(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here with theCUBE live on the Venetian Expo Hall Floor, talking all things AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the first full day of coverage. It is jam-packed here. People are back. They are ready to hear all the new innovations from AWS. Dave, how does it feel to be back yet again in Vegas? >> Yeah, Vegas. I think it's my 10th time in Vegas this year. So, whatever. >> This year alone. You must have a favorite steak restaurant then. >> There are several. The restaurants in Vegas are actually really good. >> You know? >> They are good. >> They used to be terrible. But I'll tell you. My favorite? The place that closed. >> Oh! >> Yeah, closed. In between where we are in the Wynn and the Venetian. Anyway. >> Was it CUT? >> No, I forget what the name was. >> Something else, okay. >> It was like a Greek sort of steak place. Anyway. >> Now, I'm hungry. >> We were at Pure Accelerate a couple years ago. >> Yes, we were. >> When they announced Cloud Block Store. >> That's right. >> Pure was the first- >> In Austin. >> To do that. >> Yup. >> And then they made the acquisition of Portworx which was pretty prescient given that containers have been going through the roof. >> Yeah. >> So I'm sort of excited to have these guys on and talk about that. >> We're going to unpack all of this. We've got one of our alumni back with us, Venkat Ramakrishna, VP of Product, Portworx by Pure Storage. And Dan Kogan joins us for the first time, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, FlashArray at Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Hey, guys. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. >> Do you have a favorite steak restaurant in Vegas? Dave said there's a lot of good choices. >> There's a lot of good steak restaurants here. >> I like SDK. >> Yeah, that's a good one. >> That's the good one. >> That's a good one. >> Which one? >> SDK. >> SDK. >> Where's that? >> It's, I think, in Cosmopolitan. >> Ooh. >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's pretty good, yeah. >> There's one of the Western too that's pretty. >> I'm an Herbs and Rye guy. Have you ever been there? >> No. >> No. >> Herbs and Rye is off strip, but it's fantastic. It's kind of like a locals joint. >> I have to dig through all of this great stuff today and then check that out. Talk to me. This is our first day, obviously. First main day. I want to get both of your perspectives. Dan, we'll start with you since you're closest to me. How are you finding this year's event so far? Obviously, tons of people. >> Busy. >> Busy, yeah. >> Yeah, it is. It is old times. Bigger, right? Last re:Invent I was at was 2019 right before everything shut down and it's probably half the size of this which is a different trend than I feel like most other tech conferences have gone where they've come back, but a little bit smaller. re:Invent seems to be the IT show. >> It really does. Venkat, are you finding the same? In terms of what you're experiencing so far on day one of the events? >> Yeah, I mean... There's tremendous excitement. Overall, I think it's good to be back. Very good crowd, great turnout, lot of excitement around some of the new offerings we've announced. The booth traffic has been pretty good. And just the quality of the conversations, the customer meetings, have been really good. There's very interesting use cases shaping up and customers really looking to solve real large scale problems. Yeah, it's been a phenomenal first day. >> Venkat, talk a little bit about, and then we'll get to you Dan as well, the relationship that Portworx by Pure Storage has with AWS. Maybe some joint customers. >> Yeah, so we... Definitely, we have been a partner of AWS for quite some time, right? Earlier this year, we signed what is called a strategic investment letter with AWS where we kind of put some joint effort together like to better integrate our products. Plus, kind of get in front of our customers more together and educate them on how going to how they can deploy and build vision critical apps on EKS and EKS anywhere and Outpost. So that partnership has grown a lot over the last year. We have a lot of significant mutual customer wins together both on the public cloud on EKS as well as on EKS anywhere, right? And there are some exciting use cases around Edge and Edge deployments and different levels of Edge as well with EKS anywhere. And there are pretty good wins on the Outpost as well. So that partnership I think is kind of like growing across not just... We started off with the one product line. Now our Portworx backup as a service is also available on EKS and along with the Portworx Data Services. So, it is also expanded across the product lanes as well. >> And then Dan, you want to elaborate a bit on AWS Plus Pure? >> Yeah, it's for kind of what we'll call the core Pure business or the traditional Pure business. As Dave mentioned, Cloud Block Store is kind of where things started and we're seeing that move and evolve from predominantly being a DR site and kind of story into now more and more production applications being lifted and shifted and running now natively in AWS honor storage software. And then we have a new product called Pure Fusion which is our storage as code automation product essentially. It takes you from moving and managing of individual arrays, now obfuscates a fleet level allows you to build a very cloud-like backend and consume storage as code. Very, very similar to how you do with AWS, with an EBS. That product is built in AWS. So it's a SaaS product built in AWS, really allowing you to turn your traditional Pure storage into an AWS-like experience. >> Lisa: Got it. >> What changed with Cloud Block Store? 'Cause if I recall, am I right that you basically did it on S3 originally? >> S3 is a big... It's a number of components. >> And you had a high performance EC2 instances. >> Dan: Yup, that's right. >> On top of lower cost object store. Is that still the case? >> That's still the architecture. Yeah, at least for AWS. It's a different architecture in Azure where we leverage their disc storage more. But in AWS were just based on essentially that backend. >> And then what's the experience when you go from, say, on-prem to AWS to sort of a cross cloud? >> Yeah, very, very simple. It's our replication technology built in. So our sync rep, our async rep, our active cluster technology is essentially allowing you to move the data really, really seamlessly there and then again back to Fusion, now being that kind of master control plan. You can have availability zones, running Cloud Block Store instances in AWS. You can be running your own availability zones in your data centers wherever those may happen to be, and that's kind of a unification layer across it all. >> It looks the same to the customer. >> To the customer, at the end of the day, it's... What the customer sees is the purity operating system. We have FlashArray proprietary hardware on premises. We have AWS's hardware that we run it on here. But to the customer, it's just the FlashArray. >> That's a data super cloud actually. Yeah, it's a data super cloud. >> I'd agree. >> It spans multiple clouds- >> Multiple clouds on premises. >> It extracts all the complexity of the underlying muck and the primitives and presents a common experience. >> Yeah, and it's the same APIs, same management console. >> Dave: Yeah, awesome. >> Everything's the same. >> See? It's real. It's a thing, On containers, I have a question. So we're in this environment, everybody wants to be more efficient, what's happening with containers? Is there... The intersection of containers and serverless, right? You think about all the things you have to do to run containers in VMs, configure everything, configure the memory, et cetera, and then serverless simplifies all that. I guess Knative in between or I guess Fargate. What are you seeing with customers between stateless apps, stateful apps, and how it all relates to containers? >> That's a great question, right? I think that one of the things that what we are seeing is that as people run more and more workloads in the cloud, right? There's this huge movement towards being the ability to bring these applications to run anywhere, right? Not just in one public cloud, but in the data centers and sometimes the Edge clouds. So there's a lot of portability requirements for the applications, right? I mean, yesterday morning I was having breakfast with a customer who is a big AWS customer but has to go into an on-prem air gap deployment for one of their large customers and is kind of re-platforming some other apps into containers in Kubernetes because it makes it so much easier for them to deploy. So there is no longer the debate of, is it stateless versus it stateful, it's pretty much all applications are moving to containers, right? And in that, you see people are building on Kubernetes and containers is because they wanted multicloud portability for their applications. Now the other big aspect is cost, right? You can significantly run... You know, like lower cost by running with Kubernetes and Portworx and by on the public cloud or on a private cloud, right? Because it lets you get more out of your infrastructure. You're not all provisioning your infrastructure. You are like just deploying the just-enough infrastructure for your application to run with Kubernetes and scale it dynamically as your application load scales. So, customers are better able to manage costs. >> Does serverless play in here though? Right? Because if I'm running serverless, I'm not paying for the compute the whole time. >> Yeah. >> Right? But then stateless and stateful come into play. >> Serverless has a place, but it is more for like quick event-driven decision. >> Dave: The stateless apps. >> You know, stuff that needs to happen. The serverless has a place, but majority of the applications have need compute and more compute to run because there's like a ton of processing you have to do, you're serving a whole bunch of users, you're serving up media, right? Those are not typically good serverless apps, right? The several less apps do definitely have a place. There's a whole bunch of minor code snippets or events you need to process every now and then to make some decisions. In that, yeah, you see serverless. But majority of the apps are still requiring a lot of compute and scaling the compute and scaling storage requirements at a time. >> So what Venkat was talking about is cost. That is probably our biggest tailwind from a cloud adoption standpoint. I think initially for on-premises vendors like Pure Storage or historically on-premises vendors, the move to the cloud was a concern, right? In that we're getting out the data center business, we're going all in on the cloud, what are you going to do? That's kind of why we got ahead of that with Cloud Block Store. But as customers have matured in their adoption of cloud and actually moved more applications, they're becoming much more aware of the costs. And so anywhere you can help them save money seems to drive adoption. So they see that on the Kubernetes side, on our side, just by adding in things that we do really well: Data reduction, thin provisioning, low cost snaps. Those kind of things, massive cost savings. And so it's actually brought a lot of customers who thought they weren't going to be using our storage moving forward back into the fold. >> Dave: Got it. >> So cost saving is great, huge business outcomes potentially for customers. But what are some of the barriers that you're helping customers to overcome on the storage side and also in terms of moving applications to Kubernetes? What are some of those barriers that you could help us? >> Yeah, I mean, I can answer it simply from a core FlashArray side, it's enabling migration of applications without having to refactor them entirely, right? That's Kubernetes side is when they think about changing their applications and building them, we'll call quote unquote more cloud native, but there are a lot of customers that can't or won't or just aren't doing that, but they want to run those applications in the cloud. So the movement is easier back to your data super cloud kind of comment, and then also eliminating this high cost associated with it. >> I'm kind of not a huge fan of the whole repatriation narrative. You know, you look at the numbers and it's like, "Yeah, there's something going on." But the one use case that looks like it's actually valid is, "I'm going to test in the cloud and I'm going to deploy on-prem." Now, I dunno if that's even called repatriation, but I'm looking to help the repatriation narrative because- >> Venkat: I think it's- >> But that's a real thing, right? >> Yeah, it's more than repatriation, right? It's more about the ability to run your app, right? It's not just even test, right? I mean, you're going to have different kinds of governance and compliance and regulatory requirements have to run your apps in different kinds of cloud environments, right? There are certain... Certain regions may not have all of the compliance and regulatory requirements implemented in that cloud provider, right? So when you run with Kubernetes and containers, I mean, you kind of do the transformation. So now you can take that app and run an infrastructure that allows you to deliver under those requirements as well, right? So that portability is the major driver than repatriation. >> And you would do that for latency reasons? >> For latency, yeah. >> Or data sovereign? >> Data sovereignty. >> Data sovereignty. >> Control. >> I mean, yeah. Availability of your application and data just in that region, right? >> Okay, so if the capability is not there in the cloud region, you come in and say, "Hey, we can do that on-prem or in a colo and get you what you need to comply to your EDX." >> Yeah, or potentially moves to a different cloud provider. It's just a lot more control that you're providing on customer at the end of the day. >> What's that move like? I mean, now you're moving data and everybody's going to complain about egress fees. >> Well, you shouldn't be... I think it's more of a one-time move. You're probably not going to be moving data between cloud providers regularly. But if for whatever reasons you decide that I'm going to stop running in X Cloud and I'm going to move to this cloud, what's the most seamless way to do? >> So a customer might say, "Okay, that's certification's not going to be available in this region or gov cloud or whatever for a year, I need this now." >> Yeah, or various commercial. Whatever it might be. >> "And I'm going to make the call now, one-way door, and I'm going to keep it on-prem." And then worry about it down the road. Okay, makes sense. >> Dan, I got to talk to you about the sustainability element there because it's increasingly becoming a priority for organizations in every industry where they need to work with companies that really have established sustainability programs. What are some of the factors that you talk with customers about as they have choice in all FlashArray between Pure and competitors where sustainability- >> Yeah, I mean we've leaned very heavily into that from a marketing standpoint recently because it has become so top of mind for so many customers. But at the end of the day, sustainability was built into the core of the Purity operating system in FlashArray back before it was FlashArray, right? In our early generation of products. The things that drive that sustainability of high density, high data reduction, small footprint, we needed to build that for Pure to exist as a company. And we are maybe kind of the last all-flash vendor standing that came ground up all-flash, not just the disc vendor that's refactored, right? And so that's sort of engineering from the ground up that's deeply, deeply into our software as a huge sustainability payout now. And we see that and that message is really, really resonating with customers. >> I haven't thought about that in a while. You actually are. I don't think there's any other... Nobody else made it through the knothole. And you guys hit escape velocity and then some. >> So we hit escape velocity and it hasn't slowed down, right? Earnings will be tomorrow, but the last many quarters have been pretty good. >> Yeah, we follow you pretty closely. I mean, there was one little thing in the pandemic and then boom! It's just kept cranking since, so. >> So at the end of the day though, right? We needed that level to be economically viable as a flash bender going against disc. And now that's really paying off in a sustainability equation as well because we consume so much less footprint, power cooling, all those factors. >> And there's been some headwinds with none pricing up until recently too that you've kind of blown right through. You know, you dealt with the supply issues and- >> Yeah, 'cause the overall... One, we've been, again, one of the few vendors that's been able to navigate supply really well. We've had no major delays in disruptions, but the TCO argument's real. Like at the end of the day, when you look at the cost of running on Pure, it's very, very compelling. >> Adam Selipsky made the statement, "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it." Yeah, okay. It might be that, but... Maybe. >> Maybe, but you can... So again, we are seeing cloud customers that are traditional Pure data center customers that a few years ago said, "We're moving these applications into the cloud. You know, it's been great working with you. We love Pure. We'll have some on-prem footprint, but most of everything we're going to do is in the cloud." Those customers are coming back to us to keep running in the cloud. Because again, when you start to factor in things like thin provisioning, data reduction, those don't exist in the cloud. >> So, it's not repatriation. >> It's not repatriation. >> It's we want Pure in the cloud. >> Correct. We want your software. So that's why we built CBS, and we're seeing that come all the way through. >> There's another cost savings is on the... You know, with what we are doing with Kubernetes and containers and Portworx Data Services, right? So when we run Portworx Data Services, typically customers spend a lot of money in running the cloud managed services, right? Where there is obviously a sprawl of those, right? And then they end up spending a lot of item costs. So when we move that, like when they run their data, like when they move their databases to Portworx Data Services on Kubernetes, because of all of the other cost savings we deliver plus the licensing costs are a lot lower, we deliver 5X to 10X savings to our customers. >> Lisa: Significant. >> You know, significant savings on cloud as well. >> The operational things he's talking about, too. My Fusion engineering team is one of his largest customers from Portworx Data Services. Because we don't have DBAs on that team, it's just developers. But they need databases. They need to run those databases. We turn to PDS. >> This is why he pays my bills. >> And that's why you guys have to come back 'cause we're out of time, but I do have one final question for each of you. Same question. We'll start with you Dan, the Venkat we'll go to you. Billboard. Billboard or a bumper sticker. We'll say they're going to put a billboard on Castor Street in Mountain View near the headquarters about Pure, what does it say? >> The best container for containers. (Dave and Lisa laugh) >> Venkat, Portworx, what's your bumper sticker? >> Well, I would just have one big billboard that goes and says, "Got PX?" With the question mark, right? And let people start thinking about, "What is PX?" >> I love that. >> Dave: Got Portworx, beautiful. >> You've got a side career in marketing, I can tell. >> I think they moved him out of the engineering. >> Ah, I see. We really appreciate you joining us on the program this afternoon talking about Pure, Portworx, AWS. Really compelling stories about how you're helping customers just really make big decisions and save considerable costs. We appreciate your insights. >> Awesome. Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat synth intro music) >> Hey everyone and welcome to Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, this event, the keynote that we got out of a little while ago was, standing room only. The Solutions hall is packed. There's so much buzz. The community is continuing to mature. They're continuing to contribute. One of the big topics is Cloud Native at Scale. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a revolution happening. The developers are coming on board. They will be running companies. Developers, structurally, will be transforming companies with just, they got to get powered somewhere. And, I think, the Cloud Native at Scale speaks to getting everything under the covers, scaling up to support developers. In this next segment, we have two Kube alumnis. We're going to talk about Cloud Native at Scale. Some of the things that need to be there in a unified architecture, should be great. >> All right, it's going to be fantastic. Let's go under the covers here, as John mentioned, two alumni with us, Madhura Maskasky joins us, co-founder of Platform9. Sirish Raghuram, also co-founder of Platform9 joins us. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you guys here at KubeCon on the floor in Detroit. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Excited to be here >> So, talk to us. You guys have some news, Madhura, give us the sneak peak. What's going on? >> Definitely, we are very excited. So, we have John, not too long ago we spoke about our very new open source project called Arlon. And, we were talking about the launch of Arlon in terms of its first release and etcetera. And, just fresh hot of the press, we, Platform9 had its 5.6 release which is its most recent release of our product. And there's a number of key interesting announcements that we'd like to share as part of that. I think, the prominent one is, Platform9 added support for EKS Kubernetes cluster management. And, so, this is part of our vision of being able to add value, no matter where you run your Kubernetes clusters, because, Kubernetes or cluster management, is increasingly becoming commodity. And, so, I think the companies that succeed are going to add value on top, and are going to add value in a way that helps end users, developers, DevOps solve problems that they encounter as they start running these environments, with a lot of scale and a lot of diversity. So, towards that, key features in the 5.6 six release. First, is the very first package release of the product online, which is the open source project that we've kicked off to do cluster and application, entire cluster management at scale. And, then there's few other very interesting capabilities coming out of that. >> I want to just highlight something and then get your thoughts on this next, this release 5.6. First of all, 5.6, it's been around for a while, five reps, but, now, more than ever, you mentioned the application in Ops. You're seeing WebAssembly trends, you're seeing developers getting more and more advanced capability. It's going to accelerate their ability to write code and compose applications. So, you're seeing a application tsunami coming. So, the pressure is okay, they're going to need infrastructure to run all that stuff. And, so, you're seeing more clusters being spun up, more intelligence trying to automate. So you got the automation, so you got the dynamic, the power dynamic of developers and then under the covers. What does 5.6 do to push the mission forward for developers? How would you guys summarize that for people watching? what's in it for them right now? >> So it's, I think going back to what you just said, right, the breadth of applications that people are developing on top of something like Kubernetes and Cloud Native, is always growing. So, it's not just a number of clusters, but also the fact that different applications and different development groups need these clusters to be composed differently. So, a certain version of the application may require some set of build components, add-ons, and operators, and extensions. Whereas, a different application may require something entirely different. And, now, you take this in an enterprise context, right. Like, we had a major media company that worked with us. They have more than 10,000 pods being used by thousands of developers. And, you now think about the breadth of applications, the hundreds of different applications being built. how do you consistently build, and compose, and manage, a large number of communities clusters with a a large variety of extensions that these companies are trying to manage? That's really what I think 5.6 is bringing to the table. >> Scott Johnston just was on here early as the CEO of Docker. He said there's more applications being pushed now than in the history of application development combined. There's more and more apps coming, more and more pressure on the system. >> And, that's where, if you go, there's this famous landscape chart of the CNCF ecosystem technologies. And, the problem that people here have is, how do they put it all together? How do they make sense of it? And, what 5.6 and Arlon and what Platform9 is doing is, it's helping you declaratively capture blueprints of these clusters, using templates, and be able to manage a small number of blueprints that helps you make order out of the chaos of these hundreds of different projects, that are all very interesting and powerful. >> So Project Arlon really helping developers produce the configuration and the deployment complexities of Kubernetes at scale. >> That's exactly right. >> Talk about the, the impact on the business side. Ease of use, what's the benefits for 5.6? What's does it turn into for a benefit standpoint? >> Yeah, I think the biggest benefit, right, is being able to do Cloud Native at Scale faster, and while still keeping a very lean Ops team that is able to spend, let's say 70 plus percent of their time, caring for your actual business bread and butter applications, and not for the infrastructure that serves it, right. If you take the analogy of a restaurant, you don't want to spend 70% of your time in building the appliances or setting up your stoves etcetera. You want to spend 90 plus percent of your time cooking your own meal, because, that is your core key ingredient. But, what happens today in most enterprises is, because, of the level of automation, the level of hands-on available tooling, being there or not being there, majority of the ops time, I would say 50, 70% plus, gets spent in making that kitchen set up and ready, right. And, that is exactly what we are looking to solve, online. >> What would a customer look like, or prospect environment look like that would be really ready for platform9? What, is it more apps being pushed, big push on application development, or is it the toil of like really inefficient infrastructure, or gaps in skills of people? What does an environment look like? So, someone needs to look at their environment and say, okay, maybe I should call platform9. What's it look like? >> So, we generally see customers fall into two ends of the barbell, I would say. One, is the advanced communities users that are running, I would say, typically, 30 or more clusters already. These are the people that already know containers. They know, they've container wise... >> Savvy teams. >> They're savvy teams, a lot of them are out here. And for them, the problem is, how do I manage the complexity at scale? Because, now, the problem is how do I scale us? So, that's one end of the barbell. The other end of the barbell, is, how do we help make Kubernetes accessible to companies that, as what I would call the mainstream enterprise. We're in Detroit in Motown, right, And, we're outside of the echo chamber of the Silicon Valley. Here's the biggest truth, right. For all the progress that we made as a community, less than 20% of applications in the enterprise today are running on Kubernetes. So, what does it take? I would say it's probably less than 10%, okay. And, what does it take, to grow that in order of magnitude? That's the other kind of customer that we really serve, is, because, we have technologies like Kube Word, which helps them take their existing applications and start adopting Kubernetes as a directional roadmap, but, while using the existing applications that they have, without refactoring it. So, I would say those are the two ends of the barbell. The early adopters that are looking for an easier way to adopt Kubernetes as an architectural pattern. And, the advanced savvy users, for whom the problem is, how do they operationally solve the complexity of managing at scale. >> And, what is your differentiation message to both of those different user groups, as you talked about in terms of the number of users of Kubernetes so far? The community groundswell is tremendous, but, there's a lot of opportunity there. You talked about some of the barriers. What's your differentiation? What do you come in saying, this is why Platform9 is the right one for you, in the both of these groups. >> And it's actually a very simple message. We are the simplest and easiest way for a new user that is adopting Kubernetes as an architectural pattern, to get started with existing applications that they have, on the infrastructure that they have. Number one. And, for the savvy teams, our technology helps you operate with greater scale, with constrained operations teams. Especially, with the economy being the way it is, people are not going to get a lot more budget to go hire a lot more people, right. So, that all of them are being asked to do more with less. And, our team, our technology, and our teams, help you do more with less. >> I was talking with Phil Estes last night from AWS. He's here, he is one of their engineer open source advocates. He's always on the ground pumping up AWS. They've had great success, Amazon Web Services, with their EKS. A lot of people adopting clusters on the cloud and on-premises. But Amazon's doing well. You guys have, I think, a relationship with AWS. What's that, If I'm an Amazon customer, how do I get involved with Platform9? What's the hook? Where's the value? What's the product look like? >> Yeah, so, and it kind of goes back towards the point we spoke about, which is, Kubernetes is going to increasingly get commoditized. So, customers are going to find the right home whether it's hyperscalers, EKS, AKS, GKE, or their own infrastructure, to run Kubernetes. And, so, where we want to be at, is, with a project like Arlon, Sirish spoke about the barbell strategy, on one end there is these advanced Kubernetes users, majority of them are running Kubernetes on AKS, right? Because, that was the easiest platform that they found to get started with. So, now, they have a challenge of running these 50 to 100 clusters across various regions of Amazon, across their DevTest, their staging, their production. And, that results in a level of chaos that these DevOps or platform... >> So you come in and solve that. >> That is where we come in and we solve that. And it, you know, Amazon or EKS, doesn't give you tooling to solve that, right. It makes it very easy for you to create those number of clusters. >> Well, even in one hyperscale, let's say AWS, you got regions and locations... >> Exactly >> ...that's kind of a super cloud problem, we're seeing, opportunity problem, and opportunity is that, on Amazon, availability zones is one thing, but, now, also, you got regions. >> That is absolutely right. You're on point John. And the way we solve it, is by using infrastructure as a code, by using GitOps principles, right? Where you define it once, you define it in a yaml file, you define exactly how for your DevTest environment you want your entire infrastructure to look like, including EKS. And then you stamp it out. >> So let me, here's an analogy, I'll throw out this. You guys are like, someone learns how to drive a car, Kubernetes clusters, that's got a couple clusters. Then once they know how to drive a car, you give 'em the sports car. You allow them to stay on Amazon and all of a sudden go completely distributed, Edge, Global. >> I would say that a lot of people that we meet, we feel like they're figuring out how to build a car with the kit tools that they have. And we give them a car that's ready to go and doesn't require them to be trying to... ... they can focus on driving the car, rather than trying to build the car. >> You don't want people to stop, once they get the progressions, they hit that level up on Kubernetes, you guys give them the ability to go much bigger and stronger. >> That's right. >> To accelerate that applications. >> Building a car gets old for people at a certain point in time, and they really want to focus on is driving it and enjoying it. >> And we got four right behind us, so, we'll