft, Azure, um google. Uh It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together and again, stitching together the data across those applications sets to drive value out of it. Uh This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM in our partner ecosystem and the evolution of IBM services as well. Awesome. >>Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco is trying to do, um they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring elements to the solution. When you look at networking we look at some of the security and then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for a client. >>I love the end to end story, actually hybrids, distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multi club, it's just subsystems and all gonna have to be operated together and the software all makes that happen. I could see tons of headroom opportunity there cooper and talk about what you guys are seeing as results now because this is where you start to see uh the conversation shift too. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really people want to see, can you share what you're seeing as a result? And where do you go from there? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um you know what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time, the team which really was composed of a cross functional and the highly collaborative group of people, uh they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line aside into what's going on for our business solution and you know, the implemented uh scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster, helping us reduce defect linkage through a quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where um implementations are driven by predetermined scope, we are changing the mindset specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together and our vision is to navigate yeah continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So you know to be able to have a robust self healing capability and this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability because now you can actually enable the self self healing capabilities and with afghan um is bringing in the uh uh dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Summit and Wine where it was a fully digitized end to end solution that provides services and value for excuse me for our customers. Right? So hopefully that changes the picture. >>That's awesome. Great insight, Laura Matthew Gordon? Thanks for coming on the cube in the last minute that we have, let's go down the line laura Matthew cooper on. We'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco relationship with the cloud satellite and a I guess what should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >>So as IBM invest more and more in these strategic cloud hybrid cloud solutions industry focused, it's really bringing an industry focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you heard from from Kobrin here, I mean we're bringing that value to our customers. >>All right Matthew, >>yeah, I just like to add and this is a great example here of being able to co innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, economical in this case to evolve these solutions And as cooper and had stated, uh, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come, >>come on, take us home. Final word. >>Thank you. What I would say is what we've learned from. This is really uh, standing this up more like a garage style kind of situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing RY very quickly. So that's the benefit. I've >>seen some great points. IBM and Cisco better together this ecosystem. The co creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thanks a lot john >>Okay. IBM think 2021. I'm John for with the Cube. Thank you for watching. >>Mm

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network Welcome to the Cubes. Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests joining me. Next. Chris Gru's director of Business development, AWS Marketplace Service catalog and Control Tower at AWS. Chris, welcome. >>Thank you. Welcome. Good to see you. >>Likewise. And Matthew Polly is an alumni of the Cube. He is back VP of worldwide business development alliances and channels at Crowdstrike Matthew, Welcome toe. Welcome back. >>Great to be here. Lisa, Thanks for having me. >>And I see you're in your garage, your f one car in the background. Very jealous. So we're gonna be talking a little bit about not f one today, but about what's going on. Some of the the news that's coming from the partner Keynote. So, Chris, let's start with you. What's going on? The AWS marketplace news and also give our audience a real good understanding of what the marketplace is. >>Yeah, sure. So So AWS marketplace is actually an eight year old service within the AWS family, and and our charter is really providing a fine by deploy and manage experience for third party software. And so what our organization does. We work with my issues like Crowdstrike, and we really try to get them to package up their software in that same consumption format that other customers are buying AWS services. It's already the best service already. Those customers are used to buying services like Red Shift, and that's three and a consumption format, and they want to be able to buy third party software in that same manner. And so that's really been our charter since we were launched eight years ago. We've had a lot of great mo mentum since our launch. We now have over 8000 listings available in the catalog, and we have over 1.5 million subscriptions going through the catalog. One of things that we announced earlier today is that we are up to 300,000 active customers. That's actually up from 260,000, which is our previous numbers. So we continue to see really good momentum in terms of adoption, from both our eyes, community publishing listings and then from our customers that are actually buying out of the catalog. We work on all types of formats of software, so we provide machine images in an Amazon machine image format. But we also published and make available SAS products, container products and algorithms and models to run in things like our sage maker environment. And then, as of this morning in the Global Partner Summit, we announced the ability to sell professional services through eight of this marketplace as well. >>So lots of expansion, lots of growth. I'd love to get Chris your take on this expansion into offering professional services. What does that mean? And how have your 300,000 plus customers been influential in that? >>Yeah. And so what we've seen is marketplaces evolved is the transaction sizes have actually gone up dramatically. A couple years ago we launched a feature called Private Offers, which allows eyes views to do a negotiated subscription, submit that to an AWS customer and that they accept that goes right on their bill. We've seen very good adoption that we've got thousands of private offers now going through the system and what we found when the transaction sizes started to grow. Both our eyes V s that we're using the platform, as well as the consulting partners that are partners with US through Amazon Partner Network. They typically attached services to those transactions So pure and eyes V you might wanna package on something like an installation service training services. Or it could just be a bespoke statement of work that goes along with your technology and then on the consulting partner side. Resellers want to attach those same type of services to the software that they re sell, and up until this morning we weren't able to do that. And so it provided a lot of friction to our customers or buyers because what they had to do is they actually had to bottom line those transactions, or they had to do those transactions outside of marketplace. And And that wasn't a good experience for either RSV community or restore community or customers. So now, with this launch, we could actually allow customers to buy those services from those Eyes v partners and those resellers. By virtue of doing that to marketplace and basically how it works. It's similar to our private offer experience. They just submit a private offer to that customer. They could upload a statement of work. And if that customer accept, it goes directly on their AWS bill and they did. This marketplace takes care of all the collection, and the building that goes goes along with that transaction. And so we're really excited about this. We had over 100 launch partners that we're ready to go as of this morning, and we think this is gonna be a great feature, is gonna get a lot of adoption. Crowdstrike, which is a company that Matthews with is one of our launch partners for that feature. And so we just think this is gonna be a game changer for us on a number of levels. It's really gonna open up the type of transactions that we can now do to market place. >>Well, you mentioned Ah, good f word frictionless. That's something that every business really aims to do to make that experience just as seamless as possible. So Matthew talk to us about crowdstrike being part of its professional services, launched the opportunities that that opens up for the marketplace, customers and your customers? >>Sure. So just a quick background on crowdstrike were an endpoint protection cybersecurity company that has historically been protecting laptops desktops on premise, uh, devices from from breaches, basically identifying indications of attack or indications of compromise that that may surface on those end points. We do that by having agents run on those devices and point back to our massive body of data that runs in the cloud A W s. In fact, and so collecting tons and tons of data petabytes upon petabytes of data, literally trillions of events per week were able to easily identify and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence, Um, to that corpus of data to be able to identify when there is adversary activity on those devices. Now we've gone through a bit of a digital transformation ourselves, and we're looking at now. Not only, or we have launched products here recently, that not only protect those on premise devices like the desktops, laptops and on premise servers, but also protect workloads that are running in the cloud E C. Two instances, or RDS instances. What have you in in AWS? Or we've also launched what crowdstrike calls are Falcon Horizon product, which is a cloud security posture management product to be able to give people visibility into configurations that may create risk for their cloud environments. And we've been leveraging marketplace for about two years now. Um, it's been a fantastic opportunity for us to really leverage that frictionless sales motion that Chris talked about reducing sale cycles for us and for our channel partners. We have a number of our channel partners that leverage the CPP Oh capability within within the AWS marketplace toe actually transact business with their customers. It's been a It's been a fantastic, um you know, mechanism for for crowdstrike, for our partners and for our customers. Um, you know, we've been part of the enterprise contract scenarios where we don't have to go through that process of negotiating an end user license contract. We've signed up for the enterprise contract. Many of our customers have signed up for that enterprise contracts with reduces the legal iterations to get a transaction done. So that's been fantastic. And what we're doing now with the you know, the professional services offering is we're standing up a few of our professional services, Um, you know, offerings on the AWS marketplace so that our customers and our channel partners can actually transact business through the AWS marketplace toe, acquire those particular professional services offerings. And the one that I think is most interesting is a kind of cloud security assessment where our professional services team will go in and actually evaluate our their configurations. Are there unmanaged, um, you know, accounts running in AWS or what have you that could represent a security risk and make recommendations about how to improve the overall security posture of that cloud