(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Very few physical events this year doing a lot of hybrid stuff. It's great to be back in hybrid event... Physical event land, 25,000 people here. Probably a little few more registered than that. And then on the periphery, got to be another at least 10,000 people that came in, flew in and out, see what's happening. A bunch of VCs, checking things out, a few parties last night and so forth. A lot of action here. It's like re:Invent is back. Matt Coulter is here. He's a technical architect at Liberty Mutual. Matt, thanks for flying in from Belfast. Good to see ya. >> Dave, and thanks for having me today. >> Pleasure. So what's your role as a technical architect? Maybe describe that, we'll get into a little bit. >> Yeah so I am here to empower and enable our developers across the globe to rapidly deliver business value and solve problems for our customers in a well-architected way that doesn't introduce problems or risks, you know, later down the line. So instead of thinking of me as someone who directly every day, build software, I try to create the environment where other people can rapidly build software. >> That's, you know, it's interesting. because you're a developer, right? You can use like, "Hey I code." That's what normally you would say but you're actually creating frameworks and business model so that others can learn, teach them how to fish, so we speak. >> Yeah because I can only scale, there's a certain amount. Whereas if I can teach, there's 5,000 people in Liberty Mutual's tech organization. So if I can teach the 5,000 to be 5% better, it's way more than me even if I 10Xed >> When did you first touch the Cloud? >> Personally, it would have been four/five years ago. That's when I started in the Cloud. >> What was that experience like for you? >> Oh, it was hard. It was very different to anything that we'd done in the past. So it's because you... Traditionally, you would have just written your small piece of code. You would have had a big application that was out there, it had been out there maybe 20 years, it was deployed, and you were just adding a couple of lines. Whereas when you start putting stuff into the Cloud, it's out there. It's on the internet for anyone there to try and hack or try to get into. It was a bit overwhelming the amount that you needed to learn. So it was- >> Was it worth it? >> Oh yeah. Completely. (laughing) So that's the thing, that I would never go back to the way we did things before. And that's why I'm so passionate, enthusiastic about the stuff I've been doing. Because to me, the amount of benefits you can get, like now we can deliver thing. We have teams going out there and doing discovery and framing with the business. And they're pushing well-architected products three days later into production. That was unheard of before, you know, this year. >> Yeah. So you were part of Werner's keynote this morning. Of course that's always one of the keynotes that's most anticipated at re:Invent. It's on the sort of last day. He's awesome. This is you know, 10th year of re:Invent. He sort of did a look back. He started out (chuckles) he's just a cool guy and very passionate. But talk about what your role was in the keynote. >> Yeah so I had a section towards the end of the keynote, and I was to talk about Liberty Mutual's serverless first journey. I actually went through from 2014 through to the current day of all the major Cloud milestones that we've hit. And I talked through some of the impact it's had on our business and the impact it's had on our developers. And yeah it's just been this incredible journey where as I said, it was hard at the start. So we had to spark this culture within our company that we were going to empower and enable our developers and we were going to get them excited about doing this. And that's why we needed to make it safe. So there was a lot of work went down at the start to make the Cloud safe for our developers to experiment. And then the past two years have been known that it's safe, okay? Let's see what it can do. Let's go. >> Yeah so Liberty Mutual has been around many many years, Boston-based, you know, East Coast-based, my home city. I don't live in Boston but I consider it my city. And so talk about your business a little bit because you're an established company. I don't know, probably a hundred years old, right? Any all other newbies nipping at your business, right? Coming in with low-cost products. Maybe not bringing as much protection as you dig into it. But regardless, you've got to compete with them technically. So what are some of the drivers in your business and how are you using the Cloud to sort of defend your turf and grow? >> Yeah so first of all, we're 109 years old. (laughing) Yeah. So absolutely, there's an entire insurtech market of people here gunning for the big Liberty Mutual because we've been here for so long. And our whole thing is we're focused on our customers. So we want to be there for people in their time of need. Because at a point in time whenever you need insurance, typically something is going wrong. And that's why we're building innovative solutions like a serverless call center we built, that after natural disaster, it can automatically process claims in less than four minutes. So instead of having to wait on hold for maybe an hour, you can just text or pick up the phone, and four minutes later your claims are through. And that's we're using technology always focused on the customer. >> That's unbelievable. Think about that experience, to me. I mean I've filed claims before and it's, it's kind of time consuming. And you're saying you've compressed that to minutes? Days, weeks, you know, and now you've compressed that to minutes? >> Yeah. >> Tell us more about how you did that. >> And that's because it's a fully serverless solution that was built. So it doesn't require like people to scale. It can scale to whatever number of our customers need to make a claim at that point because that would typically be the bottleneck if there's some kind of natural disaster. So that means that if something happens we can just switch it on. And customers can choose not to use it. You can always choose to say I want to speak to a person. But now with this technology, we can just make it easy and just go. Everything, all the information we know in the back end, we just use it and actually make things better for you. >> You're talking about the impact that it had on your business and developers. So how do you quantify that? Maybe start with the business. Maybe share some ways in which you look at that measure. >> Yeah, so I mean, in terms of how we measure the impact of the Cloud on our business, we're always looking at our profitability and we're always looking, as I say, at our customers. And ideally, I want our Cloud bill to go down as our number of customers goes up because that's why we're using the serverless fast mindset, we call it. We don't want to build anything we don't have to build. We want to take the best that's out there and just piece it together and produce these products for our customers. So yeah, that's having an impact on our business because now developers aren't spending weeks, months, years doing all this configuration. And they can actually sit down with the business and understand how we write insurance. So now we can start being innovative with our products and talking about the real business instead of everything else. >> When you say you want your Cloud bill to go down, you know, it reminds me like in the old days of IT budgeting, right? It was always slash, do more with less cut, cut, cut, right? And it was kind of going in cycles. But with the Cloud a lot of customers that I talk to, they were like, might be going down as a percentage of revenues but actually it might be going up as you launch more projects because they're driving revenue. There's a tighter tie between revenue and Cloud bill. How do you look at that? >> Yeah. So I mean, with every project, you have to look at the worth-based development often and whether or not it's going to hold this away in the market. And the key thing is with the serverless products that are being released now, they cost pennies if they're low scale. So you can actually launch a new product into the market and it maybe only cost you $20 to see if that thing would fit in the market. So by the time you're getting into the big bills you know whether or not you've got a market fit and you can decide whether you want to pivot. >> Oh wow. So you you've compressed, that's another business metric. You've compressed the time to get certainty around product market fit, right? Which is huge because you really can't go to market until you have product market fit (laughing) >> Exactly. You have to be. Thoroughly understand if it's going to work. >> Right because if you go to the market and you've got 50% churn. (laughing) Well, you don't want to be worried about the go-to market. You got to get back to the product so you can test that and you can generate. >> So that's why, yeah, As I said, we have developers who can go out and do discovery and framing on a potential product and deliver it three days later which (chuckles) >> How has the Cloud effected developer satisfaction or passion? I guess it's... I mean we're in AWS Cloud. Our developers, we tell them "Okay, you got to go back on-prem." They would say, "I quit." (laughing) How has it affected their lives? >> Yeah it's completely there for them, it's way better. So now we have way more ownership over any, you know, of everything we ever did. So it feels like you're truly a part of Liberty Mutual and you're solving Liberty's problems now. Because it's not a case of like, "Okay, let's put in a request to stand up a server, it's going to take six months. And then let's do some big long acquisition." It's a case of like, "Let's actually get done into the nitty gritty of what we going to build." And that's- >> How do you use the Cloud developer kit? Maybe you could talk about that. I mean, explain what it is. It's a framework. But explain from your perspective. >> Yeah so the Cloud typically, it started off, and lot of it was done by Cloud infrastructure engineers who created these big YAML files. That's how they defined all the stuff that's going to be deployed. But that's not typically the development language that most developers use. The CDK is in like Java, TypeScript, .NET, Python. The language is developers ready known love. And it means that they can use everything they already know from all of their previous development experience and bring it to the Cloud. And you see some benefits like, you get, I talked about this morning, a 1500 line YAML file was reduced to 14 lines of TypeScript. And that's what we're talking about with the cognitive difference for a developer using CDK versus anything else. >> Cognitive abstraction, >> Right? >> Yeah. And so it just simplifies your living and you spend more time doing cool stuff. >> Yeah we can write an abstraction for our specific needs once. And then everybody can use that abstraction. And if we want to make a change and make it better, everyone benefits instead of everybody doing the same thing all the time. >> So for people who are unfamiliar, what do you need? You need an AWS account, obviously. You got to get a command-line interface, I would imagine. maybe some Node.js often running, or is it- >> Yeah. So that's it. You need an AWS account, and then you need to install CDK, which is from Node Package Manager. And then from there, it depends on which way you want to start. You could use my project CDK patterns, has a whole ray of working patterns that you can clone among commands. You just have to type, like one command you've got a pattern, and then CDK deploy. And you'll have something working. >> Okay so what do you do day-to-day? You sort of, you evangelize folks to come in and get trained? Is there just like a backlog of people that want your time? How do you manage that? >> So I try to be the place that I'm needed the most based on impact of the business. And that's why I try to go in. Liberty split up into different areas and I try to go into those areas, understand where they are versus where they need to be. And then if I can do that across everywhere, you can see the common thesis. And then I can see where I can have the most impact across the board instead of focusing on one micro place. So there's a variety of tools and techniques that I would do, you know, to go through that but that's the crux of it. >> So you look at your business across the portfolio, so you have portfolio view. And then you do a gap analysis essentially, say "Okay, where can I approach this framework and technology from a developer standpoint, add value? >> Yeah like I could go into every single team with every single project, draw it all out and like, what we call Wardley map, and then you can draw a line and then say "Everything blue in this line is undifferentiated, heavy-lifted. I want you to migrate that. And here's how you're going to do it I've already built the tools for that." And that's how we can drive those conversations. >> So, you know, it's funny, I spent a lot of time in the insurance business not in the business but consulting with heads of application development and looking at portfolios. And you know, they did their thing. But you know, a lot of people sort of question, "Can developers in an insurance company actually become cool Cloud native developers?" You're doing it, right? So that's going to be an amazing transformation for your colleagues and your industry. And it's happening as we look around here (indistinct) >> And that's the thing, in Liberty I'm not the only one. So there's Tommy Gloklin, he's an AWS hero, and there's Diali Mikan, who's an AWS hero. And Diali is in Workgrid but we're still all the same family. >> So what does it mean to be an AWS hero? >> Yeah so this is something that AWS has to offer you to join. So basically, it's about impacting the community. It's not... There's not like a checklist of items you can go through and you're hero. It's you have to be nominated internally through AWS, and then you have to have the right intentions. And yeah, just follow through. >> Dave: That's awesome. Yeah so our producer, Lynette, is looking for an Irish limerick. You know, every, say I'm half Irish is through my marriage. Dad, you didn't know that, did you? And every year we have a St Patrick's Day party and my daughter comes up with limericks. So I don't know, if you have one that you want to share. If you don't, that's fine. >> I have no limericks for now. I'm so sorry. (laughing) >> There once was a producer from, where are you from? (laughing) So where do you want to take this, Matt? What's your future look like with this program? >> So right now, today, I actually launched a book called the CDK book. >> Dave: Really? Awesome. >> Yeah So me and three other heroes got together and put everything we know about CDK and distilled it into one book. But the... I mean there's two sides, there's inside Liberty. The goal as I've mentioned is to get our developers to the point that they're talking about real insurance problems rather than tech. And then outside Liberty in the community the goal is things like CDK Day, which is a global conference that I created and run. And I want to just grow those farther and farther throughout the world so that eventually we can start learning you know, cross business, cross market, cross the main instead of just internally one company. >> It's impressive how tuned in you are to the business. Do you feel like the Cloud almost forces that alignment? >> It does. It definitely does. Because when you move quickly, you need to understand what you're doing. You can't bluff almost, you know. Like everything you're building you're demonstrating that every two weeks or faster. So you need to know the business to do it. >> Well, Matt, congratulations on all the great work that you've done and the keynote this morning. You know, true tech hero. We really appreciate your time coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, for having me. >> Our pleasure. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE at AWS re:Invent. We are the leader global tech coverage. We'll be right back. (light upbeat music)

>>Mhm >>Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards And I'm delighted to introduce our next guests. They are chris Saks Ceo of think stack and Michael Matthews President Ceo at mutual Credit Union. I'm your host for the cube Natalie. Ehrlich of course. And we're going to highlight the most impactful nonprofit partner award. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thank you so much for having us. >>Terrific. Well delighted for you to be here. And Michael, I'd love to start with you. How did you figure out that cloud technology was critical to the future of mutual credit union? >>It's kind of by chance, Natalie, we're sitting down, we're looking at uh, racks of equipment in our I. T. Room and trying to keep everything up to date, um software updated, become a full time job and all of my staff and sat around and it come to a point where we were spending more time keeping upgrades, keeping servers upgraded. And we asked we reached out the things that they were a network provider at the time and we said, hey, whatever, what are our options? And they came back with several options and one of them was a W. S. And we explored it and uh we've not looked back. >>Terrific. Well, can you explain in further detail how you identified some of the gaps and what stood out to you about think stack, how this uh collaboration happened specifically? >>Well, some of the major gaps that you have is, you know, we're in Vicksburg Mississippi and I would say it's probably not the I. T mecca of the United States and staffing. What was a huge requirement for us if you're gonna make a move such as this, you've got to have the staffing and then along with the staffing is okay if you go out and we hire all these individuals to help help with this journey, are they going to become bored and you know, if we uh personally, if if I asked think stack, they would say, oh yes, don't do that hire us, but that's their job there, there there are parker vendor and so we went out, we asked other vendors that we use and what are the chances of us doing this and it was slim to none. And this type of technology you want, somebody who you can call and and all honesty, I want to be able to call chris and say chris, I'm having a problem versus, you know, one of my team called me and say we're having a problem, I'd rather call it and I love the vendor relationship. It has worked out well. Our major gaps in staffing though, Natalie >>what about staffing? >>That was our major gap. >>Oh God, it got it. Well, chris let's move on to you now. I'd love it if you could explain, you know, in some detail for our audience about the methodology of your company and also how you help your clients visualize their transformation processes. >>Yeah, for sure. Thanks Natalie. So we work with credit unions around the country and many of them are facing similar challenges to Michael at mutual. And in addition to staffing, they're often challenged with just the uncertain future of technology and that can include things like hurricanes, wildfires, various different disasters, pandemics and having to work remotely. But it also includes all of the opportunities that exist in transformative technologies for credit union. They need to keep pace with organizations like Robin Hood and stash and some of these other organizations that are providing cutting edge mobile apps and technology to their customers. And so how do you as an organization generally, that's a small nonprofit organization. How do you build the technology that will allow you to have a foundation to respond and react to whatever the world happens to throw actually, be that an opportunity to take advantage of for growth or some kind of risk from a cyber attack to a natural disaster. So what we try to do with our clients is take a very human centered approach first. And the idea behind that is to not walk in the door and talk about all the wonderful benefits of AWS or any other particular technology, but rather look at What do you expect. So if you take Michael, for example, you know, sitting down with him and trying to look out 10 years, what do you expect the industry to look like? What do you expect your organization to look like in? What goals do you have as a credit? You need to take advantage of those opportunities and to mitigate those risks. Once you identify those business needs, we can start looking at the humans that are involved in that experience. And so that would obviously be the employees and partners and vendors that support and make up the team at the credit union. And then obviously it's their current members and then any other members that they want to attract. And so you have to look at both sides of this. How how do you work securely efficiently? Um, as an employee on the flip side, how do you serve your members as well as you can serve them with cutting edge technology with technology that's always up and available. And then obviously with, with utmost security. So as we identify and build that picture, uh, we we generally do that with stick figures Natalie so we try to go in and and you know take um different personas and we use journey mapping and we use strategic foresight and various other exercise that help us uh literally paint a picture. Um and then from there we kind of back into that and say okay in order for you to accomplish these things into Have the organization that you want to have the next 10 years, what is your technology foundation and footprint need to look like to support that. And that's where we start to then back into that design which typically would include some type of public cloud services like AWS among other technologies from a cyber security perspective to build out that foundation and then allow them To respond and react to whatever the world throws at him over the next 10 years. >>Terrific. Well Michael would love to get your insight. How did you experience that human centered design focus, that think stack uh you know, is known for >>I think that's what says things take apart. You know, we there's numerous vendors you can go direct, there's there's plenty of software, there's plenty of technology out there you can buy. And as a credit union we can go out, we can just about get anything we wanted. But when we have a problem that we're trying to solve, it's not about that, it's about sitting down with chris his team and saying chris this this is a problem. We recently had one in password management, but we just this is a problem we're having. How do we solve this problem? And so the focus is not about trying to sell you another software. The focus is about solving the problem and having your staff and your team work more efficiently and effectively at their task. At the end of the day, you know, we're not arty people were in the financial service business. We rely on the solutions that we have to to help us do our jobs better and serve our members more effectively. >>Yeah, well, chris uh, you know, from your perspective, obviously human centered designed a really big component of your business, but what other key feature set your business apart from the competitive landscape? >>So I think the human centered design bleeds into another area that we really pride ourselves on, which is which is education and what I will call plain talk. So again, as Michael said, these organizations are our financial services, they're not technology experts, so you need to be able to communicate to those teams, those boards of directors, executive teams in a way that they can understand, and it can be uh somewhat difficult to talk about complex technical problems, um but when you boil it down back to that experience level, or you boil it down to a picture, it becomes a little easier to talk about. And what we want to be able to do as a partner is make sure our clients have confidence in the services or the products that they're purchasing, that they understand. How is this investment going to impact our credit union? How is this going to impact our members? And is this the right investment? It investments are, are significant. So we need to make sure that both parties understand the expectations of that investment and why they're doing that. So we take a lot of pride in the education and then probably the biggest piece uh and you know, it's one of those things that can be unappreciated, but its cybersecurity building, our infrastructure's with the tools and the processes and and the techniques so that everyone stays secure. I can tell you that there is nothing that would derail a digital transformation of an organization faster than a breach. So it's very important for us to make sure that those organizations, that everything that we do as fun as it is to talk about transformational technology equally as important that everything stays secure as we do it. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Certainly cybersecurity going to be a top uh topic for 2021 and beyond. Now, Michael, I'd like to move to you um what were the expected and unexpected business outcomes as a result of this partnership? >>Well, now we we we expected to have issues in the transition, which we really didn't um, I'll be honest with you, we we expected to have failures of servers. We expected stuff not to work because we were told by some of our other vendors that this will not work in a W S. Um and we were very surprised that most everything worked on AWS and it worked even better. Um some of the unexpected. So one of the main drivers of us moving to AWS was, I told you we had were limited on Rackspace I T room is when we want to implement a new service today, everything requires its own server. So everything needs an independent service, virtual server or physical server. We did not know how fast that could be done. So we would send a ticket in uh and we would say, hey, we need a new server here. The specs we're putting on this vendor, this is our time frame and we will get an email back the next morning. The servers ready to go where before? We weren't we didn't have that. That that was not an option. The main delay for new projects was to build up time and we weren't expecting that speech. No longer was that we all we expected that hey, we're not in a rush, but it'll be at least three months. And so now the team has to be ready to go as soon as you send the request in that we need this server is done uh and its speed up, speed up our time from uh, the idea our concept to going live with projects and we weren't that was something we had to get adjusted to. >>Yeah. And following up on that. What were some of the rational as well as the emotional impacts as a result of this collaboration? >>All right too. Two things and I don't know if they meet their, meet your that answer your question directly. But so one item we had in in a call, it's been several weeks back is when is the last time that anyone had to call it? Said, hey, I'm not working. My my can't access the server or I can complete dysfunction. And it's not been that way. We we've seen significantly improved up time, not only externally for our members who are logging in to do home banking or any other, any other feature, but internally for our staff we saw and I think it's just the entire transformation just made our company more resilient. What that was. I was as the metric we were seeing fewer instances of downtime. If we have downtown now, it's a power. We had an ice storm here in Mississippi, which is rare. Uh and we were down for a day. Um and if you lose internet today at any business you're down um The emotional side of I tell you, and it's been several years back on July four, we had a major major failure and our entire network was down and we this is prior to us moving to AWS and I'll just tell you I go home at night, this is the peace of mind that you can't put a dollar value on. I go home at night. And the last thing I'm worried about is my I. T. Network. I'm not worried about up time, I'm not worried about members, you know, going on facebook or any other social media and saying hey we can't we can't access your site what's going on and we don't have that anymore. And you know, I'm sure we could have had it any other way. But I leave that to the process of us moving from an in house holding everything on premise to moving to AWS, not only did it want to improve the results of those servers were able to back up to do different things, but it is to improve the overall working, working the functionality of our network. And I like I said I you can't put a dollar on this peace of mind and that is something I don't think there's any metric out there. You can measure, you can't measure that, but you know me and my team, we see it all the time. So >>Yeah, I agree, a peace of mind is certainly a priceless now Chris Let's move to you if you could outline to our audience some of the solutions that you provide, some of your other clients as well. Just give us a fuller picture of the services that you provide. Let's perhaps talk about, you know, 24/7 socks um services as well as data loss prevention or anything else that you think would be of interest to our audience? >>Yeah, for sure. So so obviously we I like to think of us like we design so we come in and we like to help you design and and figure out what your network needs to look like. That's not only your server and production network but also routing, switching. So Land Win S T Win various other networking projects equally. It's important that you can access the cloud as it is to move to the cloud, help with with productivity suite collaboration tools. Um and then finally, cyber security is a big part of that as well. So we try to come in and and look at all those things on the cybersecurity side. Very similar concept of what we do on the, on the cloud side, which is well design the tools and the infrastructure on the perimeter of the network, the configuration of any cloud environments, um such that they're secure and appropriate for your organization. Uh look at active directory or whatever organizational user management system you have to be using, implement those tools. Um and then as you mentioned, Natalie, we have a 24 x seven socks um with analysts watching that um that are all things that employees watching that board responding and reacting um using our our sin platform. And then we also have a 24 by seven uh network operations center or knocked. Um that is managing both the on site uh tools and network as well as any cloud uh networks that that they may have, keeping them up to date, doing all the routine maintenance, I will say from a cyber security perspective while it's not called the sock, the knock is just as important for cybersecurity as is the knock because we see that many cybersecurity attacks are often just taking advantage of systems that are not kept up to date. So the knock and that preventative maintenance is so important. So we do that for a lot of our clients. Some people pick and choose certain features. Some people use all of our services. >>Yeah. Terrific. Is that what you mean by security that's made to order? >>Yeah, exactly. Um you know, I think that's true of all technology. Um the biggest thing that we can do his look at the systems that you have during that design phase, we not only look at what technology should be should you be using, but also we take an assessment of your current team, What talent does your team have and where can we fill gaps if you have people that are doing security really well or you're doing preventative maintenance or some of these features? Uh Certainly you should keep that in house and we'll try to build services around those individuals that you have so that you're utilizing your talent to the best of your abilities and we're really fitting in um where you need us. