(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And welcome to this CUBE conversation where we welcome an ESG senior analyst, Bob Laliberte Bob, good to see you. >> Great to see you too. Thanks for having me >> Love it, I love to have the analyst sessions. Set it up. What's your scope, what's your area of expertise? >> So my coverage area right now is networking in its entirety. So that spans everything from enterprise networking, wired, wireless, campus, data center, et cetera. All the way up through telco and, in cloud networking. >> So how do you look at the landscape? One of the big things I think about a lot is how does the shift to cloud migration? How does that affect the existing, network layers? I mean, you got Cisco as the big whale and it's just, it's amazing to me. They still have whatever percent market share they have 60, 65% of the market. Are things, what's happening in the competitive landscape. How is cloud affecting that? >> That's a great question. I think the interesting piece is so many times organizations think about the network as plumbing. But the reality is the it's really important plumbing because as you talk about cloud and things get more distributed, well, guess what connects those distributed locations? It's the network. And so organizations as they've moved to the cloud you've seen a big shift with things like SD-WAN and so forth. How do I get more efficient connectivity up to that cloud? How do I not only enable able better connectivity between my data centers in the cloud, but now all my remote workers in the cloud. And so there's been a lot of big shifts going on that have driven the importance of having not only network, but secure networks. So like I said, cloud is one thing, and you're moving your applications there. But with the pandemic you saw the remote work. Think about the network administrators who we're managing, hey, I've got to control network connections between my data centers, a couple clouds and maybe dozens maybe a hundred remote branches. And now I'm connecting to 10,000 micro branches that I need to ensure that they can connect up to these applications and so forth. Hell of a lot more complex environment today than it used to be for these network teams. When we look at the, what we're seeing, how the networking providers are responding it's by driving comprehensive end-to-end solutions. So unifying, wired, wireless, and WAN. Driving efficiencies there. You're seeing even ThousandEyes for Cisco and things like that. Because they know the Internet's becoming more integral part of the corporate network. So being able to drive those types of things being able to, I think look at how to drive those operational efficiencies through AI and ML. So one of the big shifts we've seen in networking is the transition to cloud-based network management. And obviously that couple of things that helps with, first of all, the operations teams who are working remotely can more easily access it. But once all that data is up in the cloud, it creates a platform to be able to invest in AI/ML, and be able to drive intelligent alerting and even automation. And that's really what's needed because as the environments get more distributed and complex, you need to have that those operational efficiencies that automation, that intelligence to help them. >> How has remote work and hybrid work affected sort of network, spending priorities. Obviously when the pandemic hit you had to accommodate end points. And I always have this theory okay, when people come back to the office and I know it's going to be a different world but, the HQ probably needs some love as well. So has that been a tailwind for the industry? >> Absolutely, that's what we're seeing now. I think when the pandemic first hit, everyone said I've got to ramp up my VPNs. I've got to scale out my concentrators. I've got to add more firewalls in my data center. And then after a while, when they realized this was here to stay, they said, okay we just created that hub-and-spoke network that we just got rid of with SD-WAN. So what are the better solutions we can implement? So now you're seeing them not only implement better networking solutions for the remote workers. But reimagining what the campus looks like. Because it's not going to be ever 100% full or maybe it will, but how, for how many times a year will it be 100% full? So you've got to go from 80% cubes and 20% conference and collaboration areas, to 80% collaboration areas and 20% cubes. So we're seeing a lot of transition taking place in the campus environment as organizations are deploying newer technologies like Wi-Fi 6E. That have greater bandwidth to allow for those collaboration apps to run in those collaboration areas. Instead of just having the single wired conference room for video. Everyone's got to be able to run their video, voice and video collaboration apps. >> So how do you look at the landscape now? Again, you can't talk about networking without talking about Cisco. I think they, up there, I saw you and Zeus as talking about out, Cisco's quarter and other networking topics. Their long term guidance is for 60% growth for a company that size that's really outstanding. I mean, Cisco's, really has always been an execution machine of course. And it's a new era now under Chuck. There are more than ankle biters. If you look at Arista's doing pretty well there's guys like Extreme, there's others that are out there but nobody seemed to be able to unseat Cisco. What's happening in the landscape? >> I mean, that's a great question. Cisco's just been around for so long and been so big for so long. And you have to also keep in mind that with Cisco it's not just about the technology, but the fact from a if you think about it from a cultural standpoint these are workers who have been trained on Cisco since, some of them since high school. The educational component that Cisco has done has groomed generations of network technologists. So when they come into the market, they're fully familiar and used to Cisco. Plus they make a really good product and they've got products that cover everything. They cover the whole gambit. So they're still able to maintain their share. They're able to grow. They're able to move. They've made a shift last year. They announced in last spring that they were going to focus more on end-to-end. So instead of just having, hey, here's a point product, here's a point product. Here's a point product. Let's think about it in its entirety. Let's deliver a complete end-to-end solution solve bigger problems for customers, which obviously makes it much harder to remove when you're just trying to remove a piece of that single problem. But the other competitors are also having good years. And I think also the rising tide floats all boats. And so because of this distributed nature, the importance of the network, everyone is doing that. Plus obviously this has to be said, the supply chain issues where people are ordering ahead as well. But organizations, you look at Arista, they've gone from just being a data center company to expanding all the way down to the campus edge, wireless, right there creating an end-to-end environment Extreme did the same thing. They went out and made a lot of acquisitions. They pulled them all together, integrated. They're all moving to this cloud based end-to-end network management. Arista has been on a tear, bringing in a lot of, not only innovative technology, but innovative technologists. So if you look at some of the organizations they bought. I keep calling it Route 128, it's 128 Technologies. So sorry folks I live in Massachusetts. It's always been Route 128. >> You Remember when don't we. 128 Technology's Mist was their big. Mist was their, Mist was kind of like their VMware. VMware to EMC was Mist was to Juniper. And so we call it the Mistification of Juniper where every organization, every company they bring in they're rolling under that and this the AI engine. So they're bringing in 128 Technologies into that. They've got their own, their own stuff under that, their wired switches. So they've got this unified wired and wireless and WAN assurance now that they have. They've been gaining a lot of traction with that. And again, for the things we were talking about because it's far more distributed and complex. You need to have, It's not like people are getting replaced. It's not like, hey, we're leveraging this automation so that we can get rid of network teams. It's because it's getting so much more complex just to have the same number of people manage that more complex environment. We need those intelligence solutions. >> So I want to ask you about network and multi-cloud. And so it's kind of tongue in cheek because we coined this term super cloud. And so what we meant by that, so here's the premise. And I wonder you could give us your perspective. Multi-cloud, I've said many times is I think largely a symptom of multi-vendor I run in this, I run in AWS or, Azure, I've done the work to understand their primitives and or Google, whatever it is. But it's not like an abstraction layer that's floating above all those but now you're starting to see that. In fact, it re:Invent in November. The ecosystem it seemed like was everybody was focused on developing what we call these super clouds. And again, it's tongue in cheek, this abstraction layer it hides the underlying complexity of the primitives and the APIs adds incremental value on top of that. So there's a company Prosimo, which Steve Herrod, is invested in and others Praveen Akkiraju, whom I'm sure you know from Viptela. Aviatrix is another company that's sort of, Steve Malaney has come on theCUBE and talked about what they're doing. Like yeah, that's super cloud. It seems like it's something new and different than just multi-cloud which is kind of connecting in to different clouds. It's that value on top. What do you think about that? And what does that mean for networking? >> That's a really good point because we are starting to see the inception of organizations going beyond having multiple cloud providers and looking at starting to deploy applications across multiple clouds. It's still really early. The vast majority of organizations are still, I use this application for this cloud and this application for that cloud. But that's the next frontier. That's what they're trying to solve is how do I create this basically cloud fabric and make it as simple as possible. And again, all the things we've been talking about how do I, instead of you having to learn Amazon, Google, Azure networking technology, learn mine, I'll take care of it, but I'll abstract all that complexity from you and make it so much simpler to be able to connect to these interconnect, and connect to them in a seamless fashion. And so that's what they're really trying to do is they're. And the hard part is it takes really sophisticated solutions to remove that high level of complexity and make it simple for an organization to do that. So yeah, absolutely. >> If I had more time I'd make it shorter as somebody who writes a lot. And I think you're right. I think it is future. It's not definitely not here today, but the other thing is it ties into digital transformation. We used this again, throw that buzzword around but, companies not just tech company, I mean everybody's becoming like a tech company, but organizations, financial services companies, healthcare they're building their own clouds on top of the hyperscalers who spend $100 billion a year on CapEx. And that seems to be a trend that I think is going to take legs over this next decade. Just like in the previous decade everybody was thinking, okay, we're going to SaaSify our business softwares (indistinct) the world. And now it's software and cloud services are the way in which I'm going to create customer experiences. >> Correct, yeah. It's why should I go out and make an investment in technology when the technology's already there? And I can rent it for when I need it scale it as I need it and, and do all of that. I agree with that. I think that's something that we're seeing. The interesting part though is that when we look at our data points, probably let than 40% of the applications and workloads are in the cloud today. So there's still a role that the corporate data center plays. We are seeing over time. They expect that to progress and transition but I think there's still always going to be maybe a quarter of the workloads and applications may never leave. Depending on how they're built, et cetera. So there's always going to be that distributed environment where you've got workloads in the private data centers, workloads in multiple public clouds. And also, the big thing too is don't forget about the edge. We're seeing a lot more edge activity take place as organizations recognize, as they deploy more IOT devices, and want to get realtime business insights they've got to deploy the compute there. >> Well, and that's something that I wanted to ask you about, but going back to what you just said, which is, I agree with you. So that suggests to me, Bob that we're just kind of, with cloud just entering the steep part of the S curve. Amazon's headed toward $100 billion, run rate business. Maybe they probably won't get there this year but they will next year. We're entering that steep growth phase, really could be. It's incredible. But I wanted to ask you about the edge. Because you're right is we got to move compute to the edge, ARM is going to dominate. I would think, the edge. They already are with our smartphones. How do you see the cloud guys participating in the edge? Whether it was Andy Jassy, or now Adam Selipsky or anybody at Amazon. They have the dogma of in the fullness of time all workloads are going to be in the cloud. So they either have to change their definition of cloud. Or they're wrong. So what's your thought on that? >> I think it really starts coming down to what's your definition of edge. And so, much like when the cloud technologies first came about and you had all the shadow IT. Everyone running off, and everyone thought oh this is all great, until you realized you had to operationalize it and you had to pull the brakes. Stop doing that. We're going to make sure IT operations. >> Call the CIO up. Exactly, finding out where stuff was by going through accounting and seeing credit card charges. For the edge what we've seen I think is maybe organizations really saying I've got to deploy my servers in my own site. Right at that edge in order to get the lowest possible latency. And so what I think we're starting to see is organizations looking at that and saying, okay well I'm in a metro and I've got 25 locations in a metro. And I've deployed technology to every single one of those sites. Do I need it there? Or can I put it in an Equinix facility that's less than five milliseconds from all 25 sites? So I think there's starting to be this pragmatic approach of looking at let's look at the edge, let's take a look at what type of latencies. What is our definition of real time. When do we actually need the data and so forth? What kind of connectivity do we have? And then from there figure out how we go about connecting it. And so for companies like AWS and Google and Azure a lot of them there's local zones and things like that. They're deploying them in those colos because they don't have data centers in every metro but they can leverage an Equinix. They can leverage someone else's hardware that's there to deploy their software stack within that location. So I think that's something that we're starting to see more and more of as the edge. And obviously the association with the telcos as well. They've got a great footprint. If you want to get close to the edge with their colos Their home offices and things like that and whatnot. Their ability to move the compute closer to the edge, the base stations of the antennas and things like that, are certainly significant. And that's why you're seeing the wavelengths and things like that, programs like that. >> So I was going to close, but there some really interesting topics you just brought up. Call it whatever you going to call it near edge, far edge or deep edge. And you mentioned real time. Yeah. So for those Equinix data centers, I don't need, true real time. But for Tesla, I need real time. I need real time inference at the edge probably using a bunch of ARM cores and I can't go back to any cloud. How do you look at that? Both, I would think big markets. Do you have a sense as to, is one bigger than the other? Are they both just enormous or we don't even know yet. >> I'm not sure that we know yet. I think certainly, it's riding the tail of the IOTs. So the more sensors, the more things that are deployed the more that, that data businesses realize they can leverage that data to make real time business insights to drive either better experiences. And if you're in retail. So location based services and real time offer management it doesn't do any good to offer a coupon for something that you've, that's 40 yards behind you. That that's past, like you said with the cars there's, I've seen some studies recently. They say, well, based on the latency, if the command is to stop and you're at one millisecond, it stops within four inches. If you are at 50 milliseconds, it stops 10 feet later. That's a big difference. And I don't know if those numbers are right but you get the idea about the impact, what the real time impact is of. >> Margin is not huge. >> Exactly, so that's where organizations, I think first and foremost need to take a pragmatic approach to determine what is real time for us. What's our definition of it. And then that can lead them to where do I need to place this compute technology? And then that goes to how do I then connect to it? So for the Teslas and so forth, obviously you're going to want 5G connections if possible. Ultra low latency and not just any 5G. The good stuff, the millimeter bandwidth stuff that that's the ultra low latency. >> So let's wrap. So, what's going on in your research world obviously the big, big acquisition tech target they seem to be investing in ESG. You guys are really growing and hiring. That's awesome. Any research that you're working on? >> Yeah, there's a couple of couple of projects we have going on right now. We're wrapping up a four part distributed cloud research series. So we did it on distributed cloud infrastructure. Applications, observability. And now this last one is on the edge. Coincidentally. So we're working on that. We've got some new network modernization research that we've published. And we're going to be looking, from a networking perspective looking at end-to-end network modernization which will be coming out soon. >> Awesome, Bob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really would love to have you back and chat about some of those things. Observability hot space. God, I wish we had more time. >> Absolutely, appreciate it, thanks. >> And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Cisco is a company at the crossroads. It's transitioning from a high margin hardware business to a software subscription-based model, which also should be high margin through both organic moves and targeted acquisitions. It's doing so in the context of massive macro shifts to digital in the cloud. We believe Cisco's dominant position in networking combined with a large market opportunity and a strong track record of earning customer trust, put the company in a good position to capitalize on cloud momentum. However, there are clear challenges ahead for Cisco, not the least of which is the growing complexity of its portfolio, a large legacy business, and the mandate to maintain its higher profitability profile as it transitions into a new business model. Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki-bond cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we welcome in Zeus Kerravala, who's the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, long time Cisco watcher who together with me crafted the premise of today's session. Zeus, great to see you welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. It's always a pleasure to be with you guys. >> Okay, here's what we're going to talk about today, set the agenda. The catalyst for this session, Zeus and I attended Cisco's financial analyst day. We received a day and a half of firehose presentations, drill downs, interactions, Q and A with Cisco execs and one key customer. So we're going to share our takeaways from these sessions and add our additional thoughts. Now, in particular, we're going to talk about Cisco's TAM, its transformation to a subscription-based model, and how we see that evolving. As always, we're going to bring in some ETR spending data for context and get Zeus' take on what that tells us. And we'll end with a summary of Cisco's cloud strategy and outlook for how it could win in the cloud. So let's talk about Cisco's sort of structure and TAM opportunities. First, Zeus, Cisco has four main lines of business where it's organized it's executives around sort of four product areas. And it's got a large service component as well. Network equipment, SP routing, data center, collaboration that security, and as I say services, that's not necessarily how it's going to market, but that's kind of the way it organizes its ELT, its executive leadership team. >> Yeah, the in fact, the ELT has been organized around those products, as you said. It used to report to the street three product segments, infrastructure platforms, which was by far the biggest, it was all their networking equipment, then applications, and then security. Now it's moved to five new segments, secure agile networks, hybrid work, end to end security, internet for the future and optimized app experiences. And I think what Cisco's trying to do is align their, the way they report along the lines of the way customers buy. 'Cause I think before, you know, they had a very simplistic model before. It was just infrastructure, apps, and security. The ELT is organized around product roadmap and the product innovation, but that's not necessarily the way customers purchase things and so, purchase things so I think they've tried to change things a little bit there. When you look at those segments though, you know, by, it's interesting. They're all big, right? So, by far the biggest distilled networking, which is almost a hundred billion dollar TAM as they reported and they have it growing a about a 9% CAGR as reported by other analyst firms. And when you think about how mature networking is Dave, the fact that that's still growing at high single digit CAGR is still pretty remarkable. So I think that's one of those things that, you know, watchers of Cisco historically have been calling for the network to be commoditized for decades. For as long as I've been watching Cisco, we've been, people have been waiting for the network to be commoditized. My thesis has always been, if you can drive enough innovation into things, you can stave off commoditization and that's what they've done. But that's really the anchor for them to sell all their other products, some of which are higher margin, some which are a little bit sore, but they're all good high margin businesses to your point. >> Awesome. We're going to dig into that. So, so they flattened the organization when Geckler left. You've got Todd Nightingale, Jonathan Davidson, Liz Centoni, and Jeetu Patel who we heard from and we'll make some comments on what we heard from them. One of the big takeaways at the financial analysts meeting was on the TAM, as you just mentioned. Liz Centoni who also is heavily involved in strategy and the CFO Scott Herren, showed this slide, which speaks to the company's TAM and the organizational structure that you were just talking about. So the big message was that Cisco has got a large and growing market, you know, no shortage of available market. Somewhere between eight and 900 billion, depending on which of the slides you pull out of the deck. And ironically Zeus, when you look at the current markets number here on the right hand side of this slide, 260 billion, it just about matches the company's market cap. Maybe an interesting coincidence, but at any rate, what was your takeaway from this data? >> Well, I think, you know, the big takeaway from the data is there's still a lot of room ahead for Cisco to grow, right? Again, this is a, it's a company that I think most people would put in the camp of legacy IT vendor, just because of how long they've been around. But they have done a very good job of staving off innovation. And part of that is just these markets that they play in continue to grow and they continue to have challenges that they can solve. I think one of the things Cisco has done though, since the arrival of Chuck Robbins, is they don't fight these trends anymore, Dave. I know prior to Chuck's arrival, they really fought the tide of software defined networking and you know, trends like that, and even cloud to some extent. And I remember one of the first meetings I had with Chuck, I asked him about that and he said that Cisco will never do that again. That under his watch, if customers are going through a market transition, Cisco wants to lead them through it, not try and hold them back. And I think for that reason, they're able to look at, all of those trends and try and take a leadership position in them, even though you might look at some of those and feel that some of them might be detrimental to Cisco's business in the short term. So something like software defined WANs, which you would throw into secure agile networks, certainly doesn't, may not carry the same kind of RPOs and margins with it that their traditional routers did, but ultimately customers are going to buy it and Cisco would like to be the ones to sell it to them. >> You know, you bring up a great point. This industry is littered, there's a graveyard of executives who fought the trend. Many people, some people remember Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation. "Unix is snake oil," is what he said. IBM mainframe guys said, "PCs are a toy." And of course the history, they were the wrong side of history. The other big takeaway was the shift to software in subscription. They really made a big point of this. Here's a chart Cisco showed a couple of times to make the point that it's one of the largest software companies in the world. You know, in the top 10. They also made the point that Chuck Robbins, when he joined in 2015, and since that time, it's nearly 4x'ed it's subscription software revenue, and roughly doubled its software sales. And it now has an RPO, remaining performance obligations, that exceeds 30 billion. And it's committing to grow its subscription business in the forward-looking statements by 15 to 17% CAGR through 25, which would imply about a doubling of these, the blue lines. Zeus, it's unclear if that forward-looking forecast is just software. I presume it includes some services, but as Herren pointed out, over time, these services will be bundled into the product revenue, same way SAS companies do it. But the point is Cisco is committed, like many of their peers, to moving to an ARR model. But please, share your thoughts on Cisco's move to software subscriptions and how you see the future of consumption-based pricing. >> Yeah, this has been a big shift for Cisco, obviously. It's one that's highly disruptive. It's one that I know gave their partners a lot of angst for a long time because when you sell things upfront, you get a big check for selling that, right? And when you sell things in a subscription model, you get a much smaller check for a number of months over the period of the contract. It also changes the way you deal with the customer. When you sell a one-time product, you basically wipe your hands. You come back in three or four years and say, "it's time to upgrade." When you sell a subscription, now, the one thing that I've tried to talk to Cisco and its partners about is customers don't renew things they don't use. And so it becomes incumbent on the partner, it becomes incumbent upon Cisco to make sure that things that the customer is subscribing to, that they do use. And so Cisco's had to create a customer success organization. They've had to help their partners create those customer success organizations. So it's really changed the model. And Cisco not only made the shift, they've done it faster than they actually had originally forecast. So during the financial analyst day, they actually touted their execution on software, noting that it hit it's 30% revenue as percent of total target well before it was supposed to, it's actually exceeded its targets. And now it's looking to increase that to, it actually raised its guidance in this area a little bit by a few percentage points, looking out over the next few years. And so it's moved to the subscription model, Dave, the thing that you brought up, which I do see as somewhat of a challenge is the shift to consumption-based pricing. So subscription is one thing in that I write you a check every month for the same amount. When I go to the consumption-based pricing, that's easy to do for cloud services, things like WebEx or Duo or, you know, CloudLock, some of the security products. That that shift should be relatively simple. If customers want to buy it that way. It's unclear as to how you do that when you're selling on-prem equipment with the software add-on to it because in that case, you have to put metering technology in to understand how much they're using. You have to have a minimum baseline to start with. They've done it in some respects. The old HCS product that they sold, the Telcos, actually was sold with a minimum commit and then they tacked on a utilization on top of that. So maybe they move into that kind of model. But I know it's something that they've, they get asked about a lot. I know they're still thinking about it, but it's something that I believe is coming and it's going to come pretty fast. >> I want to pick up on that because I think, you know, they made the point that we're one of the top 10 software companies in the world. It's very difficult for hardware companies to make the transition to software. You know, HP couldn't do it. >> Well, no one's done it. >> Well, IBM has kind of done it, but they really struggle. It's kind of this mishmash of tooling and software products that aren't really well-integrated. But, I would say this, everybody now, Cisco, Dell, HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, pretty much all the traditional hardware players are trying to move to an as a service model or at least for a portion of their business. HPE's all in, Dell transitioning. And for the most part, I would make the following observation. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. They're pretty much following a SAS like model, which in my view is outdated and kind of flawed from a customer standpoint. All these guys say, "Hey, we're doing this because "this is what the customers want." I think the cloud is really a true consumption based model. And if you look at modern SAS companies, a lot of the startups, they're moving to a consumption based model. You see that with Snowflake, you see that with Stripe. Now they will offer incentives. But most of the traditional enterprise players, they're saying, "Okay, pay us upfront, "commit to some base level. "If you go over it, you know, "we'll charge you for it. "If you go under it, you're still going to pay "for that base level." So it's not true consumption base. It's not really necessarily the customer's best interest. So that's, I think there's some learnings there that are going to have to play out. >> Yeah, the reason customers are shying away from that SAS type model, I think during the pandemic, the one thing we learned, Dave, is that the business will ebb and flow greatly from month to month sometimes. And I was talking with somebody that worked for one of the big hotel chains, and she was telling me that what their CRM providers, she wouldn't tell me who it was, except said it rhymed with Shmalesforce, that their utilization of it went from, you know, from a nice steady level to spiking really high when customers started calling in to cancel hotel rooms. And then it dropped down to almost nothing as we went through that period of stay at home. And now it's risen back up. And so for her, she wanted to move to a consumption-based model because what happens otherwise is you wind up buying for peak utilization, your software subscriptions go largely underutilized the majority of the year, and you wind up paying, you know, a lot more than you need to. If you go to more of a true consumption model, it's harder to model out from a financial perspective 'cause there's a lot of ebbs and flows in the business, but over a longer period of time, it's more cost-effective, right? And so the, again, what the pandemic taught us was we don't really know what we're going to need from a consumption standpoint, you know, nevermind a year from now, maybe even six months from now. And consumption just creates a lot more flexibility and agility. You can scale up, you can scale down. You can bring in users, you can take out users, you can add consultants, things like that. And it just, it's much more aligned with the way businesses are run today. >> Yeah, churn is a silent killer of a software company. And so there's retention is the key here. So again, I think there's lots of learning. Let's put Cisco into context with some of its peers. So this chart we developed compares five companies to Cisco. Core Dell, meaning Dell, without VMware. VMware, HPE, IBM, we've put an AWS, and then Cisco as, IBM, AWS and Cisco is the integrated plays. So the chart shows the latest quarterly revenue multiplied by four to get a run rate, a three-year growth outlook, gross margin percentage, market cap, and revenue multiple. And the key points here are that one, Cisco has got a pretty awesome business model. It's got 60% gross margin, strong operating margins, not shown here, but in the mid twenties, 25%. It's got a higher growth rate than most of its peers. And as such, a much better, multiple than say, for instance, Core Dell gets 33 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE is double that. IBM's below two X. Cisco's revenue multiple rivals VMware, which is a pure software company. Now in a large part that's because VMware stock took a hit recently, but still the point is obvious. Cisco's got a great business. Now for context, we've added AWS, which blows away any company on this chart. We've inferred a market cap of nearly 600 billion, which frankly is conservative at a 10 X revenue multiple given it's inferred margins and growth rate. Now Zeus, if AWS were a separate company, it could have a market cap that approached 800 billion in my view. But what does this data tell you? >> Well, it just tells me that Cisco continues to be a very well-run company that has staved off commoditization, despite the calling for it for years. And I think the big lesson, and I've talked to financial analysts about this over the years, is that if, I don't really believe anything in this world is a commodity, Dave. I think even when Cisco went to the server market, if you remember back then, they created a new way of handling memory management. They were getting well above average margins for service, albeit less than Cisco's network margins, but still above average for server margins. And so I think if you can continue to innovate, you will see the margin stay where they are. You will see customers continue to buy and refresh. And I think one of the challenges Cisco's had in the past, and this is where the subscription business will help, is getting customers to stay with the latest and greatest. Prior to this refresh of network equipment, some of the stuff that I've seen in the fields, 10, 15 years old, once you move to that sell me a box and then tack on the subscription revenue that you pay month by month, you do drive more consistent refresh. Think about the way you just handle your own mobile phone. If you had to go pay, you know, a thousand dollars every three years, you might not do it at that three-year cycle. If you pay 40 bucks a month, every time there's a new phone, you're going to take it, right? So I think Cisco is able to drive greater, better refresh, keep their customers current, keep the features in there. And we've seen that with a lot of the new products. The new Cat 9,000, some of the new service provider products, the new wifi products, they've all done very well. In fact, they've all outpaced their previous generation products as far as growth rate goes. And so I think that is a testament to the way they've run the business. But I do think when people bucket Cisco in with HP and Dell, and I understand why they do, their businesses were similar at one time, it's really not a true comparison anymore. I think Cisco has completely changed their business and they're not trying to commoditize markets, they're trying to drive innovation and keep the margins up, where I think HP and Dell tend to really compete on price versus innovation. >> Well, and we are going to get to this point about the tailwinds and headwinds and cloud, and how Cisco to do it. But, to your point about, you know, the cell phone analogy. To the extent that Cisco can make that seamless for customers could hide that underlying complexity, that's going to be critical for the cloud. Now, but before we get there, I want to talk about one of the reasons why Cisco such a high multiple, and has been able to preserve its margins, to your point, not being commoditized. And it's been able to grow both organically, but also has a strong history of M and A. It's this chart shows a dominant position in core networking. So this shows, so ETR data within the Fortune 500. It plots companies in the ETR taxonomy in two dimensions, net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending velocity, and market share on the horizontal axis, which is a measure of presence in the survey. It's not like IDC market share, it's mentioned market share if you will. The point is Cisco is far and away the most pervasive player in the market, it's generally held its dominant position. Although, it's been under pressure in the last few years in core networking, but it retains or maintains a very respectable net score and consistently performs well for such a large company. Zeus, anything you'd add with respect to Cisco's core networking business? >> Yeah, it's maintained a dominant network position historically. I think part of because it drives good products, but also because the competitive landscape, historically has been pretty weak, right? We saw companies like 3Com and Nortel who aren't around anymore. It'll be interesting to see moving forward now that companies like VMware are involved in networking. AWS is interested in networking. Arista is a much stronger company. You know, Juniper bought Mist and is in better position. Even Extreme Networks who most people thought was dead a few years ago has made a number of acquisitions and is now a billion dollar company. So while Cisco has done a great job of execution, they've done a great job on the innovation side, their competitive landscape, looking out over the next five years, I think is going to be more difficult than it has been over the previous five years. And largely, Dave, I think that's good for Cisco. I think whenever Cisco's pressed a little bit from competition, they tend to step on the innovation gas a little bit more. And I look back and even just the transition when VMware bought Nicira, that got Cisco's SDN