>>Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome back to the VMware Explorer. 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, here with Dave. Valante good to be sitting next to you, sir. >>Yeah. Yeah. The big set >>And we're very excited to be welcoming buck. One of our esteemed alumni Sanja poin joins us, the CEO and president of cohesive. Nice to see >>You. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Dave. It's great to meet with you all the time and the new sort of setting here, but first >>Time, first time we've been in west, is that right? We've been in north. We've been in south. We've been in Las Vegas, right. But west, >>I mean, it's also good to be back with live shows with absolutely, you know, after sort of the two or three or hiatus. And it was a hard time for the whole world, but I'm kind of driving a little bit of adrenaline just being here with people. So >>You've also got some adrenaline, sorry, Dave. Yeah, you're good because you are new in the role at cohesive. You wrote a great blog that you are identified. The four reasons I came to cohesive. Tell the audience, just give 'em a little bit of a teaser about that. >>Yeah, I think you should all read it. You can Google and, and Google find that article. I talked about the people Mohi is a fantastic founder. You know, he was the, you know, the architect of the Google file system. And you know, one of the senior Google executives was on my board. Bill Corrin said one of the smartest engineers. He was the true father of hyperconverge infrastructure. A lot of the code of Nutanix. He wrote, I consider him really the father of that technology, which brought computer storage. And when he took that same idea of bringing compute to secondary storage, which is really what made the scale out architect unique. And we were at your super cloud event talking about that, Dave. Yeah. Right. So it's a people I really got to respect his smarts, his integrity and the genius, what he is done. I think the customer base, I called a couple of customers. One of them, a fortune 100 customer. I, I can't tell you who it was, but a very important customer. I've known him. He said, I haven't seen tech like this since VMware, 20 years ago, Amazon 10 years ago and now Ko. So that's special league. We're winning very much in the enterprise and that type of segment, the partners, you know, we have HPE, Cisco as investors. Amazon's an investors. So, you know, and then finally the opportunity, I think this whole area of data management and data security now with threats, like ransomware big opportunity. >>Okay. So when you were number two at VMware, you would come on and say, we'd love all our partners and of course, okay. So you know, a little bit about how to work with, with VMware. So, so when you now think about the partnership between cohesive and VMware, what are the things that you're gonna stress to your constituents on the VMware side to convince them that Hey, partnering with cohesive is gonna gonna drive more value for customers, you know, put your thumb on the scale a little bit. You know, you gotta, you gotta unfair advantage somewhat, but you should use it. So what's the narrative gonna be like? >>Yeah, I think listen with VMware and Amazon, that probably their top two partners, Dave, you know, like one of the first calls I made was to Raghu and he knew about this decision before. That's the level of trust I have in him. I even called Michael Dell, you know, before I made the decision, there's a little bit of overlap with Dell, but it's really small compared to the overlap, the potential with Dell hardware that we could compliment. And then I called four CEOs. I was, as I was making this decision, Andy Jassey at Amazon, he was formerly AWS CEO sat Nadela at Microsoft Thomas cor at Google and Arvin Christian, IBM to say, I'm thinking about this making decision. They are many of the mentors and friends to me. So I believe in an ecosystem. And you know, even Chuck Robbins, who the CEO of Cisco is an investor, I texted him and said, Hey, finally, we can be friends. >>It was harder to us to be friends with Cisco, given the overlap of NSX. So I have a big tent towards everybody in our ecosystem with VMware. I think the simple answer is there's no overlap okay. With, with the kind of the primary storage capabilities with VSAN. And by the same thing with Nutanix, we will be friends and, and extend that to be the best data protection solution. But given also what we could do with security, I think this is gonna go a lot further. And then it's all about meet the field. We have common partners. I think, you know, sort of the narrative I talked about in that blog is just like snowflake was replacing Terada and ServiceNow replace remedy and CrowdStrike, replacing Symantec, we're replacing legacy vendors. We are viewed as the modern solution cloud optimized for private and public cloud. We can help you and make VMware and vs a and VCF very relevant to that part of the data management and data security continuum, which I think could end VMware. And by the way, the same thing into the public cloud. So most of the places where we're being successful is clearly withs, but increasingly there's this discussion also about playing into the cloud. So I think both with VMware and Amazon, and of course the other partners in the hyperscaler service, storage, networking place and security, we have some big plans. >>How, how much do you see this? How do you see this multi-cloud narrative that we're hearing here from, from VMware evolving? How much of an opportunity is it? How are customers, you know, we heard about cloud chaos yesterday at the keynote, are customers, do they, do they admit that there's cloud chaos? Some probably do some probably don't how much of an opportunity is that for cohesive, >>It's tremendous opportunity. And I think that's why you need a Switzerland type player in this space to be successful. And you know, and you can't explicitly rule out the fact that the big guys get into this space, but I think it's, if you're gonna back up office 365 or what they call now, Microsoft 365 into AWS or Google workspace into Azure or Salesforce into one of those clouds, you need a Switzerland player. It's gonna be hard. And in many cases, if you're gonna back up data or you protect that data into AWS banks need a second copy of that either on premise or Azure. So it's very hard, even if they have their own native data protection for them to be dual cloud. So I think a multi-cloud story and the fact that there's at least three big vendors of cloud in, in the us, you know, one in China, if include Alibaba creates a Switzerland opportunity for us, that could be fairly big. >>And I think, you know, what we have to do is make sure while we'll be optimized, our preferred cloud is AWS. Our control plane runs there. We can't take an all in AWS stack with the control plane and the data planes at AWS to Walmart. So what I've explained to both Microsoft and AWS is that data plane will need to be multi-cloud. So I can go to an, a Walmart and say, I can back up your data into Azure if you choose to, but the control plane's still gonna be an AWS, same thing with Google. Maybe they have another account. That's very Google centric. So that's how we're gonna believe the, the control plane will be in AWS. We'll optimize it there, but the data plane will be multicloud. >>Yeah. And that's what Mo had explained at Supercloud. You know, and I talked to him, he really helped me hone in on the deployment models. Yes. Where, where, where the cohesive deployment model is instantiating that technology stack into each cloud region and each cloud, which gives you latency advantages and other advantages >>And single code based same platform. >>And then bringing it, tying it together with a unified, you know, interface. That was he, he was, he was key. In fact, I, I wrote about it recently and, and gave him and the other 29 >>Quite a bit in that session, he went deep with you. I >>Mean, with Mohi, when you get a guy who developed a Google file system, you know, who can technically say, okay, this is technically correct or no, Dave, your way off be. So I that's why I had to >>Go. I, I thought you did a great job in that interview because you probed him pretty deep. And I'm glad we could do that together with him next time. Well, maybe do that together here too, but it was really helpful. He's the, he's the, he's the key reason I'm here. >>So you say data management is ripe for disrupt disruption. Talk about that. You talked about this Switzerland effect. That sounds to me like a massive differentiator for cohesive. Why is data management right for disruption and why is cohesive the right partner to do it? >>Yeah, I think, listen, everyone in this sort of data protection backup from years ago have been saying the S Switzerland argument 18 years ago, I was a at Veras an executive there. We used the Switzerland argument, but what's changed is the cloud. And what's changed as a threat vector in security. That's, what's changed. And in that the proposition of a, a Switzerland player has just become more magnified because you didn't have a sales force or Workday service now then, but now you do, you didn't have multi-cloud. You had hardware vendors, you know, Dell, HPE sun at the time. IBM, it's now Lenovo. So that heterogeneity of, of on-premise service, storage, networking, HyperCloud, and, and the apps world has gotten more and more diverse. And I think you really need scale out architectures. Every one of the legacy players were not built with scale out architectures. >>If you take that fundamental notion of bringing compute to storage, you could almost paralyze. Imagine you could paralyze backup recovery and bring so much scale and speed that, and that's what Mo invented. So he took that idea of how he had invented and built Nutanix and applied that to secondary storage. So now everything gets faster and cheaper at scale. And that's a disruptive technology ally. What snowflake did to ator? I mean, the advantage of snowflake is when you took that same concept data, warehousing is not a new concept it's existed from since Ralph Kimball and bill Inman and the people who are fathers of data warehousing, they took that to Webscale. And in that came a disruptive force toter data, right on snowflake. And then of course now data bricks and big query, similar things. So we're doing the same thing. We just have to showcase the customers, which we do. And when large customers see that they're replacing the legacy solutions, I have a lot of respect for legacy solutions, but at some point in time of a solution was invented in 1995 or 2000, 2005. It's right. For change. >>So you use snowflake as an example, Frank SL doesn't like when I say playbook, cuz I says, Dave, I'm a situational CEO, no playbook, but there are patterns here. And one of the things he did is to your point go after, you know, Terra data with a better data warehouse, simplify scale, et cetera. And now he's, he's a constructing a Tam expansion strategy, same way he did at ServiceNow. And I see you guys following a similar pattern. Okay. You get your foot in the door. Let's face it. I mean, a lot of this started with, you know, just straight back. Okay, great. Now it's extending into data management now extending to multi-cloud that's like concentric circles in a Tam expansion strategy. How, how do you, as, as a CEO, that's part of your job is Tam expansion. >>So yeah, I think the way to think about the Tam is, I mean, people say it's 20, 30 billion, but let me tell you how you can piece it apart in size, Dave and Lisa number one, I estimate there's probably about 10 to 20 exabytes of data managed by these legacy players of on-prem stores that they back up to. Okay. So you add them all up in the market shares that they respectively are. And by the way, at the peak, the biggest of these companies got to 2 billion and then shrunk. That was Verto when I was there in 2004, 2 billion, every one of them is small and they stopped growing. You look at the IDC charts. Many of them are shrinking. We are the fastest growing in the last two years, but I estimate there's about 20 exabytes of data that collectively among the legacy players, that's either gonna stay on prem or move to the cloud. Okay. So the opportunity as they replace one of those legacy tools with us is first off to manage that 20 X by cheaper, faster with the Webscale glass offer the cloud guys, we could tip that into the cloud. Okay. >>But you can't stop there. >>Okay. No, we are not doing just backup recovery. We have a platform that can do files. We can do test dev analytics and now security. Okay. That data is potentially at a risk, not so much in the past, but for ransomware, right? How do we classify that? How do we govern that data? How do we run potential? You know, the same way you did antivirus some kind of XDR algorithms on the data to potentially not just catch the recovery process, which is after fact, but maybe the predictive act of before to know, Hey, there's somebody loitering around this data. So if I'm basically managing in the exabytes of data and I can proactively tell you what, this is, one CIO described this very simply to me a few weeks ago that I, and she said, I have 3000 applications, okay. I wanna be prepared for a black Swan event, except it's not a nine 11 planes getting the, the buildings. >>It is an extortion event. And I want to know when that happens, which of my 3000 apps I recover within one hour within one day within one week, no later than one month. Okay. And I don't wanna pay the bad guys at penny. That's what we do. So that's security discussions. We didn't have that discussion in 2004 when I was at another company, because we were talking about flood floods and earthquakes as a disaster recovery. Now you have a lot more security opportunity to be able to describe that. And that's a boardroom discussion. She needs to have that >>Digital risk. O O okay, go ahead please. I >>Was just gonna say, ransomware attack happens every what? One, every 11, 9, 11 seconds. >>And the dollar amount are going up, you know, dollar are going up. Yep. >>And, and when you pay the ransom, you don't always get your data back. So you that's not. >>And listen, there's always an ethical component. Should you do it or not do it? If you, if you don't do it and you're threatened, they may have left an Easter egg there. Listen, I, I feel very fortunate that I've been doing a lot in security, right? I mean, I built the business at, at, at VMware. We got it to over a billion I'm on the board of sneak. I've been doing security and then at SAP ran. So I know a lot about security. So what we do in security and the ecosystem that supports us in security, we will have a very carefully crafted stay tuned. Next three weeks months, you'll see us really rolling out a very kind of disciplined aspect, but we're not gonna pivot this company and become a cyber security company. Some others in our space have done that. I think that's not who we are. We are a data management and a data security company. We're not just a pure security company. We're doing both. And we do it well, intelligently, thoughtfully security is gonna be built into our platform, not voted on. Okay. And there'll be certain security things that we do organically. There's gonna be a lot that we do through partnerships, this >>Security market that's coming to you. You don't have to go claim that you're now a security vendor, right? The market very naturally saying, wow, a comprehensive security strategy has to incorporate a data protection strategy and a recovery, you know, and the things that we've talking about Mount ransomware, I want to ask you, you I've been around a long time, longer than you actually Sanjay. So, but you you've, you've seen a lot. You look, >>Thank you. That's all good. Oh, >>Shucks. So the market, I've never seen a market like this, right? I okay. After the.com crash, we said, and I know you can't talk about IPO. That's not what I'm talking about, but everything was bad after that. Right. 