>> Man: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> And we are back live in Boston as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Red Hat Summit 2019. It is our sixth year here at the show and this year obviously some huge announcements. A significant moment it's been for Red Hat, we heard from Jim Whitehurst a little bit ago. Stu Miniman, John Walls, we're now joined as well by Niall Fitzgerald, who is the GM of IT Application Architecture and Design at Spark NZ. Niall, good afternoon, or I guess good morning still we're in an Eastern time zone. >> Yeah it's the middle of the night in New Zealand I'd say. >> Yeah, so Spark NZ New Zealand. Tell us a little bit first off about Spark NZ. What the folks back home are doing right now, work-wise, and your role with the company. >> Yeah, so Spark is the largest provider of telecommunication services in New Zealand. All the traditional type of services you'd expect, mobile, broadband, et cetera. We came out of the traditional kind of post office, so we've a lot of heritage, and about four years ago we rebranded from Telecom New Zealand into Spark. To represent that we were changing from being a telco into much broader range of digital services. Our purpose is to help all New Zealanders win big in the digital world. >> Niall, step back for a second. Talk to our audience that might not know the telecom industry as well as you, I've been an observer and participator in the industry but you know back in the dot com boom it was like limitless bandwidth and we're gonna do all these wonderful things, and cloud and digitization, have put some new opportunities as well as stresses and strains on your industry so, you know what's going on and you said you rebranded? >> Yeah, look, I think it's well-known it's been a tough last few years for most telcos in the world. I was listening to Red Hat talking yesterday about 60 consecutive quarters or more of growth, I don't think there's any telco in the world that probably has the same story. Like most, we're facing kinda decline in all the traditional revenues like voice and text and things like that, so we're all having to kinda rebrand ourselves and deliver much higher levels of customer service. People expect the same levels of service from us that they do from Amazon, Google, and everyone else. In Spark what that means to us is we've moved into lots of new things as you said, things like ICT, we're now very big in cloud, we've recently launched a Spark Sports brand and we've got streaming right to the key events like Formula 1. We're going to stream the Rugby World Cup, which is a massive event for New Zealanders, so looking forward to seeing that and Ireland on the all blacks in the final in September this year. So yeah, lot going on. Tough times but forcing us to keep changing every year. >> And so, about these changes that you're making whether technologically based, let's just deal with that. What is that ultimately going to do for you in terms of better customer service delivery? So, you've got inherent challenges, you've talked about them at all, that the world's changing, how we use this medium, this communication opportunity is changing, and you've been just a little behind the wave, hard to keep up with it, so rapidly changing. How much of a challenge is that? And then how are you going to address this going forward? How do you stay relevant? >> Yeah I think we're lucky in one regard because if I look back about five, seven years ago we were like most traditional telcos. We had a spaghetti for want of a better description of systems, and then we had all was multiples of everything, at the time we had 19 integration layers and 10 billing systems and it wasn't uncommon. But way back in 2012 we actually embarked on a massive transformation program, and we spent five years consolidating all of that infrastructure so going into about 2017 we were very lucky in that we had a massive foundation laid already, so what that then enabled us to do was to actually push away calls from our contact centers into mobile apps, into digital adoption. We've been a big embracer of things like big data and robotic process automation as well to try and take cost out of our industry. So, I think we're quite well placed. Now that allows us to do things like innovate new products for our customers so we bundle things like Spotify and Netflix. It allows to introduce things like Spark Sports brand, which we couldn't have done five years ago before the transformation We just wouldn't have been able to enable these things with our existing kind of legacy IT estate. >> So how's open-source play into all this for you? >> Yeah open-source, I suppose our first foray into open-source was when we went to start embracing big data and automation. So we started using things like Hadoop and various other things and our entire platform is based around open-source. We changed to an IMS network recently and we started embracing things like OpenStack, and then it really took us to a new level recently when we started working on Red Hat's Fuse, and OpenShift we started implementing that. >> Okay, so the OpenStack show for many years, the last few years we saw the telcos coming in specifically for network function virtualization or NFV. Is that what you're using in that space? >> Yeah, we are. Interestingly, at this conference I've heard a lot of people talk about OpenShift and OpenStack, obviously, particularly in the telco game. We actually came out a bit differently from the application space. So we had an integration platform that we had put in through this transformation phase which had served us well, and was connecting all of our 40, 50 systems together. But it was coming up to a life cycle event, and we decided we'd look externally and see had we options beyond just upgrading it. So we started looking around, and we effectively found Fuse, and in bringing in Fuse we then brought OpenShift in, which is quite different to what I've seen from a number of other people, they're bringing in things like OpenShift and building on top of it. We did it the other way around, you know? And we did it primarily for cost reasons, you know? >> Yeah, so talk a little bit about that impact of Fuse and OpenShift, what that means. Were you already down the containerization journey, or did that help drive >> Niall: No, no some of that modernization? >> That's exactly what happened. If I'm honest we hadn't really explored containerization too much because we had come to the end of our kind of transformation journey. Open-source and containerization wasn't around when we went through that. So we kinda needed some really core reasons to move on, so, yeah effectively what happened was we looked at Fuse, I was gonna say primarily for cost, but we were looking for something that we could migrate to where it makes sense. We were looking for something that wasn't a massive lift for the people who worked in our integration already, so they could be rescaled into it, and interestingly we turned agile recently which has changed the way we look at the needs of our systems. So our old integration platform, if we needed to deploy a change we had to take an outage, which was fine when we had a centralized IT department who deployed once a month and took a two hour outage, but when you have 20 tribes all developing features in isolation and they wanna go straight through to production, if everybody took an outage then our systems wouldn't really be up very often. So one of the key things that we were looking at for our new integration platform was can we deploy hot and can we scale? So that's basically where Fuse came into us. >> Okay, so can you? >> We can and we do. Still a little bit nervous about pressing the button mid-day and doing stuff >> Right, simultaneously and thinking this has really gotta work, right? >> Yeah then normally, >> We saw it today though on the demo stage, on the keynote. You know, simultaneous operations going on. >> No, we do it, and they normally don't tell me when they're doing it they just do it and tell me it worked afterwards, but no it's actually been really successful and you can imagine connection 40 or 50 systems together is effectively the equivalent of about 2,000 API's and we managed to migrate, we're about 70% of the way through. But we've managed to migrate those without actually impacting the systems that use them and that's probably been one of our most successful IT projects that I've seen. >> It's funny, you said we were towards