environment, leveraging something like crowd strikes Falcon Horizon, as I mentioned earlier, or our cloud workload protection offering. So it >>really >>is about streamlining the procurement, offering them. You know, the ability to thio, offering customers the ability to acquire through the AWS marketplace, whether that's the crowdstrike product or the Crowdstrike service offerings. >>So, Matthew, I imagine given this year that we're all not sitting together face to face in Las Vegas. The events of this year have also brought a lot of challenges from a security perspective. We've seen Ransomware going up dramatically, but also in this massive pitot to work working remotely. I can imagine your customers big opportunity for Crowdstrike to help them when endpoints just scattered. So in terms of that, as well as the impact with what you're doing with AWS marketplace seems like a great opportunity to provide your customers with faster access to ensuring that they can guarantee the security off their all of their data, which is business critical. >>Yeah, 100%. So the kind of global pandemic and work from anywhere has driven demand for crowd strikes capabilities in two ways. Number one people leaving the office and going home. There's a proliferation of physical devices, laptops for people to actually work from home, which obviously need to be protected. And a lot of times these were people that were working from home for the first time. You know, no longer within the protection of the, you know, the corporate network. Maybe they're using a VPN or what have you? But they needed the added protection of an endpoint protection capability like crowd strikes. And the second is a lot of this digital transformation has been accelerated. We've had a few customers tell us they had a three year plan for for their their digital transformation, and a lot of that is moving on. Premise service involves moving on premise servers to the cloud, and they've had to accelerate that two months or even even weeks in cases. And that's driving. You know, huge demand for understanding how to ensure there maintaining the proper security posture for those cloud environments. So speed is key right now, making sure that you're protected and transacting those those you know, those those sale cycles quickly leveraging native US marketplace all is accelerating. >>Yes, speaking of that acceleration and we've talked about that a lot. Matthew. This acceleration of digital transformation years now crammed into months. Chris, let's wrap with you in light of that acceleration, how has that affected positively? The AWS marketplace Bringing in professional services, allowing your customers to have much more available to them, to transact directly and and in a frictionless way, when speed is so critical? >>Yeah, I mean what it really leads to. It just gives us more selection, right? So if you take a step back and you think about the you know, the infamous Amazon fire, well, one of the key components of what makes a fine we'll go a selection. And there was a lot of solutions that we had. We just couldn't sell through marketplace without having some kind of services attach. While there's a lot of products that you could just point, click and go. There are a lot of technology. Do you need to? Some have some kind of hand holding And so, you know, by virtue launching services, this actually opens up the amateur in terms of selection that we could bring into the catalog. One of things that we've been focused on as a late is bringing in business applications as an example. And a lot of times a business application might need services to go on, actually wrap around that solution cell and, you know, be part of that implementation. And so that's the other great thing about this is it's going to give us more selection, and that's just gonna let our customers buy more and more products out of this market place. But do that in this very easy format, where it literally just lets them put these transactions directly on the AWS bill. So we think it's gonna be a great you know, not only for movie deals faster but also providing more solutions to our customers and just giving a better selection experience of AWS customer >>and being able to do that all remotely, which is these days is table stakes. Chris. Matthew, Thank you so much for joining me today. Talking about what's new with the Amazon marketplace. What you guys are doing with professional services and crowdstrike. We appreciate your time. >>Yep. Thank you. Thanks. Lisa. Yep. >>From my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Live coverage of aws reinvent 2020.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS reInvent Executive Summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS reInvent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. For this segment we have two guests. First we have Helen Davis. She is the Senior Director of Cloud Platform Services, Assistant Director for IT and Digital for the West Midlands Police. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Helen. >> Welcome. >> And we also have Matthew Pound. He is Accenture Health and Public Service Associate Director and West Midlands Police Account Lead. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Matthew. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we are going to be talking about delivering data-driven insights to the West Midlands Police force. Helen, I want to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about the West Midlands Police force? How big is the force and also what were some of the challenges that you were grappling with prior to this initiative? >> Yes, certainly. So West Midlands Police is the second largest police force in the UK, outside of the Metropolitan Police in London. We have an excessive 11,000 people work at West Midlands Police serving communities through and across the Midlands region. So geographically we're quite a big area as well as being population density having that at a high level. So the reason we sort of embarked on the data-driven insights platform and which was a huge change for us was for a number of reasons. Namely we had a lot of disparate data which was spread across a range of legacy systems that were many, many years old with some duplication of what was being captured and no single view for offices or support staff. Some of the access was limited. You have to be in an actual police building on a desktop computer to access it. Other information could only reach offices on the front line through a telephone call back to one of our enabling services where they would do a manual checkup look at the information, then call the offices back and tell them what they needed to know. So it was a very long laborious process not very efficient. And we certainly weren't exploiting the data that we had in a very productive way. >> So it sounds like as you're describing an old clunky system that needed a technological reimagination, so what was the main motivation for making this shift? >> It was really about making us more efficient and more effective in how we do business. So certainly as an IT leader and some of my operational colleagues, we recognize the benefits that data analytics could bring in a policing environment, not something that was really done in the UK at the time. We have a lot of data, so we're very data rich in the information that we have, but we needed to turn it into information that was actionable. So that's where we started looking for technology partners and suppliers to help us and sort of help us really with what's the art of the possible, this hasn't been done before so what could we do in this space that's appropriate for policing. >> Helen I love that idea. What is the art of the possible, can you tell us a little bit about why you chose AWS? >> I think really as with all things, when we're procuring apartment in the public sector, there are many rules and regulations quite rightly because you would expect that to be because we're spending public money so we have to be very, very careful and it's a long process and we have to be open to public scrutiny. So we sort of look to everything, everything that was available as part of that process, but we recognize the benefits that Cloud would provide in this space because we like moving to a Cloud environment. We would literally be replacing something that was legacy with something that was a bit more modern. That's not what we wanted to do. Our ambition was far greater than that. So I think in terms of AWS, really, it was around the scalability, interoperability, just things like the disaster recovery service, the fact that we can scale up and down quickly, we call it dialing up and dialing back. It's page go. So it just sort of ticked all the boxes for us. And then we went through the full procurement process, fortunately it came out on top for us. So we were able to move forward, but it just sort of had everything that we were looking for in that space. >> Matthew, I want to bring you into the conversation a little bit here. How are you working with the West Midlands Police, sorry, and helping them implement this Cloud-first journey? >> I guess by January the West Midlands Police started paver five years ago now. So we set up a partnership with the force I wanted to operate in a way that was very different to a traditional supplier relationship. Security that the data difference insights program is one of many that we've been working with West Midlands over the last five years. As having said already Cloud gave a number of advantages certainly from big data perspective and the things that that enabled us today from an Accenture to that allowed us to bring in a number of the different teams that we have say Cloud teams, security teams, interacted from a design perspective, as well as more traditional services that people would associate with the country. >> I mean, so much of this is about embracing comprehensive change to experiment, and innovate, and try different things. Matthew, how do you help an entity like West Midlands Police think differently when there are these ways of doing things that people are used to, how do you help them think about what is the art of the possible, as Helen said? >> There's a few things to that, what is critical is trying to co-create solutions together. Yeah, there's no point just turning up with what we think is the right answer, trying to collectively work through the issues that the force are saying and the outcomes they're looking to achieve rather than simply focusing on a long list of requirements I think was critical and then being really open to working together to create the right solution rather than just trying to pick something off the shelf that maybe doesn't fit the full set of requirements in the way that it should do. >> Right, it's not always a one size fits all. >> Absolutely not. What we believe is critical is making sure that we're creating something that met the forces needs in terms of the outcomes they're looking to achieve the financial envelopes that were available and how we can deliver those in a iterative agile way rather than spending years and years working towards an outcome that is going outdate before you even get that. >> So Helen, how are things different? What kinds of business functions and processes have been re-imagined in light of this change and this shift? >> It's actually unrecognizable now in certain areas of the business as it was before. So to give you a little bit of context, when we started working with Accenture and AWS on need data driven insights program, it was very much around providing what was called locally, a wizzy tool for our intelligence analyst to interrogate data, look at data, decide whether they could do anything predictive with it. And it was very much sort of a back office function to sort of tidy things up for us and make us a bit better in that area or a lot better in that area. And it was rolled out to a number of offices, a small number on the front line. Really it was in line with the mobility strategy that we had where officers were getting new smartphones for the first time to do sort of a lot of things on policing apps and things like that to again, to avoid them having