(intro upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to our continued coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited about the conversation coming up. Not only are we joined by two brilliant minds in the cloud, one of them happens to be a CUBE alumni. Please welcome Mike from AMD and Ali from Dropbox. Ali, welcome back to the show, how you been? >> Thanks Savannah. I'm doing great and really excited to be back on theCUBE. It was great discussion last time and really excited for both re:Invent and also to see how this video turns out. >> Hey, that makes two of us and probably three of us. How are you doing today, Mike? >> Doing great. It's really nice to be getting back to in-person events again and to be out solving problems with customers and partners like Dropbox. >> I know, isn't it? We've all missed each other. Was a lonely couple of years. Mike, I'm going to open it up with you. I'm sure a lot of people are curious. What's new at AMD? >> Well, there's a lot that's new at AMD, so I'll share a subset of what's new and what we've been working on. We've expanded our global coverage in Amazon EC2 with new regions and instance types. So users can deploy any application pretty much anywhere AWS has a presence. Our partner ecosystems for solutions and services has expanded quite a bit. We're currently focused on enabling partners and solutions that focus on cloud cost optimization, modernizing infrastructure, and pushing performance to the limit, especially for HPC. But the biggest buzz, of course, is around AMD's new fourth generation of our EPYC CPU Genoa. It's the world's fastest data center CPU with transformative energy efficiency and that's a really interesting combination, highest performance and most efficient. So on launch day, AWS announced their plans to roll out AMD EPYC Genoa processor-based EC2 instances. So we're pretty excited about that and that's what we'll be working on in the near term. >> Wow, that's a big deal and certainly not a casual announcement. Obviously, power and efficiency hot topics here at re:Invent but also looking at the greater impact on the planet is a big conversation we've been having here as well. So this is exciting and timely and congratulations to you and the team on all that seems to be going on. Ali, what's going on at Dropbox? >> Yeah, thanks Savannah. The Q3 2022 was actually a very strong quarter for Dropbox during a very difficult macroeconomic backdrop. Our focus has continued to be on innovation and this is around both new products and also driving multi-product adoption which is paying a lot of dividends for us, so essentially, bringing products like Dropbox Sign, DocSend, Capture, and other exciting products to our customers. On the infra side, it's all about how do we scale our infrastructure to meet the business needs, right? How do we keep up with the accelerated growth during the pandemic and also leveraging both AMD and AWS for investments in our public cloud? >> Let's talk about the cloud a bit. You are both cloud experts and I'm glad that you brought that up. We'll keep it there with Ali. When, why, and how should users leverage public cloud? >> Yeah, so Dropbox is hybrid cloud which means we are running applications both in private and public cloud and within a unique position to leverage the best of both worlds. And Savannah, this is a decision we continue to reevaluate on a regular basis. And there are really three key factors that come into play here. First is scale and scale, are we operating at a scale where customization is cost-efficient for us? Next is uniqueness. Is our workload unique compared to what the public cloud supports? And lastly, innovation. Do we have the expertise to innovate faster than public cloud or not? So based on these three key factors, we try and balance all of them and then come up with the best option for us at Dropbox. And kind of elaborating over here, things like international storage, we're leveraging public cloud, things like AI and ML, we're leveraging public cloud, but when we talk about Magic Pocket, which is our multi-exabyte storage system, that has the scale which is why we are doing that on our own private cloud. >> Wow, I think you just gave everybody a fantastic framework for thinking about their decision matrix there if nothing else. Mike, is there anything that you'd like to add to that? Anything that AMD considers when contemplating public cloud versus private? >> Yeah, so there's really three main drivers that I see when users consider when, why, and how should they leverage public cloud. Three main drivers: establishing a global footprint, accelerating product release cycles, and efficiently rightsizing infrastructure. So customers looking to establish a global footprint often turn to public cloud deployments to quickly reach their clients in workforces around the world, most importantly with minimal capital expense. I understand Dropbox uses public cloud to establish their global presence scaling out from their core data centers in North America. And then a lot of industries have tremendous pressure to accelerate product release cycles. With public cloud, organizations can immediately deploy new applications without a long site and hardware acquisition cycle and then the associated ongoing maintenance and operational overhead. And the third thing is customers that need to rightsize and dynamically scale their infrastructure and application deployments are drawn to public cloud, for example, customers that have cyclical compute or application load peaks can efficiently deploy in the cloud without overdeploying their on-prem infrastructure for most of the year which is off-peak during those off-peak times. That infrastructure idle time is a waste of resources and OPEX. So scalable rightsizing draws a lot of users to cloud deployment. >> Yeah, wow. I think there's a lot of factors to consider but also it seems like a pretty streamlined process for navigating that or at least you two both made it sound that way. Another hot topic in the space right now is security. Mike, let's start with you a little bit. What are the most important security issues for AMD right now that you can talk about? >> Yeah, sure. So, well, first of all, AWS provides a wide variety of really good security services to protect customers that are working in the cloud. Like from a processor technology perspective, there's three main security aspects to consider, two of which are common practice today and one of which AMD brings significant differentiation and value. The first two are protecting data at rest and data in transit. And these two are part of the prevalent security models of today where AMD provides distinct value and differentiation is in protecting data in use. So EPYC Milan and Genoa processors support a function called SEV-SNP and this enables users to reside and their applications to reside within their own cryptographic context and environment with data integrity protection to accomplish what's called comprehensive confidential computing. Ethics confidential computing solution is hardware-based. So it's easy to leverage, there's no code rewrite required unlike comparable solutions that are software-based that require recoding to a proprietary SDK and come with a significant performance trade-off. So with EPYC processors, you can protect your data at rest, in transit, and most importantly, in use. >> Everybody needs to protect their data everywhere it is. So I love that. That's fantastic to hear and I'm sure gives your customers a lot of confidence. What about over at Dropbox? What security issues are you facing, Ali? >> Yeah, so the first company value at Dropbox is actually being worthy of trust, and what this really means from a security perspective is how do we keep all of our users content safe? And this means keeping everything down to all of the infrastructure hardware secure. So partnering with AMD, which is one of our strongest partners out there, the new security features that AMD have and the hardware are critical for us and we are able to take advantage of some of these best security practices within our compute infrastructure by leveraging AMD's secure ship architecture. >> How important, you just touched on it a little bit, and I want to ask, how important are partnerships like the one you have with each other as you innovate at scale? Ali, you're nodding, I'm going to go to you first. >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, the partnership with with AMD is one of the strongest that we have and it just goes beyond like a regular partnership where it's just buy and sell. We talk about technology together, we talk about innovation together, we talk about partnership together, and for us, as I look look at our hybrid cloud strategy, we would not be able to get the benefits in terms of efficiency, scale, or liability performance without having a strong partner like AMD. >> That's awesome. Mike, anything you want to add there? >> I'd reiterate some of what Ali had to say. One of my favorite parts about my job is getting together with partners and customers to figure out how to optimize their applications and deployments around the world to get the most efficient use of the cloud infrastructure for servers that are based on AMD technology. In many cases, we can find 10% or better performance or cost optimization by working closely with partners like Dropbox. And then in addition, if we keep in lock step together to look at what's coming on the roadmap, by the time the latest and greatest technology is finally deployed, our customers and our partners are ready to take advantage of it. So that's the fun part of the job and I really appreciate the Dropbox's cooperation, optimizing their infrastructure, and using AMD products >> Well, what a synergistic relationship of mutual admiration and support. We love to hear it here in the tech world. Mike, last question for you. What's next for AMD? >> Well, heading into 2023, considering the current challenge macroeconomic environment and geopolitical instability, doing more with less will be top of mind for many CFOs and CEOs in 2023. And AMD can help accomplish that. AMD's EPYC processors, leadership performance, and lower EC2 retail costs can help users reduce costs without impacting performance, or the flip side of that, they can scale capacity without increasing costs. And because of EPYC's higher core counts, really high core density, applications can be deployed with fewer servers or smaller instances that has both economic and environmental benefits that reduce usage costs as well as environmental impacts. And that allows customers to optimize their application and infrastructure spend. And then the second thing that I've seen over the last couple of years and I see this trajectory continuing is increased geographic distribution of our colleagues and workforces is here to stay, people work from everywhere. In modern cross platform, collaboration platforms, that bring teams, tools, and content together have a really important role to play to enable that new, more flexible style of working. And those tools need to be really agile and easy to use. I think Dropbox is really well positioned to enable this new style of working. AMD's really happy to work closely with Dropbox to enable these modern work styles, both on premises, hybrid, and fully in the public cloud. >> Well, it sounds like a very exciting and optimistically, bright future for you all at AMD. We love to hear that here at theCUBE. Ali, what about you? What is 2023 going to hold for Dropbox? >> Yeah, so I think we're going to continue on this journey of transformation where our focus is on new products and also multi-product adoption. And from a cloud perspective, how do we continue to evolve our hybrid cloud so that we remain a competitive advantage for our business and also for our customers? I think right now, Savannah, we're in a very unique position to utilize some of the best AMD technology that's out there and that's both on premise and in the cloud. Some of the AMD Epic processors delivered the performance that we need for our hybrid cloud and we want to continue to leverage these also in public cloud which is the EC2 instances that are powered by AMD in the long run. So overall, Dropbox is looking forward to continue to evaluate some of the AMD's Genoa CPUs that are coming out but also want to continue to grow our EC2 footprint powered by AMD in the long run. >> Fantastic. Well, it sounds like this second showing here on theCUBE is just the tee up for your third and we'll definitely have to have Mike back on for the second time around to hear how things are going. Thank you both so much for taking the time today to join me here. Mike and Ali, it was fantastic getting to chat to you and thank you to our audience for tuning into theCUBE's special coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name's Savannah Peterson and I hope we can learn together soon. (outro upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fal.Con 2022. My name is Dave Vallante. We're here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. On the last earnings call George Kurts made a really big emphasis on the relationship with managed service providers. CrowdStrike has announced a new service provider capability. The powered service provider program. Jason Cook is here. He is the president of cyber defense labs. He's joined by Mike Riolo. Who's the vice president of global system integrators and service providers at CrowdStrike gents. Welcome to TheCube. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you >> Jason, tell us about cyber defense labs. What do you guys do? Give us the bumper sticker, please. >> Cyber defense labs uses the best technology in the world to put together services that help protect our clients >> Simple. Like it. What's XDR? (people laughing) >> I've not heard of that before, sorry. >> So Mike, we've seen the rise of service providers. I saw a stat, I don't know, six, seven months ago that 50% of us companies don't even have a SOC. We're talking about mid to large companies. So service providers are crucial. What's the CrowdStrike powered service provider program all about? >> Well, it's an evolution for us. We've been dealing with this market for some time. And the idea is, is like how do we expand the opportunity to stop reaches? I mean, that's what it's all about. Like how more routes to market, more partners like cyber defense labs that can really go in and bring our technology coupled with their services to power their offerings to their customers and just help us reach every end user out there, to stop reaches. >> So Jason, how do you guys differentiate? Cause I see, you know, as an analyst, I'll look back, I'll read the press releases and they'll see, okay. They just look so similar. So how do you differentiate from the competition? What do you tell customers? >> So when it comes to our selection of technology we test it, we work it, we literally put it into real world situations with our clients. And then we differentiate ourselves with expert services. It's a white glove service from us. We embed ourselves right in with our clients. That's why we call 'em our client partners. And they see us as part of their team and extension of their team. They don't have the time to play with technology and work out what's best. They don't know the time to select it or even then the expertise to use it effectively in the environment. So that's where the trust comes in with us. And then for us, likewise, we are the technology provider such as CrowdStrick, we need to know the technology works and it does what it says. >> I always ask CISOs; What's your number one challenge? And they'll say lack of talent. The only time I didn't get that answer was at... The Mongo DB CISO at reinforced. I'm like yeah, it's cause you're Mongo, I guess reinforced or AWS doesn't have the same problem, but do you... Obviously you see that problem. And you compliment that, is that a fair? >> Yeah, absolutely. Many, many companies mid-market enterprises are really struggling to find talent and then retain the talent. So for us where that's all we are about and then we are there to enable your business to do what your business does. It is just working and I think more and more so you're going to see an industry clearly CrowdStrike's going in that direction. That it's the service provider that becomes a critical element of that trusted circle. >> Does that translate into a market segment by size of organization typically or? You mentioned the ever never ending quest for talent which is critical regardless of size but what does your target market look like? >> So I, I think the biggest gap in the market frankly, is still the mid-market. Many smaller companies still are really just struggling with 'what is the problem.' At least in the mid-market, in the enterprises they really beginning to understand the problem and want to invest and lean in. And here's the irony. They now want to partner to solve the problem cause they recognize they can't do it on their own. >> So Mike, what are the critical aspects of this program? I mean, got the press release out there, but put some meat on the bone for us. >> So if you look at what we were doing to enable managed service providers to go in and, and be powered by CrowdStrike before it was in a corporate market segment it was a specific set of product from us to really enable MDR, you know, sort of that, that generation of services that a lot of customers looked at MSPs for. And what the big message about this is is we are now expanding that. We're taking it out of corporate, we're going upmarket, we're going enterprise. We can leverage partners like cyber defense labs to package our software into their offering and help them power them more than just endpoint. Right? We've had a lot of exciting announcements and probably more to come around identity, you know XDR, the new buzz, right? Like what does it mean? And in, if you look at our approach, it's a very platform centric approach and that's something that partners can monetize. That's something that partners can really help clients grow with is that it's not just about endpoint. It's more about how do I make sure that I'm in a position with a partner that allows me to grow as a market decides it's necessary. So things like identity, cloud on and on and on, that we're investing in and continuing to grow. We are making that available to the CrowdStrike powered service about our marketplace. >> So Jason, service providers historically outsourcing, okay. And it used to be a lot of; 'okay, you know, I'll take over your mess for less kind of thing.' Right? And so the pattern was you would have one of everything and then, that limited your scale. The bigger you got, you had this economies of scale. So am I hearing that, like how do you partner with CrowdStrike? Are you kind of standardizing on that platform or not necessarily cause you have to be agnostic. What's your posture on that? >> So there's a level of, you have to be technology agnostic. We pride ourselves in just using the best technology that's out there. But at the same time, very much with the Fal.Con platform they're building out and maturing in a way that's making significant risk mitigation abilities for a solution provider like us to say we'll take one of those, one of those and put our service around it because that's the best fit service to reduce the risk of this particular client. And having that flexibility for us to do that really allows us then to stay within the same sort of product suite rather than going outside when integration is still one of the biggest challenges that you have. >> So you're one of those organizations that's consolidating a bevy of point tools. Is that right? I mean, you're going through that transformation now. Have you already gone through that? What's your journey look like there? >> Oh, we help companies do that. That's how they mitigate and reduce their risk. >> Okay. But you're using tools as, as well. Are you not? So I mean, you've got to also I mean you're like an extension of those clients. >> Absolutely. So it comes down to a lot of the time do you have the right team? We have a team of experts that deliver expert services. You get to a level of skillset and experience, which goes what's just the best tool out there. And it becomes that's our insight. So one of the reasons why we like the Fal.Con product is because regardless of what the mess is, that's happening you can rapidly deploy stuff to make a difference. And then you then work out how to fix the mess which is quite a change from how traditionally things are done, which is let's analyze the problem. Let's look at options around it. And by the time you've done that time has passed and you can't afford to just allow time to pass these days. So having the right technology allows you to rapidly deploy. Of course, we use what we sell. So we are proud to say that we use a number of the Fal.Con products to protect ourselves and consolidate onto that technology as we then offer that out as a service to our clients. >> So Mike, I'm thinking about the program in general and specifically how you are implementing this program thinking about the path to bringing the customer on board. There are a finite number of strategic seats at any customer's table. So who is at the customer's table? Is it CDL saying; 'Hey, I'm going to bring in my folks from CrowdStrike to have a conversation with you.' Is it CrowdStrike saying; 'Hey, it looks like a service provider might be the best solution for you. Let's go talk to CDL.' How does that work? >> It's a great question. And I think we talk a lot about how there's a gap in people to support cyber efforts inside of companies. But we don't talk about the gap in like experts that can go in and actually sit down with CISOs, with CIOs, with CFOs. And so for us, like it's all about the flexibility. It's it's what do you need in the moment? Because at the end of the day, it comes down to the people. If Jason has a great trusted relationship, he's like; 'Hey I just need some content.' 'Help me push why we're powered by CrowdStrike in this moment.' Great, go run. If we have an opportunity where we know that cyber defense labs has a presence then we go in together, right? Like that flexibility is there. We've done a lot. When you build a program like this, like it's easy to tell the market what they need. It's easy to tell everybody, but it's also you're looking at a cultural shift and how CrowdStrike goes to market, right? Like this is all about how do we get every possible route to market to stop reaches for customers of all size. >> I would echo that. there's three ways that that's working for our two companies at the moment. Many times a lot of the relationships that we have are trusted advisor at the owner or board level of these mid-market and enterprise companies. They're looking to ask for a number of things. And one of the things that we then say is, Hey for your technology roadmap, hey we want to bring in co-present coded us, co-discuss co-strategize with you what your roadmap is. And so we often bring CrowdStrike into the conversations that cyber defense lab is having at the board level. Then on the other side, CrowdStrike obviously has a significant sales force and trusted advisors. They go in with the product and then it's apparent that the you know, the client wants way more than just the product. They say, this is great. I love it. I've made my decision, but I can't operate it effectively. And so we then get pulled in from that perspective >> You get to all the time from product companies, right? It's like, okay, now what? How do I do this? And you go, oh, I'll call somebody. So this is going to accelerate. You go to market. >> Well, and everybody looks at it like, you know how does your sales play with their sales, right? Everyone's going after the same thing. And I'm, you know, that's important, but you have to look at CrowdStrike as more than sales, right? We have an amazing threat intel group that are helping clients understand the risk factors and what bad people are trying to do to them. We can bring so many experts to the side of a cyber defense labs in, in that realm. You know, we've been doing this a long time. >> This is what's interesting to me when I think about your threat hunting, because you guys are experts and you guys are experts. But the... Correct me if I'm wrong. But the advantage I see at the CrowdStrike has is your cloud platform allows you to have such a huge observation space. You got a ton of data and you bring that to the relationship as well and then you benefit from that? >> It's two way. It's absolutely two way. CrowdStrike has a whole bunch of experts and expertise in this space. So do cyber defense labs. We call it for us because we're providing a service to multiple clients. Many of them have a global presence. We call it our global threat view. And absolutely we are exchanging real time threat telemetry data with, with our friends at CrowdStrike Which is impacting the value that we have and the ability to respond extremely quickly when something's happening to one of our clients. >> Well, I just add to that, you know if you look at all of our alliances, right? We've got solution providers, tech reliant, everything. The one thing that's really interesting about the CrowdStrike powered service provider program; it lives in alliances, It's a partnership program, but they're our customer. They have chosen to standardize on our platform, right. To help drive the best results for their customers. And so we treat them like a partner because it's not for internal use. There's unlimited aspect to it. And so as that treating like partnership we have to enable them with more than just product. Right? We want to bring the right experts. We want to bring the right, you know, vision of where the market's going the threats out there, things of that nature. And that's something that we do every day with you guys. >> And it was even expressed earlier with the keynote speech that George gave. Look there's an ecosystem of very good technologies, very good providers. And there there's that sort of friend-of-me view here. You put the best thing together for the client at the end of the day. And if we all acknowledge, which I think is the maturity of our partnership, that one plus one equals, I always say at 51 now, if you play it right, then the partner sees... That the client sees the value of the partnership. And so they want more of that. >> So it sounds like... We got to wrap, but I wonder if we could close on this. It sounds like this was happening just organically in the field. Now you've codified it. So my question to each of you is; What's your vision for the future? Where do you guys want to take this thing? >> What a wrap question right there. I love it. Honestly, like we look at it in... Look at what does it mean to be a CrowdStrike powered service provider. It is more than just the platform. It's the program in general, offering them tools to go in and do early assessments. One thing about service providers, they're in there before vendors, right? We're still a vendor at the end of the day. And so they have that relationship, like how do we enable them to leverage our platform leverage our tools, leverage our programs in order to help a client understand, like, what is your risk factor Could a breach come, things of that nature. And so it's really building in really enabling a partner like cyber defense labs to take on the full suite of programs, services, platform that we can provide to them as a customer, treated them like a partner. >> And Jason, from your perspective, bring us on if you would. >> So our partnership with CrowdStrike is really enabling cyber defense labs to increase our share of wallet, our presence in very specific market segments; The mid-market to enterprise especially around banking, financial services auto dealerships, healthcare, manufacturing, where last year we saw a significant progress there. And we think we're going to double it between this year and next year. >> Jason Cook, Mike Riolo. thanks for coming in TheCube. Great story. >> Thank you for having us >> Alright, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Vallante and Dave Nicholson will be back right after this short break from Fal.Con 22. You're watching TheCube. (soft electronic music)

(soft upbeat music) >> Narrator: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is live. We love saying that. theCUBE is live at HPE Discover '22. It's about 8,000 HP folks here, customers, partners, leadership. It's been an awesome day one. We're looking forward to a great conversation next. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, two guests join us. We're going to be talking about the power of the channel. Mike Beltrano joins us, Worldwide Channel Sales Leader at AMD, and Phil Soper is here, the North America Head of Channel Sales at HPE. Guys, great to have you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> So we're talking a lot today about the ecosystem. It's evolved tremendously. Talk to us about the partnership. Mike, we'll start with you. Phil, we'll go to you. What's new with HPE and AMD Better Together? >> It's more than a partnership. It's actually a relationship. We are really tied at the hip, not just in X86 servers but we're really starting to get more diverse in HP's portfolio. We're in their hyper-converged solutions, we're in their storage solutions, we're in GreenLake. It's pretty hard to get away from AMD within the HP portfolio so the relationship is really good. It's gone beyond just a partnership so starting to transition now down into the channel, and we're really excited about it. >> Phil, talk about that more. Talk about the evolution of the partnership and that kind of really that pull-down. >> I think there's an impression sometimes that AMD is kind of the processor that's in our computers and it's so much more, the relationship is so much more than the inclusion of the technology. We co-develop solutions. Interesting news today at Antonio's presentation of the first Exascale supercomputer. We're solving health problems with the supercomputer that was co-developed between AMD and HPE. The other thing I would add is from a channel perspective, it's way more than just what's in the technology. It's how we engage and how we go to market together. And we're very active in working together to offer our solutions to customers and to be competitive and to win. >> Describe that go-to-market model that you guys have, specifically in the channel. >> So, there is a, his organization and mine, we develop joint go-to-market channel programs. We work through the same channel ecosystem of partners. We engage on specific opportunities. We work together to make sure we have the right creative solution pricing to be aggressive in the marketplace and to compete. >> It's a great question because we're in a supply chain crisis right now, right? And you look at the different ways that HP can go to market through the channel. There's probably about four or five ways that channel partners can provide solutions, but it's also route to purchase for the customers. So, we're in a supply chain crisis right now, but we have HP AMD servers in stock in distribution right now. That's a real big competitive advantage, okay? And if those aren't exactly what you need, HP can do custom solutions with AMD platforms all day, across the board. And if you want to go ahead and do it through the cloud, you've got AMD technology in GreenLake. So, it's pretty much have it your way for the customers through the channel and it's really great for the customers too because there's multiple ways for them to procure the equipment through the channel so we really love the way that HP allows us to kind of integrate into their products, but then integrate into their procurement model down through the channel for the end user to make the right choice. So, it's fantastic. >> You mentioned that AMD's in HCI, in storage, in GreenLake and in the channel. What are the different requirements within those areas? How does the channel influence those requirements and what you guys actually go to market with? >> Well, it comes down to awareness. Awareness is our biggest enemy and the channel's just huge for us because AMD's competitive advantage in our technology is much different. And when you think about price and performance and security and sustainability, that's what we're delivering. And really the channel kind of plugs that in and educates their customers through their marketing and demand gen, kind of influences when they hear from their customers or if they're proactively touching them, influences the route to purchase based on their situation, if they want to pay for it as a service, if they want to finance it, if it does happen to be in stock and speed of delivery is important to them, the channel partner influences that through the relationships and distribution or they can go ahead and place it as a custom to order. So, it's just really based on where they're at in their purchasing cycle and also, it's not about the hardware as much as it's about the software and the applications and the high-value workloads that they're running and that kind of just dictates the platform. >> Does hardware matter? >> Yes, it sure does. It does, man. We're just kind of, it's kind of like the vessel at this point and our processors and our GPS are in the HP vessel, but it is about the application. >> I love that analogy. I would say, absolutely does, workloads matter more and then what's the hardware to run those workloads is really critical. >> And to your point though, it's not just about the CPU anymore. It's about, you guys have made some acquisitions to sort of diversify. It's about all the other supporting sort of actors, if you will, that support those new workloads. >> Let me give you an example that's being showcased at this show, okay? Our extreme search solution with being driven by Splunk, okay? And it's a cybersecurity solution that the industry is going to have to be able to handle in regards to response to any sort of breach and when you think about, they have to search through the data and how they have to get through it and do it in a timely fashion. What we've done is developed a DL385 solution where we have a epic processor from AMD, we have a Xilinx which who we own now, they're FGPA, and Samsung SSDs which are four terabytes per drive packed in a DL385. Now you add the Splunk solution on top of that and if there ever is a breach, it would normally take about days to go ahead and access that breach. Now it can be done in 25 minutes and we have that solution here right now so it's not like we acquire Xilinx and we're waiting to integrate it. We hit the ground running and it's fantastic 'cause the solution's being driven by one of our top partners, WWT, and it's live in their booth here today so we're kind of showing that integration of what AMD is doing with our acquisitions in HP servers and being able to show that today with a workload on top of it is real deal. >> Purpose-built to scan through all those log files and actually surface the inside. >> Exactly what it is, and it's on public sector right now, that's a requirement to be able to do that and to not have it take weeks and be able to do it in 25 minutes is pretty impressive. >> Those are the outcomes customers are demanding? >> That's it. People are, if you're purchasing an outcome, HP can deliver it with AMD and if you're looking to build your own, we can give it to you that way too so, it's flexibility. >> Absolutely critical. Mike, from your perspective on the partnership we've seen and obviously a lot of transformation at HPE over the last couple of years, Antonio stood on this stage three years ago and said, "By 2022, we're going to deliver the entire portfolio as a service." How influential has AMD been from a relationship perspective on what he said three years ago and where they are today? >> Oh my gosh! We've been with them all the way through. I mean, HP is just such a great partner, and right now, we're the VDI solution on GreenLake so it's HP GreenLake, VDI solutions powered by AMD. We love that brand recognition as a service, okay? Same with high-performance computing powered by AMD, offered on HP GreenLake so it's really changed it a lot because as a service, it's just a different way for a customer to procure it and they don't have to worry about that hardware and the stack and anything like that. It's more about them going into that GreenLake portal and being able to understand that they're paying it just like they pay their phone bill or anything else so it's really Antonio's been spot-on with that because that's a reality today and it's being delivered through the channel and AMD's proud to be a part of it and it's much different 'cause we don't need to be as evolved as we have to be from a hardware sale perspective when it's going through GreenLake and it makes it much easier for us. >> Phil, you talked about workloads, really kind of what matter, how are they evolving? How is that affecting? What are customers grabbing you and saying, "We need this." What do you and from a workload standpoint and how are you delivering that? >> Well, the edge to the cloud platform or GreenLake is very much as a service offering, aimed at workloads. And so, if HPE is building and focusing its solutions on addressing specific workload needs, it's not about necessarily the performance you mentioned, or you're asking the question about hardware. It's not necessarily about that. It's, what is the workload, should the workload be, or could the workload be in public cloud or is it a workload that needs to be on premise and customers are making those choices and we're working with those customers to help them drive those strategies and then we adapt depending on where the customer wants the workload. >> Well, it's interesting, because Antonio in his keynote today said, "That's the wrong question," and my reaction was that's the question everybody's asking. It may be the wrong question, but that's what so, your challenge is to, I guess, get them to stop asking that question and just run the right tool for the right job kind of thing. >> That's exactly what it's about because you take high-value workloads, okay? And that can mean a lot of different things and if you just pick one of them, let's say like VDI or hyper-converged. HP's the only game in town where they can kind of go into a gun, a battle with four different guns. They give you a lot of choices and they offer them on an AMD platform and they're not locking you in. They give you a lot of flexibility and choice. So, if you were doing hyper-converged through HPE and you were looking to do it on AMD platform, they can offer to you with VMware vSAN ReadyNodes. They can offer it to you with SimpliVity. They can offer it to you with Nutanix. They can offer it to you with Microsoft, all on an AMD stack. And if you want to bring your own VMware and go bare metal, HP will just give you the notes. If you want to go factory integrated or if you want to purchase it via OEM through HP and have them support it, they just deliver it any way you want to get it. It's just a fantastic story. >> I'll just say, look, others could do that, but they don't want to, okay? That's the fact. Sometimes it happens, sometimes the channel cobbles it together in the field, but it's like they do it grinding their teeth so I mean, I think that is a differentiator of HPE. You're agnostic to that. In fact, by design. >> They can bring your own, you can bring your own software. I mean, it's like, you just bring your own. I mean, if you have it, why would we make a customer buy it again? And HP gives them that flexibility and if it's multiple hypervisors and it's brand agnostic, it's more about, let's deliver you the nodes, purpose-built, for the application that you're going to run in that workload and then HP goes ahead and does that across their portfolio on a custom to order. It's just beautiful for us to fit the need for the customer. >> Well, you're meeting customers where they are. >> Yes. >> Which in today's world is critical. There's no, really no other option for companies. Customers are demanding. Demands are not going to go. We're not going to see a decrease after the pandemic's over of demand, right? And the expectations on businesses. So meeting the customers where they are, giving them that choice, that flexibility is table stakes. >> How has those, you've mentioned supply chain constraints, it sounds like you guys are managing that pretty well. It's I think it's a lot of these hard to get supporting components, maybe not the most expensive component, but they just don't have it. So you can't ship the car or you can't ship the server, whatever it is, how is that affecting the channel? How are they dealing with that? Maybe you could give us an update. >> Oh, the channel's just, we love them, they're the front line, that's who the customers call in, who's been waiting to get their technology and we're wading through it, thank goodness that we have GreenLake because if you wanted to buy it traditionally, because HP is supplying supply-to-purchase through distribution in stock, but it's very limited. And then if you go customer order, that's where the long lead times come into place because it's not just the hard drives and memory and the traditional things that are constrained now. Now it's like the clips and the intangibles and things like that and when you get to that point, you got to just do the best you can and HP supply chain has just been fantastic, super informative, AMD, we're not the problem. We got HP, plenty of processors and plenty of accelerators and GPUs and we're standing with them because that back to the relationship, we're facing the customer with them and managing their expectations to the best we can and trying to give them options to keep their business floating. >> So is that going to be, is this a supply chain constraints could be an accelerant for GreenLake because that capacity is in place for you to service your customers with GreenLake presumably. You're planning for that. There's headroom there in terms of being able to deliver that. If you can't deliver GreenLake, all this promise. >> I would say I would be careful not to position GreenLake as an answer to supply chain challenges, right? I think there's a greater value proposition to a client, and keep in mind, you still have technology at the heart of it, right? And so, and to your question though about our partners, honestly in a lot of ways, it's heartbreaking given the challenges that they face, not just with HPE, but other vendors that they sell and support and without our partners and managing those, we'd be in a world of hurt, frankly and we're working on options. We work with our partners really closely. We work with AMD where we have constraints to move to other potential configurations. >> Does GreenLake make it harder or easier for you to forecast? Because on the one hand, it's as a service and on the other hand, I can dial it down as a customer or dial it up and spike it up if I need to. Do you have enough experience to know at this point, whether it's easier or harder to forecast? >> I think intuitively it's probably harder because you have that variable component that you can't forecast, right? It's with GreenLake, you have your baseline so you know what that baseline is going to be, the baseline commitment and you build in that variable component which is as a service, you pay for what you consume. So that variable component is the one thing that is we can estimate but we don't know exactly what the customer is going to use. >> When you do a GreenLake deal, how does it work? Let's say it's a two-year deal or a three-year deal, whatever and you negotiate a price with a customer for price per X. Do you know like what that contract value is going to be over the life or do you only know that that baseline and then everything else is upside for you and extra additional cost? So how does that work? >> It's a good question. So you know both, you know the baseline and you know what the variable capacity is, what the limits are. So at the beginning of the contract, that's what you know, whether or not a customer determines that they have to expand or do a change order to add another workload into the configuration is the one thing that we hope happens. You don't know. >> But you know with certainty that over the life of that contract, the amount of that contract that's booked, you're going to recognize at some point that. You just don't know when. >> Yes, and so that, and that's to your question, you know that element, the fluctuation in terms of usage is depending on what's happening in the world, right? The pandemic, as an example, with GreenLake customers, probably initially at the beginning of the pandemic, their usage went down for obvious reasons and then it fluctuates up. >> I think a lot of people don't understand that. That's an interesting nuance. Cool, thank you. >> Guys, thanks so much for joining us on the program, talking about the relationship that AMD and HPE have together, the benefits for customers on the outcomes that it's achieving. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks for having us, guys. >> Appreciate it. >> Our pleasure. >> Phil: Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at HPE Discover '22. Stick around. Our keynote analysis is up next. (soft upbeat music)