business into gear, like nothing else could have, right? So competition for that company, they always seem to respond well to it. >> So, let's break down Cisco's net score a little bit. Explain why the company has been able to hold its spending momentum despite its large size. This will give you a little insight to the survey. So this chart shows the granular components of net score. The lime green is new adoptions to Cisco. The forest green is spending more than 6%. The gray is flat plus or minus 5%. The pink is spending drops by more than 5%. And the red is we're chucking the platform, we're getting off. And Cisco's overall net score here is 25%, which for a company of its size speaks to the relationships that it has with customers. It's of course got a fat middle in the gray area, like all sort of large established companies. But very low defections as well, it's got low new adoptions. But very respectable. So that is background, Zeus. Let's look at spending momentum over time across Cisco's portfolio. So this chart shows Cisco's net score by that methodology within the ETR taxonomy for Cisco over three survey periods. And what jumps out is Meraki on the left, very strong. Virtualization business, its core networking, analytics and security, all showing upward momentum. AppD is a little bit concerning, but that could be related to Cisco's sort of pivot to full stack observability. So maybe AppD is being bundled there. Although some practitioners have cited to us some concerns in that space. And then WebEx at the end of the chart, it's showing some relative strength, but not that high. Zeus, maybe you could comment on Meraki and any other takeaways across the portfolio. >> Yeah, Meraki has proven to be an excellent acquisition for Cisco. In fact, you might, I think it's arguable to say it's its best acquisition in history going all the way back to camp Kalpana and Grand Junction, the ones that brought up catalyst switches. So, in fact, I think Meraki's revenue might be larger than security now. So, that shows you the momentum it has. I think one of the lessons it brought to Cisco was that simpler is better, sometimes. I think when they first bought Meraki, the way Meraki's deployed, it's very easy to set up. There's a lot of engineering work though that goes into making a product simple to use. And I think a lot of Cisco engineers historically looked at Meraki as, that's a little bit of a toy. It's meant for small businesses, things like that, but it's not for enterprise. But, Rocky's done a nice job of expanding the portfolio, of leveraging the cloud for analytics and showing you a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily get from traditional networking equipment. And one of the things that I was really delighted to see was when they put Todd Nightingale in charge of all the networking business, because that showed to me that Chuck Robbins understood that the things Meraki were doing were right and they infuse a little bit of Meraki into the rest of the company. You know, that's certainly a good thing. The other areas that you showed on the chart, not really a surprise, Dave. When you think of the shift hybrid work and you think of the, some of the other transitions going on, I think you would expect to see the server business in decline, the storage business, you know, maybe in a little bit of decline, just because people aren't building out data centers. Where the other ones are related more to hybrid working, hybrid cloud, things like that. So it is what you would expect. The WebEx one was interesting too, because it did show somewhat of a dip and then a rise. And I think that's indicative of what we've seen in the collaboration space since the pandemic came about. Companies like Zoom and RingCentral really got a lot of the headlines. Again, when you, the comment I made on competition, Cisco got caught a little bit flat-footed, they've caught up in features and now they really stepped on the gas there. Chuck joked that he gave the WebEx team a bit of a blank check to go do what it had to do. And I don't think that was a joke. I think he actually did that because they've added more features into WebEx in the last year then I think they did the previous five years before that. >> Well, let's just drill into video conferencing real quick here, if we could. Here's that two dimensional view, again, showing net score against market share or pervasiveness of mentions, and you can see Microsoft Teams in the upper right. I mean, it's off the chart, literally. Zoom's well ahead of Cisco in terms of, you know, mentions presence. And that could be a spate of freemium, you know, but it's basically a three horse race in this game. And Cisco, I don't think is trying to take Zoom head on, rather it seems to be making WebEx a core part of its broader collaboration agenda. But Zeus, maybe you could comment. >> Well, it's all coming together, right? So, it's hard to decouple calling from video from meetings. All of the vendors, including Teams, are going after the hybrid work experience. And if you believe the future is hybrid and not just work from home, then Cisco does have a pretty interesting advantage because it's the only one that makes its own end points, where Teams and Zoom doesn't. And so that end to end experience it can deliver. The Microsoft Teams one's interesting because that product, frankly, when you talk to users, it doesn't have a great user score, like as far as user satisfaction goes, but the one thing Microsoft has done a very good job of is bundling it in to the Office365 licenses, making it very easy for IT to deploy. Zoom is a little bit in the middle where they've appealed to the users. They've done a better job of appealing to IT, but there is a, there is a battleground now going on where video's not just video. It includes calling, includes meetings, includes room systems now, and I think this hybrid work friend is going to change the way we think about these meeting tools. >> Now we'd be remiss if we didn't spend a moment talking about security as a key part of Cisco's business. And we have a graphic on this same kind of X, Y. And it's been, we've seen several quarters of growth. Although, the last quarter security growth was in the low single digits, but Cisco is a major player in security. And this X, Y graph shows, they've got both a large presence and a solid spending momentum. Not nearly as much momentum as Okta or Zscaler or a CrowdStrike and some of the smaller companies, but they're, these guys are on a rocket ship, but others that we featured in these episodes, but much more than respectable for Cisco. And security is critical to the strategy. It's a big part of the subscriber base. And the last thing, Zeus, I'll say about Cisco made the point in analyst day, that this market is crowded. You can see that in this chart. And their goal is to simplify this picture and make it easier for customers to secure their data and apps. But that's not easy, Zeus. What are your thoughts on Cisco's security opportunities? >> Yeah, I've been waiting for Cisco go to break up in security a little more than it has. I do think, I was talking with a CSO the other day, Dave, that said to me he's starting to understand that you don't have to have best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, there's a lot of buyers now will tell you that if you try and have best of breed everywhere, it actually creates a negative when it comes to threat protection because keeping all the policies and things up to date is very, very difficult. And so the industry is moving more to a platform model, right? Now, the challenge for Cisco is how do you get that, the customer to think of the network as part of the platform? Because while the platform model, I think, is starting to gain traction, FloridaNet, Palo Alto, even McAfee, companies like that also have their own version of a security platform. And if you look at the financial performance of companies like FloridaNet and Palo Alto over the past, you know, over the past couple of years, they've been through the roof, right? And so I think an interesting and unique challenge for Cisco is can they convince the security buyer that the network is as important a part of that platform as any other component? If they can do that, I think they can break away from the pack. If not, then they'll stay mixed in with those, you know, Palo, FloridaNet, Checkpoint, and, you know, and Cisco, in that mix. But I do think that may present their single biggest needle moving opportunity just because of how big the security TAM is, and the fact that there is no de facto leader in security today. If they could gain the same kind of position in security as they have a networking, who, I mean, that would move the needle like no other market would. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that they're coming at security, obviously from a position of networking strength. You've got, to your point, you've got best of breed, Okta in identity, you got CrowdStrike in endpoint, Zscaler in cloud security. They're all growing like crazy. And you got Cisco and you know, Palo Alto, CSOs tell us they want to work with Palo Alto because they're the thought leader and they're obviously a major player here. You mentioned FloridaNet, there's a zillion others. We could talk all day about security. But let's bring it back to cloud. We've talked about a number of the piece in Cisco's portfolio, and we haven't really spent any time on full stack observability, which is a big push for Cisco with AppD, Intersight and the ThousandEyes acquisition. And that plays into this equation. But my take, Zeus, is Cisco has a number of cloud knobs that it can turn, it sells core networking equipment to hyperscalers. It can be the abstraction layer to connect on-prem to the cloud and hybrid and across clouds. And it's in a good position with Telcos too, to go after the 5G. But let's use this chart to talk about Cisco's cloud prospects. It's an ETR cut of the cloud customer spending. So we cut it by cloud customers. And they're are, I don't know, 800 or so in the survey. And then looking at various companies performance within that cut. So these are companies that compete, or in the case of HashiCorp, partner with Cisco at some level. Let me just set this up and get your take. So the insert on the chart by the way shows the raw data that positions each dot, the net score and the shared n, i.e. the number of accounts in the survey that responded. The key points, first of all, Azure and AWS, dominant players in cloud. GCP is a distant third. We've reported on that a lot. Not only are these two companies big, they have spending momentum on their platforms. They're growing, they are on that flywheel. Second point, VMware and Cisco are very prominent. They have huge customer bases. And while they're often on a collision course, there's lots of room in cloud for multiple players. When we plotted some other Cisco properties like AppD and Meraki, which as we said, is strong. And then for context, we've placed Dell, HPE, Aruba, IBM and Oracle. And also VMware cloud and AWS, which is notable on its elevation. And as I say, we've added HashiCorp because they're critical partner of Cisco and it's a multi-cloud play. Okay, Zeus, there's the setup. What does Cisco have to do to make the cloud a tailwind? Let's talk about strategy, tailwinds, headwinds, competition, and bottom line it for us. >> Yeah, well, I do think, well, I talked about security being the biggest needle mover for Cisco, I think its biggest challenge is convincing Wall Street in particular, that the cloud is a tailwind. I think if you look at the companies with the really high multiples to their stock, Dave, they're all ones where they're viewed as, they go along with the cloud ride, Right? So the, if you can associate yourself with the cloud and then people believe that the cloud is going to, more cloud equals more business, that obviously creates a better multiple because the cloud has almost infinite potential ahead of it. Now with respect to Cisco, I do think cloud has presented somewhat of a double-edged sword for Cisco. I don't believe the current consumption model for cloud is really a tailwind for Cisco, not really a headwind, but it doesn't really change Cisco's business. But I do think the very definition of cloud is changing before our eyes, Dave. And it's shifting away from centralized clouds. If you think of the way customers bought cloud before, it might have used AWS, it might've used Azure, but it really, that's not really multi-cloud, it's just multiple clouds in which I put things in these centralized resources. It's shifting more to this concept of distributed cloud in which a single application can be built using resources from your private cloud, for AWS, from Azure, from Edge locations, all the cloud providers have built their portfolios to support this concept of distributed cloud and what becomes important there, is a highly agile dynamic network. And in that case with distributed cloud, that is a tailwind for Cisco because now the network is that resource that ties all those distributed cloud components together. Now the network itself has to change. It needs to become a lot more agile and microservices and container friendly itself so I can spin up resources and, you know, in an Edge location, as fast as I can on-prem and things like that. But I do think it creates another wave of innovation and networking, and in that case, I think it does act as a tailwind for Cisco, aside from just the work it's done with the web scalers, you know, those types of companies. So, but I do think that Cisco needs to rethink its delivery model on network services somewhat to take advantage of that. >> At the analyst meeting, Cisco made the point that it does sell to the hyperscalers. It talked about the top six hyperscalers. You know, you had mentioned to me, maybe IBM and Oracle were in there. I always talk about four hyperscalers and only four, but that's fine. Here's my question. Practitioners have told me, buyers have told me, the more money and more workloads I put in the cloud, the less I spend with Cisco. Now, even though that might be Cisco gear powering those clouds, do you see that as a potential threat in that they don't own that relationship anymore and value will confer to the cloud players? >> Yeah, that's, I've heard that too. And I don't, I believe that's true when it comes to general purpose compute. You're probably not buying as many UCS servers and things like that because you are putting them in the cloud. But I do think you do need a refresh the network. I think the network becomes a very important role, plays a very important role there. The variant, the really interesting trend will be, what is your WAM look like? Do you have thousands of workers scattered all over the place, or do you just have a few centralized locations? So I think also, you know, Cisco will wind up providing connectivity within the cloud. If you think of the transition we've seen in other industries, Dave, as far as cloud goes, you think of, you know, F5, a company like that. People thought that AWS would commoditize F5's business because AWS provides their own load balancers, right? But what AWS provides is a very basic, very basic functionality and then use F5's virtual edition or a cloud edition for a lot of the advanced capabilities. And I think you'll see the same thing with the cloud that customers will start buying versions of Cisco that go in the cloud to drive a lot of those advanced capabilities that only Cisco delivers. And so I think you wind up buying more Cisco over time, although the per unit price of what you buy might be a little bit lower. If that makes sense here. >> It does, I think it makes a lot of sense and that fits into the cloud model. You know, you bring up a good point, the conversation with the customer was Rakuten. And that individual was essentially sharing with us, somebody was asking, one of the analysts was asking, "Well, what about the cloud guys? "Aren't they going to really threaten the whole Telco "industry and disrupt it?" And his point was, "Look at, this stuff is not trivial." So to your point, you know, maybe they'll provide some basic functionality. Kind of like they do in a lot of different areas. Data protection is another good example. Security is another good example. Where there's plenty of room for partners, competitors, of on-prem players to add value. And I've always said, "Look, the opportunity "is the cloud players spend 100 billion dollars a year "on CapEx." It's a gift to companies like Cisco who can build an abstraction layer that connects on-prem, cloud for hybrid, across clouds, out to the edge, and really be that layer that is that layer that takes advantage of cloud native, but also delivers that experience, I don't want to use the word seamlessly, but that experience across those clouds as the cloud expands. And that's fundamentally Cisco's cloud strategy, isn't it? >> Oh yeah. And I think people have underestimated over the years, how hard it is to build good networking products. Anybody can go get some silicon and build a product to connect two things together. The question is, can you do it at scale? Can you do it securely? And lots of companies have tried to commoditize networking, you know, White Boxes was looked at as the existential threat to Cisco. Huawei was looked at as the big threat to Cisco. And all of those have kind of come and gone because building high quality network equipment that scales is tough. And it's tougher than most people realize. And your other point on the cloud providers as well, they will provide a basic level of functionality. You know, AWS network equipment doesn't work in Azure. And Azure stuff doesn't work in Google, and Google doesn't work in AWS. And so you do need a third party to come in and act as almost the cloud middleware that can connect all those things together with a consistent set of policies. And that's what Cisco does really well. They did that, you know back when they were founded with routing protocols and you can think this is just an extension of what they're doing just up at the cloud layer. >> Excellent. Okay, Zeus, we're going to leave it there. Thanks to my guest today, Zeus Kerravala. Great analysis as always. Would love to have you back. Check out ZKresearch.com to reach him. Thank you again. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Now, remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. All these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Braking Analysis" podcast, and you can connect on Twitter at DVallante or email me David.Vallante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for the comments on LinkedIn. Check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well and we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat intro music) >> More than a decade ago, the team at Wikibon coined the term Server SAN. We saw the opportunity to dramatically change the storage infrastructure layer and predicted a major change in technologies that would hit the market. Server SAN had three fundamental attributes. First of all, it was software led. So all the traditionally expensive controller functions like snapshots and clones and de-dupe and replication, compression, encryption, et cetera, they were done in software directly challenging a two to three decade long storage controller paradigm. The second principle was it leveraged and shared storage inside of servers. And the third it enabled any-to-any typology between servers and storage. Now, at the time we defined this coming trend in a relatively narrow sense inside of a data center location, for example, but in the past decade, two additional major trends have emerged. First the software defined data center became the dominant model, thanks to VMware and others. And while this eliminated a lot of overhead, it also exposed another problem. Specifically data centers today allocate probably we estimate around 35% of CPU cores and cycles to managing things like storage and network and security, offloading those functions. This is wasted cores and doing this with traditional general purpose x86 processors is expensive and it's not efficient. This is why we've been reporting so aggressively on ARM's ascendancy into the enterprise. It's not only coming it's here and we're going to talk about that today. The second mega trend is cloud computing. Hyperscale infrastructure has allowed technology companies to put a management and control plane into the cloud and expand beyond our narrow server SAN scope within a single data center and support the management of distributed data at massive scale. And today we're on the cusp of a new era of infrastructure. And one of the startups in this space is Nebulon. Hello everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this Cube Conversation where we welcome in two great guests, Craig Nunes, Cube alum, co-founder and COO at Nebulon and Tobias Flitsch who's director of product management at Nebulon. Guys, welcome. Great to see you. >> So good to be here Dave. Feels awesome. >> Soon, face to face. Craig, I'm heading your way. >> I can't wait. >> Craig, you heard my narrative upfront and I'm wondering are those the trends that you guys saw when you, when you started the company, what are the major shifts in the world today that, that caused you and your co-founders to launch Nebulon? >> Yeah, I'll give you sort of the way we think about the world, which I think aligns super right with, with what you're talking about, you know, over the last several years, organizations have had a great deal of experience with public cloud data centers. And I think like any platform or technology that is, you know, gets its use in a variety of ways, you know, a bit of savvy is being developed by organizations on, you know, what do I put where, how do I manage things in the most efficient way possible? And there are, in terms of the types of folks we're focused on in Nebulon's business, we see now kind of three groups of people emerging, and, and we sort of simply coined three terms, the returners, the removers, and the remainers. I'll explain what I mean by each of those, the returners are folks who maybe early on, you know, hit the gas on cloud, moved, you know, everything in, a lot in, and realize that while it's awesome for some things, for other things, it was less optimal. Maybe cost became a factor or visibility into what was going on with their data was a factor, security, service levels, whatever. And they've decided to move some of those workloads back. Returners. There are what I call the removers that are taking workloads from, you know, born in the cloud. On-prem, you know, and this was talked a lot about in Martine's blog that, you know, talked about a lot of the growth companies that built up such a large footprint in the public cloud, that economics were kind of working against them. You can, depending on the knobs you turn, you know, you're probably spending two and a half X, two X, what you might spend if you own your own factory. And you can argue about, you know, where your leverage is in negotiating your pricing with the cloud vendors, but there's a big gap. The last one is, and I think probably the most significant in terms of who we've engaged with is the remainers. And the remainers are, you know, hybrid IT organizations. They've got assets in the cloud and on-prem, they aspire to an operational model that is consistent across everything and, you know, leveraging all the best stuff that they observed in their cloud-based assets. And it's kind of our view that frankly we take from, from this constituency that, when people talk about cloud or cloud first, they're moving to something that is really more an operating model versus a destination or data center choice. And so, we get people on the phone every day, talking about cloud first. And when you kind of dig into what they're after, it's operating model characteristics, not which data center do I put it in, and those, those decisions are separating. And so that, you know, it's really that focus for us is where, we believe we're doing something unique for that group of customers. >> Yeah. Cloud first doesn't doesn't mean cloud only. And of course followers of this program know, we talk a lot about this, this definition of cloud is changing, it's evolving, It's moving to the edge, it's moving to data centers, data centers are moving to the cloud. Cross-cloud, it's that big layer that's expanding. And so I think the definition of cloud, even particularly in customer's minds is evolving. There's no question about it. People, they'll look at what VMware is doing in AWS and say, okay, that's cloud, but they'll also look at things like VMware cloud foundation and say oh yeah, that's cloud too. So to me, the beauty of cloud is in the eye of the customer beholder. So I buy that. Tobias. I wonder if you could talk about how this all translates into product, because you guys start up, you got to sell stuff, you use this term smart infrastructure, what is that? How does this all turn into stuff you can sell? >> Right. Yeah. So let me back up a little bit and talk a little bit about, you know, what we at Nebulon do. So we are a cloud based software company, and we're delivering sort of a new category of smart infrastructure. And if you think about things that you would know from your everyday surroundings, smart infrastructure is really all around us. Think smart home technology like Google Nest as an example. And what this all has in common is that there's a cloud control plane that is managing some IOT end points and smart devices in various locations. And by doing that, customers gain benefits like easy remote management, right? You can manage your thermostat, your temperature from anywhere in the world basically. You don't have to worry about automated software updates anymore, and you can easily automate your home, your infrastructure, through this cloud control plane and translating this idea to the data center, right? This idea is not necessarily new, right? If you look into the networking space with Meraki networks, now Cisco or Mist Systems now Juniper, they've really pioneered efforts in cloud management. So smart network infrastructure, and the key problem that they solved there is, you know, managing these vast amount of access points and switches that are scattered across the data centers across campuses, and, you know, the data center. Now, if you translate that to what Nebulon does, it's really applying this smart infrastructure idea, this methodology to application infrastructure, specifically to compute and storage infrastructure. And that's essentially what we're doing. So with smart infrastructure, basically our offering it at Nebulon, the product, that comes with the benefits of this cloud experience, public cloud operating model, as we've talked about, some of our customers look at the cloud as an operating model rather than a destination, a physical location. And with that, we bring to us this model, this, this experience as operating a model to on-premises application infrastructure, and really what you get with this broad offering from Nebulon and the benefits are really circling it out, you know, four areas, first of all, rapid time to value, right? So application owners think people that are not specialists or experts when it comes to IT infrastructure, but more generalists, they can provision on-premise application infrastructure in less than 10 minutes, right? It can go from, from just bare metal physical racks to the full application stack in less than 10 minutes, so they're up and running a lot quicker. And they can immediately deliver services to their end customers, cloud-like operations, this, this notion of zero touch remote management, which now with the last couple of months with this strange time that we're with COVID is, you know, turnout is becoming more and more relevant really as in remotely administrating and management of infrastructure that scales from just hundreds of nodes to thousands of nodes. It doesn't really matter with behind the scenes software updates, with global AI analytics and insights, and basically overall combined reduce the operational overhead when it comes to on-premises infrastructure by up to 75%, right? The other thing is support for any application, whether it's containerized, virtualized, or even bare metal applications. And the idea here is really consistent leveraging server-based storage that doesn't require any Nebulon-specific software on the server. So you get the full power of your application servers for your applications. Again, as the servers intended. And then the fourth benefit when it comes to smart infrastructure is, is of course doing this all at a lower cost and with better data center density. And that is really comparing it to three-tier architectures where you have your server, your SAN fabric, and then you have an external storage, but also when you compare it with hyper-converged infrastructure software, right, that is consuming resources of the application servers, think CPU, think memory and networking. So basically you get a lot more density with that approach compared to those architectures. >> Okay, I want to dig into some of that differentiation too, but what exactly do I buy from you? Do I buy a software subscription? Is that right? Can you explain that a little bit? >> Right. So basically the way we do this is it's really leveraging two key new innovations, right? So, and you see why I made the bridge to smart home technology, because the approach is civil, right? The one is, you know, the introduction of a cloud control plane that basically manage this on-premise application infrastructure, of course, that is delivered to customers as a service. The second one is, you know, a new infrastructure model that uses IOT endpoint technology, and that is embedded into standard application servers and the storage within this application servers. Let me add a couple of words to that to explain a little bit more, so really at the heart of smart infrastructure, in order to deliver this public cloud experience for any on-prem application is this cloud-based control plane, right? So we've built this, how we recommend our customers to use a public cloud, and that is built, you know, building your software on modern technologies that are vendor-agnostic. So it could essentially run anywhere, whether it is, you know, any public cloud vendor, or if we want to run in our own data centers, when regulatory requirements change, it's massively scalable and responsive, no matter how large the managed infrastructure is. But really the interesting part here, Dave, is that the customer doesn't really have to worry about any of that, it's delivered as a service. So what a customer gets from this cloud control plane is a single API end point, how they get it with a public cloud. They get a web user interface, from which they can manage all of their infrastructure, no matter how many devices, no matter where it is, can be in the data center, can be in an edge location anywhere in the world, they get template-based provisioning much like a marketplace in a public cloud. They get analytics, predictive support services, and super easy automation capabilities. Now the second thing that I mentioned is this server embedded software, the server embedded infrastructure software, and that is running on a PCIE based offload engine. And that is really acting as this managed IOT endpoint within the application server that I managed that I mentioned earlier. And that approach really further converges modern application infrastructure. And it really replaces the software defined storage approach that you'll find in hyper-converged infrastructure software. And that is really by embedding the data services, the storage data service into silicon within the server. Now this offload engine, we call that a services processing unit or SPU in short. And that is really what differentiates us from hyper-converged infrastructure. And it's quite different than a regular accelerator card that you get with some of the hyper-converged infrastructure offerings. And it's different in the sense that the SPU runs basically all of the shared and local data services, and it's not just accelerating individual algorithms, individual functions. And it basically provides all of these services aside the CPU with the boot drive, with data drives. And in essence provides you with this a separate fall domain from the service, so for example, if you reboot your server, the data plan remains intact. You know, it's not impacted for that. >> Okay. So I want to stay on that for just a second, Craig, if I could, I get very clear how you're different from, as Tobias said, the three-tier server SAN fabric, external array, the HCI thing's interesting because in some respects, the HCI has, you know, guys take Nutanix, they talk about cloud and becoming more friendly with developers and API piece, but what's your point of view Craig on how you position relative to say HCI? >> Yeah, absolutely. So everyone gets what three-tier architecture is and was, and HCI software, you know, emerged as an alternative to the three-tier architectures. Everyone I think today understands that data services are, you know, SDS is software hosted in the operating system of each HCI device and consume some amount of CPU, memory, network, whatever. And it's typically constrained to a hypervisor environment, kind of where we're most of that stuff is done. And over time, these platforms have added some monitoring capabilities, predictive analytics, typically provided by the vendor's cloud, right? And as Tobias mentioned, some HCIS vendors have augmented this approach by adding an accelerator to make things like compression and dedupe go faster, right? Think SimpliVity or something like that. The difference that we're talking about here is, the infrastructure software that we deliver as a service is embedded right into server silicon. So it's not sitting in the operating system of choice. And what that means is you get the full power of the server you bought for your workloads. It's not constrained to a hypervisor-only environment, it's OS agnostic. And, you know, it's entirely controlled and administered by the cloud versus with, you know, most HCIS is an on-prem console that manages a cluster or two on-prem. And, you know, think of it from a automation perspective. When you automate something, you've got to set up your playbook kind of cluster by cluster. And depending what versions they're on, APIs are changing, behaviors are changing. So a very different approach at scale. And so again, for us, we're talking about something that gives you a much more efficient infrastructure that is then managed by the cloud and gives you this full kind of operational model you would expect for any kind of cloud-based deployment. >> You know, I got to go back, you guys obviously have some three-part DNA hanging around and you know, of course you remember well, the three-part ASIC, it was kind of famous at the time and it was unique. And I bring that up only because you've mentioned a couple of times the silicon and a lot of people yeah, whatever, but we have been on this, especially, particularly with ARM. And I want to share with the audience, if you follow my breaking analysis, you know this. If you look at the historical curve of Moore's law with x86, it's the doubling of performance every two years, roughly, that comes out to about 40% a year. That's moderated down to about 30% a year now, if you look at the ARM ecosystem and take for instance, apple A15, and the previous series, for example, over the last five years, the performance, when you combine the CPU, GPU, NPU, the accelerators, the DSPs, which by the way, are all customizable. That's growing at 110% a year, and the SOC costs 50 bucks. So my point is that you guys are riding perfect example of doing offloads with a way more efficient architecture. You're now on that curve, that's growing at 100% plus per year. Whereas a lot of the legacy storage is still on that 30% a year curve, and so cheaper, lower power. That's why I love to buy, as you were bringing in the IOT and the smart infrastructure, this is the future of storage and infrastructure. >> Absolutely. And the thing I would emphasize is it's not limited to storage, storage is a big issue, but we're talking about your application infrastructure and you brought up something interesting on the GPU, the SmartNIC of things, and just to kind of level set with everybody there, there's the HCI world, and then there's this SmartNIC DPU world, whatever you want to call it, where it's effectively a network card, it's got that specialized processing onboard and firmware to provide some network security storage services, and think of it as a PCIE card in your server. It connects to an external storage system, so think Nvidia Bluefield 2 connecting to an external NVME storage device. And the interesting thing about that is, you know, storage processing is offloaded from the server. So as we said earlier, good, right, you get the server back to your application, but storage moves out of the server. And it starts to look a little bit like an external storage approach versus a server based approach. And infrastructure management is done by, you know, the server SmartNIC with some monitoring and analytics coming from, you know, your supplier's cloud support service. So complexity creeps back in, if you start to lose that, you know, heavily converged approach. Again, we are taking advantage of storage within the server and, you know, keeping this a real server based approach, but distinguishing ourselves from the HCI approach. Cause there's a real ROI there. And when we talked to folks who are looking at new and different ways, we talk a lot about the cloud and I think we've done a bit of that already, but then at the end of the day, folks are trying to figure out well, okay, but then what do I buy to enable this? And what you buy is your standard server recipe. So think your favorite HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, whatever, whatever your brand, and it's going to come enabled with this IOT end point within it, so it's really a smart server, if you will, that can then be controlled by our cloud. And so you're effectively buying, you know, from your favorite server vendor, a server option that is this endpoint and a subscription. You don't buy any of this from us, by the way, it's all coming from them. And that's the way we deliver this. >> You know, sorry to get into the plumbing, but this is something we've been on and a facet of it. Is that silicon custom designed or is it pretty much off the shelf, do you guys add any value to it? >> No, there are off the shelf options that can deliver tremendous horsepower on that form factor. And so we take advantage of that to, you know, do what we do in terms of, you know, creating these sort of smart servers with our end point. And so that's where we're at. >> Yeah. Awesome. So guys, what's your sweet spot, you know, why are customers, you know, what are you seeing customers adopting? Maybe some examples you guys can share? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think Tobias mentioned that because of the architectural approach, there's a lot of flexibility there, you can run virtualized, containerized, bare metal applications. The question is where are folks choosing to get started? And those use cases with our existing customers revolved heavily around virtualization modernization. So they're going back in to their virtualized environment, whether their existing infrastructure is array-based or HCI-based. And they're looking to streamline that, save money, automate more, the usual things. The second area is the distributed edge. You know, the edge is going through tremendous transformation with IOT devices, 5g, and trying to get processing closer to where customers are doing work. And so that distributed edge is a real opportunity because again, it's a more cost-effective, more dense infrastructure. The cloud effectively can manage across all of these sites through a single API. And then the third area is cloud service provider transformation. We do a fair bit of business with, you know, cloud service providers, CTOs, who are looking at trying to build top line growth, trying to create new services and, and drive better bottom line. And so this is really, you know, as much as a revenue opportunity for them as cost saving opportunity. And then the last one is this notion of, you know, bringing the cloud on-prem, we've done a cloud repatriation deal. And I know you've seen a little of that, but maybe not a lot of it. And, you know, I can tell you in our first deals, we've already seen it, so it's out there. Those are the places where people are getting started with us today. >> It's just interesting, you're right. I don't see a ton of it, but if I'm going to repatriate, I don't want to go backwards. I don't want to repatriate to legacy. So it actually does kind of make sense that I repatriate to essentially a component of on-prem cloud that's managed in the cloud, that makes sense to me to buy. But today you're managing from the cloud, you're managing on-prem infrastructure. Maybe you could show us a little leg, share a little roadmap, I mean, where are you guys headed from a product standpoint? >> Right, so I'm not going to go too far on the limb there, but obviously, right. So one of the key benefits of a cloud managed platform is this notion of a single API, right. We talked about the distributed edge where, you know, think of retailer that has, you know, thousands of stores, each store having local infrastructure. And, you know, if you think about the challenges that come with, you know, just administrating those systems, rolling out firmware updates, rolling out updates in general, monitoring those systems, et cetera. So having a single console, a cloud console to administrate all of that infrastructure, obviously, you know, the benefits are easy now. If you think about, if you're thinking about that and spin it further, right? So from the use cases and the types of users that we've see, and Craig talked about them at the very beginning, you can think about this as this is a hybrid world, right. Customers will have data that they'll have in the public cloud. They will have data and applications in their data centers and at the edge, obviously it is our objective to deliver the same experience that they gained from the public cloud on-prem, and eventually, you know, those two things can come closer together. Apart from that, we're constantly improving the data services. And as you mentioned, ARM is, is on a path that is becoming stronger and faster. So obviously we're going to leverage on that and build out our data storage services and become faster. But really the key thing that I'd like to, to mention all the time, and this is related to roadmap, but rather feature delivery, right? So the majority of what we do is in the cloud, our business logic in the cloud, the capabilities, the things that make infrastructure work are delivered in the cloud. And, you know, it's provided as a service. So compared with your Gmail, you know, your cloud services, one day, you don't have a feature, the next day you have a feature, so we're continuously rolling out new capabilities through our cloud. >> And that's about feature acceleration as opposed to technical debt, which is what you get with legacy features, feature creep. >> Absolutely. The other thing I would say too, is a big focus for us now is to help our customers more easily consume this new concept. And we've already got, you know, SDKs for things like Python and PowerShell and some of those things, but we've got, I think, nearly ready, an Ansible SDK. We're trying to help folks better kind of use case by use case, spin this stuff up within their organization, their infrastructure. Because again, part of our objective, we know that IT professionals have, you know, a lot of inertia when they're, you know, moving stuff around in their own data center. And we're aiming to make this, you know, a much simpler, more agile experience to deploy and grow over time. >> We've got to go, but Craig, quick company stats. Am I correct, you've raised just under 20 million. Where are you on funding? What's your head count today? >> I am going to plead the fifth on all of that. >> Oh, okay. Keep it stealth. Staying a little stealthy, I love it. Really excited for you. I love what you're doing. It's really starting to come into focus. And so congratulations. You know, you got a ways to go, but Tobias and Craig, appreciate you coming on The Cube today. And thank you for watching this Cube Conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat outro music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are Thursday, day four of the RSA Show here in Moscone in San Francisco. It's a beautiful day outside, but the show is still going, 40,000-plus people. A couple of challenges with the coronavirus, and some other things going on, but everybody's here, everybody's staying the course, and I think it's really a good message going forward as to what's going to happen in the show season. We go to a lot of shows. Is 2020 the year we're going to know everything with the benefit of hindsight? It's not quite working out so far that way, but we're bringing in the experts to share the knowledge, and we're excited for our next guest, who's going to help us get to know what the answers are. He's Oliver Sherman, senior director, Enterprise Product Marketing for Juniper Networks. Oliver, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so first off, just general impressions of the show. I'm sure you've been coming here for a little while. >> We have, and I think the show's going very well, as you pointed out, there's a couple of challenges that are around, but I think everybody's staying strong, and pushing through, and really driving the agenda of security. >> So I've got some interesting quotes from you doing a little research for this segment. You said 2019 was the year of enforcement, but 2020 is the year of intelligence. What did you mean by that? >> Specifically, it's around Juniper. We have a Juniper connected security message and strategy that we proved last year by increasing the ability to enforce on all of your infrastructure without having to rip and replace technologies. For instance, on our widely rolled out MX routing platform, we offer second tell to block things like command and control traffic, or on our switching line for campus and data centers, we prevent lateral threat propagation with second tell, allowing you to block hosts as they're infected, and as we rounded that out, and it's a little bit in 2020 we were able to now deliver that on our Mist, or our wireless acquistion that we did last year around this time, so showing the integration of that product portfolio. >> Yeah, we met Bob Friday from Mist. >> Oliver: Excellent. >> He, doing the AI, some of the ethics around AI. >> Oliver: Sure. >> At your guys conference last year. It was pretty interesting conversation. Let's break down what you said a little bit deeper. So you're talking about inside your own product suite, and managing threats across once they get to that level to keep things clean across that first layer of defense. >> Right, well, I mean, whether you're a good packet or a bad packet, you have to traverse the network to be interesting. We've all put our phones in airplane mode at Black Hat or events like that because we don't want anybody on it, but they're really boring when they're offline, but they're also really boring to attackers when they're offline. As soon as you turn them on, you have a problem, or could have a problem, but as things traverse the network, what better place to see who and what's on your network than on the gears, and at the end of the day, we're able to provide that visibility, we're able to provide that enforcement, so as you mentioned, 2020 is now the year of an awareness for us, so the Threat Aware Network. We're able to do things like look at encrypted traffic, do heuristics and analysis to figure out should that even be on my network because as you bring it into a network, and you have to decrypt it, a, there's privacy concerns with that in these times, but also, it's computationally expensive to do that, so it becomes a challenge from both a financial perspective, as well as a compliance perspective, so we're helping solve that so you can offset that traffic, and be able to ensure your network's secure. >> So is that relatively new, and I apologize. I'm not deep into the weeds of feature functionality, but that sounds pretty interesting that you can actually start to do the analysis without encrypting the data, and get some meaningful, insightful information. >> Absolutely, we actually announced it on Monday at 4:45 a.m. Pacific, so it is new. >> Brand new. >> Yes. >> And what's the secret sauce to be able to do that because one would think just by rule encryption would eliminate the ability to really do the analysis, so what analysis can you still do while still keeping the data encrypted? >> You're absolutely right. We're seeing 70 to 80% of internet traffic is now encrypted. Furthermore, bad actors are using that to obfuscate themselves, right, obviously, and then, the magic to that, though, to look at it without having to crack open the package is using things like heuristics that look at connections per second, or connection patterns, or looking at significant exchanges, or even IP addresses to know this is not something you want to let in, and we're seeing a very high rate of success to block things like IoT botnets, for instance, so you'll be seeing more and more of that from us throughout the year, but this is the initial step that we're taking. >> Right, that's great because so much of it it sounds like, a, a lot of it's being generated by machines, but two, it sounds like the profile of the attacks keeps changing quite a bit from a concentrated attacks to more, it sounds like now, everyone's doing the slow creeper to try to get it under the covers. >> Right, and really, you're using your network to your full extent. I mean, a lot of things that we're doing including encrypted traffic analysis is an additional feature on our platform, so that comes with what you already have, so rather than walking in and saying, "Buy my suite of products, this will all" "solve all your problems," as we've done for the past, or as other vendors have done for the past 10, 20 years, and it's never worked. So you why not add things that you already have so you're allowed to amortize your assets, build your best of breed security, and do it within a multi-vendor environment, but also, do it with your infrastructure. >> Right, so I want to shift gears a little bit. Doing some research before you got on, you've always been technical lead. You've been doing technical lead roles. You had a whole bunch of them, and we don't have internet, unfortunately, here, so I can't read them off. >> Oliver: That's fine. >> But now, you've switched over. You've put the marketing hat on. I'm just curious the different, softer, squishy challenge of trying to take the talent that you have, the technical definitions that you have, the detailed compute and stuff you're doing around things like you just described, and now, putting the marketing hat, and trying to get that message out to the market, help people understand what you're trying to do, and break through, quite frankly, some crazy noise that we're sitting here surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of vendors. >> I think that's really the key, and yes, I've been technical leads. I've run architecture teams. I've run development teams, and really, from a marketing perspective, it's to ensure that we're delivering a message that is, that the market will consume that is actually based in reality. I think a lot of times you see a lot of products that are put together with duct tape, baling twine, et cetera, but then, also have a great Powerpoint that makes it look good, but from a go to market perspective, from whether it's your sellers, meaning the sellers that work for Juniper, whether it's our partners, whether it's our customers, they have to believe in what's out there, and if it's tried and true, and we understand it from an engineering perspective, and we can say it's not a marketing texture, it's a strategy. >> Right. >> That really makes a difference, and we're really seeing that if you look at our year over year growth in security, if you look at what analysts are saying, if you look at what testing houses are saying about our product, that Juniper's back, and that's why I'm in this spot. >> And it really begs to have a deeper relationship with the customer, that you're not selling them a one-off market texture slide. You're not having a quick point solution that's suddenly put together, but really, have this trusted, ongoing relationship that's going to evolve over time. The products are going to evolve over time because the threats are evolving over time, right? >> Absolutely, and to help them get more out of what they already have, and from a go to market perspective, our partners have an addressful market that's naturally through the install base that we have, we're able to provide additional value and services to those customers that may want to lean on a partner to actually build some of these solutions for them. >> All right, well, Oliver, well thanks for stopping by. I'm glad I'm not too late on the encrypted analysis game, so just a couple of days. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks for stopping by. Best to you, and good luck with 2020, the year we'll know everything. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me. >> All right, he's Oliver, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at RSA 2020 here in Moscone. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (gentle electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE studio here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We're here introducing a new format for CUBE panel discussions, it's called Around theCUBE and we have a special segment here called Get Smart: Unpacking AI with some great with some great guests in the industry. Gene Santos, Professor of Engineering in College of Engineering Dartmouth College. Bob Friday, Vice President CTO at Mist at Juniper Company. And Ed Henry, Senior Scientist and Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff for Machine Learning at Dell EMC. Guys this is a format, we're going to keep score and we're going to throw out some interesting conversations around Unpacking AI. Thanks for joining us here, appreciate your time. >> Yeah, glad to be here. >> Okay, first question, as we all know AI is on the rise, we're seeing AI everywhere. You can't go to a show or see marketing literature from any company, whether it's consumer or tech company around, they all have AI, AI something. So AI is on the rise. The question is, is it real AI, is AI relevant from a reality standpoint, what really is going on with AI, Gene, is AI real? >> I think a good chunk of AI is real there. It depends on what you apply it to. If it's making some sort of decisions for you, that is AI that's blowing into play. But there's also a lot of AI left out there potentially is just simply a script. So, you know, one of the challenges that you'll always have is that, if it were scripted, is it scripted because, somebody's already developed the AI and now just pulled out all the answers and just using the answers straight? Or is it active learning and changing on its own? I would tend to say that anything that's learning and changing on its own, that's where you're having the evolving AI and that's where you get the most power from. >> Bob what's your take on this, AI real? >> Yeah, if you look at Google, What you see is AI really became real in 2014. That's when the AI and ML really became a thing in the industry and when you look why did it become a thing in 2014? It's really back when we actually saw TensorFlow, open source technology really become available. It's all that Amazon Compute story. You know, you look what we're doing here at Mist, I really don't have to worry about compute storage, except for the Amazon bill I get every month now. So I think you're really seeing AI become real, because of some key turning points in the industry. >> Ed, your take, AI real? >> Yeah, so it depends on what lens you want to kind of look at it through. The notion of intelligence is something that's kind of ill defined and depending how how you want to interpret that will kind of guide whether or not you think it's real. I tend to all things AI if it has a notion of agency. So if it can navigate its problem space without human intervention. So, really it depends on, again, what lens you kind of want to look at it through? It's a set of moving goalposts, right? If you take your smartphone back to Turing When he was coming up with the Turing test and asked them if this intelligent, or some value intelligent device was AI, would that be AI, to him probably back then. So really it depends on how you kind of want to look at it. >> Is AI the same as it was in 1988? Or has it changed, what's the change point with AI because some are saying, AI's been around for a while but there's more AI now than ever before, Ed we'll start with you, what's different with AI now versus say in the late 80s, early 90s? >> See what's funny is some of the methods that we're using aren't different, I think the big push that happened in the last decade or so has been the ability to store as much data as we can along with the ability to have as much compute readily disposable as we have today. Some of the methodologies I mean there was a great Wired article that was published and somebody referenced called, method called Eigenvector Decomposition they said it was from quantum mechanic, that came out in 1888 right? So it really a lot of the methodologies that we're using aren't much different, it's the amount of data that we have available to us that represents reality and the amount of compute that we have. >> Bob. >> Yeah so for me back in the 80s when I did my masters I actually did a masters on neural networks so yeah it's been around for a while but when I started Mist what really changed was a couple things. One is this modern cloud stack right so if you're going to have to build an AI solution really have to have all the pieces ingest tons of data and process it in real time so that is one big thing that's changed that we didn't have 20 years ago. The other big thing is we had access to all this open source TensorFlow stuff right now. People like Google and Facebook have made it so easy for the average person to actually do an AI project right? You know anyone here, anyone in the audience here could actually train a machine learning model over the weekend right now, you just have to go to Google, you have to find kind of the, you know they have the data sets you want to basically build a model to recognize letters and numbers, those data sets are on the internet right now and you personally yourself could go become a data scientist over the weekend. >> Gene, your take. >> Yeah I think also on top of that because of all that availability on the open software anybody can come