to keep driving back to police stations, et cetera. And the pilot was so successful. Every officer now has access to this data on their mobile devices. So it literally went from a handful of people in an office somewhere using it to do sort of clever whizzbang things to every officer in the force being able to access that level of data at their fingertips literally. So what they would touch we've done before is if they needed to check an address or check details of an individual just as one example, they would either have to, in many cases, go back to a police station to look it up themselves on a desktop computer while they would have to make a call back to a centralized function and speak to an operator, relay the questions either wait for the answer or wait for a call back with the answer when those people are doing the data interrogation manually. So the biggest change for us is the self-service nature of the data we now have available. So officers can do it themselves on their phone, wherever they might be. So the efficiency savings from that point of view are immense. And I think just parallel to that is the quality of our data because we had a lot of data, but just because you've got a lot of data and a lot of information doesn't mean it's big data and it's valuable necessarily. So again, it was having the single source of truth as we call it. So you know that when you are completing those safe searches and getting the responses back, that it is the most accurate information we hold. And also you get an it back within minutes as opposed to half an hour, an hour or a drive back to a station. So it's making officers more efficient and it's also making them safer. The more efficient they are, the more time they have to spend out with the public doing what we all should be doing. >> Have you seen that kind of return on investment because what you were just describing with all the steps that we'd needed to be taken in prior to this to verify and address say, and those are precious seconds when someone's life is on the line in sort of in the course of everyday police work. >> Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's difficult to put a price on it. It's difficult to quantify. But all the minutes here and that certainly add up to a significant amount of efficiency savings, and we've certainly been able to demonstrate the officers are spending less time at police stations as a result and more time out on the frontline. Also they're safer because they can get information about what may or may not be and address what may or may not have occurred in an area before very, very quickly without having to wait. >> Matthew, I want to hear your observations of working so closely with this West Midlands Police. Have you noticed anything about changes in its culture? In its operating model in how police officers interact with one another? Have you seen any changes since this technology change? >> What's unique about the West Midlands Police is the buy-in from the top and the chief and his exact team and Helen is the leader from an IT perspective. The entire force is bought in so what is a significant change break ground. And that trickles through everyone in the organization change is difficult and there's a lot of time effort. There's been person to bake the technical delivery and the business change and adoption aspects around each of the projects. But you can see the step change that is making in each aspect to the organization and where that's putting West Midlands Police as a leader in by technology on policing in the UK and I think globally. >> And this is a question for both of you because Matthew, as you said, change is difficult and there is always a certain intransigence in workplaces about this is just the way we've always done things and we're used to this and don't try to get us to do anything new here, it works. How do you get the buy-in that you need to do this kind of digital transformation? >> I think it would be wrong to say it was easy. We also have to bear in mind that this was one program in a five-year program. So there was a lot of change going on both internally for some of our back office functions, as well as frontline officers. So with DDI in particular, I think that the step change occurred when people could see what it could do for them. We had lots of workshops and seminars where we all talk about big data and it's going to be great and it's data analytics and it's transformational, and quite rightly people that are very busy doing a day job that not necessarily technologists in the main and I'm particularly interested quite rightly so in what we are not dealing with the Cloud, and it was like, yeah, okay it's one more thing. And then when they started to see on their phones and what teams could do, that's when it started to sell itself. And I think that's when we started to see the stack change, and if we have any issues now it's literally our help desks in meltdown 'cause everyone's like, we can't manage without this anymore. And I think that speaks for itself. So it doesn't happen overnight. It sort of incremental changes and then that's a step change in attitude. And when they see it working and they see the benefits, they want to use it more. And that's how it's become fundamental to our policing by itself really without much selling. >> Matthew, Helen just made a compelling case for how to get buy-in. Have you discovered any other best practices when you are trying to get everyone on board for this kind of thing? >> We've used a lot of the traditional techniques, things around comms and engagement. We've also used things like 30-day challenge and nudge theory around how can we gradually encourage people to use things. I think there's a point with all of this around, how do we just keep it simple and keep it user centric from an end user perspective? I think DDI is a great example of where the technology is incredibly complex. The solution itself is extremely large and it's been very difficult to get to live it, but at the heart of it is a very simple front end for the user to encourage it and take that complexity away from them. I think that's been critical through the whole piece of DDI. >> One final word from Helen. I want to hear where do you go from here? What is the longterm vision? I know that this has made productivity savings equivalent to 154 full-time officers. What's next? >> I think really it's around exploiting what we've got. And I use the phrase quite a lot, dialing it up, which drives my technical architects crazy, but because it's apparently not that simple, but we've been through significant change in the last five years and we are still continuing to batch all of those changes into day operational policing. But what we need to see now is we need to exploit and build on the investments that we've made in terms of data and claims specifically, the next step really is about expanding our pool of data and all functions. So that we keep getting better and better at this. The more we do, the more data we have, the more refined we can be, the more precise we are with all of our actions. We're always being expected to, again, look after the public purse and do more for flavs. And I think this is certainly an applied journey and cloud-first by design, which is where we are now is helping us to be future-proofed. So for us, it's very much an investment. And I see now that we have good at embedded in operational policing for me, this is the start of our journey, not the end. So it's really exciting to see where we can go from here. >> Exciting times indeed. Thank you so much Helen and Matthew for joining us. I really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> And you are watching theCUBE stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of the AWS reInvent Accenture Executive Summit. I'm Rebecca Knight. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to the CUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin joined by a couple of guys from Dell Technology. Please welcome Martin Glynn, the senior director for product management for PowerMax Martin good morning. >> Good morning. >> Nice to see you. And joining Martin is Matthew Paul, the senior director of product management for PowerFlex at Dell Technologies. Matthew, nice to see you. >> Nice to see you thanks for having us Lisa. >> So our virtual cube this year can't be with you guys in person or the 14,000 other folks that usually attend at Dell Technologies World but a lot of opportunities to engage customers and partners and present analysts digitally, which is great. So Matthew, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what's new with PowerFlex, this was the kind of the end of the rebrand under the power portfolio that Dell Technologies undertook the last couple of years formerly the VXFlex excuse me, from Scale IO, what's new with PowerFlex? >> Yeah, that's a spot on. So really the idea of us aligning the full power portfolio is kind of a big deal, right? Part of the winning roadmap to at IO, kind of assigned to our customers and our field and everyone that software defined storage is a critical part of the Dell Technologies strategy. If you think about PowerFlex, just to kind of level set, it's really a software defined infrastructure kind of system that brings you the best of traditional three tier infrastructure and the best of HCI infrastructure while being able to make that experience really simple in the enterprise while still delivering exemplary really great performance and scale. In terms of new things, well, just real quick, in terms of kind of new things, we brought interesting topics like native Async replication, secure snapshots, some end to end lifecycle management pieces. So a lot of great innovation in the last year. >> And that was some of the recent announcements. Tell me Matthew, from a customer perspective since you've announced Asynchronous replication snapshots, what's the customer adoption, customer feedback been like? >> Yeah, it's been fantastic. We continue to grow this market really strong, you know, we're focusing on high end large enterprise customers working towards, bringing down also into kind of enterprise and commercial customers, so it'll make things easier to use. But very strong adoption and great investments here at Dell with this product. >> All right, so PowerFlex, Martin, let's go to you PowerMax, talk to us about PowerMax. And then also how it kind of fits into the whole power portfolio. >> Sure, yeah, so thanks Lisa. The PowerMax products, I think was the first product other than of course, the server products to be powered up in the storage portfolio, PowerMax is the sort of flagship sort of derived product that we've had now for, you know, a few decades really been a leader in mission critical data centers. But I think that pace of innovation over the last year just like Matt describing the PowerFlex side has been a really phenomenal. Just about a year ago he came out with a storage class memory, we did fiber channel Endymion over fiber channel, and more recently brought in a few really interesting new technologies, like support for replication, with VVols, cloud mobility, and now, efficient encryption. So the set of things we're enabling our customers to do with their you know, sort of traditional three tier SAN infrastructure is really just unmatched. >> So Matt talk to me about the last six seven months, where are these enterprise customers in terms of leveraging PowerMax for example, when everything just changed dramatically almost overnight. Enterprises in every industry had to suddenly remote workforce. How did PowerMax help your customers pivot and ensure that their digital transformation could support this business surviving? >> Yeah, well, like everybody we were a little worried at the outset, you know lot of uncertainty about how things would play out and the response from our customers has been amazing. You know, they've all sort of really doubled down on using our technology to support their businesses through this new model. So, you know, the business has been really amazing really incredible, and it's been great to partner with our customers that help them continue to deliver the services that