>>Everyone welcome back from the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for Aus re Mars. It's one of the re shows, as we know, reinvent is the big show. Now they have focus, shows reinforces coming up that security Remar is here. Machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John for your host, Michael Mike Miller here, director of machine learning thought leadership with AWS. Great to see you again. Yeah. Give alumni welcome back here. Back every time we got deep racer, always to talk >>About, Hey John, thanks for having me once again. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. >>So I want to get into the deep racer in context here, but first re Mars is a show. That's getting a lot of buzz, a lot of press. Um, not a lot of news, cuz it's not a newsy show. It's more of a builder kind of a convergence show, but a lot is happening here. It's almost a, a moment in time that I think's gonna be one of those timeless moments where we're gonna look back and saying that year at re Mars was an inflection point. It just seems like everything's pumping machine learning, scaling robotics is hot. It's now transforming fast. Just like the back office data center did years ago. Yeah. And so like a surge is coming. >>Yeah. >>What, what's your take of this show? >>Yeah. And all of these three or four components are all coming together. Right. And they're intersecting rather than just being in silos. Right. So we're seeing machine learning, enabled perception sort of on robots, um, applied to space and sort of these, uh, extra sort of application initiatives. Um, and that's, what's really exciting about this show is seeing all these things come together and all the industry-wide examples, um, of amazing perception and robotics kind of landing together. So, >>So the people out there that aren't yet inside the ropes of the show, what does it mean to them? This show? What, what, what they're gonna be what's in it for me, what's all this show. What does it mean? >>Yeah. It's just a glimpse into where things are headed. Right. And it's sort of the tip of the iceberg. It's sort of the beginning of the wave of, um, you know, these sort of advanced capabilities that we're gonna see imbued in applications, um, across all different industries. >>Awesome. Well, great to have you in the cube. Every time we have an event we wanna bring you on because deep racers become a, the hottest, I won't say cult following because it's no longer cult following. It's become massive following. Um, and which started out as an IOT, I think raspberry pie first time was like a, like >>A, we did a little camera initially camera >>And it was just a kind of a fun, little clever, I won't say hack, but just having a project that just took on a life OFS own, where are we? What's the update with racer you're here with the track. Yeah, >>Possibly >>You got the track and competing with the big dogs, literally dog, you got spot over there. Boston dynamics. >>Well we'll, we'll invite them over to the track later. Yeah. So deep razor, you know, is the fastest way to get hands on with machine learning. You know, we designed it as, uh, a way for developers to have fun while learning about this particular machine learning technique called reinforcement learning, which is all about using, uh, a simulation, uh, to teach the robot how to learn via trial and error. So deep racer includes a 3d racing simulator where you can train your model via trial and error. It includes the physical car. So you can take, uh, the model that you trained in the cloud, download it to this one 18th scale, um, kind of RC car. That's been imbued with an extra sensor. So we have a camera on the front. We've got an extra, uh, Intel, X, 86 processor inside here. Um, and this thing will drive itself, autonomously around the track. And of course what's a track and uh, some cars driving around it without a little competition. So we've got the deep racer league that sort of sits on top of this and adds a little spice to the whole thing. It's >>It's, it's like formula one for nerds. It really is. It's so good because a lot of people will have to readjust their models cuz they go off the track and I see people and it's oh my, then they gotta reset. This has turned into quite the phenomenon and it's fun to watch and every year it gets more competitive. I know you guys have a cut list that reinvent, it's almost like a, a super score gets you up. Yeah. Take, take us through the reinvents coming up. Sure. What's going on with the track there and then we'll get into some of the new adoption in terms of the people. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, we have monthly online races where we have a new track every month that challenges our, our developers to retrain their model or sort of tweak the existing model that they've trained to adapt for those new courses. Then at physical events like here at re Mars and at our AWS summits around the world, we have physical, uh, races. Um, and we crown a champion at each one of those races. You may have heard some cheering a minute ago. Yeah. That was our finals over there. We've got some really fast cars, fast models racing today. Um, so we take the winners from each of those two circuits, the virtual and the physical and they, the top ones of them come together at reinvent every year in November, December. Um, and we have a set of knockout rounds, championship rounds where these guys get the field gets narrowed to 10 racers and then those 10 racers, uh, race to hold up the championship cup and, um, earn, earn, uh, you know, a whole set of prizes, either cash or, or, you know, scholarships or, you know, tuition funds, whatever the, uh, the developer is most interested >>In. You know, I ask you this question every time you come on the cube because I I'm smiling. That's, it's so much fun. I mean, if I had not been with the cube anyway, I'd love to do this. Um, would you ever imagine when you first started this, that it would be such so popular and at the rise of eSports? So, you know, discord is booming. Yeah. The QB has a discord channel now. Sure, sure. Not that good on it yet, but we'll get there, but just the gaming culture, the nerd culture, the robotics clubs, the young people, just nerds who wanna compete. You never thought that would be this big. We, >>We were so surprised by a couple key things after we launched deep racer, you know, we envisioned this as a way for, you know, developers who had already graduated from school. They were in a company they wanted to grow their machine learning skills. Individuals could adopt this. What we saw was individuals were taking these devices and these concepts back to their companies. And they're saying, this is really fun. Like we should do something around this. And we saw companies like JPMC and Accenture and Morningstar into it and national Australia bank all adopting deep racer as a way to engage, excite their employees, but then also create some fun collaboration opportunities. Um, the second thing that was surprising was the interest from students. And it was actually really difficult for students to use deep racer because you needed an AWS account. You had to have a credit card. You might, you might get billed. There was a free tier involved. Um, so what we did this past year was we launched the deep racer student league, um, which caters to students 16 or over in high school or in college, uh, deep Razer student includes 10 hours a month of free training, um, so that they can train their models in the cloud. And of course the same series of virtual monthly events for them to race against each other and win, win prizes. >>So they don't have to go onto the dark web hack someone's credit card, get a proton email account just to get a deep Razer that's right. They can now come in on their own. >>That's right. That's right. They can log into that virtual the virtual environment, um, and get access. And, and one of the other things that we realized, um, and, and that's a common kind of, uh, realization across the industry is both the need for the democratization of machine learning. But also how can we address the skills gap for future ML learners? Um, and this applies to the, the, the world of students kind of engaging. And we said, Hey, you know, um, the world's gonna see the most successful and innovative ideas come from the widest possible range of participants. And so we knew that there were some issues with, um, you know, underserved and underrepresented minorities accessing this technology and getting the ML education to be successful. So we partnered with Intel and Udacity and launched the AI and ML scholarship program this past year. And it's also built on top of deep Bracer student. So now students, um, can register and opt into the scholarship program and we're gonna give out, uh, Udacity scholarships to 2000 students, um, at the end of this year who compete in AWS deep racer student racers, and also go through all of the learning modules online. >>Okay. Hold on, lets back up. Cuz it sounds, this sounds pretty cool. All right. So we kind went fast on that a little bit slow today at the end of the day. So if they sign up for the student account, which is lowered the batteries for, and they Intel and a desk, this is a courseware for the machine learning that's right. So in order to participate, you gotta take some courseware, check the boxes and, and, and Intel is paying for this or you get rewarded with the scholarship after the fact. >>So Intel's a partner of ours in, in putting this on. So it's both, um, helping kind of fund the scholarships for students, but also participating. So for the students who, um, get qualified for the scholarship and, and win one of those 2000 Udacity Nanodegree scholarships, uh, they also will get mentoring opportunities. So AWS and Intel, um, professionals will help mentor these students, uh, give them career advice, give them technical advice. C >>They'll they're getting smarter. Absolutely. So I'm just gonna get to data here. So is it money or credits for the, for the training? >>That's the scholarship or both? Yes. So, so the, the student training is free for students. Yep. They get 10 hours a month, no credits they need to redeem or anything. It's just, you log in and you get your account. Um, then the 2000, uh, Udacity scholarships, those are just scholarships that are awarded to, to the winners of the student, um, scholarship program. It's a four month long, uh, class on Python programming for >>AI so's real education. Yeah. It's like real, real, so ones here's 10 hours. Here's check the box. Here's here's the manual. Yep. >>Everybody gets access to that. That's >>Free. >>Yep. >>To the student over 16. Yes. Free. So that probably gonna increase the numbers. What kind of numbers are you looking at now? Yeah. In terms of scope to scale here for me. Yeah. Scope it >>Out. What's the numbers we've, we've been, uh, pleasantly surprised. We've got over 55,000 students from over 180 countries around the world that have signed up for the deep racer student program and of those over 30,000 have opted into that scholarship program. So we're seeing huge interest, um, from across the globe in, in this virtual students, um, opportunity, you know, and students are taking advantage of those 20 hours of learning. They're taking advantage of the fun, deep racer kind of hands on racing. Um, and obviously a large number of them are also interested in this scholarship opportunity >>Or how many people are in the AWS deep racer, um, group. Now, because now someone's gotta work on this stuff. It's went from a side hustle to like a full initiative. Well, >>You know, we're pretty efficient with what we, you know, we're pretty efficient. You've probably read about the two pizza teams at Amazon. So we keep ourselves pretty streamlined, but we're really proud of, um, what we've been able to bring to the table. And, you know, over those pandemic years, we really focused on that virtual experience in viewing it with those gaming kind of gamification sort of elements. You know, one of the things we did for the students is just like you guys, we have a discord channel, so not only can the students get hands on, but they also have this built in community of other students now to help support them bounce ideas off of and, you know, improve their learning. >>Awesome. So what's next, take us through after this event and what's going on for you more competitions. >>Yeah. So we're gonna be at the remainder of the AWS summits around the world. So places like Mexico city, you know, uh, this week we were in Milan, um, you know, we've got some AWS public sector, um, activities that are happening. Some of those are focused on students. So we've had student events in, um, Ottawa in Canada. We've had a student event in Japan. We've had a student event in, um, Australia, New Zealand. And so we've got events, both for students as well as for the professionals who wanna compete in the league happening around the world. And again, culminating at reinvent. So we'll be back here in Vegas, um, at the beginning of December where our champions will, uh, compete to ho to come. >>So you guys are going to all the summits, absolutely. Most of the summits or >>All of them, anytime there's a physical summit, we'll be there with a track and cars and give developers the opportunity to >>The track is always open. >>Absolutely. All >>Right. Well, thanks for coming on the cube with the update. Appreciate it, >>Mike. Thanks, John. It was great to be >>Here. Pleasure to know you appreciate it. Love that program. All right. Cube coverage here. Deep race are always the hit. It's a fixture at all the events, more exciting than the cube. Some say, but uh, almost great to have you on Mike. Uh, great success. Check it out free to students. The barrier's been lower to get in every robotics club. Every math club, every science club should be signing up for this. Uh, it's a lot of fun and it's cool. And of course you learn machine learning. I mean, come on. There's one to learn that. All right. Cube coverage. Coming back after this short break.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's coverage of S reinve rein Mars. I said reinvent all my VES months away. Re Mars machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John feer, host of the cube, an exciting guest here, bringing on special guest more robot robots are welcome on the cube. We're gonna have that segment here. Mike Dooley co-founder and CEO of Labrador systems. Mike, welcome to the cube. Thanks. >>Coming on. Thank, thank you so much. Yeah. Labrador systems. We're a company is developing a new type of assistive robot for people in the home. And you know, our mission is really to help people live independently. And so we're about to show a robot that's it looks like my, what used to be in a warehouse or other places, but it's being designed to be both robust enough to operate in real world settings, help people that may be aging and using a Walker wheelchair. A cane could have early onset health conditions like Parkinson's and things like that. So >>Let me, let me set this up first, before you get into the, the demo, because I think here at re Mars, one of the things that's coming outta the show besides the cool vibe, right? Is that materials handling? Isn't the only thing you've seen with robotics. Yeah. You're seeing a lot more life industrial impact. And this is an example of one of that, isn't >>It? Yeah. We just actually got an award. It's a Joseph EGL Bergo was the first person to actually put robots in factories and automation. And in doing that, um, he set up grant for robots going beyond that, to help people live in it. So we're the first recipient of that. But yeah, I think that robots, they're not the, what you think about with Rosie yet. We're the wrong way from that, but they're, they can do really meaningful things. >>And before we get the demo, your mission hearing, what you're gonna show here is a lot of hard work and we know how hard it is. What's the mission. What's the vision. >>The mission is to help people live more independently on their own terms. Uh, we're, there's, it's an innate part of the human condition that at some point in our lives, it becomes more difficult to move ourselves or move things around it. And that is a huge impact on our independence. So when we're putting this robot in pilots, we're helping people try to regain degrees of independence, be more active deal with whatever situation they want, but under their terms and have, have control over their life. >>Okay, well, let's get into it. May I offer you a glass of water? Well, you >>Know, I have a robot that just happens to be really good at delivering things, including water. Um, we just actually pulled these out of our refrigerator on our last demo. So why don't we bring over the retriever? And so we're gonna command it to come on in. So this is a Labrador retriever. These robots have been in homes. This robot itself has been in homes, helping people do activities like this. It's able to sort of go from place to place it automatically navigates itself. Uh, just like we've been called a self-driving shelf, um, as an example, but it's meant to be very friendly, can come to a position like this could be by my armchair and it would automatically park. And then I could do something like I can pick up, okay, I want some water and maybe I want to drink it out of a cup and I can do this. And if I have a cough or something else, cough drops. My phone, all sorts of things can be in there. Um, so the purpose of the retriever is really to be this extra pair of hands, to keep things close by and move things. And it can automatically adjust to any hide or position. And if I, even if I block it like a safety, it, it >>Stops. And someone who say disabled or can't move is recovering or has some as aging or whatever the case is. This comes to them. It's autonomous in it sense. Is that that what works or yeah. Is it guided? How does >>It, it works on a series of bus stops. So the in robotics, we call those way points. But when we're talking to people, the bus stops are the places you want it to go. You have a bus stop by the front door, your kitchen sink, the refrigerator, your armchair, the laundry machine, you won't closet it. <laugh>. And with that simple metaphor, we, we train the robot in a couple hours. We create all these routes, just like a subway map. And then the robot is autonomous. So I can hit a button. I can hit my cell phone, or I can say Alexa ass lab, one to come to the kitchen. The robot will autonomously navigate through everything, go around the pets park itself. And it raises and lowers to bring things with and reach. So I'm sitting and it might lower itself down. So I can just comfortably get something at the kitchen. I, it could just go right to the level of the countertop. So it's very easy for someone that has an issue to move things with with limited, uh, challenges. >>And this really illustrates to this show again. Yeah. Talk about the impact here. Cause we're at a historic moment in robotics. >>We are. Yeah. >>What's your reaction to that? Tell your, share your vision >>On that. I've been in robotics for 25 years. Um, and I started, I actually started working actually at Lego and launching Lego Mindstorms, the end of the nineties. So I have like CEO just last night again, they gush over like you did that. Yeah. <laugh> and again, I'm pretty old school. And so we've my career. If I've been working through from toys onto like robotic floor cleaners, the algorithms that are on Roomba today came from the startup that we were all part of. We're, we're moving things to be bigger and bigger and have a bigger >>Impact. What's it feel like? I mean, cuz I mean I can see the experience and by the way, it's hardcore robotics communities out there, but now it's still mainstream. It's opening up the aperture of robotics. Yeah. It's the prime time is right now and it's an inflection point. >>Well, and it's also a point where we desperately need it. So we have incredible work for shortages <laugh> and it's not that we're, these robots are not to take people jobs away it's to do the work that people don't want to do and try to make, you know, free them up for things that are more important. Yeah. In senior care, that's the high touch we want caregivers to be helping people get outta their bed, help them safely move from place to place things that robots aren't at yet. Yeah. But for getting the garbage, for getting a drink or giving the person the freedom to say, do I wanna ask my caregiver or my spouse to do that? Or do I wanna do it myself? And so robots can be incredibly liberating experience if they're, if they're done in the right way and they're done well, >>It's a choice. It actually comes down to choice. I remember this argument way back when, oh, ATM's gonna kill the bank teller. In fact more bank tellers emerged. Right. And so there's choices come out there and, but there's still more advances to do. What is you, what do you see as milestones for the industry as you start to seeing better handling better voice activation cameras on board. I noticed some cameras in there. Yeah. So we're starting to see the, some of the smaller, faster, cheaper >>It's it's especially yeah. Faster. Cheaper is what we're after. So can we redo? So like the gyros that are on this type of robot used to be like in the tens of thousands of dollars 20 or 30 years ago. And, and then when you started seeing Roomba and the floor cleaners come out, those started what happened was basically the gyro on here that what's happening in consumer electronics, the ability for the iPhone to play, you know, the game in turn and, and do portrait and landscape. That actually is what enables all these robots that clean your floors to do very tight angles. What we're doing is this migration of consumer electronics then gets robbed and, and adopted over in that. So it's really about it's I, it's not that you're gonna see things radically change. It's just that you're gonna see more and more applications get more sophisticated and become more affordable. Our target is to bring this for a few hundred dollars a month into people's homes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and make that economy work for as many people as >>Possible. Yeah. Mike, what a great, great illustration of great point there now on your history looking forward. Okay. Smaller Fest are cheaper. Yeah. You're gonna see a human aspect. So technology's kind of getting out of the way now you got a lot in the cloud, you got machine learning, big thing here. There's a human creative side now gonna be a big part of this. Yeah. Can you talk about like how you see that unfolding? Because again, younger people gonna come in, you got a lot more things pre-built I just saw a swaping on stage saying, oh, we, we write subroutines automatically the machine learning like, oh my God, that's so cool. Like, so more is coming for, to, for builders, right. To build what's the playbook gonna look like? How do you see the human aspect, creative crafting building? >>I, I it's, you know, it's a hard Fu future to predict. I think the issue is that humans are always gonna have to be more clever than the AI <laugh>, you know, I, I can't say that enough is that AI can solve some things and it can get smarter and smarter. You task that over and then let's work on the things that can't do. And I think that's intellectually challenging. Like, and I, and I think we have a long way to go, uh, to sort of keep on pushing that forward. So the whole mission is people get to do more interesting things with their life, more dynamic. Think about what the machines should be working on. Yeah. And then move on to the next things. >>Well, a lot of good healthcare implications. Yeah. Uh, senior living people who are themselves, >>All those are place. Yeah. >>Now that you have, um, this kind of almost a perfect storm of innovation coming, and I just think it's gonna be the beginning. You're gonna see a lot of young people come in. Yeah. And a lot of people in school now going down to the elementary school level yeah. Are really immersed in robotics. They're born with it. And certainly as they get older, what kind of disciplines do you see coming into robot? I used to be pretty clear. Yeah. Right. Nerdy, builder, builder. Now it's like what? I got Mac and rice. My code. >>Yeah. My, my co-founder and CEO has a good example. Anybody we interview, we say we really like it. If you think of yourself as an astronaut, going on to a space mission. And, and it's really appropriate being here at R Mars is that normally the astronaut has one specialty, but they have to know enough of the other skills to be able to help out. In case of an emergency robotics is so complex. There's so there's mechanical, there's electrical, there's software, they're perceptual, there's user interface, all of those Fs together. So when we're trying to do a demo and something goes wrong, I can't say why. I only do mechanical. Yeah. You got it. You really have to have a system. So I think if any system architects, people that if you're gonna, if, if you're gonna be, if mechanical is your thing, you better learn a little bit electrical and software. Yeah. If software is your thing, you better not just write code because you need to understand where you're >>Your back. Well, the old days you have to know for trend to run any instrumentation in the old days. So same kind of vibe. So what does that impact on the teamwork side? Because now I can imagine, okay, you got some general purpose knowledge, so math, science, all the disciplines, but the specialties there, I love that right now. Teamwork. Yeah. Because you, you know, I could be a generalism at some point. There's another component I'm gonna need to call my teammate for. >>Yeah. Yeah. And you have to have, yeah. So it, yeah, we're a small team, so it's a little bit easier right now, but even the technology. So like there's a, what, this is, this runs on Linux and that runs on Ross, which is a robotics operating system. The modules are, are the, are sorry, the modules, I mean redundant there, but the, the part that makes the robot go, okay, I'm gonna command it to go here. It's gonna go around it, see an obstacle. This module kicks in, even the elements become module. So that's part of how teams work is that, and, and Amazon has a rule around that is that everything has to have an API. Yeah. I have to be able to express my work and the way that somebody else can come in and talk to it in a very easy way. So you're also going away from like, sort of like the hidden code that only I touch you can't have ownership of that. You have to let your team understand how it works and let them control it and edit it. Well, >>Super exciting. Dan, first of all, great to bring robots on the cube set. Thanks to your team here. Doing that. Yeah. Um, talk about the company. Um, put a plug in, what are you guys doing? Sure. Raising money, getting more staff, more sales. We're give, give a commercial. >>Yeah. So we, we closed the seed round. So we've been around it's actually five years next month. Um, did pre-seed and then we closed the seed round that we announced back at CS. So we debuted the retriever for the first time we had it under wraps. We had it in people's homes for a year before we did that. Um, I, Amazon was one of our early investors and they actually co-led on this last round, along with our friends at iRobot. So yeah. Uh, so we've raised that we're right in the next phase of deploying this, especially going more into senior living now that that's opening up with COVID coming down and looking at helping these workforce issues where there's that crisis. So we'll be raising later this year. So we're starting to sort of do the preview for series a. We're starting to take those pre-orders for robots and for Lois. And then our goal is we're and we're actually already at the factory. So we've been converting this, these there's a version of this robot underway right now at the factory that will probably have engineering units at the end of this year. Yeah. Goal is for, uh, full production with all the supply chain issues for second half of, of next >>Year. Yeah. Well, congratulations. It's a great product. And I gotta ask you what's on the roadmap, how you see this product unfolding. What's the wishlist look like if you had all the dough in the world, what would you do next? What would you be putting on there? Sure. If you had the magic wand what's happening, >>It's a couple variables. I think it's scale. So it's driving the, this whole thing is designed to go down in cost, which improves basically accessibility. More people can afford it. The health system, Medicare, those sorts of folks. See it one. So basically get us into reduction and get us into volume is one part, I think the other ones is adding layers. I, what we, when we see our presentation and the speech we're doing tomorrow, we see this as a force multiplier for a lot of other things in healthcare. So if I bring the blood pressure cuff, like we have on the retrieval, I can be a physical reminder to take your medication, to take the, my, my readings, or we are just con having a conversation with some of our friends of Amazon is bringing an echo show to you when you want to have a conversation and take it away. >>When you don't think about that metaphor of how do I wanna live my life and what do I have control over? And then on top of it, the sensors on the robot, they're pretty sophisticated. So in my case, my mom is still around she's 91, but now in a hospital beded wheelchair could, we've seen her walking differently early, early on, and using things like Intel, real sense and, and computer vision and AI to detect things and just say to her, don't even tell anybody else, we're noticing this. Do you wanna share this with your doctor? Yeah. That's the world. I think that what we're trying to do is lay this out as version 1.0, so that when folks like us are around, it'll something like decades from now, life is so much more better for the options and choices we have. It's >>Really interesting. You know, I liked, um, kind of the theme here. There's a lot of day to day problems that people like to solve. And then there's like the new industrial problems that are emerging that are opportunities. And then there's the save the world kind of vibe. <laugh>, there's help people make things positive, right. You know, solve the climate problems, help people. And so we're kind of at this new era and it's beyond just like sustainability and, you know, bias. That's all gotta get done a new tipping point around the human aspect of >>Things. And you do it economically. I think sometimes you think that, okay, well, you're just doing this cuz you're, you're socially motivated and doesn't, you don't care how many you sell it to just so you can accomplish it. It's their link. The, the cheaper that we can make this, the more people you can impact. I think you're talking about the kids today is the work we did at Lego. In the end of the nineties, you made a, a robotics kit for 200 bucks and millions of kids. Yeah. Did that. And >>Grape pie. I mean, you had accessories to it. Make a developer friendly. >>Yeah, no, exactly. And we're getting all those requests. So I think that's the thing is like, get a new platform, learn what it's like to have this sort of capability and then let the market drive. It, let the people sort of the folks who are gonna be using it that are in a wheelchair, are dealing with Parkinson's or Ms, or other issues. What can we add to that ecosystem? So you it's, it's all about being very human centric in that. Yeah. And making the other parts of the economy make it work for them, make it so that the health system, they get an ROI on this so that, Hey, this is a good thing to put into people's homes. >>And well, I think you have the nice, attractive value proposition to investors. Obviously robotics is super cool and really relevant. Cool, cool. And relevant to me always is nice to have that. So check that, then you got the economics on price, pressure, prove the price down lower. Yeah. Open up the Tams of the market. Right. Make it more viable economically. >>Yeah, definitely. And then, and what we're having, what's driving us that wasn't around seven when we started this about four and a half years ago. Uh, my joke and I don't mean to offend them, but after doing pitching the vision of this in six months, don't be, >>Don't be afraid. We're do we, >>My, my joke. And I'm sort to see more bold about is that VCs don't think they're gonna get old. They're just gonna get rich. And so the idea is that they didn't see themselves in this position and we not Gloo and doom, you can work out, you can be active, but we're living older, longer. We are it's. My mom is born in the depression. She's been in a wheelchair for five years. She might be around for a good, another 10 or 15. And that's wonderful for her, but her need for care is really high. >>Yeah. And the pressure on the family too, there's always, there's always collateral damage on all these impacts. >>There's 53 million unpaid family caregivers in the us. Yeah. Just in the time that we've grown, been doing this, it's grown 4% a year and it's a complicated thing. And it's, it's not just the pressure on you to help your mom or dad or whoever. It's the frustration on their face when they have to always ask for that help. So it's, it's twofold. It's give them some freedom back so they can make a choice. Like my classic example is my mom wants tea. My dad's trying to watch the game. He, she asks for it. It's not hot enough. Sends it back. And that's a currency. Yeah, yeah. That she's losing and, and it's frustration as opposed to give her a choice to say, I'm gonna do this on my own. And I that's just, >>You wanna bring the computer out, do a FaceTime with the family, send it back. Or you mentioned the Alexa there's so many use cases. Oh >>No. We talked about, uh, we talked about putting like a, a device with a CA with a screen on it so she could chat and see pictures. And it says, I don't want to have this in my bedroom. That's my private space. Yeah. But if we could have the robot, bring it in when it's appropriate and take it on go the retriever that's that's >>The whole go fetch what I need right now. That's and then go lie down. Yeah. >>That's what I, I called >>Labrador. Doesn't lie down >>Actually. But well, it lowers down, it lowers down about 25 inches. That's about lying. >>Down's super exciting. And congratulations. I know, um, how passionate you are. It's obvious. Yeah. And being in the business so long, so many accomplishment you had. Yeah. But now is a whole new Dawn. A new era here. >>Yeah. Oh yeah. No, I, we just, it was real. It was on impromptu. It wasn't scheduled. There's a, a post circle on LinkedIn where all the robots got together. <laugh> you know, and they were seeing to hang out. No, and you're seeing stuff that wasn't possible. You look at this and you go, well, what's the big thing. It's a box on wheels. It's like, it wasn't possible to navigate something around the complexity of a home 10 years ago for the price we're doing. Yeah. It wasn't possible to wa have things that walk or spot that can go through construction sites. I, I think people don't realize it's it. It really is changing. And then we're, I think every five years you're gonna be seeing this more bold deployment of these things hitting our lives. It's >>It's super cool. And that's why this show's so popular. It's not obvious to mainstream, but you look at the confluence of all those forces coming together. Yeah. It's just a wonderful thing. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate >>It really, really appreciate you for this >>Time. Great success. Great demo. Mike, do cofounder, the CEO of Labrador systems. Check him out. They have the retriever, uh, future of robotics here. It's all impact all life on the planet. And more space. Two is to keep coverage here at re Mars, stay tuned for more live coverage. After this short break.