the end of our transformation journey, and of course I think we all understand, it is just, I might've reached a marker in my journey, but it needs to be a continuous process. And you went through an agile transformation. So bring us in a little bit. Organizationally, what happened there. Some of the good, the bad, and the ugly of agile, 'cause I mean agile's always an ongoing thing. >> It is, yeah. So about the start of last year we started to think about agile and the need to change our ways of working. And we looked at a number of models overseas, and companies like Spotify and various banks, and we settled on a model of chapter and tribes. And we took about six months in looking at what that meant for us as an organization and all of the things that we needed to change. Everything from, people's contracts to people's titles. We got rid of all complex titles and moved down to simple things like Developer, Tester, et cetera. We had to train our people in agile so we ran boot camps for over 2,000 people. We had one with 500 people attend. We had to review all of our processes and see where we had centralized things like IT governance or procurement. How do you actually manage this when you have up to 20 different people effectively, or tribes doing their own developments, so over a period of about six months we went through all of these. We started with a concept of some forerunner tribes so we could figure out how this thing actually works, you know? And get some lessons. And then on the first of July last year, about a 2,000 people in various buildings packed up their stuff in their desks and moved into a new world, into their tribes with different working spaces and different collaboration areas and all the tools that we need. So, yeah we're about nine months down that journey now and it's been good. >> How many total employees? >> We have about 5,000 in total. >> 5,000, so you had 500 at one time. 10% of your workforce in training at one time. >> That's right, yeah. Absolutely. >> How do you keep the wheels on the bus rolling? Because I mean you're asking people not only to learn new skills, but learn them in a new environment, and learn them literally in a new place. I mean that's just massive change and I think, we're human beings. We're creatures of habit to a certain extent. You had to hit a lot of bumps along the way. >> Yeah, so one of the key things we did upfront was we said the operate part of our business, which is effectively things like our contact center, our sales staff, our service desks, we will not go agile with those on the first day, because they operate in a slightly different way of working. The people in our stores, et cetera. So we had a concept of agile light and agile heavy. So we kinda parked them for a minute so that we wouldn't do exactly what you say and let the wheels fall off the trolley. And we took to people that were the IT developers, the product development staff, and all of that, which came to just over about 2,000 people, and we firstly flipped those 2,000 people and put those through bootcamp. But even as you say, scheduling the boot camps, we made sure that we always had the right people on the ground and we would schedule smaller boot camps for them later if we needed to do it, but yeah. >> So nine months in now. You talking to your peers, if they're gonna go through. Any key learnings, what were some of the most challenging things that you ran into? >> I think probably the major one is that agile at its heart is a way of working, and despite the name it's actually quite prescriptive in how you should work, you know? When you pick up the agile book it tells you all the ceremonies you need to run and the processes that you need to run as well. And I think you need to be pragmatic in how you implement it because there are so many different flavors of agile. The one flavor, even with an organization of Spark size, it doesn't work. So the tribes and squads that are building out new products compared to the tribes that are doing things like upgrading systems, they will work in different ways. So I think the first thing is be pragmatic, take the goodness and the intent of agile, but implement it in how it works for you. And there's some other practical considerations, like prior to being agile we had quite a large number of our technology partners were based offshore in India, and you know it's quite difficult to run a 10 AM stand up in New Zealand setting the priorities for the day and the sprint plans, when, you know, four members of your team are asleep in India. You know, they're missing out on all of the goodness and the collocation and the sharing, so one of the things we had anticipated that, so luckily enough we had moved a lot of those people onshore in advance of agile, you know? But it is a big cultural change for everyone in the organization, not least the leadership teams as well. >> John: Well you got through it. >> We got through it, but there's no going back. >> Absolutely, no you're in the deep end now. Well, Niall, thanks for being with us, we appreciate the time joining us here on theCUBE, and I think that an Irishman is always welcomed in Boston. >> Thank you very much! We've been enjoying the hospitality. >> Yeah the door's always open. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. Niall Fitzgerald, joing us from Spark NZ. Back with more here on theCUBE, you're watching this live at the Red Hat Summit 2019.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation everyone welcome to this cube conversation here in the cubes Palo Alto Studios we're here with the quarantine crew I'm John for your host we've got a great guest John Madison CMO an EVP of products of Fortinet and today more than ever in this changing landscape accelerating faster and faster certainly as this covin 19 crisis has forced business to realize a lot of the at scale problems are at hand and a lot of things are exposed in terms of problems and opportunities you have to take care of one of them security John thanks for coming on cube and looking forward to chatting about your recent event you had this week and also the updates at Florida thanks for joining me yeah it's great to be here John so more than ever the innovation strategies are not just talking points anymore in board meetings or companies there's they actually have to come out of this pandemic and operate through it with real innovation with actionable outcomes they've got to get their house in order you're seeing projects really focusing in on the at scale problems which is essentially keep the network's run and keep the sick the security fabric in place this is critical path stuff but the innovation coming out of it has to be a growth play for companies and this has been a big thing so you guys are in the middle of it we've chatted about all the four to guard stuff and all this you're seeing all the traffic you're seeing all the all the impact this work at home has forced companies to not only deal to new realities but it's exposed some things they need to double down on and things they need to either get rid of or fix fast what's your take on all this yeah you know I think it took a lot of people by surprise and the first thing I would like to do is you know spank our employees our customers and partners for the work they've done in the last six to seven weeks now what was happening was a lot of customers had built their work from home programs around a certain percentage 5% 10% 15% and that's what they scaled it for then all of a sudden you know everybody had to work from home and so you went from maybe a thousand people to 10,000 or 5,000 to 50,000 they had to scale very quickly because this had to be implemented in hours and days not weeks and months luckily our systems are able to gaile very quickly we can scale using a security processing units which offload the CPU and allow a lot of users simultaneously to access through VPN SSL VPN IPSec VPN and then we have an implementation at home ranging from a very simple Microsoft Wyant all the way to our clients all the way to even off Buda gate firewalls at home so we really did work very hard to make sure that our customers could maintain their business proposition during these times you know I want to get those work at home and I think it's a little big Sdn story and you guys have been on for a long time I mean we've talked with your you and your folks many times around st Wynn and what it means to to have that in place but this work at home those numbers