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, um you know, Michael, I'd like to shift to you now. What do you think will be the broader impact, you know, for the credit union industry? If others are not, you know, adopting the same kind of technologies um you know, to secure their cloud strategies. Mhm. >>I think whether credit unions want to or not, they're moving to the cloud. Um Most of our newest vendors are all cloud based. Um And so yes, he's either do it now or do it later. Which one do you want to be? And I do think that you're going to see more and more larger credit unions begin to move and it's scalable. It's more up time. It's easier to back up. A lot of people are hesitant. They don't want to take their information and move it out of town. They try to find a local data center are somewhere secure. And, and we looked at is what's the difference? You know, we, we we don't have latency issues with internet and fiber today. And so what is the difference of movement out of town and move to AWS by moving out of town? I still on the servers. I still leased the space. I still have to go over there. We have to have somebody there at all the time. And I'll be honest with you, I look at AWS as a trusted partner versus trying someone and then, and then it's not working locally and there's a lot of data centers you can, you can move to um I think I think it's going to come to the industry one way or the other. >>Yeah. Well, Terrific. Do you have any insight or you know, perhaps advice for another credit union who will, you know, like to take the next step? But, you know, as you mentioned, maybe a bit hesitant, >>I think doing your homework on it and looking at it as a, as a viable option is the first step. I know when I took it to my board and I talked about this um with chris and several people have so we we we talk about these things like the cloud, like it's this magical space and and our data is out there in Netherland and who knows where our data is. But when you break it down, you say, I have a East Coast data center and I have a West Coast data center. These are physical spaces where my dad is higher is held. Um I think it makes people think about a little differently. And and so when when you're if you're thinking about moving, if your if your in house today and you're thinking about how I'm gonna start outsourcing evaluate the cost, what are your ongoing cost, You know, who's gonna service you, Who's going to provide that service? And we've looked at other vendors over the years and I'll tell you, chris and his team have something unique that I found. Um I found very desirable in our situation is at our size and we're just under $300 million credit union. I don't think we have major projects that are too complicated to chris we're still, we're one of his better customers. I assume, chris me tell you something different in a minute, but we're not just a number, so I wouldn't go into a cube. You know, everybody knows each other. We're both small enough companies to where they're getting a lot bigger than we are now, but they're both small of companies where we're still, we we mean something to them, they care about moving to start versus just checking the box off. And so that's that's been our journey so far. Mhm. >>Yeah. Well, um, so, chris, uh, you know, first I want to know if Michael is one of your better customers, but uh, you know, really what I would I would really like to know is um, you know, what is your like, big sales pitch to? You know, as I mentioned to Michael, just some of those companies that are a little bit hesitant, a little bit on the edge. >>Michael is our best client of course because he's here doing this interview with us. No, um, you know, that that's something for us that are those, those human connections are, are, are so important and we do get very invested with any of the clients that we work with. But, um, in, in terms of the industry, I think Michael started to say at the beginning, which is, you're already there. We hear a lot of times from folks that they, I can't move to the cloud that the examiners or that the regulations do not allow them to be there. And that's, that's not true. Um, so what we're trying to do in partnership with KWS is educate the marketplaces as well as we can. Um, one of the biggest things that the cloud offers is this idea of flexibility and nimbleness and you know, unfortunately, I think Covid taught us that lesson, but there's, there's other lessons out there. I don't want to harp on Covid, I feel like that's all we talk about. Um, but if you look at any opportunity, whether it's a I machine learning, um, you know, Blockchain, pick the next technology, right? The reality is, none of us can really tell you where you're going to be in two years, maybe one year, three years, right? Like can you truly sit down after the past three years and tell me that you with no uncertainty, can tell me where your organization is going to be. And the reality is if you build your own data center right now, you have to make that guess Because you have to build something and designed for something and if you're making that investment, then you're doing that for the next probably 5-7 years. Whereas if you move to amazon you have the flexibility, whether that's scaling your organization up quickly, whether that's moving to the cloud, whether that's leveraging one of these technologies I just mentioned or in some cases even scaling back because things have hit a recession, we don't know what the future holds. But if you're in an environment like AWS, then you have the scalability and the flexibility to be able to move and pivot with that. And if you build your own and you happen to pick the wrong future, then then you could be in a bind and you've created your own limitations because you've decided to build for yourself. And I think that's the biggest thing is you can't build for yourself. You have to be flexible in this environment. That is that is the key. And the organizations that are flexible are the ones that are going to survive and thrive through all this uncertainty. Yeah. >>Well, really excellent point there. I totally agree with you. Wonderful to have you on our program. That was chris Saks Ceo of think stack as well as Michael Matthews, the president and Ceo at Mutual Credit Union. Thank you gentlemen for joining the show. Thanks so much. And that's all for this session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie or like thanks for >>watching. Mm.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a CUBE conversation. Always love when we can dig into practitioner discussions, and one of the editorial themes I've been really looking into in 2020 has been discussion of server lists. So really excited to welcome to the program, Dave Anderson, he is director of technology at Liberty Mutual, coming to me from Ireland. Dave, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, delighted to be here. >> All right, so I think most of our audience is probably familiar with Liberty Mutual. You work in the software group, Liberty IT, as part of Liberty Mutual. If you could just start us off, give us a little bit about your background, and your group's role inside the organization. >> Sure, Liberty IT started 20 years ago as really sort of an internal software host. Part of the Liberty Mutual group, we're part of Liberty Mutual Technologies. So we kind of work across all the markets in Liberty Mutual and all the kind of global locations. My role as director of technology is really think about what's the technical direction of Liberty IT? I can lead the architects with my group and really thinking about global architecture of Liberty Mutual and how can we provide business value in the mission going forward. >> Excellent, so Dave I guess what is the just kind of overall business and IT relationship? When I think of companies like yours, usually MNA comes in their growth expansions and digital transformation's been one of those buzzword discussions. But absolutely you need to be close to your customers there's lots of services that you need to provide online. How are some of those overall dynamic impacting how IT is supporting the business? >> That's a great question Stu. I mean technology has always been a key differentiator in Liberty Mutual. Even as my group was setup, like I said 20 years ago. It was always seen as a differentiator as something that we can be very good at. We've always been quite close to be in the cutting edge of technology. Many companies would say, "We're not an insurance company, we're a technology company that sells insurance." We are an insurance company, that's very important but we also need to understand that using the latest technology i.e. the cloud providers, really helps us deliver value to our business partners and customers. It is critical that we have a very tight partnership with our business partner. >> Excellent so yeah 20 years, a lot has changed in that time. Give us a little bit if you can, share a snapshot of where you are kind of in the cloud discussion. And what are the relationships between kind of the infrastructure side of the team and the development side of the team? And excepting that'll lead us forward to the server discussion. >> Sure I mean I joined Liberty about 12 years ago, 13 years ago and I actually started in one of the digital channels, that existence of digital channels. And probably almost 10 years ago our CEO James McGlannan quite a visionary, started kind of pressing the public cloud agenda and we started discussing public cloud as a potential future. It was a really exciting time. Cause I think the infrastructure development we all are in, gosh what's the possibilities of public cloud. And as you know the cloud itself it probably changes every year, it's redefined, there's new capabilities. I'm not sure we could envisage where we are today back when we started that conversation. Like every large enterprise, the initial conversation's around how do we enable this? How do we make this safe? How do we protect our data? All the usual kind of questions you would have. But in a way we kind of really joined together the very different departments. We thought, well how do we move the enterprise forward? And as well I mean we want to get a global capability for cloud was very important. And bringing up the velocity that we can deliver value quickly to our business partners. We didn't do it for technology's sake we did it to contribute real value for the business. And one of the really interesting things that we talked about is we shied away from counting how many virtual machines do we have in the cloud. That wasn't really a good metric for us. How are we delivering value to your business partners? That was kind of the metric that we chased and continue to chase. >> Well that's excellent how you kind of laid that out. I'm wondering if you could help extend that and bring us into where serverless fit into that discussion. I loved how you say it's not about number of VM's or the new shiny thing. So, what was it that led to your first use of serverless? And bring us a little bit along that journey that you've been going through. >> Sure, well one of the things that I've always found critical working in technology is that curiosity. But in a search for what's next. So, within micro IOS charts my people will say, "Where do we need to get to? What is 3 to 5 years out?" And we've a lot of really fantastic peers right across Liberty Mutual. Bright, open minded, they can think ahead. So one of my team was at I think it was re:Invent in I think it was 2013, where the launched Lambda for 2014. And each my crew were excited. They can build their first small application. It was actually a document generation. I think they were using some propriety systems. So they built a document generation solution. I couldn't believe the amount of ROM cost that was saved. It probably knocked something like 97% off the cost. Couldn't believe it. And we started saying, "Wow this is potential." But back then, again 5 or 6 years ago the stack was very immature. There was a lot of things you needed to figure out. Like the observability, the developer environment. There's a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't quite right. So it's something that we shared to our peers across the organization. We talked about it. We really started to kind of think, "Well this is interesting, this idea of serverless or manage servers." It started to really change how we thought and it really started to make the concept of a cloud native application very real. Cause we started to think of cloud native architecture loaded into application architecture. And that started to really flip how we thought. So it's just been a real journey these past couple of years. And a big thing for me is we started with engineers thinking of cloud as a mindset not necessarily as a platform. That opened the door to a lot of possibilities. >> Yeah, that's really interesting that you said that. Often times we say cloud is an operational model not a physical location. Are you using multiple clouds today? >> Yes, we probably tend to have a multi cloud strategy. And really to be very clear, serverless for us it's not just functions of service. Its not saying, "We're just using kind of something like Lambda." It's really about that idea using managed service. Thinking about evolution of architecture. How can we kind of try and cut out anything that is actually not differentiating? There's a great term which I always like is the stack policy is sometimes a technology companies we get obsessed by the stack. We think that the piece near the customer is quite easy. But think from the technology perspective we need to think about, we can deliver the most value by making the customer experience kind of best. And it can be even ramp the stack from whoever we need. >> Yeah, no, its a fascinating discussion. I've seen even today. You say serverless functions as a service. A lot of it is I don't want the developer to have to think about those underlying layer. Which reminds me of the discussion we've been having about platform as a service for more than a decade but PaaS was supposed to be platform independent. So I could have my code where ever it goes. Serverless today, right now we've talked about Lambda, Amazon there's certain things that I could only do on Amazon. There are discussions and working groups and the cloud data computing foundation. Working on how we can do serverless functions as a service that could expand between multiple clouds or use the same sort of code. So how do you look at that space? You talk about cloud native. How do you make sure that you're leveraging the technologies of the specific cloud but I guess I'll throw out not being locked into any one provider? >> I think about it for me it starts with the empowerment of the engineering team. We talk about a serverless first strategy that means that we've got the capability to build anything you need to. But to rent where you can. We had a fascinating story one of our best stories is a company called Workgrid. Workgrid Software is one of the companies that we spun out of Liberty Mutual. That was a project that we had an internal digital assistant that we built with some of our teams, it'd be back 4, 5 years ago. And our CEO James McGlannan decided to fund that as a kind of a startup. They broke off around 3 years ago and that initial team had 4 people in that engineering team. So they kind of decided that they would be serverless first in their approach. They didn't have time to think about operability or rights for portability. They had to realize business value really quickly. So they took a evolutionary architectural approach which meant they kept incrementing and iterating delivering value where possible. What's the next best thing that they can build to deliver value to the customer? So when you think in that regard, if you ever come to an Amazon of a grid, no one way doors, keep the two way doors. Don't lock yourself into anything. Make decisions that you can always build upon. So with that kind of constant iterative work our teams and that's serverless first strategy. It means that when you do rent the service if you need to change to another service it's just a matter of if you've your boundaries set up practically, it's very easy to get out of that. You dig yourself in deep to something, that's the difference. So I think there's an engineering mindset and culture that we certainly have proudness in our teams. But they kind of go fast, focus on business value and try and be sort cloud native in their outlook. >> Excellent, yeah, I just heard Andy Jassy in the AWS Summit online talking about those one way door. So sounds like from your standpoint, serverless is a two-way door for architecting in your mindset? >> Absolutely, I mean I think really for me it brings architecture back into the team. It's one of the really nice things is if your team use managed services that focus is on business value. If our infrastructure is set up to support that type of team then you have minimal hand offs within the team. Through the single team, its their job to create value, engineer the solution, make sure the security is good enough, build the operation, the visibility it's all contained within one team. We get a huge responsibility from that one team. As an engineer that is super powerful, super huge autonomy. So we can talk with the serverless engineer and for me it's been absolutely fascinating to see teams come into this environment and once they understand that event driven way of creating their systems. And I use the words systems rather than applications to create event driven systems they're constantly building upon. It's just fascinating to see where they go. You start to see the creativity and innovation of the engineers. So its truly unbelievable to watch. They're really very cool. >> Dave, I'm curious when you look at the application portfolio that your team manages, how do you decide what goes serverless? Is it new development all goes serverless? Has there been a migration? How do you look at the overall application portfolio that you have? >> It kind of depends I suppose on, I'm not going to sit here and say that we're going to refactor everything to serverless. I think when you do a migration there's usually six or seven paths you can go down and you do what's best for the business. But for new development, it's definitely interesting we haven't found many used cases that are really a bad fit. It's a spectrum we may decide what different servers to use. We built a system last year which was absolutely fascinating to see. It's like a a financial aggregation system where we do a lot of our accounting. So it was kind of serverless ETL, we're trying to do like an end of month batch system to detect a lot accounts from different countries and kind of pipe them into a kind of general ledger. Not something I would've thought about for serverless, to be honest. But then when you think about it and some of our engineering leads they have put this together. They can design this fantastic system using serverless workflows. Cause you're taking lots of various different types of data orchestrated in a single destination. And we put live in that this year and I think one of the monthly ends that they recently ran I think they ran something like 100 million transactions. Relatively low cost and of course being a month end system the rest of the months there's zero cost. You don't pay for idle. We only actually pay for wireless roaming in that month end process for maybe like FDRs or something. >> Dave, you talked about the early days 2014 when Lambda was announced, re:Invent, when you first started using it in the first year or so. There's the maturity of that ecosystem solutions set. Where do you see things now? What's working well? What's on your wishlist? Kind of mature or increase overall functionality to help? >> I think that the developer environment and developer experience is a big part. One of the key messages in trying to kind of get into our culture is code is a liability. It's not an asset. If you have a bunch of engineers writing lots of code that in fact is a liability. There's no business asset in that. The asset is in the system that you create. Trying to get engineers into the mindset to write less code and they actually engineer systems. So one of the things we've been trying to do is maybe using patterns as building blocks. People became kind of like a Lego building block way of creating their systems. Piecing somethings like CDK code development kit patterns. Using the world architect process to make sure that teams are looking after their cost, their security, their performance, their liability, and their kind of optimizations. Some of those things are really important in that whole ownership of an operational view of their systems. And also even things like observability. When you create a system with a lot of events laying around it starts getting complex. But then if you do it correctly you can start to layer on well, what better insights can we build on top of the system? So it's really opening up teams a different way of working. And then of course there's lots of operational challenges when you get into more complex environment. So as we often say, it's not easier, different, built difficulty building systems, but it's different, that's what's definitely easier but better. >> All right, how about anything that you're looking out towards the future? You talked about the early days when you look at these and while you're not necessarily throwing the latest shiny thing into production, there's that curiosity. So what's exciting you now? Anything else kind of looking forward that you prepare? >> I think one of the fantastic success stories we've had is with a project we call Virtual Assistant. And really to answer your question, its about how teams can properly work at MVP. So, one of the things that we really find fascinating is when you put a good engineering team. And I mean a team who you're really solid engineers you then layer on the cloud and security best practices and verification. We then put them in a coded serverless environment with real business problem. They then create a MVP. You're virtual assistant in, raises an MVP. So if you call into a call center and you have a fairly straightforward request, like if you have an auto claim you might say, "Well when can I pick up my ramp bill?" If you already done your claim. We have an NLP a natural language assistant that can help you with that conversation. So when you start with an MVP system like that you can start them off at a fairly small traffic, until you actually tune that until it's kind of perfect. And then you gradually scale up and add on other data driven potential AI services, integrations to that. So I think when you start to take the MVP approach, and have a very, very novel solution see what that's like in the wild and then start to scale out. We scale that system for taking maybe 30 calls maybe taking about a quarter on your calls. It's fantastic how you can start to scale these system up. Well I think what I'm really looking for is more kind of support to see how we can you know, it's the art of the possible. How can we use this skillset and this serverless mindset to create really fascinating business applications. Because when you get under that kind of creative conversation with business partners, I mean they don't want to hear about Lambda or events or observability. They want to say, "Well, what can I do with AI? What can I do with Voice, what can I do with Vision?" So we start to open up really fantastic conversations like that. So I'd like to see more of that, but in a creative product development. >> Excellent, well yeah Dave, so important that you brought back as to how IT in the business. Working together, it's not about the technical widget or knobs or anything. But the services and the value that ultimately you can provide for the business and the impact that has on your ultimate end customer. All right, Dave, thanks so much. Real pleasure having a chat with you. >> Thanks Stu really appreciate it, thank you. >> All right, be sure to check out theCUBE.net. Lots of backgrounds, if you go hit the search, you can actually type serverless, find out more about what we've been covering as well as what events we will be at in the future. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCube. (gentle music)

>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering get lab commit 20, 20 Raji you buy get lab. >>Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the cubes coverage of get lab commit 2020. We're here in San Francisco. It's a little bit chilly but uh, my first guests, uh, on the program are used to the weather cause they're coming to us from Wisconsin. Uh, both from Northwestern mutual, uh, sitting to my left here is Kyle person who is a senior engineer and sitting to his left is Sean who is also a senior engineer. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Alright. We thought, you know, both of us coming from colder climates that may be coming to San Francisco would be a little warmer, but they have hand warmers, they have warm drinks and it is the warmth of the community that will warm our innards. I'm short right there. It says get warm. That's what we're here to do. All right, Kyle, let's start with you. Northwestern mutual. I think most people are familiar with the organization, but give us a little bit of a, you know, how people should think of Northwestern mutual in 2020 and, uh, your roles. >>Yeah. So obviously we mean we're a large insurance company but also into financial services and products and we're really trying to become more of a digital company as well. We think that that's going to be a differentiator in the marketplace. You know, having apps that our customers can interact with, um, trying to speed up underwriting, things like that. So we're really just trying to be a technology company as much of an insurance company. Okay, >>great. And Sean, I understand you're, you're on the same team as Kyle helping you along with that digital transformation that that's been all the buzz for the last couple of years. Yeah. He can't get rid of me. We flew, you know, 1200 miles and I'm still sitting next to, uh, but yeah, at Northwestern mutual, I mean, going back a number of years now, the, the company started down this path of doing a digital transformation where we wanted to be, you know, a software company that is providing financial service and financial stability for our clients. So it was a big shift that we, we started, we knew we needed to modernize everything. So we started down that path. Great. So we had that. So Kyle, maybe if you, it can, you know, when did get lab enter the picture, what was kind of the initial use case and, uh, let's, let's go from there. >>Yeah, it was before my time. I'm, Chad has been there for a long time. Most of the ride, but uh, yeah, it's been several years and it's been, uh, you know, starting out with SCM, moving into CEI and then, you know, adopted sustainer journey that you hear about even in the keynote today. That's pretty much how we charted our course. Okay. >>So Sean, you've been there since the beginning of a, uh, to get lab usage? Pretty much it, it showed up a couple months before I got there. But, uh, going back to your early mid 22, yeah, 2015, uh, we had kind of a more of a pilot group of engineers that were, were starting out, you know, to get us down this path to where we wanted to go and they needed a new tool, something that worked better than what we currently had at an M and a, they settled on, on get lab because it provided, you know, one being open source was a huge selling point for us. Um, and it was just ever-growing. So it allowed our developers to really get going and get going much faster. Okay, great. And in the keynote, okay, Kyle, they were talking about how it's not just about the dev, the second the ops, but really not allowing everybody into the same tooling, even marketing and finance. What's kind of the breadth of the organization is it is mostly devs that dev and ops does security, you know, who, who's involved in using this tooling. >>It's everybody. We're a, we're figuring out our, you know, everyone's kinda got their own spin on things. So we're in that, um, classic position where I think we have the tooling sprawl that everyone talks about and we're, we're constantly evaluating, you know, how does Gilad fit into that picture? What do we bolt on? You know, we have the luxury of being able to integrate with other things as well. But then if certainly if we can get an economy of scale where we can just use get lab, it's to provide that seamless interface. That's something we always look to do too. All right. >>So Sean, my understanding is a NM is also using Coubernetties and that's something that you're involved in. So very money you bring us in people, you know, sometimes get misconstrued as to the scope and the purpose of, of Kubernetes. We've been at the cube con cloud date of con for a number of years, but uh, why don't you set the stage for us and kind of walk us through the, the what and the why of Kubernetes? Yeah. For us at least being able to leverage something like Kubernetes, which when you really back out and you know, do the 10,000 foot view, it's container management and being able to go into a more modern architecture. We're leveraging containers for pretty much whatever we can, or at least what makes sense. Um, and that's kind of how we started down the path with get lab moving into Kubernetes. You know, we were, we were trying to figure out like, where do we want to go so, you know, let's not just push the boat out a little, let's drop, kick the boat off the end of the pier and see where we end up. >>So we started working down that path of deploying get lab into Kubernetes cause it allowed us to easily expand and make the application highly available. So even if some easies go down in AWS, which knock on wood never happens. Uh, we're still good to go. Our users are, wouldn't even notice. Okay. Um, so you mentioned AWS. Is that your primary cloud, your only cloud? What, what is your cloud situation? Yeah, that's, that's a Northwestern mutual is public cloud. Okay, great. And speak a little bit to, you know, Amazon does have plenty of its own tooling. Uh, maybe a little bit about how get lab and, how those fit together for you. Um, well, I mean, we use get lab CIS specifically to be able to provision different services in one, not that we need as long as they fit near within our security requirements. And, you know, everything we do, we get vetted out through our internal processes, but it's really allowed our developers to move forward so much faster. >>You know, it's kind of gone are the days of, let me fill out a request for, you know, X, Y, Z and, you know, wait two as it goes through somebody's work queue and they eventually get around to it. Um, allowing our developers to just, you know, do their commits, get their, you know, peer review and just deploy and provision right away, allows us to get our applications to market just so much faster than even a few years ago. Alright. So Kyle, the two of you are presenting here at the show, uh, you know, we, we love, we heard GitLab talking on stages. You know, customers don't just use it, they commit, they add feedback in and they speak at the show. So maybe speak a little bit of, uh, you know, NMS, you know, involvement as to uh, you know, are you committing code and what, what are you speaking about? >>So we're here to speak about our journey on Kubernetes. I'm trans covering the application side and I'm going to talk about our, our dabble in Kubernetes CII. So we're, we're really looking to, um, we're looking for efficiencies I guess in, in density. That's a primary driver behind trying to explore the trail. But also, um, one of the things I'll talk about in the talk is, is boosting our security posture using Kubernetes. So a lot of times people are using API keys and they're getting stale and not being rotated. Uh, we can do some neat things with Kubernetes and it's native. I am offerings to boost our security posture by moving towards role based access and getting those credentials that are rotating and providing us, uh, you know, non stale sort of authentication credentials, things like that. >>Sean, yeah, pretty much covers it. Uh, uh, and beyond with the CIA, you know, being able to run and get lab itself within Qube and having the different components broken out and we're alive. It's, it, it's enabling us to limit any kind of attack plane that could exist. You know, it's, you have to get through a lot to even get to it. So it's really just been a huge, a huge plus for us. OK. I, I'd love to hear both. Both of you have been to these events a number of times. You're speaking to event. What, what, what's the value of coming to get loud commit? I mean, for me it's a, a huge networking thing and being able to relay our experiences that we've gone through to other people that are out in the community. I mean, I know lots of, you know, everyone wants to see, you know, what can you do in Kubernetes and like, here's some of the things that we've done. >>Here's some of the things that you know, works that didn't work. You know, we would recommend you going this kind of route if we were to start it over again. And beyond that, you know, meeting people from all over the world, like, uh, we were talking with some, uh, some guy, gentleman Nico from white duck who is from Germany. It's not something you get to do, you know, face to face all the time. Alright. Sean, can you share with our audience any of those? You know, if we could do it over again, we'd change something. Is it an organizational thing or technical piece or until don't don't use EFS for getting repo data. It will not end well for you can take away. All right. Kyle, how about you? You've been to a number of these shows, uh, you know, the networking, the piece or you know, what else, what, what, what, what for you personally and for NM, uh, you know, brings you back. >>Yeah. Networking is a big thing. I think it's also getting feedback on, you know, what we're doing. Does it make sense? Just like get lab is throwing things out there early, trying to tighten up that contribution loop. We want to get our ideas out there and then this is an opportunity for people to ask questions about our presentation. If maybe we're off in the wrong direction, maybe we can get that steered back on course. Um, you know, we're just really here to get the feedback. Yeah. I always love talking to people in the financial industry and you talk about open source, you know, if, if you went back, you know, five years ago, you'd probably get a little bit of sideways looks as to wait, you know, you're doing what, um, are we past that? Do do you feel are most people, uh, you know, really understanding where we are with, with cloud and open source in general that it, you know, it makes perfect sense for a financial institution to be part of it. >>I'd say at NM we, we've finally gotten past that curve and now we're, we're trying to, you know, make it even easier for our internal developers to easier participate in open source, you know, their internal products and contribute more to the community. Uh, we've completely done an about face from, you know, probably 15 years ago where it was open source. You wanted to, what to, yeah, let's go. How can we make things better? It's, it's all about, you know, our, our customers. So we want to make sure we create the best product and experience for them. That's awesome. Yeah, there's still some barriers there. I mean, it's all about managing risk, right? So you have to do things diligently and make sure that your bases are covered. And so it's not like it can be a free for all. We have to do our due diligence, but we, you know, we love to contribute. And we love to get up without their there as we can. All right. Well, Kyle and Sean, thank you so much for sharing with our audience. Best of luck with your presentations and, uh, have a great time at the show. Thank you. All right. Uh, thank you to, to NM for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube.