>>Welcome back to Vegas guys, Lisa Martin and Dave Lanta here wrapping up our coverage of day two of snowflake summit. We have given you a lot of content in the last couple of days. We've had a lot of great conversations with snowflake folks with their customers and with partners. And we have an alumni back with us. Please. Welcome back to the queue. Mike Palmer, CEO of Sigma computing. Mike. It's great to see you. >>Thanks for having me. And I guess again >>Exactly. >>It's fantastic me. >>So talk to the audience about Sigma before we get into the snowflake partnership and what you guys are doing from a technical perspective, give us that overview of the vision and some of the differentiators. >>Sure. You know, you've over the last 12 years, companies have benefited from enormous investments and improvements in technology in particular, starting with cloud technologies, obviously going through companies like snowflake, but in terms of the normal user, the one that makes the business decision in the marketing department and the finance team, you know, in the works in the back room of the supply chain, doing inventory very little has changed for those people. And the time had come where the data availability, the ability to organize it, the ability to secure it was all there, but the ability to access it for those people was not. And so what Sigma's all about is taking great technology, finding the skillset they have, which happens to be spreadsheets. There are billion license spreadsheet users in the world and connecting that skillset with all of the power of the cloud. >>And how do you work with snowflake? What are some of the, the what's the joint value proposition? >>How are they as an investor? That's what I wanna know. Ah, >>Quiet, which is the way we like them. No, I'm just kidding. Snowflake is, well, first of all, investment is great, but partnership is even better. Right. You know, and I think snowflake themselves are going through some evolution, but let's start with the basics of technology where this all starts because you know, all of the rest doesn't matter if the product is not great, we work directly on snowflake. And what that means is as an end user, when I, when I sit on that marketing team and I want to understand and, and connect, how did I get a, a customer where I had a pay to add? And they showed up on my website and from my website, they went to a trial. And from there, they touched a piece of syndicated contents. All of that data sits in snowflake and I, as a marketer, understand what it means to me. >>So for the first time, I want to be able to see that data in one place. And I want to understand conversion rates. I want to understand how I can impact those conversion rates. I can make predictions. What that user is doing is going to, to Sigma accessing live data in snowflake, they're able to ask ad hoc questions, questions that were never asked questions, that they don't exist in a filter that were never prepped by a data engineer. So they could truly do something creative and novel in a very independent sort of way. And the connection with Snowflake's live data, the performance, the security and governance that we inherit. These are all facilitators to really expand that access across the enterprise. So at, at a product level, we were built by a team of people, frankly, that also were the original investors in snowflake by two amazing engineers and founders, Rob will and Jason France, they understood how snowflake worked and that shows up in the product for our end customers. >>So, but if I may just to follow up on that, I mean, you could do that without snowflake, but what, it would be harder, more expensive. Describe what you'd have to go through to accomplish that outcome. >>And I think snowflake does a good job of enabling the ecosystem at large. Right. But you know, you always appreciate seeing early access to understand what the architecture's going to look like. You know, some of the things that I will, you know, leaning forward that we've heard here that we're very excited about is snowflake going to attack the TP market, right? The transactional market, one of the transactional database market. I, yeah. Right. You know, one of the things that we see coming, and, and one of the bigger things that we'll be talking about in Sigma is not just that you can do analytics out of snowflake. I think that's something that we do exceptionally well on an ad hoc basis, but we're gonna be the first that allow you to write into snowflake and to do that with good performance. And to do that reliably, we go away from OAP, which is the terminology for data warehousing. >>And we go toward transactional databases. And in that world, understanding snowflake and working collaboratively with them creates again, a much better experience for the end customer. So they, they allow us into those programs, even coming to these conferences, we talk to folks that run the industry teams, trying to up level that message and not just talk database and, and analytics, but talk about inventory management. How do we cut down the gap that exists between POS systems and inventory ordering, right? So that we get fewer stockouts, but also that we don't overorder. So that's another benefit, >>Strong business use cases. >>That's correct. >>And you're enabling those business users to have access to that data. I presume in near real time or near real time, so that they can make decisions that drive marketing forward or finance forward or legal >>Forward. Exactly. We had a customer panel yesterday. An example of that go puff is hopefully most of the viewers are familiar with, as a delivery company. This is a complicated business to run. It's run on the fringes. When we think about how to make money at it, which means that the decisions need to be accurate. They need to be real time. You can't have a batch upload for delivery when they're people are on the street, and then there's an issue. They need to understand the exact order at that time, not in 10 minutes, not from five minutes ago, right. Then they need to understand, do I have inventory in the warehouse when the order comes in? If they don't, what's a replacement product. We had a Mike came in from go puff and walked us through all of the complexity of that and how they're using Sigma to really just shorten those decision cycles and make them more accurate. You know, that's where the business actually benefits and, >>And actually create a viable business model. Cuz you think back to the early, think back to the.com days and you had pets.com, right? They couldn't make any money. Yeah. Without chewy. Okay. They appears to be a viable business model. Right? Part of that is just the efficiencies. And it's sort of a, I dunno if those are customers that they may or may not be, but they should be if they're not >>Chewy is, but okay. You know, and that's another example, but I'll even pivot to the various REI and other retailers. What do they care about cohorts? I'm trying to understand who's buying my product. What can I sell to them next? That, that idea of again, I'm sitting in a department, that's not data engineering, that's not BI now working collaboratively where they can get addend engineer, putting data sets together. They have a BI person that can help in the analytics process. But now it's in a spreadsheet where I understand it as a marketer. So I can think about new hierarchies. I wanna know it by customer, by region, by product type. I wanna see it by all of those things. I want to be able to do that on the fly because then it creates new questions that sort of flow. If you' ever worked in development, we use the word flow constantly, right? And as people that flow is when we have a question, we get an answer that generates a question. We have, we just keep doing that iteratively. That that is where Sigma really shines for them. >>What does a company have to do to really take advantage of, of this? I, if they're kind of starting from a company that's somewhat immature, what are the sort of expectations, maybe even outta scope expectations so they can move faster, accelerate analytics, a lot of the themes that we've heard today, >>What does an immature company is actually even a question in, in and of itself? You know, I think a lot of companies consider themselves to be immature simply because for various constraint reasons, they haven't leveraged the data in the way that they thought possible. Good, >>Good, good definition. Okay. So not, not, >>Not, I use this definition for digital transformation. It very simple. It is. Do you make better decisions, faster McKenzie calls this corporate metabolism, right? Can you speed up the metabolism of, of an enterprise and for me and for the Sigma customer base, there's really not much you have to do once. You've adopted snowflake because for the first time the barriers and the silos that existed in terms of accessing data are gone. So I think the biggest barrier that customers have is curiosity. Because once you have curiosity and you have access, you can start building artifacts and assets and asking questions. Our customers are up and running in the product in hours. And I mean that literally in hours, we are a user in snowflake, that's a direct live connection. They are able to explore tables, raw. They can do joins themselves if they want to. They can obviously work with their data engineering team to, to create data sets. If that's the preferred method. And once they're there and they've ever built a pivot table, they can be working in Sigma. So our customers are getting insights in the first one to two days, you referenced some, those of us are old enough to remember pest.com. Also old enough to remember shelfware that we would buy. We are very good at showing customers that within hours they're getting value from their investment in Sigma. And that, that just creates momentum, right? Oh, >>Tremendous momentum and >>Trust and trust and expansion opportunities for Sigma. Because when you're in one of those departments, someone else says, well, you know, why do you get access to that data? But I don't, how are you doing this? Yeah. So we're, you know, I think that there's a big movement here. People, I often compare data to communication. If you go back a hundred years, our communication was not limited. As it turns out by our desire to communicate, it was limited by the infrastructure. We had the typewriter, a letter and the us postal service and a telephone that was wired. And now we have walk around here. We, everything is, is enabled for us. And we send, you know, hundreds and thousands of messages a day and probably could do more. You will find that is true. And we're seeing it in our product is true of data. If you give people access, they have 10 times as many questions as they thought they had. And that's the change that we're gonna see in business over the next few years, >>Frank Salman's first book, what he was was CEO of snowflake was rise of the data cloud. And he talked about network effects. Basically what he described was Metcalf's law. Again, go back to the.com days, right? And he, Bob Metcalf used the phone system. You know, if there's two people in the phone system, it's not that valuable, right. >>You know, exactly, >>You know, grow it. And that's where the value is. And that's what we're seeing now applied to data. >>And even more than that, I think that's a great analogy. In fact, the direct comparison to what Sigma is doing actually goes one step beyond everything that I've been talking about, which is great at the individual level, but now the finance team and the marketing team can collaborate in the platform. They can see data lineage. In fact, one of our, our big emphasis points here is to eliminate the sweet products. You know, the ones where, you know, you think you're buying something, but you really have a spreadsheet product here and a document product there and a slide product over there. And they, you know, you can do all of that in Sigma. You can write a narrative. You can real time live, edit on numbers. You, you know, if you want to, you could put a picture in it. But you know, at Sigma we present everything out of our product. Every meeting is live data. Every question is answered on the spot. And that's when, you know, you know, to your point about met cap's law. Now everybody's involved in the decision making. They're doing it real time. Your meetings are more productive. You have fewer of them because they're no action items, right. We're answering our questions there and we're, and we're moving forward. >>You know, view were meeting sounds good. Productivity is, is weird now with the, the pandemic. But you know, if you go back to the nineties here am I'm, I'm dating myself again, but that's okay. You know, you, you didn't see much productivity going on when the PC boom started in the eighties, but the nineties, it kicked in and pre pandemic, you know, productivity in the us and Europe anyway has been going down. But I feel like Mike, listen to what you just described. I, how many meetings have we been in where people are arguing about them numbers, what are the assumptions on the numbers wasting so much time? And then nothing gets done and they, then they, they bolt cut that away and you drive in productivity. So I feel like we're on a Renaissance of productivity and a lot of that's gonna be driven by, by data. Yeah. And obviously communications the whole 5g thing. We'll see how that builds out. But data is really the main spring of, I think, a new, new Renaissance in productivity. >>Well, first of all, if you could find an enterprise where you ask the question, would you rather use your data better? And they say, no, like, you know, show me, tell me that I'll short their stock immediately. But I do agree. And I, unfortunately I have a career history in that meeting that you just described where someone doesn't like, what you're showing them. And their first reaction is to say, where'd you get that data? You know, I don't trust it. You know? So they just undermined your entire argument with an invalid way of doing so. Right. When you walk into a meeting with Sigma where'd, where'd you get that data? I was like, that's the live data right now? What question do you want answer >>Lineage, right. Yeah. And you know, it's a Sen's book about, you know, gotta move faster. I mean, this is an example of just cutting through making decisions faster because you're right. Mike and the P the P and L manager in a meeting can, can kill the entire conversation, you know, throw FUD at it. Yeah. You know, protect his or her agenda. >>True. But now to be fair to the person, who's tended to do that. Part of the reason they've done that is that they haven't had access to that data before the meeting and they're getting blindsided. Right. So going back to the collaboration point. Yes. Right. The fact we're coming to this discussion more informed in and of itself takes care of some of that problem. Yeah. >>For sure. And if, and if everybody then agrees, we can move on and now talk about the really important stuff. Yeah. That's good. It >>Seems to me that Sigma is an enabler of that curiosity that you mentioned that that's been lacking. People need to be able to hire for that, but you've got a platform that's going here. You go ask >>Away. That's right in the we're very good. You know, we love being a SaaS platform. There's a lot of telemetry. We can watch what we call our mouse to Dows, you know, which is our monthly average users to our daily average users. We can see what level of user they are, what type of artifacts they build. Are they, you know, someone that creates things from scratch, are they people that tend to increment them, which by the way, is helpful to our customers because we can then advise them, Hey, here's, what's really going on. You might wanna work with this team over here. They could probably be a little better of us using the data, but look at this team over here, you know, they've originated five workbooks in the last, you know, six days they're really on it. There's, there's, you know, that ability to even train for the curiosity that you're referring to is now there, >>Where are your customer conversations? Are they at the lines of business? Are they with the chief data officer? What does that look like these days? >>Great question. So stepping back a bit, what, what is Sigma here to do? And, and our first phase is really to replace spreadsheets, right? And so one of the interesting things about the company is that there isn't a department where a spreadsheet isn't used. So Sigma has an enormous Tam, but also isn't necessarily associated with any particular department or any particular vertical. So when we tend to have conversations, it really depends on, you know, either what kind of investment are you making? A lot of mid-market companies are making best technology investments. They're on a public cloud, they're buying snowflake and they wanna understand what's, what's built to really make this work best over the next number of years. And those are very short sales for us because we, we prove that, you know, in, in minutes to hours, if you're working at a large enterprise and you have three or four other tools, you're asking a different question. >>And often you're asking a question of what I call exploration. We have a product that has dashboards and they've been working for us and we don't wanna replace the dashboard. But when we have a question about the data in the dashboard, we're stuck, how do we get to the raw data? How do we get to the example that we can actually manage? You can't manage a dashboard. You can't manage a trend line, but if you get into the data behind the trend line, you can make decisions to change business process, to change quality, accuracy, to change speed of execution. That is what we're trying to enable. Those conversations happen between the it team who runs technology and the business teams who are responsible for the decisions. So we are, you know, we have a cross departmental sale, but across every department, >>One of the things we're not talking about at this event, which is kind of interesting, cause it's all we've been talking about is the macro supply chain challenges, Ukraine, blah, blah, blah, and the stock market. But, but how are you thinking about that? Macro? The impacts you're seeing, you know, a lot of private companies being, you know, recapped, et cetera, you guys obviously very well funded. Yeah. But how do you think about, I mean, I asked Frank a similar question. He's like, look, it's a marathon. We don't worry about it. We, you know, they made the public market, they get 5 billion in cash. Yeah. Yeah. How are you thinking about it? >>You know, first of all, what's the expression, right? You never, never waste a good, you know, in this case recession, no, we don't have one yet, but the impetus is there, right. People are worried. And when they're worried, they're thinking about their bottom lines, they're thinking about where they're going to get efficiency and their costs. They're already dealing with the supply chain issues of inventory. We all have it in our personal lives. If you've ordered anything in the last six months, you're used to getting it in, you know, days to weeks. And now you're getting in months, you know, we had customers like us foods as a good example, like they're constantly trying to align inventory. They have with transportation that gets that inventory to their end customers, right? And they do that with better data accuracy at the end point, working with us on what we are launching. >>And I mentioned earlier, having more people be able to update that data creates more data, accuracy creates better decisions. We align that then with them and better collaboration with the folks that then coordinate the trucks with Prologis and the panel yesterday, they're the only commercial public company that reports their, their valuations on a quarterly basis. They work with Sigma to trim the amount of time it takes their finance team to produce that data that creates investor confidence that holds up your stock price. So I mean the, the importance of data relative to all the stakeholders in enterprise cannot be overstated. Supply chain is a great example. And yes, it's a marathon because a lot of the technology that drives supply chain is old, but you don't have to rip out those systems to put your data into snowflake, to get better access through Sigma, to enable the people in your environment to make better decisions. And that's the good news. So for me, while I agree, there's a marathon. I think that most of the, I dunno if I could continue this metaphor, but I think we could run quite far down that marathon without an awful lot of energy by just making those couple of changes. >>Awesome. Mike, this has been fantastic. Last question. I, I can tell, I know a lot of growth for Sigma. I can feel it in your energy alone. What are some of the key priorities that you're gonna be focusing on for the rest of the year? >>Our number one priority, our number two priority and number three priority are always build the best product on the market, right? We, we want customers to increase usage. We want them to be delighted. You know, we want them to be RA. Like we have customers at our booth that walk up and it's like, you're building a great company. We love your product. I, if you want to show up happy at work, have customers come up proactively and tell you how your products changed their life. And that is, that is the absolute, most important thing because the real marathon here is that enablement over the long term, right? It is being a great provider to a bunch of great companies under that. We are growing, you know, we've been tripling the company for the fast few years, every year, that takes a lot of hiring. So I would've alongside product is building a great culture with bringing the best people to the company that I guess have my energy level. >>You know, if you could get paid in energy, we would've more than tripled it, you know, but that's always gonna be number two, where we're focused on the segment side, you know, is really the large enterprise customer. At this point, we are doing a great job in the mid-market. We have customer, we have hundreds of customers in our free trial on a constant basis. I think that without wanting to seem over confident or arrogant, I think our technology speaks for itself and the product experience for those users, making a great ROI case to a large enterprise takes effort. It's a different motion. We're, we're very committed to building that motion. We're very committed to building out the partner ecosystem that has been doing that for years. And that is now coming around to the, the snowflake and all of the ecosystem changes around snowflake because they've learned these customers for decades and now have a new opportunity to bring to them. How do we enable them? That is where you're gonna see Sigma going over the next couple of years. >>Wow, fantastic. Good stuff. And a lot of momentum, Mike, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Sigma, the momentum, the flywheel of what you're doing with snowflake and what you're enabling customers to achieve the massive business outcomes. Really cool stuff. >>Thank you. And thank you for continuing to give us a platform to do this and glad to be back in conferences, doing it face to face. It's fantastic. >>It it's the best. Awesome. Mike, thank you for Mike Palmer and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube hopefully all day. We've been here since eight o'clock this morning, Pacific time giving you wall the wall coverage of snowflake summit 22 signing off for today. Dave and I will see you right bright and early tomorrow morning. I will take care guys.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to this cube conversation featuring branch. I'm your host. Lisa Martin, my guest joining me today is Mike nav Bosnia, the VP of sales at branch. Michael. Welcome to the cube. Great to have you here. >>Thanks Lisa. Really good to be here. >>So talk to us about branch, give the audience an overview of the technology, the mission of the company. What is it that you guys do? >>Yeah, certainly. Uh, thank you for the opportunity. Um, so we are founded in 2014 and the mission is to create a more open connected and relevant digital ecosystem. And of course that's very kind of top level. And so what does that mean in terms like how do we do that? Uh, we do that in two ways. We have two, two large products. One is our mobile linking platform and this is, this is like specifically the, the thing that people click on. So you might think of like a hyperlink. We, uh, think about branch links. We want every link in the world to be a branch link. And, and why, like, why would that be helpful? Two reasons. Number one is it's gonna give the user the best experience, the most relevant experience, the fastest experience. And we're very kind of passionate about those delightful user experiences. And we'll talk more about the importance of those, um, as we go on. And then the second reason is we provide, um, great accuracy and great data in measurement. And so second product is our mobile measurement platform or measurement partnership that enables marketers to help understand what parts of their marketing are working as they buy for consumer attention and buy for consumer dollars. Um, so yeah, that's, uh, that's the mission and kind of when we were founded >>That consumer experience these days just seems to be more and more critical because one of the things that has waned thin the last two years is patients on the, on the hand of, I think all of us at some point, right? So being able to help brands deliver a seamless frictionless customer experience is table stakes for businesses in any organization. Talk to me in founded in 2014, lots of change in evolution of the business of the technology and of course of the world, since then, how has life changed for mobile modern marketers? What are some of the key challenges that they have that they come to a branch and say help us fix these? >>Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's the question right. Is, is if you, if you zoom out, if you zoom out and take just the 10,000 foot view, uh, and go back in time, like marketing was certainly simpler, right? And with each new platform creates new opportunities for marketers to reach their consumers in new ways, but also new complexity to master those and also prioritize which ones are marketers going to invest in, versus which ones are they not going to invest in. And today the, the platform that is, is, you know, the top of the heap here of course, is the mobile phone. It's where the attention is the, the insights, the data that are out there, your audience is more than well aware of, of those things. And so these are where the eyeballs are, but within the mobile phone, you have a whole host of wall gardens and new ones pop up all the time. >>The latest kind of biggest has been TikTok, but you can kind of go backwards from there and you can also go forward from where we stand today. That is not gonna be the last one. And each of these are platforms in of themselves for marketers to go reach their consumers. So two challenges for marketers. Number one, how do you reach your consumer in those places and also ensure a, a consistent, amazing brand experience. Cause this all kind of started with you mentioning the importance of that user experience. And when we're talking about mobile phone, tens of seconds matter, honestly, hundreds of seconds matter. And, and there's, there's, you know, data and studies that show that you get delays or you get a little bit of friction and your conversion rate will, will plummet. And so branch is that linking infrastructure to ensure that regardless of the platform you're trying to reach your consumer on, which is getting more and more complex and there more and more of them that you can trust, you're gonna get the best user experience without having to dedicate a ton of engineering resources. Uh, and then second that you're gonna have insights. You're gonna have the best available insights to how those campaigns, how those endeavors are performing to help you then prioritize and make informed decisions for your next set of campaigns. >>And that's so important as we've seen marketing evolve so much in recent years to become really a science. So being able to deliver those insights to organizations, I imagine across any industry on how campaigns are performing, where they're losing people, how they can facilitate conversions faster with less friction is, is a competitive advantage for any business, right? >>Yeah, hundred percent. >>Talk to me about, gimme a customer example, like walk me through a customer, any industry, one that you think really articulates your value and, and kind of walk me through that experience. If I'm engaging with this brand on my mobile phone, maybe my laptop, um, different devices, how, how does all that work together to be able to deliver that seamless experience to the consumer? >>Yeah. I love that you mentioned different devices. Um, that one's, that one's huge. Um, so yeah, let's talk through a customer example. Uh I'll, I'll, I'll just suffice to say that this is, um, a customer that, uh, does, you know, uh, sends music, uh, to, to, you know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of phones worldwide. And, um, they were using actually, uh, a competitive platform in the marketplace and they cared very deeply about having a delightful user experience in every single channel that they could have it in. And they wanted to see if, if branch was a stronger user experience and to do this on the left hand side, you have all the different places you might wanna reach your consumers. And so let's think about some of those. Maybe let's think about it in the music industry. Let's say I've got a great playlist that I know you love Lisa. >>And I, I share it with you and let's say, I share it via text message and you click on it. What is that user experience like? Let's say I share it on my Instagram feed and you click on it. What is that user experience like? Let's say I send it to you in an email. These are all different platforms that you could click on this link. And this music platform wants you to have the best possible user experience. Now over on the right hand side, let's talk about all the different devices and technology you could interact with that link on your iPhone, but maybe you're not an iPhone user. Maybe you are interacting with that on a Samsung. Maybe you're on an older version of Android. All of these things actually matter because, because in the deep technicals of how these links work and how these walled gardens operate, um, they're making changes and all of those changes can cause breakage. >>Okay, this was all the background. Now the actual story. So head-to-head test one of my favorite, most unique companies that, that illustrates the importance of user experience out there is a company called applause. Applause literally, um, puts together a user panel of hundreds, if not thousands of users with all these different phone makeup, because they recognize that it's really hard to do this type of testing in the wild. If you're just a brand like, are you gonna have hundreds of different phones and lots of different setups in your lab? So they do this for you with a user panel and they put branch links head to head with the competitor link in all of these different spaces. And they said, we want our panel to click on link a and then write down specifically, how long did it take? And they actually have like a timer. >>Um, did it, you get the expected outcome? Did it take you to the place that you expected? And just generally other things about that experience and when rated head to head, they put it in green, yellow and red buckets. Branch was getting a green rating over 85% of the time. And the competitor was getting a green rating under 20% of the time. And in that difference for this music company was downstream metrics that really mattered to them such as consumption of the media user happiness conversion to free trials and conversion to paid trials. And so by having that, that better foundation, better user experience, there was massive ROI that over the course of this six month test, we, we proved out and then, you know, initiated a multi-year partnership. >>That's a significant difference, 85% to less than 20 when you're in customer conversations. What are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're talking about and why its of the competitors out there? >>Certainly we start there, right? So like we, we care most about that user experience, right? So if you, when we, when we get over to the measurement side, which, which I hope we get to, um, measurement is all about telling you did the conversion happen and where should you give credit to? Right. And the conversion could be an event, could be streaming. A song could be a purchase, whatever, whatever a conversion is for you, but conversions don't happen if you don't have a strong user experience, you know? And so you can't measure a conversion that didn't take place. And so in terms of our differentiator, we start with that user experience. And so we talk about within the mobile ecosystem, we've identified 6,000 edge cases. Um, these are Instagram builds on a certain cell phone, maybe an older operating system. So 6,000 cases that you as a marketer should care about, but you don't necessarily want your engineering team spending time staying up to date on all of those. >>And if one of them changes, if one of 'em breaks, the big ones that are out there that people will be familiar with, of course, is we're May 25th right now on June 6th, apple will have their developer conference and they do have a history of announcing some changes there that then cause engineering teams to go running. You want branch to be that partner to, to, to know that we will run faster than anybody else and ensure that you're ahead of the pack for whatever those changes may be to ensure that that solid customer user experience that you could build upon. And then over on the measurement side, we're gonna give you best in class insights, uh, because one we're giving you better conversions, but two, we have a best in class fraud platform, we have best in class data to increase yours. We have very high accuracy across 700 ad networks. Um, and we're gonna shield you from these systematic disruptions that happen in the digital space. >>So we talked about the mobile linking plant from the MFP. Let's now talk about the, uh, mobile measurement program. The MMP give because measurement is so critical for organizations to be able to understand, see that data and act on it in real time. How does branch help? >>Yes, certainly. So on the mobile measurement platform side, um, generally when people think about this and they talk about this, they, they, they're largely talking about paid ads and, and we think paid ads are, are very important. And we do, we, we do talk about that quite a bit. And so with that, you are spending money with a lot of the big networks. So Google, Facebook, apple, et cetera. And we enable you to, to get an insight into which network was truly the last touch, because when you're dealing with self attributing networks, they tend to all take credit for them. So, Hey, yeah, Facebook, we saw this user Google. We also saw this user and they, they both take credit. And so we give you some insight into where was that touchpoint in kind of a series of touchpoints to enable you to like assign credit as you see fit, uh, for future decisions. >>And then beyond the self attributing networks, there's hundreds of other networks that you should be testing like you should consider to be testing. Cuz like, to me, this is the, the competitive advantage for marketers is the ability to find valuable users where your competition is not. And in general, if you are, you know, one big retailer and another big retailer, you're both spending on the same keywords on Google or the same things on Facebook. But if you could find some kind of niche networks for your audience and branch is able enables you to one test that with confidence and two, the smaller networks tend to, you know, have maybe a little bit more susceptible to some fraud and so have confidence that there is gonna be fraud blocking, should it pop up? Um, you know, that is gonna increase yours and increase your, your decision making over time. >>That it, the technology sense. Fascinating. I wish we had more time. I would love to dig in this deeper, but you've done a great job of articulating the value of branch. What it is that you guys do, uh, the value in it for customers in many industries. I love the music example. Thank you so much, Mike, for joining me today and sharing these insights into branch and the website is branch.io. >>Yes, that's correct. >>All right, folks can go there for more information. Awesome, Mike. Thanks. Thanks so much for your time. >>Thank you. >>Lisas. I'm Lisa Martin, you watching this.