are off the charts strange and this is disruption this was an unforeseen disruption it's not like a hurricane or flood this is real and we've also talked with you guys and your team around the endpoint you know the edge of the network that's the explosion of the billions of edges this is just an industry kind of inside baseball conversation and then also the immersion of the lifestyle we now live in so you have a world where it was inside baseball for this industry now every company and everyone's feeling it this is a huge issue I'm at home I got to protect myself I got data I gotta have a VPN I mean this is a reality that just wasn't seen I mean what do you guys are what are you guys doing in this area well I think it changes that this long-term architect and so you know the past we talked about there being millions of edges and people go how many billions of edges and what's happened is if you're working from home that's an edge and so the long term architecture means that companies need to take care of where their network edges are now the SEM at home they had them at the branch office they have them at the end of prize and the data center in the cloud then we need to decide know where to apply the security is it at the endpoint is it at the edges is the data center or bout an S T one is absolutely essential because every edge you'll have whether that were home now whether it be in your data center or eCampus on the cloud needs that st-1 technology and make sure you can guide the applications in a secure manner what's interesting is I actually deployed st-1 in my home here I've got two ISP connections one week I'm casting off with AT&T now that may be overkill right now for most people about putting st-1 in their homes but I think long-term homes are gonna be part of the enterprise network it's just another eight take a minute to explain the SD win I would call it the this is a mill especially this is not your grandfather's st win I mean it's changed st when is the internet I mean basically at home what does that mean if users don't know care what the products are at the end of the day they're working at home so kind of SD win has taken on a new broader scope if you will it's not just the classic SD win or is it can you take us through I mean and this is a category that's becoming much broader what's your what's your nails is there yeah again I'm not saying that you know consumers are gonna be putting SD wine in the homes right now but if I'm an executive and I rely on my communication out there are lots of meetings during the day work from home I want it to be as reliable as possible so if my one is pee goes down and I can't get on the internet that's an issue if I have to ISPs I have much higher availability but more importantly us you and I can guide the applications where I want when they want I can make sure you know my normal home traffic goes off certain direction the certain on a VLAN and segmentation policy whereas my war can be completely set out so again I you know I think SDRAM technology is important for the home long term is important for the branch for the enterprise and the data center and Earls St ones built into all up all our forty gates have sp1 you just switch it on we think it's a four essential technology going forward to drive that cloud on-ramp real quick follow-up on that for the folks in the enterprise I see the enterprise will make it easier for their customers their users who are at home so it feels consumer II invisible if you will I think that's the short-term what's what are what are you seeing your customers and prospective customers thinking when they come back or as they operate now in this new reality when they say you know what we really miss forecasted this now they have to get back to business what are they gonna do do they do more sta on I mean what's the architecture how does that get done what's the conversation like you know as this evolved for the next it's gonna slowly open up it still it's going to be a new reality for at least 12 months what's the conversation with the customer right now when it comes to going in and taking care of this so it doesn't happen again yeah what I'm doing actually actually what I'm doing a lot of virtual ABC's obviously we usually have 200 our customers that come to our corporate quarters or executive briefings and I'm doing actually more virtually and a lot of the opening conversations is they don't think they're gonna go completely Hunter's under percent back to where they were there's always going to be now a fraction of work-from-home people they may move around some of their physical location so as I said the ST when is that piece on the edge whether it be your home ranch campus or data centers gonna be there to guide the applications guide the users and devices to the right applications of wherever they may be as it could be in the cloud of communion data center it could be anywhere and then the key conversation thereafter for customers long-term architecture wise is where do I apply my security stack and the security spat consists of basic things like antivirus all right yes more detection capabilities even even response to Isis given that stack how much do I put in the edge how much do I put in my endpoint how much do I put my branch how much I put in my campus data center and cloud and then how do I maintain a policy a single policy across all of those and then now and again maybe I have to move that stack cross so that's going to be the key long term architecture question for enterprises as they move to a slightly different composition of workforce in different locations is hey I've got to make sure every edge that I have I identify and I secure when SP ran and then how do I apply the security stack cross all the diff tell great insight thanks for sharing that I want to get your take on now speaking of working at home you're also the CMO as well as the EVP of products which is a unique job because you can talk about any think when the cube we love it you had an event accelerate 2020 the folks watching go to the hashtag on Twitter hashtag accelerate 20 that's the hash tag you'll see a lot of the the pictures of the slides and some commentary I was laying down some tweets all the analysts were as well what are some of the highlights for you is a great presentation by the CEO you gave a talk and there's a lot of breakouts you had to do a digital event because you couldn't hold the physical event so you kind of had a shelter-in-place kind of and how did it go and what are some of the highlights yeah on the one side I was a bit sad you know we had or what we call accelerates arrange for this year in Barcelona and New York Mexico and San Jose we had to cancel war for them and I'm very quickly spin up a digital event a virtual event and you know we end up there's some initial targets around you know you know each of our physical events we get between two and three thousand and so we're thinking you know if we got to ten thousand this would be great we actually ended up with thirty thirty-two thousand or something like that registered and actually the percentage that showed off was even higher so we had over 20,000 people actually come online and go through our keynotes we built it so you go through the keynotes then you can go off to the painting what we call the breakouts for more detail we did verticals oh it did more technology sessions and so it's great and you know we tried our best to answer the questions online because these things are on demand we had three we had one for the u.s. one premiere and won't write back and so there was times but to get that sort of exposure to me is amazing twenty thousand people on there listening and it connects into another subject which is education and fun yet for some time as invested I would say you know my CEO says but I'll invest a bit more in education versus the marketing advertising budget now go okay okay that's that hey we'll work on that but education for us we announced a few weeks ago that education is now training is free for customers for everybody and we'd also been you know leading the way by providing free training for our partners now it's completely free for everybody we have something called the network security expert which goes from one to eight one and two of that are actually open to the public right now and if I go to the end of last year we had about two to three thousand people maybe a week come on and do the training obviously majority doing the NSC one