(futuristic music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here for theCUBE back with you, three guests join me. Dan Molina is here, the co-president and chief technology officer at NTH Generation. And I'm joined once again by Terry Richardson, North American channel chief for AMD and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, It's a pleasure to have you on theCUBE Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Dan. Let's have you kick things off. Talk to us about how NTH Generation is addressing the environmental challenges that your customers are having while meeting the technology demands of the future. That those same customers are no doubt having. >> It's quite an interesting question, Lisa, in our case we have been in business since 1991 and we started by providing highly available computing solutions. So this is great for me to be partnered here with HPE and the AMD because we want to provide quality computing solutions. And back in the day, since 1991 saving energy saving footprint or reducing footprint in the data center saving on cooling costs was very important. Over time those became even more critical components of our solutions design. As you know, as a society we started becoming more aware of the benefits and the must that we have a responsibility back to society to basically contribute with our social and environmental responsibility. So one of the things that we continue to do and we started back in 1991 is to make sure that we're deciding compute solutions based on clients' actual needs. We go out of our way to collect real performance data real IT resource consumption data. And then we architect solutions using best in the industry components like AMD and HPE to make sure that they were going to be meeting those goals and energy savings, like cooling savings, footprint reduction, knowing that instead of maybe requiring 30 servers, just to mention an example maybe we're going to go down to 14 and that's going to result in great energy savings. Our commitment to making sure that we're providing optimized solutions goes all the way to achieving the top level certifications from our great partner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Also go deep into micro processing technologies like AMD but we want to make sure that the designs that we're putting together actually meet those goals. >> You talked about why sustainability is important to NTH from back in the day. I love how you said that. Dan, talk to us a little bit about what you're hearing from customers as we are seeing sustainability as a corporate initiative horizontally across industries and really rise up through the C-suite to the board. >> Right, it is quite interesting Lisa We do service pretty much horizontally just about any vertical, including public sector and the private sector from retail to healthcare, to biotech to manufacturing, of course, cities and counties. So we have a lot of experience with many different verticals. And across the board, we do see an increased interest in being socially responsible. And that includes not just being responsible on recycling as an example, most of our conversations or engagements that conversation happens, 'What what's going to happen with the old equipment ?' as we're replacing with more modern, more powerful, more efficient equipment. And we do a number of different things that go along with social responsibility and environment protection. And that's basically e-waste programs. As an example, we also have a program where we actually donate some of that older equipment to schools and that is quite quite something because we're helping an organization save energy, footprint. Basically the things that we've been talking about but at the same time, the older equipment even though it's not saving that much energy it still serves a purpose in society where maybe the unprivileged or not as able to afford computing equipment in certain schools and things of that nature. Now they can benefit and being productive to society. So it's not just about energy savings there's so many other factors around social corporate responsibility. >> So sounds like Dan, a very comprehensive end to end vision that NTH has around sustainability. Let's bring John and Terry into the conversation. John, we're going to start with you. Talk to us a little bit about how HPE and NTH are partnering together. What are some of the key aspects of the relationship from HPE's perspective that enable you both to meet not just your corporate sustainable IT objectives, but those of your customers. >> Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things that HPE brings to bear is 20 years experience on sustainable IT, white papers, executive workbooks and a lot of expertise for how do we bring optimized solutions to market. If the customer doesn't want to manage those pieces himself we have our 'As a service solutions, HPE GreenLake. But our sales force won't get to every customer across the globe that wants to take advantage of this expertise. So we partner with companies like NTH to know the customer better, to develop the right solution for that customer and with NTH's relationships with the customers, they can constantly help the customer optimize those solutions and see where there perhaps areas of opportunity that may be outside of HPE's own portfolio, such as client devices where they can bring that expertise to bear, to help the customer have a better total customer experience. >> And that is critical, that better overall comprehensive total customer experience. As we know on the other end, all customers are demanding customers like us who want data in real time, we want access. We also want the corporate and the social responsibility of the companies that we work with. Terry, bringing you into the conversation. Talk to us a little about AMD. How are you helping customers to create what really is a sustainable IT strategy from what often starts out as sustainability tactics? >> Exactly. And to pick up on what John and and Dan were saying, we're really energized about the opportunity to allow customers to accelerate their ability to attain some of their more strategic sustainability goals. You know, since we started on our current data center, CPU and GPU offerings, each generation we continue to focus on increasing the performance capability with great sensitivity to the efficiency, right? So as customers are modernizing their data center and achieving their own digital transformation initiatives we are able to deliver solutions through HPE that really address a greater performance per watt which is a a core element in allowing customers to achieve the goals that John and Dan talked about. So, you know, as a company, we're fully on board with some very public positions around our own sustainability goals, but working with terrific partners like NTH and HPE allows us to together bring those enabling technologies directly to customers >> Enabling and accelerating technologies. Dan, let's go back to you. You mentioned some of the things that NTH is doing from a sustainability approach, the social and the community concern, energy use savings, recycling but this goes all the way from NTH's perspective to things like outreach and fairness in the workplace. Talk to us a little bit about some of those other initiatives that NTH has fired up. >> Absolutely, well at NTH , since the early days, we have invested heavily on modern equipment and we have placed that at NTH labs, just like HPE labs we have NTH labs, and that's what we do a great deal of testing to make sure that our clients, right our joint clients are going to have high quality solutions that we're not just talking about it and we actually test them. So that is definitely an investment by being conscious about energy conservation. We have programs and scripts to shut down equipment that is not needed at the time, right. So we're definitely conscious about it. So I wanted to mention that example. Another one is, we all went through a pandemic and this is still ongoing from some perspectives. And that forced pretty much all of our employees, at least for some time to work from home. Being an IT company, we're very proud that we made that transition almost seamlessly. And we're very proud that you know people who continue to work from home, they're saving of course, gasoline, time, traffic, all those benefits that go with reducing transportation, and don't get me wrong, I mean, sometimes it is important to still have face to face meetings, especially with new organizations that you want to establish trust. But for the most part we have become a hybrid workforce type of organization. At the same time, we're also implementing our own hybrid IT approach which is what we talk to our clients about. So there's certain workloads, there are certain applications that truly belong in in public cloud or Software as a Service. And there's other workloads that truly belong, to stay in your data center. So a combination and doing it correctly can result in significant savings, not just money, but also again energy, consumption. Other things that we're doing, I mentioned trading programs, again, very proud that you know, we use a e-waste programs to make sure that those IT equipment is properly disposed of and it's not going to end in a landfill somewhere but also again, donating to schools, right? And very proud about that one. We have other outreach programs. Normally at the end of the year we do some substantial donations and we encourage our employees, my coworkers to donate. And we match those donations to organizations like Operation USA, they provide health and education programs to recover from disasters. Another one is Salvation Army, where basically they fund rehabilitation programs that heal addictions change lives and restore families. We also donate to the San Diego Zoo. We also believe in the whole ecosystem, of course and we're very proud to be part of that. They are supporting more than 140 conservation projects and partnerships in 70 countries. And we're part of that donation. And our owner has been part of the board or he was for a number of years. Mercy House down in San Diego, we have our headquarters. They have programs for the homeless. And basically that they're servicing. Also Save a Life Foundation for the youth to be educated to help prevent sudden cardiac arrest for the youth. So programs like that. We're very proud to be part of the donations. Again, it's not just about energy savings but it's so many other things as part of our corporate social responsibility program. Other things that I wanted to mention. Everything in our buildings, in our offices, multiple locations. Now we turn into LED. So again, we're eating our own dog food as they say but that is definitely some significant energy savings. And then lastly, I wanted to mention, this is more what we do for our customers, but the whole HPE GreenLake program we have a growing number of clients especially in Southern California. And some of those are quite large like school districts, like counties. And we feel very proud that in the old days customers would buy IT equipment for the next three to five years. Right? And they would buy extra because obviously they're expecting some growth while that equipment must consume energy from day one. With a GreenLake type of program, the solution is sized properly. Maybe a little bit of a buffer for unexpected growth needs. And anyway, but with a GreenLake program as customers need more IT resources to continue to expand their workloads for their organizations. Then we go in with 'just in time' type of resources. Saving energy and footprint and everything else that we've been talking about along the way. So very proud to be one of the go-tos for Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the GreenLake program which is now a platform, so. >> That's great. Dan, it sounds like NTH generation has such a comprehensive focus and strategy on sustainability where you're pulling multiple levers it's almost like sustainability to the NTH degree ? See what I did there ? >> (laughing) >> I'd like to talk with all three of you now. And John, I want to start with you about employees. Dan, you talked about the hybrid work environment and some of the silver linings from the pandemic but I'd love to know, John, Terry and then Dan, in that order how educated and engaged are your employees where sustainability is concerned? Talk to me about that from their engagement perspective and also from the ability to retain them and make them proud as Dan was saying to work for these companies, John ? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we see in technology, and we hear it from our customers every day when we're meeting with them is we all have a challenge attracting and retaining new employees. And one of the ways that you can succeed in that challenge is by connecting the work that the employee does to both the purpose of your company and broader than that global purpose. So environmental and social types of activities. So for us, we actually do a tremendous amount of education for our employees. At the moment, all of our vice presidents and above are taking climate training as part of our own climate aspirations to really drive those goals into action. But we're opening that training to any employee in the company. We have a variety of employee resource groups that are focused on sustainability and carbon reduction. And in many cases, they're very loud advocates for why aren't we pushing a roadmap further? Why aren't we doing things in a particular industry segment where they think we're not moving quite as quickly as we should be. But part of the recognition around all of that as well is customers often ask us when we suggest a sustainability or sustainable IT solution to them. Their first question back is, are you doing this yourselves? So for all of those reasons, we invest a lot of time and effort in educating our employees, listening to our employees on that topic and really using them to help drive our programs forward. >> That sounds like it's critical, John for customers to understand, are you doing this as well? Are you using your own technology ? Terry, talk to us about from the AMD side the education of your employees, the engagement of them where sustainability is concerned. >> Yeah. So similar to what John said, I would characterize AMD is a very socially responsible company. We kind of share that alignment in point of view along with NTH. Corporate responsibility is something that you know, most companies have started to see become a lot more prominent, a lot more talked about internally. We've been very public with four key sustainability goals that we've set as an organization. And we regularly provide updates on where we are along the way. Some of those goals extend out to 2025 and in one case 2030 so not too far away, but we're providing milestone updates against some pretty aggressive and important goals. I think, you know, as a technology company, regardless of the role that you're in there's a way that you can connect to what the company's doing that I think is kind of a feel good. I spend more of my time with the customer facing or partner facing resources and being able to deliver a tool to partners like NTH and strategic partners like HPE that really helps quantify the benefit, you know in a bare metal, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and a TCO tool to really quantify what an implementation of a new and modern solution will mean to a customer. And for the first time they have choice. So I think employees, they can really feel good about being able to to do something that is for a greater good than just the traditional corporate goals. And of course the engineers that are designing the next generation of products that have these as core competencies clearly can connect to the impact that we're able to make on the broader global ecosystem. >> And that is so important. Terry, you know, employee productivity and satisfaction directly translates to customer