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Good afternoon everyone. You are watching the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Sean Gifford. He is the senior infrastructure administrator, administrator and infrastructure team lead at Illinois mutual. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. Thanks for having me. This is really fun. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about Illinois mutual. >>Sure. So Alou Mutual's a a life insurance company. We sell life insurance Dai and several other insurance products. We've been around for a little over a hundred years now. So, uh, not myself, but uh, you know, the company. Um, and uh, we are based in Peoria, Illinois, uh, about 200 employees. And uh, we're uh, mostly uh, based on one headquarters there with a couple of their uh, uh, one of their, uh, co located dead center. >>And you are a senior infrastructure administrator. Tell us, tell our viewers a little about what you do. >>Sure. So basically a infrastructure admin means you do just about everything now. Just seems that way sometimes. Um, so, uh, my team, uh, handles everything from windows system, ministration, um, individual systems like a, your exchange, SharePoint, you know, things like that that we would use on prem. Um, too. Also outside of the on prem side, any of our cloud management, et cetera. All right, so, so Sean, you know, this shows decades old and started out at the windows administrator and you know, what's now office or O three 65, uh, at its core. Uh, so have you been to the show before or is this your first time? Uh, on one time, watch. Never on before. Okay. So, but you know, I, I'd love just your viewpoint on Microsoft before we get into some of the environments. Cause of that, you know, Microsoft, you know, started out as people knew kind of windows and some of their apps, but now, you know, the sprawling company with, you know, apps everywhere in the cloud, the edge and the data center, uh, you know, such a big footprint is what they do. >>How you personally in Illinois mutual look at Microsoft? Well, Microsoft is definitely a major partner for Illinois mutual. Right. I mean, we are a very big Microsoft shop. Does that mean that everyone, uh, you know, thinks that Microsoft is the best that every product? Of course not, but, uh, they do a lot of things and they do them really well. So I mean, we obviously rely on them not only for our on prem active directory, but then replicating that out to, to as your, um, you know, I mean our email much just people like might not like to admit it is still one of the most essential pieces of the infrastructure. Um, and that's around on exchange. So I mean, honestly, uh, as much as a, you know, people might want to say Cisco networking is like the backbone of the network. Uh, my Microsoft technologies really are kind of the backbone as far as I look at it. >>Okay. So you still have exchange, you know, in your own shop. You haven't made the move. DOE Microsoft pressure in there. >> Yeah, I know, right? Um, so, uh, no. Yeah, we're, we're still on prem. Um, we have our O three 65 account and we're, um, full disclosure. So, you know, I've been in it for 20 some years, but, uh, uh, been into Eleni mutual for about four. When I was in consulting before only mutual. I did a lot of, uh, in a cloud consulting and getting people on. So it felt really weird to me, but that's, uh, you know, coming into Eleanor mutual where, uh, at the time they came on, uh, it was, the cloud in general was like a bad word. Um, so, and getting past that culture-wise has been a little bit of a struggle. >> Oh yeah. I would, I'd love you to just step back for a second. >>You know, you work for a company that's over a hundred years old, uh, so, you know, exchange in cloud and everything like that is, you know, been around for a very short piece of the overall company. So tell us some of the, you know, what are some of the changes, the pressures going on? Oftentimes there's M and a involved in pulling all those things together. So, uh, you know, Illinois mutual as a company, what are the, what are the drivers and stressors on, you know, your, your, your, your organization? >> Yeah, well first and foremost, data security, right? Um, getting it, uh, any data so that it's fully encrypted at rest in transit and all that sort of thing so that, uh, you know, and, and you don't have to worry about it, uh, leaving anywhere once it's on someone else's prem. Right. Um, it has always been a big part of it. >>Um, trust I mean in is really what it just comes down to. Uh, when you, when you're selling life insurance policies that, you know, go for the life of a human being, you know, that's a pretty longterm relationship. And, uh, going with something, uh, especially a technology like that, that is considered as you say, you know, new to the game, uh, has, has been a struggle for sure. I mean, we're, uh, just to give you an idea, we're a still on mainframe and, uh, we have now to be, to be fair, we have a sizable, uh, uh, project for getting, uh, things moved off of the mainframe, but that, you know, is 40 plus years old. Getting, getting that moving, uh, to, you know, try and hop just into the end of the 20th century, let alone the 21st is always a little bit hard. >>So talk about some of the specific challenges of managing legacy infrastructure, managing tape and, and sort of what, what you do as more of a on the Vanguard of technology in terms of how you're leading your organization to make changes that are, that are much needed. >>Yeah. Uh, so yeah, when, when I came in on, in fact until just a few months ago, you bring up the example of tape. I mean, uh, we had been doing tape off to a, on off-prem, a site that, uh, had been just the way they did it, right. And, uh, um, as a joke, when some people an earlier, um, as the new crew came in, uh, one of the things that we instituted is a, uh, that's how we always done it. Jar. Um, and, uh, instead of people having a swear jar, right, they'd have to throw money in a anytime. They didn't say, I can't do it cause that's how we've always done it. And that's always been just that struggle, you know, with tape, you know, why is it that we're sending our tapes, why are we sending tapes at all? But why are we sending them to this place that's a, you know, three miles away from our place and calling that disaster recovery. >>Um, so I, I, that has been one of the major struggles for sure. Um, getting through that. But, uh, I've been really impressed, uh, culture-wise with the fact that, uh, people are really starting to, to get in line with it. You know, they're seeing the, the advantages that we're bringing. Um, w when you have a cloud strategy that's well thought out and, uh, isn't, uh, at least inherently a, you know, tied to a given vendor as your AWS or whoever it might be. Um, and, and you're not making decisions for cloud just for the sake of calling it cloud. It makes a big difference. I think. So, uh, as you, as you started to embrace cloud, uh, how did things like data protection and security, you know, what stayed the same? You know, what, what things did you need to rethink as you roll those out? >>Data protection changes completely, right? Um, first of all, uh, you know, everyone had that, uh, idea that if it's in cloud, of course it's completely protected, right? It's not right. And so getting people to understand that, uh, as they say, Oh yeah, we're going to, you know, do this new sass offering. It's totally, you know, they take care of everything, the applications on them. You don't have to touch it. Right? Well, no, that's not really the case. You know, that they can lose a data just like anybody else. So getting through pieces like that on the, on the cloud side is, has been a struggle. But, uh, getting into just even normal or excuse me, newer, um, on-prem technologies has, has meant changing completely the way we're doing a lot of things. Um, the, uh, it was becoming harder and harder, especially as we moved data sets off of the, uh, uh, mainframe side to keep up with a lot of those replication timeframes and things like that because, uh, it, as you push more data through what is still a small pipe and it's never big enough, um, it, uh, it became everyday nightmares. >>So it's been a struggle. >>So when you are, when you, when you come to the conclusion that you need to make a change and you need to look for other kinds of solutions, how do you go about finding the right vendor for the problem that you're trying to solve? How do you find the best in class? Right. And that's, >>that's been an interesting piece with w with alimony mutual and, and, uh, having spent time at VARs for the first part of my career, I was used to, you know, answering things like RFPs and whatnot. Right. Um, and we don't necessarily do it within an RFP process, but, uh, honestly conventions like this one and stuff is how I like to do it. Um, you know, we get really stuck in the day to day doldrums and stuff like that too, right? As much as you're trying. And your goal might always be to, you know, get things to at least the cutting edge if not the bleeding edge. Uh, you really need to, you know, be at a places where you can learn about new new technologies now. So when it comes to us, we end up finding a lot of our vendors like that. And, uh, you know, cause we don't really want her to necessarily rely on, you know, the sales people or, or even really our, our, you know, sales people from a VAR or anything like that. >>It's about trying to find, uh, that, that third party knowledge to, to really understand what's the best thing for the needs and the, uh, pain points that you're having. And that's Sean, can you bring us in through, can you tell us, you know, which solutions you were, uh, you were deciding between and how you ultimately came to your final decision? Yeah. So, uh, so we looked at, uh, several different vendors. Um, when it came to our, uh, data protection, uh, analysis, we had looked at a beam for awhile. We had looked at rubric. Um, we had, we had looked at, uh, uh, of course, uh, you know, trying to continue things along with our current vendor at the time we should have been con ball. Um, and we did, uh, we did an M U a you right. a utility attribute analysis. Yeah. Uh, and we, uh, set that up and, uh, just tried to really compare and, uh, uh, you know, what are the actual things we really wanted, what were the selection criteria we have and grading each vendor on those things. >>Um, and ultimately that's what it took to be able to get it through to, you know, to our executives and, and whatnot, uh, building an algorithm that, uh, that, that looked at all those pieces and then, you know, as really address the pain points we were having, you know, uh, not just as a Jeep cause yes, as always a big thing. Right. But is it gonna replicate in time? Is it, is it going to, uh, reduce our overhead, uh, that we're in, that we're experiencing right now? Am I going to have to keep on a full time contractor just to, you know, do my data protection. So, all right, so you ended up choosing Cohesity. So what was it about Cohesity that separated it from, uh, from, from all the others? Yeah, so Cohesity, um, I had pretty given up, uh, when I did the analysis I was talking to you about a couple of years ago. >>Um, I looked around and nobody could quite fit the square peg into the round hole that I was trying to make it work. Right? I wanted a lot of things and nobody had exactly what I was looking for. Can we sit? He was the first one that could really do most of what I wanted to do. Uh, as an example. Um, being able to replicate your data, but while keeping it encrypted on both ends and but still having dedupe and compression and all those things built in, into the platform and, and weight, it's actually searchable wallets in those States, right? I can do like a Google type search and be able to find exactly what I'm looking for. Made a huge difference and it cut it down. Uh, you know, time wise, not only on the administrative effort but also when I had to do a restore and we had a major project just a, a month or so ago where, uh, I had my DBA doing a backup, uh, during a rollout. He accidentally set at the backup to go with the wrong side at the wrong data center. Everyone was kind of freaking out, right? What are we gonna do? We restored it across data centers, across the handling, kept within our timeframes. I was, that's the type of thing, type of thing that really makes it different stuff. So, >>so, so talk about some of the results that you've seen since implementing this. >>Yeah, so replication, um, that I brought up a couple of times, but, uh, it was a really big problem that we would take. For instance, um, I'll take SQL as an example, right? Our SQL data, we would do a data mirroring, right? So it replicated across our wind line for that. We would, uh, we would do a, uh, primary storage replication. So in this case, a nimble Sans that would replicate across with snapshots and then our actual data protection. Uh, so the same exact data would have to replicate across one tiny land line three times for every a replication. Um, since putting in Cohesity, we have experienced an actual, I was blown away when we actually calculated the results, but it was actually a four times increase in replication efficiency. Uh, it just allowed us to do a whole lot more without buying more land bandwidth. So this is a big deal for us. >>So, in terms of this show, as you said this, this is really helpful for you to go and meet different kinds of companies that you might not even know exists. There are new entrance all the time. So what are you going to bring back with you when you go back to Illinois mutual next week? What are some of the things that have stuck out to you, resonated most with you? >>Yeah, so I'm, I'm really encouraged and even with just Cohesity, for instance, I've talked to a, I'm actually met up with a couple of the engineers that I've talked with them, um, who had one of them and even put out a, uh, a new, uh, feature request for us. And he was telling me before lunchtime about some new features available that I can start to change up some of my jobs. I've, I'm really excited. I was texting my, my, uh, data protection, uh, you know, secondary admin, uh, uh, you know, texting furiously to them, we can do this. And, you know, I'm really excited about that. But, uh, honestly on the other side, is these your side? I'm, uh, really, uh, excited to learn about some of the things that we can actually implement, uh, even with older infrastructure, uh, in trying to pull some of those things, uh, into a cloud platform in ways that actually make sense and aren't gonna lose us money in the longterm. So I'm happy with that. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. Thank you very much. It's been fun. I'm Rebecca aid for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cube.

>> 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 to the cubes. Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS reinforce Amazon web services. First inaugural conference around Cloud Security. I'm John for your Michael's Day. Volante, our next Katie Jenkins s V P. C. Vice President. See? So, Chief Information Security officer with Liberty Mutual Big Company, Lot of activity insurance. Lot of probably a lot of action on your side. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. So you've been in this job for about a year. Tell us about what's going on in Libya. Means you guys have a large company. 100 plus years old. You're see. So you're in charge. You're running everything. We're gonna security conference. Tell us the reality. What's going on in the real world? >> Yeah, well, this is super exciting. That reinforce, of course, is in Boston. This is Liberty Mutual's hometown assed. You mentioned 107 year old security, not security company >> insurance company. But we're >> doing really cool things in technology and security. Specifically, um, I would say to kind of bring this gathering together. We have a really rich pool of security talent of security and innovators. It really matches up with what what we're doing. So Liberty Mutual has made a very significant commitment to moving to the public cloud for our technology and computing needs. We're in about your three of that journey, maybe 25% of our workload in the public cloud. It's really been a catalyst for not just transforming our technology organisation but transforming the way security does its work in the way security engages with our development community. >> While you're the head honchos, they say there's a C so but you had 20 plus years in cyber security. This is now kind of a new category with reinforced being a branded show over AWS. I see this deserves its own conversation, and industry is a lot of action going on. What is cloud security mean to you? Because this is the focus of this show. It's not just pure clouds, a lot on premise and on cloud interactions with hybrid etcetera. You guys have been doing tons of I t over the generations with Liberty Mutual, but cloud security is the focus. What does that mean? Thio to? You guys have a cyber security standpoint? >> Yeah, um, in a word. Enablement, um, I think that the public cloud offers us, um, really interesting opportunity to reinvent security. Right? So if you think about all of the technologies and processes and many of which were manual over the years, I think we have an opportunity to leverage automation to make our work easier in some ways to to, um, avoid the situation where we have air oversight. Gosh, we encrypted everything, but you know, this set of assets over here, So through using automation and enforcement, it's a new, exciting opportunity to further develop our security capabilities. But also, you know, cloud security at cloud in general has bred a transformation of the way that are practitioners do work through agile. And it means that security has toe no work with our technologists in a different way. >> So you've had a really interesting background. Um you work for a company that does audits. I can infer from that. You've worked for service is company. You work for a technology vendor. You worked as a practitioner. So you've seen it all sides and you know Amazon. It made some comments yesterday that said, Look, the narrative in the security industry has always been fear, fear, fear. And we'd like to put forth forth the narrative. That is about Listen, the state of security is really good and strong. The union is strong and we're gonna work together in a positive message. So my question is, are you an optimist? >> Ah, a reluctant activist. Um, I think the days of having security be something that's fearful, uh are just not not doing us any any any justice in that area. I mean, security is an area of partnership. There's very little of what we do. Insecurity. It's just done by security practitioners. We need asset managers. We need compliance people. We need the privacy team. We need our auditors way. Need procurement. I mean, there's just so many different parties involved in security that if we're just instilling fear and everyone, I think it'll be difficult for us tow. Get that partnership and we need Thio. Empower people, right. We need Thio. Both empower our developers to do their work in a secure manner and we have to empower our whole workforce and our trusted third parties to make good decisions. We're educating them on how to prevent phishing attacks were doing all sorts of kind of culture based initiatives, recognizing that if it's just the security folks doing security, we're gonna have a big gap. >> One of the things that we were discussing a lot of other C. So So we've been talking privately. Off the record in the hallways and private briefings is the common theme of integration as a big part of dealing with ecosystem, either suppliers and or different teams within their different pillars of how they're organized internally and externally, and then also reducing the number of security vendors that they've been buying products from to get some also in house coding, teams working more closely on the use cases that matter. So this has become kind of ah, see, So a conversation where what? What is that criteria? How do you figure out who to have a suppliers who's gonna be around for the long haul? We're gonna be that a partnership for the enablement. So rather than having hundreds of vendors, we want to get him down to a handful. Is that something that you think about or is it a trend that you see it's happening now? >> Uh, it is a trend. I think it starts at how we even procure in select our suppliers. I mean, we're really giving a lot of thought to the area of third party risk management. And do we understand not just the elements of cyber risk and engaging with 1/3 party? But but privacy and continuity kind of risk, too. So it starts there. I don't have a sort of fabricated number in terms of I'm trying to go from X number of vendors down toe Why? But I think that there's a very purposeful thought process that we're undergoing to say, Yeah, we recognize and for certain technologies, we want to have different providers to provide some of that redundancy. Let's be smart about them. Let's make sure we really understand where those overlapping capabilities are because we don't want to be wasteful either. Right >> on the span, the question comes up to around Devil's because what we're seeing is the devil ops and security paradigms kind of coming together in terms of the concepts agility. You could do some prototyping, a hackathon do some things and then ultimately trying to get into production or two different animals. So that enablement of doing innovative things, his agility, that that's been a key theme, a positive theme. And the question is, is there a funding model? Doesn't automatically get security funding. And where's the spin that you're spending going up? So all the monetary spend questions come up. >> How do you >> deal with that ballistically? And how do you think about, you know, spend conversation? >> Yeah, um, >> it's a really interesting one, because, of course, expense >> pressures. I'm not immune to those. But I >> also think that we're in a position where, um, our executive leadership team understands the value of the work that we're doing understands the important to our policy holders. So it's less often a need to justify why we need more spend. It's a demonstration of using that spend responsibly and understanding where we might have an uplift from something that we automated to say. Well, now we have these resource is that could be doing something else. >> There's >> always something else and security, right? So if we're committed to re Skilling and making sure that people are evolving the work that they do in the talents that they have to adjust a different kind of >> no rule of thumb per se. It's more of your management recognizes the criticality of it. Therefore, you could make those calls on your own building built in building, >> project tough questions and making >> responsible decisions. But I think it comes down and knowing your technology, >> so the skills gap, obviously a huge challenge in your industry would talk to somebody else, they said. We just can't find people, so we have to bring him in and train them ourselves. We have the homegrown and take the long view. Amazon talks about the shared responsibility model, and a lot of small companies don't really understand that things misunderstood. Obviously, Liberty Mutual gets it. My question is, as you see Amazon focusing on compute in the storage and data base layer, and you guys have the opportunity to focus on other areas that are your responsibility that shared responsibility model. Have you been able to shift? Resource is how have you handled that you retrain people? Has it freed up, not freed up time to do some of those more strategic things that you want to do maybe respond more quickly. Prioritized, better automate, etcetera, etcetera. Can you talk about that from your perspective? >> Yeah. So the shared responsibility model is, uh, you know, I think that's video unimportant speaking point of this whole ecosystem. At the end of the day, Liberty Mutual. Our duty is to protect policyholder data. It doesn't matter. It's in the cloud. If it's in our data, Southers, we have that duty. It's >> on you. >> So I think a lot about the skills that we will need in the future. So I've referenced sort of vaguely that yet. Compliance area is a particularly interesting area where we have opportunities to able to more easily Bingley produced artifacts on our auditors need to really bring automation to a process that just has a very steep history and being manual in nature. So, yeah, I understand that tomorrow we're not gonna ask everyone to make a big switch and I'll become developers. But way do you know plenty of people to this conference and they are participating in the tracks on how to bring of automation to compliance. And I think that's pretty heavily in training opportunities for people. >> How do you look about the vendor lock in conversation because of cloud. The value proposition certainly shifts in the old model was, Oh, you by event supplier and you're in, You're locked in with database or whatever with Cloud. There's a lot of switching costs, opportunities to move around. But people generally settling in on one main cloud and having this may be a hybrid backup cloud or the cloud is the secondary is the focus of the team's How do you view, um, lock And when you deal with suppliers because you don't want to be stuck with once a fire? If you have the need to be agile, you want to have options. How do you guys think about that? Because being in agility is key for you guys to be successful. Not someone's just dealing with the vendors. >> Um, >> it does come down to balance. We do leverage multiple cloud providers, right? I think that, um, if we're too focused on making sure that we have that portability, and we could quickly move from one to another than we miss an opportunity to kind of deeply leverage. Some of the service is, for example, that the eight of us provides, but we also, you know, you've been around the block of >> your first rodeo. Exactly. >> And I think that it's important to have that perspective and prepare for the future. >> Do you, um, attend board meetings regularly? >> I do. I do for sent out to our board of directors. >> Is that a sort of frequent thing? And once a year, once 1/4 of interested in what the board conversation is like with >> it happens in a couple different context, whether it's specific to sort of an audit readout or sort of a general state of State of Security type A report out. But yeah, we have a really engaged board that asked great questions about our partners, right about things that are more culture base in terms of how we're doing with our anti phishing protection. And we talk about technology architectures, too, in the work that we're doing to make sure that we're being more fine grain in the way that we're authenticating users and devices, no matter where they work in a more secure way. They're they're interested in that. So I feel pretty lucky. Thio both have the opportunity and get deeply. Would >> you say the conversation is more of a strategic nature with the board. Is it more tactic? You just mentioned some tactical items. Is it more metrics driven or a sort of a combination of all three? >> It's a It's a combination right? I think they want to see demonstrated progress against areas that we have self identified Azarias that we'd like to prove improve. But they're also looking to see that I have a vision for where we're going to fully cognizant of the work that we've done in the public cloud and want to understand that the level of trust and they had in their security programme on premise will perpetuate and advance into the cloud. So >> when you look at clouds, security and now security, you guys have you had a perspective on full sides and clouds certainly accelerating involving fast when you find a legacy app that you're working with. We've heard other seasons. We've talked us who have had frank conversations, that look, we're deciding whether we lift and shifted more rebuild on. So there's been some visibility into when it's great to have lifted shifts and when it's great to rebuild. So that's been a conversation that I don't think been fully baked out yet. In the full narrative in the industry, it's one people are talking about. What's your view on when you have a legacy app, you want a lift and shifted or rebuild it? What goes through your mind? What's a conversation like? >> It's a conversation that we have. We have legacy. I won't hide behind behind that. But it's not a conversation in a decision that's just made by technologists, right? I think we have to articulate what the options are, and that has to be a joint decision with our business partners. I think generally I'm not preferring a lift and shift because I think that we are may be overlooking some of the opportunities to make similar security improvements that I see. But when we can get an application that's using our software development pipelines that we have embedded security controls, we have better visibility. We have better enforcement, ensuring what we know that we know what's going into. The cloud has met, you know, a number of our security standards, so to speak, that's a much better position. >> So the destruction of multiple clouds I'm interested in how you handle that you take separate teams is the same team, sort of handling everything, and it's sort of a follow up on that is I'm interested in your relationship with AWS and how that's affected your business. >> Yeah, so the security team does not. Oh, the cloud environment, so to speak. That's that's, Ah Secure Dev Ops team within our infrastructure organization. And they're very close partner of ours, right? So, yes, I do have a resource. Is that our specialist in AWS versus other clouds and others that are identity and access management specialists are able to work on the development of those patterns across different cloud environments. Right. You know, I there's nothing bad that I could say about the relationship with our AWS partners that we felt very supported and understanding what we're trying to do introduce us to new service is and introduced it probably most importantly, introducing us to other customers that have but you know, are a little bit ahead of us in their journey. So weaken, hopefully not repeat, >> not helping you with security pieces. Well, I'm that's something that they with shared responsibility there are there working with you on this securing those workloads as you move. Glad >> be Definitely leverage their expertise. >> And you mentioned that you guys kind of made a decision a few years ago. Toe go all in on the cloud. How has that affected your business? What kind of results have you seen? A zit met expectations. Is it exceeded? You know, I >> mean, is I mentioned we do still have, Ah, a lot of a lot of our technology on premise, but for the use cases that have really seen that rapid acceleration of agile practices allowed teams to develop code so much more quickly. I think the business is generally delighted that their needs are being far more quickly met. Then >> I could ask you, there's a perpetual line in the men's room. It's quite long. So what's it like to be long? And the lady I was going to say? I don't think it is because I would say the proportion of women here is actually lower than even the industry and most conferences that we attend. So what's it like being a woman in this male dominated security business? >> I been in it so on, but I certainly have. You're in a little bit of custom toe, but not so accustomed that I'm not motivated on a daily basis to bring more women in. I think that security just has tremendous opportunities and, you know, certainly the marketing of security professionals is hoody wearing white male kind of persona. Just >> their opportunity. What some of those opportunities for women who are stem science, they might your daughters all stem love public policy, the sociology impact side. The impact that's here is a lot of range of skills. What are some of those that you would inspire someone >> I studied? Math is an undergrad. We didn't have security >> back then and since got a Masters >> degree in cyber security. So that's cool. But, you know, I think a great security professional is a great communicator, a great collaborator. I need technologists. I need developers. I need process experts. I need people that think you know very deeply about assurance type control so way have tried to attract people out of other technology round. >> And it's just not just math and computer science is creativity involved. There's a lot of things that that blend sells all kinds of diversity. >> There is, you know, you think about human psychology, right? We just totally transformed one of the systems that we use for approving for managers to approve the access of their people. Right Past system was ugly. People didn't know how to interact with it. I mean, that user experience expertise that over laid and how we developed our new platform just makes all the difference to make sure that it's actually invaluable process. Now, like I'm so frustrated. I'm just gonna sign off on this because I I give up >> really interesting because you spend a lot of time and effort and money on things that drive revenue. But this drives so much productivity in business value that, you know he's not maybe direct dollars, but clearly there. I have a question. When you recruit people, presumably you tap your network. And it's not just the good old boys network your women. Are you able to successfully find women or young women in particular that you can attract and recruit into your business as security practitioners? They had much success there. >> Yeah, so we definitely are outpacing industry numbers in terms of women and security. We have a long way to go, you know, historically excluded people right? Not just women people of color. I mean, we just have a long ways to go, right. And I think it takes more than sitting back and waiting for a recruiter to bring recruiter to bring me a slate of candidates to say no. I know people. I know people that know people. And I really have toe invest myself and make sure that my leaders know that that's my expectation of them, right? I mean, I think that way feel that diversity of thought, no matter how that diversity is expressed, is really important doing the work. >> Let us know how we could help in Silicon Valley days here in Boston as well. Love help get the word out. So anything you need for muscle now. Okay. Thanks so much for his great insights. Love to have you on the cube again sometime. Thanks. Coming on S V p. C. So at Liberty Mutual here in the cube, extracting the signal, sharing the reality of what's going on in the security equation for cloud security. I'm John for Dave. A lot. Right back after this short break

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We are joined today by Emilia Sherifova, she is the VP of Architecture and Engineering at Northwestern Mutual, thanks so much for joining us Emilia. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I want to start off by talking about how you got to Northwestern Mutual. You came via an acquisition, you were CTO of LearnVest. What is LearnVest? >> LearnVest is a financial planning start up, it's a company that is bringing financial planning to the masses, it's a very mission driven organization. When Northwestern Mutual came as an interest to acquire us, we saw an incredible opportunity to partner with a Fortune 100 company, and tap into its client base of five million people, and bring sort of best in class digital experience and innovation, with best in class financial services products. >> Talk about that problem a little bit, in terms of bringing financial planning to the masses. Why don't the masses have financial planning? What's the disconnect? >> I think it's not easy, often it's a human driven problem. Often humans do not want to deal with their finances, as I know personally for myself, historically when I met with my financial advisor in the past I would get a plan and I wouldn't follow up on that. So building delightful experiences that engage our clients, with the combination of a financial planner that's prodding you, and giving you guidance. >> So there is a human there? >> Absolutely, there's no way to avoid a human. So it was that regional model of LearnVest to have the human help the robot part of it, and we are doing the same thing with Northwestern Mutual, where we're leveraging Northwestern Mutual best in class distribution work force and providing them tools to help them do their work best. >> I love the idea of a delightful experience when dealing with your finances, it seems antithetical. Give me some examples of what you mean by this. >> I think ability to give you a 360 view of your life, and give you a financial wellness score, for instance, after we've gotten a couple of data points about you, but also gathered some of the predictive data points that we know are probably true about you, and give you a score, one score, that gives you an idea what's the probability of you reaching your financial goal, or you retiring, or you going broke. So there is a way to do that in an easy, digestible and kind of delightful way where we're able to leverage technology and predictive capabilities to really push for financial security of our clients. >> And what is the customer response here? >> Customer response, it's been great. Now that we've rolled out a lot of these experiences for the customer base of Northwestern Mutual we have massive engagement with our customers, our traffic has gone dramatically up. >> So people are hungering for this? >> Absolutely, it's a much needed thing, and we're here to help them. >> So you've now been with Northwestern Mutual for a few years now, dividing your time between New York and Milwaukee, you're in both technology and financial services, both male dominated fields, can you describe a little bit about your career path, and how you got into it, and what you've learned along the way. >> Oh, absolutely. I'm originally from Russia, and I come from a family of engineers, so it was a somewhat natural path for me. I got into software engineering in the late 90s. My go to language initially was C programming, and I participated in the Y2K Challenge on Wall Street. >> Which seems so quaint! (laughs) >> And I've spent over a decade on Wall Street, building electronic trading systems, market data feeds. So I feel honored to have been able to pursue and have these possibilities, but I know how not easy it is, given what a male dominated world this is. >> Is it as bad as the headlines make it out to be? I mean, it really does, when you read it, it's sickening. The sexism, the biases, what's your experience been? >> I think I've been lucky enough to work in very supportive places, but I can tell you majority of teams that I've been part of are majority male, and whether my team mates want to be inclusive and engaging, when the majority is someone else that doesn't look like you, act like you, lean on similar defaults as you, it does not make for a very welcome environment. So I recognize that, and a big part of that, I feel, is having proper on boarding practices. Because on boarding often can happen, if you don't have a formal on boarding process, on boarding can happen in informal ways, and when it happens in informal ways, you tend to be attracted to the people who are like you, and you hang out with. So if you look at the technology world, it's dominated by mostly male. If you are in a start up world, it's mostly young males. And so I am determined to bring operational excellence and sustainability and diversity through strong operational practices, like ensuring that there is proper on boarding. Where for instance, a young mother who has a child has the potential to go home at 4 p.m., and cannot hang out with the guys and drink coke or beer at 7 p.m., to really understand the culture of the group that she joined. We want to make sure that she has sustainable, thoughtful on boarding practices, feeling like she's part of the organization. This is just one way of doing it. >> In terms of the on boarding, and I think you're absolutely right in a sense, that we do gravitate towards people who are just like us, look like us, talk like us, think like us, so are you pairing the new people with people who are not like them? >> Absolutely, but also actually I am pairing them with people who also recently just went through on boarding, that just join also fairly recently. That way they can explain the pitfalls that they gone through, and so we're definitely making sure we have these co pilots, but also rigorous processes to get people comfortable, whatever their background is. >> Now how many Grace Hoppers have you been to, Emilia? >> I have to say this is my first one. >> Your first one, you're a newbie! So what is your experience been so far. >> I am incredibly moved by the experience, actually. I have to say I've never seen so much energy before. I am moved by the stories that I have heard, incredibly inspired. I am inspired to keep pushing. I felt I could relate to a lot of presenters' backgrounds, I also came from a small town, that actually is not on the map, because it was a military town in the former Soviet Union, and a lot of stories of overcoming, and persisting, and ending up here, is what I can relate to. So I'm very excited, and very grateful, and I want to be here every year. >> So you'll be back? >> Totally! >> Great! Well, Emilia, thanks so much for joining us, it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.

>> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my host, John Troyer. Really excited to welcome to the program one of the keynote speakers from this morning, Mojgan Lefebvre who is the SVP and chief information officer. We always love CIOs, from Liberty Mutual Insurance Global Specialty. Thank you for your keynote this morning and thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So you went through a lot of data and a lot of information in your keynote. Liberty Mutual, you say spent a billion dollars in tech yearly. There's certain technology companies that spend that much. As the CIO, what are some of the biggest things on your plate and we'll get in the discussion of Cloud Foundry and cloud and everything as we go from there. >> Sure so I'd say probably the priorities differ by the business unit you're in. The specialty business has generally been a bit more manual and we have over 200 or so insurance products. So really automating it is very different from automating consumer insurance which is really focused on home and auto. So really right now, our focus is increasing the productivity and the risk assessment for a lot of our underwriters. And then I say probably analytics, pricing. Making sure that we're assessing risks correctly is definitely another point of focus for us. >> Okay with so many products, we understand the rate of change must be difficult. In your keynote you spoke about embracing cloud and agile methodology. Maybe take us back to what some of the pain points were and led to yourself and management to embrace this big change. >> Yeah, absolutely so several things are going on. One is that we see a lot of new players entering the world of insurance, and it both about new capital coming into the world of insurance. Just 'cause there's not enough investments that capital can be put towards so insurance is one place to come to and the other is technology players that are coming into our world. Companies like Metromile, Lemonade, the list goes on and on and so really our world is changing. Technology is driving a lot of that change and so we know that we've got to be a big player in that area as well. And as I said really, we've got to become one of those software companies that can actually sell insurance as opposed to the other way around. I'd say some of the other things that are happening is the fact that our employees. Our consumers now have all these other software companies that they have experience with and so their expectations are very different. They've got one experience when they're at home and then they come into the workplace and it looks like they've gone back 100 years. So that paradigm needs to change. So those are some of the things that have really made us think we have no choice but to truly change the way that deliver software. We've got to get out of this mode where everything takes multiple years and multiple millions of dollars and really at the end of the day. The people that you started the work with are no longer even there to appreciate what you've delivered to them. And usually it's not what they ask for anyway. >> As you adopted the Cloud Foundry platform. One of the things about Cloud Foundry, even very early in it's life cycle was that it was associated with digital transformation, and cloud native. And especially once it was joined up with Pivotal Labs. So how much of, as you all embark on this journey. The great thing about here at Summit, there is a lot of talk about visual transformation. A lot of talk about agile. That's what we were just talking about. Some shows you go to it's a lot about features and a lot about speeds and feeds. And a lot about the latest, greatest. So how much apart of it as you all were adopting this platform? Was that culture of digital transformation surrounding the actual tech. How important was that? >> I think that was very important because again, as I said we know that, that's what the consumers expect. They no longer want things to be manual. They want things to be at the tips of their fingers and so really transforming us from being a company that's very paper intensive to really being more and more digital was critical to us. The very first application that we actually put in the cloud which was in my business unit was for document management in our Al Fresco. And actually what we named it was we're going paperless. As something that we started about three years ago, and today I can say that yep, we are paperless and so the great thing about Al Fresco was that it was indeed cloud native, and that was very important to us. We started out looking at some of the other solutions that are out there. I won't necessarily name them but they did not lend themselves to the cloud. And so really going with a cloud native solution that would enable us to become much more digital and paperless was very critical to us. >> You talked a lot about developer adoption now in your journey. Was that a tough sell at the very beginning or did developers go wait a minute, This is going to save me a lot of time. I'm on board. >> So you mean with Cloud Foundry in general? >> John: With Cloud Foundry, in general. >> So if anything I'd it was probably the developer community that really sorted this out and so by the time that the leadership and management started to pay attention. There were pockets of developers who were just very, very bought into it, and so I would say that went a long way. And then made it easier to sell it to other developers. I say they're much more listening to what their peers are saying than what we have to say. And then really meeting with the Pivotal Labs guys. I'd say those folks have truly a magical way of selling their story and they've truly helped us. Not only sell it to our developers but also sell the story to our business. I'd say that the mindset shift from thinking I'm going to have everything in one go versus no, I'm going to get it in iterations and I'm actually going to trust the fact that the next releases are going to come is a big mind shift and Pivotal was instrumental in helping sell that to us. >> One of the benefits of Cloud Foundry is to give you flexibility as to where your applications and data live. That being said, a majority of customers that have deployed Cloud Foundry are doing it on premises. How do you manage what goes, stays in your own environment. What handles the public cloud. My understanding you're doing quite a bit of AWS today. What's your viewpoint for you and management on public cloud? >> We certainly see public cloud as the future. I know Chip mentioned something about, well it's not going to be cheaper. We're actually counting on that in the end from a total cost of ownership perspective. That it will be cheaper and we truly mean it when we say we want 75% of the people writing code. And by that I mean the staff within the IT group of course. And we don't want them to have to worry about the infrastructure and so while we've started with AWS, we absolutely have a relationship with Microsoft as well. We definitely want to be independent on this cloud and I would say something like Cloud Foundry definitely allows you to do that. >> When you're looking at that total. That full TCO, you don't have fully burden, I have gear and I have people managing that gear and all the operations there. If you can shift that piece of it. You're not differentiated on the infrastructure or at those needs. You want to focus on those thousands of products that you have and your people coding to create those next opportunities. >> Exactly. We want to focus on the value add. That's where we want our people to really be focusing and we want to let the cloud players who do it extremely well to be doing that for us. >> You put forth in your keynotes some pretty audacious metrics. I think it was 60% of the work load public cloud. More than 50% of apps to release code on daily basis and you wanted 75% of the IT staff to write code. How did you come up with those numbers. How are doing against those? >> About a year ago, once we decided that the imperative for change was so critical. The IT leadership team got together. We spent a couple of days off site and we said let's come up with what we're calling today our IT manifesto. And so we said we just have to change and there are multiple things that we're going to change. And we said we're going to put some, what we call bold, audacious moves or BAMS as they've come to be known together. And so those were just some, we knew they were out of right to some extent, but we said if we don't really put some goals that are really hard to reach, we're never going to get there. >> What are some of the head winds there? What have slowed you from meeting those and any lessons learned that you share to your peers on what you've learned going through this. >> Certainly deciding on what goes to the clouds first is one of those areas that we're learning as we're doing. We know that it's easy when you're working in a greenfield and it's something new. So yeah, you can very easily say I'll build in the cloud. When you're looking at what you're existing environment is and what you move to the cloud. One of the questions as well, if we move all of our development environment. How's that going to interact with the production environment. If you have them in different clouds. Other things are how it interacts with active directory and held app and some of those things. And I say finally would be kind of the global applications always make it much more difficult as you think. How do you replicate among different clouds in different geographies. Those are some of the blockers that we've got to tackle and make sure that we get around. >> One of the interesting parts of any management strategy in any company is skills, up skilling. So how have you been approaching that in terms of this new cloud native world. Both for the devs, is this year at Cloud Foundry Summit. Are people here learning? There's new certifications. >> I say it's a multi prong approach. We definitely have partnered with several companies to put some training together to make sure that we're training our staff. We started a program that we call go for code and so we've asked volunteers. For people who are not coding today and who want to get there that actually they go to these coding schools and they're going to spend the next two to three months actually learning how to code. It's very rigorous. >> So they might have been technical in an infrastructure way before and they want to learn how to code? >> Yeah, it may be that or they may have just been business analysts who are just doing requirements gathering or project management, and they want to learn how to code. So we've tried to be as transparent as possible because when you say I want 75% of my IT staff to be coding. Like you've got 50% who are not coding today. There's a message in that and so of course it's up to us to make sure that we're providing the tools and what's needed for that to happen. Our goal is to get anyone on our staff who really wants to get there and is willing to put the sweat in to be able to do it. 'Cause we also know it's not like software engineers are just lying out there on the streets. There is a shortage of software engineers and that's going to become more and more of a problem. So really getting our own employees that we value greatly to be able to do that transformation, I think is critical for us. >> Another great one line, you had your keynote was out with the annual, in with the weekly. I think you said it was 16 releases in five months. The counter to that and I'm curious how you deal with it and talk to your peers is how do people keep up with just all the changes that are happening? I talk to the companies that create code on just regular occasions and they can't keep up. And how do you make sure your staff doesn't get burned out? >> So great, great question again. We're at the very beginnings of our transformation. The one thing I will say is looking at the team that did this and did the 16 releases in five months versus teams that are working on annual releases. The energy, the enthusiasm, the excitement and hopefully some of it came through in the video that you saw is just phenomenal. So I'd say, I'm much less worried about them burning out than hey can we keep the others as excited. I will tell you automation and things like Cloud Foundry that actually help you automate your pipeline are critical. You can not do multiple releases or daily releases if you don't have those tools. If you truly get to the point where you do have the automated pipeline. I think a lot of that is done for you so that's what we're gearing towards and driving towards. >> One of the things that people always love to pontificate is in the future, what is the role of the CIO? We'd love to see you embracing things like cloud because it was like well, when I had gear, and I had capital budget I understood it. But I'm changing the role. I'm doing that. What have you been seeing as the changing role? Anything down the line you see and how that changes? >> You're right, so a lot of people say, well there is no need for a CIO in the future. I'd say there's probably more and more need for very business oriented, strategic CIOs who also understands technology really well and they're the epitome of someone who understands technology and is the head of engineering so to speak. But also making sure that they can work very well with the business and understands the impact of technology on the business. I'll be waiting for the day where the need for someone like that goes away. I don't see it coming too soon. >> Final question I have for you is what brings you to an event like this? Spend the time, give the keynote. What do you get out of it personally and for your company? >> One is really learning 'cause again, if you're a doctor in medicine. If you want to keep up with what's going on around you you've got to educate yourself. So certainly that aspect of go out there, see what's going on. Making sure that you're keeping up with new technology that's one thing. The other was my experience with Pivotal has been phenomenal, and so I thought it was critical to actually take the opportunity to share that. Hopefully others will learn. A lot of the tweets that I saw was well, if a big 100 year old insurance company can do this. Then nobody has an excuse and I'll say yeah of course. So it's really both to give back and to continue to learn and then to reconnect with colleagues. Cornelia and I actually worked together over 10 years ago. So just coming to here and being able to have dinner with her tonight is going to be very enjoyable. >> Absolutely a tight knit community. Really appreciate you coming on the program. We welcome you to theCUBE alumni list now, our community, >> Thank you. Of the thousands that we had on the program. From John and myself, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (uptempo techno music)

(upbeat intro music) >> Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada where we are theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent for the 10th year in a row. John Furrier, you've been here for all 10. How does this one stack up? >> It's feeling great. It's just back into the saddle of more people. Everyone's getting bigger and growing up. The companies that were originally on are getting stronger, bigger. They're doing takeovers in restaurants and still new players are coming in. More startups are coming in and taking care of what I call the (indistinct) on classic, all the primitives. And then you starting to see a lot more ecosystem platforms building on top of AWS. I call that NextGen Cloud, NextGen AWS. It's happening. It's happening right now. >> Best thing about all of these startups is they grow up, they mature, and we stay the same age, John. (John laughing) All right. All right. All right. Very excited to introduce you our next guest, he wears a lot of hats as the CEO, founder, and chairman at Reltio, please welcome Manish. Manish, welcome to the show. How is your show going so far? >> Well, thank you so much. You know, this is amazing. Just the energy, the number of people. You know, I was here last year, just after the pandemic, and I think it's almost double, if not more the number of people this year. >> John: Pushing 50,000. The high water mark was 65,000 in 2019. >> We should be doing like a Price Is Right sort of thing here on the show and figure out. >> Yeah, $1. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah. (laughing) One guest, 80,000 guests. How many guests are here? Just in case the audience is not familiar, we know you're fast growing, very exciting business. Tell us what Reltio does. >> So, Reltio is a SaaS platform for data unification and we started Reltio in 2011. We have been serving some of the largest customers across industries like life sciences, healthcare, financial services, insurance, high tech, and retail. Those are, you know, some of the areas that we are focused on. The product capabilities are horizontal because we see the same data problem across every industry. Highly fragmented, highly siloed data that is slowing down the business for every organization out there. And that's the problem that we are solving. We are breaking down these silos, you know, one profile or one record, or one customer product supplier information record at a time, and bringing the acceleration of this unified data to every organization. >> This is the show Steam this year, Adam Celeste is going to be on stage talking about data end to end. Okay. Integrating in all aspects of a company. The word data analyst probably goes away pretty shortly. Everyone was going to be using data. This has been, and he talks about horizontal and vertical use cases. We've been saying that in theCUBE, I think it was about seven years ago, we first said we're going to start to see horizontally scalable data not just compute and cloud. This is now primetime conversation. Making that all work with governance is a real hard problem. Understanding the data. Companies have to put this horizontal and vertical capabilities in place together. >> Absolutely. You know, the data problem may be a horizontal problem, but every industry or vertical that you go into adds its own nuance or flavor to it. And that's why, you know, this has to be a combination of the horizontal and vertical. And we at Reltio thought about this for a while, where, you know, every time we enter a conversation, we are talking about patient data or physician data or client data and financial services or policy and customer information and insurance. But every time it's the number of silos that we encounter that is just an increasing number of applications, increasing number of third party data sources, and bringing that together in a manner where you can understand the semantics of it. Because, you know, every record is not created equal. Every piece of information is not created equal. But at the same time, you have to stitch it together in order to create that holistic, you know, the so-called 360 degree view. Because without that, the types of problems that you're trying to solve are not possible. Right? It's not possible to make those breakthroughs. And that's where I think the problem may be horizontal, but the application of the capabilities has to be verticalized. >> John: I'm smiling because, you know, when you're a founder like you are, and Dave, a lot here are at theCUBE, you're often misunderstood before people figure out what you do and why you started the company. And I can imagine, and knowing you and covering your company, that this is not just yesterday you came up with this idea that now everyone's talking about. There was probably moments in your history when you started, you're scratching it, "Hey the future's going to be this horizontal and vertical, especially where machine learning needs to know the data, the linguistics, whatever the data is, it's got to be very particular for the vertical, but you need to expand it." So when did you have the moment where people finally figured out like, what you guys doing is, like, relevant? I mean, now the whole world now sees- >> Savannah: Overnight success 11 years later. >> John: This shows the first time I've heard Amazon and the industry generally agree that horizontally scalable data systems with vertical value, that it's natural. We've been saying it for seven years on theCUBE. You've been doing the startup. >> Yeah. >> As a founder, you were there early. Now people are getting it. What's it like? Tell, take us through. When did you have the moment? When did you tipping point for the world getting it? >> Yeah, and you know, the key thing to remember is that, you know, not only have I been in this space for a long time but the experiences that we have gone through starting in 2011, there was a lot of focus on, you know, even AWS was at that point in time in the infancy stages. >> Yeah. >> And we said that we are going to set up a software as a service capability that runs only on public cloud because we had seen what customers had tried to do behind their firewalls and the types of hurdles that they had run into before. And while the concept was still in its nascent stages, but the directional signals, the fact that number of applications that you see in use today across any organization, that's growing. It used to be a case when in early 2000s, you know, this is early part of my career, where having six different applications across the enterprise landscape was considered complex. But now those same organizations are talking about 400, 500, a thousand different applications that they're using to run their business end to end. So, you know, this direction was clear. The need for digital transformation was becoming clear. And the fact that, you know, cloud was the only vehicle that you could use to solve these types of ad scale problems was also becoming clear. But what wasn't yet mainstream was this notion that, you know, if you're doing digital transformation, you need access to clean, consistent, trusted information. Or if you're doing machine learning or any kind of data analytics, you need similar kinds of trusted information. It wasn't a mainstream concept, but people were struggling with it because, you know, the whole notion of garbage in garbage out was becoming clearer to them as they started running into hurdles. And it's great to see that now, you know, after having gone through the transformation of, yes, we have provided the compute and the storage, but now we really need to unlock the value out of data that goes on this compute and storage. You know, it's great to see that even Amazon or AWS is talking about it. >> Well, as a founder, it's satisfying, and congratulations, we've been covering that. I got to ask, you mention this end to end. I like the example of in the 2006 applications considered complex, now hundreds and thousands of workloads are on an enterprise. Today we're going to hear more end to end data services on AWS and off AWS, hybrid or edge or whatever, that's happens. Now cross, it sounds like it's going to get more complex still. >> I mean... >> John: Right. I mean, that's not easy. >> Savannah: The gentle understatement of the century. I love that. Yes. >> If Adam's message is end to end, it's going to be more complex. How does it get easier? Because the enterprise, you know, the enterprise vendors love solving complexity with more complexity. That's the wrong answer. >> Well, you're absolutely right that things are going to get more complex. But you know, this is where, whether it is Amazon or you know, us, Reltio as a vendor coming in, the goal should always be what are we going to simplify for the customer? Because they are going to end up with a complex landscape on their hands anyway. Right? >> Savannah: Right. >> So that is where, what can be below the surface and simplified for the customers to use versus bringing their focus to the business value that they can get out of it. Unlocking that business value has to be the key aspect that we have to bring to the front. And, you know, that is where, yes, the landscape complexity may grow, but how is the solution making it simpler, easier, faster for you to get value out of the data that you're trying to work with? >> As a mission, that seems very clear and clean cut, but I'm curious, I can imagine there's so many different things that you're prioritizing when you're thinking about how to solve those problems. What is that decision matrix like for you? >> For us, it goes back to the core focus and the core problem that we are in the business of solving which is in a siloed, fragmented landscape, how can we create a single source of truth orientation that your business can depend on? If you're looking for the unified view of the customer, the product, the supplier, the location, the asset, all these are elements that are critical or crucial for you to run your business end to end. And we are there to provide that solution as Reltio to our customers. So, you know, we always, for our decision matrix have to go back to are we simplifying that problem for our customers and how much faster, easier, nimbler can it be, you know, both as a solution and also the time to value that it brings to the equation for the customer. >> Super important, end of the equation. Clearly you are on to something. You are not only a unicorn company, unicorn company being evaluated at over $1 billion latest evaluation, correct me if I'm wrong, is $1.7 billion as of last year. But you are also a centaur, which is seven times more rare than a unicorn, which for the audience maybe not familiar with the mythical creatures that define the Silicon Valley nomenclature in Lexicon. A centaur is a company with a hundred million in annual reoccurring revenue. How does it feel to be able to say that as a CEO or to hear me say that to you? >> Well, as a CEO, it's, you know, something that we have been working towards. the goal that we can deliver value to our customers, help every industry, you know, you just think about the types of products that you touch in a day, whether it's, you know, any healthcare related products that you're looking at. We are working with customers who are solving for the patient record to be unified with our platform. We are working with financial services companies who are helping you simplify how you do banking with them. We are working with retailers who are working in the area of, you know, leisure apparel or athletic goods and they are using our capabilities to simplify how they deliver better experience to you. So as I go across these industries, being able to influence and touch and simplify things overall for the customers that these companies are serving, that's an amazing feeling. And, you know, doing this while we are also making sure that we can build a durable business that has substantial revenue behind it- >> Savannah: Substantial. >> Gives us a lot of legs to stand on and talk about how we can change how the companies should run their entire data stack. >> And you're obviously a very efficient team practicing what you teach. You told me how many employees that you have? >> We have 450 employees across the globe. >> 450 employees and a hundred million in reoccurring revenue. It's pretty strong. It's pretty strong. >> Thank you. >> That's a quarter million in rev per employee. They're doing a pretty good job. That's absolutely fantastic. >> The cloud has been very successful, partnering with the cloud, a lot of leverage for the cloud. >> And that's been a part of our thesis from the very beginning that, you know, the capabilities that we build and bring to life have to be built on public cloud infrastructure. That's something that has been core to our innovation cycle because we look at it as a layer cake of innovation that we sit on and we can continue to drive faster value for our customers. >> John: Okay, so normally we do a bumper sticker. Tell me the bumper sticker for the show. We changed it to kind of modernize it called the Insta Challenge, Instagram challenge. Instagram has reels, short videos. What's the Instagram reel from your perspective? You have to do an Instagram reel right now about why this time in history, this time in for Amazon web services, this point for Reltio. Why is this moment in time important in the computer industry? Because, you know, we've reported, I put a story out, NextGen Clouds here. People are seeing their status go from ISV to ecosystem platforms on top of AWS. Your success has continued to grow. Something's going on. What's the Instagram reel about why this year's so important in the history of the cloud? >> Well, you know, just think about the overall macroeconomic conditions. You know, everybody's trying to think about where the next, you know, the set of growth is going to come from or how we are going to tackle, you know, what we have as challenges in front of us. And at the end of the day, most of the efficiency that came from applying new applications or, you know, buying new products in the application space has delivered its value. The next unlock is going to come from data. And that is the key that we have to think about because the traditional model of going across 500 different applications to run your business is no longer going to be a scalable model to work with. If you really want to move faster with your business, you have to think about how to use data as a strategic asset and think about things differently. And we are talking about delivering experience at the edge, delivering, you know, real time type of engagement with the customers that we work with. And that is where the entire data value proposition starts to deliver a whole new set of options to the customers. And that's something that we all have to think about differently. It's going to require a fundamentally different architecture, innovation, leading with data instead of thinking about the traditional landscape that we have been running with. >> Leading with data and transforming architecture. A couple themes we've had on the show lately already. >> John: Well I think there's been a great, I mean this is a great leadership example of what's going on in the industry. As young people are looking at their careers. I've talked with a lot of folks under 30, they're trying to figure out what's a good career path and they're looking at all this change in front of them. >> That's a great point, John. >> Whether it's a computer science student or someone in healthcare, these industries are being reinvented with data. What's your advice to those young, this up and coming generation that might not take the traditional path traveled 'cause it might not be there. What's your advice for those people making these career decisions? >> I think there are two things that are relevant to every career option out there. Knowledge and awareness of data and how to apply computing techniques to the data is key and relevant. It's the language that we all have to learn and be familiar with. Without that, you know, you'll be missing a key part of your arsenal that you will be required to bring to work but won't have access to if you're not well-versed or familiar with those two areas. So this is lingua franca that we all have to get used to. >> Data and computer technology applied to business or some application or some problem. >> Manish: Applied to business. You know, figuring out how to apply it to deliver business outcomes is the key thing to keep in mind. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Last question for you to wrap us up. It's obviously an exciting, thrilling, vibrant moment here on the show floor, but I'm curious because I can imagine some of your customers, especially given the scale that they're at, I mean we're talking about some Fortune 100s here, how are you delivering value in this uncertain market? I mean, I know you solved this baseline problem but I can imagine there's a little bit of frantic energy within your customer base. >> Manish: Yeah. You know, with data this has been a traditional challenge. Everybody talks about the motherhood and apple pie. If you have better data, you can drive better outcomes. But some of the work that we have been doing is quantifying, measuring those outcomes and translating what the dollar impact of that value is for each one of the customers. And this is where the work that we have done with large, you know, let's say life sciences companies like AstraZeneca or GSK or in financial services with companies like Northwestern Mutual or Fidelity or, you know, common household names like McDonald's where they're delivering their digital transformation with the data capabilities that we are helping build with them. That's the key part that's been, you know, extremely valuable. And that is where in each one of these situations, we are helping them measure what the ROI is at every turn. So being able to go into these discussions with the hard dollar ROI that you can expect out of it is the key thing that we are focused on. >> And that's so mission critical now and at any economic juncture. Just to echo that, I noticed that Forrester did an independent study looking at customers that invested in your MDM solution. 366% ROI and a total net present value of 13 million over three years. So you clearly deliver on what you just promised there with customers and brands that we touch in all of our everyday lives. Manish, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. You and Reltio are clearly crushing it. We can't wait to have you back hopefully for some more exciting updates at next year's AWS re:Invent. John, thanks for- >> Or sooner. >> Yeah, yeah. Or sooner or maybe in the studios or who knows, at one of the other fabulous events we'll all be at. I'm sure you'll be traveling around given the success that the company is seeing. And John, thanks for bringing the young folks into the conversation, was a really nice touch. >> We got skill gaps, we might as well solve that right now. >> Yeah. And I like to think that there are young minds watching theCUBE or at least watching, maybe their parents are- >> We're streaming to Twitch. All the gamers are watching this right now. Stop playing the video games. >> We have the hottest stream on Twitch right now if you're not already ready for it. John Furrier, Manish Sood, thank you so much for being on the show with us. Thank all of you at home or at the office or in outer space or wherever you happen to be tuned in to this fabulous live stream. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. My name is Savannah Peterson. We're at AWS re:Invent here in Las Vegas where we'll have our head in the clouds all week.