get them involved. So that's... >> But, you're not reinventing the wheel. >> We're not at all, because, what we are building is two very, very differentiated solutions, right. One, is, we're the simplest and easiest way to build and run Cloud Native private clouds. And, this is where the operational complexity of trying to do it yourself. You really have to be a car builder, to be able to do this with our Platform9. This is what we do uniquely that nobody else does well. And, the other end is, we help you operate at scale, in the hyperscalers, right. Those are the two problems that I feel, whether you're on-prem, or in the cloud, these are the two problems people face. How do you run a private cloud more easily, more efficiently? And, how do you govern at scale, especially in the public clouds? >> I want to get to two more points before we run out of time. Arlon and Argo CD as a service. We previously mentioned up coming into KubeCon, but, here, you guys couldn't be more relevant, 'cause Intuit was on stage on the keynote, getting an award for their work. You know, Argo, it comes from Intuit. That ArgoCon was in Mountain View. You guys were involved in that. You guys were at the center of all this super cloud action, if you will, or open source. How does Arlon fit into the Argo extension? What is Argo CD as a service? Who's going to take that one? I want to get that out there, because, Arlon has been talked about a lot. What's the update? >> I can talk about it. So, one of the things that Arlon uses behind the scenes, is it uses Argo CD, open source Argo CD as a service, as its key component to do the continuous deployment portion of its entire, the infrastructure management story, right. So, we have been very strongly partnering with Argo CD. We, really know and respect the Intuit team a lot. We, as part of this effort, in 5.6 release, we've also put out Argo CD as a service, in its GA version, right. Because, the power of running Arlon along with Argo CD as a service, in our mind, is enabling you to run on one end, your infrastructure as a scale, through GitOps, and infrastructure as a code practices. And on the other end, your entire application fleet, at scale, right. And, just marrying the two, really gives you the ability to perform that automation that we spoke about. >> But, and avoid the problem of sprawl when you have distributed teams, you have now things being bolted on, more apps coming out. So, this is really solves that problem, mainly. >> That is exactly right. And if you think of it, the way those problems are solved today, is, kind of in disconnected fashion, which is on one end you have your CI/CD tools, like Argo CD is an excellent one. There's some other choices, which are managed by a separate team to automate your application delivery. But, that team, is disconnected from the team that does the infrastructure management. And the infrastructure management is typically done through a bunch of Terraform scripts, or a bunch of ad hoc homegrown scripts, which are very difficult to manage. >> So, Arlon changes sure, as they change the complexity and also the sprawl. But, that's also how companies can die. They're growing fast, they're adding more capability. That's what trouble starts, right? >> I think in two ways, right. Like one is, as Madhura said, I think one of the common long-standing problems we've had, is, how do infrastructure and application teams communicate and work together, right. And, you've seen Argo's really get adopted by the application teams, but, it's now something that we are making accessible for the infrastructure teams to also bring the best practices of how application teams are managing applications. You can now use that to manage infrastructure, right. And, what that's going to do is, help you ultimately reduce waste, reduce inefficiency, and improve the developer experience. Because, that's what it's all about, ultimately. >> And, I know that you just released 5.6 today, congratulations on that. Any customer feedback yet? Any, any customers that you've been able to talk to, or have early access? >> Yeah, one of our large customers is a large SaaS retail company that is B2C SaaS. And, their feedback has been that this, basically, helps them bring exactly what I said in terms of bring some of the best practices that they wanted to adopt in the application space, down to the infrastructure management teams, right. And, we are also hearing a lot of customers, that I would say, large scale public cloud users, saying, they're really struggling with the complexity of how to tame the complexity of navigating that landscape and making it consumable for organizations that have thousands of developers or more. And that's been the feedback, is that this is the first open source standard mechanism that allows them to kind of reuse something, as opposed to everybody feels like they've had to build ad hoc solutions to solve this problem so far. >> Having a unified infrastructure is great. My final question, for me, before I end up, for Lisa to ask her last question is, if you had to explain Platform9, why you're relevant and cool today, what would you say? >> If I take that? I would say that the reason why Platform9, the reason why we exist, is, putting together a cloud, a hybrid cloud strategy for an enterprise today, historically, has required a lot of DIY, a lot of building your own car. Before you can drive a car, or you can enjoy the car, you really learn to build and operate the car. And that's great for maybe a 100 tech companies of the world, but, for the next 10,000 or 50,000 enterprises, they want to be able to consume a car. And that's why Platform9 exists, is, we are the only company that makes this delightfully simple and easy for companies that have a hybrid cloud strategy. >> Why you cool and relevant? How would you say it? >> Yeah, I think as Kubernetes becomes mainstream, as containers have become mainstream, I think automation at scale with ease, is going to be the key. And that's exactly what we help solve. Automation at scale and with ease. >> With ease and that differentiation. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. Last question, I guess, Madhura, for you, is, where can Devs go to learn more about 5.6 and get their hands on it? >> Absolutely. Go to platform9.com. There is info about 5.6 release, there's a press release, there's a link to it right on the website. And, if they want to learn about Arlon, it's an open source GitHub project. Go to GitHub and find out more about it. >> Excellent guys, thanks again for sharing what you're doing to really deliver Cloud Native at Scale in a differentiated way that adds ostensible value to your customers. John, and I, appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks so much >> Our pleasure. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Detroit, Michigan at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2022. Stick around, John and I will be back with our next guest. Just a minute. (light synth outro music)

(electronic music) (background party chatter) >> All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Cube. Coming up, Bryan Talebi will be here with Ahura A.I? >> Ahura A.I. >> Ahura A.I. Bryan Talebi here with Ahura A.I. We are at The Cube post party networking event, special on the ground, extended coverage. Bryan, we were at The Futurist, not The Futurist Conference, The Future of Blockchain which was the Monaco Crypto Summit over at the Grimaldi Center. Now we're at the VIP gala, the prince is here, a lot of action's happening. You had a chance to look all the presentations we have all the heavy hitters here, kind of a movement going on, right? >> Absolutely. Well, first of all, I think it's absolutely amazing that Prince Albert II put this all together. He obviously understands the future and understands technology. It's absolutely brilliance. And Julio as well, I mean is incredible. So I take off my hat to all the people that put this event together and the speakers were brilliant. I mean, did you see all the speakers the technologies that they've built have the potential to radically transform billions of people's lives. >> It's interesting, you know, I've been covering crypto for a very long time and watched it emerge and then start exploding. And there's always been, and I saw this with the web too early on, legit versus not legit. And all early markets have the hype cycles go down and up, and you always kind of have that but now you're starting to see legitimate tie-in between physical digital assets where, and the confluence of the business value, societal value, government value, all across the spectrum. Every vertical, every use case is got a decentralized vibe going on right now because it's a forcing function. And, and here in Monaco, the price and the king they're leaning into it cause I think they see the future because they could answer their legacy. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And look, you're absolutely right about this because this downturn that we're facing, especially this new crypto winter, I think is the best thing that could possibly have happened to the crypto space because what it's doing is pushing out the let's call them the less than honest brokers within the crypto community, the people that were just in it for a buck, the pump and dumpers and so forth it's really pushing those folks out. And the companies that remain are the true technologists that aren't looking at crypto as just a speculative asset, but rather an underlying technology that can transform the way that we engage with the world in a decentralized way. >> Bryan, you know, we didn't mention in the intro but you also do investment. >> I do. >> You also have a lot of things going on. You got a great history, great pedigree of seeing the waves of innovation the best. That's something, an investment question, like are you in it for the money or are you in it for the make it happen mission? That becomes kind of like the probing question. Someone comes to the table, "Hey, I need some cash. We do funding." What's your exit strategy? "I want to make an exit in two years." Okay. You're out. (Bryan laughs) (John) But it's almost that easy now, right? >> Sure. >> (John) To figure out who's in it for the money. >> Sure. >> (John) Who's in it for the mission. Yeah, the mission's successful. You make a lot of money. >> That's exactly right. Look, one of my mentors once taught me is, money like power is only amassed in great amount if indirectly sought because money by itself is not intrinsically a motivator. And so, what we do at our AB+ Ventures, my venture capital fund, is we only invest, not only in companies that are impact driven and have the capacity to impact a billion people, but we invest in founders that are climbing their third or fourth mountain. So these are people who've already made their money. They either had a couple big exits at over a hundred million dollars or they became rock stars or they became astronauts. They did things where they achieved the highest levels of achievement. And now are building technologies because they believe that they're going to impact the world in a meaningful way. >> They kind of know it's important, right? They made some money, they've been successful. They have scar tissue and experience to apply almost I want to say for the legacy of it, but more for value. >> Yeah. >> For everybody. >> Absolutely. >> All right. So I got to ask about what your current venture, I know you got some good action going on. It's growing pretty good. As they say in golf, it's middle of the fairway. It's growing, got momentum. It's a turbine market. You probably has some offers on the table. I mean, I could imagine all the AI you got going on. Blockchain, very attracted. It's a hard problem, but it's the first inning. Not even. >> Yeah. >> What going on with the company? >> We're very early. Look, we've been building our technologies, the deep tech platform we've been building for four and a half years. There's a whole bunch of offers on the table to buy us. But look, the reality is right now is a fantastic hiring opportunity. There's a lot of amazing talent out there that now wants to come to us, which is great. Number one, number two, if you look back to the 2000 Dot-com bubble, what you saw is all of the companies that didn't really solve real problems went away and it left a more oxygen in the room for the companies that were really solving problems that needed to be solved. And those are now all trillion dollar companies. So, >> Well, Brian, you and I both got a little gray hair. So let's talk about the Dot-com bubble. The other thing, I'll add to that, by the way great commentary, is that everything that was like bullshit actually happened. People bought pet food online, >> Right. >> Groceries delivered to their house. So to your point, the things actually happen. See the visions and the aspirations were correct, timing and capital markets spree. >> Sure. >> Is there similarities going on in crypto? Is it the crypto winter, weeding out those pretenders? Is that what you're saying? >> Well, there's definitely a lot of similarities there but if you look at the example that you use, right, pets.com versus Amazon, people are still buying pet food online. I buy all my pet supplies for my two puppies online. However, if you look at the reason that Amazon works is because of their supply chain and the innovations that they created on being able to deliver anything to you within a day or two days in an extremely cost effective manner. It wasn't just because they had a website and they did some hand wavy stuff to say isn't this a good idea. You actually have to have the underlying operational capability and innovation from a technology standpoint to make it happen. And so, when we talk about crypto over the past number of years, and I've been in the crypto space for a long time, as you have there's been a lot of hand wavy stuff. There's been a lot of people like, "wouldn't this be a good idea?" but then you have the true operators that are able to find the underlying competitive advantages that actually make it work. And that's what I'm interested in. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on that. First of all, great point if you look at like, I was just commentating earlier I was asked the question what I think, and I said, well, I do a lot of lot of reporting and analysis on cloud computing. I watch what Amazon Web Service has done from many, many years ago. And all the followers now. Scale data, higher level services, they're all happening and it's creating a lot of value. Okay? That's going to come to crypto. And so, okay, the dots aren't connected there yet, but you've got this, but one of the things that has proven to be a success criteria, ecosystems. When you have enabling technology like DigitalBits, for instance, is kind the main powering of this ecosystem here, the value that's being created on top of it has to be a step function or multiple of the cost or operational cost to deploy the platform. Okay, so that's kind of in concert with everyone else. You product decentralized, what's your thoughts on that? Because now you have a lot of potential ecosystems that could connect together cause there's no one centralized ecosystem. >> (Bryan) Absolutely. >> But what is, what, how do you get that? How do you square that circle? So to speak. What's your take on that? How does ecosystems play into defi, decentralization, de-apps blockchain? >> So what you really talking about is interoperable, right? So again, if we use an analogy, if we look back to the late nineties, when Web 1.0 was really flourishing and then in the 2000s where everybody created their own websites, people went to the world wide web, but every company had their own website. They had their own social media platform. They had their entire Salesforce platform or what have you. So everyone had their entire separate organization. And so, I suspect that the future of crypto is going to be very similar, where there's going to be a bunch of different metaverses, a bunch of different ecosystems, but someone's going to come along, and I think there's a number of people on the back end that are actually working on this, Some of them are really brilliant, that are going to create an interoperable mechanism for people that jump from metaverse to metaverse from chain to chain in a completely easy experience from a user experience standpoint where you don't have to have a PhD in crypto, so to speak, that doesn't exist, but you don't have to have that level. >> Well, if you're working on crypto for the past five years you've got a PhD. >> Basically. >> The thesis is, you're still alive producing. (Brian laughs) Well, that's a good point. So I'm looking for like, this defacto enabler, right? Because TCP/IP was an example in the old days, you know, the levels of the stack that never, TCP/IP is part of the OSI model. It's just interconnect. That layer, nothing got above it, was open. It was just hard and top that TCP/IP the rest was all standard. Ethernet, token ring add that data layer and then cards. That worked, the industry could galvanize around that. I'm waiting for the crypto moment now, where, what is going to be that cloud (indistinct), Kubernetes and service matches and whatnot. What, is there anything on the horizon that you see that has that kind of coalescent ecosystem, let's get, if we all get behind this, we all win. Rather than chasing crumbs. >> Sure. >> You know, the bigger pie, rising tide, all that stuff. >> Well, so I think there's a really interesting analogy from a couple of hundred years ago on this. So most people don't realize that when the United States first had their railroad system which was the innovative infrastructure play at the time each state or each region had their own systems they had different size railroad. So what would happen if you were trying to ship a bunch of grain from one part of the country to the other you would take it by a train. You get to a train station, you'd have to take everything off, put it on a different train, on a different set of train tracks. You would go a couple states over. You'd have to do that again, go a couple states over. You have to do that again. Eventually what happened is the federal government came in and said, hey, we need to create a system of policies around one set of rules for all trains and all logistics across the country. And so, I do think there's a role for governments to come together, along with the operators and the companies to work collaboratively together to say, hey, what are the regulations? What are the rules of the road? How do we make sure we get all the scam artists out of the system? How do we create a system that actually works for everybody? Now, there's always dangers there, right? You have regulatory capture. Sometimes the government, oftentimes they're slow, they don't understand the technology. So they come down with a heavy hand. And so if it's done properly, and it's not just the United States alone, by the way, it's all the countries in the world. Now at this point, it's a global effort. >> There's money involved, too. >> Exactly. But if we are able to bring together people that are much smarter than me from the public and private sectors as well as the nonprofit sectors, together to come up with one set of rules I think that will enable crypto to massively expand across the entire globe. >> What are you passionate about right now? I know you got the investment fund for, you know, helping society and the planet, you get your project with your startup company, AI is in a hot area. What's going on? What's your top goals for the year? >> So there's two things. Number one, my company, Ahura A.I. is my baby. It's where I spend 70, 80 hours a week. We invent a technology that enables people to learn three to five times faster than traditional education. >> (John) Is that so? >> Because I believe that education is the first step. It's the first variable, that impacts all of the sustainable development goals, impacts the world in a very real way. >> And you're not wearing your UA pin. >> I'm not wearing my pin, I always point to it. >> I wanted to grab it, I saw it earlier. >> But then the second thing I'm super focused on is existential risk. Look, so I throw a lot of events where I bring together four categories of people, CEOs of impact driven companies, investors, whether they're VCs or billionaires or family offices, global experts, and celebrities that want to use their influence for good in the world. And one of the speakers that I had at one of my events is a guy at Stanford who runs their lab on existential risk and what he told the group, and what he told me, is according to Stanford and all the researchers, there's a one in six chance that we're all going to go extinct by 2050. One in six, that's a dice roll. And so to me, the most important thing I can do is bring people together that have capacity, have resources, have capabilities, to address these drivers of existential risk because selfishly, I don't want to live in a dystopian Hellscape. >> Exactly, yeah. Bryan, thanks for coming on. We're going to get back into dinner. Great to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> The Cube after dark, extended hours. Look at us, we're going the whole day. VIP gala, Prince Albert, the team, DigitalBits, The Cube, all here at the Yacht Club in Monaco. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> We're back at AWS re:Invent 2021. You're watching theCUBE and we're really excited to have Adam Williams on, he's a senior director of engineering at Iron Mountain. Som Shahapurkar, who's the product engineering of vertical solutions at Iron Mountain. Guys, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you >> Thank you. All right Adam, we know Iron Mountain trucks, tapes, what's new? >> What's new. So we've developed a SaaS platform for digitizing, classifying and bringing out and unlocking the value of our customer's data and putting their data to work. The content services platform that we've developed, goes together with an IDP that we call an intelligent document processing capability to do basic content management, but also to do data extraction and to increase workflow capabilities for our customers. >> Yeah, so I was kind of joking before Iron Mountain, the legacy business of course, everybody's seeing the trucks, but $4 billion company, $13 billion market cap, the stock's been on fire. The pandemic obviously has been a tailwind for you guys, but Som, if you had to describe it to like my mother, what's the sound bite that you'd give. >> Well the sound bite, as everyone knows data is gold today, right? And we are sitting figuratively and literally on a mountain of data. And now we have the technology to take that data partner with AWS, the heavy machinery to convert that into value, into value that people can use to complete the human story of healthcare, of mortgage, finance. A lot of this sits in systems, but it also sits in paper. And we are bridging that paper to digital divide, the physical and digital divide to create one story. >> This has been a journey for you guys. I mean, I recall that when you kind of laid this vision out a number of years ago, I think he made some acquisitions. And so maybe take us through that amazing transformation that Iron Mountain has made, but help the audience understand that. >> Transformations really been going from the physical records management that we've built our business around to evolving with our customers, to be able to work with all of the digital documents and not just be a transportation and records management storage company, but to actually work with them, to put their data to work, allowing them to be able to digitize a lot of their content, but also to bring in already digitized content and rich media. >> One of the problems that always existed, especially if you go back to back of my brain, 2006, the federal rules of civil procedure, which said that emails could now be evidence in a case and everyone like, oh, I don't like, how do I find email. So one of the real problems was classifying the information for retention policies. The lawyers wanted to throw everything out after whatever six or seven years, the business people wanted to keep everything forever. Neither of those strategies work, so classification and you couldn't do it manually. So have you guys solved that problem? How do you solve that problem? Does the machine intelligence help? It used to be, I'll use support vector machines or math or probabilistic, latent, semantic, indexing, all kinds of funky stuff. And now we enter this cloud world, have you guys been able to solve that problem and how? >> So our customers already have 20 plus years of retention rules and guidelines that are built within our systems. And we've helped them define those over the years. So we're able to take those records, retention schedules that they have, and then apply them to the documents. But instead of doing that manually, we're able to do that using our classification capabilities with AI ML and that Som's expertise. >> Awesome, so lay it on me. How do you guys do that? It's a lot of math. >> Yeah, so it can get complicated real fast, but at a simple level, what's changed really from support beta machines of 2006 to today is the scale at which we can do it, right? The scale at which we are bringing those technologies. Plus the latest technologies of deep learning, your conventional neural networks going from a bag of characters and words to really the way humans look at it. You look at a document and you know this is an invoice or this is a prescription, you don't have to even know to read to know that, machines are now capable of having that vision, the computer vision to say prescription, invoice. So we train those models and have them do it at industrial scale. >> Yeah, because humans are actually pretty bad at classifying at scale. >> At scale like their back. >> You remember, we used to try to do, oh, it was just tag it, oh, what a nightmare. And then when something changes and so now machines and the cloud and Jane said, how about, I mean, I presume highly regulated industries are the target, but maybe you could talk about the industry solutions a little bit. >> Right. Regulated industries are a challenge, right. Especially when you talk about black box methodologies like AI, where we don't know, okay, why does it classify this as this and that is that? But that's where I think a combined approach of what we are trying to say, composite AI. So the human knowledge, plus AI knowledge combined together to say, okay, we know about these regulations and hey, AI, be cognizant of this regulations while you do our stuff, don't go blindly. So we keep the AI in the guardrails and guided to be within those lines. >> And other part of that is we know our customers really well. We spent a lot of time with them. And so now we're able to take a lot of the challenges they have and go meet those needs with the document classification. But we also go beyond that, allowing them to implement their own workflows within the system, allowing them to be able to define their own capabilities and to be able to take those records into the future and to use our content management system as a true content services platform. >> Okay, take me through the before and the after. So the workflow used to be, I'd ring you up, or maybe you come in and every week grab a box of records, put them in the truck and then stick them in the Iron Mountain. And that was the workflow. And you wanted them back, you'd go get it back and it take awhile. So you've digitized that whole and when you say I'm inferring that the customer can define their own workflow because it's now software defined, right. So that's what you guys have engineered. Some serious engineering work. So what's the tech behind that. Can you paint a picture? >> So the tech behind it is we've run all of our cloud systems and Kubernetes. So using Kubernetes, we can scale really, really large. All of our capabilities are obviously cloud-based, which allows us to be able to scale rapidly. With that we run elastic search is our search engine and MongoDB is our no SQL database. And that allows us to be able to run millions of documents per minute through our system. We have customers that we're doing eight million documents a day for the reel over the process. And they're able to do that with a known level of accuracy. And they can go look at the documents that have had any exceptions. And we can go back to what Som was talking about to go through and retrain models and relabel documents so that we can catch that extra percentage and get it as close to 100% accuracy as we would like, or they would like. >> So what happens? So take me through the customer experience. What is that like? I mean, do they still... we you know the joke, the paperless bathroom will occur before the paperless office, right? So there's still paper in the office, but so what's the workload? I presume a lot of this is digitized at the office, but there's still paper, so help us understand that. >> Customers can take a couple of different paths. One is that we already have the physical documents that they'd like us to scan. We call that backfile scanning. So we already have the documents, they're in a box they're in a record center. We can move them between different records centers and get them imaged in our high volume scanning operation centers. From there-- >> Sorry to interrupt. And at that point, you're auto classifying, right? It's not already classified, I mean, it kind of is manually, but you're going to reclassify it on creation. >> Correct. >> Is that electronic document? >> For some of our customers, we have base metadata that gives us some clues as to what documents may be. But for other documents, we're able to train the models to know if their invoices or if their contracts commonly formatted documents, but customers can also bring in their already digitized content. They can bring in basic PDFs or Word documents or Google Docs for instance, but they can also bring in rich media, such as video and audio. And from there, we also do a speech to text for video and audio, in addition to just basic OCR for documents. >> Public sector, financial services, health care, insurance, I got to imagine that those have got to be the sweet spots. >> Another sweet spot for us is the federal space in public sector. We achieved FedRAMP, which is a major certification to be able to work with, with the federal government. >> Now, how would he work with AWS? What's your relationship with them? How do you use the cloud? Maybe you could describe that a little bit. >> Well, yeah, at multiple levels, right? So of course we use their cloud infrastructure to run our computing because with the AI and machine learning, you need a lot of computing power, right. And AWS is the one who can reliably provide it, space to store the digital data, computing the processes, extract all the information, train our models, and then process these, like he's talking about, we are talking about eight, 12, 16 million documents a day. So now you need seconds and sub second processing times, right? So at different levels, at the company infrastructure level, also the AI and machine learning algorithms levels, AWS has great, like Tesseract is one the ones that everyone knows but there is others purpose-built model APIs that we utilize. And then we'll put our secret sauce on top of that to build that pathway up and make it really compelling. >> And the secret sauce is obviously there's a workflow and the flexibility of the workflow, there's the classification and the machine learning and intelligence and all the engineering that makes the cloud work you manage. What else is there? >> Knowledge graphs, like he was saying, right, the domain. So mortgage is not that a document that looks very similar in mortgage versus a bank stated mortgage and bank statement in healthcare have different meanings. You're looking at different things. So you have something called a knowledge graph that maintains the knowledge of a person working in that field. And then we have those created for different fields and within those fields, different applications and use cases. So that's unique and that's powerful. >> That provides the ability to prior to hierarchy for our customers, so they can trace a document back to the original box that was given to us some many years ago. >> You got that providence and that lineage, I know you're not go to market guys, but conceptually, how do you price? Is it that, it's SaaS? Is it licensed? Is it term? Is it is a consumption based, based on how much I ingest? >> We have varying different pricing models. So we first off we're in six major markets from EU, Latin America, North America and others that we serve. So within those markets, we offer different capabilities. We