they need you know, in this new model. So that part's been, been really wonderful, and as we work really closely with them, some of the things we just came out with, you know, they've helped us to design and deliver in a way that they can best take advantage of so, you know, for example the new cloud mobility functionality that's letting them take information directly off of their mission, critical sort of bedrock sand infrastructure and push it up to an object store. And that could be a local private object store, it could be a public object store like AWS. And so that's you know, it's enabling them to take advantage of some new models and a new approach to doing things. And I think ultimately that's going to help them work through this you know, new normal, we're all participating in. >> Yeah, we want to help those businesses not just survive this time, but be able to thrive, especially as we don't know how much of this remote scattered workforce is going to remain. We're hearing estimates from some of the big technology leaders at all. 50% percent of the workforce is going to remain at home so really helping organizations to maneuver and navigate these challenging landscapes is a big priority I know for Dell Technologies we talked about that with some other guests. Matthew, over to you talk to me about PowerFlex from a workloads perspective, so we can get a good idea for the workloads that it's really ideally best suited for. >> Yeah, I think wanted to just take a quick second on the COVID piece, because we have a couple of really big customers that we had to enable really quickly for curbside checkout and, you know, they were trying to run things, they were putting it on their existing infrastructure, their existing systems, and it just wasn't fast enough, it wasn't keeping up. And by working closely with the customer and designing a system with PowerFlex as the core, allowed us to enable them really quickly to turn from a customer who didn't have this idea of curbside checkout to enabling curbside checkout. So I think working and partnering closely with our customers is a critical part of how Dell Tech is successful and enabling them to kind of work through these tough times. With workloads, Yeah, oh, go ahead sorry. >> That's okay go ahead. >> I was going to say with workloads in general, the way that we have to think about them with enterprise quality or enterprise requirements is really in kind of a scheme of looking at performance, understanding scalability, ensuring we have enterprise class availability, and then last but definitely not least is like how we manage that and how we make it easier for customers to work through those. And when I think about Flex there's two or three key areas that we try to go after, if you, one of the key differentiation pieces around Flex is the fact that we can deploy it in multiple manners. So you can deploy it in an HCI mode, where you have the compute and networking together, or you can go deploy it in a dis-aggregated mode where you have compute and networking, I mean, compute and storage separate. And if those are separate that allows you to scale those independently work really, really well for key database workloads, key workloads like, let's say even like Honda, where you maybe have really high compute but little less storage requirements. So that really allows customers to dial up and down what makes the most sense for them right? The other angle that we're seeing pretty big adoption is around this idea of re-platform or realigning the data center with transformation with software defined scale all block storage. So think about deploying Powerflex in an environment and then being able to use that in a virtual environment in a physical environment, in a container environment being able to have your traditional applications like SQL or Oracle, right along really cool new applications like the ELK Stack or Mongo DB or other things, because of the way that we design our layout, it's really aligned towards being able to re-platform and align in a software defined infrastructure. So customers are using to kind of align those pieces meaning platforms, re-platforming and then also aligning specific applications that require high performance. >> I heard a lot in that and one word that pops up is no, that's good. >> No, I can tell you're passionate about it. >> I love it, yeah. >> And also the customer influence is absolutely critical. I think this is a time you mentioned the curbs I check in, and then I was reading a few months ago about some of the huge brands that were filing for chapter 11 and companies like big retailers that simply couldn't pivot, couldn't digitally transform to even offer curbside check in so that factor alone since us consumers are so demanding was table stakes a few months ago. It still is, but getting an organization able to pivot so quickly is key. Martin let's go over to you, PowerMax, workloads. Talk to me about some differentiators as well. >> Yeah Aatually, if I could I'll start with sort of some similar examples that Matt laid out there, you know, just like we have customers who chose PowerFlex you know, were in environments that made sense for them. We had customers who chose PowerMax to meet similar new demands with the whole, you know pandemic. So we had some really big customers just so okay, now we have sort of line of sight and, you know, across both products, I think the thing that our customers value most is you know, the quality of the experience, the performance of the experience, some of the things Matt mentioned already. But they really pull forward, you know, huge numbers of systems and business, and be able to support you know, where they saw things going. So that was really great to partner with them on that and be ready to help support them and provide a product that they felt really good about making such huge investments in, you know, it was great to see their trust in us and be able to deliver for them. So, that was, I think a big part of the first half of the year, that sort of new, you know, new workloads and new use cases for us on the PowerMax side really revolve around giving our customers new capabilities that can deliver new services for their end users. So one of those is our new support for VVols remote replication. And this really lets us tie together the way that the infrastructure is managed at the VMware level, much more closely to the way that the storage infrastructure is managed. And the result is that our, our customers can do more granular operations for their end users, they can simplify the whole process, and now they can do it on top of our remote replication solution, which, you know going on 20 plus years now, it's really been sort of the gold standard in which they've come to rely on so much. So that's really exciting to be able to offer that to them now, to have it be part of the whole VMware stack that they're deploying and let them use you know, new things like, you know the way VVols works with our cyber site recovery manager, to let them automate you know, the testing, I feel always in the actual fail over. There's an interesting example of how I think our customers are going to take advantage of some of these new technologies as we go forward. >> You mentioned giving customers the ability with the right infrastructure to offer new services. And that's another critical component as we've seen in 2020 is businesses needing to pivot continuously and come up with new creative ideas, products, and services and new ways of delivering those to their existing customers holding onto them and hopefully growing their customer base. And that ability to leverage technology, to deliver new services is also one of the key kind of foundations that will allow businesses to be the winners of tomorrow. Matthew, to you talk to me when you're in customer situations, customers have choice, we know this, ding into me, give me the top three differentiators when you're talking to customers, why PowerFlex is the ideal solution for them? >> That's a great question. I'm glad you asked. (laughs) So I think, you know, as part of being a product guy it's really cool when the intellectual property within your product is software that your company owns and hardware, your company owns. So we're able to do some really cool stuff together to deliver innovative solutions for our customers. But, you know, when I think about my product I think first and foremost, around performance and scale right? You know, several million, IO'S a sub-millisecond response time and anytime someone wants more performance they just add another server, right? So this idea that we scale literally is a key differentiator for the product. A second key differentiator is this idea that I talked a little bit about before that we, you can kind of multi-platform this. So when you roll this out, you can deploy to use it with virtual environments, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V or other virtual environments. You can have bare metal deployment. So if you want to run this with Linux and use software defined storage in the bare metal, we can support that. Or we can go directly to containers. So you can use containers, bare metal or virtual. And so this idea of choice is a huge differentiator. And then the last one is anchored around this idea that when you scale and you get the benefit of management, you don't have to scale everything at the same time. So in traditional software defined infrastructure on the HCI side you have to scale compute and storage together. So every time you add a node you add compute power and storage power. With power flex, we've been able to effectively split those two pieces off, so a customer could actually only scale what they need. And in fact, if they only want to buy storage side of the solution, you can just buy storage side solution and then you can have existing infrastructure connect to that and it behaves just like a traditional three tier model. So those are, I think are the key things that I think differentiate the product and kind of make it special here at Dell and for our customers. >> Matthew, sticking with you, are there any, I think of things like compliance and healthcare and financial services, especially right now, what are some of the key benefits that PowerFlex delivers, say for some of those essential industries right now? >> Yeah, I think, you know it's interesting 'cause those are two of our largest space and financial is probably our largest space. And really for them, it comes down to, you talked about compliance, you talk about scale and then you talk about management. So we said some really interesting requirements because of scale so large, for example, in our last release we're able to start to do rack level firmware and software updates. So when you look at other solutions they might be doing system at a time, doing updates taking them offline and then running those around. But in our scenario, since we kind of own the SDS layer and the compute side, we can actually do update these for an entire rack in one shot. Dramatically reducing the complexity, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to do updates. So that's a real big deal in financial space. And then in terms of healthcare, for example we're the only software defined solution product that can run all of Epic healthcare, all pieces of Epic within our product. All other products run out of bandwidth, run out of performance. So they end up not being able to run all sides of the requirement, whether it's the database back end, or the VDI front end, we're the only one on the market that can do all of that. >> It seems to really be a big differentiator in healthcare as a lot of organizations run on Epic or try to, to help with patient care and care delivery. Martin, last question for you. Give me a snapshot of the partner's perspective over the last couple of years with the rebrand under Dell Technologies, with the power portfolio, how have your partners embraced the simplification? >> So, you know, I think that the overall, this gave them clearer understanding of where and what to sell and what made sense for power max in particular, you know, I think it let them anchor on, you know the