>>Hey guys. Welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here live with the cube at Coan Cloud Native Con North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up. Yeah, it's maturing. >>Yeah. We got three days of wall to wall coverage, all about Kubernetes. We about security, large scale, cloud native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's gonna be really awesome. You have a fast growing private company and a practitioner, big name, blue chip practitioner, building out next NextGen Cloud first, transforming, then building out the next level. This is classic of what we call super cloud-like, like interview. It's gonna be great. I'm looking forward >>To this anytime we can talk about Super Cloud. All right, please welcome back. One of our alumni, Bani is here, the CEO of Rafe. Great to see you Santos. Ula also joins us, the global head of Cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Ge. Great to have you on the program. Thanks >>For having us. Thank you for having me. >>So Steve, you've been on the queue many times. You were on just recently with the momentum that that's around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about with on, on day one of the show? >>Wow, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here. And I, I, I live in this industry and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. I mean, it means that the, the community's growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other coupons. Like when we hung out at, you know, in Valencia for example, or even, you know, other places. It hasn't been this many people, which means, and this is, this is a good thing that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component, right. For their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. >>Definitely becoming foundational. >>Yep. Well, you guys got a great traction. We had many interviews at the Cube and you got a practitioner here with you. You guys are both pioneering kind of what I call the next gen cloud. First you gotta get through gen one, which you guys done at Mass Mutual, extremely well, take us through the story of your transformation. Cause you're on the, at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here. You had a lot of transformation success at Mass Mutual. >>So I was actually talking about this topic few, few minutes back, right? And, and the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or, or our insurance sector. It takes generations of leadership to get, to get to that perfection level. And, and ideally the, the, the cloud for strategy starts in, and then, and then how do you, how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? You know, that that's, that's the second gen altogether. And then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if, you know, if you're talking about Kubernetes, you know, in the traditional world, you know, almost every company is running middleware and their applications in middleware. And then containerization is a topic that come, that came in. And docker is, is you know, basically the runtime containerization. So that came in first and from Docker, you know, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, Docker Swarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually when, when, when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And, and Hasi was pointing out, you know, like you never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing and how important it is for your cloud strategy. So, >>And your success now, and what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now as you look forward? What's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? >>So we are, we are past the stage of, you know, proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, you know, the real game now. So in the past I used the quote, you know, like, hello world to real world. So we are actually playing in the real world, not, not in the hello world anymore. Now, now this is where the real time challenges will, will pop up, right? So if you're talking about standardizing it and then optimizing the cloud and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? You know, the, the, the demands that come out of regulations are met and, and how, how are you going to scale it and, and, and while scaling, however you wanna to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it. So we are in that stage today. >>Has Steve talked about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at Mass Mutual has talked a little bit about who, you mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this Coan and Detroit is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here who, who's deciding in the organization and your customer conversations, Who are the deci decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? >>Hmm. Well this guy, >>It's usually, you know, one of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So consistently what I'm seeing is, you know, somebody, a cto, CIO level, you know, individual is making a determin decision. I have multiple internal buss who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps. And this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization and they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and, and, and sort of, you know, consume it. So what that means to us is our customer is a platform organization and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer who's a developer, both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both, you know, constituencies, you're not gonna be >>Successful. You're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure. >>Yes sir. It has to be both. Exactly. Right. Right. So, so that look, honestly, that it, it, you know, it takes iterations to figure these things out, right? But this is a consistent theme that I am seeing. In fact, what I would argue now is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy. Cuz if you don't have a platform strategy, you're gonna have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things and some will be successful and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. >>Yeah. And, and stage, I wanna get to you, you mentioned that your transformation was what you look forward and your title, global head of cloud sre. Okay, so sre, we all know came from Google, right? Everyone wants to be like Google, but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google, Google's a unique thing. It's only one Google. But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure. But concept is, is, is can be portable, but, but the situation isn't. So board became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale you're doing for Mass Mutual. That's kind of what's happening. Is that kind of how I see it? And you guys are playing in there partnering. >>So I I totally agree. Google introduce, sorry, Ty engineering. And, and if you take, you know, the traditional transformation of the roles, right? In the past it was called operations and then DevOps ops came in and then SRE is is the new buzzword. And the future could be something like product engineering, right? And, and, and in this journey, you know, here is what I tell, you know, folks on my side like what worked for Google might not work for a financial company, might not work for an insurance company. So, so, so it's, it's okay to use the word sre, but but the end of the day that SRE has to be tailored down to, to your requirements and and, and the customers that you serve and the technology that you serve. Yep. >>And this is, this is why I'm coming back, this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're gonna have a platform engineering team cuz you gotta enable developers to be producing more code faster, better, cheaper guardrails policy. So this, it's kind of becoming the, you serve the business, which is now the developers it used to serve the business Yep. Back in the old days. Hey, the, it serves the business. Yep. Which is a terminal, >>Which is actually true >>Now it the new, it serves the developers, which is the business. Which is the business. Because if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. Yep. >>And the, you know, the, the hard line between development and operations, right? So, so that's thining down over the time, you know, like that that line might disappear. And, and, and that's where asari is fitting in. >>Yeah. And they're building platforms to scale the enablement up that what is, so what is the key challenges you guys are, are both building out together this new transformational direction? What's new and what's the same, The same is probably the business results, but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructures and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? >>So the new thing if, if I may go fast these, so the faster market to, you know, value, right? That we are bringing to the table. That's, that's very important. You know, business has an idea. How do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and, and take it into real time. So that journey we have cut down, right? Technology is like Kubernetes. It makes, it makes, you know, an IT person's life so easy that, that they can, they can speed up the process in, in, in a traditional way. What used to take like an year or six months can be done in a month today or or less than that, right? So, so there's definitely the losses, speed, velocity, agility in general, and then flexibility. And then the automation that we put in, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters, you know, these, these are today like, you know, it is possible to, to make that happen with a click off a button. In the past it used to take like, you know, probably, you know, a hundred, a hundred percent team and operational team to do it. And a lot of time. But, but, but that automation is happening. You know, and we can get into the technology as much as possible. But, but, you know, blueprinting and all that stuff made >>It possible. Well say that for another interview, we'll do it take time. >>But the, the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had. Right? Right. It's, I want this in my lab now. Now, how does the culture of Mass Mutual, how is it evolv to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? >>So if once in a while, you know, it's important to step yourself into the customer's shoes and think it from their, from their, from their perspective, business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product and, and, and how, how, how easy it is to reach out to the customers and how well we are serving the customers, right? So whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Dr. Swam or es you know, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about it is if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And, and, and if you, if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So, so at that point, the business will step in. So our job is to make sure, you know, from an, from a technology perspective, how fast you can make implement it and how efficiently you can implement it. And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance. >>So I was gonna ask you if you have VMware in your environment, cause a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. And I think that's what you guys got going on. I I can say that you're the v center of Kubernetes. I mean, as a, as an as an metaphor, a place to manage it all is all 1, 1 1 paint of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? >>So virtualization has gone a long way, you know where we started, what we call bare metal servers, and then we virtualized operating systems. Now we are virtualizing applications and, and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes basically got. >>So you see the need for a vCenter like thing for Uber, >>Definitely a need in the market in the way you need to think is like, you know, let's say there is, there is an insurance company who actually mented it and, and they gain the market advantage. Right? Now the, the the competition wants to do it as well, right? So, so, so there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that, that, that's very critical and it's, it's a critical component of cloud strategy as >>A whole. See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say you like the V center of Kubernetes, Explain what that means and your turn. If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would say bs or would you say on point, >>Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today? Right? It's, it's so in my opinion, by the way, well vCenter in my opinion is one of the best platforms ever built. Like ha it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. It's, VMware did an amazing job because they took an IT engineer and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VMs, multitenancy, access management audit, everything that you need to run a data center, you can do from a single, essentially single >>Platform, from a utility standpoint home >>Run. It's amazing, right? Yeah, it is because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So the, the premise man Rafa was, well, oh, bless, I should have IT engineers, same engineers now they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people that mass major are able to do now, right? So to that end, now you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management, you need ac, you know, all of these things that have happened before chargebacks, they used to have it in, in V center. Now they need to happen in other platforms. But for es so should do we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. >>Kind >>Of. Yeah. Are we a vCenter for es? Yeah, that is a John Forer question. >>All right, well, I, I'll, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the, the complexity and not make it more steps or change a tool chain or do something, then the devs move faster and the service layer that serves the business, the new organization has to enable speed. So this, this is becoming a, a real discussion point in the industry is that, oh yeah, we've got new tool, look at the shiny new toy. But if it doesn't move the needle, does it help productivity for developers? And does it actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot, what's your reaction? >>Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just, you know, hit my mind is think about, you know, the hoteling industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb, right? Or, or, or the taxi industry, you know, before Uber and after Uber, right? So if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is like, you know, build their application and deployed and running, right? They, they, they don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers and then building the middleware on top of it and then, you know, do a bunch of testing to make sure, you know, they, they, they iron out all the, all the compatible issues and whatnot. Yeah. Now, now, today, all I, all I say is like, hey, you have, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application and then deploy it in a development environment. That's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together, make sure you see your application working, and then the next thing that, that you do is like, you know, you know, build >>Production, chip, build production, go and chip release it. Yeah, that's the nirvana. But then we're there. I mean, we're there now we're there. So we see the future. Because if you, if that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features, they have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built, got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where this I call the architectural list environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. >>Yeah. And, and on top of it, you know, if, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick, right? So how do you do it? Right? And, and, and you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and testers in real time, right? So, so from an innovation perspective, you know, agility plays a key role. And, and that, that's where the Kubernetes platforms or platforms like Kubernetes >>Plays. You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Chasy, when he was the CEO of aws, either one on one or on the cube, he always said, and this is kind of happening, companies are gonna be builders where it's not just utility. You need that table stakes to enable that new business idea. And so he, this last keynote, he did this big thing like, you know, think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators. And I think that, I think starting to see that, what do you think about that? You see that coming sooner than later? Or is that in, in sight or is that still ways away? >>I, I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level now. Now the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality, right? Yeah. I mean, you can, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then, and then prove it out. Like, Hey, I got a new idea. This idea is great. Yeah. And, and it's to the business advantage, right? But we really want to see it in production live where your customers are actually >>Using it and the board meetings, Hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue, where'd that come from? Agile developer. Again, this is real. Yeah, >>Yeah. >>Absolutely agree. Yeah. I think, think both of you gentlemen said a word in, in your, as you were talking, you used the word guardrails, right? I think, you know, we're talking about rigidity, but you know, the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So it's automation with the guardrails. Yeah. Guardrails are like children, you know, you know, shouldn't be hurt. You know, they're seen but not hurt. Developers don't care about guard rails. They just wanna go fast. They also bounce >>Around a little bit. Yeah. Off the guardrails. >>One thing we know that's not gonna slow down is, is the expectations, right? Of all the consumers of this, the Ds the business, the, the business top line, and of course the customers. So the ability to, to really, as your website says, let's see, make life easy for platform teams is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here is you're, you're really an enabler of those platform teams, it sounds like to me. Yep. So, great work, guys. Thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the, the evolution of Kubernetes, why, and really what the focus should be on those platform games. We appreciate all your time and your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us. Thanks >>For our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live, Cobe Con, Cloud Native con from Detroit. We've out with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, guys. Welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here live with "theCUBE" at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up. It's maturing. >> Yeah, we got three days of wall-to-wall coverage, all about Kubernetes. We heard about Security, Large scale, Cloud native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's going to be really awesome. You have a fast growing private company and a practitioner, big name, blue chip practitioner, building out next-gen cloud. First transforming, then building out the next level. This is classic, what we call Super Cloud-Like interview. It's going to be great. I'm looking forward to this. >> Anytime we can talk about Super Cloud, right? Please welcome back, one of our alumni, Haseeb Budhani is here, the CEO of Rafay. Great to see you. Santhosh Pasula, also joins us, the global head of Cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, Haseeb, you've been on "theCUBE" many times. You were on just recently, with the momentum that's around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about with on day one of the show? >> Wow, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here. And I live in this industry, and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. It means that the community's growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is, I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other KubeCons. Like when we hung out at in Valencia, for example, or even other places, it hasn't been this many people. Which means, and this is a good thing that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component for their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. >> Definitely, becoming foundational. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> Well, you guys got a great traction. We had many interviews at "theCUBE," and you got a practitioner here with you guys, are both pioneering, kind of what I call the next-gen cloud. First you got to get through Gen-One, which you guys done at Mass Mutual extremely well. Take us through the story of your transformation? 'Cause you're on at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here? You had a lot of transformation success at Mass Mutual? >> So, I was actually talking about this topic few minutes back. And the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or insurance sector, it takes generations of leadership to get to that perfection level. And ideally, the cloud for strategy starts in, and then how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? That's the second-gen altogether, and then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if you're talking about Kubernetes, in the traditional world, almost every company is running middleware and their applications in middleware. And their containerization is a topic that came in. And Docker is basically the runtime containerization. So, that came in first, and from Docker, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, Docker Swarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually, when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And as Haseeb was pointing out, you never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So, that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing, and how important it is for your cloud strategy. >> And your success now, and what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now? As you look forward, what's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? >> So we are past the stage of proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, the real game now. In the past, I used the quote, like "Hello world to real world." So, we are actually playing in the real world, not in the hello world anymore. Now, this is where the real time challenges will pop up. So, if you're talking about standardizing it, and then optimizing the cloud, and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? The demands that come out of regulations are met? And how are you going to scale it? And while scaling, how are you going to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it? So we are in that stage today. >> Haseeb talked about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at Mass Mutual. Haseeb talk a little bit about who? You mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this KubeCon in Detroit, is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here? Who's deciding in the organization and your customer conversations? Who are the decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? >> Hmm. Well, this guy. (Lisa laughing) One of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So, consistently what I'm seeing, is somebody, a CTO, CIO level, an individual is making a decision. I have multiple internal Bus who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps, and this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization. And they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and sort of consume it. So, what that means to us, is our customer is a platform organization, and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer, who's your developer, both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both, you know, constituencies, you're not going to be successful. >> So, you're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure? >> Yes, sir. It has to be both. >> On the other side? >> Exactly, right. So that look, honestly, it takes iteration to figure these things out. But this is a consistent theme that I am seeing. In fact, what I would argue now, is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy? Because if you don't have a platform strategy, you're going to have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things, and some will be successful, and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. >> Yeah, and Santhosh, I want to get to you. You mentioned your transformations, what you look forward, and your title, Global Head of Cloud, SRE. Okay, so SRE, we all know came from Google, right? Everyone wants to be like Google, but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google. Google's a unique thing. >> Haseeb: Only one Google. >> But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure. But concept can be portable, but the situation isn't. So, Borg became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So, you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale, you're doing for Mass Mutual. That's kind of what's happening, is that kind of how I see it? And you guys are playing in there partnering? >> So, I totally agree. Google introduce SRE, Site Reliability Engineering. And if you take the traditional transformation of the roles, in the past, it was called operations, and then DevOps ops came in, and then SRE is the new buzzword. And the future could be something like Product Engineering. And in this journey, here is what I tell folks on my side, like what worked for Google might not work for a financial company. It might not work for an insurance company. It's okay to use the word, SRE, but end of the day, that SRE has to be tailored down to your requirements. And the customers that you serve, and the technology that you serve. >> This is why I'm coming back, this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're going to have a platform engineering team? 'Cause you got to enable developers to be producing more code faster, better, cheaper, guardrails, policies. It's kind of becoming the, these serve the business, which is now the developers. IT used to serve the business back in the old days, "Hey, the IT serves the business." >> Yup. >> Which is a term now. >> Which is actually true now. >> The new IT serves the developers, which is the business. >> Which is the business. >> Because if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. >> The hard line between development and operations, so that's thinning down. Over the time, that line might disappear. And that's where SRE is fitting in. >> Yeah, and then building platform to scale the enablement up. So, what is the key challenges? You guys are both building out together this new transformational direction. What's new and what's the same? The same is probably the business results, but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructures and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? >> So, the new thing, if I may go first. The faster market to value that we are bringing to the table, that's very important. Business has an idea. How do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and take it into real time? So, that journey we have cut down. Technology is like Kubernetes. It makes an IT person's life so easy that they can speed up the process. In a traditional way, what used to take like an year, or six months, can be done in a month today, or less than that. So, there's definitely speed velocity, agility in general, and then flexibility. And then the automation that we put in, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters. These are today, it is possible to make that happen with a click off a button. In the past, it used to take, probably, 100-person team, and operational team to do it, and a lot of time. But that automation is happening. And we can get into the technology as much as possible, but blueprinting and all that stuff made it possible. >> We'll save that for another interview. We'll do it deep time. (panel laughing) >> But the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had, right? It's, "I want this in my lab now." How does the culture of Mass Mutual? How is it evolve to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? >> Once in a while, it's important to step yourself into the customer's shoes and think it from their perspective. Business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product, and how easy it is to reach out to the customers. And how well we are serving the customers, right? So, whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Docker Swam or Kubernetes, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about, it is, if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So, at that point, the business will step in. So, our job is to make sure, from a technology perspective, how fast you can make implement it? And how efficiently you can implement it? And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance? >> So, I was going to ask you, if you have VMware in your environment? 'Cause a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. And I think that's what you guys got going on. I can say that, you're the vCenter of Kubernetes. I mean, as as metaphor, a place to manage it all, is all one paint of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? >> So, virtualization has gone a long way. Where we started, what we call bare metal servers, and then we virtualized operating systems. Now, we are virtualizing applications, and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes plays a role. >> So, you see the need for a vCenter like thing for Kubernetes? >> There's definitely a need in the market. The way you need to think is like, let's say there is an insurance company who actually implement it today, and they gain the market advantage. Now, the the competition wants to do it as well, right? So, there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that's very critical, and it's a critical component of cloud strategy as a whole. >> See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say, you're like the vCenter of Kubernetes. Explain what that means in your term? If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would you say, BS, or would you say on point? >> Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today? So, in my opinion, by the way, vCenter in my opinion, is one of the best platforms ever built. Like it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. VMware did an amazing job, because they took an IT engineer, and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VM's multitenancy, access management, audit. Everything that you need to run a data center, you can do from essentially single platform. >> John: From a utility standpoint, home-run? >> It's amazing. >> Yeah. >> Because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well, why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So, the premise man Rafay was, well, I should have IT engineers, same engineers. Now, they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people that Mass Mutual are able to do now. So, to that end, now you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management. All of these things that have happened before, chargebacks, they used to have it in vCenter, now they need to happen in other platforms but for Kubernetes. So, should we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. >> John: Kind of, yeah. >> Are we a vCenter for Kubernetes? >> No. >> That is a John Furrier question. >> All right, well, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the complexity and not make it more steps, or change a tool chain, or do something, then the Devs move faster. And the service layer that serves the business, the new organization, has to enable speed. This is becoming a real discussion point in the industry, is that, "Yeah, we got new tool. Look at the shiny new toy." But if it move the needle, does it help productivity for developers? And does it actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So, I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just hit my mind, is think about the hoteling industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb. Or the taxi industry before Uber and after Uber. So, if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks, or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is build their application and deploy it, and run it. They don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers, and then building the Middleware on top of it, and then, do a bunch of testing to make sure they iron out all the compatible issues and whatnot. Now, today, all I say is like, "Hey, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application, and then deploy it in a development environment, that's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together. Make sure you see your application working, and then the next thing that you do is like, do the correction. >> John: Shipping. >> Shipping. You build the production. >> John: Press. Go. Release it. (laughs) That when you move on, but they were there. I mean, we're there now. We're there. So, we need to see the future, because that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features, they have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built, got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where there's, I call the Architectural List Environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. >> Yeah, and on top of it, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick. So, how do you do it? And you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and test it in real time. So, from an innovation perspective, agility plays a key role. And that's where the Kubernetes platforms, or platforms like Kubernetes plays. >> You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Jassy, when he was the CEO of AWS, either one-on-one or on "theCUBE," he always said, and this is kind of happening, "Companies are going to be builders, where it's not just utility, you need that table stakes to enable that new business idea." And so, in this last keynote, he did this big thing like, "Think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators." I think I'm starting to see that. What do you think about that? You see that coming sooner than later? Or is that an insight, or is that still ways away? >> I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level. Now ,the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality. I mean, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then prove it out like, "Hey, I got a new idea. This idea is great." And it's to the business advantage. But we really want to see it in production live where your customers are actually using it. >> In the board meetings, "Hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue, where'd that come from?" Agile Developer. Again, this is real. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Absolutely agree. Yeah, I think both of you gentlemen said a word as you were talking, you used the word, Guardrails. We're talking about agility, but the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So, it's automation with the guardrails. Guardrails are like children, you know, shouldn't be heard. They're seen but not heard. Developers don't care about guardrails, they just want to go fast. >> They also bounce around a little bit, (laughs) off the guardrails. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> One thing we know that's not going to slow down, is the expectations, right? Of all the consumers of this, the Devs, the business, the business top line, and, of course, the customers. So, the ability to really, as your website says, let's say, "Make Life Easy for Platform Teams" is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here, is you're really an enabler of those platform teams, it sounds like to me. >> Yup. >> So, great work, guys. Thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the evolution of Kubernetes, why? And really, what the focus should be on those platform teams. We appreciate all your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" Live, KubeCon CloudNativeCon from Detroit. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone to CUBE Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great influencer, Cloud Cloud RRT segment with Sarbjeet Johal, Cloud influencer, Cloud economist, Cloud consultant, Cloud advisor. Sarbjeet, welcome back, CUBE alumni. Good to see you. >> Thanks John and nice to be here. >> Now, what's your title? Cloud consultant? Analyst? >> Consultant, actually. Yeah, I'm launching my own business right now formally, soon. It's in stealth mode right now, we'll be (inaudible) >> Well, I'll just call you a Cloud guru, Cloud influencer. You've been great, friend of theCUBE. Really powerful on social. You share a lot of content. You're digging into all the trends. Supercloud is a thing, it's getting a lot of traction. We introduced that concept last reinvent. We were riffing before that. As we kind of were seeing the structural change that is now Supercloud, it really is kind of the destination or outcome of what we're seeing with hybrid cloud as a steady state into the what's now, they call multicloud, which is kind of awkward. It feels like it's default. Like multicloud, multi-vendor, but Supercloud has much more of a comprehensive abstraction around it. What's your thoughts? >> As you said, as Dave says that too, the Supercloud has that abstraction built into it. It's built on top of cloud, right? So it's being built on top of the CapEx which is being spent by likes of AWS and Azure and Google Cloud, and many others, right? So it's leveraging that infrastructure and building software stack on top of that, which is a platform. I see that as a platform being built on top of infrastructure as code. It's another platform which is not native to the cloud providers. So it's like a kind of cross-Cloud platform. That's what I said. >> Yeah, VMware calls it that cloud-cross cloud. I'm not a big fan of the name but I get what you're saying. We had a segment on earlier with Adrian Cockcroft, Laurie McVety and Chris Wolf, all part of the Cloud RRT like ourselves, and you've involved in Cloud from day one. Remember the OpenStack days Early Cloud, AWS, when they started we saw the trajectory and we saw the change. And I think the OpenStack in those early days were tell signs because you saw the movement of API first but Amazon just grew so fast. And then Azure now is catching up, their CapEx is so large that companies like Snowflake's like, "Why should I build my own? "I just sit on top of AWS, "move fast on one native cloud, then figure it out." Seems to be one of the playbooks of the Supercloud. >> Yeah, that is true. And there are reasons behind that. And I think number one reason is the skills gravity. What I call it, the developers and/or operators are trained on one set of APIs. And I've said that many times, to out compete your competition you have to out educate the market. And we know which cloud has done that. We know what traditional vendor has done that, in '90s it was Microsoft, they had VBS number one language and they were winning. So in the cloud era, it's AWS, their marketing efforts, their go-to market strategy, the micro nature of the releasing the micro sort of features, if you will, almost every week there's a new feature. So they have got it. And other two are trying to mimic that and they're having low trouble light. >> Yeah and I think GCP has been struggling compared to the three and native cloud on native as you're right, completely successful. As you're caught up and you see the Microsoft, I think is a a great selling point around multiple clouds. And the question that's on the table here is do you stay with the native cloud or you jump right to multicloud? Now multicloud by default is kind of what I see happening. We've been debating this, I'd love to get your thoughts because, Microsoft has a huge install base. They've converted to Office 365. They even throw SQL databases in there to kind of give it a little extra bump on the earnings but I've been super critical on their numbers. I think their shares are, there's clearly overstating their share, in my opinion, compared to AWS is a need of cloud, Azure though is catching up. So you have customers that are happy with Microsoft, that are going to run their apps on Azure. So if a customer has Azure and Microsoft that's technically multiple clouds. >> Yeah, true. >> And it's not a strategy, it's just an outcome. >> Yeah, I see Microsoft cloud as friendly to the internal developers. Internal developers of enterprises. but AWS is a lot more ISV friendly which is the software shops friendly. So that's what they do. They just build software and give it to somebody else. But if you're in-house developer and you have been a Microsoft shop for a long time, which enterprise haven't been that, right? So Microsoft is well entrenched into the enterprise. We know that, right? >> Yeah. >> For a long time. >> Yeah and the old joke was developers love code and just go with a lock in and then ops people don't want lock in because they want choice. So you have the DevOps movement that's been successful and they get DevSecOps. The real focus to me, I think, is the operating teams because the ops side is really with the pressure vis-a-vis. I want to get your reaction because we're seeing kind of the script flip. DevOps worked, infrastructure's code has worked. We don't yet see security as code yet. And you have things like cloud native services which is all developer, goodness. So I think the developers are doing fine. Give 'em a thumbs up and open source's booming. So they're shifting left, CI/CD pipeline. You have some issues around repo, monolithic repos, but devs are doing fine. It's the ops that are now have to level up because that seems to be a hotspot. What's your take? What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? And if you say you agree, why? >> Yeah, I think devs are doing fine because some of the devs are going into ops. Like the whole movement behind DevOps culture is that devs and ops is one team. The people who are building that application they're also operating that as well. But that's very foreign and few in enterprise space. We know that, right? Big companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, those guys can do that. They're very tech savvy shops. But when it comes to, if you go down from there to the second tier of enterprises, they are having hard time with that. Once you create software, I've said that, I sound like a broken record here. So once you create piece of software, you want to operate it. You're not always creating it. Especially when it's inhouse software development. It's not your core sort of competency to. You're not giving that software to somebody else or they're not multiple tenants of that software. You are the only user of that software as a company, or maybe maximum to your employees and partners. But that's where it stops. So there are those differences and when it comes to ops, we have to still differentiate the ops of the big companies, which are tech companies, pure tech companies and ops of the traditional enterprise. And you are right, the ops of the traditional enterprise are having tough time to cope up with the changing nature of things. And because they have to run the old traditional stacks whatever they happen to have, SAP, Oracle, financial, whatnot, right? Thousands of applications, they have to run that. And they have to learn on top of that, new scripting languages to operate the new stack, if you will. >> So for ops teams do they have to spin up operating teams for every cloud specialized tooling, there's consequences to that. >> Yeah. There's economics involved, the process, if you are learning three cloud APIs and most probably you will end up spending a lot more time and money on that. Number one, number two, there are a lot more problems which can arise from that, because of the differences in how the APIs work. The rule says if you pick one primary cloud and then you're focused on that, and most of your workloads are there, and then you go to the secondary cloud number two or three on as need basis. I think that's the right approach. >> Well, I want to get your take on something that I'm observing. And again, maybe it's because I'm old school, been around the IT block for a while. I'm observing the multi-vendors kind of as Dave calls the calisthenics, they're out in the market, trying to push their wears and convincing everyone to run their workloads on their infrastructure. multicloud to me sounds like multi-vendor. And I think there might not be a problem yet today so I want to get your reaction to my thoughts. I see the vendors pushing hard on multicloud because they don't have a native cloud. I mean, IBM ultimately will probably end up being a SaaS application on top of one of the CapEx hyperscale, some say, but I think the playbook today for customers is to stay on one native cloud, run cloud native hybrid go in on OneCloud and go fast. Then get success and then go multiple clouds. versus having a multicloud set of services out of the gate. Because if you're VMware you'd love to have cross cloud abstraction layer but that's lock in too. So what's your lock in? Success in the marketplace or vendor access? >> It's tricky actually. I've said that many times, that you don't wake up in the morning and say like, we're going to do multicloud. Nobody does that by choice. So it falls into your lab because of mostly because of what MNA is. And sometimes because of the price to performance ratio is better somewhere else for certain kind of workloads. That's like foreign few, to be honest with you. That's part of my read is, that being a developer an operator of many sort of systems, if you will. And the third tier which we talked about during the VMworld, I think 2019 that you want vendor diversity, just in case one vendor goes down or it's broken up by feds or something, and you want another vendor, maybe for price negotiation tactics, or- >> That's an op mentality. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And that's true, they want choice. They want to get locked in. >> You want choice because, and also like things can go wrong with the provider. We know that, we focus on top three cloud providers and we sort of assume that they'll be there for next 10 years or so at least. >> And what's also true is not everyone can do everything. >> Yeah, exactly. So you have to pick the provider based on all these sort of three sets of high level criteria, if you will. And I think the multicloud should be your last choice. Like you should not be gearing up for that by default but it should be by design, as Chuck said. >> Okay, so I need to ask you what does Supercloud in my opinion, look like five, 10 years out? What's the outcome of a good Supercloud structure? What's it look like? Where did it come from? How did it get there? What's your take? >> I think Supercloud is getting born in the absence of having standards around cloud. That's what it is. Because we don't have standards, we long, or we want the services at different cloud providers, Which have same APIs and there's less learning curve or almost zero learning curve for our developers and operators to learn that stuff. Snowflake is one example and VMware Stack is available at different cloud providers. That's sort of infrastructure as a service example if you will. And snowflake is a sort of data warehouse example and they're going down the stack. Well, they're trying to expand. So there are many examples like that. What was the question again? >> Is Supercloud 10 years out? What does it look like? What's the components? >> Yeah, I think the Supercloud 10 years out will expand because we will expand the software stack faster than the hardware stack and hardware stack will be expanding of course, with the custom chips and all that. There was the huge event yesterday was happening from AWS. >> Yeah, the Silicon. >> Silicon Day. And that's an eyeopening sort of movement and the whole technology consumption, if you will. >> And yeah, the differentiation with the chips with supply chain kind of herding right now, we think it's going to be a forcing function for more cloud adoption. Because if you can't buy networking gear you going to go to the cloud. >> Yeah, so Supercloud to me in 10 years, it will be bigger, better in the likes of HashiCorp. Actually, I think we need likes of HashiCorp on the infrastructure as a service side. I think they will be part of the Supercloud. They are kind of sitting on the side right now kind of a good vendor lost in transition kind of thing. That sort of thing. >> It's like Kubernetes, we'll just close out here. We'll make a statement. Is Kubernetes a developer thing or an infrastructure thing? It's an ops thing. I mean, people are coming out and saying Kubernetes is not a developer issue. >> It's ops thing. >> It's an ops thing. It's in operation, it's under the hood. So you, again, this infrastructure's a service integrating this super pass layer as Dave Vellante and Wikibon call it. >> Yeah, it's ops thing, actually, which enables developers to get that the Azure service, like you can deploy your software in sort of different format containers, and then you don't care like what VMs are those? And, but Serverless is the sort of arising as well. It was hard for a while now it's like the lull state, but I think Serverless will be better in next three to five years on. >> Well, certainly the hyperscale is like AWS and Azure and others have had great CapEx and investments. They need to stay ahead, in your opinion, final question, how do they stay ahead? 'Cause, AWS is not going to stand still nor will Azure, they're pedaling as fast as they can. Google's trying to figure out where they fit in. Are they going to be a real cloud or a software stack? Same with Oracle. To me, it's really, the big race is now with AWS and Azure's nipping at their heels. Hyperscale, what do they need to do to differentiate going forward? >> I think they are in a limbo. They, on one side, they don't want to compete with their customers who are sitting on top of them, likes of Snowflake and others, right? And VMware as well. But at the same time, they have to keep expanding and keep innovating. And they're debating within their themselves. Like, should we compete with these guys? Should we launch similar sort of features and functionality? Or should we keep it open? And what I have heard as of now that internally at AWS, especially, they're thinking about keeping it open and letting people sort of (inaudible)- >> And you see them buying some the Cerner with Oracle that bought Cerner, Amazon bought a healthcare company. I think the likes of MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks, are perfect examples of what we'll see I think on the AWS side. Azure, I'm not so sure, they like to have a little bit more control at the top of the stack with the SaaS, but I think Databricks has been so successful open source, Snowflake, a little bit more proprietary and closed than Databricks. They're doing well is on top of data, and MongoDB has got great success. All of these things compete with AWS higher level services. So, that advantage of those companies not having the CapEx investment and then going multiple clouds on other ecosystems that's a path of customers. Stay one, go fast, get traction, then go. >> That's huge. Actually the last sort comment I want to make is that, Also, that you guys include this in the definition of Supercloud, the likes of Capital One and Soner sort of vendors, right? So they are verticals, Capital One is in this financial vertical, and then Soner which Oracle bar they are in this healthcare vertical. And remember in the beginning of the cloud and when the cloud was just getting born. We used to say that we will have the community clouds which will be serving different verticals. >> Specialty clouds. >> Specialty clouds, community clouds. And actually that is happening now at very sort of small level. But I think it will start happening at a bigger level. The Goldman Sachs and others are trying to build these services on the financial front risk management and whatnot. I think that will be- >> Well, what's interesting, which you're bringing up a great discussion. We were having discussions around these vertical clouds like Goldman Sachs Capital One, Liberty Mutual. They're going all in on one native cloud then going into multiple clouds after, but then there's also the specialty clouds around functionality, app identity, data security. So you have multiple 3D dimensional clouds here. You can have a specialty cloud just on identity. I mean, identity on Amazon is different than Azure. Huge issue. >> Yeah, I think at some point we have to distinguish these things, which are being built on top of these infrastructure as a service, in past with a platform, a service, which is very close to infrastructure service, like the lines are blurred, we have to distinguish these two things from these Superclouds. Actually, what we are calling Supercloud maybe there'll be better term, better name, but we are all industry path actually, including myself and you or everybody else. Like we tend to mix these things up. I think we have to separate these things a little bit to make things (inaudible) >> Yeah, I think that's what the super path thing's about because you think about the next generation SaaS has to be solved by innovations of the infrastructure services, to your point about HashiCorp and others. So it's not as clear as infrastructure platform, SaaS. There's going to be a lot of interplay between this levels of services. >> Yeah, we are in this flasker situation a lot of developers are lost. A lot of operators are lost in this transition and it's just like our economies right now. Like I was reading at CNBC today, and here's sort of headline that people are having hard time understanding what state the economy is in. And so same is true with our technology economy. Like we don't know what state we are in. It's kind of it's in the transition phase right now. >> Well we're definitely in a bad economy relative to the consumer market. I've said on theCUBE publicly, Dave has as well, not as aggressive. I think the tech is still in a boom. I don't think there's tech bubble at all that's bursting, I think, the digital transformation from post COVID is going to continue. And this is the first recession downturn where the hyperscalers have been in market, delivering the economic value, almost like they're pumping on all cylinders and going to the next level. Go back to 2008, Amazon web services, where were they? They were just emerging out. So the cloud economic impact has not been factored into the global GDP relationship. I think all the firms that are looking at GDP growth and tech spend as a correlation, are completely missing the boat on the fact that cloud economics and digital transformation is a big part of the new economics. So refactoring business models this is continuing and it's just the early days. >> Yeah, I have said that many times that cloud works good in the bad economy and cloud works great in the good economy. Do you know why? Because there are different type of workloads in the good economy. A lot of experimentation, innovative solutions go into the cloud. You can do experimentation that you have extra money now, but in the bad economy you don't want to spend the CapEx because don't have money. Money is expensive at that point. And then you want to keep working and you don't need (inaudible) >> I think inflation's a big factor too right now. Well, Sarbjeet, great to see you. Thanks for coming into our studio for our stage performance for Supercloud 22, this is a pilot episode that we're going to get a consortium of experts Cloud RRT like yourselves, in the conversation to discuss what the architecture is. What is a taxonomy? What are the key building blocks and what things need to be in place for Supercloud capability? Because it's clear that if without standards, without defacto standards, we're at this tipping point where if it all comes together, not all one company can do everything. Customers want choice, but they also want to go fast too. So DevOps is working. It's going the next level. We see this as Supercloud. So thank you so much for your participation. >> Thanks for having me. And I'm looking forward to listen to the other sessions (inaudible) >> We're going to take it on A stickers. We'll take it on the internet. I'm John Furrier, stay tuned for more Supercloud 22 coverage, here at the Palo Alto studios in one minute. (bright music)

(light music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here Palo Alto for a big event. Supercloud 22, we've got a great ecosystem conversation here. Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO, Prosimo. Ramesh, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So, I wanted to bring you in because we've had previous CUBE conversations around cloud networking, latency, you also have some, some pedigree, Viptela. The folks in the industry know that's been a deep tech company. >> Yep. >> You have been around the block. You've seen the movie before. You've seen the tech trends. You've seen the hype. You've seen the fluff. Where's the meat on the bone with Supercloud in your opinion? >> So it, it starts with what enterprises are struggling with, right? And if you take a very simple example, it's actually quite fresh in my mind because I was just having this conversation this morning. A large bank has an application sitting in AWS, right? And they have to provide the application access to the treasury, to their suppliers, to ticker feeds, to all their downstream partners, and so on and so forth. Guess what? They don't control, where all those things are. They're in very different regions and very different clouds. And so you, whether you like it or not, you have a problem here, right? And so it starts with, for the particular bank, what are the capabilities that they need, right? And so AWS provides a whole host of native capabilities, but they still need to build a few more things on top. So going by, essentially the definition of Supercloud, even within a single cloud you need to build a few more capabilities on top. That gets worsened by the fact that now you need to provide access to various other clouds, various other regions and, and so forth. So, whether we like it or not, this movie is here to stay. >> What's the difference between Supercloud and multi-cloud? Because multi-cloud, I've been saying, is not necessarily a market yet. >> Correct, yes. So, Supercloud is essentially the cloud native capabilities provided by the hyperscalers, get you probably 30, 40% of the way, right? But then, in order to deliver on a care about, right? In our case, from a cloud networking standpoint, that is experience, that's performance, reliability, zero trust access, and then so forth. You have to take that a little bit further, and so we have vendors, like us, that actually build capabilities on top of the hyperscalers, right? Now, even if you think of a single cloud, how you build that is different on AWS than it's on Azure, than on GCP. But do the customers care? No, they want to be able to consume it in exactly the same way across all of them. So, whether it's multi-cloud or a single cloud, you have a problem that is white space on top of the hyperscalers capabilities that you just need to build. >> And what problems is it solving today? Because again, I, again, multi-cloud, I've yet seen the problem. I kind of get what's happening. Multiple clouds do exist. Use cases matter, maybe best debri, but they're standalone. They're not really interoperating, so to speak. So people have been successful on, on public cloud. >> That's correct, yes. >> For use cases? >> Absolutely. So even if you take a single cloud, for example, right? You have multiple problems to, to address. So let's take the example of, I have users coming from various different regions, around the globe, and I have apps that are spread, maybe not across like all clouds, but single cloud, maybe multiple regions, right? Now, I have a reach problem, which is, I need to go from where the user is to where the application is sitting. I have an experience problem because if my spinning wheel shows up, I'm going to go crazy. I have a security problem because I want to make sure it's only me that have access to it, right? But does the cloud provider solve for this entirely? No, they give you the nuts, the bolts, or what we call ours essentially, what you need is a, is a latte. They give you really nice coffee beans, not just one flavor, 20 flavors of those. They give you raw sugar and a few other things. They give you five different flavors of milk, but you got to make your own latte. So, that's what we do. >> And this is where the infrastructure transformation's happening. >> Exactly. >> And the super paz layer, as Dave Vellante and I have talked about in cloud, is you have to integrate a native cloud. >> Correct. >> Which is beautiful. It's integrated, everything works together, there's a lot of lattes to be made or espressos. >> Exactly. >> I mean, tons of great things there. So, big check marks, double check, gold star for AWS. >> Correct. >> All good. Now, on premises, we've found that hybrid is a steady state. >> Exactly. >> Okay, that's cloud operations. Now, you got the edge. Where does the Supercloud strategy come in? For the folks watching there, it's like, "Hey, okay, I get that." "But I don't want to just buy into another vendor's hype." >> Absolutely. >> "I got to build my own cloud," to your point about the lattes. >> Correct. >> They have to make their own infrastructure an application environment to power the developer. >> Exactly. And, and hybrid is here to stay as, as you pointed out, right, John? So, I have my data center and let's say when most folks start out they start to like a single region of a single cloud, right? And what are you most concerned about there? Hey, can I migrate? Can I start to build applications in the public cloud, right? And all you care about is can you talk back into my data center? Like, as long as some basic hygiene is there that's all they care about, right? The problem happens when you go from, kind of, the first five EC2 instances to 50 to a hundred, then you have a few other things that you need to care about, right? That's really kind of where the, the Supercloud capabilities start to come in, right? Because you have the cloud native things you can make that work for the first few days, but then after that you need augmented capabilities. >> So Ramesh, some people will say, "Hey, John, Supercloud okay, it's funny, ha ha ha." But isn't it just SAS? >> No, SAS is a delivery mechanism, right? And so, so there is the capability and that is how do you want to consume, right? And so capabilities or cloud native capabilities or piece of software capabilities or (unintelligible) cluster form factor and so forth. How do you want to consume? Maybe it's a package form factor, it is a size, it could even be passive if it's sitting in the, in the element, and then so forth, right? And so you really want to distinguish those two. And, and, and that's how we see the, the industry evolve. >> Can Superclouds be specialty clouds? Like is Snowflake a Supercloud? Is Goldman Sachs financial cloud a Supercloud? >> Absolutely, right. So Supercloud is not like a, a conglomeration of multiple capabilities, right? It can be for a specific use case, it can be for a specific functionality. So we, we consider our capabilities by the definition as a Supercloud in, in networking, right? In cloud networking, in Prosimo. So, does that solve the entirety of what I want to do in the cloud? No, absolutely not. There's data, there's computers, a whole bunch of other things, but for a specialty you do have some Supercloud. >> Yeah, in fact, I had a note here. I was going to ask you will, when will there be specialty clouds, apps, identity, data, security, nteworking, we will see those? >> Absolutely, yeah. And, and those are slowly starting to brew, right? So you have, you have identity as one, you have networking as one, you have the zero trust piece as, as another one, you have data as a, as another one. So when all these things come together, absolutely. That's what, that's what enterprise customers care about. >> So I love infrastructure as code, that drove a lot of the evolution and revolution of DevOps. When are we going to see security as code and network as code? Or is it there? >> No networkers code, for sure. It's already, it's already there. It's probably in its early innings, I would say, but we are starting to see that already. The reason for that is really simple. Enough CIOs have yelled at their networking teams to say, "my app guys can get this done three," "four times a day, you get this done once a week." Right? And so, that has actually driven quite a bit of innovation, >> It's slow, >> It's slow, right? And so that's driven quite a bit of innovation. It all starts with, hey, can I build a Terraform provider and then just integrate into Terraform? But it doesn't, it doesn't stop there, right? There's a whole bunch of additional capabilities, a day in troubleshooting, a whole bunch of things that need to come together. But I would say networkers code has already started to, to, to take ship. >> Which, that's a great point about specialty clouds. What about vertical clouds too? 