satisfaction, customer retention. So, I always think of them as inextricably linked. So great to hear what you're all doing in terms of the employee engagement. Dan, talk to me about some of the outcomes that NTH is enabling customers to achieve, from an outcomes perspective those business outcomes, maybe even at a high level or a generic level, love to dig into some of those. >> Of course. Yes. So again, our mission is really to deliver awesome in everything we do. And we're very proud about that mission, very crispy clear, short and sweet and that includes, we don't cut corners. We go through the extent of, again, learning the technology getting those certifications, testing those in the lab so that when we're working with our end user organizations they know they're going to have a quality solution. And part of our vision has been to provide industry leading transformational technologies and solutions for example, HPE and AMD for organizations to go through their own digital transformation. Those two words have been used extensively over the last decade, but this is a multi decade type of trend, super trend or mega trend. And we're very proud that by offering and architecting and implementing, and in many cases supporting, with our partners, those, you know, best in class IT cyber security solutions were helping those organizations with those business outcomes, their own digital transformation. If you extend that Lisa , a Little bit further, by helping our clients, both public and private sector become more efficient, more scalable we're also helping, you know organizations become more productive, if you scale that out to the entire society in the US that also helps with the GDP. So it's all interrelated and we're very proud through our, again, optimized solutions. We're not just going to sell a box we're going to understand what the organization truly needs and adapt and architect our solutions accordingly. And we have, again, access to amazing technology, micro processes. Is just amazing what they can do today even compared to five years ago. And that enables new initiatives like artificial intelligence through machine learning and things of that nature. You need GPU technology , that specialized microprocessors and companies like AMD, like I said that are enabling organizations to go down that path faster, right? While saving energy, footprint and everything that we've been talking about. So those are some of the outcomes that I see >> Hey, Dan, listening to you talk, I can't help but think this is not a stretch for NTH right? Although, you know, terms like sustainability and reducing carbon footprint might be, you know more in vogue, the type of solutions that you've been architecting for customers your approach, dates back decades, and you don't have to change a lot. You just have new kind of toys to play with and new compelling offerings from great vendors like HPE to position to your customers. But it's not a big change in what you need to do. >> We're blessed from that perspective that's how our founders started the company. And we only, I think we go through a very extensive interview process to make sure that there will be a fit both ways. We want our new team members to get to know the the rest of the team before they actually make the decision. We are very proud as well, Terry, Lisa and John, that our tenure here at NTH is probably well over a decade. People get here and they really value how we help organizations through our dedicated work, providing again, leading edge technology solutions and the results that they see in our own organizations where we have made many friends in the industry because they had a problem, right? Or they had a very challenging initiative for their organization and we work together and the outcome there is something that they're very, very proud of. So you're right, Terry, we've been doing this for a long time. We're also very happy again with programs like the HPE GreenLake. We were already doing optimized solutions but with something like GreenLake is helping us save more energy consumption from the very beginning by allowing organizations to pay for only what they need with a little bit of buffer that we talked about. So what we've been doing since 1991 combined with a program like GreenLake I think is going to help us even better with our social corporate responsibility. >> I think what you guys have all articulated beautifully in the last 20 minutes is how strategic and interwoven the partnerships between HP, AMD and NTH is what your enabling customers to achieve those outcomes. What you're also doing internally to do things like reduce waste, reduce carbon emissions, and ensure that your employees are proud of who they're working for. Those are all fantastic guys. I wish we had more time cause I know we are just scratching the surface here. We appreciate everything that you shared with respect to sustainable IT and what you're enabling the end user customer to achieve. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, Dave Vellante will return to give you some closing thoughts on sustainable IT You're watching theCUBE. the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

foreign [Music] Lisa Martin of the cube here hpe and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment and I'm here with four guests please welcome Charlie mulrooney Global pre-sales engineering manager at SHI John saw is also of shi joins us Global pre-sales Technical consultant and back with me are Terry Richardson North American Channel Chief and Dr John Fry Chief technologist of sustainable transformation at hpe welcome gang great to have you here all here Thank you Lisa thank you good to be here all right Charlie let's go ahead and start with you keeping the Earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses right everywhere globally can you talk truly about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable I.T sure so starting about a year and a half two years ago we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest Enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports their Chairman's letters their SEC filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral uh or carbon zero goals starting with 20 50 dates and then since then we've seen 20 40 and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and rfps rfis that we're Fielding certainly all now contain elements of that so this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers our Fortune 250 and Fortune 500 customers for sure where we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this we get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand you know here's what we have today what can we do better what can we do different to help make it an impact on those goals so making an impact top of Mind pretty much for everyone as you mentioned John Sal's let's bring you into the conversation now when you're in customer conversations what are some of the things that you talk about with respect to shi's approach to sustainability sustainable I.T are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space well so Charlie touched on something really important that you know the the wake-up moment for us was receiving you know proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability and it was really around two years ago I suppose for the first time and those requests started coming from european-based companies because they had a bit of a head start uh over the U.S based global companies even um and what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to uh use renewable energy for data centers uh utilized they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance costs and other factors that you typically had at the top so as we started working with them uh I guess that beginning was more tactical because we really had to find a way to respond uh we were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second Headquarters in Austin Texas um those are the gold certified we've been installing solar panels producing waste across the company recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in in uh in our offices and in our headquarters um but it's a lot more than that and what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of supply of customers and partners we have over 30 000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers and we wanted to find best practices and Technologies and services that we could uh talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a as a really large Global uh reseller and integrator we can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple uh partners that we work with to help solve customer problems and so over time it's become more strategic and we've been uh as a company building the uh the the the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that um and then also reporting for CDP echovatus and so forth and it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years and we take it very seriously it sounds like it also sounds like from the customer's perspective they're shifting from that tactical maybe early initial approach to being more strategic to really enabling sustainable I.T across their organization and I imagine from a business driver's perspective John saws and Charlie are you hearing customers you talked about it being part of rfps but also where are customers in terms of we need to have a sustainable I.T strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers Charlie John what are your thoughts on that yeah that's top of mind with uh with all the folks that we're talking to uh I would say there's probably a three-way tie for the importance of uh attracting and retaining investors as you said plus customers customers are shopping their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities in sustainable priorities uh with their own and who is going to help them with their own reporting of you know spoke to and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining Talent uh it's another element now of when you're bringing on a new talent to your organization they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align so we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with with the customers we're talking to it was a little surprising because we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors but it really has become quite a bit more than that and it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization more comprehensive across the organization let's bring Dr John Fry into the conversation and Terry your neck so stay tuned Dr Frey can you talk about hpe and Shia partnering together what are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned yeah it's a great question and one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them no one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our Collective customers the same way from an hpe perspective we bring the expertise on our products we bring in a sustainable I.T point of view where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies Implement a sustainable I.T program but our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers and in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table so they extend the reach they bring their own expertise their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just Enterprise Products so by working together we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs give them the right Technology Solutions and enhance that customer experience it's because they get more value from us collectively it really is better together which is a very appropriate name for our segment here Terry let's bring you into the conversation talk to us about AMD how is it helping customers to create that sustainable I.T strategy and what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that that are able to be delivered through Partners like Shi well Lisa you use the word enabling um just a short while ago and fundamentally AMD enables hpe and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers so in the data center space We Begin our journey in 2017 with some fundamental Design Elements for our processor technology that we're really keenly focused on improving performance but also efficiency so now the the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about was really that measure of performance per watt and you'll continue to see AMD enable um customers to to try to find ways to to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing whether it's availability of power data center space or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals so we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to hpe and to Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers sounds like to me Terry that it's that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability you're right about that and and we actually have tools greenhouse gas TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals so we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like hpe and Shi Better Together as we've said at the beginning and just a minute ago Charlie let's bring you back in talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable I.T and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives so for quite a while we've had uh some offerings to help customers especially in the end user compute side a lot of customers were interested in I've got assets for you know let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and you know those need to be refreshed what do I do with those how do I responsibly retire or recycle those and we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time it's within the last year or two when we started offering for them guarantees and Assurance assurances of how they can if that equipment is reusable by somebody else how can we issue them you know credits for uh carving credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else so it's not necessarily going to be E-Waste it's uh something that can be recycled and reused we have other programs with helping extend the life of of some systems where they look at boy I have an awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically we can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment so we've been able to accomplish some Creative Solutions specifically around end user compute in the past but we are looking to new ways now to to really help extend that into Data Center infrastructure and Beyond to really help with what are the needs what are the the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them [Music] that's a great point that you bring up Charlie and the security kind of popped into my head here John saw his question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling where are you having those customer conversations I know sustainability is a board level it's a c-level discussion but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization well so it's a it's a combination of um organizations within the customer these are these Global organizations typically when we're talking about asset like cycle management asset recovery how do you do that in a sustainable Green Way and securely the customers we're dealing with I mean security is top sustainability is right up there too obviously but uh um Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are Global rollouts tens of thousands of employees typically to to have mobile devices laptops and phones and so forth um and they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to to the employees and how do you do that in a sustainable way you need to think about that does it all go to a central location um or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that well for for example one European pharmaceutical that the states and their reports that they are already in scope one in scope two they're fully uh Net Zero at this point and and they say but that only solves three percent of our overall sustainability goals uh 97 is scope three it's travel