flagship product of the legendary performance and reliability of that platform and, you know, gave them an easy way to think about where to position that with, you know, our end customers and, you know, in what ways that the products would benefit their customers the most. So, you know, as Matt described on the PowerFlex side, it starts with our performance and reliability and then ultimately, you know enabling them to do whatever they need to do, so across all the different data services and we got to talk ready about some of the new ones you know, but we also have a lot that we've you know, refined over the years and, you know making it sort of official and sort of the PowerMax envelope what everyone really just sort of simplify how they would consume it all. So, you know, I think, you know maybe one of the thing, you know, worth mentioning in all these new use cases and environments and, you know, all the different applications that our customers are trying to operate and deliver on is, you know, security, you know, so we developed a new capability that we call end-to-end efficient encryption. And this really lets customers do encryption all the way from the host through to the storage. And, you know I think ultimately that's going to help them sleep better at night and also, you know help them avoid some of the things that you've seen crop up now. Now that the world is so digital and all the different threats that our customers face. So we're keeping our finger on the pulse of a lot of different needs you know, whether it's flexibility, performance reliability, but all these new new technologies as well to make sure that we set our customers up to be successful as possible. >> That's exactly what they want to be, successful. Martin, Matthew, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube, sharing the updates for PowerMax, PowerFlex, the differentiators. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Yeah, thank you Lisa this was fun. Alright from my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cubes coverage, Dell Technologies World at 2020, the digital experience. (gentle music)

>> Welcome back to AnsibleFest. I'm Matthew Jones, I'm the architect of the Ansible Automation Platform. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about what we've got coming in 2021, and some of the things that we're working on for the future. Today, I really want to cover some of the work that we're doing on scale and flexibility, and how we're going to focus on that for the next year. I also want to talk about how we're going to help you grow and manage and use your content on the Automation platform. And then finally, I want to look a little bit beyond the automation platform itself. So, last year we introduced Ansible Content Collections. Earlier this year, we introduced the Ansible Automation Hub on Red Hat Cloud. And yesterday you heard Richard mentioned on private automation hub that's coming later this year. And automation hub, Ansible tower, this is really what the automation platform means for us. It's bringing together that content, with the ability to execute and run and manage that content, that's really important. And so what we really want to do, is we want to help you bring Red Hat and partner content that you trust together with community content from galaxy that you may need, and bring this together with content that you develop for yourself, your roles, your collections, the automation that you actually do. And we want to give you control over that content and help you curate that content and build a community around your automation. We want to focus on a seamless experience with this automation from Ansible Tower and from Automation Hub for the automation platform itself, and make it accessible to the automation and infrastructure that you're managing. Now that we've talked about content a little bit, I want to talk about how you run Ansible. Today an Ansible Tower, use virtual environments to manage the actual execution of Ansible, and virtual environments are okay, but they have some drawbacks. Primarily they're not very portable. It's difficult to manage dependencies and the version of Ansible. Sometimes those dependencies conflict with the other systems that are on the infrastructure itself, even Ansible Tower. So what we've done is created a new system that we call execution environments. Execution environments are container-based. And what we're doing is bringing the flexibility and portability of containers to these Ansible execution environments. And the goal really is portability. And we want to be able to leverage the tools that the community develops as well as the tools that Red Hat provides to be able to produce these container images and use them effectively. At Ansible we've developed a tool called Ansible Builder. Ansible builder will let you bring content collections together with the version of Ansible and Red Hats base container image so that you can put together your own images for execution environments. And you'll be able to host these on your own private registry infrastructure. If you don't already have a container registry solution, Automation Hub itself provides that registry. The idea here is that, unlike today where your virtual environments and your production execution environments diverge a little bit from what your developers, your content developers and your automation developers experience, we want to give you the same experience between your production environments and your development environments, all the way through your test and validation workloads. Red Hat's also going to provide some prebuilt execution environments. We want to have some continuity between the experience that you have today on the Ansible tower and what you'll have next year, once we bring execution environments into production. We want you to be able to trust the Ansible, the version of Ansible that's running on your execution environments, and that you have the content that you expect. At the same time, we're going to provide a version of the execution environment, that's just the base execution environment. All it has is Ansible. This will let you take those using Ansible builder, take the collections that you've developed, that you need in your automation and combine them without having to bring in things that you don't need, or that you don't want in your automation and build them together into a very opinionated, container image. If you're interested in execution environments and you want to know how these are built and how you'll use them, we actually have them available for you to use today. Shane McDonald and Adam Miller are giving a talk later with a walk through how to build execution environments and how you'll use them. You can use this to make sure that you're ready for execution environments coming to the automation platform next year. Now that we've talked about how we build execution environments, I want to talk about how execution runs in your infrastructure. So today when you deploy Ansible tower, you're deploying a monolithic web application. Your execution capability is tied up into how you actually deploy Ansible tower. This makes scaling Ansible tower and your automation workloads difficult, and everything has to be co-located together in the same data center. Isolated nodes solve this a little bit, but they bring about their own sort of opinionated challenges in setting up SSH and having direct connectivity between the control nodes and the execution nodes themselves. We want to make this more flexible and easier to use. And so one of the things that we've created over the last year and that we've been working on over the last year is something that we call receptor. Receptor is an overlay network that's an Automation Mesh. And the goal here is to separate the execution capability of your Ansible content from the control plane capability, where you manage the web infrastructure, the users, the role-based access control. We want to draw a line between those. We want you to be able to deploy execution environments anywhere. Chris Wright earlier today mentioned Edge. Well Edge Cloud, we want you to be able to manage data centers anywhere in the world, and you can do this with the Automation Mesh,. The Automation Mesh connects your control plane with those execution nodes, anywhere in the world. Another thing that the Automation Mesh brings is, we're going to be able to draw the lines between the control plane themselves and each Automation Mesh node. This means that if you have an outage or a problem on your network and on your infrastructure, if you can draw a line between the control plane itself and the node that needs to execute, the sensible work, the Automation Mesh can route around problems. The Automation Mesh in the way it's deployed, also allows this to fit closer with ingress and egress policies that you have between your infrastructure. It doesn't matter which direction the Automation Mesh itself connects in. Once the connection is established, automation will be able to flow from the control systems to the execution nodes and get responses back. Now, this all works together with automation of the content collections that we mentioned earlier, the execution environments that we were just talking about and your container registries. All of these work together with these Automation Mesh nodes. They're very lightweight and very simple systems. This means you can scale up and scale down execution capacity as your needs increase or decrease. You don't need to keep around a lot of extra capacity just in case you automate more, just because you're not sure when your execution capacity needs will increase and decrease. This fits into an automated system for scaling your infrastructure and scaling your execution capacity. Now that we've talked about the content that you use to manage, and how that execution is performed and where that execution is performed. I want to look a little bit beyond the actual automation platform itself. And specifically, I want to talk about how the automation platform works with OpenShift and Kubernetes. Now we have an existing installer for Ansible tower that we'll deploy to OpenShift Kubernetes, and we support OpenShift and Kubernetes as a first-class system for deploying Ansible tower. But I mentioned automation hub and Ansible tower as this is what the automation platform is for us. So we want to take that installer and replace it with an operator-based full life cycle approach to deploying and managing the automation platform on OpenShift. This operator will be available in OperatorHub. So there's no need to manage complex YAML files that represent the deployment. Since it's available in OperatorHub, you have one place that you can go to manage deployments, upgrades, backup and restore. And all of this work seamlessly with the container groups feature that we introduced last year. But I want to take this a little bit beyond just deploying and upgrading the automation platform from the operator. We want to look at what other capabilities that we can get out of those operators. So beyond just deploying and upgrading, we're also creating a resource operators and CRDs that will allow other systems running in OpenShift or Kubernetes to directly manage resources within the automation platform. Anything from triggering jobs and getting the status of jobs back, we want to enable that capability if you're using OpenShift and Kubernetes. The first place we're starting with this, is Red Hats Advanced Cluster Management system. Advanced Cluster Management brings together the ability to manage OpenShift and Kubernetes clusters to install them and manage them, as well as applications and products in managing the life cycle of those across your clusters. So what we really want to do, is give you the ability to connect traditional and container-based workloads together. You're already using the Ansible automation platform to manage workloads with Ansible. When using Advanced Cluster Management and OpenShift and Kubernetes, now you have a full system. You can manage across clouds across clusters, anywhere in the world. And this sort of brings me back to one of the areas of focuses for us. Our goal is complete end-to-end automation. We want to connect your people, your domains and the processes. We want to help you deliver for you and your customers by expanding the capabilities of the Ansible automation platform. And we want to make this a seamless experience to both curate content, control the content for your organization, and run the content and run Ansible itself using the full suite of the Ansible automation platform. So the Advanced Cluster management team is giving a talk later where you'll actually be able to see Advanced cluster Management and the Ansible automation platform working together. Don't forget to check out Adam and Shane's talk on execution environments, how those are built and how you can use those. Thank you for coming to AnsibleFest, and we'll see you next time.

