>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching the Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five. We reach cruising altitude on day two. Christina Seacrest is here. She's the process Artificial intelligence and automation GPS automation leader at ey. And Bob PCIs, executive director for Intelligent Automation for the state of Tennessee. Folks, welcome to the cube. Thank you for Adam. >>Good >>To have you. Okay, I don't know if I messed up that title, Christina, but it's kind of interesting. You got process, you got ai, you got automation, you got gps. What's your role? >>I have a lot of rules, so thank you for that. Yeah, so my focus is first and foremost automation. So how do you get things like UI path into our clients, but also I focus specifically in our government and public sector clients. So sled specifically. So state local education. So that's why I'm here with the state of Tennessee. And then we also like to take it beyond automation. So how do you bring an artificial intelligence and all the technologies that come with that. So really full end to end spectrum of >>Automation. So Bob, when you think about the sort of the, the factors that are driving your organization of, how did you describe that, Those sort of external factors that inform your strategy. What, what's, what are the catalysts for how you determine to deploy technology? >>Well, it was primarily that we know tendency has a tendency to provide good customer service, but we want to get to a great status best in class, if you will. And we had an external advisory review where it said, Hey, you know, we could make automation to improve our customer experience. And so that was like a directive of the, the state leaders to go across the board and automate all processes statewide, starting with the 23 executive agencies. >>So where's the focus from that standpoint? Is it on just providing better interfaces to your constituents, your customers? Is it cutting costs or you actually have more budget to invest? Kind of a combination of >>Those? Yeah, so it's, it's really both qualitative and quantitative, right? So quantitative is where we're able to reduce hours and therefore we can redirect people to more less mundane work, if you will. And then qualitative is where we're able to reduce the errors, improve data quality, reduce cycle time for our citizens, you know, when they're making requests, et cetera. So it's, I think it's a combination of both of those quantitative and qualitative metrics that we are mandated in, in micromanaged, quite frankly to, to bring, make those >>Numbers. So I'm from Massachusetts, when I go to a a mass.gov website, I say, all this was done in the 1990s and you could just see where the different stovepipes were, were. But then every now and then you'll hit one and you'll say, Wow, okay, this is up to, it's such a great experience. And then the flip side of that is you want your employees to be happy and not have to do all this mundane work so you can retain the best people. You don't have to. So you're living that in, in state and, and local. So where did you start your automation journey? What role did EY play? Let's go. Yeah, >>Sure. So I, I, I think the thought for process automation was probably three or four years ago, but then we started the program about 18 months ago and there was a lot of, let's say behind the scenes work before we could bring EY in, you know, like what resources was I gonna have in, in the state that were gonna help me address all of the agency simultaneously, right? Cuz normally you'll see a project that'll do be more siloed across the state and say, we're gonna do this agency, we're gonna do this division. Well, you have 40 other agencies that are, you know, the momentum is it's just gonna fall, it wayside. So how we looked at it was let's blanket it and go across all 23 agencies at the same time, you know, identify common processes that are used across 40 divisions, for example, right? >>So, so what we basically did is we procured the software, you know, did the contracts, and then it was really about, I designed, I'm gonna say a multistream approach where they were, we could run multiple work streams, independent define all the architectures, required dev tests, production, the disaster recovery at the same time in parallel developed the center of excellence, the operation model, the processes, methodologies. And the third one was, let's go out to a few divisions, business administration, health, you know, health, human resources, and be able to do a process inventory to see what was there. And then based on that, there's all this theory of well let's do a proof of concept. Let's do a proof of technology, let's do apply. Well, the bottom line is rpa technology's been around for a long time. It's proven there's nothing to prove. But really what was important to prove before we decided to go, you know, full tilt was, you know, develop a proof of perceived business value. >>Are we gonna bring in the, the business value, the hours and the qu qualitative metrics that is expected by our ex executive team, The leadership, we were able to do that, you know, with the help of help of ey, we built out the prototypes and we got the green light to go forward, got ey to start, and then we just basically went pedal to the metal. We had our foundation already defined. We built up the architecture in less than one to two months. Now, in, in a public sector or private sector, it's just not heard of, right? But we have a tendency with EYs technical team, myself, we look around the, the road around the rock instead, the rock in the road, right? So we ended up coming up with a very unique, very easy to easy to handle architecture that was very scalable. And then were able to hit the ground running and deploy in production by December where head of >>Was EY involved in the whole, you know, dev test production, dr. Center of excellence, the, the process inventory or did you bring them in? Did you kind of do that internally then bring EY in for the proof of >>Value? EY was actually awarded the contract for soup to nuts, basically the first phase, which was those four work streams I told you about. And they worked with myself and the state of Tennessee infrastructure architecture teams. We needed to get these things defined and signed off the architecture so we could expedite getting them built out. And then they, and they basically ran all four work streams, you know, the process, inventory, the prototype, the, the proof of perceived business value, the building out the center of excellence, working with myself. And, and this wasn't just us in a, a vacuum, we ended up having to, I mean, I could do the strategy, I could do the technology and I could said the roadmap and all the good stuff, but we had to actually meet with a lot of the state or tendency organizations on change management. How do we end up putting this process or an automation in the middle of the, the normal traditional process, right? So there was a lot of interaction there and getting their feedback and then tweaking our operational model based on feedback from the state of Tennessee. So it was all very collective collaborative. I think that would be the keyword is collaborative and then building out everything. So then, and then we ended up going to the next way where they knew so much and we were, we had such a tight timeframe