in and start playing with AI, it's also building a really large experience base of what works and what doesn't work and because they have that now you can actually better define the problem you're shooting for and when you do that you increase you know what's going to work, what's not going to work and people can also tell you that on the part that's not going to work, how's it going to expand but I think overall though this comes back to the question of when people ask what is AI, and a lot of that is just being focused on machine learning and if it's just machine learning that's kind of a little limited use in terms of what you're classifying or not. Back in the early 80s AI back then is really what people are trying to call artificial general intelligence nowadays but it's that all encompassing piece. All the things that you know us humans can do, us humans can reason about, all the decision sequences that we make and so you know that's the part that we haven't quite gotten to but there is all the things that's why the applications that the AI with machine learning classification has gotten us this far. >> Okay machine learning is certainly relevant, it's been one of the most hottest, the hottest topic I think in computer science and with AI becoming much more democratized you guys mentioned TensorFlow, a variety of other open source initiatives been a great wave of innovation and again motivation, younger generations is easier to code now than ever before but machine learning seems to be at the heart of AI and there's really two schools of thought in the machine learning world, is it just math or is there more of a cognition learning machine kind of a thing going on? This has been a big debate in the industry, I want to get your guys' take on this, Gene is machine learning just math and running algorithms or is there more to it like cognition, where do you guys fall on this, what's real? >> If I look at the applications and look what people are using it for it's mostly just algorithms it's mostly that you know you've managed to do the pattern recognition, you've managed to compute out the things and find something interesting from it but then on the other side of it the folks working in say neurosciences, the first people working in cogno-sciences. You know I have the interest in that when we look at that, that machine learning does it correspond to what we're doing as human beings, now because the reason I fall more on the algorithm side is that a lot of those algorithms they don't match what we're often thinking so if they're not matching that it's like okay something else is coming up but then what do we do with it, you know you can get an answer and work from it but then if we want to build true human intelligence how does that all stack together to get to the human intelligence and I think that's the challenge at this point. >> Bob, machine learning, math, cognition is there more to do there, what's your take? >> Yeah I think right now you look at machine learning, machine learning are the algorithms we use, I mean I think the big thing that happened to machine learning is the neural network and deep learning, that was kind of a mild stepping stone where we got through and actually building kind of these AI behavior things. You know when you look what's really happening out there you look at the self driving car, what we don't realize is like it's kind of scary right now, you go to Vegas you can actually get on a driving bus now, you know so this AI machine learning stuff is starting to happen right before our eyes, you know when you go to the health care now and you get your diagnosis for cancer right, we're starting to see AI in image recognition really start to change how we get our diagnosis. And that's really starting to affect people's lives. So those are cases where we're starting to see this AI machine learning stuff is starting to make a difference. When we think about the AI singularity discussion right when are we finally going to build something that really has human behavior. I mean right now we're building AI that can actually play Jeopardy right, and that was kind of one of the inspirations for my company Mist was hey, if they can build something to play Jeopardy we should be able to build something answer questions on par with network domain experts. So I think we're seeing people build solutions now that do a lot of behaviors that mimic humans. I do think we're probably on the path to building something that is truly going to be on par with human thinking right, you know whether it's 50 years or a thousand years I think it's inevitable on how man is progressing right now if you look at the technologically exponential growth we're seeing in human evolution. >> Well we're going to get to that in the next question so you're jumping ahead, hold that thought. Ed, machine learning just math, pattern recognition or is there more cognition there to be had? Where do fall in this? >> Right now it's, I mean it's all math, so we collect something some data set about the world and then we use algorithms and some representation of mathematics to find some pattern, which is new and interesting, don't get me wrong, when you say cognition though we have to understand that we have a fundamentally flawed perspective on how maybe the one guiding light that we have on what intelligence could be would be ourselves right. Computers don't work like brains, brains are what we determine embody our intelligence right, computers, our brains don't have a clock, there's no state that's actually between different clock cycles that light up in the brain so when you start using words like cognition we end up trying to measure ourselves or use ourselves as a ruler and most of the methodologies that we have today don't necessarily head down that path. So yeah that's kind of how I view it. >> Yeah I mean stateless those are API kind of mindsets, you can't run Kubernetes in the brain. Maybe we will in the future, stateful applications are always harder than stateless as we all know but again when I'm sleeping, I'm still dreaming. So cognition in the question of human replacement. This has been a huge conversation. This is one, the singularity conversation you know the fear of most average people and then some technical people as well on the job front, will AI replace my job will it take over the world is there going to be a Skynet Terminator moment? This is a big conversation point because it just teases out what could be and tech for good tech for bad. Some say tech is neutral but it can be shaped. So the question is will AI replace humans and where does that line come from. We'll start with Ed on this one. What do you see this singularity discussion where humans are going to be replaced with AI? >> So replace is an interesting term, so there I mean we look at the last kind of Industrial Revolution that happened and people I think are most worried about the potential of job loss and when you look at what happened during the Industrial Revolution this concept of creative destruction kind of came about and the idea is that yes technology has taken some jobs out of the market in some way shape or form but more jobs were created because of that technology, that's kind of our one again lighthouse that we have with respect to measuring that singularity in and of itself. Again the ill defined definition, or the ill defined notion of intelligence that we have today, I mean when you go back and you read some of the early papers from psychologists from the early 1900s the experiment specifically who came up with this idea of intelligence he uses the term general intelligence as kind of the first time that all of civilization has tried to assign a definition to what is intelligent right? And it's only been roughly 100 years or so or maybe a little longer since we have had this understanding that's been normalized at least within western culture of what this notion of intelligence is so singularity this idea of the singularity is interesting because we just don't understand enough about the one measure ruler or yardstick that we have that we consider intelligence ourselves to be able to go and then embed that inside of a thing. >> Gene what's your thoughts on this, reasoning is a big part of your research you're doing a lot of research around intent and contextual, all these cool behavioral things you know this is where machines are there to augment or replace, this is the conversation, your view on this? >> I think one of the things with this is that that's where the downs still lie, if we have bad intentions, if we can actually start communicating then we can start getting the general intelligence yeah I mean sort of like what Ed was referring to how people have been trying to define this but I think one of the problems that comes up is that computers and stuff like that don't really capture that at this time, the intentions that they have are still at a low level, but if we start tying it to you know the question of the terminator moment to the singularity, one of the things is that autonomy, you know how much autonomy that we give to the algorithm, how much does the algorithm have access to? Now there could be you know just to be on an extreme there could be a disaster situation where you know we weren't very careful and we provided an API that gives full autonomy to whatever AI we have to run it and so you can start seeing elements of Skynet that can come from that but I also tend to come to analysis that hey even with APIs, while it's not AI, APIs a lot of that also we have the intentions of what you're going to give us to control. Then you have the AI itself where if you've defined the intentions of what it is supposed to do then you can avoid that terminator moment in terms of that's more of an act. So I'm seeing it at this point. And so overall singularity I still think we're a ways off and you know when people worry about job loss probably the closest thing that I think that can match that in recent history is the whole thing on automation, I grew up at the time in Ohio when the steel industry was collapsing and that was a trade off between automation and what the current jobs are and if you have something like that okay that's one thing that we go forward dealing with and I think that this is something that state governments, our national government something we should be considering. If you're going to have that job loss you know what better study, what better form can you do from that and I've heard different proposals from different people like, well if we need to retrain people where do you get the resources from it could be something even like AI job pack. And so there's a lot of things to discuss, we're not there yet but I do believe the lower, repetitive jobs out there, I should say the things where we can easily define, those can be replaceable but that's still close to the automation side. >> Yeah and there's a lot of opportunities there. Bob, you mentioned in the last segment the singularity, cognition learning machines, you mentioned deep learning, as the machines learn this needs more data, data informs. If it's biased data or real data how do you become cognitive, how do you become human if you don't have the data or the algorithms? The data's the-- >> I mean and I think that's one of the big ethical debates going on right now right you know are we basically going to basically take our human biases and train them into our next generation of AI devices right. But I think from my point of view I think it's inevitable that we will build something as complex as the brain eventually, don't know if it's 50 years or 500 years from now but if you look at kind of the evolution of man where we've been over the last hundred thousand years or so, you kind of see this exponential rise in technology right from, you know for thousands of years our technology was relatively flat. So in the last 200 years where we've seen this exponential growth in technology that's taking off and you know what's amazing is when you look at quantum computing what's scary is, I always thought of quantum computing as being a research lab thing but when you start to see VC's and investing in quantum computing startups you know we're going from university research discussions to I guess we're starting to commercialize quantum computing, you know when you look at the complexity of what a brain does it's inevitable that we will build something that has basic complexity of a neuron and I think you know if you look how people neural science looks at the brain, we really don't understand how it encodes, but it's clear that it does encode memories which is very similar to what we're doing right now with our AI machine right? We're building things that takes data and memories and encodes in some certain way. So yeah I'm convinced that we will start to see more AI cognizance and it starts to really happen as we start with the next hundred years going forward. >> Guys, this has been a great conversation, AI is real based upon this around theCUBE conversation. Look at I mean you've seen the evidence there you guys pointed it out and I think cloud computing has been a real accelerant with the combination of machine learning and open source so you guys have illustrated and so that brings up kind of the final question I'd love to get each of you's thought on this because Bob just brought up quantum computing which as the race to quantum supremacy goes on around the world this becomes maybe that next step function, kind of what cloud computing did for revitalizing or creating a renaissance in AI. What does quantum do? So that begs the question, five ten years out if machine learning is the beginning of it and it starts to solve some of these problems as quantum comes in, more compute, unlimited resource applied with software, where does that go, five ten years? We'll go start with Gene, Bob, then Ed. Let's wrap this up. >> Yeah I think if quantum becomes a reality that you know when you have the exponential growth this is going to be exponential and exponential. Quantum is going to address a lot of the harder AI problems that were from complexity you know when you talk about this regular search regular approaches of looking up stuff quantum is the one that allows you now to potentially take something that was exponential and make it quantum. And so that's going to be a big driver. That'll be a big enabler where you know a lot of the problems I look at trying to do intentions is that I have an exponential number of intentions that might be possible if I'm going to choose it as an explanation. But, quantum will allow me to narrow it down to one if that technology can work out and of course the real challenge if I can rephrase it into say a quantum program while doing it. But that's I think the advance is just beyond the step function. >> Beyond a step function you see. Okay Bob your take on this 'cause you brought it up, quantum step function revolution what's your view on this? >> I mean your quantum computing changes the whole paradigm right because it kind of goes from a paradigm of what we know, this binary if this then that type of computing. So I think quantum computing is more than just a step function, I think it's going to take a whole paradigm shift of you know and it's going to be another decade or two before we actually get all the tools we need to actually start leveraging quantum computing but I think that is going to be one of those step functions that basically takes our AI efforts into a whole different realm right? Let us solve another whole set of classic problems and that's why they're doing it right now because it starts to let you be able to crack all the encryption codes right? You know where you have millions of billions of choices and you have to basically find that one needle in the haystack so quantum computing's going to basically open that piece of the puzzle up and when you look at these AI solutions it's really a collection of different things going underneath the hood. It's not this one algorithm that you're doing and trying to mimic human behavior, so quantum computing's going to be yet one more tool in the AI toolbox that's going to move the whole industry forward. >> Ed, you're up, quantum. >> Cool, yeah so I think it'll, like Gene and Bob had alluded to fundamentally change the way we approach these problems and the reason is combinatorial problems that everybody's talking about so if I want to evaluate the state space of anything using modern binary based computers we have to kind of iteratively make that search over that search space where quantum computing allows you to kind of evaluate the entire search space at once. When you talk about games like AlphaGo, you talk about having more moves on a blank 19 by 19 AlphaGo board than you have if you put 1,000 universes on every proton of our universe. So the state space is absolutely massive so searching that is impossible. Using today's binary based computers but quantum computing allows you to evaluate kind of search spaces like that in one big chunk to really simplify the aspect but I think it will kind of change how we approach these problems to Bob and Gene's point with respect to how we approach, the technology once we crack that quantum nut I don't think will look anything like what we have today. >> Okay thank you guys, looks like we have a winner. Bob you're up by one point, we had a tie for second but Ed and Gene of course I'm the arbiter but I've decided Bob you nailed this one so since you're the winner, Gene you guys did a great job coming in second place, Ed good job, Bob you get the last word. Unpacking AI, what's the summary from your perspective as the winner of Around theCUBE. >> Yeah no I think you know from a societal point of view I think AI's going to be on par with kind of the internet. It's going to be one of these next big technology things. I think it'll start to impact our lives and people when you look around it it's kind of sneaking up on us, whether it's the self driving car the healthcare cancer, the self driving bus, so I think it's here, I think we're just at the beginnings of it. I think it's going to be one of these technologies that's going to basically impact our whole lives or our next one or two decades. Next 10, 20 years is just going to be exponentially growing everywhere in all our segments. >> Thanks so much for playing guys really appreciate it we have an inventor entrepreneur, Gene doing great research at Dartmouth check him out, Gene Santos at Dartmouth Computer Science. And Ed, technical genius at Dell, figuring out how to make those machines smarter and with the software abstractions growing you guys are doing some good work over there as well. Gentlemen thank you for joining us on this inaugural Around theCUBE unpacking AI Get Smart series, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, that's a wrap everyone this is theCUBE in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat funk music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back. Everyone's two cubes Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS reinforce. This is Amazon Web services Inaugural conference around Cloud security There first of what? Looks like we'll be more focused events around deep dive security to reinvent for security. But not no one's actually saying that. But it's not a summit. It's ah, branded event Reinforce. We're hearing Mark Ryland off director Office of the Sea. So at eight of us, thanks for coming back. Good to see you keep alumni. Yeah, I'm staying here before It's fun. Wait A great Shadow 80 Bucks summit in New York City Last year we talked about some of the same issues, but now you have a dedicated conference here on the feedback from the sea. So as we've talked to and the partners in the ecosystem is, it's great to have an event