it's shipping it's it's uh it's all the all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times but they're coming to us now as a as a supplier and ask and and we're filling out forms and rfps and so forth uh to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal so sustainable supply chain absolutely Dr John Fry and Terry I want to kind of get your perspectives Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective customers coming through RFP saying hey we've got to work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway hpe and AMD hearing the same thing Dr Fry will start with you and then Terry sure absolutely we receive about 2500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year and that's come up from a few hundred so yeah absolutely accelerating then the conversations turn deeper can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can hpe offer Net Zero or carbon neutral Technology Solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those Solutions in their own carbon footprint so the questions are getting more sophisticated the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing and as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions I think this trend is just going to continue up yeah and we see the same thing uh we get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals but the surveying that the survey work that we've done with customers has led us to you know understand that you know approximately 75 percent of customers are going to make sustainability goals a key component of their rfis in 2023 which is right around the corner and you know 60 of those same customers really expect to have business level kpis uh in the new year that are really related to sustainability so this is not just a a kind of a buzzword topic this is this is kind of business imperatives that you know the company the companies like hpe and AMD and the partners like Shi that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really going to be ahead of the game that's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't we're not talking about a buzzword here we're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all Industries and Dr Farr you mentioned regulations and something that we just noticed is that the SEC recently said it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions um if they were if that were to to come into play I'm going to come back to Charlie and John saws how would Shi and frankly at hpe and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of Regulation were to be implemented Charlie yeah so we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that with the reporting we know reporting is a challenge uh the scope 2 reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was going to be a ways out now all of a sudden hey if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three uh targets and you have to report on them so that that has become really important very quickly uh as word about this requirement is rumbling around uh there's concern so we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose but stay tuned because we have something coming that's interesting definitely peaked my ears are are parked here Charlie well stay tuned for that Dr Brian Terry can you talk about together with Shi hpe and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the data obviously which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it we talked a little bit about security but how are from a Better Together perspective Dr Fry will start with you how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it and these days what is real-time requirements yeah it's an increasing challenge in fact we have changed the HP Story the way we talk about hpe's value proposition to talk about data first modernization so how often do you collect data where do you store it how do you avoid moving it how do you make sure if you're going to collect data you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value and then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable I.T because when I talk to technology Executives what they tell me again and again is there's this presumption within their user community that storage is free and so when when they have needs for collecting data for example if if once an hour would do okay but the system would collect it once a minute the default the user asks for of course is once a minute and then are you getting insights from that data or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network there's huge power and carbon implications of doing that so it's really making a better decision about what do we collect why do we collect it what we're going to do with it when we collect and how we store it and for years customers have really talked about you know modernization and the need to modernize their data center you know I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that Catalyst to really Drive true modernization and as they think forward um you know when we work with with hpe you know they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in you know specific customer workloads from the larger supercomputers down to kind of general purpose servers and when we work with Partners like Shi not only can they deliver the full Suite of um offerings for on-premise deployments they're also very well positioned to leverage the public Cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end-to-end sustainability goal that's a great point that that it needs to be strategic but it also needs to be an end-to-end goal we're just about out of time but I wanted to give John saws the last word here take us out John what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest but what are some of the things that you're excited about as hpe AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives sure um a couple of comments here um so Charlie yeah you touched on some upcoming capabilities uh that uh Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management see this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way this is a train coming at everybody very quickly and um they're not ready most customers aren't ready and if we can help um as as a reseller integrator assessments to be able to understand what they're currently running compared to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state that seems valuable if we can help in that way that's those are things that we're looking into specifically uh you know greenhouse gas emissions relevant assessments and and um and what in the comments uh of Terry and John around the power per watt and um the vast um uh portfolio of technologies that they that they had to address various workloads is uh is fantastic we'd be able to help point to Technologies like that and move customers in that direction I think as a as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers I saw an article on BBC this morning that I I think if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems um the BBC article mentioned this was ethereum a cryptocurrency and they have a big project called merge and today was a go live date and BBC US news outlets have been reporting on it they basically changed the model from a model called The Power of work which takes a a lot of compute and graphic GPU power and so forth around the world and it's now called a power of stake which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct they have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency and if they're wrong it's taken from them this new model reduces the emissions of their um uh environment by 99 plus percent the June emissions from ethereum were it was 120 uh terawatts per per year terawatt hours per year and they reduced it um actually that's the equivalent of what the Netherlands needed for energy so the comparable to a medium-sized country so if you can think differently about how to solve problems it may be on-prem it may be extremely it may be that may be the public cloud in some cases or other you know interesting Innovative Technologies that the AMD hpe other partners that we can bring in along along with them as well we can solve problems differently there is a lot going on the opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting we thank you so much for talking together about how hpe AMD and sha are really working in partnership in Synergy to help your customers across every organization really become much more focused much more collaborative about sustainable I.T guys we so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights Thank you Lisa thank you my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin in a moment Dan Molina is going to join me he's the co-president and chief technology officer of nth generation you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music]

(soft electronic music) >> Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here, in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. We're here, remotely, with Nick Halsey who's the CEO of OKERA, hot startup doing amazing work in cloud, cloud data, cloud security, policy governance as the intersection of cloud and data comes into real stable operations. That's the number one problem. People are figuring out, right now, is how to make sure that data's addressable and also secure and can be highly governed. So Nick, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, John, thank you. >> So you guys have a really hot company going on, here, and you guys are in an intersection, an interesting spot as the market kind of connects together as cloud is going full, kind of, whatever, 3.0, 4.0. You got the edge of the network developing with 5G, you've got space, you've got more connection points, you have more data flowing around. And the enterprises and the customers are trying to figure out, like, okay, how do I architect this thing. And oh, by the way, I got a, like all these compliance issues, too. So this is kind of what you could do. Take a minute to explain what your company's doing. >> Yeah, I'm happy to do that, John. So we're introduced a new category of software that we call universal data authorization or UDA which is really starting to gain some momentum in the market. And there're really two critical reasons why that happening. People are really struggling with how do I enable my digital transformation, my cloud migration while at the same time making sure that my data is secure and that I'm respecting the privacy of my customers, and complying with all of these emerging regulations around data privacy like GDPR, CCPA, and that alphabet soup of regulations that we're all starting to become aware of. >> I want to ask about the market opportunity because, you know, one of the things we see and the cloud covers normal conversations like, "Hey, modern applications are developing." We're starting to see cloud-native. You're starting to see these new use cases so you're starting to see new expectations from users and companies which creates new experiences. And this is throwing off all kinds of new, kinds of data approaches. And a lot of people are scratching their head and they feel like do they slow it down, they speed it up? Do I get a hold of the compliance side first? Do I innovate? So it's like a real kind of conflict between the two. >> Yeah, there's a real tension in most organizations. They're trying to transform, be agile, and use data to drive that transformation. But there's this explosion of the volume, velocity, and variety of data, we've all heard about the three Ds, we'll say there're five Ds. You know, it's really complicated. So you've got the people on the business side of the house and the Chief Data Officer who want to enable many more uses of all of these great data assets. But of course, you've got your security teams and your regulatory and compliance teams that want to make sure they're doing that in the right way. And so you've got to build a zero-trust infrastructure that allows you to be agile and be secure at the same time. And that's why you need universal data authorization because the old manual ways of trying to securely deliver data to people just don't scale in today's demanding environments. >> Well I think that's a really awesome approach, having horizontally scalable data. Like infrastructure would be a great benefit. Take me through what this means. I'd like to get you to define, if you don't mind, what is universal data authorization. What is the definition? What does that mean? >> Exactly and people are like, "I don't understand security. "I do data over here and privacy, "well I do that over here." But the reality is you really need to have the right security platform in order to express your privacy policies, right. And so in the old days, we used to just build it into the database, or we'd build it into the analytic tools. But now, we have too much data in too many platforms in too many locations being accessed by too many, you know, BI applications and A-I-M-L data apps and so you need to centralize the policy definition and policy enforcement so that it can be applied everywhere in the organization. And the example I like to give, John, is we are just like identity access management. Why do I need Okta or Sale Point, or one of those tools? Can't I just log in individually to, you know, SalesForce or to GitHub or? Sure, you can but once you have 30 or 40 systems and thousands of users, it's impossible to manage your employee onboarding and off-boarding policy in a safe and secure way. So you abstract it and then you centralize it and then you can manage and scale it. And that's the same thing you do with OKERA. We do all of the security policy enforcement for all of your data platforms via all of your analytic tools. Anything from Tableau to Databricks to Snowflake, you name it, we support those environments. And then as we're applying the security which says, "Oh, John is allowed access to this data in this format "at this time," we can also make sure that the privacy is governed so that we only show the last four digits of your social security number, or we obfuscate your home address. And we certainly don't show them your bank balance, right? So you need to enable the use of the data without violating the security and privacy rights that you need to enforce. But you can do both, with our customers are doing at incredible scale, then you have sort of digital transformation nirvana resulting from that. >> Yeah, I mean I love what you're saying with the scale piece, that's huge. At AWS's Reinforce Virtual Conference that they had to run because the event was canceled due to the Delta COVID surge, Stephen Schmidt gave a great keynote, I called it a master class, but he mainly focused on cyber security threats. But you're kind of bringing that same architectural thinking to the data privacy, data security piece. 