that we continued with ey. >>So Christina, Bob mentioned center of excellence a couple of times in the state of Tennessee, but then beyond state of Tennessee, other organizations you've worked with in this space, what's the relationship between center of excellence and this thing we've been hearing about over the last couple of days, the citizen developer has that been, has, has, has that been leveraged in the state of Tennessee? Bob, have you seen that leveraged in other places? Christina? What's that relationship look like? >>Yeah, so we don't leverage that, that model yet we have centralized model and there's reasons for that. So we don't end up having maverick's, runoff runoffs have one off, have, you know, have a a UI path version or down this division or have another RPA tool in another division, right? So then all of a sudden we're, we have a maintenance nightmare. Manageability nightmare. So we basically, you know, I I I negotiate an ELA with UI path, so therefore if anyone wants to go do another automation on another division, or they would basically follow our model, our design, our coe, our quality gates. We we're the gatekeepers to bring into production. >>Got it. Now, yeah. Now Christina, what's your perspective? Because I can imagine Nashville and Memphis might have very different ideas about a lot of things. Yeah. Little Tennessee reference there, but what, what, what about what, what about other places are you, are you seeing the citizen developer leveraged in, in some kinds of places more than others or >>What? Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of, because of the foundation we're building. Yeah. So we laid, you know, when, when Bob talks about the first phase of eight weeks, that was amazingly fast, even in that's ridiculous. Spoke about it to say you're gonna lay these four foundations. I was excited, like, I was like, wow, this, this is a very serious client. They wanna go fast and they wanna get that momentum, but the AUM was laid out so we could propel ourselves. So we are at 40 automations right now. We're in the works of creating 80 more automations in this next year. We'll be at 120 really quickly. The AUM is critical. And I will say at a client, I've, I've worked with over 50 clients on automation programs. The way state of Tennessee treats the aom and they abide by it, it is the living document of how you go and go fast. Got it. And the one thing I would say is it's also allowed us to have such immense quality. So I always talk about you put in forward, you put in another 80, we're at 98% uptime on all our automations, meaning they don't go down. And that's because of the AOM we set up. And the natural progression is going to be how do you take it to citizen developer? How do you take it to, we call, you know, process automation plus, >>But methodically, methodically, not just throwing it out at the beginning and, and hoping the chaos >>Works. Exactly. Exactly. And >>The ratio of of bots to automations, is that one to one or you have automation? Oh no, the single bot is doing multiple. So how many bots are you talking about? >>We're doing, Bob, you're gonna answer this better than I will, but the efficiency is amazing. We've been pushing that. >>So our ratio now, cause we have a high density architecture we put in is four bots, excuse me, four processes. The one bot and four bots, The one virtual machine EC two server. Right? So it's four to one, four to one. Now what we're going to get by next summer, we'll do more analysis. We'll probably get the six to one, six to one that's made serious shrinkage of our footprint from a machine, you know, management perspective from 60 down to seven right now we're gonna add the next chunk. We add another 80 automations in FIS gear 24. We're only gonna add two more bot, two more servers. Right? So that's only 10 running like close to 200 bucks. >>And, and is doing this on prem in the cloud? >>No, our, the architecture's fully >>Oh, cloud based >>Ct. Yeah. So we use UiPath SAS model. Yeah. Right. So that handles the orchestrator, the attended bots, all the other tooling you need automation hub, process minor et etc. Etc. Cetera. And then on the state side in aws we have, we use unattended bots, cert bots that have to go down into the legacy systems, et cetera. And they're sitting on EC two instances. >>Was there, was there a security not hole that you had to get through internally? What was that like? >>No, actually we, we, we were lock and step with the security team on this. I mean, there are some standards and templates and you know, what we had to follow, you know, but they're doing an assessment every single release, they do assessments on little bots, what systems it's activating or are accessing, et cetera. The data, because you have fedra data of FTI data, you know, in the public sector to make sure we're not touching it. >>Do you guys golf? >>I do, yeah. Not Well, yes, >>If you mean I I like golf but not don't golf well, but so you know what, what a mulligan is. If you had a Mulligan right, for the state of Tennessee, what'd you learn? What would you do differently? You know, what are some of the gotchas you see maybe Christina in, in other customers and then maybe specifically state of Tennessee, >>Right? I would say, you know, it is the intangibles. So when we talk about our clients that go fast and go big, like state of Tennessee, it's because that, that we call it phase zero that gets done that Bob did. It's about making sure you've got the sponsorship. So we've got executive sponsorship all the way up. You've got amazing stakeholder engagement. So you're communicating the value of what we're trying to do. And you're, you're showing them the value. We have been really focused on the return on investment and we'll talk a little bit about that, but it's how do you make sure that when you do, you know, states are different with those agencies, you have such an opportunity to maximize return on investment if you do it right, because you're not talking about automation in one agency, you're talking it across multiple agencies. We call that the multiplier effect. And that's huge. And if you understand that and how to actually apply that, the value you get is amazing. So I, I don't, I can't say there's a mulligan here, Bob, you may think of some, I know on other clients, if you don't line up your stakeholders and you don't set the expectations early on, you meander and you may get five, six automations in over the year. You know, when I go to clients and say, we're doing 40, we're doing 80, they're like, >>Wow, that's the, but that's the bottom line. Gotcha. Is if you, if you want to have an operational impact and have multiple zeros, you gotta go through that process that you said up front. >>Exactly. A >>Anything you do differently, Bob? >>Well, I I what I do differently, I mean, I think, I mean we, we did get executive sponsorship, you know, and in one area, but we still have to go out to all the 23 agencies and get, and bring awareness and kind of like set the hook to bring 'em in, right? Bring 'em to the, to the, to the lake. Right. And, and I think if, if it was more of a blanket top down, getting every agency to agree to, you know, in investigate automation, it would've been a lot easier. So we're, we're, we're getting it done. We've gone through 13 agencies already and less than a year, all of our releases are sprinkling