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, Cube coverage live on the floor in the Moscone center in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier host of the Cube. AWS summit 2022 is here in San Francisco, we're back in live events. Of course, Amazon summit in New York city is coming, Amazon summit this summer we'll be there as well. We've got a great guest Mike Miller, GN of AI devices at AWS always one of my favorite interviews. We've got a little prop here, we got the car, DeepRacer, very popular at the events. Mike, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >> Hey John, thank you for having me. It's really exciting to be back and chat with you a little bit about DeepRacer. >> Well I want to get into the prop in a second, not the prop, the product. >> Yeah. >> So DeepRacer program, you got the race track here. Just explain what it is real quick, we'll get that out of the way. >> Absolutely so, well, you know that AI, AWS is passionate about making AI and ML more accessible to developers of all skill levels. So DeepRacer is one of our tools to do that. So DeepRacer is a 3D cloud-based racing simulator, a 1/18th scale autonomously driven car and a league to add a little spicy competition into it. So developers can start with the cloud-based simulator where they're introduced to reinforcement learning which basically teaches the, our car to drive around a track through trial and error and of course you're in a virtual simulator so it's easy for it to make mistakes and restart. Then once that model is trained, it's downloaded to the car which then can drive around a track autonomously, kind of making its own way and of course we track lap time and your successful lap completions and all of that data feeds into our league to try to top the leaderboard and win prizes. >> This is the ultimate gamification tool. (chuckles) >> Absolutely >> Making it fun to learn about machine learning. All right, let's get into the car, let's get into the showcase of the car. show everyone what's going on. >> Absolutely. So this is our 1/18th scale autonomously driven car. It's built off of a monster truck chassis so you can see it's got four wheel drive, it's got steering in the front, we've got a camera on the front. So the camera is the, does the sensing to the compute board that's driven by an Intel atom a processor on the, on the vehicle, that allows it to make sense of the in front of it and then decide where it wants to drive. So you take the car, you download your trained model to it and then it races around the track. >> So the front is the camera. >> The front is the camera, that's correct. >> Okay, So... >> So it's a little bit awkward but we needed to give it plenty of room here so that I can actually see the track in front of it. >> John: It needs eyes. >> Yep. That's exactly right. >> Awesome. >> Yes. >> And so I got to buy that if I'm a developer. >> So, developers can start in two ways, they can use our virtual racing experience and so there's no hardware cost for that, but once you want the experience, the hands on racing, then the car is needed but if you come to one of our AWS summits, like here in San Francisco or anywhere else around the world we have one or more tracks set up and you can get hands on, you can bring the model that you trained at home download it to a car and see it race around the track. >> So use a car here. You guys are not renting cars, but you're letting people use the cars. >> Absolutely. >> Can I build my own car or does it have to be assembled by AWS? >> Yeah, we, we sell it as a, as a kit that's already assembled because we've got the specific compute board in there, that Intel processor and all of the software that's already built on there that knows how to drive around the track. >> That's awesome, so talk about the results. What's going on? What's the feedback from developers? Obviously it's a nerd dream, people like race cars, people love formula one now, all the racing there. IOT is always an IOT opportunity as well. >> Absolutely, and as you said, gamification, right? And so what we found and what we thought we would find was that adding in those sort of ease of learning so we make it the on-ramp to machine learning very easy. So developers of all skill levels can take advantage of this, but we also make it fun by kind of gamifying it. We have different challenges every month, we have a leader board so you can see how you rank against your peers and actually we have split our league into two, there's an open division which is more designed for novices so you'll get rewarded for just participating and then we have a pro league. So if you're one of the top performers in the open league each month, you graduate and you get to race against the big boys in the pro leagues. >> What's the purse? >> Oh, the, (John laughing) we definitely have cash and prizes that happen, both every month. We have prizes cause we do races every month and those winners of those races all get qualified to race at the championship, which of course happens in Las Vegas at re:Invent. So we bring all the winners to re:Invent and they all race against each other for the grand prize the big trophy and the, and the, and the cash prize. >> Well, you know, I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing so I'm kind of obviously biased on this whole program but you got to look at trend of what's going on in eSports and the online engagement is off the charts, are there plans to kind of make this more official and bigger? Is there traction there or is this just all part of the Amazon goodness, love that you guys give back? I mean, obviously it's got traction. >> Yeah. I mean, the thing that's interesting about eSports is the number of young people who are getting into it and what we saw over the last couple years is that, there were a lot of students who were adopting DeepRacer but there were some hurdles, you know, it wasn't really designed for them. So what we did was we made some changes and at the beginning of this year we launched a student focused DeepRacer program. So they get both free training every month, they get free educational materials and their own private league so they know students can race against other students, as part of that league. >> John: Yeah. >> So that was really our first step in kind of thinking about those users and what do we need to do to cater to their kind of unique needs? >> Tell about some of the power dynamics or the, or not power dynamics, the group dynamics around teams and individuals, can I play as an individual? Do I, do I have to be on a team? Can I do teams? How does that look? How do you think about those things? >> Yeah, absolutely. Great, great question. The primary way to compete is individually. Now we do have an offering that allows companies to use DeepRacer to excite and engage their own employees and this is where operating as a team and collaborating with your coworkers comes into play so, if, if I may there's, you know, Accenture and JPMC are a couple big customers of ours, really strong partners. >> John: Yeah. >> Who've been able to take advantage of DeepRacer to educate their workforce. So Accenture ran a 24 hour round the, round the globe race a couple years ago, encouraging their employees to collaborate and form teams to race and then this past year JPMC, had over 3000 of their builders participate over a three month period where they ran a private league and they went on to win the top two spots, first place and second place. >> John: Yeah. >> At reinvent last year. >> It reminds me the NASCAR and all these like competitions, the owners have multiple cars on the race. Do you guys at re:Invent have to start cutting people like, only two submissions or is it free for all? >> Well, you have to qualify to get to the races at re:invent so it's very, it's very cutthroat leading up to that point. We've got winners of our monthly virtual contests, the winners like of the summit races will also get invited. So it's interesting, this dynamic, you'll have some people who won virtual races, some people who won physical races, all competing together. >> And do you guys have a name for the final cup or is it like what's the, what's the final, how do you guys talk about the prizes and the... >> It's, it's the DeepRacer Championship Cup of course. >> John: Of course. (laughter) >> Big silver cup, you get to hoist it and... >> Are the names inscribed in it, is it like the Stanley cup or is it just one. >> It's a unique one, so you get to hold onto it each year. The champion gets their own version of the cup. >> It's a lot of fun. I think it's really kind of cool. What's the benefits for a student? Talk about the student ones. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So I'm a student I'm learning machine learning, what's in it for me is a career path and the fund's obvious, I see that. >> Yeah absolutely. You know, the, for students, it's a hands on way that's a very easy on-ramp to machine learning and you know, one of the things, as I mentioned we're passionate about making it accessible to all. Well, when we mean all we were really do mean all. So, we've got a couple partners who are passionate about the same thing, right? Which is how do we, if, if AI and ML is going to transform our world and solve our most challenging problems, how can we get the right minds from all walks of life and all backgrounds to learn machine learning and get engaged? So with two of our partners, so with Udacity and with Intel we launched a $10 million AWS, AI and ML scholarship program and we built it around DeepRacer. So not only can students who are college and high school students, age 16 and over can use DeepRacer, can learn about machine learning and then get qualified to win one of several thousand scholarships. >> Any other promotions going on that people should know about? >> Yeah, one, one final one is, so we talked about enterprises like JPMC and Accenture, so we've got a promotion that we just started yesterday. So if you are an enterprise and you want to host a DeepRacer event at your company to excite your employees and get 'em collaborating more, if you have over 50 employees participating, we're going to give you up to a hundred thousand dollars in AWS credits, to offset the costs of running your DeepRacer event at your, at your company so >> That's real money. >> Yeah. Real, real, real exciting I think for companies now to pick up DeepRacer. >> So, I mean, honestly, I know Andy Jassy, I have many sports car conversations with him. He's a sports guy, he's now the CEO of Amazon, gets to go all the sporting events, NFL. I wish I could bring the Cube there but, we'll stick with with cloud for now. You got to look at the purse kind of thing. I'm interested in like the whole economic point of cause I mean, forget the learning for side for a second which is by the way awesome. This is great competition. You got leader boards, you got regional activities, you got a funneling system laddering up to the final output. >> And we've really done a decent job and, and of adding capabilities into that user experience to make it more engaging. You can see the countries that the different competitors are from, you can see how the lap times change over time, you know, we give awards as I mentioned, the two divisions now. So if you're not super competitive, we'll reward you for just participating in that open league but if you want to get competitive, we'll even better rewards monthly in the Pro League. >> Do you guys have any conversations internally like, this is getting too big, we might have to outsource it or you keep it in inside the fold? (laughter) >> We, we love DeepRacer and it's so much fun running this, >> You see where I'm going with this. You see where I'm going with this right? The Cube might want to take this over. >> Hey. >> And you know >> We're always looking for partners and sponsors who can help us make it bigger so, absolutely. >> It's a good business opportunity. I just love it. Congratulations, great stuff. What's the big learning in this, you know, as a as an executive, you look back you got GM, AI super important and, and I think it is great community, communal activity as well. What's the learning, what have you learned from this over the years besides that it's working but like what's the big takeaway? >> Yeah, I mean. We've got such a wide range of developers and builders who are customers that we need to provide a variety of opportunities for people to get hands on and there's no better way to learn a complex technology like AI and ML than getting hands on and seeing, you know, physically the result of the AI and I think that's been the biggest learning, is that just having the hands on and the sort of element of watching what it does, just light bulbs go off. When, when developers look at this and they start piecing the, the puzzle pieces together, how they can benefit. >> So I have to ask the question that might be on other peoples minds, maybe it's not, maybe I'm just thinking really dark here but gamers love to hack and they love cheat codes, they love to get, you know, get into the system, any attempts to do a little hacking to win the, the the game, have you guys, is there, you know? >> Well, well, you know, last year we, we we released an open source version of the vehicle so that people could start using it as a platform to explore and do that kind of hacking and give them an opportunity build on top of it. >> So using mods, mods modules, we can mod out on this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. If you go to deepracer.com, we have sort of extensions page there, and you can see, somebody mounted a Nerf cannon onto the top of this, somebody built a computer vision model that could recognize you know, rodents and this thing would kind of drive to scare 'em, all kinds of fun topics. >> So it's a feature, not a bug. >> Absolutely. >> Open it up. >> Yeah. >> And also on transparency, if you have the source code out there you guys can have some review. >> Yeah. The whole idea is like, let's see what developers, >> It's really not hackable. It's not hackable. >> Yeah, I mean, for the, if you think about it when we do the races, we bring the cars ourselves, the only way a developer interacts is by giving us their trained models so... >> And you, do you guys review the models? Nothing to review, right? >> Yeah. There's nothing really to review. It's all about, you know, there, there was a model that we saw one time where the car went backwards and then went forwards across the finish line but we, we, we gently told them, well that's really not a valid way to race. >> That was kind of a hack, not really a hack. That was a hack hack. (laughter) That was just a growth hack. >> Exactly, but everybody just has a lot of fun with it across the board. >> Mike, great, thanks for coming on. Love the prop. Thanks for bringing the car on, looks great. Success every year. I want to see the purse, you know, big up to $1,000,000 you know, the masters, you know, tournament. >> Someday. (John chuckles) >> You guys.. >> Thank you for having me John. >> DeepRacer again, Fun Start has a great way to train people on machine learning, IOT device, turns into a league of its own. Great stuff for people to learn, especially students and people in companies, but the competitive juices flowing. That's what it's all about, having fun, learning. It's the Cube here in San Francisco. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Let's kick things off. We're here at Mike Capuano the CMO of Pluribus Networks, and Ami Badani VP of Networking, Marketing, and Developer of Ecosystem at NVIDIA. Great to have you welcome folks. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> So let's get into the the problem situation with cloud unified networking. What problems are out there? What challenges do cloud operators have Mike? Let's get into it. >> The challenges that we're looking at are for non hyperscalers that's enterprises, governments Tier 2 service providers, cloud service providers. And the first mandate for them is to become as agile as a hyperscaler. So they need to be able to deploy services and security policies in seconds. They need to be able to abstract the complexity of the network and define things in software while it's accelerated in hardware. Really ultimately they need a single operating model everywhere. And then the second thing is they need to distribute networking and security services out to the edge of the host. We're seeing a growth cyber attacks. It's not slowing down. It's only getting worse and solving for this security problem across clouds is absolutely critical. And the way to do it is to move security out to the host. >> With that goal in mind, what's the Pluribus vision how does this tie together? >> So basically what we see is that this demands a new architecture and that new architecture has four tenets. The first tenet is unified and simplified cloud networks. If you look at cloud networks today, there's sort of like discreet bespoke cloud networks per hypervisor, per private cloud, edge cloud, public cloud. Each of the public clouds have different networks, that needs to be unified. If we want these folks to be able to be agile they need to be able to issue a single command or instantiate a security policy across all of those locations with one command and not have to go to each one. The second is, like I mentioned distributed security. Distributed security without compromise, extended out to the host is absolutely critical. So micro segmentation and distributed firewalls. But it doesn't stop there. They also need pervasive visibility. It's sort of like with security you really can't see you can't protect you can't see. So you need visibility everywhere. The problem is visibility to date has been very expensive. Folks have had to basically build a separate overlay network of taps, packet brokers, tap aggregation infrastructure, that really needs to be built in to this unified network I'm talking about. And the last thing is automation. All of this needs to be SDN enabled. So this is related to my comment about abstraction. Abstract the complexity of all these discreet networks whatever's down there in the physical layer. I don't want to see it. I want to abstract it. I want to define things in software but I do want to leverage the power of hardware to accelerate that. So that's the fourth tenet is SDN automation. >> Mike, we've been talking on theCUBE a lot about this architectural shift and customers are looking at this. This is a big part of everyone who's looking at cloud operations, NextGen. How do we get there? How do customer customers get this vision realized? >> That's a great question. And I appreciate the tee up. We're here today for that reason. We're introducing two things today. The first is a unified cloud networking vision. And that is a vision of where Pluribus is headed with our partners like NVIDIA long term. And that is about deploying a common operating model SDN enabled, SDN automated, hardware accelerated across all clouds. And whether that's underlay and overlay switch or server, any hypervisor infrastructure containers, any workload doesn't matter. So that's ultimately where we want to get. And that's what we talked about earlier. The first step in that vision is what we call the unified cloud fabric. And this is the next generation of our adaptive cloud fabric. And what's nice about this is we're not starting from scratch. We have an award-winning adaptive cloud fabric product that is deployed globally. And in particular, we're very proud of the fact that it's deployed in over 100 Tier 1 mobile operators as the network fabric for their 4G and 5G virtualized cores. We know how to build carrier grade networking infrastructure. What we're doing now to realize this next generation unified cloud fabric is we're extending from the switch to this NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU. We know there's. >> Hold that up real quick. That's a good prop. That's the BlueField NVIDIA card. >> It's the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU, data processing unit. What we're doing fundamentally is extending our SDN automated fabric, the unified cloud fabric, out to the host. But it does take processing power. So we knew that we didn't want to do we didn't want to implement that running on the CPUs which is what some other companies do. Because it consumes revenue generating CPUs from the application. So a DPU is a perfect way to implement this. And we knew that NVIDIA was the leader with this BlueField-2. And so that is the first, that's the first step into getting, into realizing this vision. >> NVIDIA has always been powering some great workloads of GPUs, now you got DPUs. Networking and NVIDIA as here. What is the relationship with Pluribus? How did that come together? Tell us the story. >> We've been working with Pluribus for quite some time. I think the last several months was really when it came to fruition. And what Pluribus is trying to build and what NVIDIA has. So we have, this concept of a blue field data processing unit, which, if you think about it, conceptually does really three things, offload, accelerate, and isolate. So offload your workloads from your CPU to your data processing unit, infrastructure workloads that is. Accelerate, so there's a bunch of acceleration engines. You can run infrastructure workloads much faster than you would otherwise. And then isolation, So you have this nice security isolation between the data processing unit and your other CPU environment. And so you can run completely isolated workloads directly on the data processing unit. So we introduced this, a couple years ago. And with Pluribus we've been talking to the Pluribus team for quite some months now. And I think really the combination of what Pluribus is trying to build, and what they've developed around this unified cloud fabric fits really nicely with the DPU and running that on the DPU and extending it really from your physical switch all the way to your host environment, specifically on the data processing unit. So if you think about what's happening as you add data processing units to your environment. So every server we believe over time is going to have data processing units. So now you'll have to manage that complexity from the physical network layer to the host layer. And so what Pluribus is really trying to do is extending the network fabric from the host from the switch to the host and really have that single pane of glass for network operators to be able to configure, provision, manage all of the complexity of the network environment. So that's really how the partnership truly started. And so it started really with extending the network fabric and now we're also working with them on security. If you sort of take that concept of isolation and security isolation, what Pluribus has within their fabric is the concept of micro segmentation. And so now you can take that extend it to the data processing unit and really have isolated micro segmentation workloads whether it's bare metal, cloud native environments, whether it's virtualized environments, whether it's public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud. So it really is a magical partnership between the two companies with their unified cloud fabric running on the DPU. >> You know what I love about this conversation is it reminds me of when you have these changing markets. The product gets pulled out of the market and you guys step up and create these new solutions. And I think this is a great example. So I have to ask you how do you guys differentiate what sets this apart for customers? What's in it for the customer? >> So I mentioned three things in terms of the value of what the BlueField brings. There's offloading, accelerating and isolating. And that's sort of the key core tenets of BlueField. So that, if you sort of think about what BlueField what we've done, in terms of the differentiation. We're really a robust platform for innovation. So we introduced BlueField-2 last year. We're introducing BlueField-3 which is our next generation of blue field. It'll have 5X the ARM compute capacity. It will have 400 gig line rate acceleration, 4X better crypto acceleration. So it will be remarkably better than the previous generation. And we'll continue to innovate and add, chips to our portfolio every 18 months to two years. So that's sort of one of the key areas of differentiation. The other is that if you look at NVIDIA, what we're sort of known for is really known for our AI, our artificial intelligence and our artificial intelligence software, as well as our GPU. So you look at artificial intelligence and the combination of artificial intelligence plus data processing. This really creates faster, more efficient secure AI systems from, the core of your data center, all the way out to the edge. And so with NVIDIA we really have these converged accelerators where we've combined the GPU, which does all your AI processing with your data processing with the DPU. So we have this convergence really nice convergence of that area. And I would say the third area is really around our developer environment. One of the key, one of our key motivations at NVIDIA is really to have our partner ecosystem embrace our technology and build solutions around our technology. So if you look at what we've done with the DPU we've created an SDK, which is an open SDK called DOCA. And it's an open SDK for our partners to really build and develop solutions using BlueField and using all these accelerated libraries that we expose through DOCA. And so part of our differentiation is really building this open ecosystem for our partners to take advantage and build solutions around our technology. >> What's exciting is when I hear you talk it's like you realize that there's no one general purpose network anymore. Everyone has their own super environment, super cloud or these new capabilities. They can really craft their own I'd say custom environment at scale with easy tools. And it's all kind of that again this is the new architecture Mike, you were talking about. How does customers run this effectively, cost effectively? And how do people migrate? >> I think that is the key question. So we've got this beautiful architecture. Amazon Nitro is a good example of a SmartNIC architecture that has been successfully deployed but, enterprises and Tier 2 service providers and Tier 1 service providers and governments are not Amazon. So they need to migrate there and they need this architecture to be cost of effective. And that's super key. I mean, the reality is DPU are moving fast but they're not going to be deployed everywhere on day one. Some servers will have have DPUs right away. Some servers will have DPUs in a year or two. And then there are devices that may never have DPUs. IOT gateways, or legacy servers, even mainframes. So that's the beauty of a solution that creates a fabric across both the switch and the DPU. And by leveraging the NVIDIA BlueField DPU what we really like about it is, it's open and that drives cost efficiencies. And then, with this our architectural approach effectively you get a unified solution across switch and DPU, workload independent. It doesn't matter what hypervisor it is. Integrated visibility, integrated security and that can create tremendous cost efficiencies and really extract a lot of the expense from a capital perspective out of the network as well as from an operational perspective because now I have an SDN automated solution where I'm literally issuing a command to deploy a network service, or to deploy a security policy and is deployed everywhere automatically saving the network operations team and the security operations team time. >> So let me rewind that 'cause that's super important. Got the unified cloud architecture. I'm the customer, it's implemented. What's the value again, take me through the value to me. I have a unified environment. What's the value? >> I mean the value is effectively, there's a few pieces of value. The first piece of value is I'm creating this clean demark. I'm taking networking to the host. And like I mentioned, we're not running it on the CPU. So in implementations that run networking on the CPU there's some conflict between the DevOps team who own the server, and the NetOps team who own the network because they're installing software on the CPU stealing cycles from what should be revenue generating CPUs. So now by terminating the networking on the DPU we create this real clean demark. So the DevOps folks are happy because they don't necessarily have the skills to manage network and they don't necessarily want to spend the time managing networking. They've got their network counterparts who are also happy the NetOps team because they want to control the networking. And now we've got this clean demark where the DevOps folks get the services they need and the NetOps folks get the control and agility they need. So that's a huge value. The next piece of value is distributed security. This is essential I mentioned it earlier, pushing out micro segmentation and distributed firewall basically at the application level, where I create these small segments on an application by application basis. So if a bad actor does penetrate the perimeter firewall they're contained once they get inside. 'Cause the worst thing is a bad actor penetrates perimeter firewall and can go wherever they want in wreak havoc. And so that's why this is so essential. And the next benefit obviously is this unified networking operating model. Having an operating model across switch and server, underlay and overlay, workload agnostic, making the life of the NetOps teams much easier so they can focus their time on really strategy instead of spending an afternoon deploying a single VLAN for example. >> Awesome, and I think also for my stand point I mean perimeter security is pretty much, that out there, I guess the firewall still out there exists but pretty much they're being breached all the time the perimeter. You have to have this new security model. And I think the other thing that you mentioned the separation between DevOps is cool because the infrastructure is code is about making the developers be agile and build security in from day one. So this policy aspect is huge new control plan. I think you guys have a new architecture that enables the security to be handled more flexible. That seems to be the killer feature here. >> If you look at the data processing unit, I think one of the great things about sort of this new architecture it's really the foundation for zero trust. So like you talked about the perimeter is getting breached. And so now each and every compute node has to be protected. And I think that's sort of what you see with the partnership between Pluribus and NVIDIA is the DPU is really the foundation of zero trust and Pluribus is really building on that vision with allowing sort of micro-segmentation and being able to protect each and every compute node as well as the underlying network. >> This is super exciting. This is illustration of how the market's evolving architectures are being reshaped and refactored for cloud scale and all this new goodness with data. So I got to ask how you guys go into market together. Michael, start with you. What's the relationship look like in the go to market with NVIDIA? >> We're super excited about the partnership. Obviously we're here together. We think we've got a really good solution for the market so we're jointly marketing it. Obviously we appreciate that NVIDIA's open that's sort of in our DNA, we're about a open networking. They've got other ISVs who are going to run on BlueField-2. We're probably going to run on other DPUs in the future. But right now we feel like we're partnered with the number one provider of DPUs in the world and super excited about making a splash with it. >> Oh man NVIDIA got the hot product. >> So BlueField-2 as I mentioned was GA last year, we're introducing, well we now also have the converged accelerator. So I talked about artificial intelligence our artificial intelligence software with the BlueField DPU, all of that put together on a converged accelerator. The nice thing there is you can either run those workloads, so if you have an artificial intelligence workload and an infrastructure workload, you can work on them separately on the same platform or you can actually use you can actually run artificial intelligence applications on the BlueField itself. So that's what the converged accelerator really brings to the table. So that's available now. Then we have BlueField-3 which will be available late this year. And I talked about sort of, how much better that next generation of BlueField is in comparison to BlueField-2. So we'll see BlueField-3 shipping later on this year. And then our software stack which I talked about, which is called DOCA. We're on our second version, our DOCA 1.2 we're releasing DOCA 1.3 in about two months from now. And so that's really our open ecosystem framework. So allow you to program the BlueField. So we have all of our acceleration libraries, security libraries, that's all packed into this SDK called DOCA. And it really gives that simplicity to our partners to be able to develop on top of BlueField. So as we add new generations of BlueField, next year we'll have another version and so on and so forth. DOCA is really that unified layer that allows BlueField to be both forwards compatible and backwards compatible. So partners only really have to think about writing to that SDK once. And then it automatically works with future generations of BlueField. So that's sort of the nice thing around DOCA. And then in terms of our go to market model we're working with every major OEM. Later on this year you'll see, major server manufacturers releasing BlueField enabled servers, so more to come. >> Awesome, save money, make it easier, more capabilities, more workload power. This is the future of cloud operations. >> And one thing I'll add is we are, we have a number of customers as you'll hear in the next segment that are already signed up and will be working with us for our early field trial starting late April early May. We are accepting registrations. You can go to www.pluribusnetworks.com/eft. If you're interested in signing up for being part of our field trial and providing feedback on the product >> Awesome innovation and networking. Thanks so much for sharing the news. Really appreciate, thanks so much. In a moment we'll be back to look deeper in the product the integration, security, zero trust use cases. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto. Got some great guests here on this panel to talk about DeFi, the relevance of it, the importance, and all the major things happening in the changing world of finance and decentralized web, which is Web 3. Great wave here going on. We got Jaime Rogozinski, founder of WallStreetBets and strategic advisor of WallStreetBets app. Great to have you on. We've got Michael So, Partner, Head of Business Development, Cook Finance, and Mike Morhulets, CEO of DeHive. Gentlemen, thank you for coming. I'm super excited about this panel conversation here in the Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us on. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, first of all, it's been a crazy ride. Even just go back from... Just go back eight years ago now, and then go to you had the big ICO craze, you had now the operationalizing of crypto, applications, blockchain. I see the price of Bitcoin has been going great. Everyone's been making a lot of money. But it's really about the fundamental change of users and DeFi, decentralized finance has been one of the tip of the spears here from terms of change 'cause money's involved. and that's the shift here. So before we get into it, I want to get you guys to help me define what is DeFi? If someone says, "Hey, what's DeFi?" And everyone wants to know, "What's DeFi? What does it mean?" What is DeFi? >> Well, I think it's still being defined to be quite honest with you, right? Like it stands for decentralized finance, but for the most part, it's figuring out a way to use these crypto coins, tokens assets, Dallas Dap, this, that, the other to try and integrate this worldwide transactional parallel ecosystem to traditional finance, right? So I'd say for the most part, you're able to transact, send money, buy things, invest it, generating interest rates, et cetera. >> So is it a new money system, is it an architecture? How should people think about this 'cause, you know, to me it seems like a whole another stack, if you will, I had to use the word stack, tech stack, but it's really more of a different thing. People still scratch their heads. Does it help me, does it hurt me? How would you explain it to someone who's like saying, "Hey, I got a bank, got my app on my phone." What's the difference? >> Yeah. To me, there are three things that define DeFi. You know, one is the fact that it is non-custodial, meaning there is no counterparties who take hold of your money and decide when they want to release it back to you. You own it, you hold assets, you know, on your own wallet. You know, that's one clear, you know, defining moment of DeFi. Second is the fact that, you know, where the value of transfer happens. And TraFi, traditional finance. You know, you would see how the actual transfer may not even happen, actually outside of a particular location, such as for example, a centralized exchange. However, on DeFi, you can clearly see how the value of transfer happens on chain, on Ethereum, on other lines, you know, on other chain as well. And third and last, you know, to me is how the organizations define what decisions, what setups are to be made within, right? For example, you know, DAO, you know, the centralized autonomous organization, they will actually use the communities to define how things can be decided. So that's one way to see it. >> Yeah. It's interesting. I saw these protocols and the tokens and infrastructure, Mike, there's a complex system going on here. It's the plumbing, right? I mean, it's a money system. You know, how decisions are made, you got communities involved in there, you got actually mechanisms for immutability and security. You got application developers. So you got to kind of think of like an operating system here to make it all work. What's your take on this whole impact of what is DeFi relative to what people see on their phones as just an app or just some finance app. There's a lot of stuff going on under the covers. >> Yeah. I want to totally agree with Michael because it's all about one point of entering to Web 3, yeah? I have just my personal key, and can use all my wallets, get access to my funds from different point in the world. And I just have enter to all these applications, all these huge amount of services and monies. Second general part for me that is all about smart contracts and not intermediate here. Then people want to cooperate on many ways to each other on stable coins, yeah. And this is just smart contract. And one person from another side and another person from other side, that's it. It's all about DeFi ecosystem, you know, into words. >> I mean, this idea of disintermediating the middle man is a huge part of this. I mean, smart contracts is critical to this. You got to have the infrastructure, you got to have the user behavior. This is why it's important. Can you guys weigh in on some of the things on the importance of DeFi and where we are right now relative to progress? Because even just in the past two years, the cultural shift of DeFi has changed a lot. Where are we right now in DeFi? Can you guys share your perspectives on kind of, you know, progress compared to the evolution of where it will go? >> No, I think that DeFi has DeFinitely made a lot of progress with regards to adoption. Not only by retail participants, but also by institutional ones, right? They're warming up the idea of these first stops from Bitcoin or whatever these larger ones that have more proven track record. And they're starting to experiment more and more from taking crypto transactions, et cetera. But from the retail standpoint, it's also made a lot of progress. I'd say the biggest benefit to the DeFi world is community, right? It works because it's decentralized, which means one of the requirements is a lot of participants. But one of the hindrances, which is one of the biggest ones that's kind of been in the way is the usability, which although it's improved a lot, it's still not ready for the mainstream user that's used to just one click, buy it, whatever, don't care to understand how things work. But those two worlds are starting to bridge, right? People getting comfortable, institutions getting comfortable, as well as retail participants not being scared away by the process. >> Yeah. I mean that... I will just ask you to follow up on that Jaime, if you don't mind. Is that that community user piece is huge. A lot of people in the old guard will dismiss things as meme stocks, if you will. You know, we've seen a lot of the traction. But when you have communities moving at massive forces, that's in a way infrastructure, right? So you have behavior changes, whether you got some peer to peer community happening, it can't be dismissed. I mean, yeah, this is my arbitrage and a little bit of a, you know, I won't say crypto vandalism or kind of fun, but at the end of the day, that's a behavior. That is specific change. That points to... It can't be dismissed. What do you guys react to that? What's your reaction to that? >> Right. Actually, at my firm, Cook Finance, we are actually at the forefront of seeing that movement. So at Cook, you know, we label ourselves as compostable finance. And one thing that we've seen is that our communities, consistently we propose very interesting strategies, connecting different DeFi protocols together to basically execute on a portfolio execution that allows them to achieve a certain objectives. And we have to say, you know, if you were to define Web 2 as read and write and Web 3 as read, write, and create, you know, then this is really, you know, where the difference lies. We are now at this point where we are simply providing an infrastructure, as you said before, but allowing, you know, the creativities, you know, from everybody to come together and let the crowd wisdom everywhere, you know, to decide exactly, you know, what should take home from a product perspective. So we're very excited about that. >> Yeah. And these are new protocols that need to built. I mean, what does that mean, right? So how does software adapt to that? This comes into the question, I think, why it can't be dismissed. Jaime, what's your reaction to that? Because you're in the middle of it, you see all these behaviors, and Wall Street certainly is an environment where there's a lot of activity 'cause there's finance all this money there, right? And then again, a lot of that is old money, old systems. Now moving to the new, now, global, et cetera. What's your take? >> Well, I mean, first of all, I don't think that one is going to move over to the other one. I believe there's going to be elements where they coexist, right? Traditional finance still has a lot of merits to it and it has a lot of use of practical applications, but they can feed off of each other. There's a lot of things that DeFi can learn from traditional finance and vice versa. So I think that we're just going to start seeing this convergence of these two different worlds. And I think it's extremely powerful, right? Because the way that you think about sequential and transactional systems that are centralized, right? Like it requires all sorts of mechanisms. For example, I know I'm speaking arbitrary, but like you have a market with an exchange in an order book with limit orders and then you have the guy come in there and push market buy or sell, pushes the price, right? That's the mechanism by which you see something flash on your screen. In the world of DeFi, there's additional mechanisms that have previously been impossible, like automated market makers, right? They don't have order books and there's no counterparty. I mean, there is, but they're distributed. So the risk profile is really different. So like it's just a matter of rethinking and looking at all the advantages and all the benefits that DeFi has to offer. >> I love that whole point there. 'Cause that's basically refactoring existing markets in the new way. And this becomes the next question is, is that okay, if you have like say Unstoppable, where they got this access through an NFT, which is super cool with kind of like an identity, the development environment is really key in all these big ways. Because if you think about what needs to happen next, does you need more software developers or developers in general on this new paradigm, right? So with that in mind, how do you guys see the market of more innovation being developed on top of where we are now? 'cause that's the next key flywheel in this equation, which is, I need simplicity, I got to make ease of use, and reduce the time it takes to do things. And that's just going to come from development. So what's you guys reaction to with the wave coming in from a development standpoint? You mentioned smart contracts earlier, Mike, what do you guys think? >> Yeah. At that moment, I'm thinking about Web 3.0 identity. It's very close to Unstoppable Domains doing, because they're doing that you can connect by your domain to different apps, to different projects and so on. And the next step after that will be Web 3.0 identity. I think there will be some custodial service when you will put your passport or verification service and we will get NFT identifying you. And then with this NFT, you will go to every service which should be identified. For example, tomorrow SEC will create new law that all users for U-Swap should be identifying and you'll use this identity NFT for using this UniSwap. And I think it will be huge amount of works for all Web 3 applications and always that. >> Michael, what is Unstoppable matter? Why does Unstoppable matter to DeFi? What's your take on that? >> Yeah. Yeah. First of all, you know, I have been a big fan of Unstoppable both since day one, you know, from the NFT domain, you know, rollout. But one thing that I'm super excited about Unstoppable is the fact that it provides a digital identity, exactly like what Mike said. And the fact that, you know, you can leverage Unstoppable. And the fact that the digital identity can be use in a different way than where we see the traditional finance data such as owning all your PII, you know, all the personal identifiable informations, you know. The NFT aspect allows, you know, only certain informations to be transferred, but at the same time, allow all the participants in the ecosystem, DeFi or even TraFi institutional alike, you know, to only pick certain pieces such that they can still live within, you know, the existing framework. So I think that really is powerful in a way, it bridges in a way, the existing money or value transfer happens, to a way in the future, how people can use the different infrastructure to perform the very same actions. >> Jaime, what's your take on the Unstoppable position here relative to DeFi? >> Look, I think Unstoppable is in a really great position, right? The whole spirit of DeFi is to removing bottlenecks, right? Removing kind of choke points, which can either be, you know, by some people choose to label that as the government, but I choose to think of it as more as a technological, right? Like you have this distributed naming system and this idea of identifying yourself has uncalculable benefits, right? I don't think we're at the point yet where we can just imagine it. Right now we start off by associating it with, I'm going to sign into a website with my username and password. And this is the new version of that. That doesn't have any huge feel to it, right? But what's under the hood is what actually allows people to do a lot more things such as like being able to port these things across and into connectivity on different websites. And being able to have control over your data, right? Like to actually be able to open up markets for even being able to monetize your own data, right? So that when you sign into a thing, you can just decide what things to share and whatnot. Like there's so many ways that we can't quite yet imagine the use for this, and I think that Unstoppable's in an incredible position to take advantage of that. >> That's awesome insight. That's a great way to talk about it. I mean, you look at distributed naming system, first of all, it really has not been done at large scale. I mean, the traditional naming systems have been centralized. So if you look at that as an enabling platform, I mean, it's limitless possibilities. Again, you start initially with some problems, but there's real technical enablement here. So in the last few minutes, I'd love to pivot on that point, and go, what's possible with this DeFi going forward? Because if you take that premise that you have this enabling system, that people are going to kind of align with defacto and then ultimately maybe standard, what does that enable? 'Cause you're now in a growth mode for the sector. Okay. Which is innovation coders. And when you start seeing protocols start to become defacto, that's a good thing. So let's talk about in the last few minutes, what's next for DeFi? Jaime, will start with you. What's your take on what's next? 'Cause you kind of teed it up. Take us through the... Walk down that path. In hypothetical of course, but you know, let's take a road. >> So, you know, I think that for starters, DeFi gets more powerful the more that people use it, right? So we're going to just start by saying there's going to be more adoption, so this thing is going to be more robust. And more things can actually live on this decentralized platform. One of the biggest benefits of decentralization is its robustness. You think about like the worldwide web, it's really not a web, it's more like just like a pipe of data that's owned by a handful of companies and the internet and the servers that host it and all these different things. We're already starting to see decentralized storage or servers. We're already starting to see decentralized networks, right? So that you're actually able to slowly start reducing those choke points. You're going to have this entire system where the world is interconnected, where people can communicate without these choke points, without being able to worry about censorship. You'll be able to have... The world that's able to transact, interact, and where you live is no longer going to be as much of a factor as it is today. >> Awesome. Michael, what's your take? What's possible? Where's it going? >> Yeah, I would take what Jaime said earlier. You know, I mean using the AMM example, the automated market making example. From our end, you know, I think one of the defining moment was, you know, when UniSwap first roll out, you know, in the big way, it allowed many individuals to become market makers for the first time in their lives. And I think that's very powerful, you know. It changes the dynamic as to where the, I guess, you know, the forces and the power of finance, you know, lies. In addition to that, you know, like I said before, I think many people would start to come up with their own ideas as to how things, you know, can be executed from a finance perspective to achieve many different risk reward profiles. So from that sense, you know, I think it is only the beginning that now we are seeing how, you know, digital identities, you know, can be linked, you know, to an individual. And at the same time, also the value creation side of the story. >> All right. Mike, your take. What's next? >> Yeah. I believe in two things. First, this is cross-chain and will it chain liquidity? Because right now it's not simple way for transferring, for example, USDC or stablecoin from polygon to cosmos network. But I believe in common liquidity for cross-chain. And the second one is more user friendly interfaces like hybrid interfaces and connecting DeFi and traditional financial startups like near ecosystem building now. Then you have layer one, blockchain solution, and then layer two, application with who are connected to our one application. More user friendly and more common useless applications. >> Great stuff, guys. Amazing content. Great panel. You guys are awesome. Great on the front front range of this whole wave. We got one minute left. So quick lightning questions. So in one quick statement, what one thing should people pay attention to in DeFi as we look at the next, you know, year or two as we go forward? What are the key innovations? What should people look at? It could be an area that's obvious, it could be an area that's not obvious that people should look at, pay attention, that's super important. That is the most important area. Mike, we'll start with you and we'll go across. >> Sure. I would say one thing is composability. I really am excited about the fact that everyone are starting to generate ideas on their own and simply leveraging the existing DeFi infrastructure to allow that to happen. So that's one thing I would say. >> Jaime? >> Sorry. I think NFTs, right? NFTs, I'm not talking about the JPEGs or the pictures. I'm talking about the use of these technologies in much the same way that we were talking about being able to identify yourself online or buying actual real estate or whatever it might be. I think that we're unable to imagine what's going to be some of the biggest uses and I'm very, very excited about seeing what's going to happen. >> Okay. Mike, final statement. What one thing should people pay attention to? >> To my mind, we don't know what market will be next year. And I will recommend to pay attention for stable strategies, for stable core and projects, for stable rates, and always stable coin farming sphere for DeFi market. >> Guys, thanks so much for sharing your insight on this topic. Really appreciate your time for coming into theCUBE here in Palo Alto for the Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. Really thankful. Thanks for sharing. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. This is theCUBE conversation here. I'm John Furrier with theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, let's kick things off. We're here at my capital. One of the CMO of pluribus networks and AMI by Dani VP of networking, marketing developer ecosystem at Nvidia. Great to have you welcome folks. Thank you. Thanks. So let's get into the, the problem situation with cloud unified network. What problems are out there? What challenges do cloud operators have Mike let's get into? >>Yeah, really, you know, the challenges we're looking at are for non hyperscalers that's enterprises, governments, tier two service providers, cloud service providers, and the first mandate for them is to become as agile as a hyperscaler. So they need to be able to deploy services and security policies in seconds. They need to be able to abstract the complexity of the network and define things in software while it's accelerated in hardware. Really ultimately they need a single operating model everywhere. And then the second thing is they need to distribute networking and security services out to the edge of the host. We're seeing a growth in cyber attacks. It's it's not slowing down. It's only getting worse and, you know, solving for this security problem across clouds is absolutely critical. And the way to do it is to move security out to the host. >>Okay. With that goal in mind, what's the pluribus vision. How does this tie together? >>Yeah, so basically what we see is that this demands a new architecture and that new architecture has four tenants. The first tenant is unified and simplified cloud networks. If you look at cloud networks today, there's, there's sort of like discrete bespoke cloud networks, you know, per hypervisor, per private cloud edge cloud public cloud. Each of the public clouds have different networks that needs to be unified. You know, if we want these folks to be able to be agile, they need to be able to issue a single command or instantiate a security policy across all of those locations with one command and not have to go to each one. The second is like I mentioned, distributed security, distributed security without compromise, extended out to the host is absolutely critical. So micro-segmentation and distributed firewalls, but it doesn't stop there. They also need pervasive visibility. You know, it's, it's, it's sort of like with security, you really can't see you can't protect what you can't see. >>So you need visibility everywhere. The problem is visibility to date has been very expensive. Folks have had to basically build a separate overlay network of taps, packet brokers, tap aggregation infrastructure that really needs to be built into this unified network I'm talking about. And the last thing is automation. All of this needs to be SDN enabled. So this is related to my comment about abstraction abstract, the complexity of all these discreet networks, physic whatever's down there in the physical layer. Yeah. I don't want to see it. I want abstract it. I wanted to find things in software, but I do want to leverage the power of hardware to accelerate that. So that's the fourth tenant is SDN automation. >>Mike, we've been talking on the cable a lot about this architectural shift and customers are looking at this. This is a big part of everyone who's looking at cloud operations next gen, how do we get there? How do customers get this vision realized? >>That's a great question. And I appreciate the tee up. I mean, we're, we're here today for that reason. We're introducing two things today. The first is a unified cloud networking vision. And that is a vision of where pluribus is headed with our partners like Nvidia longterm. And that is about deploying a common operating model, SDN enabled SDN, automated hardware, accelerated across all clouds and whether that's underlying overlay switch or server hype, any hypervisor infrastructure containers, any workload doesn't matter. So that's ultimately where we want to get. And that's what we talked about earlier. The first step in that vision is what we call the unified cloud fabric. And this is the next generation of our adaptive cloud fabric. And what's nice about this is we're not starting from scratch. We have an award-winning adaptive cloud fabric product that is deployed globally. And in particular we're very proud of the fact that it's deployed in over a hundred tier one mobile operators as the network fabric for their 4g and 5g virtualized cores. We know how to build carrier grade networking infrastructure. What we're doing now to realize this next generation unified cloud fabric is we're extending from the switch to this Nvidia Bluefield to DPU. We, >>No, there's all that up real quick. That's a good, that's a good prop. That's the blue field and video. >>It's the Nvidia Bluefield two DPU data processing unit. And you know, what we're doing fundamentally is extending our SDN automated fabric, the unified cloud fabric out to the host, but it does take processing power. So we knew that we didn't want to do, we didn't want to implement that running on the CPU, which is what some other companies do because it consumes revenue generating CPU's from the application. So a DPU is a perfect way to implement this. And we knew that Nvidia was the leader with this blue field too. And so that is the first that's, that's the first step in the getting into realizing this vision >>And video has always been powering some great workloads of GPU. Now you've got DP networking, and then video is here. What is the relationship with clothes? How did that come together? Tell us the story. >>Yeah. So, you know, we've been working with pluribus for quite some time. I think the last several months was really when it came to fruition and what pluribus is trying build and what Nvidia has. So we have, you know, this concept of a Bluefield data processing unit, which if you think about it, conceptually does really three things, offload, accelerate an isolate. So offload your workloads from your CPU to your data processing unit infrastructure workloads, that is a accelerate. So there's a bunch of acceleration engine. So you can run infrastructure workloads much faster than you would otherwise, and then isolation. So you have this nice security isolation between the data processing unit and your other CPU environment. And so you can run completely isolated workloads directly on the data processing unit. So we introduced this, you know, a couple of years ago, and with pluribus, you know, we've been talking to the pluribus team for quite some months now. >>And I think really the combination of what pluribus is trying to build and what they've developed around this unified cloud fabric is fits really nicely with the DPU and running that on the DPU and extending it really from your physical switch, all the way to your host environment, specifically on the data processing unit. So if you think about what's happening as you add data processing units to your environment. So every server we believe over time is going to have data processing units. So now you'll have to manage that complexity from the physical network layer to the host layer. And so what pluribus is really trying to do is extending the network fabric from the host, from the switch to the host, and really have that single pane of glass for network operators to be able to configure provision, manage all of the complexity of the network environment. >>So that's really how the partnership truly started. And so it started really with extending the network fabric, and now we're also working with them on security. So, you know, if you sort of take that concept of isolation and security isolation, what pluribus has within their fabric is the concept of micro-segmentation. And so now you can take that extended to the data processing unit and really have isolated micro-segmentation workloads, whether it's bare metal cloud native environments, whether it's virtualized environments, whether it's public cloud, private cloud hybrid cloud. So it really is a magical partnership between the two companies with their unified cloud fabric running on, on the DPU. >>I love about this conversation is it reminds me of when you have these changing markets, the product gets pulled out of the market and, and you guys step up and create these new solutions. And I think this is a great example. So I have to ask you, how do you guys differentiate what sets this apart for customers with what's in it for the, >>Yeah. So I mentioned, you know, three things in terms of the value of what the Bluefield brings, right? There's offloading, accelerating, isolating, that's sort of the key core tenants of Bluefield, so that, you know, if you sort of think about what, what Bluefield, what we've done, you know, in terms of the differentiation, we're really a robust platform for innovation. So we introduced Bluefield to last year, we're introducing Bluefield three, which is our next generation of Bluefields, you know, we'll have five X, the arm compute capacity. It will have 400 gig line rate acceleration for X better crypto acceleration. So it will be remarkably better than the previous generation. And we'll continue to innovate and add, you know, chips to our portfolio every, every 18 months to two years. So that's sort of one of the key areas of differentiation. The other is the, if you look at Nvidia and, and you know, what we're sort of known for is really known for our AI artificial intelligence and our artificial intelligence software, as well as our GPU. >>So you look at artificial intelligence and the combination of artificial intelligence plus data processing. This really creates the faster, more efficient, secure AI systems from, you know, the core of your data center all the way out to the edge. And so with Nvidia, we really have these converged accelerators where we've combined the GPU, which does all your AI processing with your data processing with the DPU. So we have this convergence really nice convergence of, of that area. And I would say the third area is really around our developer environment. So, you know, one of the key, one of our key motivations at Nvidia is really to have our partner ecosystem, embrace our technology and build solutions around our technology. So if you look at what we've done with the DPU, with credit and an SDK, which is an open SDK called Doka, and it's an open SDK for our partners to really build and develop solutions using Bluefield and using all these accelerated libraries that we expose through Doka. And so part of our differentiation is really building this open ecosystem for our partners to take advantage and build solutions around our technology. >>You know, it's exciting is when I hear you talk, it's like you realize that there's no one general purpose network anymore. Everyone has their own super environment Supercloud or these new capabilities. They can really craft their own, I'd say custom environment at scale with easy tools. Right. And it's all kind of, again, this is the new architecture Mike, you were talking about, how does customers run this effectively? Cost-effectively and how do people migrate? >>Yeah, I think that is the key question, right? So we've got this beautiful architecture. You, you know, Amazon nitro is a, is a good example of, of a smart NIC architecture that has been successfully deployed, but enterprises and serve tier two service providers and tier one service providers and governments are not Amazon, right? So they need to migrate there and they need this architecture to be cost-effective. And, and that's, that's super key. I mean, the reality is deep user moving fast, but they're not going to be deployed everywhere on day one. Some servers will ha have DPS right away. Some servers will have deep use in a year or two. And then there are devices that may never have DPS, right? IOT gateways, or legacy servers, even mainframes. So that's the beauty of a solution that creates a fabric across both the switch and the DPU, right? >>And by leveraging the Nvidia Bluefield DPU, what we really like about it is it's open and that drives cost efficiencies. And then, you know, with this, with this, our architectural approach effectively, you get a unified solution across switch and DPU workload independent doesn't matter what hypervisor it is, integrated visibility, integrated security, and that can create tremendous cost efficiencies and really extract a lot of the expense from, from a capital perspective out of the network, as well as from an operational perspective, because now I have an SDN automated solution where I'm literally issuing a command to deploy a network service or to create or deploy our security policy and is deployed everywhere, automatically saving the oper, the network operations team and the security operations team time. >>All right. So let me rewind that because that's super important. Get the unified cloud architecture, I'm the customer, but it's implemented, what's the value again, take, take me through the value to me. I have a unified environment. What's the value. >>Yeah. So I mean, the value is effectively. So there's a few pieces of value. The first piece of value is I'm creating this clean D mark. I'm taking networking to the host. And like I mentioned, we're not running it on the CPU. So in implementations that run networking on the CPU, there's some conflict between the dev ops team who owned the server and the NetApps team who own the network because they're installing software on the, on the CPU stealing cycles from what should be revenue generating CPU's. So now by, by terminating the networking on the DPU, we click create this real clean DMARC. So the dev ops folks are happy because they don't necessarily have the skills to manage network and they don't necessarily want to spend the time managing networking. They've got their network counterparts who are also happy the NetApps team, because they want to control the networking. >>And now we've got this clean DMARC where the dev ops folks get the services they need and the NetApp folks get the control and agility they need. So that's a huge value. The next piece of value is distributed