>> Narrator: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I am Stu Miniman and welcome to this special cube conversations. We're here with Dell Technology to share the news of an update to one of their product lines. We've watched for a number of years, Dell has taken their portfolio like I said they powered them up. So, of course the servers are known for a long time PowerEdge and we've seen many of the storage products and like going through their power up and here we have is the PowerFlex. So people that are familiar with what's happening in the software defined storage and hyper-converged space will remember the VX flex, so it's powered up. Joining me to discuss this important announcement, we have Matthew Paul, who's the Senior Director of Product Management and Anthony Cinelli, who's the Senior Director of Business Development, both with Dell Technologies. Matt, let's jump right into it. PowerFlex, powering up this segment of the market, give us the importance and what the announcement is. >> Great, thank you Stu thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm really excited to announce that we're powering up our product and we're moving our VxFlex product through the new power brand and the power name, really responding to customers and our customers taking this product on and aligning it and using it to be able to... Inline with our bigger portfolio that we have at Dell EMC, delivering outcomes for our customers. So it's an exciting timeframe and it really reflects this idea of customers' adoption, in the technology and our investment as Dell Technologies in this software defined storage, to kind of signify to the market that we're here to stay and this is an exciting thing we're working through. The second part around this on top of kind of the rebrand is a new launch of PowerFlex three five So this new software and this software information is delivering some key additions to our portfolio, including a replication, including a new HDMI 5 GUI and including some really cool additions to our software management stack that customers are really been asking for. >> Excellent. So AC, in normal times you're out meeting with a lot of customers, I'm sure you're still talking to a lot of customers, even if you're in work from home mode during the pandemic, but help us understand one of the things we know that Dell has done is it is spring line the portfolio, but when you talk about storage software-defined storage, converged, hyper-converged, there's still a few different options inside the Dell family. So tell us where PowerFlex fits and how it differentiates in position, compared to some of the other pieces. >> Yeah, great question. So, I have a pretty nice role here for Dell, which is, I am responsible for our entire portfolio of converged, hyperconverged, and software defined offerings. And really what that affords me is one particular luxury when I engage with customers. And that luxury is that I can start every single customer engagement with a question. Which is, what problem are you trying to solve? And that's really important because having a portfolio at my disposal allows me to lead with that question and really focus the conversation and solution on what their business problem is and how best to solve it. Now, the things we typically listen for when it comes to Flex are things like flexibility, things like performance, things like I'm trying to solve a platform where I want to re-platform my architecture to a software-defined outcome. But I need to run a wide variety of workloads. I need to run virtual workload, I need to run physical workload, I need to run container workload, I want to consolidate all of that onto a single modern software-defined infrastructure. Or we hear workload specific things. Things like I have an incredibly high performance Oracle Database, or I have a workload. One great example of a customer was cause of COVID they had to go from 60,000 to 160,000 remote users over a weekend. They did that on Flex with zero incremental infrastructure required for the storage. All the performance, all of the horsepower was fully capable of handling that increased capacity. Another customer, curbside pickup was a great application for their business, saw a hundred X performance requirement increase essentially over the course of a weekend because of COVID. Running on flex, they were able to swallow that performance increase with no problem. So a lot of what we see when it comes to Flex and the problems we're hearing are I need a platform that has a lot of inherent flexibility, or I have a very acute workload problem, then I need something very scalable and very performant to solve. But again, my luxury is I can always ask the customer the question first and then leverage the power of our portfolio to provide the best solution to solve for their business problem. >> All right, so AC, appreciate you talked about scale and performance, two of the really big things, if you talk about what's happening in this space. Matt, maybe you can help us sequin through a little bit, as to how this differentiates compared to other solutions in the market place we saw software-defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure run through its wave in the last few years, you've got some very large customers, big brand names globally, as well as service providers that have used Flex in the past. So explain how this is different from others out there. >> Yeah, I think when we talk about how we manage and we work through this, it's our concepts, so I'm trying to really democratize this software to the masses, right? And be able to make it easy to use and simple to use. If you think about old or traditional software-defined storage, all the knobs and all the tweaks, sometimes it make it difficult to implement. And so you get these really high end extreme customers that leave all these knobs to tweak. We do that very, very well, but what we've been focused on the last couple of years is ensuring we can get that to multiple places through robust kind of investment in our flex manager space. So be able to automate and make things a lot easier and simpler for customers to use that way we can go down and provide this technology to more people. And then the other thing is kind of meeting customers where they need to be. And so a couple of key mechanism, which people consume our products is through our appliances and our racks or integrated racks. So when a customer comes after a kind of a full end to end white glove solution, whether I want to roll a big rack into their environment, plug it in, get it up and going, we have a full integrated rack that we deliver to the customers that really drive that outcome. And then if you think about the difference between that and the appliance the appliance has given us a little more flexibility. So if you want to plug that into an existing network or an existing environment, well, both of these things give you that extreme scale and performance that AC was just talking about, while that rich management experience. so I think you kind of aligned the consumption models and the new management, which also brings a big differentiated value to the product. >> Excellent, so, Matt when I hear you talking about these solutions, wonder if you can help connect this with how your customers are talking about cloud in general, you talked about consumption model, you talked about how to manager, so where does this fit? whether it's the Dell Tech Cloud or just your customers overall discussion of cloud. >> Yeah, so a couple of things come to mind here. Typically what we see with PowerFlex is customer saying, I'm trying to achieve what we call this common platform, which is, I want to build an on premises cloud, that gives me the flexibility to run all the workloads in my data center. And when we say all the workloads, that's everything from obviously your virtualization stack through things like your physical bare metal workloads typically your high performance databases all the way through this emerging world of containers. And those containers could be virtual, could be physical. And giving customers the value of running all of that on a single underlying software-defined infrastructure, with all of the automation life cycle management to go along with it, there's really just nothing like that in the market. So really where we're seeing this adoption is customers who are saying, I want to build my own cloud within my data center, that gives me the ability to run my workloads and because I'm building them on a common infrastructure, I can build automation that allows my end users to consume that infrastructure in a very cloud-like manner. So that's one big thing that we are seeing customers really bite off on. Another approach is within that Dell Technologies cloud platform. Which is, how do we leverage the best of all of the assets under the Dell Technologies umbrella, namely assets from VMware, VMware cloud foundations and everything they offer in their multicloud story, and providing a wide variety of options within the Dell Technologies portfolio to solve that. Obviously we have our VxRail platform, which is the most integrated solution vertically within that VMware stack. We also have other offerings within our storage portfolio that have the ability to plug into that, PowerFlex being one of those as an option for customers to leverage within that Dell Tech Cloud platform strategy. >> Excellent. Matt, you mentioned the new updates with three dot five maybe give us a little bit more on that If whether it's an existing customer, what things they've been asking for that are in this release, or maybe first some new people that might not have looked at the Flex family for awhile that three dot five might be bringing to the table. >> Yeah, I think the great thing about this product, it's an end to end solution. So we bring all these things together that add that value. A couple of the key things is that we've been hearing and driving towards our customers is around replication or a synchronous replication. So the ability for us to be able to align that and give that to customers is probably the most important piece of this release. We also did some really cool stuff in the management stack. So if you think about other competition or other products, being able to align firmware updates for example, or software updates for example, because of the scale of our product, we've had to align real unique things in our managements like stack like the ability to do rack level updates. So really innovative, really differentiated. So customers can take racks at a time down to do updates 'cause they don't have time when there's thousands of servers in their environment, they don't have time to do one note at a time in a round robin fashion. >> And a point to add onto that, right? What's really unique and Matt touched on it, this concept of democratization. We've always done large really well with this technology, right? In a way that really no other technology platform in this space can. What the team has built on the management stack is now allowing us to also do small and medium incredibly well, where we can bring this incredibly disruptive technology to the masses, to your general enterprise, to your general mid market type customer, who's not solving for hundreds or thousands of notes, but maybe solving for 10, 20 or 50 notes and delivering this very disruptive outcome that helps