across multiple agencies. So it's not like a silo. I'll look at that. Everyone at every agency is being impacted. So I think that's great. But I, I think our, our Mueller now is just trying to make sure we have enough backlog to do the next sprints. >>Is it, you know, the ROI on these initiatives is, is, is so clear and so fast. Is it self-funding? Is there gain sharing or do you just give business, give money back to the state and have to scramble for more? Do you get to, you know, get a lick off that cone? >>Unfortunately we don't, but I, I, I try to see if we could get some property like, nah, we don't do that. It's all cost, cost based. But, but our ROI is very attractive, I think for, for doing a whole state, you know, transformation. I think our ROI is three and a half to four years. Right. And that's pretty mind blowing. Even if you look at private sector or, I, I think some of the, the key things which people are noticing, even though we're in public sector, we're we are very nimble. This project is extremely nimble. We've had people come in, exactly, we need this, so we're gonna get penalized. Okay, knock it out in four hours, four days. Right? So it's that nimbleness that you just don't hear of even in private sector or public sector. And we're just able to do that for all the collaboration we do across ey, across myself and across all the other organizations that I, that I kind of drag along or what have, >>What do you, what do you, do you see any limits to the opportunities here? I mean, is this a decade long opportunity? Is you have that much runway >>Or that's just not my dna, so we're gonna, we're gonna probably do it like in four years, but Well, when >>You say do it, I mean, will you be done at that point? Or do you see the weight, >>Look at, you know, we could boil the ocean and I think this is one of the reasons why we're successful is we could boil the ocean and and be, it will be 10 attended 20 year program. Yeah. Okay. Or we looked at it, we had some of EY guys look at it and say, I said, what's the 25 80 rule? Meaning, you know, give me, So if we had 500 processes, tell me how many processes will gimme 80% of the hours. And it was 125, it was a 25 80 rule. I said, that's what we're doing it, we're doing, we're gonna do the 80% of the hours quantifiably. Now when we're done with that pass, then we'll have those other ones that are bringing 20% of the hours, that's when we might be bringing citizens in. That's what we're bringing state workers in. But at that same time, we will be going back in the wave and doing advanced ai. Right. Or advance ia, in other words. So right now we do rpa, ocr, icr, but you know, there's NL ml nps, there's virtual agents and stuff. So that's like the wave we're gonna do through the ones we've already gone through. Got it. Right. So it'll probably be a two or three wave or iterations. >>Cool. Guys, thanks so much for coming into the cube. Great story. Really appreciate you taking us through it. Thank you so much for having us. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson. The Dave ante. We back at UI path forward five from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>>welcome to the session. Long live swarm with containers and kubernetes everywhere we have this increasing cloud complexity at the same time that we're facing economic uncertainty and, of course, to navigate this. For most companies, it's a matter of focusing on speed and on shipping and iterating their code faster. Now. For many, Marantz is customers. That means using docker swarm rather than kubernetes to handle container orchestration. We really believe that the best way to increase your speed to production is choice, simplicity and security. So we wanted to bring you a couple of experts to talk about the state of swarm and Docker enterprise and how you can make best use of both of you. So let's get to it. Well, good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you are on and welcome to today's session. Long live swarm. I am Nick Chase. I'm head of content here at Mantis and I would like to introduce you to our two Panelists today eight of Manzini. Why don't you introduce yourself? >>I am a van CNI. I'm a solutions architect here at Moran Tous on work primarily with Docker Enterprise System. I have a long history of working with support team. Um, at what used to be Ah Docker Enterprise, part of Docker Inc. >>Yeah, Okay. Great. And Don Power. >>I, um Yeah, I'm Don Power on the docker. Captain Docker, community leader. Right now I run our Dev Ops team for Citizens Bank out of Nashville, Tennessee, and happy to be here. >>All right, Excellent. So All right, so thank you both for coming. Now, before we say anything else, I want to go ahead and kind of name the elephant in the room. There's been a lot of talk about the >>future. Yeah, that's right. Um, swarm as it stands right now, um, we have, ah, very vested interest in keeping our customers on who want to continue using swarm, functional and keeping swarm a viable alternative or complement to kubernetes. However you see the orchestration war playing out as it were. >>Okay? It's hardly a war at this point, but they do work together, and so that's >>absolutely Yeah, I I definitely consider them more of like, complimentary services, um, using the right tool for the job. Sort of sense. They both have different design goals when they were originally created and set out so I definitely don't see it as a completely one or the other kind of decision and that they could both be used in the same environment and similar clusters to run whatever workload that you have. >>Excellent. And we'll get into the details of all that as we go along. So that's terrific. So I have not really been involved in in the sort of swarm area. So set the stage for us where we kind of start out with all of this. Don I know that you were involved and so guys said, set the stage for us. >>Sure, Um I mean so I've been a heavy user of swarm in my past few roles. Professionally, we've been running containers in production with Swarm for coming up on about four years. Now, Um, in our case, we you know, we looked at what was available at the time, and of course you had. Kubernetes is your biggest contender out there, but like I just mentioned, the one of the things that really led us to swarm is it's design goals were very different than kubernetes. So Kubernetes tries to have an answer for absolutely every scenario where swarm tries to have an answer for, like, the 80% of problems or challenges will say that you might come across 80% of the workloads. Um, I had a better way of saying that, but I think I got my point across >>E Yeah, I think I think you hit the nail on the head. Um, Kubernetes in particular with the way that kubernetes itself is an a P I I believe that kubernetes was, um, you know, written as a toolkit. It wasn't really intended to be used by end users directly. It was really a way to build platforms that run containers. And because it's this really, really extensible ap I you can extend it to manage all sorts of resource is swarm doesn't have that X sensibility aspect, but what it was designed to do, it does very, very well and very easily in a very, very simple sort of way. Um, it's highly opinionated about the way that you should use the product, but it works very effectively. It's very easy to use. It's very low. Um, not low effort, but low. Ah, low