2008, 2000, everything was bad. I've never seen a market. That's half full, half empty, you know, snowflake beats and raises the stock, goes through the roof. Dev if it, if the area announced today, Mongo, DB, beat and Ray, that things getting crushed and, and after market never seen anything like this. It's so fed, driven and, and hard to protect. And, and of course, I know it's a marathon, you know, it's not a sprint, but have you ever seen anything like this? >>Listen, I walk worked through 18 quarters as COO of VMware. You've seen where I've seen public quarters there and you know, was very fortunate. Thanks to the team. I don't think I missed my numbers in 18 quarters except maybe once close. But we, it was, it's tough. Being a public company of the company is tough. I did that also at SAP. So the journey from 10 to 20 billion at SAP, the journey from six to 12 at VMware, that I was able to be fortunate. It's humbling because you, you really, you know, we used to have this, we do the earnings call and then we kind of ask ourselves, what, what do you think the stock price was gonna be a day and a half later? And we'd all take bets as to where this, I think you just basically, as a, as a sea level executive, you try to build a culture of beaten, raise, beaten, raise, beaten, raise, and you wanna set expectations in a way that you're not setting them up for failure. >>And you know, it's you, there's, Dave's a wonderful CEO as is Frank Salman. So it's hard for me to dissect. And sometimes the market are fickle on some small piece of it. But I think also the, when I, I encourage people say, take the long term view. When you take the long term view, you're not bothered about the ups and downs. If you're building a great company over the length of time, now it will be very clear over the arc of many, many quarters that you're business is trouble. If you're starting to see a decay in growth. And like, for example, when you start to see a growth, start to decay significantly by five, 10 percentage points, okay, there's something macro going on at this company. And that's what you won't avoid. But these, you know, ups and downs, my view is like, if you've got both Mongo D and snowflake are fantastic companies, they're CEOs of people I respect. They've actually kind of an, a, you know, advisor to us as a company, you knows moat very well. So we respect him, respect Frank, and you, there have been other quarters where Frank's, you know, the Snowflake's had a down result after that. So you build a long term and they are on the right side of history, snowflake, and both of them in terms of being a modern cloud relevant in the case of MongoDB, open source, two data technology, that's, you know, winning, I, I, we would like to be like them one day >>As, as the new CEO of cohesive, what are you most ask? What are you most anxious about and what are you most excited about? >>I think, listen, you know, you know, everything starts with the employee. You, I always believe I wrote my first memo to all employees. There was an article in Harvard business review called service profit chains that had a seminal impact on my leadership, which is when they studied companies who had been consistently profitable over a long period of time. They found that not just did those companies serve their customers well, but behind happy engaged customers were happy, engaged employees. So I always believe you start with the employee and you ensure that they're engaged, not just recruiting new employees. You know, I put on a tweet today, we're hiring reps and engineers. That's okay. But retaining. So I wanna start with ensuring that everybody, sometimes we have to make some unfortunate decisions with employees. We've, we've got a part company with, but if we can keep the best and brightest retained first, then of course, you know, recruiting machine, I'm trying to recruit the best and brightest to this company, people all over the place. >>I want to get them here. It's been, so I mean, heartwarming to come Tom world and just see people from all walks, kind of giving me hugs. I feel incredibly blessed. And then, you know, after employees, it's customers and partners, I feel like the tech is in really good hands. I don't have to worry about that. Cuz Mo it's in charge. He's got this thing. I can go to bed knowing that he's gonna keep innovating the future. Maybe in some of the companies I've worried about the tech innovation piece, but most doing a great job there. I can kind of leave that in his cap of hands, but employees, customers, partners, that's kind of what I'm focused on. None of them are for me, like a keep up at night, but there are are opportunities, right? And sometimes there's somebody you're trying to salvage to make sure or somebody you're trying to convince to join. >>But you know, customers, I love pursuing customers. I love the win. I hate to lose. So fortune 1000 global, 2000 companies, small companies, big companies, I wanna win every one of them. And it's not, it's not like, I mean, I know all these CEOs in my competitors. I texted him the day I joined and said, listen, I'll compete, honorably, whatever have you, but it's like Kobe and LeBron Kobe's passed away now. So maybe it's Steph Curry. LeBron, whoever your favorite athlete is you put your best on the court and you win. And that's how I am. That's nothing I've known no other gear than to put my best on the court and win, but do it honorably. It should not be the one that you're doing it. Unethically. You're doing it personally. You're not calling people's names. You're competing honorably. And when you win the team celebrates, it's not a victory for me. It's a victory for the team. >>I always think I'm glad that you brought up the employee experience and we're almost out of time, but I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are inextricably linked. This employees have to be empowered. They have to have the data that they need to do their job so that they can deliver to the customer. You can't do one without the other. >>That's so true. I mean, I, it's my belief. And I've talked also on this show and others about servant leadership. You know, one of my favorite poems is Brenda Naor. I went to bed in life. I dreamt that life was joy. I woke up and realized life was service. I acted in service was joy. So when you have a leadership model, which is it's about, I mean, there's lots of layers between me and the individual contributor, but I really care about that sales rep and the engineer. That's the leaf level of the organization. What can I get obstacle outta their way? I love skipping levels of going right. That sales rep let's go and crack this deal. You know? So you have that mindset. Yeah. I mean, you, you empower, you invert the pyramid and you realize the power is at the leaf level of an organization. >>So that's what I'm trying to do. It's a little easier to do it with 2000 people than I dunno, either 20, 20, 2000 people or 35,000 reported me at VMware. And I mean a similar number at SAP, which was even bigger, but you can shape this. Now we are, we're not a startup anymore. We're a midsize company. We'll see. Maybe along the way, there's an IP on the path. We'll wait for that. When it comes, it's a milestone. It's not the destination. So we do that and we are, we, I told people we are gonna build this green company. Cohesive is gonna be a great company like VMware one day, like Amazon. And there's always a day of early beginnings, but we have to work harder. This is kind of like the, you know, eight year old version of your kid, as opposed to the 18 year old version of the kid. And you gotta work a little harder. So I love it. Yeah. >>Good luck. Awesome. Thank you. Best of luck. Congratulations. On the role, it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of adrenaline, a momentum carrying you forward Sanjay. We always appreciate having you. Thank >>You for having in your show. >>Thank you. Our pleasure, Lisa. Thank you for Sanja poin and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022, stick around our next guest. Join us momentarily.

>>We're back in Boston, the Cube's coverage of AWS reinforced 2022. My name is Dave ante. Steve Malanney is here as the CEO of Aviatrix longtime cube alum sort of collaborator on super cloud. Yeah. Uh, which we have an event, uh, August 9th, which you guys are participating in. So, um, thank you for that. And, yep. Welcome to the cube. >>Yeah. Thank you so great to be here as >>Always back in Boston. Yeah. I'd say good show. Not, not like blow me away. We were AWS, um, summit in New York city three weeks ago. I >>Took, heard it took three hours to get in >>Out control. I heard, well, there were some people two I, maybe three <laugh>, but there was, they expected like maybe nine, 10,000, 19,000 showed up. Now it's a free event. Yeah. 19,000 people. >>Oh, I didn't know it >>Was that many. It was unbelievable. I mean, it was packed. Yeah. You know, so it's a little light here and I think it's cuz you know, everybody's down the Cape, >>There are down the Cape, Rhode Island that's after the fourth. The thing is that we were talking about this. The quality of people are pretty good though. Yeah. Right. This is there's no looky lose it's everybody. That's doing stuff in cloud. They're moving in. This is no longer, Hey, what's this thing called cloud. Right. I remember three, four years ago at AWS. You'd get a lot of that, that kind of stuff. Some the summit meetings and things like that. Now it's, we're a full on deployment mode even >>Here in 2019, the conversation was like, so there's this shared responsibility model and we may have to make sure you understand. I mean, nobody's questioning that today. Yeah. It's more really hardcore best practices and you know how to apply tools. Yeah. You know, dos and don't and so it's a much more sophisticated narrative, I think. Yeah. >>Well, I mean, that's one of the things that Aviatrix does is our whole thing is architecturally. I would say, where does network security belong in the network? It shouldn't be a bolt on it. Shouldn't be something that you add on. It should be something that actually gets integrated into the fabric of the network. So you shouldn't be able to point to network security. It's like, can you point to the network? It's everywhere. Point to air it's everywhere. Network security should be integrated in the fabric and that wasn't done. On-prem that way you steered traffic to this thing called a firewall. But in the cloud, that's not the right architectural way. It it's a choke point. Uh, operationally adds tremendous amount of complexity, which is the whole reason we're going to cloud in the first place is for that agility and the ability to operationally swipe the card and get our developers running to put in these choke points is completely the wrong architecture. So conversations we're having with customers is integrate that security into the fabric of the network. And you get rid of all those, all those operational >>Issues. So explain that how you're not a, a checkpoint, but if you funnel everything into one sort of place >>In the, so we are a networking company, uh, it is uh, cloud networking company. So we, we were born in the cloud cloud native. We, we are not some on-prem networking solution that was jammed in the cloud, uh, wrapped >>In stack wrapped >>In, you know, or like that. No, no, no. And looking for wires, right? That's VM series from Palo. It doesn't even know it's in the cloud. Right. It's looking for wires. Um, and of course multicloud, cuz you know, Larry E said now, could you believe that on stage with sat, Nadela talking about multi-cloud now you really know we've crossed over to this is a, this is a thing, whoever would've thought you'd see that. But anyway, so we're networking. We're cloud networking, of course it's multi-cloud networking and we're gonna integrate these intelligent services into the fabric. And one of those is, is networking. So what happens is you should do security everywhere. So the place to do it is at every single point in the network that you can make a decision