have an essentials offering on AWS that we've launched in the last two weeks that allows you to be able to bring in base content. And that has a per object pricing. And then from there, we go into our standard edition that has ability to bring in additional workflows and have some custom pricing. And then we have what we call the enterprise. And for enterprise, we look at the customer's problem. We look at custom AI and ML models who might be developing and the solution that we're having to build for them and we provide a custom price and capability for what they need. >> And then the nativists this week announced a new glacier tier. So you guys are all over that. That's where you use it, right? The cheapest and the deepest, right? >> Yeah, one of the major things that AWS provides us as well is the compliance capabilities for our customers. So our customers really require us to have highly secure, highly trusted environments in the cloud. And then the ability to do that with data sovereignty is really important. And so we're able to meet that with AWS as well. >> What do you do in situations where AWS might not have a region? Do you have to find your own data center to do that stuff or? >> Well, so data privacy laws can be really complex. When you work with the customer, we can often find that the nearest data center in their region works, but we also do, we've explored the ability to run cloud capabilities within data centers, within the region that allows us to be able to bridge that. We also do have offerings where we can run on-premise, but obviously our focus here is on the cloud. >> Awesome business. Does Iron Mountain have any competitors? I mean like... >> Yeah. >> You don't have to name them, but I mean, this is awesome business. You've been around for a long time. >> And we found that we have new competitors now that we're in a new business. >> They are trying to disrupt and okay. So you guys are transforming as an incumbent. You're the incumbent disruptor. >> Yes. >> Yes, it's self disruption to some extent, right. Saying, hey, let's broaden our horizon perspective offering value. But I think the key thing is, I want to focus more on the competitive advantage rather than the competitors is that we have the end to end flow, right? From the high volume scanning operations, trucking, the physical world, then up and about into the digital world, right? So you extract it, it's not just PDFs. And then you go into database, machine learnings, unstructured to structured extraction. And then about that value added models. It's not just about classification. Well, now that you have classified and you have all this documents and you have all this data, what can you glean from it? What can you learn about your customers, the customers, customers, and provide them better services. So we are adding value all throughout this chain. And think we are the only ones that can do that full stack. >> That's the real competitive advantage. Guys, really super exciting. Congratulations on getting there. I know it's been a lot of hard work and engineering and way to go. >> Thank you. >> It's fun. >> Dave: It's good, suppose to have you back. >> Thanks. >> All right and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> We're back at AWS reinvent 2021. You're watching theCUBE. We're here live with one of the first live events, very few live events this year. It's the biggest hybrid event really of the year, of the season. Hopefully it portends a great future. We don't know it's a lot of uncertainty, but AWS said they're going to go for it. Close to 30,000 people here, Chris Wiborg is here. He's the VP of product marketing at Cohesity. Chris, great to see you face to face man. >> It's great to see you live again Dave. You understand that. >> Over the last couple of years we've had a lot of virtual meetup, hang out, and we talk every other quarter. >> Yeah. >> So it's great to see. Wow. You know, we were talking before the show. Well, we didn't really know what it was going to be like. I don't think AWS knew. >> No. >> It's like everything these days. >> You know, we did our own virtual event back in October because that was the time. And this is the first thing we've been back to live. And I was wondering, what's going to be like when I show up, but it's great to see all the folks that are here. >> Yeah. So I could see the booth. You know, you guys have had some good traffic. >> We have, yeah. >> A lot of customers here, obviously huge ecosystem. This, you know, the "flywheel keeps going". >> Yeah. You and I had a conversation recently about data management. It's something that you guys have put a stake in the ground. >> Absolutely. >> Saying, you know, we're not just backup, we're a good data management. It's fuzzy to a lot of people, we've had that conversation, but you're really starting to, through customer feedback, hone that message and the product portfolio. So let's start from the beginning. What is data management to cohesity? >> Well, so for us it's about the data lifecycle, right? And you heard a little bit about this actually during the keynote today, right? >> Right. >> When you think about the various services, you need to apply to data along the way to do basic things like protect it, be able to make sure you can recover from disasters, obviously deal with security today given the prevalence of ransomware out there, all the way down to at the end, how do you get more value out of it? And we do that in some cases with our friends from AWS using some of their AIML services. >> So your view of data may mean, it's kind of stops at the database right underneath. There's an adjacency to security that we've talked about. >> Yeah, very much. >> Data protection is now becoming an increasingly important component of a security strategy. >> It is. >> It's not a direct security play, but it's just the same way that it's not just the SecOps team has to worry about security anymore. It's kind of other parts of the organization. Talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, well, we actually had a customer advisory board about two months or so ago now. And we talked to many of our customers there, and one of them I won't name, a large financial institution. We asked them, you know, where did we stand in your spend these days? And he's able to tell you, a while back about a year ago, having new backup and recovery is a starting point was kind of on the wishlist. And he said today it's number two. And I said, well why? He said well, because of ransomware, right? You'd be able to come back from that and ask, well, great, what's number one? He said, well, endpoint security. So there you are, number one and number two, right? Top of mind for customers these days in dealing with really the scourge that's affecting so many organizations out there. And I think where you're going, you starting to see these teams work together in a way that perhaps they hadn't before, or you've got the SecOps team, you've got the IT operations team. And while exactly your point, we don't position ourselves as just a data security company, that's part of what we do. We are part of that strategy now where if you have to think about the various stages and dealing with that, defending your backups, 'cause that's often the first point of attack now for the bad guys. Being able to detect what's going on through AI and the anomaly detection and such, and then being able to rapidly recover, right? In the recover phase, that's not something that security guys spend time on necessarily, but it's important for the business to be able to bring themselves back when they're subject to an attack, and that's where we come in in spades. >> Yeah. So the security guys are busy trying to figure out, okay, what happened? How do we stop it from happening again? >> There's another business angle which is okay, how do we get back up and running? How much data did we lose? Ideally none. How fast can we get it back up? That's that's another vector that's now becoming part of that broader security stack. >> That's right. I mean, I think if you look at the traditional NIST cybersecurity framework, right? Stage five has always been the recover piece. And so this is where we're working with some of the players in the security space. You may see an announcement we did with Cisco around secure access recently. Where, you know, we're working together, not only to unite two tribes within large organizations. Right? The SecOps and ITOps guys. But then bringing vendors together because it's through that, that really, we think we're going to solve that problem best. >> Before we get into the portfolio, and I want to talk about how you've evolved that, let's talk a little about ransomware, it's in the news. You know, I just wrote a piece recently and just covered some of the payments that have made. I mean, I think the biggest is 40 million, but many tens of millions here and there. And it was, you know, one case, I think it was the Irish health service did not pay, thus far hasn't paid, but it's costing him $600 million to recover as the estimate. So this is serious threat. And as I've said, many times on theCUBE, exactly anybody can be a ransomware as they go on the dark web. >> Ransomware is a service. >> Right, ransomware is a service. Hey, can you set up a help desk for me to help me negotiate? And I'm going to put a stick into a server and you know, I hope that individual gets arrested but you never know. Okay. So now it's top of mind, what are you guys doing? First of all, what are you seeing from customers? How are they responding? What are you guys doing to help? >> Well, I think you're right. First of all, it's just a huge problem. I think the latest stat I saw was something like every 11 seconds there's a new attack because I can go into your point with a credit card, sign up as a service and then launch an attack. And the average payment is around 4.2 million or such, but there's some that are obviously lots bigger. And I think what's challenging is beyond the costs of recovering and invent itself is there's also the issue around brand and reputation, and customer service. And all these downstream effects that I think, you know, the IT guys don't think about necessarily. We talked to one customer or a regional hospital where the gentleman there told me that what he's starting to see after the fact is now, you've actually got class action suits from patients coming after them saying like, "Hey you, you let my data get stolen. Right? Can you imagine no IT guys thinking about that. So the cost is huge. And so it's not just an issue I think that was once upon a time just for ITOps or SecOps through the CIO, even it's even past the board level now if you can imagine. It's something the general public worries about and we actually did a survey recently where we asked people on the consumer side, are you more or less likely to do business with companies if you know they've been subject to ransomware or attacks? And they said, no, we are concerned about that, we are more reticent to do business with people as consumers if they're not doing the right things to defend their business against ransomware. Fascinating. Right? It's long past the tipping point where this is an IT only issue. >> So, high-level strategy. So we talk about things like air gaps, when I talked about your service to ensure immutability, >> Yeah, yeah. >> And at 50,000 foot level, what's the strategy then I want to get into specifics on it. >> Let's talk a little bit about, so the evolution of the attack, nature of attacks, right? So once upon a time, this is in the distant past now, the bad guys that you used to come after your production data, right? And so that was pretty easy to fix with companies like us. It's just restore from backup. They got a little smarter< let's call that ransomware 2.0, right? Where now, they say, let's go after the backup first and encrypt or destroy that. And so there, to your point, you need immutability down to the file system level. So you can't destroy the backup. You got to defend the backup data itself. And increasingly we're seeing people take in isolation in a different way than they used to. So you probably recall the sort of standard three, two, one rule, right? >> Yeah, sure. >> Where the one traditionally meant, take that data offsite on magnetic tape, send it to Iron mountain for example, and then get the data back when I need it. Well, you know, if your business is at risk, trying to recover from tape, it just takes too long. That's just no reason. >> It can be weeks. >> It can be weeks and you've got to locate the tapes, you got to ship them, then you got to do the restore. And just because of the physical media nature, it takes a while. So what we're starting to see now is people figuring out how to use the cloud as a way to do that and be able to have effectively that one copy stored offsite in a different media, and use the cloud for that. And so one of the things we announced actually back in our show in October, was a new service that allows you to do just that. We're calling it for now Project Fort Knox. We're not sure if that name is going to work globally, right? But the idea is a bunker, an isolated copy of the data in the cloud that's there, that can restore quickly. Now, is it as fast as having a local replica copy? Of course not. But, it's way better than tape. And this is a way to really give you that sort of extra layer of insurance on top of what you're already doing probably to protect your data. >> And I think that's the way to think of it. It's an extra layer. It's not like, hey, do this instead of tape, you're still going to do tape, you know. >> There's some that do that for all sorts of reasons, including compliance and governance and regulatory ones. Right? >> Yeah. >> And, you know, even disaster recovery scenarios of the worst case, I hope I never have to go through it. Yeah, you could go to the cloud. >> That's right. >> So, local copy is the best. If that's not there, you've got your air gap copy in the cloud. >> Yap. >> If that's not there for some crazy reason. >> We have a whole matrix we've been sharing with our customers recently with a different options. Right? And it's actually really interesting the conversation that occurs between the IT operations folks, and the SecOps folks back to that. So, you know, some SecOps folks, if they could, they just unplug everything from the network, it's safe. Right? But they can't really do business that way. So it's always a balance of what's the return that you need to meet. And by return I mean, coming back from an attack or disaster versus the security. And so again, think of this as an extra layer that gives you that ability to sleep better at night knowing that you've got a third, a tertiary copy, stored somewhere offsite in a different media, but you can bring it back at the same time. >> How have you evolve your portfolio to deal with both the data management trends that we've talked about and the cyber threats. >> Yeah. Well, a number of things. So amongst the other announcements we made back in October is DR. So DR is not a security thing per se, you know, who gets paged when something goes wrong? It's not the info SEC guys for DR, it's the ITOps guys. And so we've always had that capability, but one of the things we announced is be able to do that to do that to the cloud now in AWS. So, instead of site to site, being able to do it site to cloud, and for some organizations, that is all about being able to maybe eliminate a secondary site, you know, smaller organizations, others that are larger enterprises, they probably have a hybrid strategy where that's a part of their strategy now. And the value there is, it's an OpEx cost, right? It's not CapEx anymore. And so again, you lower your cost of operations. So that's one thing in the data management side. On the security side, another thing we announced was yet another service that runs in AWS, we call Cohesity Data Govern. And this is a way to take a look at your data before something ever occurs. One of the key things in dealing with ransomware is hygiene is prevention, right? And so you sort of have classically security folks that are trying to protect your data, and then another set of folks, certainly a large enterprise that are more on the compliance regulatory front, wanting to know where your PII is, your private sensitive data. And we believe those things need to come together. So this data governance product actually does that. It takes a look at first classifying your data, and then being able to detect anomalies in terms of who's coming in from where to get to it, to help you proactively understand what's at threat, and first of all, you know, where your crown jewels really are and make sure that you're protecting those appropriately and maybe modifying access policies If you have set up in your existing native applications,. So it's a little bit of awareness, a little bit prevention, and then when things start to go wrong, another layer that helps you know what's wrong. >> I love that the other side of the coin, I mean, you going to get privacy as a service along with my data protection as a service, know that's a better model. Tight on time sir, but the last question. >> Sure. >> The ecosystem. >> Yeah. >> So you mentioned endpoint security, I know identity access is cloud security, and since the remote work has really escalated, we talk about the ecosystem and some of the partnerships that you're enabling, API integration. >> Yeah, totally. So, you know, we have this, what we call our threat defense model, has got four layers to it. One is the core, is all about resiliency. You need to assume failure. We have, you know, the ability to fail over, fail back down our file system. It has to be immutable to keep the bad guys out. You have to have encryption, basic things like that. The next layer, particularly in this world of zero trust. Right? Is you have to have various layers access control, obvious things like multifactor authentication, role-based access control, as well as things like quorum features. It's the two keys in the safety deposit box to unlock it. But that's not enough. The third layer is AI powered anomaly detection, and being able to do data classification and stuff and such. But then the fourth layer, and this was beyond just us, is the ability to easily integrate in that ecosystem. Right? So I'll go back to the Cisco example I gave you before. We know that despite having our own admin console, there's no SecOps person that's going to be looking at that. They're going to look at something like a SecureAX, or maybe a Palo Alto XR, and be able to pull signals from different places including endpoints, including firewall. >> You going to feed that. >> Exactly. So we'll send signals over that, they can get a better view and then because we're all API based, they can actually invoke the remedy on their side and initiate the workflow that then triggers us to do the right thing from a data protection standpoint, and recovery standpoint. >> It's great to have you here. Thanks so much for coming on. >> It's good to see you again live today. >> See you in the evolution of cohesity. Yes, absolutely. Hopefully we do this a lot in 2022, Chris. >> Absolutely, looking forward to. >> All right. Me too. All right, thank you for watching this is theCUBE's coverage, AWS reinvent. We are the leader in high tech coverage, we'll be right back.

>> Hello everyone. On today's panel, the theme is Drug Discovery and how Artificial Intelligence can make a difference. On the panel today, we are honored to have Dr. Ryan Yates, principal scientist at The National Center for Natural Products Research, with a focus on botanicals specifically the pharmacokinetics, which is essentially how the drug changes over time in our body and pharmacodynamics which is essentially how drugs affects our body. And of particular interest to him is the use of AI in preclinical screening models to identify chemical combinations that can target chronic inflammatory processes such as fatty liver disease, cognitive impairment and aging. Welcome, Ryan. Thank you for coming. >> Good morning. Thank you for having me. >> The other distinguished panelist is Dr. Rangan Sukumar, our very own, is a distinguished technologist at the CTO office for High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence with a PHD in AI and 70 publications that can be applied in drug discovery, autonomous vehicles and social network analysis. Hey Rangan, welcome. Thank you for coming, by sparing the time. We have also our distinguished Chris Davidson. He is leader of our HPC and AI Application and Performance Engineering team. His job is to tune and benchmark applications, particularly in the applications of weather, energy, financial services and life sciences. Yes so particular interest is life sciences he spent 10 years in biotech and medical diagnostics. Hi Chris, welcome. Thank you for coming. >> Nice to see you. >> Well let's start with your Chris, yes, you're regularly interfaced with pharmaceutical companies and worked also on the COVID-19 White House Consortium. You know tell us, let's kick this off and tell us a little bit about your engagement in the drug discovery process. >> Right and that's a good question I think really setting the framework for what we're talking about here is to understand what is the drug discovery process. And that can be kind of broken down into I would say four different areas, there's the research and development space, the preclinical studies space, clinical trial and regulatory review. And if you're lucky, hopefully approval. Traditionally this is a slow arduous process it costs a lot of money and there's a high amount of error. Right, however this process by its very nature is highly iterate and has just huge amounts of data, right it's very data intensive, right and it's these characteristics that make this process a great target for kind of new approaches in different ways of doing things. Right, so for the sake of discussion, right, go ahead. >> Oh yes, so you mentioned data intensive brings to mind Artificial Intelligence, you know, so Artificial Intelligence making the difference here in this process, is that so? >> Right, and some of those novel approaches are actually based on Artificial Intelligence whether it's deep learning and machine learning, et cetera, you know, prime example would say, let's just say for the sake of discussion, let's say there's a brand new virus, causes flu-like symptoms, shall not be named if we focus kind of on the R and D phase, right our goal is really to identify target for the treatment and then screen compounds against it see which, you know, which ones we take forward right to this end, technologies like cryo-electron, cryogenic electron microscopy, just a form of microscopy can provide us a near atomic biomolecular map of the samples that we're studying, right whether that's a virus, a microbe, the cell that it's attaching to and so on, right AI, for instance, has been used in the particle picking aspect of this process. When you take all these images, you know, there are only certain particles that we want to take and study, right whether they have good resolution or not whether it's in the field of the frame and image recognition is a huge part of this, it's massive amounts of data in AI can be very easily, you know, used to approach that. Right, so with docking, you can take the biomolecular maps that you achieved from cryo-electron microscopy and you can take those and input that into the docking application and then run multiple iterations to figure out which will give you the best fit. AI again, right, this is iterative process it's extremely data intensive, it's an easy way to just apply AI and get that best fit doing something in a very, you know, analog manner that would just take humans very long time to do or traditional computing a very long time to do. >> Oh, Ryan, Ryan, you work at the NCNPR, you know, very exciting, you know after all, you know, at some point in history just about all drugs were from natural products yeah, so it's great to have you here today. Please tell us a little bit about your work with the pharmaceutical companies, especially when it is often that drug cocktails or what they call Polypharmacology, is the answer to complete drug therapy. Please tell us a bit more with your work there. >> Yeah thank you again for having me here this morning Dr. Goh, it's a pleasure to be here and as you said, I'm from the National Center for Natural Products Research you'll hear me refer to it as the NCNPR here in Oxford, Mississippi on the Ole Miss Campus, beautiful setting here in the South and so, what, as you said historically, what the drug discovery process has been, and it's really not a drug discovery process is really a therapy process, traditional medicine is we've looked at natural products from medicinal plants okay, in these extracts and so where I'd like to begin is really sort of talking about the assets that we have here at the NCNPR one of those prime assets, unique assets is our medicinal plant repository which comprises approximately 15,000 different medicinal plants. And what that allows us to do, right is to screen mine, that repository for activities so whether you have a disease of interest or whether you have a target of interest then you can use this medicinal plant repository to look for actives, in this case active plants. It's really important in today's environment of drug discovery to really understand what are the actives in these different medicinal plants which leads me to the second unique asset here at the NCNPR and that is our what I'll call a plant deconstruction laboratory so without going into great detail, but what that allows us to do is through a how to put workstation, right, is to facilitate rapid isolation and identification of phytochemicals in these different medicinal plants right, and so things that have historically taken us weeks and sometimes months, think acetylsalicylic acid from salicylic acid as a pain reliever in the willow bark or Taxol, right as an anti-cancer drug, right now we can do that with this system on the matter of days or weeks so now we're talking about activity from a plant and extract down to phytochemical characterization on a timescale, which starts to make sense in modern drug discovery, alright and so now if you look at these phytochemicals, right, and you ask yourself, well sort of who is interested in that and why, right what are traditional pharmaceutical companies, right which I've been working with for 20, over 25 years now, right, typically uses these natural products where historically has used these natural products as starting points for new drugs. Right, so in other words, take this phytochemical and make chemicals synthetic modifications in order to achieve a potential drug. But in the context of natural products, unlike the pharmaceutical realm, there is often times a big knowledge gap between a disease and a plant in other words I have a plant that has activity, but how to connect those dots has been really laborious time consuming so it took us probably 50 years to go from salicylic acid and willow bark to synthesize acetylsalicylic acid or aspirin it just doesn't work in today's environment. So casting about trying to figure out how we expedite that process that's when about four years ago, I read a really fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times about my colleague and business partner, Dr. Rangan Sukumar, describing all the interesting things that he was doing in the area of Artificial Intelligence. And one of my favorite parts of this story is basically, unannounced, I arrived at his doorstep in Oak Ridge, he was working Oak Ridge National Labs at the time, and I introduced myself to him didn't know what was coming, didn't know who I was, right and I said, hey, you don't know me you don't know why I'm here, I said, but let me tell you what I want to do with your system, right and so that kicked off a very fruitful collaboration and friendship over the last four years using Artificial Intelligence and it's culminated most recently in our COVID-19 project collaborative research between the NCNPR and HP in this case. >> From what I can understand also as Chris has mentioned highly iterative, especially with these combination mixture of chemicals right, in plants that could affect a disease. We need to put in effort to figure out what are the active components in that, that affects it yeah, the combination and given the layman's way of understanding it you know and therefore iterative and highly data intensive. And I can see why Rangan can play a huge significant role here, Rangan, thank you for joining us So it's just a nice segue to bring you in here, you know, given your work with Ryan over so many years now, tell I think I'm also quite interested in knowing a little about how it developed the first time you met and the process and the things you all work together on that culminated into the progress at the advanced level today. Please tell us a little bit about that history and also the current work. Rangan. >> So, Ryan, like he mentioned, walked into my office about four years ago and he was like hey, I'm working on this Omega-3 fatty acid, what can your system tell me about this Omega-3 fatty acid and I didn't even know how to spell Omega-3 fatty acids that's the disconnect between the technologist and the pharmacologist, they have terms of their own right since then we've come a long way I think I understand his terminologies now and he understands that I throw words like knowledge graphs and page rank and then all kinds of weird stuff that he's probably never heard in his life before right, so it's been on my mind off to different domains and terminologies in trying to accept each other's expertise in trying to work together on a collaborative project. I think the core of what Ryan's work and collaboration has led me to understanding is what happens with the drug discovery process, right so when we think about the discovery itself, we're looking at companies that are trying to accelerate the process to market, right an average drug is taking 12 years to get to market the process that Chris just mentioned, Right and so companies are trying to adopt what's called the in silico simulation techniques and in silico modeling techniques into what was predominantly an in vitro, in silico, in vivo environment, right. And so the in silico techniques could include things like molecular docking, could include Artificial Intelligence, could include other data-driven discovery methods and so forth, and the essential component of all the things that you know the discovery workflows have is the ability to augment human experts to do the best by assisting them with what computers do really really well. So, in terms of what we've done as examples is Ryan walks in and he's asking me a bunch of questions and few that come to mind immediately, the first few are, hey, you are an Artificial Intelligence expert can you sift through a database of molecules the 15,000 compounds that he described to prioritize a few for next lab experiments? So that's question number one. And he's come back into my office and asked me about hey, there's 30 million publications in PubMag and I don't have the time to read everything can you create an Artificial Intelligence system that once I've picked these few molecules will tell me everything about the molecule or everything about the virus, the unknown virus that shows up, right. Just trying to understand what are some ways in which he can augment his expertise, right. And then the third question, I think he described better than I'm going to was how can technology connect these dots. And typically it's not that the answer to a drug discovery problem sits in one database, right he probably has to think about uniproduct protein he has to think about phytochemical, chemical or informatics properties, data and so forth. Then he talked about the phytochemical interaction that's probably in another database. So when he is trying to answer other question and specifically in the context of an unknown virus that showed up in late last year, the question was, hey, do we know what happened in this particular virus compared to all the previous viruses? Do we know of any substructure that was studied or a different disease that's part of this unknown virus and can I use that information to go mine these databases to find out if these interactions can actually be used as a repurpose saying, hook, say this drug does not interact with this subsequence of a known virus that also seems to be part of this new virus, right? So to be able to connect that dot I think the abstraction that we are learning from working with pharma companies is that this drug discovery process is complex, it's iterative, and it's a sequence of needle in the haystack search problems, right and so one day, Ryan would be like, hey, I need to match genome, I need to match protein sequences between two different viruses. Another day it would be like, you know, I need to sift through a database of potential compounds, identified side effects and whatnot other day it could be, hey, I need to design a new molecule that never existed in the world before I'll figure out how to synthesize it later on, but I need a completely new molecule because of patentability reasons, right so it goes through the entire spectrum. And I think where HP has differentiated multiple times even the recent weeks is that the technology infusion into drug discovery, leads to several aha! Moments. And, aha moments typically happened in the other few seconds, and not the hours, days, months that Ryan has to laboriously work through. And what we've learned is pharma researchers love their aha moments and it leads to a sound valid, well founded hypothesis. Isn't that true Ryan? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Yeah, at some point I would like to have a look at your, peak the list of your aha moments, yeah perhaps there's something quite interesting in there for other industries too, but we'll do it at another time. Chris, you know, with your regular work with pharmaceutical companies especially the big pharmas, right, do you see botanicals, coming, being talked about more and more there? >> Yeah, we do, right. Looking at kind of biosimilars and drugs that are already really in existence is kind of an important point and Dr. Yates and Rangan, with your work with databases this is something important to bring up and much of the drug discovery in today's world, isn't from going out and finding a brand new molecule per se. It's really looking at all the different databases, right all the different compounds that already exist and sifting through those, right of course data is mind, and it is gold essentially, right so a lot of companies don't want to share their data. A lot of those botanicals data sets are actually open to the public to use in many cases and people are wanting to have more collaborative efforts around those databases so that's really interesting to kind of see that being picked up more and more. >> Mm, well and Ryan that's where NCNPR hosts much of those datasets, yeah right and it's interesting to me, right you know, you were describing the traditional way of drug discovery where you have a target and a compound, right that can affect that target, very very specific. But from a botanical point of view, you really say for example, I have an extract from a plant that has combination of chemicals and somehow you know, it affects this disease but then you have to reverse engineer what those chemicals are and what the active ones are. Is that very much the issue, the work that has to be put in for botanicals in this area? >> Yes Doctor Goh, you hit it exactly. >> Now I can understand why a highly iterative intensive and data intensive, and perhaps that's why Rangan, you're highly valuable here, right. So tell us about the challenge, right the many to many intersection to try and find what the targets are, right given these botanicals that seem to affect the disease here what methods do you use, right in AI, to help with this? >> Fantastic question, I'm going to go a little bit deeper and speak like Ryan in terminology, but here we go. So with going back to about starting of our conversation right, so let's say we have a database of molecules on one side, and then we've got the database of potential targets in a particular, could be a virus, could be bacteria, could be whatever, a disease target that you've identified, right >> Oh this process so, for example, on a virus, you can have a number of targets on the virus itself some have the spike protein, some have the other proteins on the surface so there are about three different targets and others on a virus itself, yeah so a lot of people focus on the spike protein, right but there are other targets too on that virus, correct? >> That is exactly right. So for example, so the work that we did with Ryan we realized that, you know, COVID-19 protein sequence has an overlap, a significant overlap with previous SARS-CoV-1 virus, not only that, but it overlap with MERS, that's overlapped with some bad coronavirus that was studied before and so forth, right so knowing that and it's actually broken down into multiple and Ryan I'm going to steal your words, non-structural proteins, envelope proteins, S proteins, there's a whole substructure that you can associate an amino acid sequence with, right so on the one hand, you have different targets and again, since we did the work it's 160 different targets even on the COVID-19 mark, right and so you find a match, that we say around 36, 37 million molecules that are potentially synthesizable and try to figure it out which one of those or which few of those is actually going to be mapping to which one of these targets and actually have a mechanism of action that Ryan's looking for, that'll inhibit the symptoms on a human body, right so that's the challenge there. And so I think the techniques that we can unrule go back to how much do we know about the target and how much do we know about the molecule, alright. And if you start off a problem with I don't know anything about the molecule and I don't know anything about the target, you go with the traditional approaches of docking and molecular dynamics simulations and whatnot, right. But then, you've done so much docking before on the same database for different targets, you'll learn some new things about the ligands, the molecules that Ryan's talking about that can predict potential targets. So can you use that information of previous protein interactions or previous binding to known existing targets with some of the structures and so forth to build a model that will capture that essence of what we have learnt from the docking before? And so that's the second level of how do we infuse Artificial Intelligence. The third level, is to say okay, I can do this for a database of molecules, but then what if the protein-protein interactions are all over the literature study for millions of other viruses? How do I connect the dots across different mechanisms of actions too? Right and so this is where the knowledge graph component that Ryan was talking about comes in. So we've put together a database of about 150 billion medical facts from literature that Ryan is able to connect the dots and say okay, I'm starting with this molecule, what interactions do I know about the molecule? Is there a pretty intruding interaction that affects the mechanism of pathway for the symptoms that a disease is causing? And then he can go and figure out which protein and protein in the virus could potentially be working with this drug so that inhibiting certain activities would stop that progression of the disease from happening, right so like I said, your method of options, the options you've got is going to be, how much do you know about the target? How much do you know the drug database that you have and how much information can you leverage from previous research as you go down this pipeline, right so in that sense, I think we mix and match different methods and we've actually found that, you know mixing and matching different methods produces better synergies for people like Ryan. So. >> Well, the synergies I think is really important concept, Rangan, in additivities, synergistic, however you want to catch that. Right. But it goes back to your initial question Dr. Goh, which is this idea of polypharmacology and historically what we've done with traditional medicines there's more than one active, more than one network that's impacted, okay. You remember how I sort of put you on both ends of the spectrum which is the traditional sort of approach where we really don't know much about target ligand interaction to the completely interpretal side of it, right where now we are all, we're focused on is, in a single molecule interacting with a target. And so where I'm going with this is interesting enough, pharma has sort of migrate, started to migrate back toward the middle and what I mean by that, right, is we had these in a concept of polypharmacology, we had this idea, a regulatory pathway of so-called, fixed drug combinations. Okay, so now you start to see over the last 20 years pharmaceutical companies taking known, approved drugs and putting them in different combinations to impact different diseases. Okay. And so I think there's a really unique opportunity here for Artificial Intelligence or as Rangan has taught me, Augmented Intelligence, right to give you insight into how to combine those approved drugs to come up with unique indications. So is that patentability right, getting back to right how is it that it becomes commercially viable for entities like pharmaceutical companies but I think at the end of the day what's most interesting to me is sort of that, almost movement back toward that complex mixture of fixed drug combination as opposed to single drug entity, single target approach. I think that opens up some really neat avenues for us. As far as the expansion, the applicability of Artificial Intelligence is I'd like to talk to, briefly about one other aspect, right so what Rang and I have talked about is how do we take this concept of an active phytochemical and work backwards. In other words, let's say you identify a phytochemical from an in silico screening process, right, which was done for COVID-19 one of the first publications out of a group, Dr. Jeremy Smith's group at Oak Ridge National Lab, right, identified a natural product as one of the interesting actives, right and so it raises the question to our botanical guy, says, okay, where in nature do we find that phytochemical? What plants do I go after to try and source botanical drugs to achieve that particular end point right? And so, what Rangan's system allows us to do is to say, okay, let's take this phytochemical in this case, a phytochemical flavanone called eriodictyol and say, where else in nature is this found, right that's a trivial question for an Artificial Intelligence system. But for a guy like me left to my own devices without AI, I spend weeks combing the literature. >> Wow. So, this is brilliant I've learned something here today, right, If you find a chemical that actually, you know, affects and addresses a disease, right you can actually try and go the reverse way to figure out what botanicals can give you those chemicals as opposed to trying to synthesize them. >> Well, there's that and there's the other, I'm going to steal Rangan's thunder here, right he always teach me, Ryan, don't forget everything we talk about has properties, plants have properties, chemicals have properties, et cetera it's really understanding those properties and using those properties to make those connections, those edges, those sort of interfaces, right. And so, yes, we can take something like an eriodictyol right, that example I gave before and say, okay, now, based upon the properties of eriodictyol, tell me other phytochemicals, other flavonoid in this case, such as that phytochemical class of eriodictyols part right, now tell me how, what other phytochemicals match that profile, have the same properties. It might be more economically viable, right in other words, this particular phytochemical is found in a unique Himalayan plant that I've never been able to source, but can we find something similar or same thing growing in, you know a bush found all throughout the Southeast for example, like. >> Wow. So, Chris, on the pharmaceutical companies, right are they looking at this approach of getting, building drugs yeah, developing drugs? >> Yeah, absolutely Dr. Goh, really what Dr. Yates is talking about, right it doesn't help us if we find a plant and that plant lives on one mountain only on the North side in the Himalayas, we're never going to be able to create enough of a drug to manufacture and to provide to the masses, right assuming that the disease is widespread or affects a large enough portion of the population, right so understanding, you know, not only where is that botanical or that compound but understanding the chemical nature of the chemical interaction and the physics of it as well where which aspect affects the binding site, which aspect of the compound actually does the work, if you will and then being able to make that at scale, right. If you go to these pharmaceutical companies today, many of them look like breweries to be honest with you, it's large scale, it's large back everybody's clean room and it's, they're making the microbes do the work for them or they have these, you know, unique processes, right. So. >> So they're not brewing beer okay, but drugs instead. (Christopher laughs) >> Not quite, although there are pharmaceutical companies out there that have had a foray into the brewery business and vice versa, so. >> We should, we should visit one of those, yeah (chuckles) Right, so what's next, right? So you've described to us the process and how you develop your relationship with Dr. Yates Ryan over the years right, five years, was it? And culminating in today's, the many to many fast screening methods, yeah what would you think would be the next exciting things you would do other than letting me peek at your aha moments, right what would you say are the next exciting steps you're hoping to take? >> Thinking long term, again this is where Ryan and I are working on this long-term project about, we don't know enough about botanicals as much as we know about the synthetic molecules, right and so this is a story that's inspired from Simon Sinek's "Infinite Game" book, trying to figure it out if human population has to survive for a long time which we've done so far with natural products we are going to need natural products, right. So what can we do to help organizations like NCNPR to stage genomes of natural products to stage and understand the evolution as we go to understand the evolution to map the drugs and so forth. So the vision is huge, right so it's not something that we want to do on a one off project and go away but in the process, just like you are learning today, Dr. Goh I'm going to be learning quite a bit, having fun with life. So, Ryan what do you think? >> Ryan, we're learning from you. >> So my paternal grandfather lived to be 104 years of age. I've got a few years to get there, but back to "The Infinite Game" concept that Rang had mentioned he and I discussed that quite frequently, I'd like to throw out a vision for you that's well beyond that sort of time horizon that we have as humans, right and that's this right, is our current strategy and it's understandable is really treatment centric. In other words, we have a disease we develop a treatment for that disease. But we all recognize, whether you're a healthcare practitioner, whether you're a scientist, whether you're a business person, right or whatever occupation you realize that prevention, right the old ounce, prevention worth a pound of cure, right is how can we use something like Artificial Intelligence to develop preventive sorts of strategies that we are able to predict with time, right that's why we don't have preventive treatment approach right, we can't do a traditional clinical trial and say, did we prevent type two diabetes in an 18 year old? Well, we can't do that on a timescale that is reasonable, okay. And then the other part of that is why focus on botanicals? Is because, for the most part and there are exceptions I want to be very clear, I don't want to paint the picture that botanicals are all safe, you should just take botanicals dietary supplements and you'll be safe, right there are exceptions, but for the most part botanicals, natural products are in fact safe and have undergone testing, human testing for thousands of years, right. So how do we connect those dots? A preventive strategy with existing extent botanicals to really develop a healthcare system that becomes preventive centric as opposed to treatment centric. If I could wave a magic wand, that's the vision that I would figure out how we could achieve, right and I do think with guys like Rangan and Chris and folks like yourself, Eng Lim, that that's possible. Maybe it's in my lifetime I got 50 years to go to get to my grandfather's age, but you never know, right? >> You bring really, up two really good points there Ryan, it's really a systems approach, right understanding that things aren't just linear, right? And as you go through it, there's no impact to anything else, right taking that systems approach to understand every aspect of how things are being impacted. And then number two was really kind of the downstream, really we've been discussing the drug discovery process a lot and kind of the kind of preclinical in vitro studies and in vivo models, but once you get to the clinical trial there are many drugs that just fail, just fail miserably and the botanicals, right known to be safe, right, in many instances you can have a much higher success rate and that would be really interesting to see, you know, more of at least growing in the market. >> Well, these are very visionary statements from each of you, especially Dr. Yates, right, prevention better than cure, right, being proactive better than being reactive. Reactive is important, but we also need to focus on being proactive. Yes. Well, thank you very much, right this has been a brilliant panel with brilliant panelists, Dr. Ryan Yates, Dr. Rangan Sukumar and Chris Davidson. Thank you very much for joining us on this panel and highly illuminating conversation. Yeah. All for the future of drug discovery, that includes botanicals. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering Google Cloud. Next on Air 20. Hi, I'm Stew Minimum And and this is the Cube's coverage of Google Cloud next 20 on air, Of course. Last year we were all in person in San Francisco. This year it's an online experience. It's actually spanning many weeks and this week when we're releasing the Cube interviews, talking about application modernization, happy to welcome back program two of our Cube alumni. Chris Well, I've got Aparna Sinha, Uh, who is the director of product management, and joining her is Pali Bhat, who's the vice president of product and design, both with Google Cloud Poly. Welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Good to be here. >>Well, so it goes without saying it. That 2020 has had quite a lot of changes. Really affect it. Start with you. You know, obviously there's been a lot of discussion is what is the impact of the global pandemic? The ripple in the economy on cloud. So I would love to hear a little bit. You know what you're hearing from your customers. What? That impact has been on on you and your business. >>Yes to thank thank you for asking as I look at our customers, what's been most inspiring for me to see is how organizations and the people in those organizations are coming together to help each other during this unprecedented event. And one of the things I wanted to highlight is, as we all adjust to this sort of new normal, there are two things that I keep seeing across every one of our customers. Better operation efficiency, with the focus on cost saving is something that's a business imperative and has drawn urgency. And the second bit is an increased focus on agility and business innovation. In the current atmosphere, where digital has truly become gone from being one of the channels being D channel, we're seeing our customers respond by being more innovative and reaching their customers in the way that they want to be rich. And that's been, for me personally, very inspiring to see. And we turned on Google Cloud to be a part of helping our customers in this journey in terms of our business itself. We're seeing tremendous momentum around our organization business because it plays directly into these two business imperatives around operational efficiency, cost saving and, of course, business innovation and agility. In Q two of 2020 we saw more than 100,000 companies use our application modernization platform across G ke and those cloud functions Cloud Run and our developers tools. So we've been, uh, just tagged with the response of how customers are using our tools in order to help them run their businesses, operate more efficiently and be more innovative on behalf of their customers. So we're seeing customers use everything from building mission critical applications who then securing, migrating and then operating our services. And we've also seen that customers get tremendous benefits. We've seen up to a 35% increase simply by using our own migration tools. And we've also seen it up to 75% improvement to all of the automation and re platform ing that they can do with our monetization platform. That's been incredible. What I do want to do. Those have a partner chime in on some of the complexity that these customers are seeing and how we're going about trying to address that >>Yes, eso to help our customers with the application modernization journey. Google Cloud really offers three highly differentiated capabilities. Us to the first one is really providing a consistent development and operations experience, and this is really important because you want the same experience, regardless of whether you're running natively in Google Cloud or you're running across clouds or you're running hybrid or you're running at the edge. And I think this is a truly unique differentiator off what we offer. Secondly, we really give customers and their developers industry leading guidance. And this is particularly important because there's a set of best practices on how you do development, how you run these applications, how you operate them in production for high reliability, a exceptional security staff, the stature and for the maximum developer efficiency on. And we provide the platform and the tooling to do that so that it can be customized to it's specific customers needs and their specific place on that modernization journey. And then the third thing on and I think this is incredibly important as well is that we would ride a data driven approach, a data driven optimization and benchmarking approach so that we can tell you where you are with regard to best practice and then help you move towards best practice, no matter where you're starting. >>Yeah, well, thank you, Aparna and Polly definitely resonates with what we're hearing. You know, customers need to be data driven. And then there's the imperative Now that digital movement Pali last year at the show, of course, Antos was, you know, really the talk of the conference years gone by. We know things move really fast, so if you could, you know, probably don't have time to get all of the news, but share with us the updates what differentiated this year along from a new standpoint, >>Yeah, So we've got tremendous set off improvements to the platform. And one of the things that I wanted to just share was that our customers as they actually migrate on to onto the cloud and begin the modernization journeys in their digital transformation programs. What we're seeing over and over is those customers that start with the platform as opposed to an individual application, are set up for success in the future. The platform, of course, is an tos where your application modernization journey begins. In terms of updates, we're gonna share a series off updates in block post, etcetera. I just want to highlight a few. We're sharing their availability off Antos for their middle swathe things that our customers have been asking about. And now our customers get to run on those on Prem and at the edge without the need for a hyper visor. What this does is helps organizations minimize unnecessary overhead and ultimately unlock all of the new cloud and edge use case. The second bit is we're not in the GF our speech to text on prem capability, but this is our first hybrid AI capability. So customers like Iron Mountain get to use hybrid AI, so they have full control of the infrastructure and have control off their data so they can implement data residency and compliance while still leveraging all of Google Cloud AI capabilities. Third services identity again. This extends existing identity solutions so that you can seamlessly work on and those workloads again. This is going to be generally available for on premise customers and better for Antos on AWS, and you're going to see more and more customers be able to leverage their existing identity investments while still getting the consistency that Anton's provides across environments. In the last one that I like to highlight is on those attached clusters, which lets customers bring any kubernetes conforming cluster on Toronto's and still take advantage of the advanced capabilities that until provides like declarative configurations and service automation. So one of the customers I just want to call out is Cold just built it. Entire hybrid cloud strategy on Anton's Day began with the platform first, and now we're seeing a record number of customers on Cold Start camaraderie. Take advantage of Mantel's tempting. With Macquarie Bank played, there's a number of use cases. I am particularly excited about major league baseball. I'm a big fan of baseball, and Major League Baseball is now using and those for 2020 season and all of the stadium across, trusting a large amount of data and gives them the capability to get those capabilities in stadiums very, really acceptable. All of those >>Okay, quick, quick. Follow up on that and those attached clusters because it was one of the questions I had last year. Google Cloud has partnerships with VM Ware for what they're doing. You know, Red Hat and Pivotal also is part of the VM Ware families, and they have their own kubernetes offering. So should I be thinking of this as a management capability that's similar to like what? What Andrew does Or maybe as your arca, Or is it just a kind of interoperability piece? How do we understand how these multiple kubernetes fit together? >>Yeah. So what we've done with Antos has really taken the approach that we need to help our customers are made and manage the infrastructure to specifically what Antos attach clusters gives our customers is they can have any kubernetes cluster as long as it's kubernetes conformance, they can benefit from all of the things that we provide in terms of automation. One of the challenges, of course, is you know, those two is configuring these very, very large instances in walls. A lot of handcrafting today we can provide declarative configuration. So you automate all of that. So think of this as configures code I think of this is infrastructure scored management scored. We're providing that service automation layer on top of any kubernetes conforming cluster with an tools. >>Great. Alright, uh, it's at modernization weeks, so Ah, partner, maybe bring us in aside. You were talking about your customers and what their what they're doing to modernize what's new that they should be aware of this year. >>Yeah, so So, First of all, you know, our mission is really to accelerate innovation in every organization through making their developers more productive as well as automating their operations. And this is something that is resonating even more in these times. Specifically, I think the biggest news that we have is really around, how we're going to help companies get started with the application modernization so that they can maximize the impact of their modernization efforts. And to do this, we're introducing what we're calling. The Google Cloud Application Modernization program or a Google camp for short on Google Camp has three pieces. It has an assessment, which is really data driven and fact based. It's a baseline assessment that helps organizations understand where they are in terms of their maturity with application modernization. Secondly, we give them a blueprint. This is something that is, is it encapsulates a specific set of best practices, proven best practices from development to security to operations, and it's something that they can put into practice and implement immediately. These practices, they cover the entire application lifecycle from writing the code to the See I CD to running it and operating it for maximum reliability and security. And then the third aspect, of course, is the application platform. And this is a modern platform, but also extremely extensible. And, as you know, it spans across clouds on this enables organizations to build, run and secure and, of course, manage both legacy as well as new applications. And the good news, of course, here is you know, this is a time tested platform. It's something that we use internally as well. For our Cloud ML services are being query omni service capability as well as for apogee, hot hybrid and many more at over time. So with the Google campus really covered all aspects of the application lifecycle. And we think it's extremely important for enterprises to have this capability. >>Yeah, so a party when you talk about the extent ability, I would expect that Google Cloud Run is one of the options there to help give us a bridge to get to server list. If that's where customers looking to my right on >>that, that's rights to the camp program provides is holistic, and it brings together many of our capabilities. So Cloud Code Cloud See I CD Cloud Run, which is our server less offering and also includes G ki e and and those best practices. Because customers for their applications, they're usually using multiple platforms. Now, in the case of Cloud Run, in particular, I want to highlight that there's been a lot of interest in the serverless capability during this last few months. In particular, I think, disproportionate amount of interest and server lists on container Native. In fact, according to the CNC F 2020 State of Cloud Native Development Report, you might have seen that, you know, they noted that 2.7 million cloud native developers are using kubernetes and four million are using serverless architectures or cloud functions, and that about 60% of back and developers are now using containers. So this just points to the the usage that was happening already and is now really disproportionately accelerated. In our case, you know, we've we've worked with several customers at the New York State Department and Media Market. Saturn are two that are really excellent stories with the New York State Department. They had a unemployment claims crisis. There was a lot. Ah, volume. That was difficult for their application to handle. And so we worked with them to re architect their application as a set of micro services on Google Cloud on our public sector team of teamed up with them to roll out a new unemployment website in record time. That website was able to handle the 1600% increase in Web traffic compared to a typical week. And this is very much do, too, the dev ops tooling that we provided and we worked with them on and then with Media market Saturn. This is really an excellent example in EMEA based example of a retailer that was able to achieve an eight X increase in speed as well as a 40% cost reduction. And these are really important metrics in these times in particular because for a retailer in the Cove in 19 crisis, to be able to bring new applications and new features to the hands of their customers is ultimately something that impacts their business is extremely valuable. >>Yeah, you think you bring up a really great point of partner when I traditionally think of application modernization. Maybe I've been in the space to long. But it is. Simplicity is not. The first thing that comes to mind is probably pointed out right now. There's an imperative people need to move fast, so I want to throw it out to both of you. How is Google's trying to make sure that, you know, in these uncertain times that customers can move fast and that with all these technology options that it could be just a little bit simpler? >>Yeah, I think I just, uh you know, start off by saying the first thing we've done is build all of our services from the ground up with automation, simplicity and agility in mind. So we've designed for development teams and operations teams be able to take these solutions and get productive with them right away. In addition, we understand that some of our largest customers actually need dedicated program where they can actually assess where they are and then map out a plan for incremental improvement so they can get on their journey to application modernization. But do it with the highest our way. And that was Google camp that apartment talked about ultimately at Google Cloud. Our mission, of course, is to accelerate innovation. Every organization toe hold developer velocity improvements, but also giving them the operation automation that we talked about with that application modernization platform. So we're very excited to be able to