security. This is essential. I mentioned earlier, you know, put pushing out micro-segmentation and distributed firewall, basically at the application level, right, where I create these small, small segments on an application by application basis. So if a bad actor does penetrate the perimeter firewall, they're contained once they get inside. Cause the worst thing is a bad actor penetrates at perimeter firewall, and it can go wherever they want and wreak havoc, right? And so that's why this, this is so essential. And the next benefit obviously is this unified networking operating model, right? Having an operating model, switch and server underlay and overlay, workload agnostic, making the life of the NetApps teams much easier so they can focus their time on really strategy instead of spending an afternoon, deploying a single V LAN for example. >>Awesome. And I think also from my standpoint, I mean, perimeter security is pretty much, I mean, they're out there, it gets the firewall still out there exists, but pretty much they're being breached all the time, the perimeter. So you have to have this new security model. And I think the other thing that you mentioned, the separation between dev ops is cool because the infrastructure is code is about making the developers be agile and build security in from day one. So this policy aspect is, is huge new control points. I think you guys have a new architecture that enables the security to be handled more flexible. Right. That seems to be the killer feature, >>Right? Yeah. If you look at the data processing unit, I think one of the great things about sort of this new architecture, it's really the foundation for zero trust it's. So like you talked about the perimeter is getting breached. And so now each and every compute node has to be protected. And I think that's sort of what you see with the partnership between pluribus and Nvidia is the DPU is really the foundation of zero trust. And pluribus is really building on that vision with allowing sort of micro-segmentation and being able to protect each and every compute node as well as the underlying network. >>And this is an illustration of how the market's evolving architectures are being reshaped and refactored for cloud scale and all this new goodness with data. So I got to ask how you guys go into market together. Michael, start with you. What's the relationship look like in the go to market with an Nvidia? >>Sure. I mean, we're, you know, we're super excited about the partnership. Obviously we're here together. We think we've got a really good solution for the market, so we're jointly marketing it. You know, obviously we appreciate that Nvidia is open that's, that's sort of in our DNA, we're about open networking. They've got other ISV who are gonna run on Bluefield too. We're probably going to run on other DPS in the future, but right now we're we feel like we're partnered with the number one provider of DPS in the world and super excited about making a splash with it >>In video, get the hot product. >>Yeah. So Bluefield too, as I mentioned was GA last year, we're introducing well, we now also have the converged accelerator. So I talked about artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence software with the Bluefield DPU, all of that put together on a converged accelerator. The nice thing there is you can either run those workloads. So if you have an artificial intelligence workload and an infrastructure workload, you can warn them separately on the same platform or you can actually use, you can actually run artificial intelligence applications on the Bluefield itself. So that's what the converged accelerator really brings the table. So that's available now. Then we have Bluefield three, which will be available late this year. And I talked about sort of, you know, how much better that next generation of Bluefield is in comparison to Bluefield two. So we will see Bluefield three shipping later on this year, and then our software stack, which I talked about, which is called Doka we're on our second version are DACA one dot two. >>We're releasing Doka one dot three in about two months from now. And so that's really our open ecosystem framework. So allow you to program the Bluefields. So we have all of our acceleration libraries, security libraries, that's all packed into this SDK called Doka. And it really gives that simplicity to our partners to be able to develop on top of Bluefield. So as we add new generations of Bluefield, you know, next, next year, we'll have, you know, another version and so on and so forth. Doka is really that unified unified layer that allows Bluefield to be both forwards compatible and backwards compatible. So partners only really have to think about writing to that SDK once and then it automatically works with future generations of Bluefields. So that's sort of the nice thing around, around Doka. And then in terms of our go to market model, we're working with every, every major OEM. So later on this year, you'll see, you know, major server manufacturers releasing Bluefield enabled servers, so more to come >>Save money, make it easier, more capabilities, more workload power. This is the future of, of cloud operations. Yeah. >>And one thing I'll add is we are, we have a number of customers as you'll hear in the next segment that are already signed up and we'll be working with us for our early field trial starting late April early may. We are accepting registrations. You can go to www.pluribusnetworks.com/e F T if you're interested in signing up for being part of our field trial and, and providing feedback on the product, >>Awesome innovation and network. Thanks so much for sharing the news. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Okay. In a moment, we'll be back to the deeper in the product, the integration security zero trust use cases. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCube's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube, wall-to-wall coverage in-person and hybrid. The two great guests here, Manu Parbhakar, worldwide Leader, Linux and IBM Software Partnership at AWS, and Mike Evans, Vice President of Technical Business Development at Red Hat. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCube. Love this conversation, bringing Red Hat and AWS together. Two great companies, great technologies. It really is about software in the cloud, Cloud-Scale. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John. >> So get us into the partnership. Okay. This is super important. Red Hat, well known open source as cloud needs to become clear, doing an amazing work. Amazon, Cloud-Scale, Data is a big part of it. Modern software. Tell us about the partnership. >> Thanks John. Super excited to share about our partnership. As we have been partnering for almost 14 years together. We started in the very early days of AWS. And now we have tens of thousands of customers that are running RHEL on EC2. If you look at over the last three years, the pace of innovation for our joint partnership has only increased. It has manifested in three key formats. The first one is the pace at which RHEL supports new EC2 instances like Arm, Graviton. You know, think a lot of features like Nitro. The second is just the portfolio of new RHEL offerings that we have launched over the last three years. We started with RHEL for sequel, RHEL high availability, RHEL for SAP, and then only last month, we've launched the support for knowledge base for RHEL customers. Mike, you want to talk about what you're doing with OpenShift and Ansible as well? >> Yeah, it's good to be here. It's fascinating to me cause I've been at Red Hat for 21 years now. And vividly remember the start of working with AWS back in 2008, when the cloud was kind of a wild idea with a whole bunch of doubters. And it's been an interesting time, but I feel the next 14 years are going to be exciting in a different way. We now have a very large customer base from almost every industry in the world built on RHEL, and running on AWS. And our goal now is to continue to add additional elements to our offerings, to build upon that and extend it. The largest addition which we're going to be talking a lot about here at the re:Invent show was the partnership in April this year when we launched the Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS as a managed version of OpenShift for containers based workloads. And we're seeing a lot of the customers that have standardized on RHEL on EC2, or ones that are using OpenShift on-premise deployments, as the early adopters of ROSA, but we're also seeing a huge number of new customers who never purchased anything from Red Hat. So, in addition to the customers, we're getting great feedback from systems integrators and ISV partners who are looking to have a software application run both on-premise and in AWS, and with OpenShift being one of the pioneers in enabling both container and harnessing Kubernetes where ROSA is just a really exciting area for us to track and continue to advance together with AWS. >> It's very interesting. Before I get to ROSA, I want to just get the update on Red Hat and IBM, obviously the acquisition part of IBM, how is that impacting the partnership? You can just quickly touch on that. >> Sure. I'll start off and, I mean, Red Hat went from a company that was about 15,000 employees competing with a lot of really large technology companies and we added more than 100,000 field oriented people when IBM acquired Red Hat to help magnify the Red Hat solutions, and the global scale and coverage of IBM is incredible. I like to give two simple examples of people. One is, I remember our salesforce in EMEA telling me they got a $4 million order from a country in Africa theydidn't even know existed. And IBM had 100 people in it, or AT&T is one of Red Hat's largest accounts, and I think at one point we had seven full-time people on it and AT&T is one of IBM's largest accounts and they had two seven storey buildings full of people working with AT&T. So RHELative to AWS, we now also see IBM embracing AWS more with both software, and services, in the magnification of Red Hat based solutions, combined with that embrace should be, create some great growth. And I think IBM is pretty excited about being able to sell Red Hat software as well. >> Yeah, go ahead. >> And Manu I think you have, yeah. >> Yeah. I think there's also, it is definitely very positive John. >> Yeah. >> You know, just the joint work that Red Hat and AWS have done for the last 14 years, working in the trenches supporting our end customers is now also providing lot of Tailwinds for the IBM software partnership. We have done some incredible work over the last 12 months around three broad categories. The first one is around product, what we're doing around customer success, and then what we're doing around sales and marketing. So on the product side, we have listed about 15 products on Marketplace over the course of the last 12 to 15 months. And our goal is to launch all of the IBM Cloud Paks. These are containerized versions of IBM software on Marketplace by the first half of next year. The other feedback that we are getting from our customers is that, hey, we love IBM software running at Amazon, but we like to have a cloud native SaaS version of the software. So there's a lot of work that's going on right now, to make sure that many of these offerings are available in a cloud-native manner. And you're not talking with Db2 Cognos, Maximo, (indistinct), on EC2. The second thing that we're doing is making sure that many of these large enterprise customers are running IBM software, are successful. So our technical teams are attached to the hip, working on the ground floor in making customers like Delta successful in running IBM software on them. I think the third piece around sales and marketing just filing up a vibrant ecosystem, rather how do we modernize and migrate this IBM software on Cloud Paks on AWS? So there's a huge push going on here. So (indistinct), you know, the Red Hat partnership is providing a lot of Tailwinds to accelerate our partnership with IBM software. >> You know, I always, I've been saying all this year in Red Hat summit, as well as Ansible Fest that, distributed computing is coming to large scale. And that's really the, what's happening. I mean, you looking at what you guys are doing cause it's amazing. ROSA Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, very notable to use the term on AWS, which actually means something in the partnership as we learned over the years. How is that going Mike because you launched on theCube in April, ROSA, it had great traction going in. It's in the Marketplace. You've got some integration. It's really a hand in glove situation with Cloud-Scale. Take us through what's the update? >> Yeah, let me, let me let Manu speak first to his AWS view and then I'll add the Red Hat picture. >> Thanks Mike. John for ROSA is part of an entire container portfolio. So if you look at it, so we have ECS, EKS, the managed Kubernetes service. We have the serverless containers with Fargate. We launched ECS case anywhere. And then ROSA is part of an entire portfolio of container services. As you know, two thirds of all container workloads run on AWS. And a big function of that is because we (indistinct) from our customer and then sold them what the requirements are. There are two sets of key customers that are driving the demand and the early adoption of ROSA. The first set of customers that have standardized on OpenShift on-premises. They love the fact that everything that comes out of the box and they would love to use it on Arm. So that's the first (indistinct). The second set of customers are, you know, the large RHEL users on EC2. The tens of thousands of customers that we've talked about that want to move from VM to containers, and want to do DevOps. So it's this set of two customers that are informing our roadmap, as well as our investments around ROSA. We are seeing solid adoption, both in terms of adoption by a customer, as well as the partners and helping, and how our partners are helping our customers in modernizing from VMs to containers. So it's a, it's a huge, it's a huge priority for our container service. And over the next few years, we continue to see, to increase our investment on the product road map here. >> Yeah, from my perspective, first off at the high level in mind, my one of the most interesting parts of ROSA is being integrated in the AWS console and not just for the, you know, where it shows up on the screen, but also all the work behind what that took to get there and why we did it. And we did it because customers were asking both of us, we're saying, look, OpenShift is a platform. We're going to be building and deploying serious applications at incredible scale on it. And it's really got to have joint high-quality support, joint high-quality engineering. It's got to be rock solid. And so we came to agreement with AWS. That was the best way to do that, was to build it in the console, you know, integrated in, into the core of an AWS engineering team with Red Hat engineers, Arm and Arms. So that's, that's a very unique service and it's not like a high level SaaS application that runs above everything, it's down in the bowels and, and really is, needs to be rock solid. So we're seeing, we're seeing great interest, both from end users, as I mentioned, existing customers, new customers, the partner base, you know, how the systems integrators are coming on board. There's lots of business and money to be made in modernizing applications as well as building new cloud native applications. People can, you know, between Red Hat and AWS, we've got some, some models around supporting POCs and customer migrations. We've got some joint investments. it's a really ripe area. >> Yeah. That's good stuff. Real quick. what do you think of ROSA versus EKS and ECS? What's, how should people think about that Mike? (indistinct) >> You got to go for it Manu. Your job is to position all these (indistinct). (indistinct) >> John, ROSA is part of our container portfolio services along with EKS, ECS, Fargate, and any (indistinct) services that we just launched earlier this year. There are, you know, set of customers both that are running OpenShift on-premises that are standardized on ROSA. And then there are large set of RHEL customers that are running RHEL on EC2, that want to use the ROSA service. So, you know, both AWS and Red Hat are now continuing to invest in accelerating the roadmap of the service on our platform. You know, we are working on improving the console experience. Also one of the things we just launched recently is the Amazon controller to Kubernetes, or what , you know, service operators for S3. So over the next few years you will see, you know, significant investment from both Red Hat and AWS in this joint service. And this is an integral part of our overall container portfolio. >> And great stuff to get in the console. That's great, great integration. That's the future. I got to ask about the graviton instances. It's been one of the most biggest success stories, I think we believe in Amazon history in the acquisition of Annapurna, has really created great differentiation. And anyone who's in the software knows if you have good chips powering apps, they go faster. And if the chips are good, they're less expensive. And that's the innovation. We saw that RHEL now supports graviton instances. Tell us more about the Red Hat strategy with graviton and Arms specifically, has that impact your (indistinct) development, and what does it mean for customers? >> Sure. Yeah, it's pretty, it's a pretty fascinating area for me. As I said, I've been a Red Hat for 21 years and my job is actually looking at new markets and new technologies now for Red Hat and work with our largest partners. So, I've been tracking the Arm dynamics for awhile, and we've been working with AWS for over two years, supporting graviton. And it's, I'm seeing more enthusiasm now in terms of developers and, especially for very horizontal, large scale applications. And we're excited to be working with AWS directly on it. And I think it's going to be a fascinating next two years on Arm, personally. >> Many of the specialized processors for training and instances, all that stuff, can be applied to web services and automation like cloud native services, right? Is that, it sounds like a good direction. Take us through that. >> John, on our partnership with Red Hat, we are continuing to iterate, as Mike mentioned, the stuff that we've done around graviton, both the last two years is pretty incredible. And the pace at which we are innovating is improving. Around the (indistinct) and the inferential instances, we are continuing to work with Red Hat and, you know, the support for RHEL should come shortly, very soon. >> Well, my prediction is that the graviton success was going to be applied to every single category. You can get that kind of innovation with this on the software side, just really kind of just, that's the magical, that's the, that's the proven form of software, right? We've been there. Good software powering with some great performance. Manu, Mike, thank you for coming on and sharing the, the news and the partnership update. Congratulations on the partnership. Really good. Thank you. >> Excellent John. Incredible (indistinct). >> Yeah, this is the future software as we see, it's all coming together. Here on theCube, we're bringing all the action, software being powered by chips, is theCube coverage of AWS re:invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. And welcome to the cubes. Continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. So excited to be here in person with thousands of folks. Everybody covered vaccinated. We are winning one of the largest industry's largest tech hybrid events with AWS and it's huge ecosystem of partners. We're going to be having two black sets. Two remote says over a hundred guests, and I am pleased to welcome two new guests to the queue. Mike Milner is here the head of product management at trend micro and Danielle Greshaw worldwide partner solution architects at AWS guys. Welcome to the program. It's nice robbing us. Isn't it nice to say, I have this background noise of actual humans, >>Such a nice buzz. Yeah, it >>Really isn't. I suppose. So the last, obviously 20, 22 months have been quite challenging for all of us, kudos to AWS for doing this in such a safe manner. But Mike, I wanted to get kind of a background in the last year and a half or so since we last spoke, what's going on at trend micro, we've seen so much change in the security landscape, the threat landscape. What are some of the things that you guys are saying? >>Yeah, good question. So, you know, some things stay the same and some things are always changing certainly lately, a big rise in ransomware, really affecting companies. This is a case where in the past, maybe we were concerned with targeted attacks, but now things like ransomware can affect anyone. So it's really broad attacks looking at any possible threat, any possible vector that can impact >>Company ransomware as a service is on the rise massively. And it's become, I've talked to some about it a lot this last year and a half or so being with it growing so rapidly, it's now a matter of when we got hit, not if so that's a really interesting topic that you bring up. Daniel want to bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about from a partnership perspective and about what you guys are doing together with. >>I mean, we've had a partnership with trend micro. I mean, I've been at AWS almost eight years, as long as I've been there. I can remember, you know, trends being a huge AWS partner. Um, and of course we've evolved over the years. And, um, definitely in the last 12 to 18 months, we've been doing a lot of joint events together trying to broaden our reach of customers, um, about talking about trends, solution. And we're going now to a lot of companies that have not used cloud before and look at a solution such as trend solution as a way in which they can move their workloads into the cloud and feel secure and safe about it. And, you know, not have to worry about, you know, ransomware or any other kinds of cyber attacks and feel good about moving into the cloud, >>Thinking to the cloud while there's still so many folks that are working from home, working from anywhere really that will be for, >>He did that, uh, journey for a lot of companies who maybe weren't thinking about it, but now are making that move a lot faster. >>The, of the challenges that you're seeing in the last 20 months as the acceleration of digital transformation cloud adoption, it was for so many businesses that weren't there. And on that journey, I'm just curious what some of the things are that you guys have observed together in this interesting time. Yeah. >>Oh for sure. Certainly, you know, trend micro has a lot of capability, a lot of products. I focus on the cloud cloud one, but really the endpoint protection users are at home. They're remote, they're accessing their infrastructure from so many different environments. Like you said, it's really set this ahead probably 10 years, really this work from home concept, >>It has to talk to me about some of the other things that are changing. And then there's the security buyer like what's going on there? What are some of the conversations that you're having challenges that they're having, but this is kind of a new, uh, persona that's been. >>Yeah, I think there is a big shift happening here as consumers. We're so used to trying things out, adopting new technology really rapidly. And I think industry is kind of catching up. Historically, this has been kind of top down decisions. Uh, a CSO or executive is making security buying decisions. Increasingly customers want to actually try things out. They want to experience the value, see how it works in their environments. And this could be coming from different business units, different parts of the organization. So we've really been focusing on adapting our products, our capability, and how we address customers to really reach these people who are making these decisions. >>And I think more and more developers are actually part of that process as well, because they're being tasked with, if you're going to build it, you also have to operate it and you also have to secure it. And so, you know, >>What are some of the challenges that the specifically that you're hearing from developers that are helping you surely advanced cloud one and the partnership? >>I mean, I would say like for what I hear from developers is mostly how can I integrate this into my existing process and make it easy, but >>It's really developers who are shaping so much of the infrastructure that needs to be protected in the past. It maybe was the other way around. That's been a massive shift in the industry. And as you say, we need to help developers be secure without them having to learn a whole new set of skills and security. We want them to be security aware, but we can't expect them all to be experts. >>I was a developer myself for like 15, 16 years. And we're terrible at security we're terrible at. So, uh, anything that any products let that, that help in that journey is key >>For sure. And it's not that you don't want to be secure it's that really your goal is providing the business value and security. It needs to be there, but it's always going to be seen as kind of a drag kind of slowing things down. So we want to build tools to help their, >>I imagine too also. So it facilitate from a cultural perspective, the developers, the security folks becoming better partners together because the security, as we talked about in the very beginning, even mentioning ransomware is a massive issue. It's, it's a global issue with say national security issue for the U S and other countries like that. But that cultural shift has got to be interesting, especially Danielle, you as a former developer, talk to me about some of the customer conversations and how are you helping those developers become comfortable with the security responsibility. >>Again, it's back to integrating it into their normal process and to the dev ops process to just have that be an extra step in there, um, where they can, they can see that it's easy and B being easy as key. And then they can just be able to roll that out with everything that they're doing. They've already kind of like made the mind shift to test their work that they do. So it's now secure it. Um, and that's just one other practice that they start doing. So, >>Yeah, and I think it really goes in the other direction as well, security teams who have the responsibility for security. They now have to understand all of the new technologies coming out of AWS, all these new tools with Kubernetes, continuous integration, continuous deployment. And that's a big ask as well. We can't expect security teams to be experts in all that. So really it's the two sides of that coin >>For sure. The results are kind of like a shared responsibility model if you think of it in >>That way. Absolutely. Absolutely. >>Talk to me, Mike, about cloud one, is this a joint solution that just built on AWS? Help me understand it and what's going on with, >>For sure. I mean, cloud one is really a platform to help cloud builders be secure. We want to make security simple, and that is those different personas. We needed it to be simple for security, let them just set their policy goals. Hey, I need to be compliant to this standard or this standard. I want to follow the well-architected framework. These are my goals. And then the development teams need to work, deliver that value that they're trying to do and tools like cloud one, our goal is to really help them deliver that value and be secure following those guard rails and those goals set by security. And we do that across containers. Workloads server lists really extending our offering as customers start using new platforms. >>What are some of the things Mike that you've seen in during the pandemic, as we've seen this massive acceleration and the rush to the cloud what's been going on with cloud one from that perspective and how has the pandemic maybe helped shape the technology and the partnership? >>Yeah, that's a great point. Um, I think of it as well as, I mean, Cloud One, we build our platform and we've been doing that now remotely for the past two years with engineers all over the world, really around the world, five major engineering sites teams working from home. And in that time we've delivered all of our security value, but we've also ourselves deployed cloud one across eight regions worldwide. And now our engineering teams are deploying worldwide and we're making our system compliant and secure. So I really feel like all this remote work has helped us gain a really deeper understanding of the problems our customers are facing. For sure. Yeah. >>I was going to say just for us, as we've done some joint events together, we've had to do all of those things remotely. So that is definitely been a challenge, but also getting good with the messaging and making sure that we are able to connect with those customers, um, online, >>Right, as we knew, things shifted dramatically overnight for everyone in every industry. And it was interesting to see how technology helped shape and paved the pathway for those folks that survived and are now thriving. Um, but I did see some, some of the recent news on cloud one or on cloud security, the data data centers in nine countries. It sounds to me like a differentiator for trend micro in terms of data, sovereignty, data data. >>It's a major issue. These days, our companies, our customers are around the world and they've got their own security requirements. And obviously cloud one is helping them be secure, but they need to trust us with our compliance and with data sovereignty. They might have a specific requirement to store data within their own jurisdiction. And we want to support that, make it easy for them, security, simplified, >>Security stupefied. I like that. If we could only simplify more things in life, guys, that would be fantastic. Talk to me about, uh, a customer example that you think really speaks volumes to the partnership and the capabilities of club one. >>Yeah, I think it's interesting to see the companies come on board using cloud one who you don't typically associate with security issues like media companies who are used to sending information out security is a major concern. We've got major brands from news to media who needs security and it's coming up in more and more industries. Every company is a software company and they need to be secure. >>Really. Every company is a data company. You think of, of the supermarket, the grocery chains here we are at AWS reinvent, the big owning Amazon owning whole foods, for example, but the data challenge that did a growth challenge is huge it's and that's where I think the security, um, focus needs to be is wherever that data is. And now it's scattered everywhere. >>Absolutely trend micro has been in this business for over 30 years, and it's amazing to see the shifts of what's important, what needs to be secured, how it needs to be secured over that long a period. And we always feel that we're leading things. And I think cloud wine is really on the forefront for how customers are building applications, delivering value to their customers and we're helping them be secure. >>Yeah. And just to Mike's point, I mean, I definitely think, you know, years ago it was always financial services company, healthcare companies who had compliance requirements, but more and more travel and hospitality, media, and entertainment. These are all companies that are looking for security solutions. >>We're seeing a lot from a data privacy perspective. We're seeing regulations pop up all over the world, California as China DRCR. Exactly. And I'm sure that's the tip of the iceberg for more data security regulations that we're going to see across the board as we humans and our technology companies are generating more and more and more data. That's the one thing that is not slowing down at all and they're not going to no pandemic. Right. So what's the vision going forward, Danielle, in terms of the partnership with trend micro? >>Um, I mean, I think again, we are always looking for joint customers who are looking for simplicity and looking for the, you know, the value proposition that cloud one has and just continuing to grow that customer base together. >>Yeah, for sure. I think it was two years ago. We were in person here at the cube in 2019. I think talking about cloud one is a new thing. Two years later, a lot has changed, but it's great to see the market validating all the effort we're putting into it. And industry looking at these big platforms that provide that broad security as the way forward. >>And then from an analyst perspective, there's a lot of value if coming down from the analyst for cybersecurity firms, because of the threats that we talked about, the net landscape changing the fact that it is so easy to launch ransomware, the fact that it is coming through every media, we're seeing a lot more value placed on cybersecurity firms from, from the industry, which has gotta be kudos to you guys and what you're doing and also help kind of guide direction in terms of the vision going forward. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, we have threatened research. We are really into understanding what attackers are doing and they lead our direction. We're always on the forefront of protecting our customers from the leading threats >>And our partnerships, the most successful partnerships that we have, or the ones in which we're consistently innovating and trend has always been doing that with us. Any new service that we released, any, you know, as he taught, as Mike was talking about, uh, Kubernetes, et cetera, all of those new areas in which to go in the CA the partners that are able to keep up with us are the ones who are, you know, the most successful. So >>One of the things I know about many things of AWS is that it's very customer obsessed, focused on the customer. I imagine culturally Mike there's alignment there in turn Microsoft. >>Absolutely. And AWS is a great organization to work with because it shows through throughout interaction that they are customer obsessed. Absolutely. >>That's a good, that's a good thing to be obsessed about all things considered. Last question, guys, tell me what some of the things are that that attendees are going to be learning from both of you guys and from the booth at the event this week. >>So certainly from the cloud one trend micro booth right behind us. If the cameras can see it, uh, we've got demos of all the different functionality in cloud. One from containers, file storage workloads serverless, definitely come check that out to really see the breadth of the platform and what it can do to help. >>Awesome guys, thank you so much. You're now cube alumni got to give, you got branded masks, very COVID friendly. Uh, we appreciate your insights talking to us about trend micro, the AWS partnership and sharing some of those customer examples. Great work in the last 20 months. And it's great to have you here in person. Thanks for having very much for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021, the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to VMworld 2021, a two day virtual event, hosted by the company which permanently changed data center operations last decade. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021, where we want to know what VMware and its ecosystem have in store for the next 10 years and how your digital business can survive and thrive in the coming decade, and who better to give us a glimpse as to how that's being done both inside VMware and within its customer base, than Mike Hayes, who is the chief digital transformation officer at VMware. Mike, great to have you on the program. >> No Dave, thank you for having me, we appreciate you and all that you do for this great event. Thank you, sir. >> Oh, I appreciate that. So talk about, what's involved with your role as chief digital transformation officer. What's that all about? >> Yeah thank you for, many people, are chief digital transformation officer in a lot of different places, different things. Here at VMware I'm responsible for worldwide business operations and digital transformation of the firm. Just like first and foremost, we're focused on our customers and how our customers can improve their own business models, whether it's cost, flexibility, speed, imagining new things, that's what gets us really excited. And at the same time, we're transforming internally in order to bring ourselves into our exciting third chapter. >> Yeah, everybody wants to be a SAS company these days, VMware obviously is accelerating its move towards SAS. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your strategy for leading business operations as well as that transformation. >> Absolutely, I think there's a couple of things. And first of all, the most important thing in an organization is agility we have or transforming our own ability to transform. As we all know, everybody listening knows that markets don't sit still, they pivot quickly, and so the organizations that win aren't the organizations that prepare for tomorrow, but they prepare for the ability to change for tomorrow, and as the markets change, they stay ahead of that. So that's what we're doing at VMware and that's what we're really excited about our entire suite of products and services so that we can help organizations do the same. >> Yes so, if I could stay on this for a second, Mike, when you think about what you have to deal with there, and you're moving to that as a service subscription model, you got to the external factors, you mentioned you start with the customer, but you also have internal factors, right? Your salespeople might be used to one and done move on to the next one, more transactional, it's a whole different mindset, isn't it? >> It absolutely is, and so any organization as large as VMware is, should always be staring at itself and saying, how can we be more flexible? And so we just like everywhere else are looking at our foundational data, we're looking at our ERP systems, we're looking at our own internal processes to say, as we pivot to SAS, and the back office becomes closer to the front office. That's really where it's at, there's not a customer in the world that cares about any of their... Where they're buying from, the back offices from where they're buying from don't matter, what matters is that experience, it's that front layer, it's that first touch with the customer. We recognize that, and we're preparing for that, and I'm really excited about how it's going. >> Let's talk about some of the waves that you're riding here, the major trends that are driving digitally. I often call it the forced march to digital in 2020. It was like, we were just thrown into the fire. And it's just the way it was. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. And now people are kind of sitting back and saying okay, let's take those learnings, fill those gaps, and really set us on a course over the next decade. So what do you see as the major trends? What are the technologies that are enabling digital business and how are you applying them both in your own business and what you're seeing with your customers? >> We first of all I think what's important is to recognize that every organization needs the ability to scale. So what we're doing at VMware is simplifying our foundation. And so then as we 2x or 5x or 10x, our own business, we're multiplying off a much simpler base. And so as we drive our own transformation, our internal principles of like simplicity and clarity and accountability, and really streamlining is what VMware is doing. And that's what we're also not surprisingly recommending and helping our own customers with. And so that's what gets really exciting for us. I think that, one of the things that you're alluding to with this a forced march to digital which I totally agree with, is really, it is about experience and for us there are a couple of KPIs that are really interesting to us, and it should be for everybody, no surprise here, but the velocity that it takes for operations to go from an idea to a closure, from quote to cash, or from idea to implementation, whatever that front and back end words your own business uses are what's important, but how fast do you get through that? And so for us, we're imagining a touch less future. So no, are we there yet? Absolutely not. Is any organization? Very few are. And so how do we constantly say, ask ourselves what don't we need to be doing? When I walk into a room in a lot of places VMware or otherwise, and you say who's in charge of what we're not doing? That's where all the good ideas are, the good idea spaces, like what organizations aren't doing, so you have that culture of pulling awesome ideas to the front and saying, how do we just prioritize? The hardest thing Dave right now, is that there are so many shiny objects for all of our enterprises, for everybody that's listening. I think one of the hardest things is prioritizing and saying, how do we spend our resources in the smartest way possible, so that we are doing the things that will have the greatest impact for our customers. Something that we feel like we have a great plan for, and we're excited about the execution over the coming year. >> I wonder if you could comment on what you're seeing and just in terms of spending patterns. All throughout last year, we reported that CIO's expected budget contractions of around 5% relative to 2019, and what happened is in the second half, he really saw, companies had to respond to the cyber threats, they had to respond, of course to hybrid work, this whole digital march that we talked about, and it was actually pretty strong. Many people expected that a lot of the traditional companies that relied on data center and on-prem and HQ spend, were really going to get hit and they actually got through it okay. And meanwhile, the cloud is exploding, your cloud businesses exploding, security is exploding. What was interesting is, just this weekend, we published some data that suggested, that is not only continuing into 2021, but CIO's are expecting, more of this in 2022. So we used to have this sort of steady IT spend, refresh cycles, et cetera, but it seems like we're in a step function right now, in terms of investment, and it seems like CEOs are saying, if we don't lead this digital transformation, we're going to become toast. >> Absolutely Dave, yeah, the first thing you mentioned was budget. Let's remember budgets are a function of a company's focus on either short term goals or long-term goals. And so the organizations that are really smartest are thinking three, four, five years out and you're investing now, so that you can always really be high-performing in that 2, 3, 4 year window. Because any organization that mortgages it's future for this current year is not doing itself any favors. So the cycles that I'm seeing that are aligned exactly as you described, organizations are understanding, key leaders get that they need to invest. But the question is, how do you invest in the things that are classically thought of as maybe back office, or let me just say boring, just to be provocative. How do we choke out the boring stuff from a budget standpoint, and then really give a lot of oxygen and energy to the things that are fun and really transformative? And that's what we're seeing, and that's why we feel like our strategy is so great Dave, because we're part of that for the future, and as organizations think about freeing up capital so that they can invest in those fun things that really accelerate their own business models, that's what it's about. >> Now VMware of course has always had an amazing ecosystem, always been very proud of the value that you created, not just free for your own selves, but for your customers, and also your ecosystem partners. So as it relates to your digital transformation role Mike, we talked about customers, we talked about some of the internal stuff and operations. How does the ecosystem fit in? How do you collaborate with them? What kind of learnings do you get from them? How do you plug them into your digital platform if you will? >> Absolutely, I think the most important element you're drawing out, Dave, is the concept of trust. We have incredible partners, and without whom VMware's business and success that we enable in the world would be very limited. So we recognize that we all go through life with friends and partners, it's obviously not just true in business, I was a Navy Seal for 20 years and the most important thing is that foundational element. Now, what we do and what we're always trying to do is be as transparent and fast and helpful as we can. I think that in the partner world, anytime you can reach across the table more than halfway and with another organization, that's easy to intersect. If you're not willing to meet people in places more than halfway, there is no middle. So for us, what we're doing is constantly listening and getting feedback and saying, where can we improve? That's what's really awesome. Sandy Hogan is an incredible colleague of mine who runs our channel, and Sandy runs a board with 30 of our largest partners in the channel, and the first question that she always asks is, what can we be doing better? And that's for us the most important thing is listening. Just like you were in developing an individual product. What's important is product market fit, right? Does your product fit in the market, and then how do you get feedback from it? We apply that as an institution and an enterprise. >> Mike, you mentioned your experience in the military, thank you for your service, I wanted to ask you something about that. So I wrote a piece one time and talked about Frank Slootman, who is becoming a Silicon Valley icon, how he's going to apply his playbook at his new company, Bubba. And he wrote me back, he said, "Dave I learned in the military that, it's not a playbook. I am a situational leader and I learned that in the military." So my question to you is, what did you learn as a Navy Seal to deal with situations, especially in a condition like we are now, where there's a lot unknown. How do you apply that in today's world? >> Yeah Look, the there's the parallels between the Seals and VMware are perfect, right? Because all we're doing is quickly defining an outcome. What's the vision for the organization? What's the outcomes we'd want to achieve? That's the where we're going. Then there's the strategy, which is the how. How are we going to get there? How do you develop strategy? There are a hundred different ways to go achieve the vision, but how do we think about the different risks along the way? And like I said earlier, draw those risks out, so they're known risks. Then we can price them and size them and understand that for our strategy. And then how do we execute well and how do we get feedback throughout the whole thing? But you know Dave, the best thing I would say, the analogy from the Seals in the military, really is what you hit on. A lot of people say that they have a plan, but in the Seals the only plan that we had was for our plan to change, it's that concept I said earlier of transforming our ability to transform. So we go in on any given night with complicated missions and have a plan, but we knew that that plan was going to very quickly change, it's no different than what we're doing here at VMware, with our own customers in this technology market. >> It's a great lesson to apply Mike. I really appreciate you sharing that and appreciate you coming on the queue. >> Thank you for having me, it's such a pleasure. >> Really a pleasure was ours, and thank you for watching over. Keep it right there for more great content from Vmworld 2021, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

[upbeat electronic music] >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with Eric Pennington, Director of Solutions Engineering, and Mike Todaro, Senior Epic Cache Consultant at Sapphire Health. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE and chatting about the wave of Cloud, cloud-native, Sapphire Health and Ansible. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, let's get started. Can you guys just briefly describe Sapphire Health and what you guys are doing there. The consulting services, the trends that you're seeing. Just take a step, a minute to describe the environment at Sapphire Health and what you guys are doing. >> For sure, yeah. So, Sapphire Health was a consultancy that was founded by the CEO back in 2016, Austin Park, who also serves as a CTO for some healthcare organizations, because he was having difficulty finding an organization that really specialized in Epic infrastructure. So you might be familiar with some of the large players in Epic consultancies, but they are typically focused more on the application side, so configuring like the ambulatory clinical system or something like that. And there really wasn't a solution that he could find in the market for an organization that was focused on Epic infrastructure and some of the more technical components of managing an Epic technical ecosystem. So, Austin founded a team. Mike was one of the early folks to join. I joined a little bit later. But he put a team together to, again, really focus on the technical components of an Epic implementation. And since then, we've been providing managed services for Epic infrastructure for a number of organizations. We've been focusing on platform migrations from, for example, AIX to REL for Epic organizations, and we've been focusing on some growth areas as well in the Cloud. Epic systems is now able to be hosted on the public Cloud, that's a relatively recent occurrence. So, we're working with some organizations in that space as well. Mike, anything you'd add there? >> No, I think that pretty much covers it. We've spent a large fraction of our effort making sure that we're engineering solutions for these clients that move them in the directions towards Cloud readiness, towards containerization, automation, and those sorts of things. I think Eric's description's spot on. >> So, you guys must be busy. I mean, I can only imagine the action happening right now as people realized, with the pandemic specifically, two areas that we've reported aggressive growth on was public sector and healthcare. Both were under massive strains of pressure to get faster. (chuckles) Can you guys just weigh in real quickly on what you guys are seeing and how that's impacted your consulting services, but also the customer. What's going on in their minds? >> Absolutely, we had some customers very early on in the beginning of the pandemic where we were given the cadence of updates coming from Epic, the needs for growth for those customers where both in ICU surge capability as well as just general admittance. There was a flurry of hardware purchasing, provisioning, set up. An increased cadence around patching for various pieces of the Epic environment including Epic code directly. All of those things. The tempo of all of that increased once the pandemic began, and we spent a significant fraction of time trying to find better ways, faster ways to engineer what we were already doing for clients, simply so that we could continue to keep up with the surge in demand without requiring an additional surge in investment in people, where it wasn't necessary. Obviously, some growth was necessary, but we wanted to help our clients get the most out of what they already had so that they could spend that money where it was needed to help patients. >> Yeah, awesome, great stuff. So, we're here at AnsibleFest getting into the action. It's all about automation. So I have to ask you guys, what led you to start exploring automation solutions at Sapphire Health? >> Yeah, so there's quite a few reasons. I would say the most critical is that we've been providing managed services to organizations around infrastructure management for some time. And as you can imagine, infrastructure management has some repetitive tasks, and I'm quoting my colleague, Mike, here, but a good administrator is a lazy administrator. And what we mean when we say that is, if there's a repetitive task that's being performed over and over again, if there's an opportunity to automate it, that's going to save us time. But more importantly, that's going to... Paul, these lights here. Let me move around a little bit, should come back, there we go. But it's going to provide an opportunity for us to focus on more value-add services for the client. It's going to reduce costs for the client in terms of the services that we're providing. And I think most importantly, it's removing the possibility for human error or the possibility for error overall. So it's a natural evolution of us observing the time that we're spending with our client partners, and again, it really provides a lot of value to Sapphire as an organization and our customer partners as well. >> Mike, you want to weigh in on this automation trend. How do you see it evolving? I mean, obviously sounds good when you want to automate things that you do repetitive tasks, but is there more going on that you see in automation that goes beyond just, okay, if you do it three times-automated kind of vibe. >> Sure. Automating repetitive tasks is the kiddie end of the pool. That's how we get... That's how we sell the idea to people who just don't get the concept yet. But there are workflows that really aren't feasible outside of automation. We tend to think of automation, in some cases in this sort of limited way, but automation is really... What we really are targeting with automation is more about workflow. It's less about individual tasks, and it's more about an idea of workflow or a business requirement from its origin all the way through its implementation. So, I've got just the simplest case that jumps immediately to mind, is I have a new hire, I've got to provision them an account. I need to provision it across multiple systems. I've got to do it in our single sign on. They need home directories. They might need access. They need building accesses we need to generate. You got to generate badges for these people. And these are all workflows that are normally disparate. You know, you have to take your sheet to this guy, take your sheet to this guy, here's my new hire form. Really, what you really want is, we got a new hire, everything's checked out, put it in this basket here and let the automation move it through all of these systems all the way across. And that's the sort of thing, like I said, that's a very limited, very simple idea, but that's the kind of thing we really want. We want to get in the door with automation with simple things and then we want to teach... We want clients and ourselves to be challenged, to be creative, to find new ways to apply it that aren't immediately obvious. >> Yeah, I was smiling because I love the example of the kiddie end of the pool because automation is going mainstream, and it used to be kind of, you know, for the geeks who were doing the hardcore stuff who got the whole big picture. Now you're seeing with AI automation moving in and with Cloud, a lot more automation happening. So, I can almost see in my mind mental image of people wearing bubbles in the pool, kind of like going in the deep end, get back over here. Stay in your lane. Yeah, but this is the trend, and I want to get into this because you guys are involved in this Epic migration that's been talked about. So for the folks that aren't in, say the health care space, put a little context around Epic and then I want to get into this whole migration discussion. I think that kind of points to some real value propositions. So, what is Epic for the folks outside healthcare? >> Sure, so Epic is one of the leading EHRs or electronic health records software in the world. It is by far the most deployed in the United States. What's involved in building an Epic, or performing an Epic migration. Epic is hundreds of systems. When you think about Epic as an umbrella concept, it is servers and end-user workstations and all of these things. When we talk about platform migration, what we're usually talking about is the transactional database. They call it the ODB or whichever term I think you feel applies best. When we perform all those migrations, we're usually talking about... When we perform one of those migrations, we're usually talking about an AIX to Red Hat migration, although you can just do hardware to hardware. Involved in that is a number of things. You're building new VMs. You're setting up patch cycles, setting up the patching server. Installing the various administration scripts that Epic provides. Installing the software that runs the DB, which at the moment is either InterSystems Cache or Iris. There's the provisioning of the local security users. There's the configuration of the OS. If you're moving from AIX to Red Hat, you're talking generally about a bit endians conversions, so, big endian to little endian, there's a tool for that. There's a lot of these little stats. And the thing is, is that, they're all very, very well defined and very similar, and so, they look identical in many of these cases from one implementation of Epic to the next. And that's not true for the entire Epic stack necessarily, but at the ODB level, this stuff is all very similar, and this is a very right place to automate. This screams automate, and we do this because, I mean, who wants to make mistakes. If you write and build your script and debug it, the script runs, it doesn't make mistakes. I make mistakes, the script doesn't. So, we do that, and we end up spending less time on these repetitive, unnecessary tasks. We guarantee the correctness of them, or we do a better job of guaranteeing the correctness of them, and all of that ends up saving money in the long run. >> That's awesome, and thanks for the context. I was going to get there on the automation piece. It really sets the table for the automation. Real quick clarification. How much or what kind of software work is involved in a migration? >> Oh, so there's the installation of... You have from the installation of the OS and the configuration of the OS, the building in the patch server, the implementation, testing, and patch cycling. There's those data conversions I talked about. There's environment refreshes where we copy an existing environment on a regular basis to another environment for things like testing, for troubleshooting purposes or for other reasons. There's more than one database for Epic. There's one big production database. You have training databases, and you have playground databases for people to work in so they can learn to use the system better, and then there are, I mean, there's a galaxy. >> Oh man, so it's a huge system. Okay, so I got to ask the security question. >> Sure. >> Is security element as important when selecting automation or how has that factored in? I mean, right now that's super important, obviously, records are key, but honestly, where does that fit into the automation piece of security? >> Yeah, I think that's a very important question, and as you alluded to, security is incredibly important. It's very important in healthcare in particular. And in fact, with healthcare, there's a lot of regulatory requirements. There's a lot of requirements that individual healthcare institutions have that we as a partner to that institution need to follow. So, as we were evaluating automation vendors and automation solutions, a highly secure system was not a nice to have or like a value add, it was something that was absolutely critical and paramount to being able to successfully automate any of the things that we're doing. So I'll turn it over to Mike to talk about some of the specifics, but as we evaluated Ansible, we saw that it really supported robust security. So, Mike, can you comment a little bit more on that? >> Sure. There's a number of ways that we use Ansible to help improve the security posture for clients. One of the ways is Ansible playbooks are written to be runnable against the server and nothing will change unless something is set incorrectly. And this lets us assure that the configuration is where we expect it to be so we don't get drift on these servers. Now, remember I said an Epic environment is a lot of servers. If one or two of these... >> John: Mike, if you don't mind, I need to interrupt. What is, when you say drift, what are you referring to? >> So when I say drift, what I mean is, if there's a bunch of different servers and I as an administrator have to work on one or two of these servers just for little things during the day, I might make a change on one of these servers advertently or inadvertently, and then that server's configuration is now slightly out of phase with the other servers, which could be benign, but it could also be a security hole. Having Ansible able to run nightly and continue to adjust these servers back to the expected baseline, and in the case of things like tower, be able to report that these things were out of position. Let us know, hey, it lets us reduce the attack surface, first of all. It lets us multiply it, like a force multiply our attention across this farm of servers, and it gives us that sort of clarity that we know we're doing what we have to do to make sure these servers continue to be safe. >> That's an awesome service. That right there is, I mean, just going in manually trying to figure all this stuff out, it's just a nightmare. I mean, what a great relief that is. I mean, just the alternative is what, you know, more pain and suffering human wise, that's the labor, and then risk on attack because people go to bed. >> I'm a patient. The thing is, on a personal note, I'm a patient too, all of us are. We all have doctors. We have to go to the hospital for things occasionally. And if we fail when we perform these security audits, if we fail when we perform these security checks, patient data can get lost. It can get sent to people who shouldn't have it. And I'm a patient, I have no desire for my medical information to be available anywhere but in the hands of my doctor or myself. And that's the thought I try to stay with when I'm working on these systems. I'm a patient. It's not that I'm doing this because... I mean, the knock-on effects of reducing liability for the customers cannot be ignored or overstated, and they're critical, but, ultimately, my eyesight is on the patient. >> Yeah and having that stability is huge. Okay, this brings up the whole automation thing as it becomes more mainstream for you guys, specifically, is critical. The system's there, you have to watch farms, all the action happening, it's a huge system. Complex automation is key. How are you guys continuing to push the automation envelope into the Sapphire Health's consulting practice? >> Well, as you mentioned, John, yeah, we're really taking a look at the entire technical infrastructure when we're working with our clients. And we are offering fully outsourced managed services for organizations, not just around the Epic infrastructure but things like networking devices, security and other third party systems. So with that, we're seeing a lot of these things that are going on, and we're always evaluating opportunities for automation. There's actually two areas in particular that we're seeing gain a lot of momentum with our customers, and we're seeing a lot of opportunity for automation. The first is business continuity and disaster recovery, specifically within Epic. So, Epic has very stringent requirements for resiliency, as you can imagine. When the system goes down, a hospital can't really do what it needs to do from a billing standpoint, a clinical standpoint, so very robust disaster recovery and resiliency standards and solutions are very important. However, there's not a lot of automation that's available either from Epic or, as far as I know, other consultancies, so what we did is we built a script that provides failover automation. So some of the tasks that would be very manual in terms of failing over to your DR solution, we've automated that, and that again, removes a lot of the opportunity for human error, really speeds up the failover process. And so with the customers that we work with, that's something that we provide. Another big area that we're seeing is environment refreshes. So within Epic, there are different environments that are, basically, all their data is copied over on a recurring basis from the production environment, and the refreshes can have a lot of manual steps involved, so we found an opportunity and have implemented some automation around environment refreshes for some of our managed services clients. And as we continue to go throughout, you know, building our Cloud practice in some other areas, I'm very confident that we're going to see, you know, infrastructure is code more opportunities for automation around areas like that. >> I mean, you guys got to love the DevOps vibe going on now. Mike, I mean, you guys have seen the movie before in the old legacy going back to the mainframes, so you probably still run into a lot of older systems that still do a purpose. I mean, I have a lot of friends and clients that are working in the big banks, and they still have all the old school that does their job well, but containerization and Cloud kind of give life to these systems because now we're living in this system architecture called distributed computing again with the Cloud. It's the same game, different, different stuff though. >> Absolutely. Years ago, almost every Epic client was running on AIX, and maybe not mainframe but more mini computer. The migration path for almost all of the clients has been to move from those AIX mini computers down to VMs running Red Hat, or running Linux, and the natural evolution of that path is to move at least disaster recovery data centers into the Cloud, and then for some clients, the economics say the whole data center to the Cloud. So, absolutely that path is, it's well forged, it's there. I suspect that we'll see a lot more of clients, even larger hospitals, beginning to move down that road in the near future. >> And for the folks watching who may not have the scar tissue that we have, AIX was IBM's old Unix, a kind of mid-range mini computer. It was kind of client server, it was client server going now again being modernized. So obviously Red Hat is now part of IBM, but it speaks not just to IBM, this is about Ansible, right. So this is like, there is action happening here, so this is a case study of pretty much all migrations. It's not just the fact that it's AIX to Red Hat, it's system to the new thing that has benefits. >> Absolutely. >> What's your take, Mike, on that that kind of paradigm, because a lot of people going through similar situations just change AIX to something else. You have a lot of this migration re-platforming going on with the opportunity to kind of tweak it and add stuff to it. What's your advice and what's your reaction to this big trend? >> My advice for this trend, honestly, my advice is when you're planning these migrations, you know they're coming. Even if you're not in the cycle yet, you know it's coming. My advice is start brainstorming your implementation of the automation now. Get your automation into the system as you platform into your new platform, because it is far easier to build that entire platform with automation as a critical component than it is to bolt it on later, and you will get much more out of your investment and time and effort if you've integrated it from the very beginning. I would say anyone that was looking to perform a platform migration now and hadn't already begun serious consideration of running automation or had no plans for an automation, was setting themselves up for a very long and very difficult road to hell, and I would advise against it at this point. >> Great, great insight, Mike and Eric. Thanks for coming on, appreciate your insight here. You guys want to give a quick plug for the company? What you guys are looking to do, hiring, any update you want to share because great, great content you guys just shared here. Thanks for doing that. Take a minute to put a plug for the company. >> Yeah, I think a quick plug here. Yeah, if you're a talented cache admin, there's not too many Mikes out there, so we're definitely looking for more Mikes. But more broadly, we're really looking to expand into the Cloud space. We're rapidly expanding our managed services opportunities, and what we're seeing is a lot of organizations have like one ODB admin or one client systems ECSA admin. And what they run into is that person will leave, that person will retire, that person needs to get married and go on their honeymoon. It's kind of a problem, so we're working with a lot of organizations to not just fully outsource their environment but to provide a hybrid-managed service to provide overflow, to provide capabilities, to scale up with upgrades and projects like that. So, talk to us, we're pretty darn good at it, as you heard from Mike. We've got a couple of Mikes, again, we could use more, so if you are a Mike, please reach out. >> I think we virtualized him, we just virtualized Mike, you know, virtualization is a huge trend. >> If data writes Mike, we need to do that, yeah. >> Are you a body, are you the real Mike? >> (laughing) As far as I know, my wife would appreciate it if you guys would clone me a few times. >> You know, I've heard horror stories, Eric, around root passwords, like, who has the root password, oh, she left two years ago, kind of situations, this happens. I mean, this is not... it sounds like crazy but people leave. >> Yeah, I mean, nobody works anywhere forever, right? >> Don't be that company where you lose the root password, and never mind the ransomware action. Oh my God, must be brutal. Anyway, we can go another segment on that. Eric, thank you for coming on. Mike, thank you for your insight, really appreciate it, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely, it was our pleasure. >> Stay right here for continued coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (slow