and you embed it and actually embed it into the network. So it's that when you're making a decision of does that traffic need to go somewhere or not, you're doing a little bit of security everywhere. And so what, it looks like a giant firewall effectively, but it's actually distributed in software through every single point in a network. >>Can I call it a mesh? >>It's kind of a mesh you can think of. Yeah, it's a fabric. >>Okay. It's >>A, it's a fabric that these advanced services, including security are integrated into that fabric. >>So you've been in networking much of >>Your career career, >>37 years. All your career. Right? So yay. Cisco Palo Alto. Nicera probably missing one or two, but so what do you do with all blue coat? Blue coat? What do you do with all that stuff? That's out there that >>Symantics. >>Yes. <laugh> keep going. >>Yeah, I think that's it. That's >>All I got. Okay. So what do you do with all that stuff? That's that's out there, you rip and replace it. You, >>So in the cloud you mean yeah. >>All this infrastructure that's out there. What is that? Well, you >>Don't have it in the right. And so right now what's happening is people, look, you can't change too many things. If you're a human, you know, they always tell you don't change a job, get married and have a kid or something all in the same year. Like they just, just do one of 'em cuz you it's too much. When people move to the cloud, what they do is they tend to take what they do on Preem and they say, look, I'm gonna change one thing. We're gonna go to the cloud, everything else. I'm gonna keep the same. Cuz I don't wanna change three things. So they kind of lift and shift their same mentality. They take their firewalls, their next gen fire. I want them, they take all the things that they currently do. And they say, I'm gonna try to do that in the cloud. >>It's not really the right way to do it. But sometimes for people that are on-prem people, that's the way to get started and I'll screw it up and not screw it up and, and not change too many things. And look, I'm just used to that. And, and then I'll, then I'll go to change things, to be more cloud native, then I'll realize I can get rid of this and get rid of that and do that. But, but that's where people are. The first thing is bring these things over. We help them do that, right? From a networking perspective, I'll make it easier to bring your old security stuff in. But in parallel to that, we start adding things into the fabric and what's gonna happen is eventually we start adding all these things and things that you can't do separately. We start doing anomaly detection. We start doing behavioral analysis. Why? Because the entire network, we are the data plan. We see everything. And so we can start doing things that a standalone device can't do because not all the traffic steered to them. It can only control what's steered to you. And then eventually what's happening is people look at that device. And then they look at us and then they look at the device and they look at us and they go, why do I have both of this? And we go, I don't know. >>You don't need it. >>Well, can I get rid of that other thing? That's a tool. >>Sure. And there's not a trade off. There's not a trade off. You >>Don't have to. No. Now people rid belts and suspenders. Yeah. Cause it's just, who has, who has enough? Who has too much security buddy? They're gonna, they're gonna do belt suspenders. You know anything they can do. But eventually what will happened is they'll look at what we do and they'll go, that's good enough. That happened to me. When I was at Palo Alto networks, we inserted as a firewall. They kept their existing firewall. They had all these other devices and eventually all those went away and you just had a NextGen >>Firewall just through attrition, >>Through Atian. You're like, you're looking, you go, well, that platform is doing all these functions. Same. Thing's gonna happen to us. The platform of networking's gonna do all your network security devices. So any tool or agent or external, you know, device that you have to steer traffic to ISS gonna go away. You're not gonna need it. >>And, and you talking multi-cloud obviously, >>And then don't wanna do the same thing. Whether man Azure, you know the same. >>Yeah. >>Same, same experie architecture, same experience, same set of services. True. Multi-cloud native. Like you, that's what you want. And oh, by the way, skill, gap, skill shortage is a real thing. And it's getting worse. Cause now with the recession, you think you're gonna be able to add more people. Nope. You're gonna have less people. How do I do this? Any multicloud world with security and all this kind of stuff. You have to put the intelligence in the software, not on your people. Right? >>So speaking of recession. Yep. As a CEO of a well funded company, that's got some momentum. How are you approaching it? Do you have like, did you bring in the war time? Conig I mean, you've been through, you know, downturns before. This is you are you >>I'm on war time already. >>Okay. So yeah. Tell me more about how you you're kind of approaching this >>So recession down. So didn't change what we were doing one bit, because I run it that way from the very beginning. So I've been around 30 years, that's >>Told me he he's like me. You know what he said? >>Yeah. Or maybe >>I'm like, I want be D cuz he said, you know, people talk about, you know, only do things that are absolutely necessary during times like this. I always do things that are only, >>That's all I >>Do necessary. Why would you ever do things that aren't necessary? >><laugh> you'd be surprised. Most companies don't. Yeah. Uh, recession's very good for people like snowflake and for us because we run that way anyway. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, I, I constantly make decisions that we have to go and dip there's people that aren't right for the business. I move 'em out. Like I don't wait for some like Sequoia stupid rest in peace. The world's ending fire all your people that has no impact on me because I already operated that way. So we, we kind of operate that way and we are, we are like sat Nadel even came out and kind of said, I don't wanna say cloud is recession proof, but it kind of is, is we are so look, our top customer spends 5 million a year. Nothing. We haven't even started yet. David that's minuscule. We're not macro. We're micro 5 million a year for these big enterprises is nothing right. SA Nadel is now starting to count people who do billion dollar agreements with him billion over a period of number of years. Like that's the, the scale we have not even >>Gun billion dollar >>Agreements. We haven't even under begun to understand the scope of what's happening in the cloud. Right. And so yeah, the recession's happening. I don't know. I guess it's impacting somebody. It's not impacting me. It's actually accelerating things because it's a flight to quality and customers go and say, I can't get gear on on-prem anyway, cuz of the, uh, shortage, you know, the, uh, uh, get chips. Um, and that's not the right thing. So guess what the recession says, I'm gonna stop spending more money there and I'm gonna put it into the cloud. >>All right. So you opened up Pandora's box, man. I wanna ask you about your sort of management philosophy. When you come into a company to take, to go lead a company like that. Yeah. How, what, what's your approach to assess the team? Who do you, who do you decide? How do you decide who to keep on the bus? Who to throw off the bus put in the right seats. So how long does that take you? >>Doesn't take long. When I join, we were 30, 30, 8 people. We're now 525. Um, and my view on everything and I I've never met Frank Lubin, but I guarantee you, he has the same philosophy. You have a one year contract me included next year, the board might come to me and say, you were the right CEO for this year. You're not next year. Ben Horowitz taught me that it's a one year contract. There's no multi-year contract. So everybody in the company, including the CEO has a one year >>Contract. So you would say that to the board. Hey, if you can find somebody better, >>If, and, and you know what, I'll be the first one to pull myself, fire myself and say, we're, we're replacing me with somebody better right now. There isn't anybody better. So it's me. So, okay, next year maybe there's somebody better. Or we hit a certain point where I'm not the right guy. I'll I'll, I'll pull myself out as the CEO, but also internally the same thing just because you're the right guy this year. And we hire people for the, what you need to do this year. We're not gonna, we don't hire, oh, like this is the mistake. A lot of companies make, well, we wanna be a billion dollars in sales. So we're gonna go hire some loser from HPE. Who's worked at a company for a billion dollars. And by the way has no idea how they became a billion dollars, right. In revenue or billions of dollars. >>But we're gonna go hire 'em because they must know more than we do. And what every single time you bring them in what you realize, they're idiots. They have no idea how we got to that. And so you, you don't pre-hire for where you want to be. You hire for where you are that year. And then if it's not right, and then if it's not right, you'd be really nice to them. Have great severance packages, be, be respectful for people and be honest with them. I guarantee you Frank, Salman's not, if you're not just have this conversation with a sales guy before I came into here, very straight conversation, Northeast hockey player mentality. We're straight. If you're not working out or I don't think you're doing things right. You're gonna know. And so it's a one year, it's a one year contract. That's what you do. So you don't have time. You don't the luxury of >>Time. So, so that's probably the hardest part of, of any leadership job is, and people don't like confrontation. They like to put it off, but you don't run away from it. It's >>All in a confrontation, right? That's what relationships have built. Why do war buddies hang out with each other? Cuz they've gone through hell, right? It's in the confrontation. And it's, it's actually with customers too, right? If there's an issue, you don't run from it. You actually bring it up in a very straightforward manner and say, Hey, we got a problem, right? They respect you. You respect them, blah, blah, blah. And then you come out of it and go, you know, you have to fight like, look with your wife. You have to fight. If you don't fight, it's not a relationship you've gotta see in that, in that tension is where the relationship's >>Built. See, I should go home and have a fight tonight. You gotta have a fight with your wife. <laugh> you know, you mentioned Satia and Nadella and Larry Ellison. Interesting point. I wanna come back to that. What Oracle did is actually pretty interesting, do we? For their use case? Yeah. You know, it's not your thing. It's like low latency database across clouds. Yeah. Who would ever thought that? But >>We love it. We love it because it drives multi-cloud it drives. Um, and, and, and I actually think we're gonna have multi-cloud applications that are gonna start happening. Um, right now you don't, you have developers that, that, that kind of will use one cloud. But as we start developing and you call it the super cloud, right. When that starts really happening, the infrastructure's gonna allow that networking and network security is that bottom layer that Aviatrix helps once that gets all handled. The app, people are gonna say, so there's no friction. So maybe I can use autonomous database here. I can use this service from GCP. I can use that service and, and put it all into one app. So where's the app run. It's a multicloud app. Doesn't exist today. >>No, that doesn't happen today. >>It's it's happen. It's gonna happen. >>But that's kind of what the vision was. No, seven, eight years ago of what >>It's >>Gonna, that would be, you know, the original premise of hybrid. Right? Right. Um, I think Chuck Hollis, the guy was at EMC at the time he wrote this piece on, he called it private cloud, but he was really describing hybrid cloud application and running in both places that never happened. But it's starting to, I mean, the infrastructure is getting put in place to enable that, I guess is what you're saying. >>Yep. >>Yeah. >>Cool. And multicloud is, is becoming not just four plus one is a lot of enterprises it's becoming plus one, meaning you're gonna have more and more. And then there won't be infrastructure clouds like AWS and so forth, but it's gonna be industry clouds. Right? You've you've talked about that again, back to super clouds. You're gonna have Goldman Sachs creating clouds and you're gonna have AI companies creating clouds. You're gonna have clouds at the edge, you know, for edge computing and all these things all need to be networked with network security integrated. And you mentioned fact >>Aviatrix you mentioned Ben Horowitz, that's mark Andreesen. All, all companies are software companies. All companies are becoming cloud companies. Yeah. Or, or they're missing missing opportunities or they might get disrupted. >>Yeah. Every single company I talk to now, you know, whether you're Heineken, they don't think of themselves as a beer company anymore. We are the most technologically, you know, advanced brewer in the world. Like they all think they're a technology company. Now, whether you're making trucks, whether you're making sneakers, whether you're making beer, you're now a technology company, every single company in >>The world, we are too, we're we're building a media cloud. You're you know, John's, it's a technology company laying that out and yeah. That's we got developers doing that. That's our, that's our future. Yep. You know? Cool. Hey, thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. Great to see you. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back right after this short break. It keeps coverage. AWS reinforced 20, 22 from Boston. Keep it right there. >>You tired? How many interviewed.