'Cause you got insurance, oil and gas, FinTech. Both sides of the stack can have specialty clouds. >> Absolutely, yeah. So, it, what's driving specialty clouds, right? Some of it is compliance, mainly because you just have to shard the data, and when you shard the data, the entirety gets, gets sharded, right? Some of it driven by use case, because some are a little more serverless, service mesh and intelligence focused, some are a little more infrastructure focused. So you do see that taking off. I would say we've seen a whole lot more, kind of, on the horizontal side, less on the vertical side, but that's really happening, right? >> Yeah, I think that, to me, indicates a Supercloud. The fact that the diversity of the application on the clouds themselves, someone could be spending, say, Liberty Mutual or Goldman Sachs. They were once spending that as CapEx. >> Exactly. >> Now it's OPEX, so they become a service provider. So, if you have scale with data and expertise, you become a Supercloud by default. And you don't have to pay for the CapEx, >> Yeah. You're already paying in. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And that's what snowflake basically did with data warehouse. >> That's right, yeah. >> I mean they're basically a data warehouse. Refactored on the cloud and then go, "whoa, let's go to Azure." >> Yeah. And, and where does that data decide do you ask that question? No, right? You just assume that, hey, retrospective of it's a single cloud, multiple regions, it's there. If it's stretched to multiple clouds, yes, it's just there, but you, you talk about like that. >> In our cloud already panel earlier, we talked about how companies are going fast on one native cloud, 'cause they don't want to have multiple development teams and different ops teams. They go all in say, hey, mostly AWS wins this, unless it's specially Azure productivity software or SQL database, go hard in on Amazon, get speed and velocity, get that flywheel, win, get scale, get value. Then go to Azure, provide that same value to that marketplace and other clouds. Then the next dot to connect is, can the customer have the same experience across the clouds? That's where it gets interesting. What's your thoughts on that? >> Actually, it gets interesting even when they go from a single cloud in a single region to multiple regions, right? And the, the more spread out the regions are, you have requirements around application performance, application experience and so forth. So, suddenly the networking conversation starts to become an experience and a performance conversation. The security conversation starts to become a zero trust conversation and so forth. And so you, you do see that, that interesting shift that's happening. >> Of course. >> Exactly. And then that gets worsened by the fact that now you have multiple clouds, multiple regions, and then... >> So you got regions, clouds, >> and then you have edge locations now. >> And edge. >> You mentioned edge. >> This, this is why I think multi-cloud is BS, because this is all coming so fast. You got to get your Supercloud first. >> Exactly. >> Then you extend into, what it looks like a multi-vendor or multifaceted environment that should be automated by that time. >> Exactly. >> So it's evolutionary, we're not there yet. >> Exactly. >> So you agree, no market yet? >> That's right, yes. So unless it's like the super large enterprises where we have seen a really good mix of multiple different clouds or super large enterprises where each business unit is free to choose the cloud of their choice for the application developers because they just like a certain cloud, right? >> Or negotiations. >> Or negotiations, right? Exactly, so there you find yourself in a healthy mix. It's not like you're 80, 10, 10. It's, it's a healthy mix of three different clouds, right? But vast majority of the enterprises, they have a concerted strategy, I have a primary cloud 'cause that's where two, two big CEOs shake hands and assign multi billion dollar deals, right? >> It's just a song with Howie Shute, who's now a Zscaler, former VMware. Probably know Howie, he's a legend in the community as well. We were talking about the old days of the data center and you remember that? We'll go back to our, into our, you know, historical views of experience. Back when the data center became popular this was the glass house. Mainframes to mini computers. It became a complex environment. You had to have pretty much a PhD or serious networking or some sort of technical background. And then IT was born, the local area networks, the mini computers, and the PCs change that dynamic. IT was born. Okay, and let's just say it, most IT guys aren't PhDs. >> Exactly. >> So what's happened there is democratization and the operations side of that wave. We're kind of going th&rough it now, don't ya think, with cloud? Like, you got to be super smart to wrangle the data. I mean, some of the data pipelining stuff is super complex, after Snowflake and data bricks. >> Absolutely. And largely depends on the maturity, right? Like, so once you pass a certain scale in the cloud the care abouts start to be very different. The care abouts are, how can I operate this at scale? Because I might have started off with a relatively inefficient infrastructure, right? But now if I start to operate that at scale with like thousands of VPCs and so forth, somebody is looking at an AWS bill there and going, "ah, no, no, no, we're not going to do that." >> We're getting to the good part now. So, so here's where I wanted to get to, 'Cause we're kind of getting there, The proof points of Supercloud is IT like operations, >> Correct. >> Easy. >> Yep. >> Not overstaffed and maybe an SRE model one too many. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What are the proof points do you see that would be evidence that Supercloud is working? >> So in a well functional model where we have seen enterprises take the applications that they care about and then move that into the public cloud or build it organically. If they have staffed their team, I think a good leading indicator is that they have staffed the team so that there are a bunch of guys who understand what it means for cloud native capabilities. There are a bunch of guys who then put it together and then you look at the care abouts, right? Ultimately at the end of the day, the goal, if you go higher up in the layers, is it about application experience? Is it about kind of reducing the blast radius of my security? Is it about my data cleanliness and, and hygiene? You don't care about kind of how the pipelining works underneath the covers or how do I put a transit gateway and this and that together? No, that's not what you care about. You care about kind of the outcomes and, and- >> Palmer (unintelligible) that VMware, when he was there. You just say the hardened top, no one talks about what's in an Intel processor. I mean it's just works. >> Exactly, yeah. And it's what applications you build on top of that Intel processor that actually makes it more powerful, right? And so the first evidence I would say is kind of how is the team structured? The second evidence would be kind of what, what are the care abouts for the guys that are building these applications, right? Because even the application developers more than the application, they care about kind of, is it helping? Is it delivering on the experience? Is it being used the way it's supposed to? >> Is it value? >> Exactly, right? And those are not areas that the cloud providers are solely focused on, right? Like you don't see an AWS or an Azure dashboard show that particular thing for the entirety of the application, they'll tell you for the ATR services that you, that you use, here's the SLA for each one of these services. >> And that's where the customer has to build it. >> Exactly right. Now, does that give you the full picture? No, it doesn't. Somebody has to pull this together. Somebody has to aggregate this together and then make sense as to whether this is working or not, right? So whether you call it Supercloud, or whether you call it kind of the care abouts on top of the cloud native stuff, they're all the same. I'm glad you guys came up with a, with a name for this. And I think it's going to be here to stay. >> Well, thank you for sharing your expertise. You got a great background in this area and you got, I think you guys are right on the front wave of this new change. I think a little bit early, but that's good, but don't be too early. >> Yeah, exactly. No, and, and, and that's really important, right, John? So, you don't want to be too early. You certainly don't want to be too late, but at the same time, the pace at which things are evolving are fast enough that you, you will see. I think when, if we have this conversation even three months from now, it might be a very different conversation. >> Yeah, people want to go fast and they don't want to get stuck with a vendor. They made a bad choice that slows 'em down 'cause they got problems to solve, things to build. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Ramesh, thanks for coming on, Supercloud 22, we're breaking it all down. We're exposing it out to everyone. We're discussing it. We're going to challenge it. But ultimately it is a thing. Supercloud 22. Thanks for watching. >> Wonderful, thanks John. (light music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to the "Supercloud 22." I'm John Furrier, host of "The Cube." This is the Cloud-erati panel, the distinguished experts who have been there from day one, watching the cloud grow, from building clouds, and all open source stuff as well. Just great stuff. Good friends of "The Cube," and great to introduce back on "The Cube," Adrian Cockcroft, formerly with Netflix, formerly AWS, retired, now commentating here in "The Cube," as well as other events. Great to see you back out there, Adrian. Lori MacVittie, Cloud Evangelist with F5, also wrote a great blog post on supercloud, as well as Dave Vellante as well, setting up the supercloud conversation, which we're going to get into, and Chris Hoff, who's the CTO and CSO of LastPass who's been building clouds, and we know him from "The Cube" before with security and cloud commentary. Welcome, all, back to "The Cube" and supercloud. >> Thanks, John. >> Hi. >> All right, Lori, we'll start with you to get things going. I want to try to sit back, as you guys are awesome experts, and involved from building, and in the trenches, on the front lines, and Adrian's coming out of retirement, but Lori, you wrote the post setting the table on supercloud. Let's start with you. What is supercloud? What is it evolving into? What is the north star, from your perspective? >> Well, I don't think there's a north star yet. I think that's one of the reasons I wrote it, because I had a clear picture of this in my mind, but over the past, I don't know, three, four years, I keep seeing, in research, my own and others', complexity, multi-cloud. "We can't manage it. They're all different. "We have trouble. What's going on? "We can't do anything right." And so digging into it, you start looking into, "Well, what do you mean by complexity?" Well, security. Migration, visibility, performance. The same old problems we've always had. And so, supercloud is a concept that is supposed to overlay all of the clouds and normalize it. That's really what we're talking about, is yet another abstraction layer that would provide some consistency that would allow you to do the same security and monitor things correctly. Cornell University actually put out a definition way back in 2016. And they said, "It's an architecture that enables migration "across different zones or providers," and I think that's important, "and provides interfaces to everything, "makes it consistent, and normalizes the network," basically brings it all together, but it also extends to private clouds. Sometimes we forget about that piece of it, and I think that's important in this, so that all your clouds look the same. So supercloud, big layer on top, makes everything wonderful. It's unicorns again. >> It's interesting. We had multiple perspectives. (mumbles) was like Snowflake, who built on top of AWS. Jerry Chan, who we heard from earlier today, Greylock Penn's "Castles in the Cloud" saying, "Hey, you can have a moat, "you can build an advantage and have differentiation," so startups are starting to build on clouds, that's the native cloud view, and then, of course, they get success and they go to all the other clouds 'cause they got customers in the ecosystem, but it seems that all the cloud players, Chris, you commented before we came on today, is that they're all fighting for the customer's workloads on their infrastructure. "Come bring your stuff over to here, "and we'll make it run better." And all your developers are going to be good. Is there a problem? I mean, or is this something else happening here? Is there a real problem? >> Well, I think the north star's over there, by the way, Lori. (laughing) >> Oh, there it is. >> Right there. The supercloud north star. So indeed I think there are opportunities. Whether you call them problems or not, John, I think is to be determined. Most companies have, especially if they're a large enterprise, whether or not they've got an investment in private cloud or not, have spent time really trying to optimize their engineering and workload placement on a single cloud. And that, regardless of your choice, as we take the big three, whether it's Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, each of them have their pros and cons for various types of workloads. And so you'll see a lot of folks optimizing for a particular cloud, and it takes a huge effort up and down the stack to just get a single cloud right. That doesn't take into consideration integrations with software as a service, instantiated, oftentimes, on top of infrastructure of the service that you need to supplement where the obstruction layer ends in infrastructure of the service. You've seen most IS players starting to now move up-chain, as we predicted years ago, to platform as a service, but platforms of various types. So I definitely see it as an opportunity. Previous employers have had multiple clouds, but they were very specifically optimized for the types of workloads, for example, in, let's say, AWS versus GCP, based on the need for different types and optimized compute platforms that each of those providers ran. We never, in that particular case, thought about necessarily running the same workloads across both clouds, because they had different pricing models, different security models, et cetera. And so the challenge is really coming down to the fact that, what is the cost benefit analysis of thinking about multi-cloud when you can potentially engineer the resiliency or redundancy, all the in-season "ilities" that you might need to factor into your deployments on a single cloud, if they are investing at the pace in which they are? So I think it's an opportunity, and it's one that continues to evolve, but this just reminds me, your comments remind me, of when we were talking about OpenStack versus AWS. "Oh, if there were only APIs that existed "that everybody could use," and you saw how that went. So I think that the challenge there is, what is the impetus for a singular cloud provider, any of the big three, deciding that they're going to abstract to a single abstraction layer and not be able to differentiate from the competitors? >> Yeah, and that differentiation's going to be big. I mean, assume that the clouds aren't going to stay still like AWS and just not stop innovating. We see the devs are doing great, Adrian, open source is bigger and better than ever, but now that's been commercialized into enterprise. It's an ops problem. So to Chris's point, the cost benefit analysis is interesting, because do companies have to spin up multiple operations teams, each with specialized training and tooling for the clouds that they're using, and does that open up a can of worms, or is that a good thing? I mean, can you design for this? I mean, is there an architecture or taxonomy that makes it work, or is it just the cart before the horse, the solution before the problem? >> Yeah, well, I think that if you look at any large vendor... Sorry, large customer, they've got a bit of everything already. If you're big enough, you've bought something from everybody at some point. So then you're trying to rationalize that, and trying to make it make sense. And I think there's two ways of looking at multi-cloud or supercloud, and one is that the... And practically, people go best of breed. They say, "Okay, I'm going to get my email "from Google or Microsoft. "I'm going to run my applications on AWS. "Maybe I'm going to do some AI machine learning on Google, "'cause those are the strengths of the platforms." So people tend to go where the strength is. So that's multi-cloud, 'cause you're using multiple clouds, and you still have to move data and make sure they're all working together. But then what Lori's talking about is trying to make them all look the same and trying to get all the security architectures to be the same and put this magical layer, this unicorn magical layer that, "Let's make them all look the same." And this is something that the CIOs have wanted for years, and they keep trying to buy it, and you can sell it, but the trouble is it's really hard to deliver. And I think, when I go back to some old friends of ours at Enstratius who had... And back in the early days of cloud, said, "Well, we'll just do an API that abstracts "all the cloud APIs into one layer." Enstratius ended up being sold to Dell a few years ago, and the problem they had was that... They didn't have any problem selling it. The problem they had was, a year later, when it came up for renewal, the developers all done end runs around it were ignoring it, and the CIOs weren't seeing usage. So you can sell it, but can you actually implement it and make it work well enough that it actually becomes part of your core architecture without, from an operations point of view, without having the developers going directly to their favorite APIs around them? And I'm not sure that you can really lock an organization down enough to get them onto a layer like that. So that's the way I see it. >> You just defined- >> You just defined shadow shadow IT. (laughing) That's pretty- (crosstalk) >> Shadow shadow IT, yeah. >> Yeah, shadow shadow it. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I mean, this brings up the question, I mean, is there really a problem? I mean, I guess we'll just jump to it. What is supercloud? If you can have the magic outcome, what is it? Enstratius rendered in with automation? The security issues? Kubernetes is hot. What is the supercloud dream? I guess that's the question. >> I think it's got easier than it was five, 10 years ago. Kubernetes gives you a bunch of APIs that are common across lots of different areas, things like Snowflake or MongoDB Atlas. There are SaaS-based services, which are across multiple clouds from vendors that you've picked. So it's easier to build things which are more portable, but I still don't think it's easy to build this magic API that makes them all look the same. And I think that you're going to have leaky abstractions and security being... Getting the security right's going to be really much more complex than people think. >> What about specialty superclouds, Chris? What's your view on that? >> Yeah, I think what Adrian is alluding to, those leaky abstractions, are interesting, especially from the security perspective, 'cause I think what you see is if you were to happen to be able to thin slice across a set of specific types of workloads, there is a high probability given today that, at least on two of the three major clouds, you could get SaaS providers that sit on those same infrastructure of the service clouds for you, string them together, and have a service that technically is abstracted enough from the things you care about to work on one, two, or three, maybe not all of them, but most SaaS providers in the security space, or identity space, data space, for example, coexist on at least Microsoft and AWS, if not all three, with Google. And so you could technically abstract a service to the point that you let that level of abstract... Like Lori said, no computer science problem could not be... So, no computer science problem can't be solved with more layers of abstraction or misdirection... Or redirection. And in that particular case, if you happen to pick the right vendors that run on all three clouds, you could possibly get close. But then what that really talks about is then, if you built your seven-layer dip model, then you really have specialty superclouds spanning across infrastructure of the service clouds. One for your identity apps, one for data and data layers, to normalize that, one for security, but at what cost? Because you're going to be charged not for that service as a whole, but based on compute resources, based on how these vendors charge across each cloud. So again, that cost-benefit ratio might start being something that is rather imposing from a budgetary perspective. >> Lori, weigh in on this, because the enterprise people love to solve complexity with more complexity. Here, we need to go the other way. It's a commodity. So there has to be a better way. >> I think I'm hearing two fundamental assumptions. One, that a supercloud would force the existing big three to implement some sort of equal API. Don't agree with that. There's no business case for that. There's no reason that could compel them to do that. Otherwise, we would've convinced them to do that, what? 10, 15 years ago when we said we need to be interoperable. So it's not going to happen there. They don't have a good reason to do that. There's no business justification for that. The other presumption, I think, is that we would... That it's more about the services, the differentiated services, that are offered by all of these particular providers, as opposed to treating the core IaaS as the commodity it is. It's compute, it's some storage, it's some networking. Look at that piece. Now, pull those together by... And it's not OpenStack. That's not the answer, it wasn't the answer, it's not the answer now, but something that can actually pull those together and abstract it at a different layer. So cloud providers don't have to change, 'cause they're not going to change, but if someone else were to build that architecture to say, "all right, I'm going to treat all of this compute "so you can run your workloads," as Chris pointed out, "in the best place possible. "And we'll help you do that "by being able to provide those cost benefit analysis, "'What's the best performance, what are you doing,' "And then provide that as a layer." So I think that's really where supercloud is going, 'cause I think that's what a lot of the market actually wants in terms of where they want to run their workloads, because we're seeing that they want to run workloads at the edge, "a lot closer to me," which is yet another factor that we have to consider, and how are you going to be moving individual workloads around? That's the holy grail. Let's move individual workloads to where they're the best performance, the security, cost optimized, and then one layer up. >> Yeah, I think so- >> John Considine, who ultimately ran CloudSwitch, that sold to Verizon, as well as Tom Gillis, who built Bracket, are both rolling in their graves, 'cause what you just described was exactly that. (Lori laughing) Well, they're not even dead yet, so I can't say they're rolling in their graves. Sorry, Tom. Sorry, John. >> Well, how do hyperscalers keep their advantage with all this? I mean, to that point. >> Native services and managed services on top of it. Look how many flavors of managed Kubernetes you have. So you have a choice. Roll your own, or go with a managed service, and then differentiate based on the ability to take away and simplify some of that complexity. Doesn't mean it's more secure necessarily, but I do think we're seeing opportunities where those guys are fighting tooth and nail to keep you on a singular cloud, even though, to Lori's point, I agree, I don't think it's about standardized APIs, 'cause I think that's never going to happen. I do think, though, that SaaS-y supercloud model that we were talking about, layering SaaS that happens to span all the three infrastructure of the service are probably more in line with what Lori was talking about. But I do think that portability of workload is given to you today within lots of ways. But again, how much do you manage, and how much performance do you give up by running additional abstraction layers? And how much security do you give up by having to roll your own and manage that? Because the whole point was, in many cases... Cloud is using other people's computers, so in many cases, I want to manage as little of it as I possibly can. >> I like this whole SaaS angle, because if you had the old days, you're on Amazon Web Services, hey, if you build a SaaS application that runs on Amazon, you're all great, you're born in the cloud, just like that generations of startups. Great. Now when you have this super pass layer, as Dave Vellante was riffing on his analysis, and Lori, you were getting into this pass layer that's kind of like SaaS-y, what's the SaaS equation look like? Because that, to me, sounds like a supercloud version of saying, "I have a workload that runs on all the clouds equally." I just don't think that's ever going to happen. I agree with you, Chris, on that one. But I do see that you can have an abstraction that says, "Hey, I don't really want to get in the weeds. "I don't want to spend a lot of ops time on this. "I just want it to run effectively, and magic happens," or, as you said, some layer there. How does that work? How do you see this super pass layer, if anything, enabling a different SaaS game? >> I think you hit on it there. The last like 10 or so years, we've been all focused on developers and developer productivity, and it's all about the developer experience, and it's got to be good for them, 'cause they're the kings. And I think the next 10 years are going to be very focused on operations, because once you start scaling out, it's not about developers. They can deliver fast or slow, it doesn't matter, but if you can't scale it out, then you've got a real problem. So I think that's an important part of it, is really, what is the ops experience, and what is the best way to get those costs down? And this would serve that purpose if it was done right, which, we can argue about whether that's possible or not, but I don't have to implement it, so I can say it's possible. >> Well, are we going to be getting into infrastructure as code moves into "everything is code," security, data, (laughs) applications is code? I mean, "blank" is code, fill in the blank. (Lori laughing) >> Yeah, we're seeing more of that with things like CDK and Pulumi, where you are actually coding up using a real language rather than the death by YAML or whatever. How much YAML can you take? But actually having a real language so you're not trying to do things in parsing languages. So I think that's an interesting trend. You're getting some interesting templates, and I like what... I mean, the counterexample is that if you just go deep on one vendor, then maybe you can go faster and it is simpler. And one of my favorite vendor... Favorite customers right now that I've been talking to is Liberty Mutual. Went very deep and serverless first on AWS. They're just doing everything there, and they're using CDK Patterns to do it, and they're going extremely fast. There's a book coming out called "The Value Flywheel" by Dave Anderson, it's coming out in a few months, to just detail what they're doing, but that's the counterargument. If you could pick one vendor, you can go faster, you can get that vendor to do more for you, and maybe get a bigger discount so you're not splitting your discounts across vendors. So that's one aspect of it. But I think, fundamentally, you're going to find the CIOs and the ops people generally don't like sitting on one vendor. And if that single vendor is a horizontal platform that's trying to make all the clouds look the same, now you're locked into whatever that platform was. You've still got a platform there. There's still something. So I think that's always going to be something that the CIOs want, but the developers are always going to just pick whatever the best tool for building the thing is. And a analogy here is that the developers are dating and getting married, and then the operations people are running the family and getting divorced. And all the bad parts of that cycle are in the divorce end of it. You're trying to get out of a vendor, there's lawyers, it's just a big mess. >> Who's the lawyer in this example? (crosstalk) >> Well... (laughing) >> Great example. (crosstalk) >> That's why ops people don't like lock-in, because they're the ones trying to unlock. They aren't the ones doing the lock-in. They're the ones unlocking, when developers, if you separate the two, are the ones who are going, picking, having the fun part of it, going, trying a new thing. So they're chasing a shiny object, and then the ops people are trying to untangle themselves from the remains of that shiny object a few years later. So- >> Aren't we- >> One way of fixing that is to push it all together and make it more DevOps-y. >> Yeah, that's right. >> But that's trying to put all the responsibilities in one place, like more continuous improvement, but... >> Chris, what's your reaction to that? Because you're- >> No, that's exactly what I was going to bring up, yeah, John. And 'cause we keep saying "devs," "dev," and "ops" and I've heard somewhere you can glue those two things together. Heck, you could even include "sec" in the middle of it, and "DevSecOps." So what's interesting about what Adrian's saying though, too, is I think this has a lot to do with how you structure your engineering teams and how you think about development versus operations and security. So I'm building out a team now that very much makes use of, thanks to my brilliant VP of Engineering, a "Team Topologies" approach, which is a very streamlined and product oriented way of thinking about, for example, in engineering, if you think about team structures, you might have people that build the front end, build the middle tier, and the back end, and then you have a product that needs to make use of all three components in some form. So just from getting stuff done, their ability then has to tie to three different groups, versus building a team that's streamlined that ends up having front end, middleware, and backend folks that understand and share standards but are able to uncork the velocity that's required to do that. So if you think about that, and not just from an engineering development perspective, but then you couple in operations as a foundational layer that services them with embedded capabilities, we're putting engineers and operations teams embedded in those streamlined teams so that they can run at the velocity that they need to, they can do continuous integration, they can do continuous deployment. And then we added CS, which is continuously secure, continuous security. So instead of having giant, centralized teams, we're thinking there's a core team, for example, a foundational team, that services platform, makes sure all the trains are running on time, that we're doing what we need to do foundationally to make the environments fully dev and operator and security people functional. But then ultimately, we don't have these big, monolithic teams that get into turf wars. So, to Adrian's point about, the operators don't like to be paned in, well, they actually have a say, ultimately, in how they architect, deploy, manage, plan, build, and operate those systems. But at the same point in time, we're all looking at that problem across those teams and go... Like if one streamline team says, "I really want to go run on Azure, "because