do this with every organization. >>Great. Well, Aparna, I'll let you have the final word Is the application modernization week here at Google Cloud. Next online, you can have the final take away for customers. >>Well, thank you, cio. You know, we are extremely passionate about developers on. We want to make sure that it is easy for anyone, anywhere to be able to get started with development as well as to have a path to, uh, accelerated path to production for their applications. So some of what we've done in terms of simplicity, which, as you said is extremely important in this environment, is to really make it easy to get started on. Some of the announcements are around build packs and the integration of cloud code are plug ins to the development environment directly into our serverless environment. And that's the type of thing that gets me excited. And I think I'm very passionate about that because it's something that applies to everyone. Uh, you know, regardless of where they are or what type of person they are, they can get started with development. And that can be a path to economic renewal and growth not just for companies, but for individuals. And that's a mission that we're extremely passionate about. Google Cloud >>Apartment Poly Thank you so much for sharing all the updates. Congratulations to the team. And definitely great to hear about how you're helping customers in these challenging times. >>Thank you for having us on. >>Thank you. So great to see you again. >>Alright. Stay tuned for more coverage from stew minimum and, as always, Thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. I'm happy to welcome to the program someone we've known for many years, but a first time on the program. Priyanka Sharma, thank you so much for joining us. >> Hi, Stu. Thank you so much for having me. >> All right, and Priyanka, let's not bury the lead or anything. The reason we're talking to you is the news. You've got a new job, but in an area that you know really well. So we've known you through the cloud native communities for a number of years. We see you at the shows. We see you online. So happy to share with our community you are now the general manager of the CNCF, so congratulations so much on the job. >> Thank you so much. I am so honored to have this opportunity, and I can't wait to work even more closely with the cloud native community than I have already. I mean, as you said, I've been involved for a long time. I actually just saw on my LinkedIn today that 2016 was when my conversation within the CNCF started. I was then working on the OpenTracing Project, which was the third project to join the foundation, and CNCF had started in 2015, so it was all very new. We were in conversations, and it was just such an exciting time, and that just kept getting bigger and bigger, and then with GitLab I served, I actually still serve, until the 31st, on the board. And now this, so I'm very, very excited. >> Yeah, well right. So you're a board member of the CNCF, but Priyanka, if you go back even further, we look at how did CNCF start. It was all around Kubernetes. Where did Kubernetes come from? It came from Google, and when I dug back far enough into your CV I found Google on there, too. So maybe just give us a little bit of your career arc, and what you're involved with for people that don't know you from all these communities and events. >> Sure, absolutely. So my career started at Google in Mountain View, and I was on the business side of things. I worked with AdSense products, and around that same time I had a bit of the entrepreneurial bite, so the bug bit me, and I first joined a startup that was acquired by GoDaddy later on, and then I went off on my own. That was a very interesting time for me, because that was when I truly learned about the power of opensource. One of the products that me and my co-founder were building was an opensource time tracker, and I just saw the momentum on these communities, and that's when the dev tools love started. And then I got involved with Heavybit Industries, which is an accelerator for dev tools. There I met so many companies that were either in the cloud space, or just general other kinds of dev tools, advised a few, ended up joining LightStep, where the founders, them and a few community members were the creators of the OpenTracing standard. Got heavily, heavily involved in that project, jumped into cloud native with that, was a project contributor, organizer, educator, documentarian, all kinds of things, right, for two-plus years, and then GitLab with the board membership, and that's how I saw, actually, the governance side. Until then it had all been the community, the education, that aspect, and then I understood how Chris and Dan had built this amazing foundation that's done so much from the governance perspective. So it's been a long journey and it all feels that it's been coming towards in this awesome new direction. >> Well, yeah. Congratulations to you, and right, CNCF, in their press release I see Dan talked about you've been a speaker, you've been a governing board member, you participate in this, and you're going to help with that next phase, and you teased out a little bit, there's a lot of constituencies in the CNCF. There's a large user participation. We always love talking at KubeCon about the people not only just using the technology, but contributing back, the role of opensource, the large vendor ecosystem, a lot there. So give us your thought as to kind of where the CNCF is today, and where it needs to continue and go in the future. >> Absolutely. So in my opinion the CNCF is a breakout organization. I mean, we're approaching 600 members, of which 142 are end users. So with that number the CNCF is actually the largest, has the largest end user community of all opensource foundations. So tremendous progress has been made, especially from those days back in 2016 when we were the third project being considered. So leaps and bounds, so impressive. And I think... If you think about what's the end user storyline right now, so the CNCF did a survey last year, and so 84% of the people surveyed were using containers in production, and 78% were using Kubernetes in production. Amazing numbers, especially since both are up by about 15, 20% year over year. So this move towards devops, towards cloud native, towards Kubernetes is happening and happening really strong. The project has truly established itself. Kubernetes has won, in my opinion, and that's really good. I think now when it comes to the second wave, it is my perspective that the end user communities and the... Just the momentum that we have right now, we need to build and grow it. We need deeper developer engagement, because if you think about it, there's not just one graduated project in CNCF. There are 10. So Kubernetes being one of them, but there's Prometheus, there's Envoy, Jaeger, et cetera, et cetera. So we have amazing technologies that are all gaining adoption. Being graduated means that they have fast security audits, they have diverse contributors, they have safe, good governance, so as an end user you can feel very secure adopting them, and so we have so much to do to expand on the knowledge of those projects. We have so much to make software just better every day, so that's my one vector in my opinion. The second vector, I would say it has been more opportunistic. As you know, we are all living in a very unprecedented time with a global pandemic. Many of us are sheltering in place. Many are... Generally, life is changed. You are in media. You know this much better than me, I'm sure, that the number of, the amount of digital consumption has just skyrocketed. People are reading that many more articles. I'm watching that many more memes and jokes online, right? And what that means is that more and more companies are reaching that crazy web scale that started this whole cloud native and devops space in the first time, first place with Google and Netflix being D-to-C companies just building out what eventually became cloud native, SRE, that kind of stuff. So in general, online consumption's higher, so more and more companies need to be cloud native to support that kind of traffic. Secondly, even for folks that are not creating content, just a lot of the workflows have to move online. More people will do online banking. More people will do ecommerce. It's just the shift is happening, and for that we, as the foundation, need to be ready to support the end users with education, enablement, certifications, training programs, just to get them across that chasm into a new, even more online-focused reality. >> Yeah, and I say, Priyanka, that tees up one of the ways that most people are familiar with the CNCF is through the event. So KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, really the signature event. Tremendous growth over the last few years. You actually had involvement in a virtual event, the Cloud Native Summit recently. For KubeCon-- >> Yes. >> The European show is announced virtual. We know that there's still some uncertainty when it comes to the North America show. Supposed to be in my backyard here in Boston, so we'd love for it to happen. If it happens-- >> Of course. >> If not, we'll be there virtually or not. Give us a little bit your experience with the Cloud Native Summit, and what's your thinking today? We understand, as you said, a lot of uncertainty as to what goes on. Absolutely, even when physical events come back in the future, we expect this hybrid model to be with us for a long time. >> I definitely hear that. Completely agree that everything is uncertain and things have changed very rapidly for our world, particularly when it comes to events. We're lucky at the CNCF to be working with the LF Events team, which is just best in class, and we are working very hard every day, them, doing a lot of the lion's share of the work of building the best experience we can for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon EU, which, as you said, went virtual. I'm really looking forward to it because what I learned from the Cloud Native Summit Online, which was the event you mentioned that I had hosted in April, is that people are hungry to just engage, to see each other, to communicate however they can in this current time. Today I don't think the technology's at a point where physical events can be overshadowed by virtual, so there's still something very special about seeing someone face-to-face, having a coffee, and having that banter, conversations. But at the same time there are some benefits to online. So as an example, with the Cloud Native Summit, really, it was just me and a few community folks who were sad we didn't get to go to Amsterdam, so we're like, "Let's just get together in a group, "have some fun, talk to some maintainers," that kind of thing. I expected a few hundred, max. Thousands of people showed up, and that was just mind blowing because I was like, "Wait, what?" (chuckling) But it was so awesome because not only were there a lot of people, there were people from just about every part of the globe. So normally you have US, Europe, that kind of focus, and there's the Asia-PAC events that cater to that, but here in that one event where, by the way, we were talking to each other in realtime, there were folks from Asia-PAC, there were folks from Americas, EU, also the African continent, so geo meant nothing anymore. And that was very awesome. People from these different parts of the world were talking, engaging, learning, all at the same time, and I think with over 20,000 people expected at KubeCon EU, with it being virtual, we'll see something similar, and I think that's a big opportunity for us going forward. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. There are some new opportunities, some new challenges. I think back to way back in January I got to attend the GitLab event, and you look at GitLab, a fully remote company, but talking about the benefits of still getting together and doing things online. You think of the developer communities, they're used to working remote and working across different timezones, but there is that need to be able to get together and collaborate, and so we've got some opportunities, we've got some challenges when remote, so I guess, yeah, Priyanka. Give me the final word, things you want to look forward to, things we should be expecting from you and the CNCF team going forward. I guess I'll mention for our audience, I guess, Dan Kohn staying part of Linux Foundation, doing some healthcare things, will still stay a little involved, and Chris Aniszczyk, who's the CTO, still the CTO. I just saw him. Did a great panel for DockerCon with Kelsey Hightower, Michelle Noorali, and Sean Connelly, and all people we know that-- >> Right. >> Often are speaking at KubeCon, too. So many of the faces staying the same. I'm not expecting a big change, but what should we expect going forward? >> That's absolutely correct, Stu. No big changes. My first big priority as I join is, I mean, as you know, coming with the community background, with all this work that we've put into education and learning from each other, my number one goal is going to be to listen and learn in a very diverse set of personas that are part of this whole community. I mean, there's the board, there is the technical oversight committee, there is the project maintainers, there's the contributors, there are the end users, potential developers who could be contributors. There's just so many different types of people all united in our interest and desire to learn more about cloud native. So my number one priority is going to listen and learn, and as I get more and more up to speed I'm very lucky that Chris Aniszczyk, who has built this with Dan, is staying on and is going to be advising me, guiding me, and working with me. Dan as well is actually going to be around to help advise me and also work on some key initiatives, in addition to his big, new thing with public health and the Linux Foundation. You never expect anything average with Dan, so it's going to be amazing. He's done so much for this foundation and brought it to this point, which in my mind, I mean, it's stupendous the amount of work that's happened. It's so cool. So I'm really looking forward to building on this amazing foundation created by Dan and Chris under Jim. I think that what they have done by not only providing a neutral IP zone where people can contribute and use projects safely, they've also created an ecosystem where there is events, there is educational activity, projects can get documentation support, VR support. It's a very holistic view, and that's something, in my opinion, new, at least in the way it's done. So I just want to build upon that, and I think the end user communities will keep growing, will keep educating, will keep working together, and this is a team effort that we are all in together. >> Well, Priyanka, congratulations again. We know your community background and strong community at the CNCF. Looking forward to seeing that both in the virtual events in the near term and back when we have physical events again in the future, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right. Be sure to check out thecube.net. You'll see all the previous events we've done with the CNCF, as well as, as mentioned, we will be helping keep cloud native connected at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe, the virtual event in August, as well as the North American event later in the year. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (smooth music)

I'm going alive I'm live right now let's send you this link and see if you can get on here so this is private see if I can break this out this is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello they're coming you live from Chuck alley studio here in Mountain View California and I'm on YouTube live I hope I'm not securing anything outta been out there for two minutes now let's be able to do a live private stream and be able to have that account that link to people - yeah okay yes you see me voice what's up what's up what's up so this is a private link I don't know if you can hear me that's a private link and if you give the link to whoever you want to see it oh you can't hear me hmm one two one two one two three four stop that

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis I want to talk to you about what I learned this week at Dell Technology's financial analyst meeting in New York. They gathered all the financial analysts, Rob Williams hosted it, he's the head of IR, Michael Dell of course was there. They had Dennis Hoffman who is the head of strategic planning, Jeff Clarke who basically runs the business and Tom Sweet, of course, who was the star of the show, the CFO, all the analysts want to see him. Dell laid out its longterm goals, it provided much clearer understanding of its strategic direction, basically focused on three areas. Dell believes that IT is getting more complex, we know that, they want to capitalize on that by simplifying IT. We'll talk about that. And then they want to position for the wave of digital transformations that are coming and they also believe, Dell believes, that it can capitalize on the consolidation trend, consolidating vendors, so I'll talk about each of those. And so let me bring up the first slide, Alex, if you would. The takeaways from the Dell financial analyst meeting. Let me share with you the overall framework that Tom Sweet laid out. And I have to say, the messaging was very consistent, these guys were very well-prepared. I think Dell is, from a management perspective, very well-run company. They're targeting three to 5% growth on what they're saying is a 4% GDP forecast. Or sorry, 4%, I have GDP here, it's really 4% industry growth. GDP's a little lower than that obviously. So this is IDC data, Gartner data, 4% industry growth. So that's an error on my part, I apologize. The strategies to grow relative to their competition. So grow share on a relative basis. So whatever the market does, again, not GDP, but whatever the market does, Dell wants to grow faster than the market. So it wants to gain share, that's its primary metric. From there they want to grow operating income and they want to grow that faster than revenue, that's going to throw off cash. And then they're going to also continue to delever the balance sheet. I think they paid down 17 billion in debt since the EMC acquisition. They want to get to a two X debt to EBITA ratio within 18 months. And what they're saying is, you know, they talked about, Tom Sweet talked about this consistent march toward investment-grade rating. They've been talkin' about that for awhile. He made the comment, we don't need to have a triple A rating but we want to get to the point where we can reduce our interest expense, and that will, 'cause they'll drop right into the bottom line. So they talked about these various levers that they can turn, some of them under the P and L, gaining share, some are their operating structure and their organizational structure, and one big one is obviously their debt structure. The other key issue here is will this cut the liquidity discount that Dell faces? What do I mean by that? Well, VMware has about a $60 billion valuation. Dell owns about 80% of VMware, which would equate to 48 billion. But if you look at Dell's market cap, it's only 37 billion. So it essentially says that Dell's core business is worth minus 11 billion. We used to talk about this when EMC owned VMware. Its core business only comprised about 40% of the overall value of the company, in this case because of the high debt, Dell has a negative value. And it's not just the high debt. Michael Dell has control over the voting shares, it's essentially a conglomerate structure, there's very high debt, and it's a relatively low margin business, notwithstanding VMware. And so as a result, Dell trades at a discount relative to what you would think it should trade at, given its prominence in the market, $92 billion company, the leader in every category under the sun. So that's the big question is can Dell turn these levers, drop EBITA or cash to the bottom line, affect operating income, and then ultimately pay down its debt and affect that discount that it trades at? Okay, bring up, if you would, Alex, the next slide. Now I want to share with you the takeaways from the Dell line of business focus. This really was Jeff Clarke's presentations that I'm going to draw from. Servers, we know, they're softer demand, but the key there is they're really faced tough compares. Last year, Dell's server business grew like crazy. So this year the comparisons are lessened. But there's less spending on servers. I'll share with you some of the ETR data. Storage, they call it holding serve, you saw last quarter I did an analysis, I took the ETR data and the income statement, it showed Pure was gaining share at like 22% growth from the income statement standpoint. Dell was 0% growth but is actually growing faster than its competitors. With the exception of Pure. It's growing faster than the market. So Dell actually gained share with 0% growth. Dell's really focused on consolidating the portfolio. They've cut the portfolio down from 80, I think actually the right number is 88 products, down to 20 by May of 2020. They've got some new mid-range coming, they've just refreshed their data protection portfolio, so again, by May of next year, by Dell Technologies World they'll have a much, much more simplified portfolio. And they're gaining back share. They've refocused on the storage business. You might recall after the acquisition, EMC was kind of a mess. It was losing share before the acquisition, it was so distracted with all the Elliott Management stuff goin' on. And kind of took its eye off the ball, and then after the acquisition it took awhile for them to get their act together. They gained back about 375 basis points in the last 18 months. Remember a basis point is 1/100th of 1%. So gaining share and their consistent focus on trying to do that. Their PC business, which is actually doin' quite well, is focused on the commercial segment and focused on higher margins. They made the statement that the PCs are kind of undersupply right now so it's helping margins. There's a big focus in Jeff Clarke's organization on VMware integration. To me this makes a lot of sense. To the extent that you can take the VMware platform and make Dell hardware run VMware better, that's something that is an advantage for Dell, obviously. And at the same time, VMware has to walk the fine line with the ecosystem. But certainly it's earned the presence in the market now that it can basically do what I just said, tightly integrate with Dell and at the same time serve the ecosystem, 'cause frankly, the ecosystem has no choice. It must serve VMware customers. The strategy, essentially, is to, as I say, capitalize on vendor consolidation, leverage value across the portfolio, so whether it's pivotal, VMware integration, the security portfolio, try to leverage that and then differentiate with scale. And Dell really has the number one supply chain in the tech business. Something that Dave Donatelli at HP, when he was at HP, used to talk about. HPE doesn't really talk about that supply chain advantage anymore 'cause essentially it doesn't have it. Dell does. So Jeff Clarke's reorganization, he came in, he streamlined the organization, really from the focus on R and D to product to collaboration across the organization and the VMware integration. I actually was quite impressed with when I first met Jeff Clarke I guess two years ago now, what he and the organization have accomplished since then. No BS kind of person. And you can see it's starting to take effect. So we'll keep an eye on that. The next slide I want to show you, I want to bring in the ETR data. We've been sharing with you the ETR spending intention surveys for the last couple of weeks and months. ETR, enterprise technology research, they have a data platform that comprises 4,500 practitioners that share spending data with them. CIOs, IT managers, et cetera. What I'm showing here is a cut off of the server sector. So I'm going to drill down into server and storage. So these are spending intentions from the July survey asking about the second half of 2019 relative to the first half of 2019. And this is a drill-down into the giant public and private firms. Why do I do that? Because in meeting the ETR, this is the best indicator. So it's big, big public companies and big private companies. Think Uber. Private companies that spend a ton of dough on IT. UPS before it went public, for example. So those companies are in here. And they're, according to ETR, the best indicators. What this chart shows, so the bars show, and I've shared this with you a number of times, the lime green is we're adding, we're new to this platform, we're new adoption. The evergreen is we're spending more, the gray is we're spending the same, the light red or pink is we're spending less, and the dark red is we're leaving the platform. So if you subtract the red from the green you get what's called a net score, and that's that blue line. And this is the overall server spending intentions from that July survey. The end is about 525 respondents out of the 4,500. And this is, again, those that just answered the question on server. So you can see the net score on server spend is dropping. And you can see the market share on server is dropping. The takeaway here is that servers, as a percentage of overall IT spend, are on a downward slope, and have been for quite some time. Back to the January '16 survey. Okay, so that's going to serve us. Let's take a look at the same data for storage. So if, Alex, if you bring up the storage sector slide, You can see kind of a similar trend. And I would argue what's happening here, a couple of things. You've got the CLOB effect, I'll talk about that some more, and you've also got, in this case, the flash, all-flash array effect. What happened was you had all-flash arrays and flash come into the data center, and that gave performance a huge headroom. Remember, spinning disk was the last bastion of mechanical movement and it was the main bottleneck in terms of overall application performance. IO was the problem. Well you put a bunch of flash into the system and it gives a lot of headroom. People used to over-provision capacity just for performance reasons. So flash has had the effect of customers saying, hey, my performance is good, I don't need to over-provision anymore, I don't need to buy so much. So that combined with cloud, I think, has put down the pressure on the storage business as well. Now the next slide, Alex, that I want you to bring up is the vendor net scores, the server spending intentions. And what I've done is I've highlighted Dell EMC. Now what's happening here in the slide, and I realize it's an eye chart, but basically where you want to be in this chart is in the left-hand side. What it shows is the spending intentions and the momentum from the October '18, which is the gray, the April '19, which is the blue, and then the July '19 which is the most recent one. Again, the end is 525 in the servers for the July '19 survey. And you can see Dell's kind of in the middle of the pack. You'd love to be in the left-hand side, you know, Docker, Microsoft, VMware, Intel, Ubuntu. And you don't want to be on the right-hand side, you know, Fujitsu, IBM, is sort of below the line. Dell's kind of in the middle there, Dell EMC. The next slide I want to show you is that same slide for storage. And again, you can see here is that on-- So this is vendor net scores, the storage spending intentions. On the left-hand side it's all the high growth companies. Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, Pure, VMware with vSAN, Veeam. You see Dell EMC's VxRail. On the right-hand side, you see the guys that are losing momentum. Veritas, Iron Mountain, Barracuda, HitachiHDS, Fusion-io still comes up in the survey after the acquisition by Western Digital. Again, you see Dell EMC kind of holding serve in the middle there. Not great, not bad. Okay, so that's kind of just some other ETR data that I wanted to share. All right, next thing we're going to talk about is the macros market summary. And Alex, I've got some bullet points on this, so if you bring up that slide, let me talk about that a little bit. So five points here. First, cloud continues to eat away at on-prem, despite all this talk about repatriation, which I know does happen. People try to throw everything to the cloud and they go, whoa! Look at my Amazon bill, yeah, I get that. That's at the margin. The main trend is that cloud continues to grow. That whole repatriation thing is not moving the on-prem market. On-prem is kind of steady eddy. Storage is still working through that AFA injection. Got a lot of headroom from performance standpoint. So people don't need to buy as much as they used to because you had that step function in performance. Now eventually the market will catch up, all this digital transformation is happening, all this data is flowing through the system and it will catch up, and the storage market is elastic. As NAN prices fall, people will, I predict, will buy more storage. But there's been somewhat of a lull in the overall storage market. It's not a great market right now, frankly, at the macro level. Now ETR does these surveys on a quarterly basis. They're just about to release the October survey, and they put out a little glimpse on Friday about this survey. And I'll share some bullet points there. Overall IT spending clearly is softening. We kind of know that, everybody kind of realizes that. Here's the nuance. New adoptions are reverting to pre-2018 levels, and the replacements are rising. What does this mean? So the number of respondents that said, oh yes, we're adopting this platform for the first time is declining, and the replacements are actually accelerating. Why is that? Well I was at ETR last week and we were talking about this and one of the theories, and I think it's a good one, is that 2016, 2017 was kind of experimentation around digital transformation. 2018, people started to put things into production or closer to production, they were running systems in parallel, and now they're making their bets, they're saying, hey, this test worked, let's put this heavy into production in 2019, and now we're going to start replacing. So we're not going to adopt as much stuff 'cause we're not doing as much experimentation. We're going to now focus and narrow in on those things that are going to drive our business, and we're going to replace those things that aren't going to drive our business. We're going to start unplugging them. So that's some of what's happening. Another big trend is Microsoft. Microsoft is extending its presence throughout. They're goin' after collaboration, you saw the impact that they had on Slack and Slack stock recently. So Slack Box, Dropbox, are kind of exposed there. They're goin' after security, they've just announced a SIM product. So Splunk and IBM, they're kind of goin' after that base. The application performance management vendors. For instance, New Relic. Microsoft goin' after them. Obviously they got a huge presence in cloud. Their Windows 10 cycle is a little slower this time around, but they've got other businesses that are really starting to click. So Microsoft is one of the few vendors that really is showing accelerated spending momentum in the ETR data. Financial services and telcos, which are always leading spender indicators, are actually very weak right now. That's having a spillover effect into Europe, which is over-banked, if I can use that term. Banking heavy, if you will. So right now it's not a pretty picture, but it's not a disaster. I don't want to necessarily suggest this as like going back to 2007, 2008, it's not. It's really just a matter of things are softening and it's, you know, maybe taking a little breath. Okay, so let me summarize the meeting overall. Again, it was a very well-run meeting. Started at 9:00, ended at 12:00, bagged lunch, go home. Nice and crisp. So these guys are very well-prepared. I think, again, Dell is a extremely well-managed company. They laid out a much clearer vision for Wall Street of its strategy, where it's headed. As they say, they're going after IT complexity. I want to make a comment on this. You think about Legacy EMC. Legacy EMC was not the company that you would expect to deal with complexity. In fact, they were the culprit of complexity. One of the things that Jeff Clarke did when he came in, he said, this portfolio's too complex, needs to be simplified. Joe Tucci used to say, overlap is better than gaps. Jeff Clarke said we got too much overlap. We don't have a lot of gaps so let's streamline that portfolio. Taking advantage of vendor consolidation, this is an interesting one. Ever since I've been in this business, which has been quite a long time now, I've been hearing that buyers want to consolidate the number of vendors that they have. They've really not succeeded in doing that. Now can they do that now 'cause there are less vendors? Well, in a sense, yes, there are less sort of on-prem big vendors. EMC's no longer in the market, you don't have companies like Sun and Digital anymore, Compact is gone. HP split in two, but still. You're not seeing a huge number of new vendors, at scale, come into the market. Except you've got AWS and Google as new players there. So I think that injects sort of a new dynamic that a lot of people like to put cloud aside and kind of ignore it and talk about the old on-prem business, but I think that you're going to see a lot of experimentations and workload ins and outs, particularly with AWS and Google and of course Azure, which is in itself, their cloud is almost a separate force. So we'll see how that shakes up. As I say, servers right now, Dell's got a very tough compare. I think Dell will be fine in the server space. Storage, it's all about simplifying the portfolio, they've got a refreshed portfolio focused on regaining share. They've rebranded everything Power, so their whole line is going to be Power by, if it's not already, by May of next year, Dell Technologies World. It's a much more scalable portfolio. And I think Dell's got a lot of valuation levers. They're a $92 billion company, they've got their current operations, their current P and L, their share gains, their cross-company synergies, particularly with VMware, they can expand their TAM into cloud with partnerships like they're doing with AWS and others, Google, Microsoft. The Edge is a TAM expansion opportunity to them. And also corporate structure. You've seen them. VMware acquired Pivotal. They're cleaning that up. I'm sure they could potentially make some other moves. Secureworks is out there, for example. Maybe they'll do some things with RSA. So they got that knob to turn and they can delever. Paying down the debt to the extent that they can get back to investment grade, that will lower their interest rates, that'll drop right to the bottom line, and they'll be able to reinvest that. And Tom Sweet said, within 18 months, we'll be able to get there with that two X ratio relative to EBITA, and that's when they're going to start having conversations with the rating agencies to talk about you know, hey, maybe we can get a better rating and lower our interest expense. Bottom line, did Wall Street buy the story? Yes. But I don't think it's going to necessarily change anything in the near term. This is a show me from Missouri, prove it, execute, and then I think Dell will get rewarded. Okay, so this is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching this Cube Insights powered by ETR. We'll see ya next time. (electronic music)