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

>>Good morning live from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin and Dave Lanta here covering snowflake summit 22. Dave, it's great to be here in person. The keynote we just came from was standing room only. In fact, there was overflow. People are excited to be back and to hear from the company in person the first time, since the IPO, >>Lots of stuff, lots of deep technical dives, uh, you know, they took the high end of the pyramid and then dove down deep in the keynotes. It >>Was good. They did. And we've got Doug Hench with us to break this down in the next eight to 10 minutes, VP and principle analyst at constellation research. Doug, welcome to the cube. >>Great to be here. >>All right, so guys, I was telling Dave, as we were walking back from the keynote, this was probably the most technical keynote I've seen in a very long time. Obviously in person let's break down some of the key announcements. What were some of the things Dave that stood out to you and what they announced just in the last hour and a half alone? >>Well, I, you know, we had a leave before they did it, but the unit store piece was really interesting to me cuz you know, the big criticism is, oh, say snowflake, that doesn't do transaction data. It's just a data warehouse. And now they're sort of reaching out. We're seeing the evolution of the ecosystem. Uh, sluman said it was by design. It was one of the questions I had for them. Is this just kind of happen or is it by design? So that's one of many things that, that we can unpack. I mean the security workload, uh, the, the Apache tables, we were just talking about thatt, which not a lot of hands went up when they said, who uses Apache tables, but, but a lot of the things they're doing seem to me anyway, to be trying to counteract the narrative, that snow, I mean that data bricks is put out there about you guys. Aren't open, you're a walled garden and now they're saying, Hey, we're we're as open as anybody, but what are your thoughts, Doug? >>Well, that's the, the iceberg announcement, uh, also, uh, the announcement of, of uni store being able to reach out to, to any source. Uh, you know, I think the big theme here was this, this contrast you constantly see with snowflake between their effort to democratize and simplify and disrupt the market by bringing in a great big tent. And you saw that great big tent here today, 7,000 people, 2,007,000 plus I'm told 2000 just three years ago. So this company is growing hugely quickly, >>Unprecedented everybody. >>Yeah. Uh, fastest company to a billion in revenue is Frank Salman said in his keynote today. Um, you know, and I think that there's, there's that great big tent. And then there's the innovations they're delivering. And a lot of their announcements are way ahead of the J general availability. A lot of the things they talked about today, Python support and some, some other aspects they're just getting into public preview. And many of the things that they're announcing today are in private preview. So it could be six, 12 months be before they're generally available. So they're here educating a lot of these customers. What is iceberg? You know, they're letting them know about, Hey, we're not just the data warehouse. We're not just letting you migrate your old workloads into the cloud. We're helping you innovate with things like the data marketplace. I see the data marketplace is really crucial to a lot of the announcements they're making today. Particularly the native apps, >>You know, what was interesting sluman in his keynote said we don't use the term data mesh, cuz that means has meaning to the people, lady from Geico stood up and said, we're building a data mesh. And when you think about, you know, the, those Gemma Dani's definition of data mesh, Snowflake's actually ticking a lot of boxes. I mean, it's it's is it a decentralized architecture? You could argue that it's sort of their own wall garden, but things like data as product we heard about building data products, uh, uh, self-serve infrastructure, uh, computational governance, automated governance. So those are all principles of Gemma's data mesh. So I there's close as anybody that, that I've seen with the exception of it's all in the data cloud. >>Why do you think he was very particular in saying we're not gonna call it a data mesh? I, >>I think he's respecting the principles that have been put forth by the data mesh community generally and specifically Jamma Dani. Uh, and they don't want to, you know, they don't want to data mesh wash. I mean, I, I, I think that's a good call. >>Yeah, that's it's a little bit out there and, and it, they didn't talk about data mesh so much as Geico, uh, the keynote or mentioned their building one. So again, they have this mix of the great big tent of customers and then very forward looking very sophisticated customers. And that's who they're speaking to with some of these announcements, like the native apps and the uni store to bring transactional data, bring more data in and innovate, create new apps. And the key to the apps is that they're made available through the marketplace. Things like data sharing. That's pretty simple. A lot of, uh, of their competitors are talking about, Hey, we can data share, but they don't have the things that make it easy, like the way to distribute the data, the way to monetize the data. So now they're looking forward monetizing apps, they changed the name from the data marketplace to the, to the snowflake marketplace. So it'll be apps. It will be data. It'll be all sorts of innovative products. >>We talk about Geico, uh, JPMC is speaking at this conference, uh, and the lead technical person of their data mesh initiative. So it's like, they're some of their customers that they're putting forth. So it's kind of interesting. And then Doug, something else that you and I have talked about on the, some of the panels that we've done is you've got an application development stack, you got the database over there and then you have the data analytics stack and we've, I've said, well, those things come together. Then people have said, yeah, they have to. And this is what snowflake seems to be driving towards. >>Well with uni store, they're reaching out and trying to bring transactional data in, right? Hey, don't limit this to analytical information. And there's other ways to do that, like CDC and streaming, but they're very closely tying that again to that marketplace, with the idea of bring your data over here and you can monetize it. Don't just leave it in that transactional database. So a, another reach to a broader play across a big community that they're >>Building different than what we saw last week at Mongo, different than what you know, Oracle does with, with heat wave. A lot of ways to skin a cat. >>That was gonna be my next question to both of you is talk to me about all the announcements that we saw. And, and like we said, we didn't actually get to see the entire keynote had come back here. Where are they from a differentiation perspective in terms of the competitive market? You mentioned Doug, a lot of the announcements in either private preview or soon to be public preview early. Talk to me about your thoughts where they are from a competitive standpoint. >>Again, it's that dichotomy between their very forward looking announcements. They're just coming on with things like Python support. That's just becoming generally available. They're just introducing, uh, uh, machine learning algorithms, like time series built into the database. So in some ways they're catching up while painting this vision of future capabilities and talking about things that are in development or in private preview that won't be here for a year or two, but they're so they're out there, uh, talking about a BLE bleeding edge story yet the reality is the product sometimes are lagging behind. Yeah, >>It's interesting. I mean, they' a lot of companies choose not to announce anything until it's ready to ship. Yeah. Typically that's a technique used by the big whales to try to freeze the market, but I think it's different here. And the strategy is to educate customers on what's possible because snowflake really does have, you know, they're trying to differentiate from, Hey, we're not just a data warehouse. We have a highly differentiatable strategy from whether it's Oracle or certainly, you know, Mongo is more transactional, but, but you know, whether it's couch base or Redis or all the other databases out there, they're saying we're not a database, we're a data cloud. <laugh> right. Right. Okay. What is that? Well, look at all the things that you can do with the data cloud, but to me, the most interesting is you can actually build data products and you can monetize that. And their, the emphasis on ecosystem, you, they look at Salman's previous company would ServiceNow took a long time for them to build an ecosystem. It was a lot of SI in smaller SI and they finally kind of took off, but this is exceeding my expectations and ecosystem is critical because they can't do it all. You know, they're gonna O otherwise they're gonna spread themselves to >>That. That's what I think some competitors just don't get about snowflake. They don't get that. It's all about the community, about their network that they're building and the relationships between these customers. And that they're facilitating that with distribution, with monetization, things that are hard. So you can't just add sharing, or you can share data from one of their, uh, legacy competitors, uh, in, in somebody else's marketplace that doesn't facilitate the transaction that doesn't, you know, build on the community. Well, >>And you know, one of the criticisms too, of the criticism on snowflake goes, they don't, you know, they can't do complex joins. They don't do workload management. And I think their answer to that is, well, we're gonna look to the ecosystem to do that. Or you, you saw some kind of, um, cost governance today in the, in the keynote, we're gonna help you optimize your spend, um, a little different than workload management, but related >>Part of their governance was having a, a, a node, uh, for every workload. So workload isolation in that way, but that led to the cost problems, you know, like too many nodes with not enough optimization. So here too, you saw a lot of, uh, announcements around cost controls, budgets, new features, uh, user groups that you could bring, uh, caps and guardrails around those costs. >>In the last couple minutes, guys talk about their momentum. Franks Lutman showed a slide today that showed over 5,900 customers. I was looking at some stats, uh, in the last couple of days that showed that there is an over 1200% increase in the number of customers with a million plus ARR. Talk about their momentum, what you expect to see here. A lot of people here, people are ready to hear what they're doing in person. >>Well, I think this, the stats say it all, uh, fastest company to a, to a billion in revenue. Uh, you see the land and expand experience that many companies have and in the cost control, uh, announcements they were making, they showed the typical curve like, and he talked about it being a roller coaster, and we wanna help you level that out. Uh, so that's, uh, a matter of maturation. Uh, that's one of the downsides of this rapid growth. You know, you have customers adding new users, adding new clusters, multi clusters, and the costs get outta control. They want to help customers even that out, uh, with reporting with these budget and cost control measures. So, uh, one of the growing pains that comes with, uh, adding so many customers so quickly, and those customers adding so many users and new, uh, workloads quickly, >>I know we gotta break, but last point I'll make about the key. Uh, keynote is SL alluded to the fact that they're not taking the foot off the gas. They don't see any reason to, despite the narrative in the press, they have inherent profitability. If they want to be more profitable, they could be, but they're going for growth >>Going for growth. There is so much to unpack in the next three days. You won't wanna miss it. The Cube's wall to oil coverage, Lisa Martin for Dave Valenti, Doug hen joined us in our keynote analysis. Thanks so much for walking, watching stick around. Our first guest is up in just a few minutes.