courses you get further through to eight it's more technical last week we had over eighty thousand people we just think about those numbers incredible because people you know having more time let's do the training and finding is as they're doing this training going up the stack more quickly and they're able to implement their tools more quickly so training for us is just exploded off the map and I and there's a new reality of all the unemployment and also people are at home and there's a lot of job about the skill gap before in another cube conversation it's it's more apparent than ever and why not make it free give people some hope give them some tools to be successful there's demand yes and it's not you know it's not just them you know IT professionals are Ennis e1 is a foundational course and you'll see kids and students and universities doing it and so Ben Mars granddad's dad's doing it so we we're getting all sorts of comments and social media about the training you know our foundation great stuff has a great we'll put a plug on that when should we get that amplified for its really good stuff I got to ask you about the event one of the things I really like about the presentation was from your CEO and you gave one as well was the clarity around the vision of security and a couple of things that were notable to me was the confluence of the collision between networking and security and at the intersection of those two forces you have an accelerated integrated policy dynamic to me this is the heart of DevOps of what used to be in cloud being kind of applied to security you have data you got all kinds of new things emerging new patterns new signals that's security so you got to be you got to be fast you got to identify things so you guys are in this business that's one force and the other one was the billions of edges and this idea that there's no perimeter so it's everything's immersive so illustrate some points of validation on that from your standpoint is that how you guys are seeing it unfold in the future is that happening now can you give us a feeling for whether where we are and that those those kind of paradigms yeah good point so I think it's been happening it's happening now has been happening the future you know if you look at networking and our CEO Enzi talked about this and that networking hasn't really cheer outing and switching we go back to 2000 we had 100 mega under megabit now you have formed a gigabit but the basic function we haven't really changed that much securities different we've gone from a firewall and we add VPN then we at next-gen firewall then we had SSL inspection now we've added sd1 and so this collisions kind of an equal in that you know networking's sped ahead and firewalling is stayed behind because it's just got too many applications on that so the basic principle premise of the company of putting net is to build and bring that together so it's best of all accelerate the basic security network security functions so you can consolidate multiple functions on one system and then bring networking and security together a really good example of security where or nexium firewall where you can accelerate and so our security processing units and my analogy simple analogy is GPUs inside games where their GPU offloads CPU to allow rendering to happen very quick it's the same for us RSP use way of a network SPU and we have a Content SPU which all flows the CPU to allow a security and networking do it be accelerated work now coming to your second point about the perimeter I I'm not quite sure whether the perimeters disappear and the reason I say that is customer still goes they have firewalls on the front of the networks they have endpoint protection they have protection in the cloud so it's not that the perimeters disappeared it's just but much larger and so now the perimeters sitting across all your infrastructure your endpoints your in factories you got IOT devices you've got workloads in different powered and that means you need to look very carefully at those and give visibility initially and then apply the control that control maybe it's a ten-point security it may be SD mine at the edge it may be a compliance template in the cloud but you need visibility of all those edges which have been created with the perimeters reading across the image it's interesting you bring up a good point we always have kind of debates over beers on this on this topic you know the old model was mote you know get the castle and the gate but here the perimeter of the edge if you believe there's an edge and I do believe you find it perfectly the edge is a perimeter it's an endpoint right so it's a door into the internet so are the network so is the perimeter just an end adorn there's more doors right so or service yeah just think about it the castle would did multiple doors is the back everyone's the door there's this dozle someday and you have to define those H's and have visibility of them and that's why things like network access control know for you know zero trust network access is really important making sure you kind of look at the edge inside your way and so your data center and then it's like you powd what workloads are spinning off and what's the configuration and what's there what's from a data perspective right your recommendation and I'm a customer looking at my network I got compute I got edge devices and users I realized there's a billions of edges on my network now and the realities hit me I wasn't really being proactive on investing what do I do what's the PlayBook for me as I start to rethink that and what do I put into place how do I get going now I got to rethink it I now recognize I got full validation I got to manage this I got to do something what's your recommendation to me if I'm a customer the key to me is and I've had this conversation now for the last five years and it's getting louder and louder and that is I suppose I spend a lot of money on point solution point but even end point may have five point products on there and so they're getting to the conclusion it's just too hard to manage I can't find all the right people I get so many alerts from so many security systems I can't work out what's going on and the conversation now is how do I deploy a platform we call it the security fabric now I don't deploy that fabric across my network I'm not saying you should go from 30 vendors to one vendor that would be nice of course but I what I'm saying as you go from 30 vendors down to maybe five or six platform the platform's perform multiple functions it could be they're out there you attach a platform a designer platform just birth protector or a particular organization or part of the network and so the platform allows you then to build automation and the automation allows you to see things more quickly and react to things more quickly and do things without manual intervention the platform approach it's absolutely starting to resonate yes you've still got very very large customers who put everything into segments of a C's Exedra book most customers now moving towards a yeah I think you know as you see and again back to that collision with the end of the intersection we have integrated policies if you're gonna do any integration which is the data problem so we talk about all the time to a lot of different tools can create silos and there's a use case for that but also creates problematic situations I mean a platform gives you a much more robust capability to be adaptive to be real time to program and automate yeah it's it's it's an issue if you've got 30 vendors and just be honest it's also an issue in the industry so I mean networking the story kind of worked out how to work together you can use the same different vendor switches and routers and they roughly work together with cybersecurity they've all been deal you know built totally separately not to even work and that's why you've got these multiple layers you've got a product the security problem then this got its own analytics engine and manager then you've got a manager of managers and an analyzer of analyzers and the sim system and then a saw I mean just goes on it makes it so complex for people and that's why I think they look into something a bit more simplified but most importantly the platform must be friendly from a consumption model you must be able to do an appliance where you need to do virtual machine SAS cloud native container whatever it may be because that network has changed in those ages as those edges move you've