them much more adapt or much more quickly adapt to changing demands they have, harnessing all this flexibility, but doing it with point click operations that are incredibly simple across the full stack. >> Excellent, well, we've heard from Jeff Clark when you get the power brand on there, that's a message to the customers that this is a platform that's going to be with us for quite a number of years. Give us a look forward as to both of you as to what would you expect to see from PowerFlex. >> Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about the future, right? To your point, aligning with the winning roadmap, the investment level in this technology is really high within the organization, how we work well within the broader Dell Technologies portfolio is really exciting. So we'll continue to innovate and drive this democratization story that Anthony was talking about. Innovate in new data services, innovate in new management paradigms and stacks. Like the thing I just talked about in terms of doing rack level updates. And I think just giving customers, listening to our customers and providing that on a reoccurring basis is the critical thing. So we're really embracing this idea of providing updates on a regular basis to be able to respond to customers' needs on a daily day basis. >> Yeah, I think one thing to add to that, that I'm excited to see the team continue executing on is delivering actual workload solution-based outcomes, right? Very often customers will come to us and say, here's my workload problem, right? It's an Oracle, it's a Slung, it's an elastic stack or name your workload. The team's really done a great job of leveraging this platform and building full stack validated solutions, oftentimes in tandem with the application vendor. So customers can consume this technology with complete confidence to run oftentimes their most important or critical workloads, knowing that they have the full backing of the vendor, they have the full backing of the infrastructure provider and the application provider working together to deliver this technology as an outcome. And because of its extreme flexibility, we can adapt it to so many different workload scenarios and customers have responded to that incredibly well. So for me, I'm excited to see the team continuing to build that solutions portfolio because customers are really seeing a ton of value in that. >> Great. I guess final question I have for you Matt, probably up your alley there, availability of the product, is it available now at the launch and if I was a VxFlex customer before what does the move to PowerFlex move, how do I get from where I was to the future If there are any hardware changes or is it all software? >> Yeah, good point. So it's available now, there on the 25th, so, really excited for the customers and we do support customers going from the existing version to the new version. And so the upgrades are pretty straight forward, pretty easy to bring in that updated management stack and then bring in the updated FlexOS. I'm sorry, PowerFlex version. (giggles) >> It's all right, I'm sure customers will be going back and forth on the terms. All right, Matt and AC thank you so much for the update. Congratulations on the progress. (mumbles) All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. This is theCUBE Virtual with our quarantine crew going out and covering the latest posts of the Virtual Summit where our next guest is Matthew Cornelius, Executive Director for the Alliance for Digital Innovation. Matthew, thanks for joining me today for part of AWS virtual Public Sector Summit. >> That's great, thanks, John. Appreciate you having me. >> I know that John Wood and I have been talking about this organization and some of the ambition and the relevance of it. So I think it's a super important story. I want to get your thoughts on this in an unpack kind of the mission but for starters, tell us what is the Alliance for Digital Innovation? When were you formed? What's the mission? What do you do? >> Sure. Yeah, so ADI was formed about two years ago, to create a new advocacy group that could focus explicitly on getting cloud forward, commercial, highly innovative companies into the public sector. So the government technology space has traditionally been dominated by a lot of legacy vendors, folks that are very happy with vendor lock-in, folks that have an outdated business model that would not suffice in the commercial sector. So why does it have to be that way for government and ADI started with about eight members has since grown. We're approaching two dozen now. So we've had a lot of growth and I think a lot of the response that you've seen in the public sector, especially to the COVID crisis, and the response and relief efforts have made this organization and our mission more relevant now than ever. There's no way that you can go back to the previous way of doing business, so adopting all these commercials technologies, changing your business model, changing your operating model, and really use an emerging technology to deliver all these missions services is critical. >> You know, one of the things that I've been reporting on for many, many years is this idea of modernization. Certainly on the commercial side with cloud, it's been really important and Amazon has done extremely well, from a business standpoint. We all know that where that's going. The issue that's happening now is the modernization is kicking in. So the government has started to move down this track, we've seen the procurement start to get more modernized. Move from buying manuals to actually having the modern stuff and in comes COVID-19. You couldn't have accelerated, you couldn't have pulled the future forward fast enough to an already struggling federal government, in my opinion, and I've talked to many people in DC and the young crowd saying, "Hey, old government get modern", and then this comes. It's almost like throwing the rock on your back and you're sinking. This is a problem. What's your take on this? Because you're trying to solve a problem with modernizing, but now you got COVID-19 coming in, it compounds the complexity and the challenge. What's your chosen reaction to that? >> Yeah, so it there's a multifaceted response to this. So part of it is what I like to say is the government's done more in the past four months than it's done in the past 14 years when it comes to modernization and adopting commercial capabilities. I think with individual agencies, you've seen those those agencies, I will name a couple like the Small Business Administration, the General Services Administration, where I used to work, folks that were already heavily invested in cloud, heavily invested in modern digital tools and modern digital processes, they were able to weather this storm and to deal especially in SPS case, with a dramatic increase in their mission. I mean, running the paycheck Protection Program is something unlike an organization that size has ever seen. And from a technology standpoint, they have a lot of good stories that are worth telling and I think it's because they were so cloud forward. I think one of the other interesting points that as really come to light over the past four months is so many of the issues around modernization were cultural. Now, of course, there are some that are legal, there's acquisition, there's the way agencies are appropriated and financed and the way they can spend their money, but by and large, all of these agencies had to move to maximum telework, they had to get rid of all of these outdated on premise processes, these paper based processes that they had. And although surely there were some bumps in the road, and that was not easy, especially for these folks working around the clock to keep their agencies operational to make sure citizens are getting the services, they need, especially during this crisis, I think there's a lot of great success stories that you see there and because of this, no one even if they're allowed to go back into the office or when they're allowed to go back in the office, people are going to understand how much more productive they are, how much more technologically capable they are. And that's not just CIO officers that's people on programs in the front lines delivering services that mission response. We've really seen it powerful word over the last four months. >> You know, Matthew, I've been very vocal given that I'm kind of the old guy, get off my lawn kind of commentary. (Matthew laughs) I've seen that the waves and I remember coming in when I was in my late 20s and 30s old school enterprises, the commercial business wouldn't do business with startups, you had to be approved or you were in entrenched vendors supporting those things and then in comes the web, in comes the 90s, and then the web came there's more agile, you had startups that were more open and working with commercial vendors. It seems like we're seeing that movie play out in public sector where you have the entrenched incumbents, they got the town wired, who knows what's going on. It's been called the Beltway bandits for years and Tris and Curson and I talk about that all the time, but now the government can be agile, and startups need to be product to these new solutions, like whether it's video conferencing or virtual events, things like we do. New solutions are coming that need to come in, it's hard. Can you share how a company whether it's a startup or a new solution can come in and work with the government? Because the perception is, it's impossible. >> Yeah, and part of why ADI exist is to break that down. One to recruit more members to join us to really help drive commercial innovation in the government. And we have some very large companies like AWS and others that do an awful lot of work with the government. And we have a lot of smaller startups that are interested in dipping their toe in there. And so we try to help them demystify how it is that you go about working with the government. I think there have been again, some good success stories on this one. I think that there are lots of places like the Department of Defense, a lot of the folks in the intelligence community, some other agencies, they have authorities, they have partnership programs that make it easier for folks to adopt commercial innovation. They have unique authorities like other transaction authorities or commercial solutions offerings that really lowers the barrier for new technologies to be piloted and potentially scaled inside government. But that's not the case across lots of agencies, and that's why we advocate broadly for getting the acquisition process to move at the speed of technology. If there are good authorities that work in some agencies, let's get into everybody, let's have everybody try it because the people in the agencies, the acquisition professionals, the technical professionals, they have to be committed to working with industry, so the industry is committed to working with them. And as a former federal employee, myself, I worked at the Office of Management and Budget and the General Service Administration, I always was upset at the fact that the government is very good at speaking to industry, but not very good at working with industry and listening, and so we see a lot more of that now and I think part of that is a response to COVID, but it's also the recognition that you can't do things the way you used to do it, the traditional butts in seats contracting business model where everybody in between a federal employee and that outsourced service provider. You don't need all those people there, you can do it yourself and be just as effective and get all the real outcomes you're looking for with commercial innovation. >> It sounds like ADI your priorities is to make things go fast and be modernized. So I have to ask you, the question that's on my mind, probably on everyone's mind is, what are the key conversations or messages you provide to the agencies, heads or members of Congress to get them excited about this, to take action to support what you're doing? Because let's face it, most of these guys up on the Hill are girls now, most of them have a law backgrounds, they don't have a tech background. So that's a complaint