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the cube and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave ante. >>When Frank sluman took service, now public many people undervalued the company, positioning it as just a better help desk tool. You know, it turns out that the firm actually had a massive Tam expansion opportunity in it. SM customer service, HR, logistics, security marketing, and service management. Generally now stock price followed over the years, the stellar execution under Slootman and CFO, Mike scar Kelly's leadership. Now, when they took the reins at snowflake expectations were already set that they'd repeat the feet, but this time, if anything, the company was overvalued out of the gate, the thing is people didn't really better understand the market opportunity this time around, other than that, it was a bet on Salman's track record of execution and on data, pretty good bets, but folks really didn't appreciate that snowflake. Wasn't just a better data warehouse that it was building what they call a data cloud, and we've turned a data super cloud. >>Hello and welcome to this. Week's Wikibon cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis, we'll do four things. First. We're gonna review the recent narrative and concerns about snowflake and its value. Second, we're gonna share survey data from ETR that will confirm precisely what the company's CFO has been telling anyone who will listen. And third, we're gonna share our view of what snowflake is building IE, trying to become the defacto standard data platform, and four convey our expectations for the upcoming snowflake summit. Next week at Caesar's palace in Las Vegas, Snowflake's most recent quarterly results they've been well covered and well documented. It basically hit its targets, which for snowflake investors was bad news wall street piled on expressing concerns about Snowflake's consumption, pricing model, slowing growth rates, lack of profitability and valuation. Given the, given the current macro market conditions, the stock dropped below its IPO offering price, which you couldn't touch on day one, by the way, as the stock opened well above that and, and certainly closed well above that price of one 20 and folks express concerns about some pretty massive insider selling throughout 2021 and early 2022, all this caused the stock price to drop quite substantially. >>And today it's down around 63% or more year to date, but the only real substantive change in the company's business is that some of its largest consumer facing companies, while still growing dialed back, their consumption this past quarter, the tone of the call was I wouldn't say contentious the earnings call, but Scarelli, I think was getting somewhat annoyed with the implication from some analyst questions that something is fundamentally wrong with Snowflake's business. So let's unpack this a bit first. I wanna talk about the consumption pricing on the earnings call. One of the analysts asked if snowflake would consider more of a subscription based model so that they could better weather such fluctuations and demand before the analyst could even finish the question, CFO Scarelli emphatically interrupted and said, no, <laugh> the analyst might as well have asked, Hey Mike, have you ever considered changing your pricing model and screwing your customers the same way most legacy SaaS companies lock their customers in? >>So you could squeeze more revenue out of them and make my forecasting life a little bit easier. <laugh> consumption pricing is one of the things that makes a company like snowflake so attractive because customers is especially large customers facing fluctuating demand can dial and their end demand can dial down usage for certain workloads that are maybe not yet revenue producing or critical. Now let's jump to insider trading. There were a lot of insider selling going on last year and into 2022 now, I mean a lot sloop and Scarelli Christine Kleinman. Mike SP several board members. They sold stock worth, you know, many, many hundreds of millions of dollars or, or more at prices in the two hundreds and three hundreds and even four hundreds. You remember the company at one point was valued at a hundred billion dollars, surpassing the value of service now, which is this stupid at this point in the company's tenure and the insider's cost basis was very often in the single digit. >>So on the one hand, I can't blame them. You know what a gift the market gave them last year. Now also famed investor, Peter Linsey famously said, insiders sell for many reasons, but they only buy for one. But I have to say there wasn't a lot of insider buying of the stock when it was in the three hundreds and above. And so yeah, this pattern is something to watch our insiders buying. Now, I'm not sure we'll keep watching snowflake. It's pretty generous with stock based compensation and insiders still own plenty of stock. So, you know, maybe not, but we'll see in future disclosures, but the bottom line is Snowflake's business. Hasn't dramatically changed with the exception of these large consumer facing companies. Now, another analyst pointed out that companies like snap, he pointed to company snap, Peloton, Netflix, and face Facebook have been cutting back. >>And Scarelli said, and what was a bit of a surprise to me? Well, I'm not gonna name the customers, but it's not the ones you mentioned. So I, I thought I would've, you know, if I were the analyst I would've follow up with, how about Walmart target visa, Amex, Expedia price line, or Uber? Any of those Mike? I, I doubt he would've answered me anything. Anyway, the one thing that Scarelli did do is update Snowflake's fiscal year 2029 outlook to emphasize the long term opportunity that the company sees. This chart shows a financial snapshot of Snowflake's current business using a combination of quarterly and full year numbers in a model of what the business will look like. According to Scarelli in Dave ante with a little bit of judgment in 2029. So this is essentially based on the company's framework. Snowflake this year will surpass 2 billion in revenues and targeting 10 billion by 2029. >>Its current growth rate is 84% and its target is 30% in the out years, which is pretty impressive. Gross margins are gonna tick up a bit, but remember Snowflake's cost a good sold they're dominated by its cloud cost. So it's got a governor. There has to pay AWS Azure and Google for its infrastructure. But high seventies is a, is a good target. It's not like the historical Microsoft, you know, 80, 90% gross margin. Not that Microsoft is there anymore, but, but snowflake, you know, was gonna be limited by how far it can, how much it can push gross margin because of that factor. It's got a tiny operating margin today and it's targeting 20% in 2029. So that would be 2 billion. And you would certainly expect it's operating leverage in the out years to enable much, much, much lower SGNA than the current 54%. I'm guessing R and D's gonna stay healthy, you know, coming in at 15% or so. >>But the real interesting number to watch is free cash flow, 16% this year for the full fiscal year growing to 25% by 2029. So 2.5 billion in free cash flow in the out years, which I believe is up from previous Scarelli forecast in that 10, you know, out year view 2029 view and expect the net revenue retention, the NRR, it's gonna moderate. It's gonna come down, but it's still gonna be well over a hundred percent. We pegged it at 130% based on some of Mike's guidance. Now today, snowflake and every other stock is well off this morning. The company had a 40 billion value would drop well below that midday, but let's stick with the 40 billion on this, this sad Friday on the stock market, we'll go to 40 billion and who knows what the stock is gonna be valued in 2029? No idea, but let's say between 40 and 200 billion and look, it could get even ugly in the market as interest rates rise. >>And if inflation stays high, you know, until we get a Paul Voker like action, which is gonna be painful from the fed share, you know, let's hope we don't have a repeat of the long drawn out 1970s stagflation, but that is a concern among investors. We're gonna try to keep it positive here and we'll do a little sensitivity analysis of snowflake based on Scarelli and Ante's 2029 projections. What we've done here is we've calculated in this chart. Today's current valuation at about 40 billion and run a CAGR through 2029 with our estimates of valuation at that time. So if it stays at 40 billion valuation, can you imagine snowflake grow into a 10 billion company with no increase in valuation by the end, by by 2029 fiscal 2029, that would be a major bummer and investors would get a, a 0% return at 50 billion, 4% Kager 60 billion, 7%. >>Kegar now 7% market return is historically not bad relative to say the S and P 500, but with that kind of revenue and profitability growth projected by snowflake combined with inflation, that would again be a, a kind of a buzzkill for investors. The picture at 75 billion valuation, isn't much brighter, but it picks up at, at a hundred billion, even with inflation that should outperform the market. And as you get to 200 billion, which would track by the way, revenue growth, you get a 30% plus return, which would be pretty good. Could snowflake beat these projections. Absolutely. Could the market perform at the optimistic end of the spectrum? Sure. It could. It could outperform these levels. Could it not perform at these levels? You bet, but hopefully this gives a little context and framework to what Scarelli was talking about and his framework, not with notwithstanding the market's unpredictability you're you're on your own. >>There. I can't help snowflake looks like it's going to continue either way in amazing run compared to other software companies historically, and whether that's reflected in the stock price. Again, I, I, I can't predict, okay. Let's look at some ETR survey data, which aligns really well with what snowflake is telling the street. This chart shows the breakdown of Snowflake's net score and net score. Remember is ETS proprietary methodology that measures the percent of customers in their survey that are adding the platform new. That's the lime green at 19% existing snowflake customers that are ex spending 6% or more on the platform relative to last year. That's the forest green that's 55%. That's a big number flat spend. That's the gray at 21% decreasing spending. That's the pinkish at 5% and churning that's the red only 1% or, or moving off the platform, tiny, tiny churn, subtract the red from the greens and you get a net score that, that, that nets out to 68%. >>That's an, a very impressive net score by ETR standards. But it's down from the highs of the seventies and mid eighties, where high seventies and mid eighties, where snowflake has been since January of 2019 note that this survey of 1500 or so organizations includes 155 snowflake customers. What was really interesting is when we cut the data by industry sector, two of Snowflake's most important verticals, our finance and healthcare, both of those sectors are holding a net score in the ETR survey at its historic range. 83%. Hasn't really moved off that, you know, 80% plus number really encouraging, but retail consumer showed a dramatic decline. This past survey from 73% in the previous quarter down to 54%, 54% in just three months time. So this data aligns almost perfectly with what CFO Scarelli has been telling the street. So I give a lot of credibility to that narrative. >>Now here's a time series chart for the net score and the provision in the data set, meaning how penetrated snowflake is in the survey. Again, net score measures, spending velocity and a specific platform and provision measures the presence in the data set. You can see the steep downward trend in net score this past quarter. Now for context note, the red dotted line on the vertical axis at 40%, that's a bit of a magic number. Anything above that is best in class in our view, snowflake still a well, well above that line, but the April survey as we reported on May 7th in quite a bit of detail shows a meaningful break in the snowflake trend as shown by ETRS call out on the bottom line. You can see a steady rise in the survey, which is a proxy for Snowflake's overall market penetration. So steadily moving up and up. >>Here's a bit of a different view on that data bringing in some of Snowflake's peers and other data platforms. This XY graph shows net score on the vertical axis and provision on the horizontal with the red dotted line. At 40%, you can see from the ETR callouts again, that snowflake while declining in net score still holds the highest net score in the survey. So of course the highest data platforms while the spending velocity on AWS and Microsoft, uh, data platforms, outperforms that have, uh, sorry, while they're spending velocity on snowflake outperforms, that of AWS and, and Microsoft data platforms, those two are still well above the 40% line with a stronger market presence in the category. That's impressive because of their size. And you can see Google cloud and Mongo DB right around the 40% line. Now we reported on Mongo last week and discussed the commentary on consumption models. >>And we referenced Ray Lenchos what we thought was, was quite thoughtful research, uh, that rewarded Mongo DB for its forecasting transparency and, and accuracy and, and less likelihood of facing consumption headwinds. And, and I'll reiterate what I said last week, that snowflake, while seeing demand fluctuations this past quarter from those large customers is, is not like a data lake where you're just gonna shove data in and figure it out later, no schema on, right. Just throw it into the pond. That's gonna be more discretionary and you can turn that stuff off. More likely. Now you, you bring data into the snowflake data cloud with the intent of driving insights, which leads to actions, which leads to value creation. And as snowflake adds capabilities and expands its platform features and innovations and its ecosystem more and more data products are gonna be developed in the snowflake data cloud and by data products. >>We mean products and services that are conceived by business users. And that can be directly monetized, not just via analytics, but through governed data sharing and direct monetization. Here's a picture of that opportunity as we see it, this is our spin on our snowflake total available market chart that we've published many, many times. The key point here goes back to our opening statements. The snowflake data cloud is evolving well beyond just being a simpler and easier to use and more elastic cloud database snowflake is building what we often refer to as a super cloud. That is an abstraction layer that companies that, that comprises rich features and leverages the underlying primitives and APIs of the cloud providers, but hides all that complexity and adds new value beyond that infrastructure that value is seen in the left example in terms of compressed cycle time, snowflake often uses the example of pharmaceutical companies compressing time to discover a drug by years. >>Great example, there are many others this, and, and then through organic development and ecosystem expansion, snowflake will accelerate feature delivery. Snowflake's data cloud vision is not about vertically integrating all the functionality into its platform. Rather it's about creating a platform and delivering secure governed and facile and powerful analytics and data sharing capabilities to its customers, partners in a broad ecosystem so they can create additional value. On top of that ecosystem is how snowflake fills the gaps in its platform by building the best cloud data platform in the world, in terms of collaboration, security, governance, developer, friendliness, machine intelligence, etcetera, snowflake believes and plans to create a defacto standard. In our view in data platforms, get your data into the data cloud and all these native capabilities will be available to you. Now, is that a walled garden? Some might say it is. It's an interesting question and <laugh>, it's a moving target. >>It's definitely proprietary in the sense that snowflake is building something that is highly differentiatable and is building a moat around it. But the more open snowflake can make its platform. The more open source it uses, the more developer friendly and the great greater likelihood people will gravitate toward snowflake. Now, my new friend Tani, she's the creator of the data mesh concept. She might bristle at this narrative in favor, a more open source version of what snowflake is trying to build, but practically speaking, I think she'd recognize that we're a long ways off from that. And I also think that the benefits of a platform that despite requiring data to be inside of the data cloud can distribute data globally, enable facile governed, and computational data sharing, and to a large degree be a self-service platform for data, product builders. So this is how we see snow, the snowflake data cloud vision evolving question is edge part of that vision on the right hand side. >>Well, again, we think that is going to be a future challenge where the ecosystem is gonna have to come to play to fill those gaps. If snowflake can tap the edge, it'll bring even more clarity as to how it can expand into what we believe is a massive 200 billion Tam. Okay, let's close on next. Week's snowflake summit in Las Vegas. The cube is very excited to be there. I'll be hosting with Lisa Martin and we'll have Frank son as well as Christian Kleinman and several other snowflake experts. Analysts are gonna be there, uh, customers. And we're gonna have a number of ecosystem partners on as well. Here's what we'll be looking for. At least some of the things, evidence that our view of Snowflake's data cloud is actually taking shape and evolving in the way that we showed on the previous chart, where we also wanna figure out where snowflake is with it. >>Streamlet acquisition. Remember streamlet is a data science play and an expansion into data, bricks, territory, data, bricks, and snowflake have been going at it for a while. Streamlet brings an open source Python library and machine learning and kind of developer friendly data science environment. We also expect to hear some discussion, hopefully a lot of discussion about developers. Snowflake has a dedicated developer conference in November. So we expect to hear more about that and how it's gonna be leveraging further leveraging snow park, which it has previously announced, including a public preview of programming for unstructured data and data monetization along the lines of what we suggested earlier that is building data products that have the bells and whistles of native snowflake and can be directly monetized by Snowflake's customers. Snowflake's already announced a new workload this past week in security, and we'll be watching for others. >>And finally, what's happening in the all important ecosystem. One of the things we noted when we covered service now, cause we use service now as, as an example because Frank Lupin and Mike Scarelli and others, you know, DNA were there and they're improving on that service. Now in his post IPO, early adult years had a very slow pace. In our view was often one of our criticism of ecosystem development, you know, ServiceNow. They had some niche SI uh, like cloud Sherpa, and eventually the big guys came in and, and, and began to really lean in. And you had some other innovators kind of circling the mothership, some smaller companies, but generally we see sluman emphasizing the ecosystem growth much, much more than with this previous company. And that is a fundamental requirement in our view of any cloud or modern cloud company now to paraphrase the crazy man, Steve bomber developers, developers, developers, cause he screamed it and ranted and ran around the stage and was sweating <laugh> ecosystem ecosystem ecosystem equals optionality for developers and that's what they want. >>And that's how we see the current and future state of snowflake. Thanks today. If you're in Vegas next week, please stop by and say hello with the cube. Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan, who sometimes helps research breaking analysis topics. Alex, my is, and OS Myerson is on production. And today Andrew Frick, Sarah hiney, Steven Conti Anderson hill Chuck all and the entire team in Palo Alto, including Christian. Sorry, didn't mean to forget you Christian writer, of course, Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out. And Rob ho is our E IIC over at Silicon angle. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcast, wherever you listen to search breaking analysis podcast, I publish each week on wikibon.com and Silicon angle.com. You can email me directly anytime David dot Valante Silicon angle.com. If you got something interesting, I'll respond. If not, I won't or DM me@deteorcommentonmylinkedinpostsandpleasedocheckoutetr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Valante for the insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next week. I hope if not, we'll see you next time on breaking analysis.

>> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

(gentle music) >> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

>> From Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, everyone, to CUBE coverage here in Bahrain for AWS Summit. Cloud computing's changing the landscape, startups, business, government, and society. We're here with a special guest, His Excellency, Aymen Tawfiq Almoayed. Thank you very much, thanks for coming, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> And of course Max Peterson, Vice President of International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector for Amazon Web Services. >> Good to be here, John. >> Your Excellency, this program you're doing with Amazon, this MOU you've signed is interesting, I want to unpack it, because it speaks to the bigger picture of how the region is shaped by its generational shift of cloud computing and the people here. This is a really big part of this modernization plan. >> No question, no question. So the program that the government adopted, so Vision 2030, which was adopted a while ago, is based on one premise, one key premise. That the government is going to move from operator to regulator, and our focus would be to focus on and establish, create almost, an open, just, competitive environment. So the idea is for us to provide the platform and then allow the meritocratic system to let those that can aspire to opportunities and reach these opportunities come up through the system. So this program really sets the stage to get a new level going. >> Explain the difference with this program and why it's different than some of the things we've been hearing. We saw a cloud computing degree coming out of the University of Bahrain. We're seeing a lot of job skill training. This is different, this is a unique thing. Can you give a more detail around how it works. >> So, what we're doing is we're looking at very quick wins. And for us, six months, for somebody to spend six months, one year, in Amazon is a very quick win. This is not an extended degree. What this is is it's an opportunity to interact with the best of the best in their world sector. And to, honestly it's almost like a reset, where what Max and I were talking about earlier is somebody that spends a year with Amazon, I think that something happens to the pulse rate, right. So your pulse literally starts to beat much faster. >> Max knows all about that. >> Exactly, exactly. We hear about their traveling patterns, and that in itself is amazing. So in any case, so the reason it's different from a degree is it gives you real-life vocational experience. It gives you the networking opportunity. It gives you the lifestyle exposure. And then it gives you the shortcuts in organization. >> So you're exposing them to the excellence of what a culture looks like, Amazon in this case. They're hard-charging, they're fast. Anyone who's worked with Amazon knows that they move pretty quickly. But they're disciplined. It's a world-class organization. It's like a sports team being promoted to varsity or the pro team. Work their way up from the entry-level. >> So maybe the difference as well is, in this sort of program it's sink or swim. It's really as simple as that. I mean, you need to hit the ground running and take off. Maybe with a degree, it's much less so. With a degree, you go through your first year, your second year, your sophomore and so on. So what we do, what we want, is we want our youth to hit the ground running. We want very quick wins and I have no doubt that once the first trench, first team goes out to Amazon, comes back, I'm sure that the ripple effect that you see in industry and you see in the marketplace will be tremendous. >> Max, what's your take on this? 'Cause obviously you're on the Amazon side. You're taking them in Amazon Web Services here in Bahrain, or is it outside corporate headquarters in Seattle? Is there a definition around? >> All good questions. First, we're excited to be the first company that is partnered with the Ministry on this effort. We're sure many others are going to join, but we're excited to be first. I think what makes it different is the aspect of experiential. There's a lot of experiential learning that's going on different than the academic learning. Equally or maybe even more necessary is the sort of organizational cultural learning. Just what does it take to operate at world scale or at pace. And then to be able to bring that back to the region. We'll do that wherever we've got the right mix of skills. So it could be in Bahrain, where we've got a big office now, it could be in London, could be Washington, D.C., could be Seattle. >> Your Excellency, we always talk about on theCUBE over the years, tech athletes. Because, you know, to be an athlete, you got to have durability, intelligence, stability. Being a tech athlete, the travel schedules, we were just joking last night about it, you mentioned it. But also the intelligence and the integrity to do this at this speed. So this is kind of, I love the theme, so I want you to elaborate why this connects in with your vision and how did this idea get started, what was the origination around this effort? >> So initially the, again, if one takes a step back, we started experimenting about a year ago, a year and a half ago with the sports sector. So what we were doing with the sports sector, because it was a much smaller sector. What we're trying to experiment there is, if you were to allow our athletes to interact with the best in class, what would happen? Would they live up to that experience or not? And so one of the segments that we were looking at is, for example, triathlons. So about two years ago, this sport, triathlons in general, just simply didn't exist in the region. So two, maximum three years ago, they just, they were nonexistent. So His Highness had ordered that we go ahead and see if we can develop this and see if we can develop the athletes for it. And so what we needed to do, essentially, was pick some-- >> Find the athletes. (laughs) >> Is find the athletes, exactly. Send them out, we did a few triathlons. They did Kuna and Florida, came back, loved it, the addiction and the adrenaline kicked in, and then we started arranging duathlons and then triathletes here in Bahrain. Of course, I don't know if you know this, a year, fast forward, a year and a half later, and BE13, which is our triathlon team, is number one in the world. Simply it's number one in the world. Now we're doing this, we tried this with biking. So we sent a team to the Tour de France, and we started to do exactly the same thing. We were aspiring to look at greats like Sky team and the rest, and just learning from them, imitate, and then innovate, and-- >> One, if you have to have the talent to begin with, your theory is put 'em in, let 'em see it, and they'll either level up or they won't. It's self selection. >> Absolutely, no question. >> And you want to bring that formula to tech. >> It's pure meritocratic sink or swim. So we've got, so there's two, there's two phrases that we live by, all right. Number one, our role is open, competitive, just environment. That's it, all right. The number two is we open doors with no hand-holding. Simply no hand-holding, but we'll get you the opportunity. But if Amazon calls us and says participant number 606 or whatever isn't up to the cut, then they're not up to the cut. And what our youth have proven to us time after time is they're always up to the cut. As long as you make that clear, they-- >> The expectation defines the experience. So if you say this is what it is, you can swim or you can sink, your choice, people will tap out, they won't even jump in. >> I like the tech athletes piece. >> Yeah, I'm loving it, absolutely. >> Well, I mean, a lot of tech athletes, it takes a lot of energy, it is like you said, you don't know what it takes to build a company, it's really hard, I mean, it's not easy. >> It is, and the thing, just like this program, the thing that was interesting about the University of Bahrain idea was they're going to try and immerse everybody, because cloud and technology now is immersed in any field. I mean, anything becomes digital. And we were talkin' earlier about e-sports, so you need a whole bunch of great tech athletes to start bringing e-sports services to the world. >> Absolutely. >> Do you see e-sports emerging? >> Yeah, no doubt. So what we did on Friday is we signed the first agreement, this is the first time that a region hosts, we're hosting BLASTPro's finals in Bahrain, this is going to be on the 13th and the 14th of December, and that's running, streaming on Twitch. So we're excited, we're excited to be doing this with the guys at BLASTPro, and we're excited to be using Amazon's infrastructure to do it. So yes, absolutely, there is amazing things to be seen in e-sports and we're excited. >> This is awesome, digital disruption, you guys have been so proactive on this. I was commenting this morning on Twitter, then stats went out about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley in the U.S., 51% of all ventures fail. And some other ones, 4% become unicorns, but it was all about optionality, et cetera, et cetera, and entrepreneurs are about getting on the right wave and falling and trying again, and this is, you guys have been very proactive on this. >> Right, so that's exactly why we think that sports plays a big role. So the idea behind the program was simply to gamify everything. The idea behind this program, the idea behind adopting the new bankruptcy law in Bahrain, and the new reform regulations that are coming in, all we're doing is we're gamifying things. What we're simply saying is when you fall, it's OK to fall. As long as you get back up and hit the ground running once again, we're OK with that. So you'll start to hear phrases that are pretty interesting. Like I said, with the entrepreneurships, what we're looking at is unlocking levels. So we're gamifying. With education we're doing exactly the same thing, we're looking at vocational training where you get to unlock levels. So as long as people know that the name of the game is just to stay in the game, and then outpace everybody else, then we're good. >> And the funding's been fantastic. You guys have been supporting it with resources. Now that the region's up and running, Max, do you feel good about the development so far with the new region? Therese was just on earlier, she mentioned first day they turned it on, a bunch of companies were launched already. >> Besides the cannons and the confetti that shot out today at the summit, the other exciting thing's I think when we launched the region, we had over 350 different companies, many small businesses, small and medium enterprises that put their offerings into the AWS Marketplace. When it was launched, anybody in the region, anybody in Bahrain, could literally turn on 1,700 different types of software solutions at the push of a button, so I think that's big. I think we heard how 35 local companies have created migration offerings and fast-start offerings. We heard from one great entrepreneur on stage today and we heard from government about how government's operating faster than business, I think Sheikh Salman threw down a bit of a challenge to the rest of the government and state enterprises and even corporations. And then of course I think we saw the digital bank of the future from Bank ABC with their first virtual banking assistant up on stage who, by the way, lives in the cloud over Bahrain. >> Yeah, digital employee, we had a great chat about that. This speaks to the generational shift, this is something that's going to be an interesting footnote in history. The sea change around expectations, you brought this up earlier, I think this is important. The younger generation, they want the world to be at a different speed, and they don't want an intolerant blockers in their way. And so whoever can be out front on setting up the environment, whether it's society, government, citizen services, but money-making potential, banks got to operate. So this is the replatforming of society is happening. >> No question, yeah, no question. I'll give you just the, when you compare ministries, when you compare government entities, you would walk in and you'd assume the ultra-bureaucratic system is still in place where you've got to go through tiers and so on and so forth. As far as the youth at the Ministry of Youth is involved, these guys are running things with chats, we've got internal chat systems, and so there is no memo-writing process where you then have to escalate it, and then it goes to the minister's office and so on. Absolutely not. These guys are on the likes of Slack, the likes of Teams from Microsoft and so on, and that's how government is run. >> Max, email's for old people like us. >> Hey, modern digital governments are redesigning the way all this stuff works, and it doesn't, the thing that's interesting to me is it doesn't just impact these things that you would think of as tech. I thought the example of going from 130 days to 5 days for permitting approvals-- >> For building permits, sure. >> That takes out a massive amount of inefficiency from the industry, right, and it enables that very industry to then move faster, instead of government as a blocker to so many of these things, becomes an enabler. And I think it's that attitude about modernized, customer-focused or citizen-focused that is the hallmark of what folks are doing now to make a difference. >> Well, thanks for coming in and sharing the insights. Your Excellency, great to see you. I have one final question, take a minute to explain to the folks what is the Ministry of Youth and Sports Affair, what's the charter, you going to add tech athletes to the mix now that we've kind of defined that term? But take a minute to explain-- >> Tech athletes. So the vast majority of the population is under the age of 35. The ministry's mandate is to make sure that anybody within that constituency, their touchpoints are being managed in the right way. So our job, very, very simply, is to be effectively the change agent for them, number one, and number two, to protect their interests. So we're the ones that are