got them to have a platform that adaptable to the consumption model require you know I had a great cartridge with Phil Quaid you see your seaso over there and we were chatting around you know this idea of I won't say customization but there's no one turnkey monolithic application it seems to these platforms tend to be enabling where the seaso trend is to have teams building ok and and and almost a customized but building software to automate to solve their use case for their outcome so enabling that is a trend we're seeing so I think you guys are on the right track there any comment on your take on this enabling platform is that something that you guys are seeing that CSIS is looking at more in-house development more use case focus because they have the data they got real-time they need to be building on a platform not told what they could do yeah I think you've always had this this network team trying to build things fast and open and the security team trying to post things down and make it more secure you know it becomes even more problematic if you kind of go to the cloud where you've got pockets a developer's kind of thing do things in the DevOps way really as fast as possible and sometimes the controls are not put in place in fact no the big as I said the biggest issue for the cloud is not so much you know malware it it's more about miss configuration that's why you're seeing the big breaches and that's more of a customer thing to do and so I think what the seaso is trying to do is make sure they apply the controls appropriately and again their job has become much harder now we've got all the multitude of endpoints that they didn't have before they've got now there when that's not just the closed MPLS network is old off different types of broadband 5 G's coming towards the end of this year next year as well the data centers may have decreased a bit but they've still got datacenter capacity and they're probably got 5 or 6 hours and 20 different SAS applications that put a deal with and they've got to deal with developers in there so it's a harder job for them and they need to melt or add those tools but come back to that single point of management great stuff John Madison CMO EVP great insight there it's almost a master class right there you laid it all out on what's going on a final question any change is what any other news updates on the four net front I know you guys got some answer I didn't see the breakouts of the session I had something else going on I think I've been walking dog and do some other things but you know being at home and to take care of things what's new what's what's out that people might have missed that's coming out of for today you're telling me you didn't have 60 hour a breakout on dedicated I don't think yeah we've you know we've have a lot going on you know we have a big R&D team here in North America and Canada and with a lot of products coming out this time of the year we bring out our 40 OS network operating system with 6.4 over 300 new features inside there including new orchestration systems for sp1 and then also we actually launched on network processor seven and the board gate already 200 F powered by four network processor sevens it's some system out there and provide over 800 gigs of fire or capacities but in bill V explain acceleration they can do things like elephant flows huge flows of data so there's always there's always new products coming out of 14 it sure those are the two big ones for this quarter you guys certainly are great interviews to talk to great a lot of expertise there final final question you know everyone every company's got their culture Moore's laws cadence of Moore's laws Intel faster cheaper smaller what's the for Annette culture if you had to kind of boil it down what's it you guys are always pushing great products out there all high quality I'll see security you got to be buttoned up and have good ops and controls but you still need to push the envelope and have stadia what's the culture if you had to kind of boil the culture down for Porter net what would it be that's always an interesting question and so the company's been going since 2000 okay the founders are still there NZ's CEO and Michael Z's the CTO and I think that one of the philosophies is that listen to the customer very closely because you can get distracted by shiny objects all over the place I want to go and do this oh yeah let's build this what about this and in the end the customer and and what they want may get lost and so we listen very closely we use you know we have a very high content of technology people who can translate the customer use case into what we should build and so I think that's the culture we have and maintain that so we're very close to our customers we've been building very quickly for them make sure it works it needs tweaking then we'll look at it again a very very customer driven always great to hear from the founders you guys had a great event accelerate 20 that's the hashtag some great highlights on Twitter some commentary there and of course go to Ford a net site to check out the replays Sean man so thanks for taking the time to share your insights here on the cube conversation I really appreciate it thank you okay it's cube concert here in Palo Alto we're bringing you all the interviews during this time we have our quarantine crew the cube is virtual we'll do whatever it takes to get the interviews out there and get the stories out there and the people behind the tech making it happen I'm John Fourier thanks for watching [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco. Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMWorld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Stu: Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Justin Warren. And you are watching theCUBE. We have two sets, three days, here at VMWorld 2019. Our 10th year of the show. And happy to welcome back to our program, two of our theCUBE Alumni. We were at VeeamON earlier this year down in Miami, but sitting to my right is Ratmir Timashev, who is the co-founder and executive vice president of global sales and marketing with Veeam, and joining us also is Danny Allan, who's the vice president of product strategy also at Veeam. Thank you so much both for joining us. >> Thanks for having us Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right so, Ratmir, let's start. Veeam has been very transparent as to how the company is doing. You know, there's all this talks about unicorns and crazy evaluations or anything like that? But give us the update on, you know, actual dollars and actually what's happening in your business. >> Ratmir: Absolutely, we're always transparent. So actually, there's this term, unicorn, right? So does it mean one billion in valuation, or one billion in revenue (chuckles)? >> Stu: It is valuation. >> Yeah, I know that. So, Veeam is not unicorn anymore, right? Veeam is one billion in bookings. So, yeah, the major trend in the industry, is that we're moving from perpetual to subscription, because we're moving on-prem to hybrid cloud. And Veeam is actually leading that wave. So where we've been always known to be very customer friendly to do business with, easy to do business with, from the channel, from the customer perspective, and that's the major trend. If the customers are moving to hybrid cloud, we have to move to there, from our business model to a hybrid cloud. So we're changing our business model, to make it very easy for customers. >> Ratmir, that's not an easy adjustment. We've watched some public companies go through a little bit of challenges as you work through, you know there's the financial pieces, there's the sales pieces of that, since... Give us a little bit of the, how that works? You know, you just retrain the sales force and go or-- >> That is awesome, awesome question. That that is awesome point, that it's extremely painful. Extremely painful, and for some company, like everybody says Adobe is the best example of moving from perpetual or traditional business model to a subscription, right. So annual, even monthly subscription. For us it's even ten times more difficult than Adobe, because, we're not only moving from perpetual to subscription. We're moving, we're changing our licensing unit, per socket which is VMware traditional to pure VM or pure workload or pure instance, right. What we call instance, basically means, so it's extremely painful, we have to change how we do business, how we incentivize our sales people, how