barrier to entry. >>Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I was gonna touch on the same thing. It's very easy for someone to come in. Pick up swarm. You know they don't They don't have to know anything about the orchestrator on day one. Most people that are getting into this space are very familiar with Docker. Compose um, and entering from Docker compose into swarm is changing one command that you would run on the command line. >>Yeah, very, very trivial to if you are already used to building docker files using composed, organize your deployment into stacks of related components. It's trivial to turn on swarm mode and then deploy your container set to a cluster. >>Well, excellent. So answer this question for me. Is the swarm of today the same as the swarm of, you know, the original swarm. So, like when swim first started is that the same is what we have now >>it's kind of ah, complicated story with the storm project because it's changed names and forms a few times. Originally in is really somewhere around 2014 in the first version, and it was a component that you really had to configure and set up separately from Docker Ah, the way that it was structured. Ah, you would just have docker installed on a number of servers are machines in your cluster. And then you would organize them into a swarm by bringing your own database and some of the tooling to get those nodes talking to each other and to organize your containers across all of your docker engines. Ah, few years later, the swarm project was retooled and baked into the docker engine. And, um, this is where we sort of get the name change from. So originally it was a feature that we called swarm. Ah. Then the Swarm Kit project was released on Get Hub and baked directly into the engine, where they renamed it as swarm mode. Because now it is a motile option that you just turn on as a button in the docker engine and because it's already there the, um, the tuning knobs that you haven't swarm kit with regard to how what my time outs are and some of these other sort of performance settings there locked there, they're there. It's part of the opinionated set of components that builds up the docker engine is that we bring in the Swarm Kit project with a certain set of defaults and settings. And that is how it operates in today's version of Docker engine. >>Uh, okay for that, that makes sense. That makes sense. So ah, so don, I know you have pretty strong feelings about this topic, but it is swarm still viable in a world that's sort of increasingly dominated by Kubernetes. >>Absolutely. And you were right. I'm very passionate about this topic where I work. We're we're doing almost all of our production work lives on swarm we only have out of Ah, we've got something like 600 different services between three and 4000 containers. At any given point in time. Out of all of those projects, all of those services we've only run into two or three that don't kind of fit into the opinionated model of swarm. So we are running those on KUBERNETES in the same cluster using Moranis is Docker enterprise offering. But, um, no, that's a very, very small percentage of services that we didn't have an answer for in swarm with one. The one case that really gets us just about every time is scaling state full services. But you're gonna have very few staple services in most environments for things like micro service architecture, which is predominantly what we build out. Swarm is perfect. It's simple. It's easy to use you, don't you? Don't end up going for miles of yamma files trying to figure out the one setting that you didn't get exactly right? Um yeah, the other Thea the other big piece of it that way really led us to adopting it so heavily in the beginning is, you know, the overlay network. So your networks don't have to span the whole cluster like they do with kubernetes. So we could we could set up a network isolation between service A and service B, just by use using the built in overlay networks. That was a huge component that, like I said, let us Teoh adopting it so heavily when we first got started. >>Excellent. You look like you're about to say something in a >>Yeah, I think that speaks to the design goals for each piece of software. On the way that I've heard this described before is with regard to the networking piece the ah, the docker networking under the hood, um, feels like it was written by a network engineer. The way that the docker engine overlay networks communicate uses ah, VX lan under the hood, which creates pseudo V lands for your containers. And if two containers aren't on the same Dylan, there's no way they can communicate with each other as opposed to the design of kubernetes networking, which is really left to the C and I implementation but still has the design philosophy of one big, flat sub net where every I p could reach every other i p and you control what is allowed to access, what by policy. So it's more of an application focused Ah design. Whereas in Docker swarm on the overlay networking side, it's really of a network engineering sort of focus. Right? >>Okay, got it. Well, so now how does all this fit in with Docker enterprise now? So I understand there's been some changes on how swarm is handled within Docker Enterprise. Coming with this new release, >>Docker s O swarm Inside Docker Enterprise is represented as both the swarm classic legacy system that we shift way back in 2014 on and then also the swarm mode that is curly used in the docker engine. Um, the Swarm Classic back end gives us legacy support for being able to run unmanaged plane containers onto a cluster. If you were to take Docker ce right now, you would find that you wouldn't be able to just do a very basic docker run against a whole cluster of machines. You can create services using the swarms services, a p I but, um, that that legacy plane container support is something that you have to set up external swarm in order to provide. So right now, the architecture of Docker Enterprise UCP is based on some of that legacy code from about five or six years ago. Okay. Ah, that gives us ability to deploy plane containers for use cases that require it as well as swarm services for those kinds of workloads that might be better served by the built in load balancing and h A and scaling features that swarm provides. >>Okay, so now I know that at one point kubernetes was deployed within Docker Enterprise as you create a swarm cluster and then deploy kubernetes on top of swarm. >>Correct? That is how the current architecture works. >>Okay. All right. And then, um what is what is where we're going with this like, Are we supposed to? Are we going to running Swarm on top of kubernetes? What's >>the the design goals for the future of swarm within branches? Stocker Enterprise are that we will start the employing Ah, like kubernetes cluster features as the base and a swarm kit on top of kubernetes. So it is like you mentioned just a reversal of the roles. I think we're finding that, um, the ability to extend kubernetes a p I to manage resource is is valuable at an infrastructure and platform level in a way that we can't do with swarm. We still want to be able to run swarm workloads. So we're going to keep the swarm kit code the swarm kit orchestration features to run swarm services as a part of the platform to keep the >>got it. Okay, so, uh, if I'm a developer and I want to run swarm, but my company's