I like their services better," the reality is the foundational team has a larger vote versus opinion on whether or not, functionally, we can satisfy all of the requirements of the other team. Now, they may make a fantastic business case and we play rock, paper, scissors, and we do that. Right now, that hasn't really happened. We look at the balance of AWS, we are picking SaaS-y, supercloud vendors that will, by the way, happen to run on three platforms, if we so choose to expand there. So we have a similar interface, similar capability, similar processes, but we've made the choice at LastPass to go all in on AWS currently, with respect to how we deliver our products, for all the reasons we just talked about. But I do think that operations model and how you build your teams is extremely important. >> Yeah, and to that point- >> And has the- (crosstalk) >> The vendors themselves need optionality to the customer, what you're saying. So, "I'm going to go fast, "but I need to have that optionality." I guess the question I have for you guys is, what is today's trade-off? So if the decision point today is... First of all, I love the go-fast model on one cloud. I think that's my favorite when I look at all this, and then with the option, knowing that I'm going to have the option to go to multiple clouds. But everybody wants lock-in on the vendor side. Is that scale, is that data advantage? I mean, so the lock-in's a good question, and then also the trade-offs. What do people have to do today to go on a supercloud journey to have an ideal architecture and taxonomy, and what's the right trade-offs today? >> I think that the- Sorry, just put a comment and then let Lori get a word in, but there's a lot of... A lot of the market here is you're building a product, and that product is a SaaS product, and it needs to run somewhere. And the customers that you're going to... To get the full market, you need to go across multiple suppliers, most people doing AWS and Azure, and then with Google occasionally for some people. But that, I think, has become the pattern that most of the large SaaS platforms that you'd want to build out of, 'cause that's the fast way of getting something that's going to be stable at scale, it's got functionality, you'd have to go invest in building it and running it. Those platforms are just multi-cloud platforms, they're running across them. So Snowflake, for example, has to figure out how to make their stuff work on more than one cloud. I mean, they started on one, but they're going across clouds. And I think that that is just the way it's going to be, because you're not going to get a broad enough view into the market, because there isn't a single... AWS doesn't have 100% of the market. It's maybe a bit more than them, but Azure has got a pretty solid set of markets where it is strong, and it's market by market. So in some areas, different people in some places in the world, and different vertical markets, you'll find different preferences. And if you want to be across all of them with your data product, or whatever your SaaS product is, you're just going to have to figure this out. So in some sense, the supercloud story plays best with those SaaS providers like the Snowflakes of this world, I think. >> Lori? >> Yeah, I think the SaaS product... Identity, whatever, you're going to have specialized. SaaS, superclouds. We already see that emerging. Identity is becoming like this big SaaS play that crosses all clouds. It's not just for one. So you get an evolution going on where, yes, I mean, every vendor who provides some kind of specific functionality is going to have to build out and be multi-cloud, as it were. It's got to work equally across them. And the challenge, then, for them is to make it simple for both operators and, if required, dev. And maybe that's the other lesson moving forward. You can build something that is heaven for ops, but if the developers won't use it, well, then you're not going to get it adopted. But if you make it heaven for the developers, the ops team may not be able to keep it secure, keep everything. So maybe we have to start focusing on both, make it friendly for both, at least. Maybe it won't be the perfect experience, but gee, at least make it usable for both sides of the equation so that everyone can actually work in concert, like Chris was saying. A more comprehensive, cohesive approach to delivery and deployment. >> All right, well, wrapping up here, I want to just get one final comment from you guys, if you don't mind. What does supercloud look like in five years? What's the Nirvana, what's the steady state of supercloud in five to 10 years? Or say 10 years, make it easier. (crosstalk) Five to 10 years. Chris, we'll start with you. >> Wow. >> Supercloud, what's it look like? >> Geez. A magic pane, a single pane of glass. (laughs) >> Yeah, I think- >> Single glass of pain. >> Yeah, a single glass of pain. Thank you. You stole my line. Well, not mine, but that's the one I was going to use. Yeah, I think what is really fascinating is ultimately, to answer that question, I would reflect on market consolidation and market dynamics that happens even in the SaaS space. So we will see SaaS companies combining in focal areas to be able to leverage the positions, let's say, in the identity space that somebody has built to provide a set of compelling services that help abstract that identity problem or that security problem or that instrumentation and observability problem. So take your favorite vendors today. I think what we'll end up seeing is more consolidation in SaaS offerings that run on top of infrastructure of the service offerings to where a supercloud might look like something I described before. You have the combination of your favorite interoperable identity, observability, security, orchestration platforms run across them. They're sold as a stack, whether it be co-branded by an enterprise vendor that sells all of that and manages it for you or not. But I do think that... You talked about, I think you said, "Is this an innovator's dilemma?" No, I think it's an integrator's dilemma, as it has always ultimately been. As soon as you get from Genesis to Bespoke Build to product to then commoditization, the cycle starts anew. And I think we've gotten past commoditization, and we're looking at niche areas. So I see just the evolution, not necessarily a revolution, of what we're dealing with today as we see more consolidation in the marketplace. >> Lori, what's your take? Five years, 10 years, what does supercloud look like? >> Part of me wants to take the pie in the sky unicorn approach. "No, it will be beautiful. "One button, and things will happen," but I've seen this cycle many times before, and that's not going to happen. And I think Chris has got it pretty close to what I see already evolving. Those different kinds of super services, basically. And that's really what we're talking about. We call them SaaS, but they're... X is a service. Everything is a service, and it's really a supercloud that can run anywhere, but it presents a different interface, because, well, it's easier. And I think that's where we're going to go, and that's just going to get more refined. And yes, a lot of consolidation, especially on the observability side, but that's also starting to consume the security side, which is really interesting to watch. So that could be a little different supercloud coming on there that's really focused on specific types of security, at least, that we'll layer across, and then we'll just hook them all together. It's an API first world, and it seems like that's going to be our standard for the next while of how we integrate everything. So superclouds or APIs. >> Awesome. Adrian... Adrian, take us home. >> Yeah, sure. >> What's your- I think, and just picking up on Lori's point that these are web services, meaning that you can just call them from anywhere, they don't have to run everything in one place, they can stitch it together, and that's really meant... It's somewhat composable. So in practice, people are going to be composable. Can they compose their applications on multiple platforms? But I think the interesting thing here is what the vendors do, and what I'm seeing is vendors running software on other vendors. So you have Google building platforms that, then, they will support on AWS and Azure and vice versa. You've got AWS's distro of Kubernetes, which they now give you as a distro so you can run it on another platform. So I think that trend's going to continue, and it's going to be, possibly, you pick, say, an AWS or a Google software stack, but you don't run it all on AWS, you run it in multiple places. Yeah, and then the other thing is the third tier, second, third tier vendors, like, I mean, what's IBM doing? I think in five years time, IBM is going to be a SaaS vendor running on the other clouds. I mean, they're already halfway there. To be a bit more controversial, I guess it's always fun to... Like I don't work for a corporate entity now. No one tells me what I can say. >> Bring it on. >> How long can Google keep losing a billion dollars a quarter? They've either got to figure out how to make money out of this thing, or they'll end up basically being a software stack on another cloud platform as their, likely, actual way they can make money on it. Because you've got to... And maybe Oracle, is that a viable cloud platform that... You've got to get to some level of viability. And I think the second, third tier of vendors in five, 10 years are going to be running on the primary platform. And I think, just the other final thing that's really driving this right now. If you try and place an order right now for a piece of equipment for your data center, key pieces of equipment are a year out. It's like trying to buy a new fridge from like Sub-Zero or something like that. And it's like, it's a year. You got to wait for these things. Any high quality piece of equipment. So you go to deploy in your data center, and it's like, "I can't get stuff in my data center. "Like, the key pieces I need, I can't deploy a whole system. "We didn't get bits and pieces of it." So people are going to be cobbling together, or they're going, "No, this is going to cloud, because the cloud vendors "have a much stronger supply chain to just be able "to give you the system you need. "They've got the capacity." So I think we're going to see some pandemic and supply chain induced forced cloud migrations, just because you can't build stuff anymore outside the- >> We got to accelerate supercloud, 'cause they have the supply. They are the chain. >> That's super smart. That's the benefit of going last. So I'm going to scoop in real quick. I can't believe we can call this "Web3 Supercloud," because none of us said "Web3." Don't forget DAO. (crosstalk) (indistinct) You have blockchain, blockchain superclouds. I mean, there's some very interesting distributed computing stuff there, but we'll have to do- >> (crosstalk) We're going to call that the "Cubeverse." The "Cubeverse" is coming. >> Oh, the "Cubeverse." All right. >> We will be... >> That's very meta. >> In the metaverse, Cubeverse soon. >> "Stupor cloud," perhaps. But anyway, great points, Adrian and Lori. Loved it. >> Chris, great to see you. Adrian, Lori, thanks for coming on. We've known each other for a long time. You guys are part of the cloud-erati, the group that has been in there from day one, and watched it evolve, and you get the scar tissue to prove it, and the experience. So thank you so much for sharing your commentary. We'll roll this up and make it open to everybody as additional content. We'll call this the "outtakes," the longer version. But really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much. >> Okay, we'll be back with more "Supercloud 22" right after this. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: theCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante live at HPE Discover '22. Dave, it's great to be here. This is the first Discover in three years and we're here with about 7,000 of our closest friends. >> Yeah. You know, I tweeted out this, I think I've been to 14 Discovers between the U.S. and Europe, and I've never seen a Discover with so much energy. People are not only psyched to get back together, that's for sure, but I think HPE's got a little spring in its step and it's feeling more confident than maybe some of the past Discovers that I've been to. >> I think so, too. I think there's definitely a spring in the step and we're going to be unpacking some of that spring next with one of our alumni who joins us, Keith White's here, the executive vice president and general manager of GreenLake Cloud Services. Welcome back. >> Great. You all thanks for having me. It's fantastic that you're here and you're right, the energy is crazy at this show. It's been a lot of pent up demand, but I think what you heard from Antonio today is our strategy's changing dramatically and it's really embracing our customers and our partners. So it's great. >> Embracing the customers and the partners, the ecosystem expansion is so critical, especially the last couple of years with the acceleration of digital transformation. So much challenge in every industry, but lots of momentum on the GreenLake side, I was looking at the Q2 numbers, triple digit growth in orders, 65,000 customers over 70 services, eight new services announced just this morning. Talk to us about the momentum of GreenLake. >> The momentum's been fantastic. I mean, I'll tell you, the fact that customers are really now reaccelerating their digital transformation, you probably heard a lot, but there was a delay as we went through the pandemic. So now it's reaccelerating, but everyone's going to a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Data is the new currency. And obviously, everyone's trying to push out to the Edge and GreenLake is that edge to cloud platform. So we're just seeing tons of momentum, not just from the customers, but partners, we've enabled the platform so partners can plug into it and offer their solutions to our customers as well. So it's exciting and it's been fun to see the momentum from an order standpoint, but one of the big numbers that you may not be aware of is we have over a 96% retention rate. So once a customer's on GreenLake, they stay on it because they're seeing the value, which has been fantastic. >> The value is absolutely critically important. We saw three great big name customers. The Home Depot was on stage this morning, Oak Ridge National Laboratory was as well, Evil Geniuses. So the momentum in the enterprise is clearly present. >> Yeah. It is. And we're hearing it from a lot of customers. And I think you guys talk a lot about, hey, there's the cloud, data and Edge, these big mega trends that are happening out there. And you look at a company like Barclays, they're actually reinventing their entire private cloud infrastructure, running over a hundred thousand workloads on HPE GreenLake. Or you look at a company like Zenseact, who's basically they do autonomous driving software. So they're doing massive parallel computing capabilities. They're pulling in hundreds of petabytes of data to then make driving safer and so you're seeing it on the data front. And then on the Edge, you look at anyone like a Patrick Terminal, for example. They run a whole terminal shipyard. They're getting data in from exporters, importers, regulators, the works and they have to real-time, analyze that data and say, where should this thing go? Especially with today's supply chain challenges, they have to be so efficient, that it's just fantastic. >> It was interesting to hear Fidelma, Keith, this morning on stage. It was the first time I'd really seen real clarity on the platform itself and that it's obviously her job is, okay, here's the platform, now, you guys got to go build on top of it. Both inside of HPE, but also externally, so your ecosystem partners. So, you mentioned the financial services companies like Barclays. We see those companies moving into the digital world by offering some of their services in building their own clouds. >> Keith: That's right. >> What's your vision for GreenLake in terms of being that platform, to assist them in doing that and the data component there? >> I think that was one of the most exciting things about not just showcasing the platform, but also the announcement of our private cloud enterprise, Cloud Service. Because in essence, what you're doing is you're creating that framework for what most companies are doing, which is they're becoming cloud service providers for their internal business units. And they're having to do showback type scenarios, chargeback type scenarios, deliver cloud services and solutions inside the organization so that open platform, you're spot on. For our ecosystem, it's fantastic, but for our customers, they get to leverage it as well for their own internal IT work that's happening. >> So you talk about hybrid cloud, you talk about private cloud, what's your vision? You know, we use this term Supercloud. This in a layer that goes across clouds. What's your thought about that? Because you have an advantage at the Edge with Aruba. Everybody talks about the Edge, but they talk about it more in the context of near Edge. >> That's right. >> We talked to Verizon and they're going far Edge, you guys are participating in that, as well as some of your partners in Red Hat and others. What's your vision for that? What I call Supercloud, is that part of the strategy? Is that more longer term or you think that's pipe dream by Dave? >> No, I think it's really thoughtful, Dave, 'cause it has to be part of the strategy. What I hear, so for example, Ford's a great example. They run Azure, AWS, and then they made a big deal with Google cloud for their internal cars and they run HPE GreenLake. So they're saying, hey, we got four clouds. How do we sort of disaggregate the usage of that? And Chris Lund, who is the VP of information technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, he talked about it today, where he said, hey, I can deliver these services to my business unit. And they don't know, am I running on the public cloud? Am I running on our HPE GreenLake cloud? Like it doesn't matter to the end user, we've simplified that so much. So I think your Supercloud idea is super thoughtful, not to use the super term too much, that I'm super excited about because it's really clear of what our customers are trying to accomplish, which it's not about the cloud, it's about the solution and the business outcome that gets to work. >> Well, and I think it is different. I mean, it's not like the last 10 years where it was like, hey, I got my stuff to work on the different clouds and I'm replicating as much as I can, the cloud experience on-prem. I think you guys are there now and then to us, the next layer is that ecosystem enablement. So how do you see the ecosystem evolving and what role does Green Lake play there? >> Yeah. This has been really exciting. We had Tarkan Maner who runs Nutanix and Karl Strohmeyer from Equinix on stage with us as well. And what's happening with the ecosystem is, I used to say, one plus one has to equal three for our customers. So when you bring these together, it has to be that scenario, but we are joking that one plus one plus one equals five now because everything has a partner component to it. It's not about the platform, it's not about the specific cloud service, it's actually about the solution that gets delivered. And that's done with an ISV, it's done with a Colo, it's done even with the Hyperscalers. We have Azure Stack HCI as a fully integrated solution. It happens with managed service providers, delivering managed services out to their folks as well. So that platform being fully partner enabled and that ecosystem being able to take advantage of that, and so we have to jointly go to market to our customers for their business needs, their business outcomes. >> Some of the expansion of the ecosystem. we just had Red Hat on in the last hour talking about- >> We're so excited to partner with them. >> Right, what's going on there with OpenShift and Ansible and Rel, but talk about the customer influence in terms of the expansion of the ecosystem. We know we've got to meet customers where they are, they're driving it, but we know that HPE has a big presence in the enterprise and some pretty big customer names. How are they from a demand perspective? >> Well, this is where I think the uniqueness of GreenLake has really changed HPE's approach with our customers. Like in all fairness, we used to be a vendor that provided hardware components for, and we talked a lot about hardware costs and blah, blah, blah. Now, we're actually a partner with those customers. What's the business outcome you're requiring? What's the SLA that we offer you for what you're trying to accomplish? And to do that, we have to have it done with partners. And so even on the storage front, Qumulo or Cohesity. On the backup and recovery disaster recovery, yes, we have our own products, but we also partner with great companies like Veeam because it's customer choice, it's an open platform. And the Red Hat announcement is just fantastic. Because, hey, from a container platform standpoint, OpenShift provides 5,000 plus customers, 90% of the fortune 500 that they engage with, with that opportunity to take GreenLake with OpenShift and implement that container capabilities on-prem. So it's fantastic. >> We were talking after the keynote, Keith Townsend came on, myself and Lisa. And he was like, okay, what about startups? 'Cause that's kind of a hallmark of cloud. And we felt like, okay, startups are not the ideal customer profile necessarily for HPE. Although we saw Evil Geniuses up on stage, but I threw out and I'd love to get your thoughts on this that within companies, incumbents, you have entrepreneurs, they're trying to build their own clouds or Superclouds as I use the term, is that really the target for the developer audience? We've talked a lot about OpenShift with their other platforms, who says as a partner- >> We just announced another extension with Rancher and- >> Yeah. I saw that. And you have to have optionality for developers. Is that the way we should think about the target audience from a developer standpoint? >> I think it will be as we go forward. And so what Fidelma presented on stage was the new developer platform, because we have come to realize, we have to engage with the developers. They're the ones building the apps. They're the ones that are delivering the solutions for the most part. So yeah, I think at the enterprise space, we have a really strong capability. I think when you get into the sort of mid-market SMB standpoint, what we're doing is we're going directly to the managed service and cloud service providers and directly to our Disty and VARS to have them build solutions on top of GreenLake, powered by GreenLake, to then deliver to their customers because that's what the customer wants. I think on the developer side of the house, we have to speak their language, we have to provide their capabilities because they're going to start articulating apps that are going to use both the public cloud and our on-prem capabilities with GreenLake. And so that's got to work very well. And so you've heard us talk about API based and all of that sort of scenario. So it's an exciting time for us, again, moving HPE strategy into something very different than where we were before. >> Well, Keith, that speaks to ecosystem. So I don't know if you were at Microsoft, when the sweaty Steve Ballmer was working with the developers, developers. That's about ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. I don't expect we're going to see Antonio replicating that. But that really is the sort of what you just described is the ecosystem developing on top of GreenLake. That's critical. >> Yeah. And this is one of the things I learned. So, being at Microsoft for as long as I was and leading the Azure business from a commercial standpoint, it was all about the partner and I mean, in all fairness, almost every solution that gets delivered has some sort of partner component to it. Might be an ISV app, might be a managed service, might be in a Colo, might be with our hybrid cloud, with our Hyperscalers, but everything has a partner component to it. And so one of the things I learned with Azure is, you have to sell through and with your ecosystem and go to that customer with a joint solution. And that's where it becomes so impactful and so powerful for what our customers are trying to accomplish. >> When we think about the data gravity and the value of data that put massive potential that it has, even Antonio talked about it this morning, being data rich but insights poor for a long time. >> Yeah. >> Every company in today's day and age has to be a data company to be competitive, there's no more option for that. How does GreenLake empower companies? GreenLake and its ecosystem empower companies to really live being data companies so that they can meet their customers where they are. >> I think it's a really great point because like we said, data's the new currency. Data's the new gold that's out there and people have to get their arms around their data estate. So then they can make these business decisions, these business insights and garner that. And Dave, you mentioned earlier, the Edge is bringing a ton of new data in, and my Zenseact example is a good one. But with GreenLake, you now have a platform that can do data and data management and really sort of establish and secure the data for you. There's no data latency, there's no data egress charges. And which is what we typically run into with the public cloud. But we also support a wide range of databases, open source, as well as the commercial ones, the sequels and those types of scenarios. But what really comes to life is when you have to do analytics on that and you're doing AI and machine learning. And this is one of the benefits I think that people don't realize with HPE is, the investments we've made with Cray, for example, we have and you saw on stage today, the largest supercomputer in the world. That depth that we have as a company, that then comes down into AI and analytics for what we can do with high performance compute, data simulations, data modeling, analytics, like that is something that we, as a company, have really deep, deep capabilities on. So it's exciting to see what we can bring to customers all for that spectrum of data. >> I was excited to see Frontier, they actually achieve, we hosted an event, co-produced event with HPE during the pandemic, Exascale day. >> Yeah. >> But we weren't quite at Exascale, we were like right on the cusp. So to see it actually break through was awesome. So HPC is clearly a differentiator for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And you talk about the egress. What are some of the other differentiators? Why should people choose GreenLake? >> Well, I think the biggest thing is, that it's truly is a edge to cloud platform. And so you talk about Aruba and our capabilities with a network attached and network as a service capabilities, like that's fairly unique. You don't see that with the other companies. You mentioned earlier to me that compute capabilities that we've had as a company and the storage capabilities. But what's interesting now is that we're sort of taking all of that expertise and we're actually starting to deliver these cloud services that you saw on stage, private cloud, AI and machine learning, high performance computing, VDI, SAP. And now we're actually getting into these industry solutions. So we talked last year about electronic medical records, this year, we've talked about 5g. Now, we're talking about customer loyalty applications. So we're really trying to move from these sort of baseline capabilities and yes, containers and VMs and bare metal, all that stuff is important, but what's really important is the services that you run on top of that, 'cause that's the outcomes that our customers are looking at. >> Should we expect you to be accelerating? I mean, look at what you did with Azure. You look at what AWS does in terms of the feature acceleration. Should we expect HPE to replicate? Maybe not to that scale, but in a similar cadence, we're starting to see that. Should we expect that actually to go faster? >> I think you couched it really well because it's not as much about the quantity, but the quality and the uses. And so what we've been trying to do is say, hey, what is our swim lane? What is our sweet spot? Where do we have a superpower? And where are the areas that we have that superpower and how can we bring those solutions to our customers? 'Cause I think, sometimes, you get over your skis a bit, trying to do too much, or people get caught up in the big numbers, versus the, hey, what's the real meat behind it. What's the tangible outcome that we can deliver to customers? And we see just a massive TAM. I want to say my last analysis was around $42 billion in the next three years, TAM and the Azure service on-prem space. And so we think that there's nothing but upside with the core set of workloads, the core set of solutions and the cloud services that we bring. So yeah, we'll continue to innovate, absolutely, amen, but we're not in a, hey we got to get to 250 this and 300 that, we want to keep it as focused as we can. >> Well, the vast majority of the revenue in the public cloud is still compute. I mean, not withstanding, Microsoft obviously does a lot in SaaS, but I'm talking about the infrastructure and service. Still, well, I would say over 50%. And so there's a lot of the services that don't make any revenue and there's that long tail, if I hear your strategy, you're not necessarily going after that. You're focusing on the quality of those high value services and let the ecosystem sort of bring in the rest. >> This is where I think the, I mean, I love that you guys are asking me about the ecosystem because this is where their sweet spot is. They're the experts on hyper-converged or databases, a service or VDI, or even with SAP, like they're the experts on that piece of it. So we're enabling that together to our customers. And so I don't want to give you the impression that we're not going to innovate. Amen. We absolutely are, but we want to keep it within that, that again, our swim lane, where we can really add true value based on our expertise and our capabilities so that we can confidently go to customers and say, hey, this is a solution that's going to deliver this business value or this capability for you. >> The partners might be more comfortable with that than, we only have one eye sleep with one eye open in the public cloud, like, okay, what are they going to, which value of mine are they grab next? >> You're spot on. And again, this is where I think, the power of what an Edge to cloud platform like HPE GreenLake can do for our customers, because it is that sort of, I mentioned it, one plus one equals three kind of scenario for our customers so. >> So we can leave your customers, last question, Keith. I know we're only on day one of the main summit, the partner growth summit was yesterday. What's the feedback been from the customers and the ecosystem in terms of validating the direction that HPE is going? >> Well, I think the fantastic thing has been to hear from our customers. So I mentioned in my keynote recently, we had Liberty Mutual and we had Texas Children's Hospital, and they're implementing HPE GreenLake in a variety of different ways, from a private cloud standpoint to a data center consolidation. They're seeing sustainability goals happen on top of that. They're seeing us take on management for them so they can take their limited resources and go focus them on innovation and value added scenarios. So the flexibility and cost that we're providing, and it's just fantastic to hear this come to life in a real customer scenario because what Texas Children is trying to do is improve patient care for women and children like who can argue with that. >> Nobody. >> So, yeah. It's great. >> Awesome. Keith, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, talking about all of the momentum with HPE Greenlake. >> Always. >> You can't walk in here without feeling the momentum. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Always. Thank you you for the time. Yeah. Great to see you as well. >> Likewise. >> Thanks. >> For Keith White and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live, day one coverage from the show floor at HPE Discover '22. We'll be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)