negotiating regulations that come in, but what touchpoint really is relevant? We're negotiating new laws that impact youth when it comes to their trades, new laws that impact youth when it comes to their rights, new laws-- >> Whether it's culture or art or whatever. >> Any touchpoints, so effectively we're customer-relations for youth, or client relations for youth. So that's that from one perspective. With regards to sports, we're simply regulators. So what we're doing is we're moving from an operator model to a regulator model, and what we're trying to do is we're trying to create a sports industry. So instead of us focusing on the actual tournament itself only, we're looking at sports diplomacy, we're looking at sports industry, we're looking at human performance and things like that. So any sectors that we can catalyze to grow in Bahrain that relates in any way, shape, or form to sports, whether it was medicinal development, technological development, regulations or otherwise, that falls under Ministry of Youth and Sports. >> You're charged to look at the whole individual across all spectrums touchpoints. >> Exactly >> That's awesome. >> So we're a horizontal as opposed to a vertical. >> Your Excellency, great to have you on theCUBE, great topic, could talk about it forever. We love sports, of course, on theCUBE, we love talkin' sports, Max, you're a tech athlete. >> I'm a tech athlete, I learned that today. Brilliant. >> You go from city to city, hit a home run everywhere you go. >> I'm looking for the next league to compete in. >> Guys, thanks so much for the insights. CUBE coverage here at AWS Summit in Bahrain, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE live in Washington, D.C. for AWS, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit. This is the event for Global Public Sector, and I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante; next guest, Salman Al Khalifa, vice CEO of Bahrain, Information and eGovernment Authority, excited to have him on theCUBE, and dying to talk to you for over a year. Welcome to theCUBE; thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So, one of the things we've been covering, and Terese has been really hot on this for over a year, and I think people are starting to figure it out, that the digital nation concept of digitizing and being a digital country is a moonshot kind of thinking, but it's reality for a lot of people. You guys have a story working with AWS, I think is super fascinating, so I want to get into it. How did it all start? What are you guys doing? Take a minute to explain what's going on in Bahrain, in your country. >> How did it start? Basically, every IT guy in government, is like bogged down, day in, day out, buying stuff, building stuff, and it's a constant race to just keep changing things over. We've got a really smart leader, and he has a vision. He said, "We're going to go to the cloud." It caught us off guard. What do you mean, take everything and move it to the cloud? That's crazy, but sitting down, really analyzing what the cloud will do for us, I was excited. I mean, take into consideration, 70% of our time is spent buying, installing, and re-buying, and re-installing stuff. So, I'm in a constant cycle of buying, tendering, and you know government bureaucracy. You can't pick up the phone and say "Hey, HP, "get us the server; get us this application." No, you need to put it in the public domain; you need to put in tender, evaluate it publicly, and then, write a contract and the contract... But it takes you to buy anything, six months. So, you're constantly, every month, issuing tenders. And, you're losing sight of what's really important. It's building applications that can help the citizen, not helping vendors. And I think the key thing is we need to focus our attention on building applications that serve the citizens. That's the bottom line; that's what we own. We own the business; we own the data, not the hardware. We don't want to keep buying hardware, so what the cloud gave us was the ability to innovate without having to go through all those hoops. And I think that is the real benefit to us as a government by moving to the cloud. >> Alright, so what's the status of the current situation? Amazon's the provider. >> Yep. >> Talk about the relationship with Amazon, and then we'll come into the cool things that are going on in Bahrain. >> Amazon is a strategic partner. They've opened up a region in Bahrain because the government saw this is the right approach. We've always seen where everything is going. In the 1970s, the government had the first satellite in the region. Lebanon, the war came on, and then the banks panicked. Where do they go? And they came where? The only region that was available and was able to take all the international banks at that time? Bahrain. And so, Bahrain was established as a banking sector. Now, we are betting on the cloud, and Amazon being the biggest and the best with more options for us. We're betting big on Amazon. We believe by having Amazon in Bahrain, they will help stimulate and stimulate innovation of our citizens because at the end of the day, we're not an oil-rich country. Our crowned jewel is the citizen, and the people are the innovators. They are going to be our future developers and entrepreneurs. And making them ready for the cloud is going to help us succeed. And that's where we see Amazon. >> What's the mission and vision of the eGovernment Authority and the modernization with digital? Is it to make citizens happy? Of course. Is it to attract business in? So talk about the mission of Bahrain because, obviously, when you stand up the cloud, Amazon regions, it's like a lot of things are going to start happening. You guys looking for more outward migration, inward migration, of talent and business. What are you guys trying to achieve? >> Business can work anywhere. But business wants to work in an environment where it's easy for them to establish. Without the bureaucracies, they can establish themselves in hours, not in weeks, or in months. That's what we want; we want people to come and establish their business in Bahrain and serve the region. That's the ultimate objective. And have a workforce that is competent enough to work in today's technology, not on yesterday's technology. And I think that is where we see it, as an innovative marketplace that is flexible enough to accommodate any international company coming in, and help stimulate local products, and that's the other part. >> So you have to have the infrastructure that attracts those people. >> Exactly. >> That makes them want to come to you. That's almost table stakes. Right now, talk about your journey. We saw this gentleman from the CIA talk about the icebergs today, that the part you see, maybe the software, maybe the licenses, but there's everything else that you talked about, the installation, the planning, the maintenance. How has that been affected or how do you expect that to be affected that below the iceberg that you see? >> So we've built up the below the iceberg. We're actually moving to the new iceberg, but that's the iceberg, is the cloud. So, we already have, there are a lot of smart people that work with us, and they've adapted their architecture and our applications to suit the cloud. And what they've done is they've come up with a master architecture for all the government agencies to follow. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We tell them how to do it; this is how you're going to protect yourselves, and we have the team there to support all the 40 agencies that are moving to the cloud. So that's step one; we've got the right architecture, we've got the right security in place that is open to, that has so many options and flavors that allows them to innovate, as well-- >> You've got a lot of-- >> Down to single stack. >> You've got a lot of flexibility, but also, just to give you guys some credit, you're the first country to adopt a cloud first-- >> Yes. >> Policy. >> In the region. >> Yes. >> In the region; this is historic. What's the impact of that; what's been the feedback? Are people confused, are they happy, are they jumping up and down, what's going on? >> Truth? Panic. (laughing) To start. Like I did. But once they understood what's at stake, oh they're loving it. We can't keep up, some agencies are faster than others, some are slower than others, and for different reasons. Obviously, the different stacks that they have. But in reality, now, fear has changed over to excitement. And I think, that I can see right now. We can't keep up, so we had to work with local partners to help other agencies move to the cloud faster. So, that is the positive side. So, as you already mentioned, you saw us start with the cloud first, but once you do that, they need to be educated, so we've set up sort of a program where we can re-skill the IT guys in government and say, "Here you go, here's the courses. "Go in, no charge. "We're going to help skill you up to the cloud," and they're loving it. Anybody, especially our developers, they're loving it. Anything away from operations, they're loving it. They don't need to deal with the operations guys. Because we've already started to establish a dev-ops, and with this dev-ops, the agility of moving, seamlessly, the application faster to the cloud becomes much smoother. >> Talk about startups in the region, the startup mentality. When John first told me about Bahrain, we were so excited to have you on. He's like, "Dave, this country "is like the startup mentality country." Talk about startups, cloud, and that mentality. >> In the region, previously, there's not much startups historically. But with the cloud, that is the ultimate catalyst for any startup. If you had an idea, and you wanted to develop it, you used to have to invest a lot of money into infrastructure, security, but with the cloud, with serverless, with all the tools that you've got, it's going to cost you nothing to establish an application. You have enough tools to compete against the big establishments out there. So we've got Careem, for example, which is basically a local taxi hire company, like Uber of the world. And it's doing incredibly well, shockingly well. And they are like the Cinderella Story of the region. And now, everybody's into it. Everybody's building applications. Last application that I heard was a guy who links up all the fishermen in the ports, and they can sell their fish to the locals without the middleman. And that's what you're going to see, some small guys coming up and girls coming up with applications that will innovate the way they do business, and we will see a lot more of it with the cloud. >> That's a motivational factor. People are seeing real advantages coming off this what was once a scary prospect of cloud to innovation actually happening. Okay, how do you continue it? What's the plan? How're you going to keep the train rolling, keep the momentum going? What's the focus, what's your plan? >> So we've got the economic development board, and the economic development board will handle that sector. Basically, their focus is stimulate the market regionally and locally and help innovators and entrepreneurs establish themselves on the cloud in Bahrain. And they are giving them every kind of support you can imagine: capacity building, capacity on the cloud, even accounting, business advice, all of that is free. And that is amazing. So as a startup, you know the tech, you know the problem. But you don't know how to establish that from the cloud. Alright, go to these guys, and they say, "Okay, "Here's enough credit through another organization. "Take it to the cloud. "You want to market your product? "Here's another company." And that is all embedded, and free of charge. That will, I believe, really help stimulate the small, but innovative companies and help them grow. >> So thoughts on the AWS partnership. Obviously, they chose to put a region in the region in your country. That's got to be huge, but what's the relationship like with AWS? Where do you want to see it go? >> Alright, so we're at the lift and shift stage of that. We just started, as you guys are aware. But already, in the pipeline, we're looking at innovations on the cloud. So, healthcare is a big deal for us, and we believe that the healthcare in the region has a lot of opportunities to improve. And by moving the healthcare system to the cloud and leveraging artificial intelligence, and helping things like oncology departments identify cancer better, treat cancer better, using technology, I think is the next frontier for us. I think that is an opportunity. I believe we'll see a lot of more innovation and simplifying government processes through mobile apps that are becoming much better. But I think we'll be more efficient. We will be able to continuously improve government services, for example, in the cloud at a faster rate. It used to take us two years for a change, now it's going to take us weeks for a change. That's the degree of flexibility and rapid response that we can give to our citizens, to our guests that come into the country, to satisfy their demands. >> And your developers. >> Yes, our developers love it. >> It's a huge economic opportunity to grow a new generation of citizens that are tech-savvy, and they don't have to be total nerds. Anyone can be programming, anyone can be developing big data. It should open up, I think, really good commerce for you guys, as well. I think that's a great opportunity. The question is, when is theCUBE going to come to Bahrain? When are we going to see theCUBE? >> We're getting you on the plane right now. (laughing) >> Salman, thanks for spending the time. Great to see you, final question: For the folks watching back at home and around the world, AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington, D.C., what's your impression, the vibe? What's the content? For the people who aren't here, take a minute to share your color commentary on what's happening here. >> I think it's very difficult to express the enthusiasm. It's in the air, you can smell it, you can feel it, the way people are talking. It's not only the private sectors that are talking about moving to the cloud, it's government. And