we incentivize our channel, how we incentivize our customers. But that's inevitable, we're moving to a hybrid cloud where sockets don't exist. Sockets, there are no sockets in the hybrid cloud. There are workloads and data. Data and applications. So we have to change our business model, but we also have to keep our current business model. And it's very difficult in terms of the bookings and revenue, when we give a customer an option to buy this way or that way. Of course they will choose the way that is the less expensive for them, and we're ready to do that. We can absorb that, because we're a private company, and we're approachable and we're fast growing. So we can afford that, unlike some of the public companies or companies that, venture capital finance. >> So how do you make that kind of substantial change to the... I mean changing half your company, really. To change that many structures. How do do you do that without losing the soul of the company? And like Veeam, Veeam is famous for being extremely Veeamy. How do you make all those sorts of changes and still not lose the soul of the company like that? How do you keep that there? >> That's an awesome question, because that's 50% of executive management discussions, are about that questions, right. What made Veeam successful? Core value, what we call, core values, there are family values, there are company core values every company has. So that's the most important. And one of them is, be extremely customer friendly, right. So easy to do business with. That's the number one priority. Revenue, projects, number two, number three, being doing the right things for the customer is number one. That's how we're discussing, and we're introducing a major change on October 1st. >> Ah yes. >> Another major change. We've done this major changes in the last two years, moving to subscription. So we started that move, two, two-and-a-half years ago, by introducing our product for Office 365, backup, when that was available only for, on subscription basis, not perpetual. So we're moving in subscription, to the subscription business model in the the last three years. On October 1st, 2019, in one month, we introducing another major change. We are extremely simplifying our subscription licensing and introducing, what we will call Veeam Universal License. Where you can buy once and move or close everywhere. From physical to VMware to Hyper-V to a double SS, ash or back to VMware and back to physical. I'm joking. (lauging) >> All right, Danny, bring us inside the product. We've watched the maturity, ten years of theCUBE here, Veeam was one of the early big ecosystems success stories, of course it went into Multi-Hypervisor, went into Multicloud. You know Ratmir, just went through all of the changes there. Exciting the VUL I guess we'll call it. >> Ratmir: VUL >> VUL, absolutely. So on the product piece, how's the product keeping in line with all these things. >> So our vision is to be the most trusted provider, backup solutions that enable high data management. So backup is still a core of it and it's the start of everything that we do. But if you look what we've done over the course of this year, it's very much about the cloud. So we added the ability, for example, to tier things into object storage in the hyperscale public cloud and that has been taking off, gang busters into S3 and into Azure Blob storage. And so that's a big part of it. Second part of it, in cloud data management is the ability to recover, if you're sending your data into the cloud, why not recover there? So we've added the ability to recover workloads in Azure, recover workloads in EC2. And lastly of course, once your workloads are in the cloud, then you want to protect it, using cloud-native technology. So we've addressed all of these solutions, and we've been announcing all these exciting things over the course of 2019. >> The product started off as being VM-centrical, VM Only back in the day. And then you've gradually added different capabilities to it as customers demanded, and it was on a pretty regular cadence as well. And you've recently added, added cloud functionality and backups there. What's the next thing, customers are asking for? 'Cause we've got lots of workloads being deployed in edge, we've got lots of people doing things with NoSQL backups, we've got Kubernetes, is mentioned every second breath at this show. So where are you seeing demand for customers that you need to take the product next? So we've heard a lot about Kubernetes obviously, the shows, the containers it's obviously a focus point. But one of the things we demoed yesterday. We actually had a breakout session, is leveraging an API from VMR called the VCR API for IO filtering. So it basically enables you to fork the rights when you're writing down to the storage level, so that you have continuous replication in two environments. And that just highlights the relationship we have with VMware. 80% of our customers are running on VMware. But that's the exciting things that we're innovating on. Things like making availability better. Making the agility and movement between clouds better. Making sure that people can take copies of their data to accelerate their business. These all areas that we are focusing on. >> Yeah, a lot of companies have tried to, multiple times have tried to go away from backup and go into data management. I like that you don't shy away from, ah, yeah we do backup and it's an important workload, and you're not afraid to mention that. Where's some other companies seem to be quite scared of saying, we do backup, 'cause it's not very cool or sexy. Although well, it doesn't have to be cool and sexy to be important. So I like that you actually say that yes we do backup. But we are also able to do some of these other bits and pieces. And it's enabled by that backup. So you know, copy, data management, so we can take copies of things and do this. Where is some of the demand coming around what to do with that data management side of things. I know there's, people are interested in things like, for example, data masking, where you want to take a copy of some data and use it for testing. There's a whole bunch of issue and risks around in doing that. So companies look for assistance from companies like Veeam to do that sort of thing. Is that where you're heading with some of that product? >> It is, there's four big use cases, DevOps is certainly one of them, and we've been talking about Kubernetes, right, which is all about developers and DevOps type development, so that's a big one. And one of the interesting things about that use case is, when you make copies of data, compliance comes into play. If you need to give a copy of the data to the developer, you don't want to give them credit card numbers or health information, so you probably want to mask that out. We have the capability today in Veeam, we call it, Staged Restore, that you could actually open the data in the sandbox to manipulate it, before you give it to the developer. But that's certainly one big use case, and it's highlighted at conferences like this. Another one is security, I spent a decade in security. I get passionate about it, but pentesting or forensics. If you do an invasive test on a production system, you'll bring the system down. And so another use case of the data is, take a copy, give it to the security team to do that test without impacting the production workload. A third one would be, IT operations, patching and updating all the systems. One of the interesting things about Veeam customers. They're far more likely to be on the most recent versions of software, because you can test it easily, by taking a copy. Test the patch, test the update and then roll it forward. And then a forth huge use case that we can not ignore is the GDPR in analytics and compliance. There's just this huge demand right now. And I think there's going to be market places opened in the public cloud, around delegating access to the data, so that they can analyze it and give you more intelligence about it. So GDPR is just a start, right. Were is my personally identifiable information? But I can imagine workload where a market place or an offering, where someone comes in and says, hey, I'll pay you some money and I'll classify your data for you, or I'll archive it smartly for you. And the business doesn't have to that. All they have to do is delegate access to the data, so that they can run some kind of machine learning algorithm on that data. So these are all