where they go deep dives on some of the key things that are really, really important to security. Absolutely. This is really kind of a vibe that how reinvents started, right? So reinventing was a similar thing for commercial. You're deep, not easy to us. Three here, deeper on Amazon. But with security. Yeah, security lens on some of the same issues. One thing that happened >> and kind of signal to us that we needed an event like this over the years with reinvent was consistently over the years, the security and compliance track became one of the most important tracks that was oversubscribed in overflow rooms and like, Hey, there's a signal here, right? And so, but at the same time, we wanted to be able to reach on audience. Maybe they wouldn't go to reinvent because they thought I'd say It's all the crazy Dale Ops guys were doing this cloud thing. But now, of course, they're getting the strong message in their security organizations like, Hey, we're doing cloud. Or maybe as a professional, I need to really get smart about this stuff. So it's been a nice transition from still a lot of the same people, but definitely the different crowd that's coming here and was a cross pollination between multiple and I was >> just at Public sector summit. They about cyber security from a national defense and intelligence standpoint. Obviously, threesome Carlson leads That team you got on the commercial side comes like Splunk who our data and they get into cyber. So you started to see kind of the intersection of all the kind of Amazon ecosystems kind of coming around security, where it's now part of its horizontal. It's not just these are the security vendors and partners writes pretty much everyone's kind of becoming native into thinking about security and the benefits that you guys have talk about that what Amazon has to have a framework, a posture. Yeah, they call it shared responsibility. But I get that you're sharing this with the ecosystem. Makes sense. Yeah, talk about the Amazon Web service is posture for this new security >> world. Well, the new security world is if you look at like a typical security framework like Mist 853 120 50 controls all these different things you need to worry about if you're a security professional. And so what eight obvious able to do is say, look, there's a whole bunch of these that we can take care of on your behalf. There's some that we'll do some things and you got to do some things and there's some There's still your responsibility, but we'll try to make it easy for you to do those parts. So right off the bat we can get a lot of wins from just hey, there's a lot of things will just take care of. And you could essentially delegate to us. And for the what remain, You'll take your expertise and you'll re focus it on more like applications security. There still may be some operating systems or whatever. If using virtual machine service, you still have to think about that. But even there, we'll use we have systems Manager will make it easy to do patch management, updating, et cetera. And if you're willing to go all the way to is like a lambda or some kind of a platform capability, make it super easy because all you gotta do is make sure your code is good and we'll take care of all the infrastructure automatically on your behalf so that share responsibility remains. There's a lot of things you still need to be careful about and do well, but your experts can refocus. They could be very you know like it's just a lot less to worry about it. So it's really a message for howto raise the bar for the whole community, but yet still have >> that stays online with the baby value properties, which is, you know, build stuff, ship fast, lower prices. I mazon ethos in general. But when you think about the core A. W. S what made it so great Waas you can reduce the provisioning of resource is to get something up and running. And I think that's what I'm taking away from the security peace you could say. We know Amazon Web service is really well, and we're gonna do these things. You could do that so us on them and then parts to innovate. So I get that. That's good. The other trend I want to get your reaction to is comments we've had on the Cube with si SOS and customers is a trend towards building in house coding security. Your point about Lambda some cool things air being enabled through a B s. There's a real trend of big large companies with security teams just saying, Hey, you know what? I wanna optimize my talent to code and be security focused on use cases that they care about. So you know, Andy Jazz talks about builders. You guys are about builders you got cos your customers building absolutely. Yet they don't want Tonto, but they are becoming security. So you have a builder mindset going on in the big enterprises. >> Yes, talk about that dynamic. That's a That's a really important trend. And we see that even in security organizations which historically were full of experts but not full of engineers and people that could write code. And what we're seeing now is people say, Look, I have all this expertise, but I also see that with a software defined the infrastructure and everything's in a P I. If I pair up in engineering team with a security professional team, then well, how good things will happen because the security specials will say, Gosh, I do this repetitive task all the time. Can you write code to do that like, Yeah, we can write code to do that. So now I can focus on things that require judgment instead of just more rep repetitive. So So there's a really nice synergy there, and our security customers are becoming builders as well, and they're codifying if you moment expression in code, a policy that used to be in a document. And now they write code this as well. If that policy is whatever password length or how often we rode a credentials, whatever the policy is where Icho to ensure that that actually happening. So it's a real nice confluence of security expertise with the engineering, and they're not building the full stack >> themselves. This becomes again Aki Agility piece I had one customer on was an SMS business. They imported to eight of US Cloud with three engineers, and they wrote all the Kuban aged code themselves. They could have used, you know, other things, but they wanted to make sure it's stable so they could bring in some suppliers that could add value. So, again, this is new. Used to be this way back in the old days, in House developers build the abs on the mainframe, build the APS on the mini computers and then on I went to outsourcing, so we're kind of back. The insourcing is the big trend now, >> right in with the smaller engineering team, I can do a lot that used to require so many more people with a big waterfall method and long term projects. And now I take all these powerful building blocks and put an engineering team five people or what we would call it to pizza team five or six people off to the side, given 34 weeks, and they can generate a really cool system that would have required months and not years before. So that's a big trend, and it applies across the board, including two security. >> I think there's a sea change, and I think it's clear what I like about this show is this cloud security. But it's also they have the on premises conversation, Mrs Legacy applications that have been secured and or need to be secured as they evolve. And then you got cloud native and all these things together where security has to be built in. Yeah, this is a key theme, so I want to get your thoughts on this notion of built in security from Day one. What's your what's your view on this? And how should customers start thinking >> about it? And >> what did you guys bringing to the table? Well, I think that's just a general say maturation that goes on in the industry, >> whether it's cloud or on Prem is that people realize that the old methods we used to use like, Hey, I'm gonna build a nap And then I'm gonna hand it to the security team and they're gonna put firewalls around it That's not really gonna have a good result. So security by design, having security is equal co aspect of If I'm getting doing an architecture, I look a performance. I look, it cost. I look at security. It's just part of my system designed. I don't think of it as like a bolt on afterwards, so that leads to things like, you know, Secure Dev ops and kind of integration teams through. This could be happening on premises to it's just part of I T. Modernization. But Cloud is clearly a driver as well, and cloud makes it easier because it's all programmable. So things that are still manual on premises, you can do in a more automated getting into a lot of conversations here under the covers, A lot of under the hood conversations here around >> security BC to one of the most popular service is you guys have obviously compute a big part of the mission Land, another of the feature VPC traffic flows, where mirroring was a big announcement. Like we talked about that a lot of talking about the E c two nitro. You gave a talk on that. Did you just unpacked it a little bit because this has been nuanced out there. It's out there people are interested in. What's that talk about inscription is, is in a popular conversation taking minutes? Explain your talk. Sure, So we've talked for now a year and 1/2 >> about how we've essentially rien. Imagine reinvented our virtual machine architecture, too. Go from a primarily soft defined system where you have a mainboard with memory and intel processor and all that kind of a coup treatments of a standard server. And then your virtual ization layer would run a full copy of an operating system, which we call a Dom zero privileged OS that would mediate access between the guest OS is in this and the outside world because it would maintain the device model like how do I talk to a network card? How I talked to a storage device. I talked through the hyper visor, but through also a dom zero Ah, copy of Lennox. A copy of Windows to do all that I owe. So what we just did over the past few years, we begin to take all the things we're running inside that privileged OS and move that into dedicated hardware software, harbor combination where we now have components we call nitro components their actual separate little computers that do dbs processing. They do vpc processing they do instance, storage. So at this point now, we've taken all of the components of that damn zero. We've moved it out into these You could call Cho processors. I almost think of them is like the Nitro controllers. The main processor and the Intel motherboard is a co processor where customer workloads run because the trust now is in these external all systems. And when you go to talk to the outside world from easy to now you're talking through these very trusted, very powerful co processors that do encryption. They do identity management for you. They do a lot of work that's off the main processor, but we can accelerate it. We could be more assured that it's trustworthy. It can it can protect itself from potential types of hacks that might have been exposed if that, say, an encryption key was in the and the main motherboard. Now it's not so it's a long story until one hour version and doing three minutes now. But overall we feel that we built a trustworthy system for virtual. What was the title of talk so people can find it online? So I was just called the night to architecture security implications of the night to architecture. So it's taking information that we had out there. But we're like highlighting the fact that if you're a security professional, you're gonna really like the fact that this system has it has no damn zero. It has no shell. You can't log into the system as a human being. It's impossible to log in. It's all software to find suffer driven, and all the encryption features air in these co processors so we can do like full line made encryption of 100 gigabits of network traffic. It's all encrypted like that's never been done before. Really, in the history of computing, what's the benefit of nitro architectural? Simply not shelter. More trust built into it a trusted root. That's not the main board encryption, off load and more isolation. Because even if I somehow we're toe managed to the impossible combination of facts to get sort of like ownership of that main board, I still don't have access to the outside world. From there, I have to go through a whole another layer of very secure software that mediates between the inner world of where customer were close run and the outside world where the actual cloud is. So it's just a bunch of layers that make things more secure, >> and I'm sure Outpost will have that as well. Can you waste on that? Seem to me to hear about that. Okay, Encryption, encrypt everything. Is it philosophy we heard in the keynote? You also talked about that as well. Um, encrypting traffic on the hour. I didn't talk about what that means. What was talked to you? What's the big conversation around? Encryption within a. W s just inside and outside. What's the main story there? >> There's a lot of pieces to the pie, but a big one that we were talking about this week is a pretty long term project we call Project lever. It was actually named after a ah female cryptographer. Eventually Park team that was help. You know, one of the major factors, including World War Two, are these mathematicians and cryptographers. So we we wanted to do a big scale encryption project. We had a very large scale network and we had, you know, all the features you normally have, but we wanted to make it so that we really encrypted everything when it was outside of our physical control. So we done that took a long time. Huge investment, really exciting now going forward, everything we build. So any time data that customers give to us or have traffic between regions between instances within the same region outside reaches, whenever that traffic leaves our physical control so kind of our building boundaries or gates and guards and going down the street on a fiber optic to another data center, maybe not far away or going inter continent intercontinental links are going sub oceanic links all those links. Now we encrypt all the traffic all the time. >> And what's the benefit of that? So the benefit of that is there. Still, you know, it's it's obscure, >> but there is a threat model where, you know, governments have special submarines that are known to exist that go in, sniff those transoceanic links. And potentially a bad guy could somehow get into one of those network junction points or whatever. Inspect traffic. It's not, I would say, a high risk, but it's possible now. That's a whole nother level of phishing attacks. Phishing attack, submarine You're highly motivated to sniff that line couldn't resist U. S. O. So that's now so people could feel comfortable that that protection exists and even things like here's a kind of a little bit of scare example. But we have customers that say, Look, I'm a European customer and I have a very strong sense of regional reality. I wanna be inside the European community with all my data, etcetera, and you know, what about Brexit? So now I've got all this traffic going through. A very large Internet peering point in London in London won't be part of Europe anymore according to kind of legal norms. So what are you doing in that case? Unless they Well, how about this? How about if yes, the packets are moving through London, but they're always encrypted all the time. Does that make you feel good? Yeah, that makes me feel good. I mean, I so my my notion of work as extra territorial extra additional congee modified to accept the fact that hey, if it's just cipher text, it's not quite the same as unscripted. >> People don't really like. The idea of encrypted traffic. I mean, just makes a lot of sense. Why would absolutely Why wouldn't you want to do that right now? Final question At this event, a lot of attendee high, high, high caliber people on the spectrum is from biz dab People building out the ecosystem Thio Hardcore check. He's looking under the hood to see SOS, who oversee the regime's within companies, either with the C i O or whatever had that was formed and every couple is different. But there's a lot of si SOS here to information security officers. You are in the office of the Chief Security Information officer. So what is the conversations they're having? Because we're hearing a lot of Dev ops like conversations in the security bat with a pretty backdrop about not just chest undead, but hack a phone's getting new stuff built and then moving into production operations. Little Deb's sec up So these kinds of things, we're all kind of coming together. What are you hearing from those customers inside Amazon? Because I know you guys a customer driven in the customers in the sea SOS as your customer. What are they saying? What are they asking for? So see, so's our first getting their own minds around >> this big technical transformations that are happening on dhe. They're thinking about risk management and compliance and things that they're responsible for. They've got a report to a board or a board committee say, Hey, we're doing things according to the norms of our industry or the regulated industries that we sit in. So they're building the knowledge base and the expertise and the teams that can translate from this sort of modern dev ops e thing to these more traditional frameworks like, Hey, I've got this oversight by the Securities Exchange Commission or by the banking regulators, or what have you and we have to be able to explain to them why our security posture not only is maintained, it in some ways improved in these in this new world. So they're they're challenge now is both developing their own understanding, which I think they're doing a good job at, but also kind of building this the muscle of the strength. The terminology translate between these new technologies, new worlds and more traditional frameworks that they sit within and people who give oversight over them. So you gotta risk. So there's risk committees on boards of these large publics organizations, and the risk committees don't know a lot about cloud computing. So s O they're part of what they do now is they do that translation function and they can say, Look, I've I've got assurance is based on my work that I do in the technology and my compliance frameworks that I could meet the risk profiles that we've traditionally met in other ways with this new technology. So it's it's a pretty interesting >> had translations with the C I A. Certainly in public sector, those security oriented companies, a cz well, as the other trend, they're gonna educate the boards and they're secure and not get hacked the obsolete. And then there's the innovation side of it. Yeah, we actually gotta build out. Yes. This is what we just talked about a big change for our C says. That we talk to and work with all the time is that hey, we're in engineering community now. We didn't used to write a lot of code, and now we do. We're getting strong in that way. Or else we're parting very closely with an engineering team who has dedicated teams that support our security requirements and build the tools. We need to know that things are going well from our perspective. So that's a really cool, I think, changing that. I think that is probably one >> of my favorite trends that I see because he really shows the criticality of security was pretty much all critically, only act. But having that code coding focus really shows that they're building in house use case that they care about and the fact that I can now get native network traffic. Yeah, and you guys are exposing new sets of service is with land and other things >> over the top. >> It just makes for a good environment to do these clouds. Security things. That seems to be the show >> in a nutshell. Yeah, I think that's one of the nice thing about this show. Is It's a very positive energy here. It's not like the fear and scary stuff sometimes hear it. Security conference is like a the sky's falling by my product kind of thing Here. It's much more of a collaborative like, Hey, we got some serious challenges. There's some bad guys out there. They're gonna come after us. But as a community using new tooling, new techniques, modern approaches, modernization generally like let's get rid of a lot of these crusty old systems we've never updated for 10 or 20 years. It's a positive energy, which is really exciting. Good Mark, get your insights out. So this is your wheelhouse Show. Congratulations. >> You got to ask you the question. Just take your see. So Amazon had off just as an industry participant riding this way, being involved in it. What is the most important story that needs to be told in the press? In the media that should be told what's as important. Either it's being told it, then should be amplified or not being told and be written out. What's the What's the top story? I don't think that even after all this time that you know when people >> hear public cloud computing. They still have this kind of instinctive reaction like, Oh, that sounds kind of scary or a little bit risky and, you know, way need to get to the point where those words don't elicit some sense of risk in people's minds, but rather elicit like, Oh, cool, that's gonna help me be secure instead of being a challenge. Now that's a journey, and people have to get there, and our customers who go deep, very consistently, say, And I'm sure you've had them say to you, Hey, I feel more confident in my cloud based security. Then I do my own premises security. But that's still not the kind of the initial reaction. And so were we still have a ways, a fear based mentality. Too much more >> of a >> Yeah. Modernization base like this is the modern way to get the results in the outcomes I want, and cloud is a part of that, and it doesn't not only doesn't scare me, I want to go there because it's gonna take a community as well. Yeah, Mark, thanks so much for coming back on the greatest. Be hearing great Mark Mark Riley, direct of the office of the chief information security at Amazon Web services here, sharing his inside, extracting the signal. But the top stories and most important things >> being being >> said and discussed and executed here, it reinforced on the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more after this short break.