you feel it here. It's not a pipe dream; it's a reality. And I think coming here to really show people that the world is changing, and if they're not on the cloud, they're going to be left behind. That is my impression. >> It's a big opportunity. >> Absolutely. >> Salman, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it, great to see you on theCUBE. It's theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante bringing you all the action, most important stories happening here at AWS Public Sector Summit. Bahrain, cloud first policy, really going to pay off, a real investment in the future of their citizens. An example of being cloud first, creating value. Stay with us. More live coverage here in Washington after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Net App and The Cube's ecosystem partnership. >> Welcome back, we're here live at The Cube here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman have been co-hosts all week here for three days live coverage. Day one and I'm winding down. Great keynotes, CEO of Cisco laying out the next generation network and it's not just the old networking, it's a whole nother thing. Our next guest is Salman Asadullah, who is the CTO and VP in Engineering at Netnology.io. Like technology, Netnology.io, former Cisco fellow been twenty- >> Distinguished engineer. >> Distinguished engineer, sorry, fellow engineer, well you look distinguished today. So how many years have you been at Cisco? >> 22 years. >> 22 years, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> So I got to ask you, before I get into the company, which we were talking before we came on camera, you doing really, I think you're on the front end of a big wave we see, certainly in The Cube, but you've been at Cisco 20 years and I've been working with Cisco since the beginning of time, 1993, in some capacity or another in the industry and I've had friends that have sold companies to Cisco. There's always been a debate within Cisco's engineering organization as to how to move up the stack. One team, yes no. So there's been but now it's time. Can you add some color and reaction to that because I think that's kind of where it is now. So all those conversations, even go back 15 years ago, where in the stack should we go? What's the right time? How about some of the history of Cisco and now they're moving up the stack. >> Yeah so I think first of all just to start with, our company name is Netnology.io but our tagline is full stack system integrator because we call ourselves a full stack system integrator because we know end networking, we know Cisco but we know how to move up in the stack as well. With the APIs and the STKs and what not. So the thing what is happened when you kind of look into this from Cisco's perspective, and I was there for 22 years, I am what I am because of Cisco, like when people say in Cisco when they work in Cisco I am Cisco but I still say I am Cisco because all of our business, 70% of our business is around Cisco. But the thing is when people are in Cisco, from Cisco's perspective when they say okay we are a software company and all of that good stuff, they look at the software from a networking perspective but the world, the industry when they say software, they are kind of talking about up in the stack from the application perspective. This is what you see even in Cisco they are sort of trying to pivot and all of the requisitions which are happening is around that. That they are acquiring companies which are basically up in the stack. There are more application based companies and also they are building organically some stuff in there as well. >> What's interesting is that the trend is their friend right now because they are getting to have their cake and eat it too. They are going to have best of both worlds. The networking is becoming more and more important with something to find and then you've got Kubernetes which Google Cloud is out there on the stage today. You've got Kubernetes and containers and Service Mesh is coming on that all look like networking. It's got words like policy, QOS, I mean this is networking world moving it up the stack. What does that mean for a customer? Is that the path in your mind? >> Yeah and I'm a big believer of that. I'm a big believer of that even before leaving Cisco for last five years of Cisco, I was basically working around all of these SDN, NFE, APIs and making sure in organizations I was leading or I was part of that how do I enable our engineering force to do some of that, to gain those capabilities. This is what we are trying to mimic on a much smaller scale in our company. That the way we sort of call it we are a bunch of hybrid engineers. The people who are CCIs but they can also code as well. This is our sort of a focus because just like what you said John, five years ago or three years ago when people talked about this stuff it was only about if you are a data center, cloud these things matter. But now, if you really see all Cisco's solutions are around APIs, around STKs, around SDN and NFE concepts. So let's say if you look into Cisco enterprise solution like SDA or SDVAN it's all around that. If you look into collaboration, Spark, Intropo it's all around that. So the point is that for any network, for any engineer or any organization to get to the next level they have to go through this evolution. >> And that's scaling too then. The network's got to scale and the new software environment. >> You bet. >> So there has been a big debate in the networking world, Salman, for many years, okay I ran networks, wait I have to be a coder. Maybe there's not that skillset. Will my solution providers and my software providers and the platforms I build on take care of some of that or is the traditional role of the network dead? You're saying your company's got a hybrid role but what percentage of people that are the CCIEs and the network admins today, how many of them need to be coding, developing, working with APIs and everything in the future? >> Yeah I think the way I sort of look at it that there's some push back. There is some push back but mainly more in the younger generation. They get it, they get it because if I give you an example of our company, we have 15 to 20 people company, the last two hires we had these were fresh grads, computer science grads and what I asked them to do, first six months go get your CCNA so then they start to understand some of the basics of the networking so they can work with our senior CCI engineers who know how to write 50 lines of five tone script but they can work with the coders to get bigger things developed. >> That's the new strategy from millennials. Throw them in CIE training, get them up to speed. Okay I got to ask you the question, because I want Netnology, the company that you're the co-founder of, is small but you're doing a unique thing. You're taking and SIE approach, obviously Cisco DNA is in your blood, you in the Cisco family if you will, but you still got to work with other platforms like Amazon and what not, as you guys go out there is a trend towards automation and we're seeing that professional services, whether they are from global SIs, the trend is towards accelerating down the cycle of deployment, faster, faster, faster, it's almost like the old days was eight months to roll out an SAP deployment, now that's eight weeks, now is it going to be eight minutes. This is the trend, it requires automation, what is your vision on how this is going to pan out going forward because this is the beginning of a new kind of Cloud scale at a service level. What's your vision? >> So if you really see from the compute world guys they were already doing that stuff for the longest time and they always asked us, the networking people, how come if my CAPEX is 30% but my OPPEX is 70% when it comes to the networking because we were lacking all of those capabilities. And the reason was that all the vendors they had these closed systems but now with this whole trend of SDN, NFE, people want to have more control. Cisco, and a lot of the vendors, they have all opened up their APIs and given the SD case so now you have the capability to go and take this talk to the compute guys. Say you are ahead of the game but we are catching up as well. By using all of these different tools what we are using in our deployments day in and day out. So if I give you an example, recently we did a project for a customer which was a multi-vendor fabric, VXLAN fabric, for data center, and we automated that whole deployment using Ansible Tower. So the thing is that if you would have done that manually, my God it would have taken a long time but now you can do it in minutes. >> Sal, talk about the Devnet explosion, because obviously we've reported all day today it came out in the keynote, over half a million developers are on Devnet, Susie Wee who's heading up Devnet and now Devnet Create which is the Cloud version of Devnet. Those two worlds are coming together and you're seeing network guys, even old school folks, adopting Cloud Navis. A natural migration and the younger guys are going and get networking as you pointed out. Devnet's been popular, you're seeing some great demos here. You can get a free Meraki Switch if you can code a little bit, take it home with you and play with it. A lot of tools, a lot of APIs as you're talking about, this is the new software development environment. What are you guys doing with Devnet? Can you share some insight into some of the things that you're doing that's relevant? Things that you're kicking the tires on? What's up? >> So first of all, to start with, we do a lot of work with Cisco Devnet and we are so humbled and honored by that because we get to learn while we are working on a lot of cool stuff. Then we can go sell that to our customers. Just to kind of tell you tomorrow, Susie Wee is announcing Devnet's cord exchange you might have heard about. So we are among those few partners who have contributed to that cord exchange. So we have put our code for everybody go get it, play with it, like we couple of use cases we have shared on that cord exchange, free for everybody. Think about you have Cisco VNFs running on AWFs how would you use cisco Cloud Center to model and deploy that service on AWFs? Using the APIs and then in the back end we have done scripting using Python and Shell and Ansible. These sort of things. And also we have a booth over here at the Devnet zone partner village and we are demonstrating some of these demos over there as well. >> That's really the standard now, people are getting the scale up in multiple clouds then deploying. That seems to be the big trend, automation there. >> Oh yeah, because as I said, the way we are partnered with Cisco we are also partnering with AWS and GCP so we have close to 35 certifications in our team including 13 CCIs. >> You're a veteran at Cisco, obviously to work at Cisco that long it's very entrepreneurial inside so it's always kind of been there. It's still a big company even when you were there but not you're an entrepreneur. What's it like on the other side? >> Oh my god, I'm living someone's dream. I'm blessed to be afford to do this. It's an awesome time for us. Of course it's a little stressful. >> Heavy lift there huh? It's not easy right? >> Me being in the silicon valley and I wanted to kind of do this but I tell you I recently Cisco included me in the Cisco designated VIP, which is a very selected group of people and worldwide, so I'm one of those people and I wrote a blog about that and I said something in there that although I have left Cisco but I don't feel like I've left Cisco because I'm still you know- >> Extended family. >> Yeah extended family. >> So what's up for the company, what's next? What's you're mission? Are you hiring? What are you working on? Share some insight into what's next for you guys? What's on your road map? >> So it's the growing pains. It's the growing pains, we are growing, our work is expanding. We are basically hiring some good talent. But more exciting something that we are also building a platform. So hopefully in the next six months we are going to be releasing something around that as well. Because again, think about we are recently named as a top 10 SDN providers by Enterprise Networking Magazine, so we are focusing on three Cisco SDN solutions. SDI in data center, SDA in branch and campus, and SDVAN on the VAN side. Now think about that you have segmentation in all of these solutions. How you can simplify this whole thing. How you can map these different perimeters between these three different solutions. So we are working on some cool ideas and some product as well so that's something really exciting for us. >> Are you guys self funded? >> Until now we are all privately funded. >> Sal, I'll put the hard question to you. As a startup, congratulations by the way, we know all about startups, we started a startup ourselves, it's growing pains but it's fun. It's hard work but it's a whole different joy. What problem are you solving? When you look at hiring an engineer what's the tough problem that you guys are trying to tackle? If you could boil it down into, the full stack great mission, what's the hard problem that you guys are trying to solve? >> So we just want to further simplify the Cisco story. As a matter of fact, in some of these SDN NFE based environments, that's our goal. How we can further simplify it. We are small enough that we can tackle some of these things. >> So tackle the complexity, that's where your mission is? >> Yes. >> Salman, thanks for coming on The Cube. Great to meet you, great to have you here. Thanks for sharing your insight here on The Cube with us live here- >> Very good, I appreciate the opportunity. >> Yeah let's follow up, love what you do. I think the future is going to be changing the game on how professional services are built, deployed and leveraged. Certainly code sharing. Collaboration is the new competitive behavior. You don't have to beat the other guy to win, you can work together. This is the new normal. This is what's going on at Cisco Live. Here in The Cube we're bringing you all the content. Stay with us, we'll see you tomorrow for day two of coverage. Thanks for watching.