interesting use cases. I go back, DevOps, security IT operations and analytics, all of those. >> So Ratmir, when I go to the keynote, it did feel like it was Kubernetes world? When I went down the show floor it definitely felt like data protection world. So it's definitely been one of the buzzier conversations the last couple of years at this show. But you look, walk through the floor, whether it be some of the big traditional vendors, lots of brand new start ups, some of the cloud-native players in this space. How do you make sure that Veeam gets the customers, keeps the customers that they have and can keep growing on the momentum that you've been building on? >> That's a great question, Stu. Like Pat Gelsinger mention that, number of applications has grown in the last five years, from 50 million to something like 330 million, and will grow to another almost 800 million in the next five years, by 2024. Veeam is in the right business, Veeam is the leader, Veeam is driving the vision and the strategy, right. Yeah, we have good competition in the form of legacy vendors and emerging vendors, but we have very good position because we own the major part of your hybrid cloud, which is the private cloud. And we're providing a good vision for how the hybrid cloud data management, not just data protection, which just Danny explained, should be done, right. I think we're in a good position and I feel very comfortable for the next five, ten years for Veeam. >> It's a good place to be. I mean feeling confident about the future is... I don't know five to ten years, that's a long way out. I don't know. >> Yeah I agree, I agree, it used to be like that, now you cannot predict more than six moths ahead, right. >> Justin I'm not going to ask him about Simon now, it's-- >> Six months is good yeah, six months maximum, what we can predict-- >> We were asking Michael Dell about the impact of China these days, so there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these day. >> Ratmir: Totally. >> Anything macro economic, you know that, you look at your global footprint. >> No we're traditional global technology company that generates most of the revenue between Europe and North America and we have emerging markets like Asia-Pac and Latin. We're no different than any other global technology company, in terms of the revenue and our investment. The fastest growing region of course is Asia-Pac, but our traditional markets is North America and Europe. >> Hailing from Asia-Pac, I do know the region reasonably well and Veeam is, yeah Veeam is definitely, has a very strong presence there and growing. Australia used to be there, one of our claims to fame, was one of the highest virtualized workload-- >> And Mohai is the cloud adapter. >> Cloud adoption. >> Yes, we like new shiny toys, so adopt it very, very quickly. Do you see any innovation coming out of Asia-Pac, because we use these things so much, and we tend to be on that leading edge. Do you see things coming out of the Asia-Pac teams that notice how customers are using these systems and is that placing demand on Veeam. >> Absolutely, but Danny knows better because he just came back from the Asia-Pacific trip. >> Justin: That's right, you did. >> Yeah, I did, I always say you live in the future, because you're so many hours ahead. But the reality is actually, the adoption of things like Hyper-convergence infrastructure, was far faster in areas like NZ, the adoption of the cloud. And it's because of New Zealand is part of the DAid, Australia is very much associated with taking that. One of the things that we're seeing there is consumption based model. I was just there a few weeks ago and the move to a consumption and subscription based model is far further advanced in other parts of the world. So I go there regularly, mostly because it gives me a good perspective on what the US is going to do two years later, And maybe AMEA three years later. It gives us a good perspective of where the industry is going-- >> It's not to the US it comes to California first then it spreads from there. (lauging) >> Are you saying he's literally using the technology of tomorrow in his today, is what we're saying. >> Maybe me I can make predictions a little bit further ahead there. >> Well you live in the future. >> All right I want to give you the both, just a final word here, VMWorld 2019. >> It's always the best show for us. VMWorld is the, I mean like Danny said, 80% of our customers is VMware, so it's always the best. We've been here for the last 12 years, since 2007. I have so many friends, buddies, love to come here, like to spend three, four days with my best friends, in the industry and just in life. >> I love the perspective here of the Multicloud worlds, so we saw some really interesting things, the moving things across clouds and leveraging Kubernetes and containers. And I think the focus on where the industry is going is very much aligned with Veeam. We also believe that, while it starts with backup up, the exciting thing is what's coming in two, three years. And so we have a close alignment, close relationship. It's been a great conference. >> Danny, Ratmir, thank you so much for the updates as always and yeah, have some fun with some of your friends, in the remaining time that we have. >> We have a party tonight Stu, so Justin too. >> Yeah, I think most people that have been to VMWorld are familiar with the Veeam party, it is famous, definitely. >> For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here, from VMWorld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston Massachusets it's The Cube covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to The Cubes coverage of the Red Hat Summit, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Jim Wasko, he is the vice president of Open Systems at IBM. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, before we get into the new ways in which IBM and Red Hat are working together, give us a little history on the IBM, Red Hat alliance and contextualize things for us. >> Oh sure, sure, so we started with Linux back in the very late '90's as a strategic initiative for IBM, and so Red Hat was one of the key players at that time. We worked with other Linux vendors who no longer exist. Linux Care was one of the companies we worked with, Mandrake, things along those lines. But Red Hat has been a constant through all of that. So we started in the very early days with Red Hat and we had an X86 line at the time, and then as well as Power NZ, and even in the very early days, we had ports of Red Hat running on IBM, all of IBM's hardware. >> And the alliance is going strong today? >> Yes it is, yes it is. So we have that long history and then as Red Hat transformed as a company into their enterprise software and REL in particular, that really matured, as far as our relationship was concerned, and I'm the engineering VP with Red Hat, and we just had a very strong collaborative relationship. We know how to work upstream, they obviously work very well upstream. We've worked in the Fedora Project, as a staging area for our platforms and so, yeah, we've known each other very well. I've been working on Linux at IBM since November of 2000. >> Jim, so IBM, long history with Open Source, I remember when it was the billion dollars invested in Linux. We covered on The Cube when Power became Open Power. Companies like Google endorsing Open Power. Bring us up to speed as to Open Power, how that fits with what you're doing with Red Hat and what you're talking about on the show here. >> Oh yeah, so Open Power was really about opening up hardware architecture as well as the operating system and firmware. And so, as that's progressed Red Hat has also joined in that Open Power initiative. If you look at when we started, just a small group of companies kicked it off, and today we're over 300 companies, including Red Hat as a part of Open Power foundation. They're also board members, so as a key partner in strategic partner of ours, they've recognized that it's an ecosystem that is worth participating in, because it's very disruptive, and they've been very quick to join us. >> That's good, we've talked to Jim Lighthurst about how they choose and they look for communities that are going to do good things for the industry, for the world, for the users, so, it's a nice endorsement to have Red Hat participate, I would think. >> Oh, it is, they don't enter into anything lightly. And so, their participation really is a signal, I think, in the marketplace, that