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (futuristic music) >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two, we're sort of wrapping up the Chief Data Officer event. It's MIT CDOIQ, it started as an information quality event and with the ascendancy of big data the CDO emerged and really took center stage here. And it's interesting to know that it's kind of come full circle back to information quality. People are realizing all this data we have, you know the old saying, garbage in, garbage out. So the information quality worlds and this chief data officer world have really come colliding together. Robert Abate is here, he's the Vice President and CDO of Global IDS and also the co-chair of next year's, the 14th annual MIT CDOIQ. Robert, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, well thank you. >> Now you're a CDO by background, give us a little history of your career. >> Sure, sure. Well I started out with an Electrical Engineering degree and went into applications development. By 2000, I was leading the Ralph Lauren's IT, and I realized when Ralph Lauren hired me, he was getting ready to go public. And his problem was he had hired eight different accounting firms to do eight different divisions. And each of those eight divisions were reporting a number, but the big number didn't add up, so he couldn't go public. So he searched the industry to find somebody who could figure out the problem. Now I was, at the time, working in applications and had built this system called Service Oriented Architectures, a way of integrating applications. And I said, "Well I don't know if I could solve the problem, "but I'll give it a shot." And what I did was, just by taking each silo as it's own problem, which was what EID Accounting Firm had done, I was able to figure out that one of Ralph Lauren's policies was if you buy a garment, you can return it anytime, anywhere, forever, however long you own it. And he didn't think about that, but what that meant is somebody could go to a Bloomingdale's, buy a garment and then go to his outlet store and return it. Well, the cross channels were different systems. So the outlet stores were his own business, retail was a different business, there was a completely different, each one had their own AS/400, their own data. So what I quickly learned was, the problem wasn't the systems, the problem was the data. And it took me about two months to figure it out and he offered me a job, he said well, I was a consultant at the time, he says, "I'm offering you a job, you're going to run my IT." >> Great user experience but hard to count. >> (laughs) Hard to count. So that's when I, probably 1999 was when that happened. I went into data and started researching-- >> Sorry, so how long did it take you to figure that out? You said a couple of months? >> A couple of months, I think it was about two months. >> 'Cause jeez, it took Oracle what, 10 years to build Fusion with SOA? That's pretty good. (laughs) >> This was a little bit of luck. When we started integrating the applications we learned that the messages that we were sending back and forth didn't match, and we said, "Well that's impossible, it can't not match." But what didn't match was it was coming from one channel and being returned in another channel, and the returns showed here didn't balance with the returns on this side. So it was a data problem. >> So a forensics showdown. So what did you do after? >> After that I went into ICICI Bank which was a large bank in India who was trying to integrate their systems, and again, this was a data problem. But they heard me giving a talk at a conference on how SOA had solved the data challenge, and they said, "We're a bank with a wholesale, a retail, "and other divisions, "and we can't integrate the systems, can you?" I said, "Well yeah, I'd build a website "and make them web services and now what'll happen is "each of those'll kind of communicate." And I was at ICICI Bank for about six months in Mumbai, and finished that which was a success, came back and started consulting because now a lot of companies were really interested in this concept of Service Oriented Architectures. Back then when we first published on it, myself, Peter Aiken, and a gentleman named Joseph Burke published on it in 1996. The publisher didn't accept the book, it was a really interesting thing. We wrote the book called, "Services Based Architectures: A Way to Integrate Systems." And the way Wiley & Sons, or most publishers work is, they'll have three industry experts read your book and if they don't think what you're saying has any value, they, forget about it. So one guy said this is brilliant, one guy says, "These guys don't know what they're talking about," and the third guy says, "I don't even think what they're talking about is feasible." So they decided not to publish. Four years later it came back and said, "We want to publish the book," and Peter said, "You know what, they lost their chance." We were ahead of them by four years, they didn't understand the technology. So that was kind of cool. So from there I went into consulting, eventually took a position as the Head of Enterprise and Director of Enterprise Information Architecture with Walmart. And Walmart, as you know, is a huge entity, almost the size of the federal government. So to build an architecture that integrates Walmart would've been a challenge, a behemoth challenge, and I took it on with a phenomenal team. >> And when was this, like what timeframe? >> This was 2010, and by the end of 2010 we had presented an architecture to the CIO and the rest of the organization, and they came back to me about a week later and said, "Look, everybody agrees what you did was brilliant, "but nobody knows how to implement it. "So we're taking you away, "you're no longer Director of Information Architecture, "you're now Director of Enterprise Information Management. "Build it. "Prove that what you say you could do, you could do." So we built something called the Data CAFE, and CAFE was an acronym, it stood for: Collaborative Analytics Facility for the Enterprise. What we did was we took data from one of the divisions, because you didn't want to take on the whole beast, boil the ocean. We picked Sam's Club and we worked with their CFO, and because we had information about customers we were able to build a room with seven 80 inch monitors that surrounded anyone in the room. And in the center was the Cisco telecommunications so you could be a part of a meeting. >> The TelePresence. >> TelePresence. And we built one room in one facility, and one room in another facility, and we labeled the monitors, one red, one blue, one green, and we said, "There's got to be a way where we can build "data science so it's interactive, so somebody, "an executive could walk into the room, "touch the screen, and drill into features. "And in another room "the features would be changing simultaneously." And that's what we built. The room was brought up on Black Friday of 2013, and we were able to see the trends of sales on the East Coast that we quickly, the executives in the room, and these are the CEO of Walmart and the heads of Sam's Club and the like, they were able to change the distribution in the Mountain Time Zone and west time zones because of the sales on the East Coast gave them the idea, well these things are going to sell, and these things aren't. And they saw a tremendous increase in productivity. We received the 2014, my team received the 2014 Walmart Innovation Project of the Year. >> And that's no slouch. Walmart has always been heavily data-oriented. I don't know if it's urban legend or not, but the famous story in the '80s of the beer and the diapers, right? Walmart would position beer next to diapers, why would they do that? Well the father goes in to buy the diapers for the baby, picks up a six pack while he's on the way, so they just move those proximate to each other. (laughs) >> In terms of data, Walmart really learned that there's an advantage to understanding how to place items in places that, a path that you might take in a store, and knowing that path, they actually have a term for it, I believe it's called, I'm sorry, I forgot the name but it's-- >> Selling more stuff. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's selling more stuff. It's the way you position items on a shelf. And Walmart had the brilliance, or at least I thought it was brilliant, that they would make their vendors the data champion. So the vendor, let's say Procter & Gamble's a vendor, and they sell this one product the most. They would then be the champion for that aisle. Oh, it's called planogramming. So the planogramming, the way the shelves were organized, would be set up by Procter & Gamble for that entire area, working with all their other vendors. And so Walmart would give the data to them and say, "You do it." And what I was purporting was, well, we shouldn't just be giving the data away, we should be using that data. And that was the advent of that. From there I moved to Kimberly-Clark, I became Global Director of Enterprise Data Management and Analytics. Their challenge was they had different teams, there were four different instances of SAP around the globe. One for Latin America, one for North America called the Enterprise Edition, one for EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and one for Asia-Pacific. Well when you have four different instances of SAP, that means your master data doesn't exist because the same thing that happens in this facility is different here. And every company faces this challenge. If they implement more than one of a system the specialty fields get used by different companies in different ways. >> The gold standard, the gold version. >> The golden version. So I built a team by bringing together all the different international teams, and created one team that was able to integrate best practices and standards around data governance, data quality. Built BI teams for each of the regions, and then a data science and advanced analytics team. >> Wow, so okay, so that makes you uniquely qualified to coach here at the conference. >> Oh, I don't know about that. (laughs) There are some real, there are some geniuses here. >> No but, I say that because these are your peeps. >> Yes, they are, they are. >> And so, you're a practitioner, this conference is all about practitioners talking to practitioners, it's content-heavy, There's not a lot of fluff. Lunches aren't sponsored, there's no lanyard sponsor and it's not like, you know, there's very subtle sponsor desks, you have to have sponsors 'cause otherwise the conference's not enabled, and you've got costs associated with it. But it's a very intimate event and I think you guys want to keep it that way. >> And I really believe you're dead-on. When you go to most industry conferences, the industry conferences, the sponsors, you know, change the format or are heavily into the format. Here you have industry thought leaders from all over the globe. CDOs of major Fortune 500 companies who are working with their peers and exchanging ideas. I've had conversations with a number of CDOs and the thought leadership at this conference, I've never seen this type of thought leadership in any conference. >> Yeah, I mean the percentage of presentations by practitioners, even when there's a vendor name, they have a practitioner, you know, internal practitioner presenting so it's 99.9% which is why people attend. We're moving venues next year, I understand. Just did a little tour of the new venue, so, going to be able to accommodate more attendees, so that's great. >> Yeah it is. >> So what are your objectives in thinking ahead a year from now? >> Well, you know, I'm taking over from my current peer, Dr. Arka Mukherjee, who just did a phenomenal job of finding speakers. People who are in the industry, who are presenting challenges, and allowing others to interact. So I hope could do a similar thing which is, find with my peers people who have real world challenges, bring them to the forum so they can be debated. On top of that, there are some amazing, you know, technology change is just so fast. One of the areas like big data I remember only five years ago the chart of big data vendors maybe had 50 people on it, now you would need the table to put all the vendors. >> Who's not a data vendor, you know? >> Who's not a data vendor? (laughs) So I would think the best thing we could do is, is find, just get all the CDOs and CDO-types into a room, and let us debate and talk about these points and issues. I've seen just some tremendous interactions, great questions, people giving advice to others. I've learned a lot here. >> And how about long term, where do you see this going? How many CDOs are there in the world, do you know? Is that a number that's known? >> That's a really interesting point because, you know, only five years ago there weren't that many CDOs to be called. And then Gartner four years ago or so put out an article saying, "Every company really should have a CDO." Not just for the purpose of advancing your data, and to Doug Laney's point that data is being monetized, there's a need to have someone responsible for information 'cause we're in the Information Age. And a CIO really is focused on infrastructure, making sure I've got my PCs, making sure I've got a LAN, I've got websites. The focus on data has really, because of the Information Age, has turned data into an asset. So organizations realize, if you utilize that asset, let me reverse this, if you don't use data as an asset, you will be out of business. I heard a quote, I don't know if it's true, "Only 10 years ago, 250 of the Fortune 10 no longer exists." >> Yeah, something like that, the turnover's amazing. >> Many of those companies were companies that decided not to make the change to be data-enabled, to make data decision processing. Companies still use data warehouses, they're always going to use them, and a warehouse is a rear-view mirror, it tells you what happened last week, last month, last year. But today's businesses work forward-looking. And just like driving a car, it'd be really hard to drive your car through a rear-view mirror. So what companies are doing today are saying, "Okay, let's start looking at this as forward-looking, "a prescriptive and predictive analytics, "rather than just what happened in the past." I'll give you an example. In a major company that is a supplier of consumer products, they were leading in the industry and their sales started to drop, and they didn't know why. Well, with a data science team, we were able to determine by pulling in data from the CDC, now these are sources that only 20 years ago nobody ever used to bring in data in the enterprise, now 60% of your data is external. So we brought in data from the CDC, we brought in data on maternal births from the national government, we brought in data from the Census Bureau, we brought in data from sources of advertising and targeted marketing towards mothers. Pulled all that data together and said, "Why are diaper sales down?" Well they were targeting the large regions of the country and putting ads in TV stations in New York and California, big population centers. Birth rates in population centers have declined. Birth rates in certain other regions, like the south, and the Bible Belt, if I can call it that, have increased. So by changing the marketing, their product sales went up. >> Advertising to Texas. >> Well, you know, and that brings to one of the points, I heard a lecture today about ethics. We made it a point at Walmart that if you ran a query that reduced a result to less than five people, we wouldn't allow you to see the result. Because, think about it, I could say, "What is my neighbor buying? "What are you buying?" So there's an ethical component to this as well. But that, you know, data is not political. Data is not chauvinistic. It doesn't discriminate, it just gives you facts. It's the interpretation of that that is hard CDOs, because we have to say to someone, "Look, this is the fact, and your 25 years "of experience in the business, "granted, is tremendous and it's needed, "but the facts are saying this, "and that would mean that the business "would have to change its direction." And it's hard for people to do, so it requires that. >> So whether it's called the chief data officer, whatever the data czar rubric is, the head of analytics, there's obviously the data quality component there whatever that is, this is the conference for, as I called them, your peeps, for that role in the organization. People often ask, "Will that role be around?" I think it's clear, it's solidifying. Yes, you see the chief digital officer emerging and there's a lot of tailwinds there, but the information quality component, the data architecture component, it's here to stay. And this is the premiere conference, the premiere event, that I know of anyway. There are a couple of others, perhaps, but it's great to see all the success. When I first came here in 2013 there were probably about 130 folks here. Today, I think there were 500 people registered almost. Next year, I think 600 is kind of the target, and I think it's very reasonable with the new space. So congratulations on all the success, and thank you for stepping up to the co-chair role, I really appreciate it. >> Well, let me tell you I thank you guys. You provide a voice at these IT conferences that we really need, and that is the ability to get the message out. That people do think and care, the industry is not thoughtless and heartless. With all the data breaches and everything going on there's a lot of fear, fear, loathing, and anticipation. But having your voice, kind of like ESPN and a sports show, gives the technology community, which is getting larger and larger by the day, a voice and we need that so, thank you. >> Well thank you, Robert. We appreciate that, it was great to have you on. Appreciate the time. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We'll be right back with out next guest as we wrap up day two of MIT CDOIQ. You're watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. Everyone were accused Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS reinforce. First inaugural conference runs security. I'm Jeffrey. David Lot there. Next guest is Dan Hubbard, CEO of lacework. I've started at a Mountain View, California. Great to have you on. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks. Thanks for having me. >> So, you know, reinvent was developers Reinforces. Kind of like, si SOS coding security cloud and intersecting with security. This is a new kind of show. What's your take on? >> Super impressed so far? I mean, there's about 1000 people here, you know, way have literally hundreds of demos lined up in the booth s oh, really impressed so far. First impressions. >> It's a good move for Amazon. Do. Ah, security conference. Don't you think I mean >> really smart, Really smart. It's a lot more about defending than a lot of security conference about offense and vulnerabilities and how to find kind of holes and weak cracks. This is really about how do we defend you know, our security in the cloud >> Talk about your company. Your mission? You guys air started going after a hot space. Si SOS or CEO spending Talk to They want a new breed of supplier service provider. Certainly cloud a p. I is gonna be critical in all of this. So you start to see really smart platform thinking systems, thinking around companies around the security challenge and opportunity. What? What do you guys do? Explain what you guys? >> Yes, we really believed you know, this new wave of cloud I s and pass really needs a new architecture. It's a whole new architecture from a 90 perspective. So we need a new architect from a security perspective. And the great thing about the operating model is you could do a wide set of things and then go deep in the areas that are really important. So at least work does we allow you to secure? I asked. Past service is with compliance configuration host and container security. There's one platform that kind of wraps across all of those >> different targeting developers, right? So they don't have to think about security all the time. Is that the poor thing? >> Yeah, definitely. Eso in almost every case. Security is unlocking the budget. However, Dev Ops is involved, Dev Ops is involved from an influence. But, you know, it used to be that developers would ask security for permission. Now security's going back to developers and asking for permission to security >> infrastructure. He said that with the architecture is gonna be different because the the the I t. Is changing. So cloud security needs a new architecture. One of the fundamentals of that architecture and how is it different from security on prim? >> So I think it has to be SAS. So it's gotta be delivered multi cloud from the cloud. You know, we're gonna secure the cloud. It really should be from the cloud, their business models, that should be different. It's almost always a subscription is not perpetual models. You know you're annually re occurring your revenue. You're always keeping your customers happy and you're always innovating. The pace of innovation has to be really quick because the pace of the cloud is moving at such a dramatic speed. >> So that the those kind of business oriented you know, that's kind of a different definition of architecture. Technically, is it a fundamental do over Or is it fundamentally similar? >> Wolf. You know, there's some of the tenants which are the same, you know, we need to get visibility. That's very similar. You know, we have controls needed have auditing. We need to find threats. However, the way you do it is very different. So you don't own the hardware, you don't own the racks, you don't own the network. You gotta get used to that. You gotta live above the responsibility line. You have to fit within their infrastructure. So what that means is you need to be very happy. I friendly because we're sucking a lot of data on Amazon were pulling in configuration cloudtrail data, and you'll have to be able to deploy inside their infrastructures. We support things like kubernetes things like docker or we also interoperate things like bare metal and you know, in the AM eyes themselves, what >> problem you guys solve. Every startup has that cultural doctor, and they sometimes you weave into a market and also you get visibility into into a key value proper. What's the key problem that you saw? What's the benefit >> so that the key value we solve is if you are in the cloud or migraine in the cloud. We give you compliance configuration and threat protection across all your clowns. So, irrespective of which cloud you live in or operate in, we give you one central threat detection engine and that which gives you visibility but also gives you compliance and controls into that. >> So Amazon has this, you know she had responsibility model. They're they're protecting the compute, the storage, the database and customers are responsible for the end points. The operating system, the data, etcetera, etcetera. And Amazon certainly has tools. Help them. What is fuzzy to me sometimes is you know where eight of us leaves off. Where ecosystem partners like you guys come in. You obvious have to keep moving fast to your point. Absolute. Can you help us sort of squint through that maze? >> Sure. Yeah. I mean, the easiest way that I can explain it is if you could configure it, you have to secure everything. Below is the providers responsibility. That said, there are different areas where things are kind of peeking through the responsibility lines. So what I see is a world where there's not 50 security vendors that you've bought like in premise or traditional data center, but your Inter operating with a provider. So you know, the big three providers open source and then a solution like ours. So it's more about how do we interoperate there together? But what we do is we sit actually right within your container on the host themselves with an agent, and then we suck in there a p I. So technically, it's a little bit different. >> So the threat of containers is an interesting topic, right? You're spinning him up. It makes V M v ems look like child's play. Yeah, So are you using specific techniques, toe? So the fake out the bad guys make it. You're raising the bar on them and their cost using sort of algorithms to do that spin up, spin him down. You know, like the shell game of asking you. >> What we do is we get baked right into your infrastructure every single time you deploy and run through C I c d. A new container or a new app were baked in there and what we're doing, we're looking all your applications, processes the network traffic and then we look for that no one bad and the unknown bad based off of that. >> So it's native security in the container at the point of creation. Not a not an afterthought. Correct. Yep, >> What? Your take on kubernetes landscape? Obviously, pretty much everyone's kind of consolidate around that from a de facto standard. That's good news, wouldn't it? Koen ETS does is all kinds of stateless state full applications that becomes, like service mess conversation. You got all kinds of services that could land out there, automating all these things these sources were being turned on turned off in real time. >> It's >> a log it >> all. It's incredible. I think Cos. Is the fastest growing enterprise open source project ever. You know where every customer we talked to is either in the midst of migrating migrate or just thinking about it. That said, the world is looking to go multi cloud. But most customers today have, ah, a combination of in premise bare metal am eyes kubernetes containers. What we're doing is we give you visibility into your coup Bernays infrastructure. So we talk pods, nodes, clusters, name spaces and we allow you to secure the management plane. Any communication between those So it's really critical when you're deploying those from a security perspective that you know what's happening. The ephemeral nature of it is very different from regular security to you need to answer questions like what happened for 10 minutes during this time from six months ago, and that's really hard with traditional >> tools, really are. And that's really gonna with automation plays in Talk about the journey of where your customers are going out because we're seeing a progression kind of categorically three kind of levels. I really wanted to go to the cloud. I really want to convince you that cloud every aspiration. Yeah, not realistic, but it's on their plans. Then you've got people who go out and do it gets stuck in the mud. The wheels are spinning culturally, whatever's going on and then full on cloud native hard core Dev ops, eaten glass, spit nails, just kicking ass and taking names right? So you get the leaders. People are kind of in the middle, and then people jumping in. Where do you guys see your benefit? What are some of the challenges? How do you guys >> think it's a super dynamic marketplace? Because what's happening is every big company that may not be fully cloud native, is buying companies that are cloud native. So then they become the sexy new way to deploy, and then they start figure out how to deploy their there. So one of the trains were seeing is core centralized. Security is becoming governance and tooling, and then they're distributing the security function within the AP teams themselves. And that model seems to work really well because you've got security practitioners baked within the Dev Ops team. But then you've got a governing roll with tooling, centralized tooling from there. That said, depending on the customer or the prospect, it's all over the place. You know, many sisters, you're scratching their heads saying, No, you know, I don't know what's going over the cloud guys. They've got a different group that's running it. They're trying to figure out how do I just get visibility? I know my name's you know, I'm the one they're gonna come after if there's a problem. So it's really all over the place >> for your service. So you're baking it in creatively into the container. >> Yep, it doesn't matter. >> You're aware, if you will. >> It is a matter of urine premise or not. Containers or not, we worked across all of them. >> Was that the hook for your sort of original idea? Your business plan? Your investors you've raised, I think 32,000,000. You got 70 employees. What was that hook? What attracted the investment Community >> Theory journal? Idea was, if you're deployed in the cloud and you have a breach, how do you know you had a breach? Things that happen to come and go very quickly. All the data's encrypted on the network. I don't have full visibility on the network itself. So that was the original idea. How would I go back in time kind of time machine to find out what happened then? Way originally supported eight of us and it was really about visibility within 80 bus infrastructure. Then kubernetes happened. Now the big hook really is amazing containers. Am I using kubernetes? And then how do I make sure I'm compliant and then following best practices and then that breach that breach scenario still definitely happens. Everybody tries the service before they buy it. They're almost always finding out problems along the way. >> What did kubernetes do for you guys? That made a consensus step, function, change or what you guys were doing? Was it because they had the dynamic nature of the service's was orchestration? What specifically was the benefit? >> I think the orchestration, the single management plane from a security perspective, is one of the big things. You get access to that one brain, if you will. You have access to everything. Obviously, the ephemeral workload is big that it was enforcement kubernetes with service messes. Things like pot security policies allows us to hook a P eyes in a way that you can actually write enforcement versus a firewall or some of these old school ways of killing packets. >> Yes, you got a cloud native approach. Kubernetes comes along. It's aligns with your sort of philosophy and >> architectural, and