tempo electronic music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello. Welcome to today's session of the AWS Startup Showcase, The Next Big Thing in AI, Security & Life Sciences. Today featuring TetraScience for the life sciences track. I'm your host Natalie Erlich, and now we are joined by our special guests, Michelle Bradbury, VP of Product at TetraScience, as well as Mike Tarselli, the Chief Scientific Officer at TetraScience. We're going to talk about the R&D Data Cloud movement in life sciences, unlocking experimental data to accelerate discovery. Thank you both very much for joining us today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah, thank you. Great to be here. >> Well, while traditionally slower to adopt cloud technology in R&D, global pharmas are now launching digital lab initiatives to improve time to market for therapeutics. Now, can you discuss some of the key challenges still facing big pharma in terms of digital transformation? >> Sure. I guess I'll start in. The big pharma sort of organization that we have today happens to work very well in its particular way, i.e., they have some architecture they've installed, usually on-premises. They are sort of tentatively sticking their foot into the cloud. They're learning how to move forward into that, and in order to process and automate their data streams. However, we would argue they haven't done enough fast enough and that they need to get there faster in order to deliver patient value and efficiencies to their businesses. >> Well, how specifically, now for Michelle, can R&D Data Cloud help big pharma in this digital transformation? >> So the big thing that large pharmas face is a couple different things. So the ecosystem within large pharma is a lot of diverse data types, a lot of diverse file types. So that's one thing that the data cloud handles very well to be able to parse through, harmonize, and bring together your data so that it can be leveraged for things like AI and machine learning at large-scale, which is sort of the other part where I think one of the large sort of challenges that pharma faces is sort of a proliferation of data. And what cloud offers, specifically, is a better way to store, more scalable storage, better ability to even tier your storage while still making it searchable, maintainable, and offer a lot of flexibility to the actual pharma companies. >> And what about security and compliance, or even governance? What are those implications? >> Sure. I'll jump into that one. So security and compliance, every large pharma is a regulated industry. Everyone watching this probably is aware of that. And so we therefore have to abide by the same tenets that they would. So 21 CFR Part 11 compliance, getting ready for GXP ready systems, And in fact, doing extra certifications around a SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 9001, really every single regulation that would allow our cloud solution to be quality, ready, inspectable, and really performant for what needs to be done for an eventual FDA submission. >> And can you also speak about some of the advances that we're seeing in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how that will impact pharma, and what your role is in that at TetraScience? >> Sure. I'll pass this one to Michelle first. >> I was going to say I can take that one. So one of the things that we're seeing in terms of where AI and ML will go with large pharma is their ability to not only search and build models against the data that they have access to right now, which is very limited in the way they search, but the ability to go through the historical amount of data, the ability to leverage mass parallel compute on top of these giant data clusters, and what that means in terms of not only faster time to market for drugs, but also, I think, more accurate and precise testing coming in the future. So I think there's so much opportunity for this really data-rich vertical and industry to leverage in a lot of the modern tooling that it hasn't been able to leverage so far. >> And Mike, what would you say are the benefits that a fully automated lab could bring with increased fairness and data liquidity? >> Yeah, sure. Let's go five years into the future. I am a bench chemist, and I'm trying to get some results in, and it's amazing because I can look up everything the rest of my colleagues have ever done on this particular project with a single click of a button in a simple term set in natural language. I can then find and retrieve those results, easily visualize them in our platform or in any other platform I choose to use. And then I can inspect those, interrogate those, and say, "Actually, I'm going to be able to set up this automation cascade." I'll probably have it ready by the afternoon. All the data that's returned to me through this is going to be easily integratable, harmonized, and you're going to be able to find it, obviously. You're going to interoperate it with any system, so if I suddenly decide that I need to send a report over to another division in their preferred vis tool or data system of choice, great! I click three buttons, configure it. Boom. There goes that report to them. This should be a simple vision to achieve even faster than five years. And that data liquidity that enables you to sort of pass results around outside of your division, and outside of even your sort of company or division, to other who are able to see it should be fairly easy to achieve if all that data is ingested the right way. >> Well, I'd love to ask this next question to both of you. What is your defining contribution to the future of cloud scale? >> Mike, you want to go first? >> (chuckles) I would love to. So right now the pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, they aren't seeing data increase linearly. They're seeing it increase exponentially, right? We are living in the exabyte era, and really have on the internet since about 2016. It's only going to get bigger, and it's going to get bigger in a power law, right? So you're going to see, as sequencing comes on, as larger form microscopy comes on, and as more and more companies are taking on more and more data about each individual sample, retaining that data for longer, doing more analytics of that data, and also doing personalized medicine, right, more data about a specific patient, or animal, or cell line. You're just going to see this absolute data explosion. And because of that, the only thing you can really do to keep up with that is be in the cloud. On-prem, you will be buying disk drives and out of physical materials before you're going to outstrip the data. Michelle? >> Yeah. And, I think, to go along with not just the data storage scale, I think the compute scale. Mike is absolutely right. We're seeing personalized drugs. We're seeing customers that want to, within a matter of three, four hours, get to a personalized drug for patients. And that kind of scale on a compute basis not just requires a ton of data, but requires mass compute ability to be able to get it right, right? And so it really becomes this marriage of getting a huge amount of data, and getting the mass compute to be able to really leverage that per patient. And then the one thing that... Sort of enabling that ecosystem to come centrally together across such a diverse dataset is sort of that driving force. If you can get the data together but you can't compute it, if you can compute it but you can't get it together, it all needs to come together. Otherwise it just doesn't work. >> Yeah. Well, on your website you have all these great case studies, and I'd love it if you could outline some of your success stories for us, some specific, concrete examples. >> Sure. I'll take one first, and then they'll pass to Michelle. One really great concrete example is we were able to take data format processing for a biotech that had basically previously had instruments sitting off in a corner that they could not connect, were integratable for a high throughput screening cascade. We were able to bring them online. We were able to get the datasets interpretable, and get literally their processing time for these screens from the order of weeks to the order of minutes. So they could basically be doing probably a couple hundred more screens per year than they could have otherwise. Michelle? >> We have one customer that is in the process of automating their entire lab, even using robotics arms. So it's a huge mix of being able to ingest IoT data, send experiment data to them, understand sampling, getting the results back, and really automating that whole process, which when they even walked me through it, I was like, "Wow," and I'm like, "so cool." (chuckles) And there's a lot of... I think a lot of pharma companies want, and life science companies, want to move forward in innovation and do really creative and cool things for patients. But at the end of it, you sort of have to also realize it's like their core competency is focusing on drugs, and getting that to market, and making patients better. And we're just one part of that, really helping to enable that process and that ecosystem come to life, so it's really cool to watch. >> Right, right. And I mean, in this last year we've seen how critical the healthcare sector is to people all over the world. Now, looking forward, what do you anticipate some of the big innovations in the sector will be in the next five years, and where do you see TetraScience's role in that? >> So I think some of the larger innovations are... Mike mentioned one of them already. It's going to be sort of the personalized drugs the personalized health care. I think it is absolutely going to go to full lab automation to some degree, because who knows when the next pandemic will hit, right? And we're all going to have to go home, right? I think the days of trying to move around data manually and trying to work through that is just... If we don't plan for that to be a thing of the past, I think we're all going to do ourselves a disservice. So I think you'll see more automation. I think you'll see more personalization, and you'll see more things that leverage larger amounts of data. I think where we hope to sit is really at the ecosystem enablement part of that. We want to remain open. That's one of the cornerstones. We're not a single partner platform. We're not tied to any vendors. We really want to become that central aid and the ecosystem enabler for the labs. >> Yeah, to that point- >> And I'd also love to get your insight. >> Oh! Sorry. (chuckles) Thank you. To that point, we're really trying to unlock discovery, right? Many other horizontal cloud players will do something like you can upload files, or you can do some massive compute, but they won't have the vertical expertise that we do, right? They won't have the actual deep life sciences dedication. We have several PhDs, postdocs, et cetera, on staff who have done this for a living and can do this going forward. So you're going to see the realization of something that was really exciting in sort of 2005, 2006, that is fully automated experimentation. So get a robot to about an experiment, design it, have a human operator assist with putting together all the automation, and then run that over and over again cyclically until you get the result you want. I don't think that the compute was ready for that at the time. I don't think that the resources were up to snuff, but now you can do it, and you can do it with any tool, instrument, technique you want, because to Michelle's point, we're a vendor-agnostic partner networked platform. So you can actually assemble this learning automation cascade and have it run in the background while you go home and sleep. >> Yeah, and we often hear about automation, but tell us a little bit more specifically what is the harmonizing effect of TetraScience? I mean, that's not something that we usually hear, so what's unique about that? >> You want to take that, or you want me to go? >> You go, please. (chuckles) >> All right. So, really, it's about... It's about normalizing and harmonizing the data. And what does that... What that means is that whether you're a chromatography machine from, let's say Waters, or another vendor, ideally you'd like to be able to leverage all of your chromatography data and do research across all of it. Most of our customers have machinery that is of same sort from different customers, or sorry, from different vendors. And so it's really the ability to bring that data together, and sometimes it's even diverse instrumentation. So if I track a molecule, or a project, or a sample through one piece, one set of instrumentation, and I want to see how it got impacted in another set of instrumentation, or what the results were, I'm able to quickly and easily be able to sort of leverage that harmonized data and come to those results quickly. Mike, I'm sure you have a- >> May I offer a metaphor from something outside of science? Hopefully that's not off par for this, but let's say you had a parking lot, right, filled with different kinds of cars. And let's say you said at the beginning of that parking lot, "No, I'm sorry. We only have space right here for a Ford Fusion 2019 black with leather interior and this kind of tires." That would be crazy. You would never put that kind of limitation on who could park in a parking lot. So why do specific proprietary data systems put that kind of limitation on how data can be processed? We want to make it so that any car, any kind of data, can be processed and considered together in that same parking lot. >> Fascinating. Well, thank you both so much for your insights. Really appreciate it. Wonderful to hear about R&D Data Cloud movement in big pharma, and that of course is Michelle Bradbury, VP of Product at TetraScience, as well as Mike Tarselli, the Chief Scientific Officer at TetraScience. Thanks again very much for your insights. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich. Catch us again for the next session of the AWS Startup Session. Thank you. (smooth music)

>>Mhm >>Yes, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm lisa martin excited about this conversation. It's combining my background in life sciences with technology. Please welcome Mike Tarsa Lee, the chief scientific officer at Tetra Science. Mike I'm so excited to talk to you today. >>Thank you lisa and thank you very much to the cube for hosting us. >>Absolutely. So we talk about cloud and data all the time. This is going to be a very interesting conversation especially because we've seen events of the last what are we on 14 months and counting have really accelerated the need for drug discovery and really everyone's kind of focused on that. But I want you to talk with our audience about Tetra science, Who you guys are, what you do and you were founded in 2014. You just raised 80 million in series B but give us an idea of who you are and what you do. >>Got it. Tetro Science, what are we? We are digital plumbers and that may seem funny but really we are taking the world of data and we are trying to resolve it in such a way that people can actually pipe it from the data sources they have in a vendor agnostic way to the data targets in which they need to consume that data. So bringing that metaphor a little bit more to life sciences, let's say that you're a chemist and you have a mass spec and an NMR and some other piece of technology and you need all of those to speak the same language. Right? Generally speaking, all of these are going to be made by different vendors. They're all going to have different control software and they're all going to have slightly different ways of sending their data in. Petro Science takes those all in. We bring them up to the cloud or cloud native solution. We harmonize them, we extract the data first and then we actually put it into what we call our special sauce are intermediate data schema to harmonize it. So you have sort of like a picture and a diagram of what the prototypical mass spec or H P. L. C. Or cell counting data should look like. And then we build pipelines to export that data over to where you need it. So if you need it to live in an L. N. Or a limb system or in a visualization tool like spot fire tableau. We got you covered. So again we're trying to pipe things from left to right from sources to targets and we're trying to do it with scientific context. >>That was an outstanding description. Data plumbers who have secret sauce and never would have thought I would have heard that when I woke up this morning. But I'm going to unpack this more because one of the things that I read in the press release that just went out just a few weeks ago announcing the series B funding, it said that that picture science is pioneering a $300 billion dollar Greenfield data market and operating this is what got my attention without a direct cloud native and open platform competitor. Why is that? >>That's right. If you look at the way pharma data is handled today, even those that long tend to be either on prem solutions with a sort of license model or a distribution into a company and therefore maintenance costs, professional services, etcetera. Or you're looking at somebody who is maybe cloud but their cloud second, you know, they started with their on prem journey and they said we should go and build out some puppies, we should go to the cloud migrate. However, we're cloud first cloud native. So that's one first strong point. And the second is that in terms of data harmonization and in terms of looking at data in a vendor agnostic way, um many companies claim to do it. But the real hard test of this, the metal, what will say is when you can look at this with the Scientific contextual ization we offer. So yes, you can collect the data and put it on a cloud. Okay great. Yes. You may be able to do an extract, transform and load and move it to somewhere else. Okay. But can you actually do that from front to back while retaining all the context of the data while keeping all of the metadata in the right place? With veracity, with G XP readiness, with data fidelity and when it gets over to the other side can somebody say oh yeah that's all the data from all the H. P. L. C. S we control. I got it. I see where it is. I see where to go get it, I see who created it. I see the full data train and validation landscape and I can rebuild that back and I can look back to the old raw source files if I need to. Um I challenge someone to find another direct company that's doing that today. >>You talk about that context and the thing that sort of surprises me is with how incredibly important scientific discovery is and has been for since the beginning of time. Why is why has nobody come out in the last seven years and tried to facilitate this for life sciences organizations. >>Right. I would say that people have tried and I would say that there are definitely strides being made in the open source community, in the data science community and inside pharma and biotech themselves on these sort of build motif, right. If you are inside of a company and you understand your own ontology and processes while you can probably design an application or a workflow using several different tools in order to get that data there. But will it be generally useful to the bioscience community? One thing we pride ourselves on is when we product eyes a connector we call or an integration, we actually do it with a many different companies, generic cases in mind. So we say, OK, you have an h p l C problem over at this top pharma, you have an HPC problem with this biotech and you have another one of the C R. O. Okay. What are the common points between all of those? Can we actually distill that down to a workflow? Everyone's going to need, for example a compliance workflow. So everybody needs compliance. Right. So we can actually look into an empower or a unicorn operation and we can say, okay, did you sign off on that? Did it come through the right way? Was the data corrupted etcetera? That's going to be generically useful to everybody? And that's just one example of something we can do right now for anybody in bio pharma. >>Let's talk about the events of the last 14 months or so mentioned 10 X revenue growth in 2020. Covid really really highlighted the need to accelerate drug discovery and we've seen that. But talk to me about some of the things that Tetra science has seen and done to facilitate that. >>Yeah, this past 14 months. I mean um I will say that the global pandemic has been a challenge for everyone involved ourselves as well. We've basically gone to a full remote workforce. Um We have tried our very best to stay on top of it with remote collaboration tools with vera, with GIT hub with everything. However, I'll say that it's actually been some of the most successful time in our company's history because of that sort of lack of any kind of friction from the physical world. Right? We've really been able to dig down and dig deep on our integrations are connections, our business strategy. And because of that, we've actually been able to deliver a lot of value to customers because, let's be honest, we don't actually have to be on prem from what we're doing since we're not an on prem solution and we're not an original equipment manufacturer, we don't have to say, okay, we're going to go plug the thing in to the H. P. L. C. We don't have to be there to tune the specific wireless protocols or you're a W. S. Protocols, it can all be done remotely. So it's about building good relationships, building trust with our colleagues and clients and making sure we're delivering and over delivering every time. And then people say great um when I elect a Tetra solution, I know what's going right to the cloud, I know I can pick my hosting options, I know you're going to keep delivering more value to me every month. Um Thanks, >>I like that you make it sound simple and that actually you bring up a great point though that the one of the many things that was accelerated this last year Plus is the need to be remote that need to be able to still communicate, collaborate but also the need to establish and really foster those relationships that you have with existing customers and partners as everybody was navigating very, very different challenges. I want to talk now about how you're helping customers unlock the problem that is in every industry data silos and point to point integration where things can talk to each other, Talk to me about how you're helping customers like where do they start with? Touch? Where do you start that? Um kind of journey to unlock data value? >>Sure. Journey to unlock data value. Great question. So first I'll say that customers tend to come to us, it's the oddest thing and we're very lucky and very grateful for this, but they tend to have heard about what we've done with other companies and they come to us they say listen, we've heard about a deployment you've done with novo Nordisk, I can say that for example because you know, it's publicly known. Um so they'll say, you know, we hear about what you've done, we understand that you have deep expertise in chromatography or in bio process. And they'll say here's my really sticky problem. What can you do here? And invariably they're going to lay out a long list of instruments and software for us. Um we've seen lists that go up past 2000 instruments. Um and they'll say, yeah, they'll say here's all the things we need connected, here's four or five different use cases. Um we'll bring you start to finish, we'll give you 20 scientists in the room to talk through them and then we to get somewhere between two and four weeks to think about that problem and come back and say here's how we might solve that. Invariably, all of these problems are going to have a data silos somewhere, there's going to be in Oregon where the preclinical doesn't see the biology or the biology doesn't see the screening etcetera. So we say, all right, give us one scientist from each of those, hence establishing trust, establishing input from everybody. And collaboratively we'll work with, you will set up an architecture diagram, will set up a first version of a prototype connector, will set up all this stuff they need in order to get moving, we'll deliver value upfront before we've ever signed a contract and will say, is this a good way to go for you? And they'll say either no, no, thank you or they'll say yes, let's go forward, let's do a pilot a proof of concept or let's do a full production rollout. And invariably this data silos problem can usually be resolved by again, these generic size connectors are intermediate data schema, which talks and moves things into a common format. Right? And then also by organizationally, since we're already connecting all these groups in this problem statement, they tend to continue working together even when we're no longer front and center, right? They say, oh we set up that thing together. Let's keep thinking about how to make our data more available to one another. >>Interesting. So culturally, within the organization it sounds like Tetra is having significant influences their, you know, the collaboration but also data ownership. Sometimes that becomes a sticky situation where there are owners and they want to read retain that control. Right? You're laughing? You've been through this before. I'd like to understand a little bit more though about the conversation because typically we're talking about tech but we're also talking about science. Are you having these technical conversations with scientists as well as I. T. What is that actual team from the customer perspective look >>like? Oh sure. So the technical conversation and science conversation are going on sometimes in parallel and sometimes in the same threat entirely. Oftentimes the folks who reach out to us first tend to be the scientists. They say I've got a problem, you know and and my research and and I. T. Will probably hear about this later. But let's go. And then we will invariably say well let's bring in your R. And D. I. T. Counterparts because we need them to help solve it right? But yes we are usually having those conversations in parallel at first and then we unite them into one large discussion. And we have varied team members here on the Tetris side we have me from science along with multiple different other PhD holders and pharma lifers in our business who actually can look at the scientific use cases and recommend best practices for that and visualizations. We also have a lot of solutions architects and delivery engineers who can look at it from the how should the platform assemble the solution and how can we carry it through? Um And those two groups are three groups really unite together to provide a unified front and to help the customer through and the customer ends up providing the same thing as we do. So they'll give us on the one call, right? Um a technical expert, a data and QA person and a scientist all in one group and they'll say you guys work together to make sure that our orders best represented here. Um And I think that that's actually a really productive way to do this because we end up finding out things and going deeper into the connector than we would have otherwise. >>It's very collaborative, which is I bet those are such interesting conversations to be a part of it. So it's part of the conversation there helping them understand how to establish a common vision for data across their organization. >>Yes, that that tends to be a sort of further reaching conversation. I'll say in the initial sort of short term conversation, we don't usually say you three scientists or engineers are going to change the fate of the entire orig. That's maybe a little outside of our scope for now. But yes, that first group tends to describe a limited solution. We help to solve that and then go one step past and then they'll nudge somebody else in the Oregon. Say, do you see what Petra did over here? Maybe you could use it over here in your process. And so in that way we sort of get this cultural buy in and then increased collaboration inside a single company. >>Talk to me about some customers that you've worked with it. Especially love to know some of the ones that you've helped in the last year where things have been so incredibly dynamic in the market. But give us an insight into maybe some specific customers that work with you guys. >>Sure. I'd love to I'll speak to the ones that are already on our case studies. You can go anytime detector science dot com and read all of these. But we've worked with Prelude therapeutics for example. We looked at a high throughput screening cascade with them and we were able to take an instrument that was basically unloved in a corner at T. Can liquid handler, hook it up into their Ln. And their screening application and bring in and incorporate data from an external party and do all of that together and merge it so they could actually see out the other side a screening cascade and see their data in minutes as opposed to hours or days. We've also worked as you've seen the press release with novo Nordisk, we worked on automating much of their background for their chromatography fleet. Um and finally we've also worked with several smaller biotechs in looking at sort of in stan shih ation, they say well we've just started we don't have an L. N. We don't have a limbs were about to buy these 50 instruments. Um what can you do with us and we'll actually help them to scope what their initial data storage and harmonization strategy should even be. Um so so we're really man, we're at everywhere from the enterprise where its fleets of thousands of instruments and we're really giving data to a large amount of scientists worldwide, all the way down to the small biotech with 50 people who were helping add value there. >>So big range there in terms of the data conversation, I'm curious has have you seen it change in the last year plus with respect to elevating to the C suite level or the board saying we've got to be able to figure this out because as we saw, you know, the race for the Covid 19 vaccine for example. Time to value and and to discovery is so critical. Is that C suite or board involved in having conversations with you guys? >>It's funny because they are but they are a little later. Um we tend to be a scientist and user driven um solution. So at the beginning we get a power user, an engineer or a R and D I. T. Person in who really has a problem to solve. And as they are going through and developing with us, eventually they're going to need either approval for the time, the resources or the budget and then they'll go up to their VP or their CIA or someone else at the executive level and say, let's start having more of this conversation. Um, as a tandem effort, we are starting to become involved in some thought leadership exercises with some larger firms. And we are looking at the strategic aspect through conferences, through white papers etcetera to speak more directly to that C suite and to say, hey, you know, we could fit your industry for dato motif. And then one other thing you said, time to value. So I'll say that the Tetro science executive team actually looks at that as a tract metric. So we're actually looking at driving that down every single week. >>That's outstanding. That's a hard one to measure, especially in a market that is so dynamic. But that time to value for your customers is critical. Again, covid sort of surfaced a number of things and some silver linings. But that being able to get hands on the day to make sure that you can actually pull insights from it accelerate facilitate drug discovery. That time to value there is absolutely critical. >>Yeah. I'll say if you look at the companies that really, you know, went first and foremost, let's look at Moderna right? Not our customer by the way, but we'll look at Madonna quickly as an example as an example are um, everything they do is automated, right? Everything they do is cloud first. Everything they do is global collaboration networks, you know, with harmonized data etcetera. That is the model we believe Everyone's going to go to in the next 3-5 years. If you look at the fact that Madonna went from sequence to initial vaccine in what, 50, 60 days, that kind of delivery is what the market will become accustomed to. And so we're going to see many more farmers and biotechs move to that cloud first. Distributed model. All data has to go in somewhere centrally. Everyone has to be able to benefit from it. And we are happy to help them get >>Well that's that, you know, setting setting a new record for pace is key there, but it's also one of those silver linings that has come out of this to show that not only was that critical to do, but it can be done. We have the technology, we have the brain power to be able to put those all user would harmonize those together to drive this. So give me a last question. Give me an insight into some of the things that are ahead for Tetra science the rest of this year. >>Oh gosh, so many things. One of the nice parts about having funding in the bank and having a dedicated team is the ability to do more. So first of course our our enterprise pharma and BioPharma clients, there are plenty more use cases, workflows, instruments. We've just about scratch the surface but we're going to keep growing and growing our our integrations and connectors. First of all right we want to be like a netflix for connectors. You know we just want you to come and say look do they have the connector? No well don't worry. They're going to have it in a month or two. Um so that we can be basically the almost the swiss army knife for every single connector you can imagine. Then we're going to be developing a lot more data apps so things that you can use to derive value from your data out. And then again, we're going to be looking at helping to educate everybody. So how is cloud useful? Why go to the system with harmonization? How does this influence your compliance? How can you do bi directional communication? There's lots of ways you can use. Once you have harmonized centralized data, you can do things with it to influence your order and drive times down again from days and weeks, two minutes and seconds. So let's get there. And I think we're going to try doing that over the next year. >>That's awesome. Never a dull moment. And I, you should partner with your marketing folks because we talked about, you talked about data plumbing the secret sauce and becoming the netflix of connectors. These are three gems that you dropped on this this morning mike. This has been awesome. Thank you for sharing with us what teacher science is doing, how you're really helping to fast track a lot of the incredibly important research that we're all really um dependent on and helping to heal the world through data. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >>Haley says I'm a real quickly. It's a team effort. The entire Tetro science team deserves credit for this. I'm just lucky enough to be able to speak to you. So thank you very much for the opportunity. >>And she about cheers to the whole touch of science team. Keep up the great work guys. Uh for mike Roselli, I'm lisa martin. You're watching this cube conversation. >>Mhm.