>> Male Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by, IBM. >> Welcome back, we're live here in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is theCUBE's coverage of InterConnect, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante my co-host. Our next guest is Deon Newman, CMO of IBM Watson IoT, and Slava Rubin, the founder and Chief Business Officer of Indiegogo, great keynote today, you're on stage. Welcome to theCUBE. Deon, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I got to first set the context. Indiegogo, very successful crowd-funder, you guys pioneered. It's pretty obvious now looking back, this has created so much opportunity for people starting companies, whether it's a labor of love or growing into a great business, so congratulations on your success. What's the IBM connection? Because I don't want, you know, there was some stuff on the tweets, I don't want to break the news, but you guys are here. Share the connection. What's the packaging, why is IMB and Indigogo working together? >> Yeah, so back up to 2008. We launched to be able to get people access to funding. And over the last several years, we've done a pretty good job of that. Sending over a billion dollars to over half a million entrepreneurs around the world. And more recently, we've had a lot more requests of Indiegogo can you do more? And we knew that we couldn't do it all on our own. So we partnered first with Arrow to be able to bring these ideas more into reality around components and engineering and supply chain. And we knew we needed more in terms of these IoT products, so they need to be smart and they need software. So we were really excited to be able to announce today, the partnership with IBM, around everything IoT Cloud, security, and being able to provide all the block chain and any other elements that we need. >> Deon I want to ask you, get your thoughts on, we had the Watson data platform guys on earlier in the segment, and the composability is now the norm around data. This brings the hacker-maker culture to IoT. Which if you think about it as a sweet-spot for some of the innovations. They can start small and grow big. Is that part of the plan? >> Yeah, I mean, if you look at what's going on we have about 6000 clients already with us in the IoT space. They tend to be the big end of town, you know whether it be a Daimler or an Airbus or whether it be a Kone, the world's biggest elevator company. Or ISS, the world's biggest facilities management company. So we were doing a lot of work up there really around optimizing their operations, connecting products, wrapping services around them so they can create new revenue streams. But where we didn't have an offering that was being used extensively, was in the start-up space. And you know when we saw what Indiegogo had been doing in the marketplace, and when our partner Arrow, who as Slava has said, has really built up an engineering capability and a component capability to support these makers. It was just a match made in heaven. You know, for an entrepreneur who needs to find a way to capture data, make that data valuable, you know, we can do that. We have the Cloud platform, we have the AI, et cetera. >> It's interesting, we just hit the stride of dude, we have our big data Silicon Valley event just last week, and the big thing that come out of that event is finally the revelation, this is probably not new to Slava and what you're doing, it that, the production under-the-hood hard stuff that's being done is some ways stunting the creativity around some of the cooler stuff. Like whether it's data analytics or in this case, starting a company. So, Slava I want to get your thought on, your views on how the world is becoming democratized. Because if you think about the entrepreneurship trend that you're riding, is the democratization of invention. Alright, there's a democracy, this is the creative, it's the innovation, but yet it's all this hard stuff, like what's called production or under-the-hood that IBM's bringing in. What do you expect that to fuel up? What's your vision of this democratization culture? >> I mean, it's my favorite thing that's happening. I think whether it's YouTube democratizing access to content or Indiegogo democratizing access to capital. The idea of democratizing access to entrepreneurship between our partnership, just really makes me smile. I think that capital is just one of those first points and now they're starting to get the money but lots of other things are hard. When you can actually get artificial intelligence, get Cloud capabilities, get security capabilities, put it into a service so you don't need to figure all those things out on your own so you can go from a small little idea to actually start scaling pretty rapidly, that's super exciting. When you can be on Indiegogo and in four weeks get 30,000 backers of demand across 100 countries, and people are saying, we want this, you know it's good to know you don't need to start ramping up your own dev team to figure out how to create a Cloud on your own, or create your own AI, you can tap right into a server that's provided. Which is really revolutionizing how quickly a small company can scale. So it proliferates more entrepreneurs starting because they know there's more accessibility. Plus it improves their potential for success, which in the long run just means there's more swings at the bat to be able to have and entrepreneur succeed, which I think all of us want. >> Explain to the audience how it works a little bit. You got the global platform that you built up. Arrow brings it's resources and ideation. IBM brings the IoT, the cognitive platform. Talk about how that all comes together and how people take advantage of it? >> Sure, I mean you can look at it as one example, like Water Buy. So Water Buy is an actual sensor that you can deploy against your water system to be able to detect whether or not your water that you're drinking is healthy. You're getting real-time data across your system and for some reason it's telling you that you have issues, you can react accordingly. So that was an idea. You go on Indiegogo, they post that idea and they're able to get the world to start funding it. You get customer engagement. You get actual market validation. And you get funding. Well now you actually need to make these sensors, you need to make these products, so now you get the partnership with Arrow which is really helpful cause they're helping you with the engineering, the design, the components. Now you want to be able to figure out how you can store all that data. So it's not just your own house, maybe you're evaluating across an entire neighborhood. Or as a State you want to see how the water is for the whole entire State. You put all of that data up into the Cloud, you want to be able to analyze the data rapidly through AI, and similarly this is highly sensitive data so you want it to be secure. If Water Buy on their own, had to build out all of this infrastructure, we're talking about dozens, hundreds, who knows how many people they would need? But here through the partnership you get the benefit of Indiegogo to get the brilliant idea to actually get validated, Arrow to bring your idea from the back of a napkin into reality, and then you get IBM Watson to help with all the software components and Cloud that we just talked about. >> And how did this get started? How did you guys, you know, fall into this, and how did it manifest itself? >> So can I tell the story? >> Go for it. >> So I love this story, so as Slava's explained at the front end of this it was really a partnership of Arrow and Indiegogo that came out of the need of entrepreneurs to actually build their stuff. You know, you get it funded and then you say, oh boy, now I've got a bunch of orders how do I now make this stuff? And so Arrow had a capability of looking at the way you designed, you know looking at it deeply with their engineers, sourcing the components, putting it together, maybe white-boxing it even for you. So they put that together. Now, we're all seeing that IoT and the connective products are moving for disconnection, which is actually generating data and that data having value. And so Arrow didn't have that capability, we were great partners with Arrow, you know when we all looked at it, the need for AI coming into all these products, the need for security around the connection, the platform that could actually do that connection, we were a logical map here. So we're another set of components, not the physical. You know, we're the Cloud-based components and services that enable these connected devices. >> If you think about like the impact, and it's mind-boggling what the alternative is. You mentioned that the example you gave, they probably might have abandoned the project. So if you think about the scale of these opportunities what the alternative would have been without an Indiegogo, you probably have some anecdotal kind of feeling on this. But any thoughts on what data you can share around, do you have kind of reference point of, okay, we've funded all this and 90% wouldn't have been done or 70% wouldn't have been done. Do you have any flavor for? >> It's hard to know exactly. Obviously many of these folks that come to Indiegogo, if they could've gotten funded on another path earlier in the process, they would have. Indiegogo became really a great choice. Now you're seeing instead of being the last resort, Indiegogo is becoming the first resort because they're getting so much validation and market data. The incredible thing is not to think about it at scale when you think about 500 or 700 thousand entrepreneurs, or over a billion dollars, and it's in virtually every country in the world. If you really just look at it as one product. So like, Flow Hive is just one example. They've revolutionized how honey gets harvested. That product was bought in almost 170 countries around the world and it's something that hadn't been changed in over 150 years. And it's just so interesting to see that if it wasn't for Indiegogo that idea would not go from the back of a napkin to getting funded. And now through these partnerships they're able to realize so much more of their potential. >> So it's interesting, the machine learning piece is interesting to me because you take the seed-funding which is great product-market fit as they say in the entrepreneurial culture, is validated. So that's cool. But it could be in some cases, small amounts of cash before the next milestone. But if you think about the creativity impact that machine learning can give the entrepreneur, with through in their discovery process, early stage, that's an added benefit to the entrepreneur. >> Absolutely. Yeah, a great example there is against SmartPlate. SmartPlate is trying to use a combination of a weight-sensing plate as well with photo-detection, image detection software. The more data it can feed its image detection, the more qualified it can know, is that a strawberry or a cherry, or is that beef? And we take that for granted that our eyes can detect all that, but it's really remarkable to think about instead of having to journal everything by hand or make sure you pick with your finger what's the right product and how many ounces, you can take a photo of something and now you'll know what you're eating, how much you're eating and what is the food composition? And this all requires significant data, significant processing. >> I'm really pumped about that, congratulations to you on a great deal. I love the creativity and I think the impact to the globe is just phenomenal. Thinking about the game-changing things that are coming up, Slava I've got to ask you, and Deon if you could weigh in too, maybe you have some, your favorites. You're craziest thing that you've seen funded and the coolest thing you've seen funded. (laughter) >> I mean, who is hard because it's kind of like asking well who's your favorite child? I have like 700,000 children, I'm not even Wilt Chamberlain (laughter) and I like them all. But you know it's everything from an activity tracker to security devices, to being able to see what the trend is 24, 36 months ahead. Before things become mainstream today, we're seeing these things 3, 5 years ago. Things are showing up at CES, and you know these are things we get to see in advance. In terms of something crazy, it's not quite IoT but I remember when a young woman tried to raise $200,000 to be able to get enough money for her and Justin Bieber to fly to the moon. (laughter) >> That's crazy. >> That didn't quite get enough funding. But something that's fresh right now is Nimuno Loops is getting funded right now on Indiegogo live. And they just posted less than seven days ago and they have Lego-compatible tape. So it's something that you can tape onto any surface and the other side is actually Lego-compatible so you actually put Legos onto that tape. So imagine instead of only a flat surface to do Legos, you could do Legos on any surface even your jacket. It's not the most IoT-esque product right now but you just asked for something creative. >> That's the creative. >> I think once you got Wilt Chamberlain and Justin Bieber in the conversation, I'm out. (laughter) (crosstalk) >> Well now, how does Indiegogo sustain itself? Does it take a piece of the action? Does it have other funding mechanisms for? >> Yeah, and that's the beautiful thing about Indiegogo. It's a platform and it's all about supply and demand. So supply is the ideas and the entrepreneurs and the demand is the funders. It's totally free to use the website and as long as you're able to get money in your pocket, then we take a percentage. If you're not taking any money into your pocket, then we get no money. As part of the process, you might benefit from actually not receiving money. You might try to raise a hundred grand, only raise thirty-one and learn that your price-point is wrong, your target audience is wrong, your color is wrong, you're bottom cost it too high. All this feedback is super valuable. You just saved yourself a lot of pain. So really it's about building the marketplace we're a platform, we started out just with funding, we're really becoming now a springboard for entrepreneurs. We can't do it all ourselves which is why we're bringing on these great partners. >> You know we've done, just to add to that, I think it's a relevant part here too. We've actually announced a premium-based service for the entrepreneurs to get onto the Cloud, to access the AI, to access the services as a starting point to the complete premium model so they can get started very low barrier to entry and overseeing scale as they grow. >> What do you call that? Is it IBM IoT Premium or? >> It hasn't got a name specifically to the premium element of the, it's just the Watson IoT platform. Available on Blue Mist. >> So it's a Watson sort of, right. So it's like a community edition of Watson. So Deon, new chapter for you. You know I saw a good quarter for mainframes, last quarter. It's still drafting off your great work and now you've shifted to this whole new IoT role, what's that been like? Relatively new initiative for IBM, building on some historical expertise. But give us the update on your business. >> Yes, so about 15 months ago, we announced a global headquarters that we were going to open in Munich, and we announced the Watson IT business. Which brought together a lot of IBM's expertise and a lot of our experience over the years through smarter cities, through the smarter planet initiative. You know we've been working The Internet Of Things, but we made a 3-billion dollar commitment to that marketplace, that we were going to go big and go strong. We've built out a horizontal platform, the Watson IoT platform. On top of that we've got market-leading enterprise asset management software, the Maximo portfolio, TRIRIGA for facilities management. And then we have a whole set of engineering software for designing connected products as well. So we've built out a very comprehensive industry-vertical-aligned IoT business. We added last year, we went from about 4000 to about 6000 clients. So we had a very good year in terms of real enterprises getting real outcomes. We continue to bring out new industry solutions around both connected products and then operations like retail, manufacturing, building management, telco, transportation. We're building out solutions and use-cases to leverage all that software. So business is going well. We officially the Watson IoT headquarters three weeks ago in Munich. And we're jam packed with clients coming through that building, building with us. We've got a lot of clients who've actually taken space in the building. And their using it as a co-laboratory with us to work on PSE's and see the outcomes they can drive. >> Alright, Deon Newman with IoT Watson, and IoT platforms. Slava Rubin, founder of Indiegogo, collective intelligence is cultural shift happening. Congratulations outsourcing and using all that crowdfunding. It's real good data, not just getting the entrepreneur innovations funded but really using that data and your wheelhouse IoT. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you John. >> More live coverage after this short break, with theCUBE live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect. We'll be right back, stay with us. (upbeat music)