we run today's ourselves. So our entire infrastructure is based off of kubernetes. We were kubernetes user very early on, so, you know, we just take the things that we learn to our customers. >> So here's a quote from a seesaw. I won't say his or her name, but I want to get your reaction to it when talking about dealing with suppliers, looking for the new generation of like what you guys are doing you got, I would put you in the new classification of emerging suppliers. This is the message to all the suppliers in the room. I happen to be in there having a P I and don't have its suck because you eyes shifting to a p a u ie Focus is shifting to FBI focus. So we are evaluating every supplier on their eight b. I's your reaction to that? >> I absolutely agree. So there's two levels of AP eyes. One is you have to interrupt it with the guys from the providers in order to get the data properly. Right. That's a big, big component. Others, you have to have a P eyes for your consumers. You can't automate without a P I. So that's really critical. That said, I will disagree a little bit on the u X and Y aspect. If you are triaging data, it's really important that you have the right data at the right time and visualizing that data in a ways. It's pretty important. >> How real is multi cloud, in your opinion, I mean, everybody's talking about multi cloud Ah la times we've said multi cloud. It's none of us a symptom of multi vendor. But increasingly it could be a strategy in terms of your thinking about your total available market, your market opportunity. How real is it when you're conversations with Coast? >> It's very really. We were really surprised. We first started supporting eight of us, and then we had a G, C, P and Azure together. Now we have a core principle that everything we build has to be parody across all the clouds. And we had a huge uptick across G, C, P and as your very early. So we were really surprised. What we were surprised about was, it's not portable workloads. So it's not about taking one application distributed across multi cloud. That's kind of fiction. That doesn't happen very often. It's either you bought a company that's in another cloud or use a past service in another cloud, or you have just two totally disparate applications in a large company. They just happen to be in different clouds in the data's in different places. They don't need to interoperate, so it's so it's just a little different, but we're seeing kind >> of horses for courses as well, right? Some clouds may be better for data oriented. >> Here's your point early, and we've heard this in some of the sea. So conversations em and becomes a big factor because they get new teams in new culture and they might have different cloud approaches. But I totally agree with you on that. I would say I would even go more further and saying It's absolute fiction between multi Cloud because it's just got a latent seizes on the connections, whether they're direct connections are not welcome on the factor. So I've always said, and I kind of believe in I'd love to get your thoughts on. It is the workload should dictate to the infrastructure which clouded should you know, and go with one cloud for that. If it makes sense on, then use multi cloud across workloads and low can handle a better cloud. Cloud Cloud selection. Be joined by the workload. >> Yeah, it's certainly from an out >> the other way around. >> Yeah, it's certainly from application perspective. You want a silo? It, you know, probably there. I think what's interesting about a lot of the work each provider is doing in security a lot people ask. Well, you know, why don't I just use all my provider security tools. And the answer is they got some great tools. You should use those for sure, but there is a bunch of technology above that you can use. And then you got a span across multiple clouds. What you don't want is three different AP eyes for security across every single cloud. That's gonna be a major pain or >> have to stitch. And that's where you guys come in. Absolutely. >> What's your take on this show? Reinforce against inaugural show. Love to go. The knuckle shows they don't have a 2nd 1 because they were there. Yeah, reinvent you made a calm before we came on. Reinvents started out. We were there early on as well. There's developers. Yeah, it wasn't a lot of fanfare. In fact, you could wander around Andy Jazz. It wasn't crowded. It all great, great time. That was younger. Now Amazons gotten much stronger. Bigger? What's the vibe here? Is that developers for security? Is it si SOS? Is it? What's your read on the makeup and the focus of the attendees? >> So I think it's it's a little bit of a mix of both, which I think is good you know, I've met a number of developers or what I would call kind of new breed security engineers. These are engineers that arm or interested in? How does the cloud work an inter operate? And how do you secure that versus, like reverse engineering malware with assembler, which you know a lot of the other places there really about the threats? And what of the threats and how specific or those This is really a little bit more about? How do we up our game from from a security perspective in this New World order, which is really >> get plowed. Very agile, very fast, yet horizontally scalable, elastic, all the goodness of cloud Final question developers Bottom line is developers continue to code and do the things, whether it's a devil's culture of having a hack a phone and testing new things, that which is how things roll now, getting into productions hard. What's the developers impact to security? Is the trend coming out of the show that security baked in enough to think about it like how configuration management took that track and Dev Ops took that away? You mentioned that earlier you figure you can secure it yet. So similar track for security going the way of automation. What's your? >> It's a lot of automation is gonna be critical for sure. And then it's gonna be a combination of Security and Dev ops together, you know, Call it DEP SEC Ops, code security engineer. Whatever you want to call it, it's definitely a combination of both. Security people are going away, that's for sure. You know, we're still gonna need security experts. And focus is just a critical aspect about this. >> Dan, Thanks for the insight coming on here. Reinforced. Take a quick second. Give a plug for your company. What you guys looking to do? Your hiring? What's going on? The company? >> Sure lacework. We're gonna help you protect all your workloads, Your configuration. Compliance in the cloud regardless of which cloud way are hiring websites lacework dot com and way love Thio culture Their cultures great, Very fast moving very fast paced, very modern way live and breathe by the success of our customers It's a subscription business. So now we have to continue innovating and renewing. Our customers >> got smart probably to get dealing combination containers. Thanks for coming on. Your coverage here live in Boston. General David, Want to stay tuned for more live coverage after this short break

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem barters >> Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of Sisqo Live from San Diego. Sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin with Stew Minutemen today and stew and I are very pleased to welcome to the Cube for the first time. Peter Sprigg gotta distinguished engineer from red Hat. Peter, Welcome. >> Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. >> We're excited to have you here today. I'd like to say Welcome to the sun. Its pretty toasty for in this very cool sales pavilion, which is Ah, very nice. A bright. So we got a lot of bright, but we do have some heat. So you've been with Cisco Cisco? No, actually. >> Was what? Siskel Ugo? >> Two degrees of Kevin Bacon Way where? In this room. Right. You've been with Red Hat since the answerable acquisition. One of the things that was funny that Chuck Robbins mention this morning was this the 30th anniversary of Cisco event with customers and partners. He also mentioned 30 years ago Seinfeld started. So I'm gonna do a Jerry Seinfeld on go digital transformation. What's the deal with that. >> You know, I think that, you know, one of the things that's really exciting and being part of Ansel and actually coming from the network's base. You know, we've had the opportunity to really be out in front of this whole digital transfer station. We've been doing it for you very long time on it's been just It's really been all about a journey on DH. That's really what I think. Earmarks. Really? What answer was all about >> Peter? So another thing. We've been on a journey a long time. That whole automation thing. Yes, we've been talking about that my entire career in the network. So bring us forward. You know, maybe, you know, did not 30 years. But you know what's going on in the last couple of years, That's different about automation, you know, 30 2019. Then we would have talked about, you know, when you first joined. And >> yeah, you know, I think that when I first joined, you know, everything was we were just trying to convince people that this is something you should think about doing you. Now you look around, you see what's going on here, alive and at definite and it's become a whole world unto itself. It's really starting to define its own space and networking, which is really exciting to see because I've been part of this journey really since the get go. And it's just it's really exciting to watch this homeworld start to come together. And people really taken interest in changing really the way that we approached, cooperating in >> person, and I'm glad actually mentioned the definite zone that we're in here. So there's lots of workshops happening right next to us. Hear developers really helping to drive that transformation software a big piece of your world. I'm assuming >> it is. It really is, you know, And I always love to tell the story of, you know, I've got a software development background, but I also have a network operations background watching these two worlds come together. It's so exciting and being out at the forefront, really pushing the envelope off. What we can do from an automation perspective is really been exciting >> so as to mention we're in the definite zone. This definite communities mass it is John Fourier and I had the opportunity to cover definite create back in Mountain View about six or eight weeks ago. I think that number this is Yoo, he mentioned, is 585,000 members, strong looking at Red hat and the spirit of this open source community. Talk to us about sort of the alignment of these communities and how this is helping to drive, not just technology forward, but be able to get that feedback from customers in any industry to drive these emerging technologies into mainstream. >> You know, I think you touched on the key there. It really is all about the customer and the customer's experience. You know, the wonderful thing about open source community is the fact that we can all come together. Vendor supply our customer, you know, consulting team, whoever you are, we all can come together, and it really does become right. We're all better together, and we're all pushing forward and trying. Teo really change the way that we approach how we build design and operate now destruction. >> Peter Peter Wonder if you've got a you know, a customer example. I know sometimes you need to anonymous things are what kind of things are customers Went, went when they're going through this. The outcomes and results that change how their business works, >> you know? So one of the things that and I got one particular customer mind. I can't say who they are, but one particular customer that that we worked a lot of time with him. What >> they were >> able to do is they were actually able. We gave them back the gift of time. That's what we talked about with automation. And what we mean by that is they were able to take a job that used to take them literally weeks to get done, that we could now automate and get it done once a night twice, you know, do it in a single night as opposed to them taking ways to get that job done. That frees them up to doing the more high value work. That networking here's really wanted you and not saddle them with more Monday and stuff. >> So just to follow up on that because, you know, traditionally that's been one of the pieces right is how do you know make my employees mohr efficient? Howto I give them more environment, something that they talked about. The keynote this morning is some of the scale and some of the you know you're dealing with EJ applications and all these environments is even if I had the resource, I probably couldn't keep up with the pace of change. Correct. They're doing so when you start throwing in things like a I and ML on top of those. But there's time to find their way intersect with what you're doing. >> Absolutely, they really are. And it's areas that we're starting to look into a swell. You know, Ansel's been doing this for a long time, but we're starting to see how do we bring some of these other two separate pieces and bring them together underneath this automation umbrella? And really again, we want to drive out that that everyday task out of of the operations Hansel. They can focus on the high value things of evaluating technology and moving things forward for their organizations. >> You say you were able to give that particular customer back the gift of time. I've got everybody breathing on the planet today, wants back the gift of time. But I would love to follow that story down the road because the gift of time has so much potential. Posit did impact all the way up to the C suite. Teo, you know, being able to move resources around to identify new revenue streams, new business nodules, new products, new services expanded into new markets. So that gift of time is transformative. >> Absolutely. Without, without a doubt, it is. And you know what we're seeing and what we're getting feedback from our customers on is that because of that gift of time, they're able to now focus on pushing their businesses forward. Right? And they're starting to solve challenges that have always been on that traditional, ever going task list. Right? That never you never get Teo. And they're really starting to be able to focus on those tasks such that they can start to become more innovative. They become more agile and they focus on their business, not on the active managing technology. >> All right, So, Peter, another another big theme of the show here is multi cloud, something we heard. A lot of red has something. Also, it's this skill set that one of the biggest challenges for customers working behind between those various environment. How sensible helping customers bridge some of those worlds today. >> Well, so you know, obviously, Ansel's not just a network to write. We automate anything and everything. And we like to talk about Ansel as the language of automation and really what it does for organizations. Whether you're looking at at infrastructure, whether you're looking at hybrid Cloud, what we do is we bring a language to the operations team where you get these two separate teams talking in a dialect that they can understand each other. And that's really what Ancel starts to bring your two. Those organizations. >> That internal collaboration. Absolutely. Maybe bridging business folks and folks who not wouldn't normally necessarily be driving towards the same types of solution. Correct? Correct. And it really >> kind of starts. And this is actually how we see Answer will kind of unfolding most organizations, right? It starts in these pockets, and small teams will start to use answerable. And then it just kind of grows and grows and grows. And what we find is all of a sudden, you've got, you know, a cloud Administrator's going out talk to a network engineer, and they can talk through this language of automation instead of trying to figure out how to communicate. They actually become productive immediately. >> OKay, Peter, Some of the big waves coming down the line that we're talking the keynote this morning, You know, five g y 56 You know, just incremental changes, you know, in your world. Or, you know, what will some of these new architectures that they're talking about, you know, have some dramatic impacts? >> Well, they're gonna have huge. In fact, you know, I think you know one of the things That's very interesting. You look at some of these technologies coming down, the coming down the ways now is everything is getting faster. I mean, that's nothing that we've been. You know, anyone who's been a knight for any period of time knows it's always faster, faster, faster. But what it's doing is is it's really motivating us to look at ants one and rethink how we do certain things so that we can keep up with the demand and allow organizations to, you know, meet the demands of their customers in accelerating their time to market. >> Maybe dig into that a little bit more in terms of the customer feedback. How are you guys? How is answerable being able to work with your customers across any industry, get their feedback to really accelerate what you guys are able to then deliver back to the market. What's that feedback loop? Well, I think >> you know, when you think about automation, automation is certainly it's a technology, but it's also very much about how organizations work, right? I like to talk about automation is really more a state of mind, Not so necessarily a state of action. And so therefore, you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers to understand how do they run their business and how Khun Automation become a way that they think about running the organization and really help them move forward. So we spent a lot of time understanding our customers business before we ever get into the bits and bytes of what automation really is. >> Yeah, you mentioned some of those organizational pieces, like the cloud guy in the network guy. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're seeing customers these days, and, you know, how are they helping to, you know, mature the organization to this new modern, multi cloud developer centric? You know, software defined, you know, Buzz, word of the day. >> You know, I think that you know, the biggest challenge that we see every single day with our car? Does Moses. You know, just where to get started, how you get started with. There's so much of it out there. Now it's it's they're looking at, and how do you get started with this? And how do you let this thing take on a life of its own? And so we spent a lot of time just getting them. You 123 steps down the road, get going in the open source and then let it expand from there. And we bring a whole suite of capabilities, then to the customer, whether it's through red at consulting, whether it's you're working through our open source communities to really help them on that journey. >> Wondering customer meetings. Where is this conversation now with respect to automation? Is he talked about giving the gift back of time. That would go all the way up to the C suite. So much potential there. Are you still having the conversation with more? The technical folks are where the lines of business or maybe even the executive sweet in terms of being a part of this decision in understanding the massive impact that automation will deliver. >> Yeah, it was just starting to see that that trend transition. Now, you know, we just came off of Redhead Summit, and we spent a lot of time talking with senior directors. See sweet individuals about kind of that transition in how automation is. As I mentioned before, it's no longer just a technical tool in the tool back. It really is becoming a business tool and how you could leverage it to really drive the business. So that's those conversations air starting now. We're just starting to see that, and it's really it's really exciting is really an exciting time to be part of this. >> All right, Peter, what will tell us a little bit about what red hats got going out of the show? I happen to show this to stop down the show floor, I saw the like command line video game, which I see that Red House seems that's making the go around there. I know your team's having a lot of fun team who can get the high score. What else at the show should people be looking at for red hat? >> Well, so you know, In addition, to answer. Well, of course, we also spent a lot of time talking about open shift, which is the other big red hat, you know, flagship product and really, what we're doing in terms of being able to deliver and the multi G hybrid cloud infrastructure and be able to run workloads in any cloud infrastructure, no matter where that may be. And then, of course, they'd always always comes back. Tio the operating system Red hat. Lennox, you know, they go hand in hand, way are always gonna be about the operating system, and everything kind of bubbles up from there. >> So here we are, halfway through calendar year 2019 which is scary. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to as the rest of the year progresses? Some, you know, exciting things going with Red had a big blue, for example. >> Well, there there is there. Certainly that although you could probably tell me more about how that's going that I get to know even anymore. But you know, I think really, What? What's exciting about the second half of this year and you're going to hear more about it? Actually, a definite this is a good time for me to mention this is that you know, we're doing a lot with Cisco right now. One of the things that course you know, Cisco's making a huge investment in definite and Red Hat is really becoming a very key partner with Cisco in that. So you're going to see a lot of open source community work around red Hand Cisco collaborating together to enhance what Ansel's doing and try and bring even more traditional and nontraditional people into these communities. >> More collaboration, I presume, over some of their cognitive collaborations, >> like absolutely, absolutely. >> That does work on linen because I've been using blue jeans most the time. >> It does. I You know, I I I pushed them really hard because yes, at first I had troubles with it, But yes, now it worked fantastic on Lenny. I couldn't be happier. >> You heard it. Here, Peter, Thank you so much for joining stew and me on the Cube this afternoon. We appreciate your time. I >> appreciate it. Thank you so much for >> having all right. It was fun for stupid aman. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Cisco live in sunny San Diego. Thanks for watching

from San Mateo its the cube covering scaler innovation day brought to you by scaler Livan welcome to the special innovation day with the cube here in San Mateo California heart of Silicon Valley John for the cube our next guest as Steve Newman the co-founder scaler congratulations thanks for having us you guys got a great company here Thanks yeah go ahead glad to have you here so tell the story what's the backstory you guys found it interesting pedigree of founders all tech entrepreneurs tech tech savvy tech athletes as we say tell the backstory how'd it all start and had it all come together so I also traced the story back to I was part of the team that built the original Google Docs and a lot of the early people here at scaler either were part of that Google Docs team or you know they're people we met while we were at Google and really scaler is an outgrowth of the it's a solution to problems we were having trying to run that system at Google you know Google Docs of course became part of a whole ecosystem with Google Drive and Google sheets and there's that you know all these applications working together it's a very complicated system and keeping that humming behind the scenes became a very complicated problem well congratulate ago Google Docs is used by a lot of people so been great success scale is different though you guys are taking a different approach than the competition what's unique about it can you share kind of like the history of where it's going and where it came from and where it's going yeah so you know maybe it'd be helpful like just to kind of set the context a little bit to the blackboard yeah so you know I you know I talked about it's kind of probably put a little flesh on what I was saying about you know there's a very complicated system that we're trying to run in the whole Google Drive ecosystem too there are all these trends in the industry nowadays you know the move to the cloud and micro services and kubernetes and serverless and can use deployment is all everything like these are all great innovations makes you know people are building more complex applications they're evolving faster but it's making things a lot more complicated and to make that concrete imagine that you're running an e-commerce site back in the calm web 1.0 era so you're gonna have a web server maybe a patchy you've got a MySQL database behind that with your inventory and your shopping carts you may be an email gateway and some kind of payment gateway and that's about it that's your that's your system each one of these pieces involved you know going to Fry's buying a computer driving it over the data center slotting it into a rack you know a lot of sweat went into every one of those boxes but there's only about four boxes it's your whole system if you wanted to go faster you threw more hardware at it more ram exactly and like and you know not literally through but literally carried you literally brought in more hardware and so you know took a lot of work just to do the you know that simple system fast forward a couple of decades if you're running uh running an e-commerce site today well you know you're certainly not seeing the inside of a data center you know stripe will run the payments for you you know somebody's on will run the database server and say you know like this is much much you know you know one guy can get this going in an afternoon literally but nobody's running this today this is not a competitive operation today if you're an e-commerce today you also have personalization and advertising based on the surf service history or purchase history and you know there's a separate flow for gifts and you know then printing the you know interfacing to your delivery service and and you know you've got 150 blocks on this diagram and maybe your engineering team doesn't have to be so much larger because each one of those box is so much easier to run but it's still a complicated system and trying to actually understand what's working what's not working why isn't it working and and tracking that down and fixing it this is the challenge day and this and this is where we come in and that's the main focus for today is that you can figure it out but the complexity of the moving parts is the problem exactly so you know and so you see oh you know 10% of the time that somebody comes in to open their shopping cart it fails well you know the problem pops out here but the the root cause turns out to be a problem with your database system back here and and figuring that out you know that's that's the challenge okay so with cloud technology economics has changed how is cloud changing the game so it's interesting you know changes changes the game for our customers and it changes the game for us so for a customer you know kind of we touched on this a little bit like things are a lot easier people run stuff for you you know you're not running your own hardware you're not you know you're often you're not even running your own software you're just consuming a service it's a lot easier to scale up and down so you can do much more ambitious things and you can move a lot faster but you have these complexity problems for us what it presents an an economy of scale opportunity so to you know we step in to help you on the telemetry side what's happening in my system why is it happening when did it start happening what's causing it to happen that all takes a lot of data log data other kinds of data so every one of those components is generating data and by the way for our customers know that they're running a hundred and 50 services instead of four they are generating a lot more data and so traditionally if you're trying to manage that yourself running your own log management cluster or whatever solution you know it's a real challenge to you as you scale up as your system gets more complex you've got so much data to manage we've taken an approach where we're able to service all of our customers out of a single centralized cluster meaning we get an economy of scale each one of our customers gets to work with a basically log management engine that's to scale to our scale rather than the individual customers scale so the older versions of log management had the same kind of complexity challenges you just drew a lot ecommerce as the data types increase so does their complexity is that so the complexity increases and but you also get into just a data scale problem you know suddenly you're generating terabytes of data but you don't you know the you only want to devote a certain budget to the computing resources that are gonna process that data because we can share our processing across all of our customers we we fundamentally changed economics it's a little bit like when you go and run a search and Google thousands literally thousands of servers in that tenth of a second that Google is processing the query 3,000 servers on the Google site may have been involved those aren't your 3,000 servers you know you're sharing those with you know 50 million other people in your data center region but but for a millisecond there those 3,000 servers are all for you and that's that's a big part of how Google is able to give such amazing results so quickly but in still economically yeah economically for them and that's basically on a smaller scale that's what we're doing is you know taking the same hardware and making it all of it available to all of the customers people talk about metrics as the solution to scaling problems is that correct so this is a really interesting question so you know metrics are great you know basically the you know if you look up the definition of a metric it's basically just a measurement on number and you know and it's a great way to boil down you know so I've had 83 million people visit my website today and they did 163 million things in this add mirror and that's you can't make sense of that you can boil it down to you know this is the amount of traffic on the site this was the error rate this was the average response time so these you know these are great it's a great summarization to give you an overall flavor of what's going on the challenge with metrics is that they tend to measure they can be a great way to measure your problems your symptoms sites up it's down it's fast its slow when you want to get to then to the cause of that problem all right exactly why is the site now and I know something's wrong with the database but what's the error message and what you know what's the exact detail here and a metric isn't going to give that to you and in particular when people talk about metrics they tend to have in mind a specific approach to metrics where this flood of events and data very early is distilled down let's count the number of requests measure the average time and then throw away the data and keep the metric that's efficient you know throwing away data means you don't have to pay to manage the data and it gives you this summary but then as soon as you want to drill down you don't have any more data so if you want to look at a different metric one that you didn't set up in advance you can't do it and if you need to go into the the details you can't do an interesting story about that you know when you were at Google you mentioned you the problem statements came from Google but one of things I love about Google is they really kind of nailed the sre model and they clearly decoupled roles you know developers and site reliability engineers who are essentially one-to-many relationship with all the massive hardware and that's a nice operating model it's had a lot of efficiencies was tied together but you guys are kind of saying in a way that does developers use the cloud they become their own sres in a way because this cloud can give them that kind of Google like scale and in smaller ways not like Google size but but that's similar dynamic where there's a lot of compute and a lot of things happening on behalf of the application or the engineers developer as developers become the operator through their role what challenges do they have and what do you see that happening because that's interesting trim because as applications become larger cloud can service them at scale they then become their own sres what yeah well how does that roll out most how do you see that yes I mean and so this is something we see happening