running kubernetes what? What are my one of my options there? Well, I think >>eight touched on it pretty well already where you know, it depends on your design goals, and you know, one of the other things that's come up a few times is Thea. The level of entry for for swarm is much, much simpler than kubernetes. So I mean, it's it's kind of hard to introduce anything new. So I mean, a company, a company that's got most of their stuff in kubernetes and production is gonna have a hard time maybe looking at a swarm. I mean, this is gonna be, you know, higher, higher up, not the boots on the ground. But, um, you know, the the upper management, that's at some point, you have to pay for all their support, all of it. What we did in our approach. Because there was one team already using kubernetes. We went ahead and stood up a small cluster ah, small swarm cluster and taught the developers how to use it and how to deploy code to it. And they loved it. They thought it was super simple. A time went on, the other teams took notice and saw how fast these guys were getting getting code deployed, getting services up, getting things usable, and they would look over at what the innovation team was doing and say, Hey, I I want to do that to, uh, you know, so there's there's a bunch of different approaches. That's the approach we took and it worked out very well. It looks like you wanted to say something too. >>Yeah, I think that if you if you're if you're having to make this kind of decision, there isn't There isn't a wrong choice. Ah, it's never a swarm of its role and your organization, right? Right. If you're if you're an individual and you're using docker on your workstation on your laptop but your organization wants to standardize on kubernetes there, there are still some two rules that Mike over Ah, pose. And he's manifest if you need to deploy. Coop resource is, um if you are running Docker Enterprise Swarm kit code will still be there. And you can run swarm services as regular swarm workloads on that component. So I I don't want to I don't want people to think that they're going to be like, locked into one or the other orchestration system. Ah, there the way we want to enable developer choice so that however the developer wants to do their work, they can get it done. Um Docker desktop. Ah, ships with that kubernetes distribution bundled in it. So if you're using a Mac or Windows and that's your development, uh, system, you can run docker debt, turn on your mode and run the kubernetes bits. So you have the choices. You have the tools to deploy to either system. >>And that's one of the things that we were super excited about when they introduced Q. Burnett ease into the Docker Enterprise offering. So we were able to run both, so we didn't have to have that. I don't want to call it a battle or argument, but we didn't have to make anybody choose one or the other. We, you know, we gave them both options just by having Docker enterprise so >>excellent. So speaking of having both options, let's just say for developers who need to make a decision while should I go swarm, or should I go kubernetes when it sort of some of the things that they should think about? >>So I think that certain certain elements of, um, certain elements of containers are going to be agnostic right now. So the the the designing a docker file and building a container image, you're going to need to know that skill for either system that you choose to operate on. Ah, the swarm value. Some of the storm advantage comes in that you don't have to know anything beyond that. So you don't have to learn a whole new A p I a whole new domain specific language using Gamel to define your deployment. Um, chances are that if you've been using docker for any length of time, you probably have a whole stack of composed files that are related to things that you've worked on. And, um, again, the barrier to entry to getting those running on swarm is very low. You just turn it on docker stack, deploy, and you're good to go. So I think that if you're trying to make that choice, if you I have a use case that doesn't require you to manage new resource is if you don't need the Extensible researchers part, Ah, swarm is a great great, great viable option. >>Absolutely. Yeah, the the recommendation I've always made to people that are just getting started is start with swarm and then move into kubernetes and going through the the two of them, you're gonna figure out what fits your design principles. What fits your goals. Which one? You know which ones gonna work best for you. And there's no harm in choosing one or the other using both each one of you know, very tailor fit for very various types of use cases. And like I said, kubernetes is great at some things, but for a lot of other stuff, I still want to use swarm and vice versa. So >>on my home lab, for all my personal like services that I run in my, uh, my home network, I used storm, um, for things that I might deploy onto, you know, a bit this environment, a lot of the ones that I'm using right now are mainly tailored for kubernetes eso. I think especially some of the tools that are out there in the open source community as well as in docker Enterprise helped to bridge that gap like there's a translator that can take your compose file, turn it into kubernetes. Yeah, Mel's, um, if if you're trying to decide, like on the business side, should we standardize on former kubernetes? I think like your what? What functionality are you looking at? Out of getting out of your system? If you need things like tight integration into a ah infrastructure vendor such as AWS Azure or VM ware that might have, like plug ins for kubernetes. You're now you're getting into that area where you're managing Resource is of the infrastructure with your orchestration. AP I with kube so things like persistent volumes can talk to your storage device and carve off chunks of storage and assign those two pods if you don't have that need or that use case. Um, you know, KUBERNETES is bringing in a lot of these features that you maybe you're just not taking advantage of. Um, similarly, if you want to take advantage of things like auto scaling to scale horizontally, let's say you have a message queue system and then a number of workers, and you want to start scaling up on your workers. When your CPU hits a certain a metric. That is something that Kubernetes has built right into it. And so, if you want that, I would probably suggest that you look at kubernetes if you don't need that, or if you want to write some of that tooling yourself. Swarm doesn't have an object built into it that will do automatic horizontal scaling based on some kind of metric. So I always consider this decision as a what features are the most I available to you and your business that you need to Yep. >>All right. Excellent. Well, and, ah, fortunately, of course, they're both available on Docker Enterprise. So aren't we lucky? All right, so I am going to wrap this up. I want to thank Don Bauer Docker captain, for coming here and spending some time with us and eight of Manzini. I would like to thank you. I know that the the, uh, circumstances are less than ideal here for your recording today, but we appreciate you joining us. Um and ah, both of you. Thank you very much. And I want to invite all of you. First of all, thank you for joining us. We know your time is valuable and I want to invite you all Teoh to take a look at Docker Enterprise. Ah, follow the link that's on your screen and we'll see you in the next session. Thank you all so much. Thank you. >>Thank you, Nick.