'Cause it's not so much you're vulnerable for hacking, it's still a zero-trust infrastructure for access and management, but-- >> Well you mean you need security for many reasons. You do want to be able to protect external hacks. I mean, every week there's another T-Mobile, you know, you name it, so that's... But 30% of data breaches are by internal trusted users who have rights. So what you needed to make sure is that you're managing those rights and that you're not creating any long tails of data access privilege that can be abused, right? And you also need, one of the great benefits of using a platform like OKERA, is we have a centralized log of what everybody is doing and when, so I could see that you, John, tried to get into the salary database 37 times in the last hour and maybe we don't want to let you do that. So we have really strong stakeholder constituencies in the security and regulatory side of the house because, you know, they can integrate us with Splunk and have a single pane of glass on, weird things are happening in the network and there's, people are trying to hit these secure databases. I can really do event correlation and analysis, I can see who's touching what PII when and whether it's authorized. So people start out by using us to do the enforcement but then they get great value after they've been using us for a while, using that data, usage data, to be able to better manage their environments. >> It's interesting, you know, you bring up the compliance piece as a real added value and I wasn't trying to overlook it but it brings up a good point which is you have, you have multiple benefits when you have a platform like this. So, so take me through like, who's using the product. You must have a lot of customers kicking the tires and adopting it because architecturally, it makes a lot of sense. Take me through a deployment of what it's like in the customer environment. How are they using it? What is some of the first mover types using this approach? And what are some of the benefits they might be realizing? >> Yeah, as you would imagine, our early adopters have been primarily very large organizations that have massive amounts of data. And they tend also to be in more regulated industries like financial services, biomedical research and pharmaceuticals, retail with tons of, you know, consumer information, those are very important. So let me give you an example. We work with one of the very largest global sports retailers in the world, I can't use their name publicly, and we're managing all of their privacy rights management, GDPR, CCPA, worldwide. It's a massive undertaking. Their warehouse is over 65 petabytes in AWS. They have many thousands of users in applications. On a typical day, an average day OKERA is processing and governing six trillion rows of data every single day. On Black Friday, it peaked over 10 trillion rows of data a day, so this is scale that most people really will never get to. But one of the benefits of our architecture is that we are designed to be elastically scalable to sort of, we actually have a capability we call N scale because we can scale to the Nth degree. We really can go as far as you need to in terms of that. And it lets them do extraordinary things in terms of merchandising and profitability and market basket analysis because their teams can work with that data. And even though it's governed and redacted and obfuscated to maintain the individuals' privacy rights, we still let them see the totality of the data and do the kind of analytics that drive the business. >> So large scale, big, big customer base that wants scale, some, I'll say data's huge. What are some of the largest data lakes that you guys have been working with? 'Cause sometimes you hear people saying our data lakes got zettabytes and petabytes of content. What are some of the, give us a taste of the order of magnitude of some of the size of the data lakes and environments that your customers were able to accomplish. >> I want to emphasize that this is really important no matter what size because some of our customers are smaller tech-savvy businesses that aren't necessarily processing huge volumes of data, but it's the way that they are using the data that drives the need for us. But having said that, we're working with one major financial regulator who has a data warehouse with over 200 petabytes of data that we are responsible for providing the governance for. And one thing about that kind of scale that's really important, you know, when you want to have everybody in your organization using data at that scale, which people think of as democratizing your data, you can't just democratize the data, you also have to democratize the governance of the date, right? You can't centralize policy management in IT because then everybody who wants access to the data still has to go back to IT. So you have to make it really easy to write policy and you have to make it very easy to delegate policy management down to the departments. So I need to be able to say this person in HR is going to manage these 50 datasets for those 200 people. And I'm going to delegate the responsibility to them but I'm going to have centralized reporting and auditing so I can trust but verify, right? I can see everything they're doing and I can see how they are applying policy. And I also need to be able to set policy at the macro level at the corporate level that they inherit so I might just say I don't care who you are, nobody gets to see anything but the last four digits of your social security number. And they can do further rules beyond that but they can't change some of the master rules that you're creating. So you need to be able to do this at scale but you need to be able to do it easily with a graphical policy builder that lets you see policy in plain English. >> Okay, so you're saying scale, and then the more smaller use cases are more refined or is it more sensitive data? Regulated data? Or more just levels of granularity? Is that the use case? >> You know, I think there's two things that are really moving the market right now. So the move to remote work with COVID really changed everybody's ideas about how do you do security because you're no longer in a data center, you no longer have a firewall. The Maginot Line of security is gone away and so in a zero-trust world, you know, you have to secure four endpoints: the data, the device, the user, and the application. And so this pretty radical rethinking of security is causing everybody to think about this, big, small, or indifferent. Like, Gartner just came out with a study that said by 2025 75% of all user data in the world is going to be governed by privacy policy. So literally, everybody has to do this. And so we're seeing a lot more tech companies that manage data on behalf of other users, companies that use data as a commodity, they're transacting data. Really, really understand the needs for this and when you're doing data exchange between companies that is really delicate process that have to be highly governed. >> Yeah, I love the security redo. We asked Pat Gelsinger many, many years ago when he was a CEO of VMware what we thought about security and Dave Allante, my co-host at theCUBE said is it a do-over? He said absolutely it's a do-over. I think it was 2013. He mused around that time frame. It's kind of a do-over and you guys are hitting it. This is a key thing. Now he's actually the CEO of Intel and he's still driving forward. Love Pat's vision on this early, but this brings up the question okay, if it's a do-over and these new paradigms are existing and you guys are building a category, okay, it's a new thing. So I have to ask you, I'm sure your customers would say, "Hey, I already got that in another platform." So how do you address that because when you're new you have to convince the customer that this is a new thing. Like, I don't-- >> So, so look, if somebody is still running on Teradata and they have all their security in place and they have a single source of the truth and that's working for them, that's great. We see a lot of our adoption happening as people go on their cloud transformation journey. Because I'm lifting and shifting a lot of data up into the cloud and I'm usually also starting to acquire data from other sources as I'm doing that, and I may be now streaming it in. So when I lift and shift the data, unfortunately, all of the security infrastructure you've built gets left behind. And so a lot of times, that's the forcing function that gets people to realize that they have to make a change here, as well. And we also find other characteristics like, people who are getting proactive in their data transformation initiatives, they'll often hire a CDO, they'll start to use modern data cataloging tools and identity access management tools. And when we see people adopting those things, we understand that they are on a journey that we can help them with. And so we partner very closely with the catalog vendors, with the identity access vendors, you know, with many other parts of the data lake infrastructure because we're just part of the stack, right? But we are the last mile because we're the part of the stack that lets the user connect. >> Well I think you guys are on a wave that's massive and I think it's still, it's going to be bigger coming forward. Again, when you see categories being created it's usually at the beginning of a bigger wave. And I got to ask you because one thing's I've been really kind of harping on on theCUBE and pounding my fist on the table is these siloed approaches. And you're seeing 'em everywhere, I mean, even in the consumer world. LinkedIn's a silo. Facebook's a silo. So you have this siloed mentality. Certainly in the enterprise they're no stranger to silos. So if you want to be horizontally scalable with data you've got to have it free, you've got to break the silos. Are we going to get there? Is this the beginning? Are we breaking down the silos, Nick, or is this the time or what's your reaction to that? >> I'll tell you something, John. I have spent 30 years in the data and analytics business and I've been fortunate enough to help launch many great BI companies like Tableau and Brio Software, and Jaspersoft and Alphablocks we were talking about before the show. Every one of those companies would have been much more successful if they had OKERA because everybody wanted to spread those tools across the organization for better, more agile business analytics, but they were always held back by the security problem. And this was before privacy rights were even a thing. So now with UDA and I think hand-in-hand with identity access management, you truly have the ability to deliver analytic value at scale. And that's key, you need simplicity at scale and that is what lets you let all parts of your organization be agile with data and use it to transform the business. I think we can do that, now. Because if you run in the cloud, it's so easy, I can stand up things like Hadoop in, you know, like Databricks, like Snowflake. I could never do that in my on-prem data center but I can literally press a button and have a very sophisticated data platform, press a button, have OKERA, have enforcement. Really, almost any organization can now take advantage of what only the biggest and most sophisticated organizations use to be able to do it. >> I think Snowflake's an example for all companies that you could essentially build in the shadows of the big clouds and build your own franchise if you nail the security and privacy and that value proposition of scale and good product. So I got, I love this idea of security and privacy managed to a single platform. I'd love to get your final thought while I got you here, on programmability because I'm seeing a lot of regulators and people in the privacy world puttin' down all these rules. You got GDPR and I want to write we forgot and I got all these things... There's a trend towards programmability around extraction of data and managing data where just a simple query could be like okay, I want to know what's goin' on with my privacy and we're a media company and so we record a lot of data too, and we've got to comply with all these like, weird requests, like hey, can you, on June 10th, I want, can you take out my data? And so that's programmatic, that's not a policy thing. It's not like a lawyer with some privacy policy. That's got to be operationalized. So what's your reaction to that as this world starts to be programmable? >> Right, well that's key to our design. So we're an API first approach. We are designed to be a part of a very sophisticated mesh of technology and data so it's extremely simple to just call us to get the information that you need or to express a policy on the fly that might be created because of the current state-based things that are going on. And that's very, very important when you start to do real-time applications that require geo-fencing, you're doing 5G edge computing. It's a very dynamic environment and the policies need to change to reflect the conditions on the ground, so to speak. And so to be callable, programmable, and betable, that is an absolutely critical approach to implementing IUDA in the enterprise. >> Well this is super exciting, I feel you guys are on, again, a bigger wave than it appears. I mean security and privacy operating system, that's what you guys are. >> It is. >> It is what it is. Nick, great to chat with you. >> Couldn't have said it better. >> I love the category creation, love the mojo and I think you guys are on the right track. I love this vision merging data security policy in together into one to get some enablement and get some value creation for your customers and partners. Thanks for coming on to theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Now, it's my pleasure and I would just give one piece of advice to our listeners. You can use this everywhere in your organization but don't start with that. Don't boil the ocean, pick one use case like the right to be forgotten and let us help you implement that quickly so you can see the ROI and then we can go from there. >> Well I think you're going to have a customer in theCUBE. We will be calling you. We need this. We've done a lot of digital events now with the pandemic, so locked data that we didn't have to deal with before. But thanks for coming on and sharing, appreciate it. OKERA, hot startup. >> My pleasure, John and thank you so much. >> So OKERA conversation, I'm John Furrier here, in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Burlingame, California, it's the Cube, covering Sumo Logic Illuminate 2019. Brought to you by Sumo Logic. >> Hey welcome back everybody! Jeff Frick here with the Cube, we're at the Sumo Logic Illuminate conference, it's at the Hyatt San Francisco Airport. About 700, 800 people, full house in the keynote earlier today, all about operational process monitoring, all this crazy data is being kicked out of the Cloud and IoT and all these crazy next-gen applications. We're excited to have a very close friend of mine, CEO of a very hot company, Kamal Shah, the CEO of StackRox. Kamal, great to see you! >> Thank you, and great to be here, Jeff! >> Absolutely! So for folks that aren't familiar with StackRox, give us the overview. >> Sure, so in a nutshell, we do Kubernetes Security, and so as we've heard all day today, enterprises are deploying microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and we do security for your cloud data infrastructure. >> So how does security work for Kubernetes versus security for other things? >> Yeah, so the use cases for security, or the mission for the security team is the same, right? You got to harden your environment to prevent the bad guys from getting in. >> And, you have to make sure, despite your best efforts, if somebody does break in, then you catch them before they do any damage, right? But the how you do security has to evolve for the cloud data stack, right? It has to understand the containers are immutable affirm all infrastructure, you have to understand that it's not just about the container, but it's also about the orchestrator, and specifically Kubernetes, and it's also about making sure that you seamlessly integrate with dev ops processes, automation and workflow. So it requires a fundamentally different approach to security than traditional security tools. >> So you know, we talk a lot about the increasing attack area that's offered by IoT, right? And increasing attack area that's offered by all those API's and all these interconnected applications, but I've never heard anyone really talk about containers or orchestration as kind of a new attack surface. Did we just stop paying attention? Is that something you're seeing happen? >> Yeah it's something that is starting to emerge, and we've seen some high-profile breachers at a large next generation electric car company, and a large shopping site where misconfigurations led to security breaches in the Kubernetes' environment, and Kubernetes' ecosystem also did a Cube security audit, and so I think we're going to start to hear a lot more, because there's more and more applications are being deployed in production. It's creating a new attack area, and as the old saying goes, the predators