this is a good strategic initiative for the industry. >> Where do you see as the biggest opportunities for growth, going forward. >> Opportunities for growth, there's quite a few. A lot of people don't realize that Linux is really the underlying engine for so many things that we do in the technology world. It's everything from embedded into the automotive industry, if you've got Onboard computer, which most new cars do, 80% of those are Linux. If you talked about web serving, websites, front ends, it's Linux, you know. I know with my mom, she's like "What do you work on?" and I say Linux you know, and she's like "Is that like Windows?" and I'm like "No." And then I tell her, you know Mom you've used it, probably a dozen times today, and then I give her examples. And so, all the new innovation tends to happen on Linux. If we look at HyperLedger, and Blockchain in particular, good example, that's one that takes a lot of collaboration, a lot of coordination if it's going to have a meaningful impact on the world. And so, it starts with Linux as foundation to it. So, any of those new technologies, if you look at what we're doing with quantum computing for example, it takes a traditional computer to feed it, and a tradition computer for the output, and we don't have time to go into details behind that but, Linux fed, as a part of it, because really that's where the innovation is taking place. >> Jim, could you expand a little bit more on the Hyperledger and Blockchain piece? A lot of people still, I think they understand BitCoin and digital currency there, but it's really some of the distributed and open source capabilities that these technologies deliver to the market, have some interest and use cases, what's the update on that? >> Oh that's a good question. So, a lot of people think of BitCoin and that says a very limited use case. As we look at Hyperledger, we notice that it could be applied in so many more ways than just a financial kind of way. Where we've done, it is logistics, and supply chain, we've implemented it at IBM for our supply chain and we've taken data from Weather.com, company that we've acquired, and we use that for our logistics for end of quarter for example. So that's something that was easier for us to implement, because it's all within our company. But then we are expanding that through partners. So that's an example where you could do supply chain logistics, you could do financials. But really, in order for that to work 'cause it's a distributed ledger, you need everybody in the ecosystem to participate. It can't be one company, can't be two companies. And so, that's why very early on we recognized we should jointly start up a project that the Linux Foundation, called Hyperledger, to look at what's the best and how could we all collaborate because we're all going to benefit from it, and it will be transformative. >> So what are you doing there, because as you said, these do present big challenges because there has to buy in from everyone? >> Yeah so if I look at the Hyperledger project specifically at the Linux Foundation, we've got customers of ours like JPMC for example, founding member and participant, we've got a distribution partners, we've got technology partners all there and so we contributed early code. Stuff we'd done in research, as kind of like a building block. And then we have members, both from research and product development side of the house, that are constantly working in that upstream community on the source code. >> And continually contributing, and okay... >> Yeah, well continually contributing, that's on the technology side. On the business side we're doing early proof of concepts, so we worked early with a company called Everledger that looks at the history of diamonds and tracks them beginning to end, and the ultimate goal of that is to eliminate blood diamonds from the marketplace and so if you know, it's also a very good market to begin because it's a limited set of players. So you can implement the technology, you can do the business processes behind it and then demonstrate the value. So that's an early project. Most of the financial institutions are doing stuff, whether it's stock trading or what have you. And so we're doing early proof of concept, so we're taking both technology and business, you marry 'em together as Jim Whitehurst said the other day you know, what's the minimal viable product, lets get that out there, lets try it out, lets learn. >> Release early release often. >> Yes, and then modify quickly, don't start with something you think is overly baked, and find that you have to shelf it in order to kind of back track and make corrections. >> And what is like to mesh those two cultures, the technology and the business? I mean, do you find that there is a clash? >> We have not. Now at IBM it was not a simple transition back in the late '90's. There were people that thought Open Source would be just a flash in the pan, and here we are so many years later, that's not true. And so early on, like I said, there were a lot of internal kind of debates, but that debate is long since settled, so we don't have that. And if you look across our different business divisions, even within our company, whether its Cloud, whether it's Cognitive, whether it's systems business, all use Open Source. Whether we contribute everything externally and we're using third party packaged, or we consume it ourselves. And we see that as happening across industry, even with out clients. Some that you might think are very traditional, they recognize that's where the innovation is taking place. And so, you always look at balancing is this viable, is that healthy? Or is still the commercially available stuff the better stuff? Just a quick story, I had a development team and we were doing Agile and we needed a tool to do to track our sprints and everything like that, and so, all of my developers were Open Source developers, and so that's their bias. If we're going to use software, it has to be Open Source, they went and evaluated a couple projects and they found Open Source software that had been abandoned, they were smart enough to recognize we also acquired a company called Rational, and Rational Team Concert does this, but it's proprietary. And so they initially resisted it, but then they looked at these Open Source project and saw, if we picked up that code, we maintain it forever, and we're alone. That is as worthless, as it can be, because there's no benefit. Doing Open Source, where you have multiple people contributing, you give an added benefit. So they went with our in house stuff, Rational Team Concert. Just showed the maturity of the team that even though they think Open Source is really the best thing in life, you've got to balance the business with it. >> Jim, so we look at the adoption of Open Source, it took many years to mature. Today, you talk about things like Cognitive, it's racing so fast, give us a little bit of look forward, you know, what's changing your space? What are you looking forward to? What would we expect to see from you by the time we come back next year? >> Sure, so a lot of what you've heard here at the conference so a lot of things that we're doing, are often offered in a Cloud platform, or as a hosted service, or as a service. So, for example, we do have Blockchain as a service available today. And it's running the back end is on mainframe cloud, for example, running Linux. Other examples of that, looking at new applications for quantum computing. Well that requires severengic freezing in order to keep those cubits alive. And so that's a hosted thing, and we actually have that available online, people can use that today. So I think that you're going to see a lot of early access, even for commercial applications. Early access so people can try it, and then based on their business model, like we've heard from clients this week, sometimes they'll need it on prem, and for various business reasons, and other times they can do it on the cloud and we'll be able to provide that. But we give them early access via cloud and as a service. And I think that's what you're going to see a lot in the industry. >> And it's this hybrid mix, as you said, some on prem, some off prem, okay. >> Jim: Yes. >> Well Jim, thanks so much for joining us, we really appreciate you sitting down with us. >> You're welcome, and thanks for your time. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we'll have more from the Red Hat Summit after this. (upbeat electronic music)