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual event. Of course, when we talk about Cloud Native we talk about Kubernetes there's a lot that's happening to modernize the infrastructure but a very important thing that we're going to talk about today is also what's happening up the stack, what sits on top of it and some of the new use cases and applications that are enabled by all of this modern environment and for that we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning or AI and ML as we tend to talk in the industry, so happy to welcome to the program. We have two first time guests joining us from Red Hat. First of all, we have Abhinav Joshi and Tushar Katarki they are both senior managers, part of the OpenShift group. Abhinav is in the product marketing and Tushar is in product management. Abhinav and Tushar thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Stu, we're glad to be here. >> Thanks Stu and glad to be here at KubeCon. >> All right, so Abhinav I mentioned in the intro here, modernization of the infrastructure is awesome but really it's an enabler. We know... I'm an infrastructure person the whole reason we have infrastructure is to be able to drive those applications, interact with my data and the like and of course, AI and ML are exciting a lot going on there but can also be challenging. So, Abhinav if I could start with you bring us inside your customers that you're talking to, what are the challenges, the opportunities? What are they seeing in this space? Maybe what's been holding them back from really unlocking the value that is expected? >> Yup, that's a very good question to kick off the conversation. So what we are seeing as an organization they typically face a lot of challenges when they're trying to build an AI/ML environment, right? And the first one is like a talent shortage. There is a limited amount of the AI, ML expertise in the market and especially the data scientists that are responsible for building out the machine learning and the deep learning models. So yeah, it's hard to find them and to be able to retain them and also other talents like a data engineer or app DevOps folks as well and the lack of talent can actually stall the project. And the second key challenge that we see is the lack of the readily usable data. So the businesses collect a lot of data but they must find the right data and make it ready for the data scientists to be able to build out, to be able to test and train the machine learning models. If you don't have the right kind of data to the predictions that your model is going to do in the real world is only going to be so good. So that becomes a challenge as well, to be able to find and be able to wrangle the right kind of data. And the third key challenge that we see is the lack of the rapid availability of the compute infrastructure, the data and machine learning, and the app dev tools for the various personas like a data scientist or data engineer, the software developers and so on that can also slow down the project, right? Because if all your teams are waiting on the infrastructure and the tooling of their choice to be provisioned on a recurring basis and they don't get it in a timely manner, it can stall the projects. And then the next one is the lack of collaboration. So you have all these kinds of teams that are involved in the AI project, and they have to collaborate with each other because the work one of the team does has a dependency on a different team like say for example, the data scientists are responsible for building the machine learning models and then what they have to do is they have to work with the app dev teams to make sure the models get integrated as part of the app dev processes and ultimately rolled out into the production. So if all these teams are operating in say silos and there is lack of collaboration between the teams, so this can stall the projects as well. And finally, what we see is the data scientists they typically start the machine learning modeling on their individual PCs or laptops and they don't focus on the operational aspects of the solution. So what this means is when the IT teams have to roll all this out into a production kind of deployment, so they get challenged to take all the work that has been done by the individuals and then be able to make sense out of it, be able to make sure that it can be seamlessly brought up in a production environment in a consistent way, be it on-premises, be it in the cloud or be it say at the edge. So these are some of the key challenges that we see that the organizations are facing, as they say try to take the AI projects from pilot to production. >> Well, some of those things seem like repetition of what we've had in the past. Obviously silos have been the bane of IT moving forward and of course, for many years we've been talking about that gap between developers and what's happening in the operation side. So Tushar, help us connect the dots, containers, Kubernetes, the whole DevOps movement. How is this setting us up to actually be successful for solutions like AI and ML? >> Sure Stu I mean, in fact you said it right like in the world of software, in the world of microservices, in the world of app modernization, in the world of DevOps in the past 10, 15 years, but we have seen this evolution revolution happen with containers and Kubernetes driving more DevOps behavior, driving more agile behavior so this in fact is what we are trying to say here can ease up the cable to EIML also. So the various containers, Kubernetes, DevOps and OpenShift for software development is directly applicable for AI projects to make them move agile, to get them into production, to make them more valuable to organization so that they can realize the full potential of AI. We already touched upon a few personas so it's useful to think about who the users are, who the personas are. Abhinav I talked about data scientists these are the people who obviously do the machine learning itself, do the modeling. Then there are data engineers who do the plumbing who provide the essential data. Data is so essential to machine learning and deep learning and so there are data engineers that are app developers who in some ways will then use the output of what the data scientists have produced in terms of models and then incorporate them into services and of course, none of these things are purely cast in stone there's a lot of overlap you could find that data scientists are app developers as well, you'll see some of app developers being data scientist later data engineer. So it's a continuum rather than strict boundaries, but regardless what all of these personas groups of people need or experts need is self service to that preferred tools and compute and storage resources to be productive and then let's not forget the IT, engineering and operations teams that need to make all this happen in an easy, reliable, available manner and something that is really safe and secure. So containers help you, they help you quickly and easily deploy a broad set of machine learning tools, data tools across the cloud, the hybrid cloud from data center to public cloud to the edge in a very consistent way. Teams can therefore alternatively modify, change