that I've heard in the hallways in DC is, the guy making all the decisions doesn't know jack about tech. >> No, it's it's a great point. When we advocate up on the Hill there's a law that I don't think a lot of folks pay in awful lot of attention to. Everybody likes the nice new things that are coming from Capitol Hill but there's a great piece of legislation from 1994 for the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act. We actually did some tremendous original research at ADI, about a year ago and released an interesting report that got a lot of uptick here. And most people don't even understand that the law requires you to do market research and see if there's a commercial product or service that meets your need before you go down building any sort of specific requirements or building out some sort of long procurement process. And so a lot of what we're doing is educating folks, not just on what the law says, but on why these can lead to better outcomes for agencies. I mean, I truly believe that most of the folks in government whether they're technical folks or not want to do the best thing, but if you're a company trying to do business with the government, you have to go through what is often a five or six or sometimes 10 person human supply chain. There's someone in government who wants your solution because it addresses a particular problem, and between them, and you the company, there's all sorts of additional bureaucratic overlays and folks that are not technical, that have other incentives and other priorities that don't always lead to the most optable procurement outcome. So there's an educational component, there's a cultural component. We need more champions inside government. We need not just better technology that's wanting to work with the government but we also need smarter, better people inside that understand the technology and can get to it the way they need to get to it so that they can deliver mission. >> As someone like me who's in the technology business, who loves entrepreneurship, loves business, loves the impact of technology, I'm not a public servant, and I'm not at that up to speed on all the government kind of inside baseball, so I kind of look at it a little bit differently. I've always been a big proponent of public private partnerships that's been kicked around in the past. It's kind of like digital transformation, kind of cliche, but there's been some pockets of success there, but look at the future. The role of influence and the commercial impact just China, for instance, just riffing the other day with someone around China doesn't actually go through government channels for how they deal with the United States. There's a little commercial, they have intellectual property issues going on, people saying they're stealing, they're investing in the United States. So there's a commercial influence. So as the government has to look at these commercial influences, they then have to modernize their workforce, their workloads, their applications, their workplaces. The work is not just workloads, it's workplace, workforce. So if you had your way, how would you like to see the landscape of the federal technology piece of this look like in five years? Because there's now new influence vectors coming in that are outside the channels of federal purview. >> No, it's a great question, and I appreciate you bringing up the other complexities around nation state actors in China and everything else. Obviously, supply chain security and being able to deal with legitimate security threat is critical when you're inside government. I mean, your first sort of purpose is to do no harm and to make sure that you're keeping citizen data, whether it's classified or unclassified secure. We think at ADI that there's a great balance to be heard there and part of that is if you're working with American companies, and you're adopting the best and most agile and most innovative commercial technology that America has to offer, that's going to make our industry more competitive and position it better in the commercial market and it's also going to make government agencies more effective. They're going to be able to meet their mission faster, they're going to be able to lower costs, they're going to be able to shift what are going to be tighter and tighter budgets over the next four or five or 10 years to other areas because they're not wasting so much money on these old systems and this old business processes, this old way of doing business. So you that is one of the balances that we have to take from an advocacy standpoint. We have to understand that supply chain security, cybersecurity are real issues, but security can also be an enabler to innovation and not an impediment and if a lot of the commercial capabilities that are coming out now and a lot of these companies like the ones ADI represents, want to do business with the government, and their commercial products can inherently be more secure than a lot of these old bespoke systems or old business practices. That's good for not just federal agencies, that's good for citizens and that's good for our national defense and our economy. >> You know, I look at our landscape and being an American born here, looking at other emerging countries, certainly China's one example of becoming very world digital native, even other areas where 5G and then telecom has made great internet access, you're seeing digital native countries, so as we modernize, and our lawmakers have more tech savvy and things become digital native, the commercial enabling piece is a huge thing, having that enabling technology, because it creates wealth and jobs and other things so you got three things, digital native country, enabling technologies to promote good and wealth and engine of economic value, and then societal impact. What's your take on those three kind of pillars? Because we're kind of as a country coming into this world order and look at the younger generation, they're all screaming for it, we're digital native, and all kinds of arbitrage there, fake news, misinformation, then you got enabling technology with the cloud, and then you get societal benefits, future of elections and everything else. So what's your thoughts? 'Cause it sounds like you're thinking about these things in your Digital Innovation Alliance. >> Yeah, absolutely. The one thing I will say and as someone that was a former federal employee, the one thing we need more of whether you're on the executive branch or in Congress, we need more people that like you said, are digital natives that understand technology that also want to be inside government either running programs or dealing with policy issues. We need as many good new ideas and folks with real, legitimate, necessary and current skills in there. Because if you don't understand the technology, you don't understand, like you said the societal impacts, you don't understand the business impacts of government decision making and the government can drive markets. I mean, especially in the middle of Coronavirus, we're spending trillions of dollars to keep folks afloat and we're using technology primarily as a way to make that happen. So the first thing I would say is, we need, we continue, need to continue, sorry, we need to continue to recruit and retain and train the best and the brightest to go into government service because it is a joy and a privilege to serve government and we've got to have better smarter technical people in there or we're going to keep getting these same outcomes, like you've mentioned over the past 30 plus years. >> I think we're in a JFK moment where John F. Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, "what you can do for your country". Moment in the modern era and that was the 60s, that we saw the revolution of that happen there, we're kind of having a digital version of that now where it's an opportunity for people to get involved, younger generations and make change rather than arguing about it. So I feel fairly strongly about this so I think this is an opportunity. Your reaction to that? >> No, that's a fantastic point. I hadn't really thought about the JFK resemblance. From an industry standpoint, I think that is what is happening with these emerging technology companies and even some of the large companies. They understand that this is their way to contribute to the country whose R&D dollars and these public private partnerships helped a lot of these folks to grow and become the companies they are now. At least started them down that road. And so for us at the Alliance for Digital Innovation and the companies that are a part of us that is sort of purposeful to who we are. We do what we do and we want the government to build stronger relationships and to use this technology, because it does serve mission. I mean, we exclusively focus on the public sector. Focus of these companies and it's tremendously valuable when you see a federal agency who spent five or 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars and still not solving a problem and then they can pick up the commercial off the shelf technology from a company that we represent, and can solve that problem for $5 million and do it in six months. I mean, that's truly rewarding and whether you're inside government or out, we should all celebrate that and we should find ways to make that the norm and not the exception. >> And take all that hate and violence and challenge it towards voting and getting involved. I'm a big proponent of that. Matthew, thank you so much for taking the time. I'll give you the last word. Take a minute to put a plug in for the Alliance for Digital Innovation. Who are the charter members, who's involved? I know John Wood from Telos is a charter member. Who's involved, how did it all start? >> Yeah. >> Give it taste of the culture and who's involved. >> Yeah, thanks, John. So, yeah, like you mentioned, we have tremendous members, AWS is obviously a great partner. We have a lot of big companies that are involved, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks. We also have great midsize and small companies. You think of Telos, you think of SAP NS2 and Iron Net, you think of Saildrone. We've got companies that whose technology product and service offerings run the range for government needs. We all come together because we understand that the government can and should and must do better to buy and leverage commercial technology to meet mission outcomes. So that is what we focus on. And, frankly, we have seen tremendous growth since COVID started. I mean, we are 24 members now we were at 18, just four months ago, but I like to say that ADI is an organization whose mission is more important and more resonant now, not just in the technology, parts of government, but at the secretary level at the Chief Acquisition Officer level, in Congress. We are folks that are trying to paint the future, we're doing a positive vision for change for what government can and should be. And for all of those other technology companies that want to be a part of that, that understand that the government can do better, and that has ideas for making it work better and for getting commercial innovation into government faster, to solve mission outcomes and to increase that trust between citizens and government, we want you. So if folks are interested in joining you got people that are watching out there, you can go to alliance4digitalinnovation.org. We're always accepting interested applicants and we look forward to continuing this message, showing some real outcomes and helping the government for the next year, five years, 10 years, really mature and modernize faster and more effectively than it has before. >> Great mission, love what you're doing. I think the future democracy depends on these new models to be explored, candidly and out in the open, and it's a great mission, we support that. Thanks for taking the time, Matthew. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, John. Have a great Public Sector Summit. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Virtual Summit. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE Virtual. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for more coverage. (gentle music)