at more and more of our customers and one of the implications of that is you have all these people these developers who are now responsible for operations but but they're not special you know they're not that specialist SRE team they're specialists in developing code not in operations they're you know they they minor in operations and and they don't think of it as their real job you know that's the distraction something goes wrong all right they're they're called upon to help fix it they want to get it done as quickly as possible so they can get back to their real job so they're not gonna make the same mental investment in becoming an expert at operations and an expert at the operations tools and the telemetry tools you know they're not gonna be a log management expert on metrics expert um and so they need they need tools that have a gentle learning Kurt have a gentle learning curve and are gonna make it easy for them to get Ian's not really know what they're doing on this side of things but find an answer solve the problem and get back out and that's kind of a concept you guys have of speed to truth exactly so and we mean a couple of things by that sort of most literally we our tool is it's a high performance solution you you hand us your terabytes of log data you ask some question you know what's the trend on this error in this service over the last day and we you know we give you a quick answer Big Data scan through a give you a quick answer but really it's you know that's just part of the overall chain of events which goes from the you know the developer with a problem until they have a solution so they they have to figure out even how to approach the problem what question to ask us you know they have to pose the query and in our interface and so we've done a lot of work to to simplify that learning curve where instead of a complicated query language you can click a button get a graph and then start breaking down that just visually break that down which okay here's the error rate but how does that break down by server or user or whatever dimension and be able to drill down and explore in a you know very kind of straightforward way how would you describe the culture at scaler I mean you guys been around for a while you still growing fast growing startup you haven't done the B round yet got any you guys self-funded it got customers early they pushed you again now 300 plus customers what's the culture like here so you know it's been this has been a fun company to build in part because you know we're into you know the the heart of this company is the engineering team our customers our engineers so you know we're kind of the kind of the same group and that keeps the you know it kind of keeps the inside in the outside very close together and I think that's been a part of the culture we've built is you know we all know why we're building this what it's for you know we use scalar extensively internally but you but even you know even if we weren't we're it's the kind of thing we've used in the past and we're gonna use in the future and so you know I think people are really excited here because you know we understand why and you have an opinion of the future on how it should roll out what's the big problem statement you guys are solving as a company what's it how would you boil that down if asked so by a customer and engineer out there what real problem are you solving that's core problem big problem that's gonna be helping me you know at the end of the day it's giving people the confidence to keep you know building these kind of complicated systems and move quickly because because and this is the business pressure everyone is under you know whatever business you're in it has a digital element and your competitors are in the same you know doing the same thing and they are building these sophisticated systems and they're adding functionality and they're moving quickly you need to be able to do the same thing but it's easy then to get tangled up in this complexity so at the end of the day you know we're giving people the ability to understand those systems and and and the functionality and the software's getting stronger and stronger more complicated with service meshes and micro services as applications start to have these the ability to stand up and tear down services on the fly that's so annoying and they'll even wield more data exact you get more data it gets more complicated actually if you don't mind there's a little story I'd like to tell so hold on just will I clear this out this is going back back to Google and again you know kind of part of the inspiration of you know how he came to build scalar and this doesn't be a story of frustration of you know probably get ourselves into that operation and motivation yep so we were we were working on this project it was building a file system that could tie together Google Docs Google sheets Google Drive Google photos and the black diagram looks kind of like the thing I just erased but there was one particular problem we had that took us months and literally months and months and months to track down you know you'd like to solve a problem in a few minutes or a few hours but this one took months and it had to do with the the indexing system so you have all these files in Google Drive you wanna be able to search and so we had modeled out how we were gonna build this or this search engine you'd think you know Google searches a solve problem but actually so Google web search is four things the whole world can see there's also like Gmail search which is four things that only one person can see so it's lots of separate little indexes those are both solve problems at Google Google Drive is for things a few people can see you share it with your coworker or your whoever and it's actually a very different problem and but we looked at the statistics and we found that the average document our average file was shared with about 1.1 people in other words things were mostly private or maybe you share with one or two people so we said we're just gonna make if something's shared to three people we're just gonna make three copies of it and then now we have just the Gmail problem each copy is for one person and we did the math on how how much work is this going to be to build these indexes and in round numbers we were looking at something like at the time this would be so much larger now but at the time we had maybe one billion documents and files in the system each one was shared to about 1.1 people maybe it was a thousand words long on average and maybe it would change be edited once per day on average so we had about a trillion word updates per day if you multiply all that together and so we allocate it we put in a request and purchase machines to handle that much traffic and we started bringing up the system and immediately collapsed it was completely overloaded and we checked our numbers and we check them again yeah 1.1 about a billion whatever and but then work into the system with just way beyond them and we looked at our metrics so you know measuring the number documents measuring each of these things all the metrics looked right to make a month's long story short these metrics and averages were hiding some funny business there turned out there was this type of use case read of occasional documents that were shared to thousands of people and one of there was a specific example it was the signup sheet for the Google company picnic this is a spreadsheet it was shared to about 5,000 people so it wasn't the whole company but you know a big chunk of Mountain View which meant it was I don't know let's say 20 thousand words long because it had you know the name and a couple other things for each person this is one document but shared to 5,000 people and you know during the period people were signing up maybe it was changing a couple thousand times per day so you multiply out just this document and you get 200 billion word updates for that one document in a day where we're estimating a trillion for the whole earth and so there was something like a hundred documents in this kid Google was hamstringing your own thing we were hamstrung our own thing there were about a hundred examples like this so now we're up to 20 trillion and like that was the whole problem these hundred files and we would have never found that until we got way down into the details of the the logs which in this two months just took month so because we didn't have the tools because we didn't have scaler yeah and I think this is the kind of anomaly you might see with Web Services evolving with micro services which someone has an API interface with some other SAS as apps start to rely on each other this is a new dynamic we're seeing as SLA s are also tied together so the question is whose fault is it exactly you have to whose fault is it and also things get so much more varied now you know again web 1.0 e-commerce you buy a thing you buy a thing that's all the same now you're building a social media site or whatever you've got 8 followers you've got 8 million followers this person has three movies rented on Netflix this person has three thousand movies everything's different and so then you get these funny things hiding yeah you're flying blind if you don't get all the data exposed it's like it's like you know blind person trying to read Braille as we heard earlier see if thanks so much for sharing the insight great story I'm John furry you're here for the q4 innovation day at scalers headquarters thanks for watching

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. VeeamON day one of two-day coverage of the Veeam conference, very swaggy hotel. Dave Russell is here. He's the Vice President of NFI Strategy at Veeam. David, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks so much for coming onto theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. >> You're very welcome. So let's see, you're well over, let's see, a year out, just about a year out of Gartner. Right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so okay you've been injected with the Kool-Aid fully, I presume, right? >> There you go, in the green, yes. >> But we're still going to talk a little bit about the magic water, but before we get into that, talk about your first year here. >> Yeah. >> Your impressions. Do they meet, exceed your expectations? >> It exceeded my expectations, but I can honestly say I'm not doing what I thought I was going to be doing here, but it actually turned out to be better. The other thing I will honestly tell you is I'm now on Pacific Coast time at the moment. Arizona, we're too unsophisticated for Daylights Saving, right so I'm either Mountain or Pacific but I'm Pacific now. But by 10 a.m. my time, I pretty much what I thought I was going to do that day is out the window and I'm doing something else and it's fun though. I mean now especially with the investment that we had earlier in the year and the cash reserves we ended last year with, looking at a lot of partnership capabilities, looking at ecosystem activities, certainly involved with customer activity. We're redoing our marketing and how we're focusing our go-to-market so it's a whole variety of things that sort of change hourly. >> So on the, I think we just talked about the M&A side. You've always been a dot connector in your, right? Because you talk to all the vendors, you talk to all the customers and you could see the picture. You have a huge observation space so part of your job on strategy is to try to what? Figure out where the gaps are. >> Yeah. >> And then drive strategy around do we build, do we buy? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah and it really does net down to what you said. It's a build/buy decision. It's an acceleration to market kind of decision and then the hard part is what are you willing to trade off and of course the real answer is as little as humanly possible. But you have to decide, just because you can do it, just 'cause you have the money doesn't necessarily mean you should pull the trigger. So if anything, it's curious because people like myself and a couple of my colleagues, we almost are more discerning. So we look at, okay, the technology, is it really viable? Do our due diligence, right? But then we also look at well, does this fit culturally? Is the integration point really there? Is the customer value really going to be significantly improved and if you cannot answer that very favorably, then keep the money. >> So you worked at IBM for a number of years, you worked at Gartner for a number of years. Now you're back working for a vendor. >> Yeah. >> Compare and contrast those roles. I mean Gartner, you do a lot of writing, you do a lot of traveling, you talk to a zillion people. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people here too, but you're coming at it from a very biased perspective whereas Gartner of course you're unbiased. You're serving the end customer. So talk about the difference in those two roles. >> So I approach it a little uniquely in that I'm biased. I mean I'm paid by a vendor, right? And so there's a certain inherent bias in there, but I go into a customer conversation and say "Maybe you shouldn't be using Veeam for certain things." So I'll give you an example. We have Unix capabilities with Solaris AIX. There are other vendors that do that even better than we do. They have rich application integration. If someone says that's my number one problem, honestly we're not your best choice. Now the reality is most of the world is moving towards more physical and virtual Windows and Linux. So I'll come in, say, a large enterprise and I'll say, "Okay, if you're like most shops," and I'll always undersell it. "Like probably 85% of your workload "is physical virtual Windows Linux." and they always interrupt me and go, "No, no, no, it's 92%." Like, "Okay, well we can help with that 92%." >> Yeah, yeah. >> The other 7%, I'm honestly going to tell you, we're not best of breed. >> Yeah that's a safe balance view that the AIX Solaris piece. >> Series. (Dave laughs) There's certain things. >> Yeah. >> We want to stick to our swim lane. We think it's a pretty wide lane, but there's no reason to come out of it. >> So your role as strategy, talk a little bit about how you're turning that strategy into action and specifics at Veeam. >> Yeah a big part of it has to do with cloud. >> I know that's the word that we've been talking about for a long, long time. So there's the aspirational aspect of Cloud and the operational. The aspirational is I want to be able to move in and out. I want mobility, I want the ability to exit. The operational is I want to be able to do this efficiently, meaning I want to be able to either send data to the cloud, my on-prem backup or I want to be able to protect SAAS-based workloads or infrastructure as a service workload so cloud-native workloads and then over time, I might want to be able to leverage that for something other than availability. So how can you rapidly make the data and only the portion of data that I need available to me when I need it? >> I was taking some notes during the key notes and I was just doing like a little, not really a tag cloud, but I was trying to identify as I heard them and grabbed them, the attributes of cloud data protection. I want to throw some out to you. You tell me. We'll play kind of word association, I guess. So I have fast recovery, API-based, open, simple, transparent, data-oriented, automated, cloud pricing, federated to accomodate the edge. Are these some of the attributes that we should associate with cloud data protection, maybe some of the things that I'm missing. How do you look at the attributes of a company and its products providing cloud data protection? >> Yeah so a big part of it, I actually like the phrase hybrid cloud even better than people say multi-cloud. The reason I like that is because hybrid presumes that you can have on premises as well. So like if it was the Dave and Dave company tomorrow, we'd probably be born in the cloud. Everything would be software as a service. We'd get some public cloud space. Now if we'd been in business for 20 years, we've got investments that we've made and we don't want to get rid of that any sooner than we have to. So hybrid cloud I like, but I think you nailed it in that what do every one of those attributes have in common? It's trying to get your most precious resource to you in a way that you want to consume it with as least amount of friction as possible. We want to reduce the aggravation associated with being able to access that rapidly. >> When you think about the customer conversations that you've had at Veeam and even going back to your Gartner days, I've always felt this notion of not hybrid, I see hybrid and multi-cloud as different. I've always looked at multi-cloud as multi-vendor. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I've got line of business, I've got shadow IT, I've got different IT projects and I've got multiple clouds and it's just, to me it was always less of a strategy than sort of this is where we are and now people need to put together a hybrid strategy. So IT's been asked to come clean up this mess as it always is. What's your take on the hybrid landscape and how we got here but more specifically, customer strategies when you consult with your customers? >> Yeah you're right that there's a lot of departmental buying, there's a lot of, in some cases, it's best of breed so I'm very willing to go look at multiple providers because I didn't sign up to go deploy the third best solution. Everyone wants what they think will be the most appropriate tool for them and rightfully so. So I think that's how we got, to your point, we didn't have a strategy that said I want 10 vendors. We arrived at an implementation choice that resulted in 10 vendors being deployed and then to your point further, then we had to layer on something on top of that. That's really where we come in and simple as it sounds, we really want to promote choice, choice of infrastructure, choice of cloud, choice of hypervisor, choice of operating system. >> So great discussion vector is the best of breed versus sort of integration. >> Yeah. >> And my question is that's been a decades-long. >> Yeah. >> Sort of trade-off that people have made. You see it in the software business, the hardware business and all through the industry. Is the API economy changing that. Can you be both, I mean Veeam, let's agree. Veeam is a best-of-breed provider. While your portfolio's growing, you're a billion-dollar company, you take a company like Dell who's got this ridiculously large portfolio. They can come into a customer and say well even with services or at IBM, we can wrap the big blue blanket around you and integrate everything. With the API economy, does that change the game on that argument of best of breed versus integration and convenience? >> It's a nuanced answer. The answer is a little yes and a little no. >> It depends, right? >> Let me decompose that because that's a cop-out, but the "it depends" aspect is really, APIs are wonderful to create an ecosystem and other integration points. If that's about offering your expandability to do something, that's a positive. If that really means that well because I can't deliver what you need, you got to go and write it yourself, that is a negative. So if the API is leveraging something for even greater value but beyond what the tools are originally designed to do, I think that's net positive, but if you have to exploit the API to just to get the product to work, why did I buy your product when I have to go hire someone to write code to work on your product? That's, you don't want that business. >> Okay so the last Gartner Magic Quadrant that came out was one that you sort of spearheaded back in 2017. It was like this perfect storm of backup analysts leaving Gartner and so there's been a little bit of delay in terms of the new one coming out which is coming our shortly as I understand it, but one of the observations that you can make if you look at the 2016-2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant is that Veeam moved from lower right to upper right which is rare. Can you explain that a little bit? You were saying that it usually goes in a different pattern. Elucidate, please. >> Yeah. Yeah so the magic in the Magic Quadrant is if you could actually jump from one quadrant to straight to leaders and that would be a very atypical progression. Usually it's a backwards Z. You come into the lower left, probably get over to the lower right, fall back, but go up to the upper left and then maybe you get to leaders in the upper right. The magic part in Veeam, the thing that they were able to do is go from visionary lower right to leader upper right. >> Okay and why do you think they were able to do that? I mean there are numerous attributes, but presumably 350,000 I think is the number of customers helped and so you've got a lot of references and proof points, the technology itself, but it's rare. Why do you think Veeam has been able to succeed in that regard? >> I think it's because Veeam has been good about getting answers to the most pressing problems. Again Veeam doesn't do everything. It doesn't support every single operating system, but the vast majority of the concentration of where customer issues are and where customer environments are getting deployed at, we can address very well and actually this weekend, I got here Friday night. So all day Saturday, all day Sunday and yesterday 'til 5 p.m. I took our SE training and so I've deployed Veeam, worked with active directories, all kinds of things for 72 hours basically and it was really that easy to use. In fact, my most difficult thing is I stayed in class until 6:30 at night because I'd never done active directory. I've never been an exchange admin before so I had to kind of come up to speed on those tools a little bit, but once I got that, the product was incredibly powerful, but also very intuitive. So you still have a little bit of that independent analyst DNA in you so I'm going to ask you to try to put that independent hat on. When you think about Veeam's traditional base of SMB, they're very successful there, obviously superglued itself to the virtualization trend. The last couple of years, Veeam has tried to move up-market, develop some relationships with some large players and has had some success there. Is the product well-suited for that larger enterprise and where do you see that going in terms of the up-market progression? >> Yeah so in theory, that's what I'm here to drive, the enterprise word is in my title, but in reality I focus more broadly than that. But if I just think about enterprise, I ran the numbers last week and company inception to date, we've actually derived over $2 billion of software-only revenue from the enterprise market and that's been accelerating. Now in 2017-18 and the first quarter of this year, almost $1 billion. So we're moving and we're moving fast. We had our sales kick off like most companies do. January, go to sales kick off and Ratmir says, "Hey don't chase just the big deals, the $2 million deals. "We've never sold a $2 million "without having a $200,000 deal first." The very next week, we got a $2 million deal on the first paper so he shot low. He should've said five million, but the interesting thing about Veeam and to answer your question, I think we resonate with the kind of challenges a large enterprise has. We allow them to move at their own scale if they want to move in a very large fashion, they can with Veeam. I would honestly tell them move as appropriate for you. As assets age, as you're willing to take on the change in an environment, do so, but I think Veeam is interesting. It's the same piece of software that I installed on my laptop this weekend that can also go to a Fortune 100 company. The same piece of software that manages 50,000 agents, we have at one shop, 50,000 Windows agents. We can do that with same code base and the only thing that's different is we just horizontally scale out how we deploy the capacity and then how we deploy the mover agents. >> I tweeted out this morning, Ratmir was standing in front of a chart with all these features and over the time and that's been part of the hallmark of Veeam is not checkbox features but real substantive features and you've had a consistent progression. Even Ratmir said, we don't have a big long-term roadmap that we share with our customers even internally. Yeah we have a direction and a vision, but very focused, almost like a bit of an Agile development methodology but the point is that, and you see that some companies are really good at this, some companies, not so good at this, but just consistently delivering features that are in-demand, that customers want, listening to their customers and just nailing it and that seems to be the hallmark of Veeam and as they say, some companies just don't have that in their DNA. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I think what it really comes down to is at the end of the day, every developer thinks like a customer and they do that because they spend a lot of time on our Veeam forums and I'll be honest, when I was a mainframe backup developer, I didn't talk to that many customers. I was just writing code and I didn't know how people were actually putting the product to use in production. I didn't always know what feature might be most helpful for them. >> You were guessing. >> I was trying to think of the art of the possible, hopefully an educated guess, but I was really just trying to say what might be good, what might be of resonance versus actually having someone goes on a forum and says Veeam, what I would like you to do is X. That's one of the reasons why we do have, to your point, we don't have a 10-year roadmap where we say this feature is coming in 12 months, this feature is coming in 24 months. It's fluid and in some cases, we actually moved up delivering our physical agent management by a year because we started selling more and more of those and people said I need that feature functionality faster. We're willing to trade-off some of our other feature functionality. So if we can be, as long as we can continue to respond to the market, I think we're well-positioned. >> How does a capability like that surface itself? Obviously by talking to customers, but how does it get into the development pipeline so quickly? >> Yeah well in some cases, we've got a huge amount of not just, our part of R&D. It's the research, it's experimentation, it's incubation of new things. So when we find that sweet intersection point, then we can quickly operationalize that. In other cases, we just have to be nimble. We have to react fast. >> Is it a command and control culture though where somebody says okay this is what we're doing or is it more sort of the team gets together and says oh this really makes sense based on what the customers are telling us, let's go. How does that decision get made? >> Yeah well ultimately it is a command and control in the sense that our co-founder, one of our co-founders runs sales and marketing. Our other co-founders runs R&D and they ultimately get sign-off on their respective areas, but it is collaborative in the sense of we do bring forward, here's what we see in market, here's what see in our customer forums. Here's what our ecosystem of partners are telling us, here's our view of the top five things we ought to go do. >> I was struck by the other slide that Ratmir had. It was the $15 billion slide and it was probably, backup and recover was maybe I don't know seven out of the 15 if I remember, but there were all these other segments. It was sort of analytics and disaster recovery and data management, all new pockets of opportunity. $15 billion today, obviously growing with especially the cloud. How do you see that landscape and how does that affect the way you look at strategy? >> Yeah so I actually put that bubble chart together. >> Oh, I like it. >> The rationale between the bubbles, we have core, we put backup in the middle because that's what we do but also that's how we ingest data and now we can do other things around it. So the reason for those bubbles and they were of varying sizes and the bubbles were sort of in and out of to varying degrees the main backup bubble according to how much intersection we thought as a company we could have with that. Where we thought we could add value, where we thought there was an ecosystem potential. So for example, analytics. We're not going to become the next best analytics company tomorrow, not even years from now. We could partner and we can provide data and we get better access to data to be able to do that. So we'd want to facilitate that. In other cases, maybe we really do want to go own and acquire. >> Well and so to your earlier comments there, I didn't use the term, the phrase land and expand, but that's clearly what you guys are doing starting with the $200,000 sale and growing it to a $2 million sale. So those bubbles are potentially cohort sales. >> Yes. >> That you can sell sort of like bananas in bunches I like to say, right? >> Yeah. And part of that is who do you sell that to. And so if you're able to go and address some of those ancillary bubbles or markets, now you've got a different entree point into the organization. If you're already involved with an organization, now you can offer more value because you can get more out of your data that you've already protected. So it opens up new conversations for us to have. It opens up entirely new buying centers for us too. >> Well how is the role of whom you sell to changing? I mean it was backup admin historically, right or maybe a Veeamware admin. Veeam admin. How is that changing? >> So greatest example I would tell you are events. So we acquired a company last January or a year ago January called N2W Software. So they're predominantly at Amazon re:Invent conferences. You go to Amazon re:Invent and no one's heard of Veeam and if anyone's heard of either of the two companies, it's definitely N2WS and someone's seen it in the marketplace. That demographic tends to be totally different from the demographic if you go to the on-premises data center type of conference where they have heard of Veeam and it's a very different sort of mindset. To your point, they grew up in a very different landscape. Now instead of someone who's well-steeped in server storage and networking and maybe majored in one, possibly two of those things, now you've got a generalist where he or she is probably in their 20s, has a very different point of view of what it should take to get something working and has a very different view of how they want to be sold to, how you can go and reach them. >> So at the cloud show, there might be a development persona. >> Yes. >> That you're selling to. Obviously VMWare, VMWorld, we know what that is. It's IT guys, right, is the predominant and how do you see cloud changing that? Is it cloud architects or sort of cloud leaders? CTOs increasingly? Data Protection becomes more and more important to digital business. So how are you seeing that role change due to cloud? >> So right now we have to basically have more touchpoints. Our typical legacy fan of our customer, our customer base, our product's sweet spot still remains and it's in some cases will pull us into the cloud. In other cases, we have to go talk to someone that's entirely different. But again, that's more of an administrative view. But to your point, going up the stack now, if you go to the not even Vice President of Infrastructure, you go to the CIO, he or she says, "I am tired of thinking about boxes. "I am tired of thinking about where this resides. "I want to think business outcome." So for us that's actually a great conversation because it all comes back to data. That's what we're in the business of doing. We capture, protect and move data. >> So that brings it back to strategy. We got to run, but summarize in your words, just sort of the strategy of Veeam and where you see this whole thing going. >> Yeah I will simplistically say it's more of the same. We want to continue to offer what we think is a best of breed solution for on-prem and increasingly cloud availability, but also we want to offer real customer value in terms of now being able to leverage that data, get more value out of that whether that's DevOps, running analytics against that, security test patch, whatever it may be, we want to be able to give you just the data you need, so have granularity, and offer speed and ease of use to do that. >> So as data becomes more and more important, you're seeing companies go beyond backup, trying to get more out of there, their backup, moving to data protection, data management, not just an insurance policy anymore. Dave Russell, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with Peter Burris as my cohost. We're at VeeamON Live from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)