a shared container images, machine learning models with (indistinct) and track changes. And this could be applicable to both containers as well as to the data by the way and be transparent and transparency helps in collaboration but also it could help with the regulatory reasons later on in the process. And then with containers because of the inherent processes solution, resource control and protection from threat they can also be very secure. Now, Kubernetes takes it to the next level first of all, it forms a cluster of all your compute and data resources, and it helps you to run your containerized tools and whatever you develop on them in a consistent way with access to these shared compute and centralized compute and storage and networking resources from the data center, the edge or the public cloud. They provide things like resource management, workload scheduling, multi-tendency controls so that you can be a proper neighbors if you will, and quota enforcement right? Now that's Kubernetes now if you want to up level it further if you want to enhance what Kubernetes offers then you go into how do you write applications? How do you actually make those models into services? And that's where... and how do you lifecycle them? And that's sort of the power of Helm and for the more Kubernetes operators really comes into the picture and while Helm helps in installing some of this for a complete life cycle experience. A kubernetes operator is the way to go and they simplify the acceleration and deployment and life cycle management from end-to-end of your entire AI, ML tool chain. So all in all organizations therefore you'll see that they need to dial up and define models rapidly just like applications that's how they get ready out of it quickly. There is a lack of collaboration across teams as Abhinav pointed out earlier, as you noticed that has happened still in the world of software also. So we're talking about how do you bring those best practices here to AI, ML. DevOps approaches for machine learning operations or many analysts and others have started calling as MLOps. So how do you kind of bring DevOps to machine learning, and fosters better collaboration between teams, application developers and IT operations and create this feedback loop so that the time to production and the ability to take more machine learning into production and ML-powered applications into production increase is significant. So that's kind of the, where I wanted shine the light on what you were referring to earlier, Stu. >> All right, Abhinav of course one of the good things about OpenShift is you have quite a lot of customers that have deployed the solution over the years, bring us inside some of your customers what are they doing for AI, ML and help us understand really what differentiates OpenShift in the marketplace for this solution set. >> Yeah, absolutely that's a very good question as well and we're seeing a lot of traction in terms of all kinds of industries, right? Be it the financial services like healthcare, automotive, insurance, oil and gas, manufacturing and so on. For a wide variety of use cases and what we are seeing is at the end of the day like all these deployments are focused on helping improve the customer experience, be able to automate the business processes and then be able to help them increase the revenue, serve their customers better, and also be able to save costs. If you go to openshift.com/ai-ml it's got like a lot of customer stories in there but today I will not touch on three of the customers we have in terms of the different industries. The first one is like Royal Bank of Canada. So they are a top global financial institution based out of Canada and they have more than 17 million clients globally. So they recently announced that they build out an AI-powered private cloud platform that was based on OpenShift as well as the NVIDIA DGX AI compute system and this whole solution is actually helping them to transform the customer banking experience by being able to deliver an AI-powered intelligent apps and also at the same time being able to improve the operational efficiency of their organization. And now with this kind of a solution, what they're able to do is they're able to run thousands of simulations and be able to analyze millions of data points in a fraction of time as compared to the solution that they had before. Yeah, so like a lot of great work going on there but now the next one is the ETCA healthcare. So like ETCA is one of the leading healthcare providers in the country and they're based out of the Nashville, Tennessee. And they have more than 184 hospitals as well as more than 2,000 sites of care in the U.S. as well as in the UK. So what they did was they developed a very innovative machine learning power data platform on top of our OpenShift to help save lives. The first use case was to help with the early detection of sepsis like it's a life-threatening condition and then more recently they've been able to use OpenShift in the same kind of stack to be able to roll out the new applications that are powered by machine learning and deep learning let say to help them fight COVID-19. And recently they did a webinar as well that had all the details on the challenges they had like how did they go about it? Like the people, process and technology and then what the outcomes are. And we are proud to be a partner in the solution to help with such a noble cause. And the third example I want to share here is the BMW group and our partner DXC Technology what they've done is they've actually developed a very high performing data-driven data platform, a development platform based on OpenShift to be able to analyze the massive amount of data from the test fleet, the data and the speed of the say to help speed up the autonomous driving initiatives. And what they've also done is they've redesigned the connected drive capability that they have on top of OpenShift that's actually helping them provide various use cases to help improve the customer experience. With the customers and all of the customers are able to leverage a lot of different value-add services directly from within the car, their own cars. And then like last year at the Red Hat Summit they had a keynote as well and then this year at Summit, they were one of the Innovation Award winners. And we have a lot more stories but these are the three that I thought are actually compelling that I should talk about here on theCUBE. >> Yeah Abhinav just a quick follow up for you. One of the things of course we're looking at in 2020 is how has the COVID-19 pandemic, people working from home how has that impacted projects? I have to think that AI and ML are one of those projects that take a little bit longer to deploy, is it something that you see are they accelerating it? Are they putting on pause or are new project kicking off? Anything you can share from customers you're hearing right now as to the impact that they're seeing this year? >> Yeah what we are seeing is that the customers are now even more keen to be able to roll out the digital (indistinct) but we see a lot of customers are now on the accelerated timeline to be able to say complete the AI, ML project. So yeah, it's picking up a lot of momentum and we talk to a lot of analyst as well and they are reporting the same thing as well. But there is the interest that is actually like ramping up on the