go where there's food in the system. >> And so if you're not proactive about it, I think it's going to really hurt as you deploy containers in Kubernetes. >> Right, so we hear over and over and over again about breaches because people misconfigure stuff. That just seems to happen, whether it's a database or this, that, and the other. And I think we can pretty much safely assume everyone's going to get breached if they haven't got breached already, 'cause we hear about it all the time. How do you catch them fast, limit the damage and try not to have too much vulnerabilities? >> Exactly, so the use cases for what we do at Kubernetes are the same. Right? Its vulnerability management, it's configuration management, and we just did a study around the state of container in Kubernetes security and misconfigeration was the number one concern. Because the reality is that Kubernetes, there are a lot of knobs. And each knob has multiple options, so if you're not careful you can really misconfigure your environment and make it so much easier for attackers. >> Right, right. >> And it's precisely what happened at the two examples I sighted earlier. So a misconfigerations is important, runtime security is important, and also compliance. Let's not forget about compliance, right. You have to make sure that you meet your PCI, HIPAA, NIST, and CIS benchmark standards for this cloud native stock. >> So what we're seeing is that these are all becoming very, very important and as a result, it's increasing awareness as Kubernetes gets more prominent. >> Right, and then they are creating and tearing down hundreds, thousands, millions of these things at a nidicolous pace. >> I mean exactly. Kubernetes came out of Google, they open sourced it, and it's really what allows you to deploy, manage, containers at scale. Apparently, they manage hundreds of millions of container a day using Kubernetes, it's incredible. >> Jeff: Oh yeah, I saw a statistic that Google launches 4 billion containers per week. That was from a presentation, actually from a 451 analyst from like 2 years ago. So one can only imagine the scale. >> We are also seeing not quite 4 billion containers per week, but we are seeing thousands, and tens of thousands of containers at scale at companies everywhere. They are all deployed in production, and now they are waking up to security. The good news here is that they are waiting for breaches to happen before they solve the problem. There's still a lack of awareness, and what Sumo Logic has done today with the announcement around continued intelligence for Kubernetes just increases the awareness around, hey we have to solve observability, which is logs, metrics, and tracing, which is what Sumo does, and security for your cloud native infrastructures. >> Yeah, I mean the automation is so important, right? You can't do any of this stuff with this exponential growth of data, exponential growth of pushes, of new code releases. There's so many pieces in this, so automation is a huge piece of the puzzle. >> Automation is paramount and with this new infrastructure there aren't enough security people to solve this. So security has to become everybody's responsibility. And the only way we are going to solve this is to automate it. It also has to integrate with your DebOps processes and automation and work flows. If you don't, then the DebOps body is going to reject the security organ, right? So it has to be seamless in the way you deploy it. >> It's interesting you say that because we go to RSA, forty thousand people, more vendor than you can count, it bulges Moscone to the absolute edges. Everyone says over and over that security has to be baked in the entire process from beginning to end, it's not a bolt on and can never be successful as a bolt on. So it surprises me to hear you say that still a lot of people are kind of behind the curve. >> Well I mean if you think about I, even though they say that, right? In a traditional model of the application you go to spend 6 months building it and then you can go spend a couple of weeks or month hardening and putting security around it. But when you are launching applications every 6 hours, you can spend 6 days addressing security, so it has to be built in. And speaking of RSA, if you recall, last year the big talk at RSA was around AI, right. Everything was AI driven security. My prediction, my bold prediction for this RSA is it's going to be all around Kubernetes security. >> Yeah, well it's applied AI. Applied AI for Kubernetes. >> Exactly. >> And that's what you need. I always feel for the SISO just walking the floor at RSA going, "Where do I begin? I mean where do I spend my money, how do I prioritize?" It's kind of like an insurance problem. You can't insure to the nth degree. You got to have a budget, but how do you deploy your assets? It's got to be super, super confusing. >> It really is. I think what your seeing is that SISO's are relying on their DEV and IT ops teams, right? They are partnering with the VP of platform, the VP of infrastructure, the VP engineering, because when you think about this new world security is really, the ownership of security is now shifting from the information's security teams to DevOps teams. So security teams still drive policy, and they still want to make sure they do the trust and verify, but the implementation of the security is now being owned by DevOps teams. So its a big cultural shift that's going on in organizations today. SISO's have to realize that it's no longer just them, but they have to partner with their DevOps counterparts to effectively address security for this cloud native stock. >> Right, so tell us a little bit about the relationship with Sumo. How do the applications work together? What's the solution look like when the 2 solutions are brought together. >> So Sumo has been a great partner. We have several joint customers. The simplest way to think about this is that Sumo does observability for Kubernetes, so that's logs, metrics, and tracing, and we do security from Kubernetes. We are the yin to their yang. What we do is we have taken all the intelligence we get from security and we feed it into the Sumo dashboard. Sumo customers get a single pane of glass, not just for the observability data, but also for their security violations, weather its for vulnerability, weathers it's for configuration or if it's for runtime threats, right? You get it all in one single place. >> Right. So I just want to get your take on kind of this rise of the momentum behind Hybrid Cloud that we've seen recently. Big announcement at Google Cloud show, with Anthos. Big announcement between VMware and Amazon. It always kind of swings back and forth. It was all in to public cloud and now there's a little bit of a pullback in Hybrid, but that's terrific for you. The fact of the matter is workload should run where they should run, they don't really care it's what's appropriate. Horses for courses, right? >> Precisely so, we see the shift from public cloud to Multi-cloud, and then from Multi-cloud to Hybrid cloud. The underlying infrastructure that makes that a reality are containers and Kubernetes, right? And that's why we've seen this tremendous momentum on Kubernetes. What we are seeing is customers that want to give their Dev teams that flexibility to pick their favorite cloud, or to do it on premises, their private clouds. But they want to make it in a single security solution that gets integrated no matter where you run your infrastructure and that's integrated back to your Sumo dashboard. So you have visibility across all Dev teams, all your application infrastructure, regardless of where they are running. There is one security standard that gets implemented. That is really, that's the future. You don't want to be beholden to a one claw provider, you want flexibility, you want choice. Kubernetes allows you to do that. >> Well and the whole thing becomes more autotomized, right, with autonomic memory, autonomic compute, autonomic store, throw that on an IoT and Edges and now you're starting to distribute all those pieces all over the place, which is going to happen. >> Kamal: It is going to happen for sure. >> All right, looking forward I can't believe we're almost through 2019, it still shocks me everyday I look at the calendar, but what are some of your priorities looking forward? What are you guys working on? What do you see coming down the pipe? >> Yes, so you touches on a couple of these. So today, is a lot of talk around Kubernete. We are seeing Kubernetes also get deployed in IoT and edge devices, we are also seeing they are being used to manage serve-less infrastructure. So we are going to continue to evolve as Kubernetes evolves. The other big trend that we are seeing in the market today is around service mesh. People talk a lot about Istio and Linkerd and using service mesh as your policy framework to drive consistent policies across applications, so that's another area where we are innovating very rapidly and that will become, I think, more and more real in enterprise deployments over 2020. >> Well, congratulations Kamal to you and the team. I think you picked a good horse to ride on, I should say ship, right, with Kubernetes. Thanks for taking a few minutes. >> No, thank you for having me. I can officially say now that I've checked off one of my professional bucket-list items, which is to be on the Cube with an old friend. So thank you for having me. >> Check that box man. All right, he's Kamal, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube. Were at Sumo Logic Illuminate from the Hyatt San Francisco Airport. Thanks for watching, see you next time.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2019. Brought to you by Forescout. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the RSA Conference in downtown San Francisco, it's crazy, 40,000 plus people, we'll get the number later today. We're in the Forescout booth for our first time, we're really excited to be here, and, you know, part of the whole Forescout story is the convergence of IT and OT, operations technology, and those things are coming together, which is such a critical piece of smart things, and smart cities, and smart cars. We're excited to have our next guest, Elisa Costante, on. She is the OT technology and innovation lead at Forescout. Elisa, great to see you. >> Great to see you, thank for having me. >> Absolutely. So you've got a PhD in this space, you picked a field that is pretty hot, so as you think back and look at the convergence of OT and IT, what are some of the top-level things that people are thinking about, but what are some of the top-level things that they're just missing? >> Well, when you speak about OT, typically you refer to critical infrastructure and the technology that operates things. So it's cyber-physical systems, right? And when you think of IT, you think about computer and you think about the web, and you're like, okay, when the two things meet? And then you put in the recipe, you put something like an IoT device, like an IP camera, or a sensor for the number of people in a room. Now these whole things are coming together. And they're coming together because they come with a lot of interesting use cases. You can have all the data and information to configure, for instance, your building, to be as smart as possible, and to have. >> They need smart wheels on that cart, my goodness. >> Of course. And you have a clear picture of how much energy you consume and then you can basically have the energy that is cheaper, because it just arrives in the moment that you need it. Now all of these things are IT and OT convergence. And all of these things make our cities and our world smarter today. >> Right, now one of the interesting things I saw in a talk getting ready for this is, you talked about, there's always been a lot of OT systems, they've been around for a while, >> Yeah. >> But they've always been siloed, you know, they haven't been connected to other OT systems and much less being connected to IT systems. >> Yeah >> So they weren't architected for that from the first point of view. So how does that get implemented? Are they re-architecting 'em? Are you guys overlaying a different kind of control plane? How do you take these siloed applications around, say, elevator operation, and then integrate it in with all these other things? >> So what happens is that those systems are legacy systems. That's why. There are like, 60% of the modern buildings, of the buildings today, they have, they are controlled and managed by system that are 20 years old. So what does it mean? That you make an investment and you don't want to change that investment. You are not going to renew all the backbones of your buildings, or of your manufacturing and operation factories. So what do you do on top of these legacy system that have been developed without security in mind, you put the IT systems, to monitor, to control, to have remote access and remote control. And this is where, like, things can go wrong, because if this is not done properly, and by having in mind, for instance, the threat landscape, that's where you will have the controller for your HVAC exposed to the internet, and can pull down all the air conditioning in a hospital, for instance. And that's why WannaCry can come and heat and put down tons and tons of hospitals. >> Right. It's pretty interesting, you know, I think it's a pretty common concept in security for people that you should only have access, you know, to the information you need around a particular project or particular dataset. But you talked about, in some of your other talks that I saw, about a lot of these devices come out of the box with all kinds of capabilities, right? 'Cause they're built for kind of the Nth degree, the maximum use, but there may be a whole bunch of stuff that's turned on out of the box that you probably need to turn off. >> Yeah, that's actually super interesting. If you look at IP cameras, now IP cameras, they should do one thing, record stuff that they see on the screen. But actually they come with a bunch of protocols indeed, like FTPs, Samba protocols, SSDP, that announce the camera on the network, and reveal a lot of information about those camera on the network that if RPCed by an attacker or by someone with not-good intentions, might actually be leveraged to turn the camera against the owner of the camera itself. >> Right, right. And do weird things that the camera should not. And that's really part of what the Forescout solution is, is making sure that the devices are profiled and acting in the way that they're supposed to act. And not doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. >> Yeah, Forescout is a leader in device visibility. So what we do is we enter into a network, and we give full visibility of all the IP devices that are there, and that's most of the times is a wow effect, like, the asset owner has no ideas that they had a camera that was directly connected to the internet. Or they'd have a thermostat that communicates with the servers. So all of these things, we bring basically light on the dark sides of the network. >> Right. So excited to talk to you 'cause I think the smart cities and smart buildings is such an interesting concept and going to be so important as we get denser populations and smaller areas that connected to transportation. I wonder if you could share some examples that you see out in the field where the ROI on putting these things in, the good part, is way higher than maybe people expect. That because you're combining, you know, a one plus one equals three kind of an opportunity. >> Right, so actually, one example of a very useful and smart use case is, is happening in Amsterdam right now. The Bijlmer Arena, is basically all the walls are made of solar panels, which means it gets the energy and is able to basically self-sustain the arena. The arena is one of the biggest stadiums in the Netherlands. >> Ajax plays there probably? >> Exactly. >> Alright. >> Now what they do if they have collected more energy than they are able to consume, they provide that same energy to the neighbors. Which means that you have basically a small ecosystem that thanks to the collection of data, knowing what neighbor needs how much light and energy in a certain time, you can actually even improve sustainability and going green initiatives. >> I love the innovation that comes out of the Netherlands. We interviewed a company a long time ago, and they were basically doing segmented data centers, where you would have a piece of the data center in your house and they were selling it as free heating. And I'm like, is it free heating, or is it distributed data center? But I mean, the creativity is terrific. So as you look forward, you know, what are you excited about in 2019? What are some of your top initiatives that you're working on? >> So we are working on a lot of IT and OT convergence, and especially on the IoT part. So we are looking at all those tiny devices that you would not expect to be on your network, and what they can do, and how these old systems that have been conceived to be standalone are now starting to communicate, and what kind of threats this communication can bring, and what we can do to actually defend our customers from the threats that can be arised. >> Going to be a good year. Excited to watch the developments unfold. >> Yeah, thanks. >> All right Elisa, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day, I know you said you had early meetings, you're calling Europe, calling all over the world, so thanks for taking a few. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, she's Elisa, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at RSA Conference, RSAC is the hashtag, in the Forescout booth. I'm Jeff Frick, thanks for watching. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are at Vmworld 2018, Day One. I'm with Justin Warren. Hey Justin. >> Hi Lisa, how you doin'? >> Good. This is VMware's 20th anniversary and we're very excited to welcome two new guests to theCUBE. We've got Scott Brindamour, the Senior Director of the U.S. architect team from CenturyLink. Hey Scott. >> Hello, how are ya? >> Good. And we've got Geoff Thompson, the Senior Director of VMware Cloud Provider Program. Welcome. >> Thank you very much and hello. >> The 20th anniversary of VMware. You've been with VMware a long time. >> Yes. >> Lot of momentum kicked off this show, not just this morning. You guys said you were in here yesterday. >> Yes. >> Just curious to get your perspective, Geoff, on the buzz and the opportunity that you're hearing, not just from your customers but from your partners as well. >> Oh yeah, yeah. I remember the first one I went to way, way back, even before I joined VMware, when I was at Hewlett Packard. Then, it was a little small event back in, I think it was Los Angeles. Now, here we are in 20 thousand something people in Vegas for the nth year running, so the buzz is amazing. This year, I think more than ever for us, because Cloud is just becoming more and more of a focal point and the discussion and topic area for everybody, so the buzz is incredible. Working with CenturyLink here and with Scott is just like an opportunity to dig deeper on all these relationships, find new opportunities to go all in on the strategy that you guys have really already adopted, look at Cloud Verified and take that to the next step. Yep, great so far and looking forward to more. >> So talk to us, Scott, about the partnership that CenturyLink has with VMware. VMware has a massive amount of partners. I saw a stat this morning on stage. What is it about CenturyLink's offering and VMware that's really better together for end users? >> Yeah, I think it's really in our approach and how we really listen to our customers and try to understand where they are in their journey and what they need and not just throw a widget at a customer, but really design a solution that meets their needs and VMware having a flexible architecture and a vision for the future enables us to not only plant the seed today, but where we're going; a lot of co-development with VMware, a lot of partnership with VMware, a lot of making sure our teams that operate the environment and my team on the front lines work with customers are trained and ready for the next technology. I think I've seen a remarkable change in VMware over the last several years in accelerating their road map and working with AWS and a lot of the other partners. It's refreshing. A lot of our business is private Cloud on VMware. We've been a big partner for a long time and the VMware Verified is something we hold dear and we look forward to the relationship ongoing. >> Yeah, that focus on Cloud came through loud and strong in the keynote today and you mentioned it here, the private Cloud, hybrid Cloud, multi Cloud. CenturyLink has a rich heritage in networking and networking is vital for managing Cloud. So tell us a bit more about how CenturyLink's networking skills helps customers to understand how they can manage this multi-Cloud universe they have to live in now. >> Sure and maybe I should even talk about, the viewers that don't know what CenturyLink is. I've been with the company for 15 years, a company called Savvis, but we've made a number of different acquisitions over the years to gain different technology areas, where there'd be ERP, where there'd be dev opps capabilities in the public Cloud, where there'd be Cloud management platforms, et cetera. Now, we see more data is being moved outside of the data center and more data is being originated outside the data center, so customers are really saying, what do I do with all this data? Where do I put my apps? I can't put it in my four walls. I want to move it to the Cloud. Not every customer is on the same path at the same rate and can accept the change. I think the biggest thing we do is helping customers manage pieces of that portfolio, but it's not just a take-over kind of an old ITO play. It's a co-sourcing kind of play, a co-management model where they may have some skills in one area but deficient in another. We can help them with AWS, for instance. We can help them with the new software-defined V-conformate foundation technologies that VMware is going to as well, and bring the network components as well, so that a workload that's running on premise can work and perform just as well off premise by providing that private network connectivity or public network connectivity to those end users as well. >> You mentioned that partnership idea. I'm keen to understand the partnership you can provide essentially as a service provider. Customers rely on service providers a lot to help them manage their own infrastructure, in conjunction with the vendors. So, tell us a bit more about how your partnership with VMware works for customers. >> Yeah, we work a lot with-- VMware at its roots was a software company, so lately, selling services and selling services to clients that are not just a software skew in a software package, so a lot of interaction with VMware client teams and doing strategic discussions with some of our key clients about how we can bring them to the next generation and buying a private Cloud as a service, instead of just selling them a VMware license and have the customer try and figure it out. So, how do we get a customer on the same path and working together to do a lot of that together with our clients, and really making sure we're a partnership and our sales teams are going out to customers together is a big part of6 that. >> Right. >> Yeah, I think from our side, CentralLink is a strategic global partner of ours, so that means several things. The most important thing is we get an opportunity to have more and more briefings together, go deeper on our global strategy as a combined unit so we can look at new technologies that are comin6g down the pike. You can assess them and decide if there's a customer opportunity there and if there is, we'll bring our Cloud practice team in. We'll look at how we take that opportunity and make it a go-to-market strategy together and then we'll go and do sell with. We'll go out into our field teams. We'll educate them on what the offering is and then VMware and CentralLink is co-selling that solution. >> Yeah, I think a lot of the VMware sellers, the public Cloud threat that they have and the move to the public Cloud, how does that still co-exist with customers? I still strongly see that there's a lot of legacy apps. We were talking earlier about only 20% of workloads have moved to the Cloud. There's still a lot of legacy apps that are on VMware that are their crown jewels that are running their companies. They just need to deliver that in a new model and that's where a partner like CentralLink can help, to move it out of their data centers, to move it into VMware on AWS and help a customer understand what are the right workloads to move there, do I need to replatform it, when is it ready, how do I migrate it and how not to disrupt their operations and then manage it, if the customer doesn't have the capabilities to do it off their own premise and skill sets. It's a totally different mindset managing it off your premise than inside your four walls. >> So when you're talking to a customer at the outset of an organization that has multiple Clouds maybe driven by application type, maybe driven by that on a combination of acquisitions. Where does that business conversation start? Are you starting at the C-suite level? Are you starting there to really help the business leaders understand how to extract the power of their data? Tell us a little bit about how do you help them with a multi-phased approach. >> Sure. We definitely talk to the C-suite, CIO, whoever is leading the strategy but it depends on the company. A lot of that's actually done in the line of business, the more innovative lines of business that are transferring their business that have done a first mover. You hear a lot about shadow IT, where the business is going around IT because IT can't move fast enough. CIOs who are transformative, we're typically working with them and we're trying to figure out where they are in their strategy. Are they an early adopter or are they a lagger, do they not have a strategy and then understand; do they want to take a lot of risk and move quickly. Do they want to do it slowly and not disrupt their business. Depending upon the culture and the risk nature of their organization and what is actually running on that infrastructure they're going to move, you got to make those decisions. We call it, in CentralLink terms, my team talks about what's called best execution venue. We're agnostic. We're obviously a big VMware partner, but we also do resale solutions on Azure and AWS as well, as we're a data center provider and we can put it in our four walls on old legacy dedicated server environments as well. Whatever the right venue for our customer is, which is typically going to be hybrid, some on public Cloud, some on private Cloud, some on premise, some off premise and even more moving out to the edge, that customers want to do workloads in smaller quantities in kind of a dynamic nature, spinning up and spinning down, that we work with the clients to figure out what's the right execution venue; cost factor, who's going to manage it, what's the best place to locate it, does it need to be secure, governed, is their data sovereignty or compliance regulations on it. Then, ultimately, how they're going to scale their business and what their vision is to automate as much as possible and standardize it. You heard it today this morning; it's all about automation. So, how can they automate and how can they reduce the labor that the individual persons on the keystrokes and automate the infrastructure and make it look the same. I think the software-defined data center model that VMware has is a step in the right direction and there's a big uptake on customers in that environment today. >> Yeah, we're hearing a lot today, I think Lisa, of people saying it's customer choice. The ability to automate things but in the way that I choose to do it and transforming at the speed I need to do it. It's coming up quite a lot. Maybe you could tell us a bit more from the VMware perspective about how you're enabling that customer choice and we heard a lot about the automation, so how does the automation work with partners in enabling customers to be able to transform their business. >> For us, it's about we give choice and flexibility so within our program, it's all about making sure that we give everything that we build for ourselves and our end user customers, giving that to our partners. So, in terms of Scott and CentralLink, we give them the tools to go and build the Cloud and then set up the automated operations for them to expose to their end user customers and then we also leverage VMware Cloud on AWS, so we made that available to the program as well. So, our partners have choice in flexibility and ease of operations and then they expose that to their customers as well, so it's win-win-win, I think there. >> Yeah, and the keynote this morning, it was SDDC, software-defined data center from VMware was talked about as a self-driving data center and that's ultimately what we see as well in partnership with VMware that a lot of customers understand the VMware tool sets. Extending that to a new platform that's software defined and enabling automation, that it can ultimately one day drive itself, so customers can automate the deployment of applications they're running on, something that can be spun up on AWS very quickly. Applications can be migrated over automatically with tools, managed and then no one responding to an alert that a VM or an application is down, it can autocorrect itself and it really could be automated in the future. We see that and certainly all the tools and capabilities that VMware puts in place that enable that is something that we subscribe, we use it ourselves and we have our customers use it as well. >> I'm curious what your take is, Scott, on the announcements that Andy Jassy made this morning on the stage with Pat Gelsinger. They announced VMware Cloud on AWS a year ago at this same event. There's been a lot of momentum. &They talked about the different M releases now going everywhere. From a partnership perspective, what does that mean to CentralLink and how do you think that will positively impact your business? >> Well, there's two sides of our business. We have a very large, obviously, networking business and we have a hosting and Cloud and data center business, so we see the two of them coming together. I talked about the data center dying and everything moving off; how do you network that all together, but we have a very large retail customer in the, let's say, fast food chicken business, I'll keep it at that level. We started off hosting a lot of their critical applications that run their stores and understand what's the best place to put stores and store operations. We also, from the networking side in acquiring Level three, they had a lot of the networking capabilities. They now want a single platform to run store operations from a network, from a virtual desktop, from an email, from an order fulfillment, supply chain management, all to be contained in a particular region that you can manage it locally without all the data going back. So, the ability to have a software-defined smaller component that can run it that can not only have the data center and the Cloud component as private, to keep the data safe and non-public, but also the network software-defined on one platform together with one provider that can manage the whole thing. Now you're distributing your data out, the network becomes more important, the performance of the network, the resilience of the network becomes more important too. That environment goes down, you don't sell any more chicken. That's the biggest thing that customers are seeing, is converging of those capabilities together and I think there's very few providers out there that can speak both those languages and provide both of those to clients today. >> Taking those benefits all the way out, for what the infrastructure enables from a cost in speed perspective, the Board of Directors at said chicken chain, what are they actually benefitting from? It might be this invisible software, but from a business perspective, how is this going to impact their business? Selling more chicken? >> Yeah, it's basically, they have a strategy to continue to be in more markets and the more markets they do, the time to set up and deploy infrastructure and have that ready, that's the biggest enabler. To have the store front, to have the store ready, then all the infrastructure that supports the store, especially now you have people, they can order chicken on their phones, loyalty, they can place their order ahead of time and pick it up, they don't have to go through drive-through any more, things of that nature. Everything becomes digitized and the I want it now generation that we live in today, that'll accelerate their ability to deliver services to the store and then react to the changes in the market as they happen. Everything is digital now. That's the biggest thing, is growth through stores, growth through being able to meet the demands of the stores as they change going forward, so very dynamic. >> Awesome. Scott, Geoff, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. You're now theCUBE alumni. We'll give you some stickers. >> Yeah, stickers. Great thank you. >> We appreciate you guys sharing what's new. >> Thanks for your time as well. It's such really good VMware. >> Thanks. >> Appreciate it. >> For Justin Warren, my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Vmworld Las Vegas 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you buy Blockchain Industries. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to our exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico with theCUBE on the ground for extensive two days of coverage for Blockchain Unbound in Puerto Rico where all the action is. It's a global conference where investors, entrepreneurs, thought leaders are all coming together to check out the future and set the agenda for Blockchain cryptocurrency and the decentralized internet. My next guest is John Hartigan, Executive Vice President in Intiva Health. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So we were talking yesterday with Hash-Craft, CTO, you guys are part of that ecosystem, you guys are doing some of these things with health. Take a minute to explain what you guys are working on and your value proposition. >> Sure, so, Intiva Health is a career and credential management platform for physicians and all licensed medical professionals, and it streamlines and automates the credential management process that they have to go through every time that they either change positions or take on temporary work. And the Hash-Craft integration is allowing us to do instantaneous credential verification. Currently the state of affairs in the granting of privileges at a particular hospital or a facility can take literally weeks and in some cases months to complete. It's a very analog process, and with our integration with Hash-Craft, it will take seconds. >> So I was watching The New York Times today, an our Wall Street Journal article about verification of work history. This Blockchain is certainly a good example of that, but you're now getting it into more of health, what is the use case, what's the low hanging fruit that you guys are going after with your solution, and how does that evolve and how you see that evolving? >> Well, so, like I mentioned, the current verification process for the granting of privileges in a hospital setting, it is pretty much unchanged since the 1950s. The internet helps a lot but what you're talking about is somebody getting a credential paper file with 25 or 30 documents, and opening the file and picking up the phone and calling, and verifying the reputation and provenance of that particular physician. And it's truly a bureaucratic nightmare. It's red tape to the nth degree. And so that represents thousands and hundreds of thousands of hours and billions and billions of dollars in waste that could be reallocated to better patient care for example. >> The big use case we're seeing education, the workplace, but now healthcare. I see a perfect storm for innovation. Healthcare is not known for moving fast. >> John: Correct. >> HIPAA regulations in the past couple decades really put a damper on data sharing for privacy reasons. At that time it seemed like a good call. Has things like HIPAA, has the cloud computing model opened up new avenues for health because everyone wants great healthcare, but the data is stuck in some silo, database. >> Database, absolutely. >> That's the problem. >> That's absolutely a problem. >> So what's your reaction to that? >> So the approach that we're seeing a lot of organizations take is they are attempting to go after the EHRs and the EMRs, the Electronic Health Records for Patients. Of course that is something that needs to be fixed. However the medical space is truly influenced, the main stakeholders are the physicians. They sit on all the committees, they run all the budgets, they make the policy. So it's imperative that we address the physicians and get their buy into any kind of significant change. And what you're seeing now is states, as well as other organizations including the federal medical board, the Federal Association of Medical Boards, as well as the State of Illinois, Wyoming is here, as a matter of fact, representing, and they are all looking at Blockchain solutions for this verification problem for the medical space and remaining HIPAA compliant. >> Let's talk about security because hospitals and healthcare organizations have been really good targets for ransomware. >> John: Absolutely. >> And so we're seeing that mainly because their IT systems have been kind of ancient in some cases, but they're right in the target of, they don't have a lot of IT support. One of the things about Blockchain, it makes these things immutability. So is that something that is on the radar, and how is, I mean, not necessarily ransomware, that's one example of many security issues 'cause you got Internet of Things, you have a slew of cloud-edge technologies-- >> John: Yes. >> That are emerging, that opened up a surface area for a text. So what's your thoughts on that? >> So, as you mentioned, the traditional models have been layered on top of each other overtime. It's a patchwork situation. And because it's a patchwork situation, there is vulnerabilities all over the place, in facilities a lot of times. And besides that, the medical space is probably 10 years behind the times when it comes to technology, maybe five at a minimum. The model that we're using, you mentioned earlier that there are siloed information in these different facilities and hospitals, and that's absolutely true. So all of that information, you have facility A, facility B, facility C, they all have information on one particular provider or physician, but they don't talk to each, and that information is at different levels of accuracy and timeliness, you mentioned time and date stamps. So our model works where the information follows the provider, okay, it's all built around the provider themselves, and then the individual facilities can tap into that information, and also they can influence the information, they can update it. So everybody will then be talking to each other in an anonymous fashion around the one provider updating that information and making it the most accurate in the market, and we get away from the old SaaS model. >> Before we deep dive in here, I'm going to ask you one more thing around as you walked into healthcare providers and then the healthcare industry, you're a different breed, you have Blockchain, you got different solution, the conversation that they're having is, let's put a data leg out there, again, centralized data leg. ISPs are doing that. We know with cybersecurity, any time you have centralized data resources, it's just an easier target to hack. >> John: Correct. >> So it's clear that centralized is not going to be the ideal architecture, and this entire movement is based upon the principles of decentralized data. >> John: Yes. >> So what's it like when you go in there? It must be like, do you have like three heads to them? Or are you like a martian, you're like speaking some foreign language? I mean what is it like, are there people receptive to what you talk about? Talk about some of the experiences you had when you walked in the door and knocked on the front door and walked in and talked to them. >> So it is an interesting situation. When I speak with CEOs and when I speak with COOs, they understand that they're vulnerable when it comes to their data, and they understand how expensive it is if, for example, if they have a HIPAA breach, it's $10,000 per occurrence. Now that means if somebody texts patient information to somebody else on a normal phone, that $10,000 every time that happens, okay. And so if it's a major data breach, and a record of files if they have 50,000 files lost, I mean it could be a killing, a business killing event under the right circumstances. So I tried to educate them about-- >> Do they look at Blockchain as a solution there? Or are they scratching their heads, kicking the tires? What's the reaction? >> They're interested, they don't understand exactly how we can apply Blockchain, and we're trying to educate them as to how that is, we are capable of doing so. We're explaining about the vast security improvements by decentralizing the information, and they are receptive, they're just reticent because they're very, tend to be more conservative. So as these organizations like the State of Illinois and the Federal Association of Medical Boards, as they start to adopt the hospitals and facilities, they're starting to look in and oh say, "Hey, this is a real thing, "and there may be a real application here." >> Talk about your business, you market, you go on after obviously healthcare, product specifically in the business model, where are you guys? How big are you? Are you funded? Are you doing an ICO? How are you using token economics? How is it working? Give us a status on the company. >> Sure, so, we've been in business for approximately two years. We're a funded startup out of Austin, Texas. We are born actually out of a practice management company which is an important point because a technology company trying to solve this problem would really struggle because there is a lot of bureaucracy, there's a lot of nuance in how the system operates because it is evolved overtime. So that gives us a very significant advantage. We have an operating platform that has been out for a little over a year now, and we have thousands and thousands of physicians and other licensed medical professionals that use the platform now. >> Are they paying customers or are they just users? >> No, so the model works like this, it's free to the providers, it's also free to the facilities and medical groups, and so we allow that platform, that utility for them to use. How we monetize is we have other curated goods and services for the providers along their career journey. So, for example, continuing medical education. All providers are required to take so many units a year, and we have a very robust online library of CME. And we also have partnerships with medical malpractice organizations. >> So it's a premium model. You get them using the platform. >> Correct, that's right. >> Where does tokens fit in? Where does the cryptocurrency fit in? Do you have a token as a utility, obviously, it's a utility token. I mean explain the model. >> Correct. Yeah so we just announced last Friday. in South by Southwest that we are launching a token, a utility token, and it'll go on sale April 19th. And basically how it works is the providers, the physicians will earn tokens by taking actions in the platform that update their data for example, or if they look for a job on our platform, or if they do different tasks in the platform that improve the veracity of their data, and then they will be able to use those tokens to purchase the continuing medical education courses, travel courses, medical malpractice insurance, a number of different resources. >> Token will monitor behavior, engage behavior, and then a two-sided marketplace for clearing house. >> Exactly. >> How does the token go up in value? >> We have multiple partners that are involved, so the partners will be also purchasing advertising time, or it's a sponsorship model, so they'll be able to sponsor within the platform. So the more partners we bring in, the more providers we have, the value-- >> So suppliers, people who want to reach those guys. So >> Exactly. >> You get the coins, you see who's doing what. You get a vibe on who's active and then >> Exactly. That's a signal to potential people who want to buy coins. >> Yeah, and when we announced that we were doing this token, we had multiple partners that we have been in business with for the last two years, saying, "We want in, we want to do this, "we want to get involved." Oh another thing that we're doing with the token, we have an exclusive relationship with the National Osteoporosis Foundation, and we put forth to them that we would like to set them up with a crypto wallet so that they can accept donations, and then we would also match those donations up to a certain point that they receive in crypto. So we want to help our organizations, our not-for-profits by facilitating crypto acceptance. >> So talk about your relationship with Hash-Craft. It's two days old but it's been around for two years, they announced a couple days ago. It got good feedback, a lot of developers are using it. It's not a theorem but that's the compatibility to a theorem. You're betting on that platform. How long have you worked with these guys, and why the bet on Hash-Craft? >> So we were looking at Blockchain Technologies about two years ago because we realized, as you mentioned earlier, the security issues we have. We have to be very aware of the type of data that we're holding. So at the time though, there were significant issues with speed, significant issues with storage, and how it would work by actually putting a credential packet into Blockchain, and the technology frankly just wasn't there, and so we started looking for alternatives. Thankfully we were in Texas, and we happened to run into Hash-Craft, and they explained what they were doing, and we thought this must be too good to be true. It checked off all of our boxes. And we had multiple conversations about how we would actually execute an integration into our current platform with Hash-Craft. So we've been in talks with them for, I think, a little over five or six months, and we will actually, it looks like be one of the very first applications on the market integrating Hash-Craft. >> It's interesting, they don't really have a Blockchain-based solution, it's a DAG, a directed acyclic graphic model. Did that bother you guys? You don't care, it's plumbing. I mean does it matter? >> So actually the way that it is established, it has all of the benefits of Blockchain, and none of the fat and sugar, so to speak. I mean there are a number of things that they do that Blockchain-- >> You mean performance issues and security? >> Performance, speed is a big one, but also fairness on the date and timestamps, because with the verification system, you have to prove, you have to be able to prove and show that this date and timestamp is immutable, and that it has been established in a fair manner. And they have been able to solve that problem, where the Blockchain model, there is still some question about, if you have some bad actors in there, they can significantly influence the date and timestamps. And that was very significant for our model. >> Alright, well, congratulations. What's next for the company? What are you guys doing? What's the plan, what's the team like? Well, excited obviously. What's next? >> So we are going to be announcing some very big partnerships that we've established here late spring. I was hoping to do it here now, however we've-- >> Come on, break it out then. >> I would like to but I have to be careful. So we have some big partnerships we're going to be announcing, and of course we have the token sale coming up so there'll be a big-- >> Host: When is that sale happening? >> So it starts April 19th, and it'll run for about six weeks. >> What's the hard cap and soft cap? >> Yeah, we prefer not to talk about that, but let's say, soft cap, about 12 million. And we have some interested parties that want to do more, and so we're looking at what our best options are as far as setting the value to the token, and what the partnerships that are going to significantly impact it will be. >> Well, great job, congratulations. One of the big concerns to this market is scams versus legit, and you're starting to see clearly that this is a year, flight to quality, where real businesses are tokenizing for real reasons, to scale, provide value. You guys are a great example of that. Thanks for sharing that information. >> We're really excited, and it's very exciting to bring this to the healthcare space which is, as we said, conservative and somewhat traditional. And we believe that we will be setting the standard moving forward for primary source verification. >> And you can just summarize the main problem that you solve. >> Yeah, it is that analog primary source verification of the credential documents, and when our platform goes live, we will literally be putting hours of time a day, something like eight hours back into the providers' lives, and back to the money of that, associated with that back to their pockets, which we hope translates into better patient care. >> So verification trust and they save time. >> John: Absolutely. >> It's always a good thing when you can reduce the steps to do something, save time, make it easy. That's a business model of success. >> Absolutely and more secure. >> John Hatigan, who's with Intiva, Executive Vice President from Austin, Texas here in Puerto Rico for theCUBE coverage. Day Two of two days of live coverage here in Puerto Rico, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE host. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering HPEE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with my co-host Peter Burris, and this is day one of HPEE Discover Madrid. Susan Blocher is here, she's the vice-president of portfolio marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Bruce Trevarthen joins her. He's the CEO and founder, I believe, of Layer X. Welcome back, both of you, to theCUBE. >> Thank you David. >> All right so Susan, big show for you guys, and we have these six months cadence of big messages >> Susan: Yes. >> And customer shows, so what are we going to hear this afternoon at the keynotes? >> Wow. I'll tell you we've got a lot of exciting news to talk about. First of all, the way customers are consuming IT is really changing, cloud is changing the game. We got some amazing announcements to talk about around how we're going to help customers in the hybrid IT space consume IT differently. We're going to talk about how we're helping them manage across multi-cloud environments. We're going to talk about bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to the data center which is really transformational. So, lot's of exciting news here. >> Good, okay! So we'll be covering the keynotes here just actually in about a half hour or so, we kick off. Meg, Antonio >> Yes. you've got a new leader so we're going to hear from him, we've been hearing from him for some time now. >> Very exciting. >> Looking forward to hearing from him. Okay, Bruce. It's been awhile since we talked about layerX. Tell us what's transpired in the last couple years. Set up layerX, what you guys are all about and what's new. >> Sure, so it's a cloud service provider based out of New Zealand. Multiple platforms giving us that resilience. You know, that sort of general cloud people all know what cloud is these days. But really for us the journey it just continues. We keep, from a strategy point of view we keep looking at where is cloud adoption at, where is cloud going, are these hyperscale providers going to enter every country and every market? And really, sort of, make us, sort of in country boutique operators less relevant. So you're always asking that question and then you're sort of hit with this new wave of expectations down from the clients. Hybrid IT has been the big push in the last 12 months and what's really encouraging for us when we get hit with this new sort of level of interest and a slight tangent on this manage services delivery is that HPE already thinking the same way. They've already come up with a product line that's going to plug that gap. So we work very closely with HPE with their edge line and the OEM team globally, to deliver HPE hardware on customer site or on premise. And then we put our own software on that, we link it back into the core V-grid environment, and that really, for a customer they keep those workloads on site where they need to be. And then you've got that public cloud environment for the disaster recovery and the workloads that don't need to be on site. >> So let's unpack that a little bit. Tagline, Hewlett Packard Enterprises uses make hybrid IT simple, that's the objective. >> [Susan]- That's right. >> You know, IT is complicated, hybrid IT is complicated. What's the starting point to make it simple Bruce, from your perspective? Is it to make the infrastructure as invisible as possible, is it bringing the cloud upward model? Maybe talk about those steps. >> Sure. Well, I mean, one of the first things we try to do to make it simple is we don't mention cloud. We talk ultimately about what workload is the customer consuming and where do they belong? And so, we're invariably seeing more and more workloads that really shouldn't go centralized in a data center they should be on site. So, GPU accelerated desktops for oil and gas research, or some of our clients doing 3D engineering, you know, CAD design work. You can put that in a data center, and we have, but then you're at the mercy of the fiber connections. Speed of the fiber connection, the resilience of the fiber connection, and the cost absolutely. And so keeping some of those workloads on site just makes sense. But how can you then leverage the benefit of that centralized IT in the event of a disaster if all of your workloads are actually on site? And that's where it's got to be hybrid. You can have those workloads on site but all your files and all that capability is sort of mirrored in the cloud environment. So if you have a fiber cut, then you can use a cellular network to get there. Or if you have an on site disaster, then you can spend the equivalent resources in the data center, but on demand, rather than dedicated to you. >> We like to say that customers want or the way that we summarize it at Wikibon is, customers want the cloud experience where the data demands. >> Dave: 'cause we do talk about cloud >> 'cause we do talk about cloud periodically. Well, but you have to, because at the end of the day it's driving a new way of thinking. Not just about the technology, but how you solve business problems. And it comes back to how do you think about the business problem differently. I love New Zealand, I've been there a couple times. I've worked with a lot of customers and the minute that you said New Zealand I was like, right! How do, how does the cloud experience, how are you solving problems differently than you did a few years ago because of not only the HPEE partnership, but thinking differently about these problems? >> Thinking differently is definitely something you have to do to stay relevant, right, to keep up with the market. Almost ten years ago we thought what we felt was a little differently, when we adopted the HPEE 3PAR, and that really was a technology that gave us the ability to change our mind regarding storage. Spin forward now to 2017. In April this year we put in our first HPE Synergy platform. This month we're just putting in our second HPE Synergy platform. And Synergy gives us for compute what HPE 3PAR gave us for storage. The ability to change our mind, to be programmatic or autonomous with the deployment of resources for a customer need. And so for a public cloud environment, that's basically spinning up compute nodes as required for the demand within the clusters. But it also introduces by way of the technology capability, a new channel, or a new revenue opportunity. Because now we can actually programmatically spin up compute nodes of any flavor, for a customer in a private cloud environment. So this is physical tend to the customer opposed to virtual, you know, cloud. We can do that just as easily as we can a VN because of Synergy. >> And that's really exciting. I think what Bruce is really representing here is that he can focus on business outcomes for his customers. And you, Dave, you said it makes the infrastructure transparent. Transparent but underneath that is really differentiated capability and value like the ability to spin up and spin down composable infrastructure on demand. Like the ability to bring world class security to that infrastructure. So all of those things are underpinning the services that layerX is able to deliver. >> So I would think part of making Hybrid IT simple is not just throwing a bunch of products at your customers. >> Right. >> We heard on the last financial call that HPE is changing the way... >> Exactly. >> ...it reports. It's going to report hybrid IT, which is essentially your portfolio. >> Susan: Exactly. >> So it's server, storage, networking and relevant services around that >> That' right. >> Susan: And software. >> And software that powers all that, so talk about how you're going to market and how that aligns with how you guys want to buy. >> Yeah, well think about it from, let's talk about it from the layerX perspective. When you look at Synergy, that is not a piece of hardware, that is truly software defined intelligence built into innovative hardware. Based on our Gen 10 server platform, which in and of itself is the world's most secure industry standard server platform because we have built in silicon route of trust, and things like that, so what you get is all of that put together. All of that integrated. That software defined intelligence, the technology innovation, the infrastructure innovation. And wrappered with the services that both support the layerX company and their customers. >> Maybe talk about your customers a bit more. What are they really pushing you hard to do? What are the big challenges they face, and how are you addressing those? >> One of the most common conversations with cloud is obviously cost. Everyone's trying to commoditize this resource to the Nth degree every day, but the vGrid which is the our brand for our cloud platform, The vGrid position really is around performance and reliability and we back that up through HPE hardware platforms and a software stack that enables that. But our customers are really driving us to make sure that we stay relevant. Not only with that performance and reliability but still on cost. Even though we are giving them enterprise and beyond capabilities as an SMB, cost is still a major defective for an SMB. So for us to keep our overheads low we need automation. You know we're not going to go put in, no disrespect to the product line, but we're not going to go and put in maybe an Apollo or a CloudLine solution, we're going to stick with Synergy and previously the ProLion because of the added value wrapped around that that actually gives us the peace of mind and the operational efficiency through our engineering team to get the work done far more effectively. Now with Synergy takes it up to a whole new level because this is all composable now. My CTO mentioned to me the other day they just put in a new 8450 3PAR. And he said, "All I had to do "was create the CPG's in the 3PAR and OneView did the rest." He's like I don't have to go into all these other steps that he used to have to do. So, it saves time and time is expensive. Not only from a human resource point of view, but go to market speed. >> Well, converged hardware was about having a common set of support technologies. The whole notion of hyperconverge starting to converge the actual administrative tasks. But what I remember, the last time that I was in New Zealand and talked with large users, was a real emphasis on analytics because of New Zealand being an island with great resources in some respects and less resources in others, energy, telecommunications. How is the modern economy of New Zealand with some of the constraints that it faces driving the use of digital technology to lift up industry, services, and the quality of life in New Zealand? >> We're seeing that in a very far reaching kind of industry verticals. And more so now with obviously IOT's become a pretty hot topic, but IOT backed by all the smart and on-demand composable architecture is really making a difference to primary industries, making them more productive more effective, more efficient. But really the customers in New Zealand we're a nation of early adopters. We have 96% of our companies are six or less people. So, we're dealing with SMB's that have to box above their weight. They have to adapt, they have to do more with less. You know all of this cliches that really encumber the average small company, and we have a lot of them. So the demands from an IT perspective are give me what my enterprise counterparts have but at a per user, or resource unit per month kind of model so cloud just makes so much sense for them. >> Susan, big takeaways from Madrid? What do you want the world to walk away with? >> Well I think first of all, when we say we're going to help make hybrid IT simple, what we're talking about and really exemplified with layerX is we're talking about from the edge to the core to the cloud. So, really end to end. The other really exciting thing that we're here talking about is AI, artificial intelligence. Deep learning, machine learning. And you talked about it in the context of edge computing and IOT which is obviously super hot, but we are also bringing AI to the data center. So as we look at-- >> Peter: In other words, making data center operations, IT operations, >> Making the data center autonomous, self healing, self managing. You look at the automobile industry, autonomous cars, right? Well think about how that's going to be applied to autonomous data centers. That's what we're going to be talking about. >> Shoes for the cobbler's children. >> You got it. >> Well, and think about the impact that has on the business where you're allowing people not to spend money on whatever, lung provisioning, >> Right. >> And server management, but really focusing on some other more strategic aspects of their business whether it's digital transformation, AI, other data-oriented activities. >> Exactly. >> Sometimes the data has to be here and you want to make sure that when the data's there it has the same services are available to the business, >> Susan: Yes. >> to take advantage of that asset where it is. >> Real time analytics for the data that matters to our customers at the edge and in the cloud, as well as applying that same AI to the telemetry of the data center and using that to make the data center more efficient, more effective, more autonomous and self-healing. >> Awesome. So, keynotes are coming up very shortly. We'll be running those on our twitch channel twitch.com/siliconangle. You can check those out obviously at HPE as well, HPE.com Susan and Bruce, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, >> Thank you so much, appreciate it. >> setting up the afternoon. Really appreciate your time. >> No problem. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep right there buddy. We'll be back after the keynotes. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover, Madrid. (electronic music)