AI, ML projects like across their customer base. So yeah it's the right time to be looking at the innovation services that it can help improve the customer experience in the new virtual world that we live in now about COVID-19. >> All right, Tushar you mentioned that there's a few projects involved and of course we know at this conference there's a very large ecosystem. Red Hat is a strong contributor to many, many open source projects. Give us a little bit of a view as to in the AI, ML space who's involved, which pieces are important and how Red Hat looks at this entire ecosystem? >> Thank you, Stu so as you know technology partnerships and the power of open is really what is driving the technology world these days in any ways and particularly in the AI ecosystem. And that is mainly because one of the machine learning is in a bootstrap in the past 10 years or so and a lot of that emerging technology to take advantage of the emerging data as well as compute power has been built on the kind of the Linux ecosystem with openness and languages like popular languages like Python, et cetera. And so what you... and of course tons of technology based in Java but the point really here is that the ecosystem plays a big role and open plays a big role and that's kind of Red Hat's best cup of tea, if you will. And that really has plays a leadership role in the open ecosystem so if we take your question and kind of put it into two parts, what is the... what we are doing in the community and then what we are doing in terms of partnerships themselves, commercial partnerships, technology partnerships we'll take it one step at a time. In terms of the community itself, if you step back to the three years, we worked with other vendors and users, including Google and NVIDIA and H2O and other Seldon, et cetera, and both startups and big companies to develop this Kubeflow ecosystem. The Kubeflow is upstream community that is focused on developing MLOps as we talked about earlier end-to-end machine learning on top of Kubernetes. So Kubeflow right now is in 1.0 it happened a few months ago now it's actually at 1.1 you'll see that coupon here and then so that's the Kubeflow community in addition to that we are augmenting that with the Open Data Hub community which is something that extends the capabilities of the Kubeflow community to also add some of the data pipelining stuff and some of the data stuff that I talked about and forms a reference architecture on how to run some of this on top of OpenShift. So the Open Data Hub community also has a great way of including partners from a technology partnership perspective and then tie that with something that I mentioned earlier, which is the idea of Kubernetes operators. Now, if you take a step back as I mentioned earlier, Kubernetes operators help manage the life cycle of the entire application or containerized application including not only the configuration on day one but also day two activities like update and backups, restore et cetera whatever the application needs. Afford proper functioning that a "operator" needs for it to make sure so anyways, the Kubernetes operators ecosystem is also flourishing and we haven't faced that with the OperatorHub.io which is a community marketplace if you will, I don't call it marketplace a community hub because it's just comprised of community operators. So the Open Data Hub actually can take community operators and can show you how to run that on top of OpenShift and manage the life cycle. Now that's the reference architecture. Now, the other aspect of it really is as I mentioned earlier is the commercial aspect of it. It is from a customer point of view, how do I get certified, supported software? And to that extent, what we have is at the top of the... from a user experience point of view, we have certified operators and certified applications from the AI, ML, ISV community in the Red Hat marketplace. And from the Red Hat marketplace is where it becomes easy for end users to easily deploy these ISVs and manage the complete life cycle as I said. Some of the examples of these kinds of ISVs include startups like H2O although H2O is kind of well known in certain sectors PerceptiLabs, Cnvrg, Seldon, Starburst et cetera and then on the other side, we do have other big giants also in this which includes partnerships with NVIDIA, Cloudera et cetera that we have announced, including our also SaaS I got to mention. So anyways these provide... create that rich ecosystem for data scientists to take advantage of. A TEDx Summit back in April, we along with Cloudera, SaaS Anaconda showcased a live demo that shows all these things to working together on top of OpenShift with this operator kind of idea that I talked about. So I welcome people to go and take a look the openshift.com/ai-ml that Abhinav already referenced should have a link to that it take a simple Google search might download if you need some of that, but anyways and the other part of it is really our work with the hardware OEMs right? And so obviously NVIDIA GPUs is obviously hardware, and that accelerations is really important in this world but we are also working with other OEM partners like HP and Dell to produce this accelerated AI platform that turnkey solutions to run your data-- to create this open AI platform for "private cloud" or the data center. The other thing obviously is IBM, IBM Cloud Pak for Data is based on OpenShift that has been around for some time and is seeing very good traction, if you think about a very turnkey solution, IBM Cloud Pak is definitely kind of well ahead in that and then finally Red Hat is about driving innovation in the open-source community. So, as I said earlier, we are doing the Open Data Hub which that reference architecture that showcases a combination of upstream open source projects and all these ISV ecosystems coming together. So I welcome you to take a look at that at opendatahub.io So I think that would be kind of the some total of how we are not only doing open and community building but also doing certifications and providing to our customers that assurance that they can run these tools in production with the help of a rich certified ecosystem. >> And customer is always key to us so that's the other thing that the goal here is to provide our customers with a choice, right? They can go with open source or they can go with a commercial solution as well. So you want to make sure that they get the best in cloud experience on top of our OpenShift and our broader portfolio as well. >> All right great, great note to end on, Abhinav thank you so much and Tushar great to see the maturation in this space, such an important use case. Really appreciate you sharing this with theCUBE and Kubecon community. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Okay thank you and thanks a lot and have a great rest of the show. Thanks everyone, stay safe. >> Thanks you and stay with us for a lot more coverage from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual edition I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music plays)

(soft music) >> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio here for a CUBE conversation. Really like when we can dig into help some of the nonprofits in our industry, going to be talking about, training, helping other people lift up their careers. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guests, Jerome Hardaway. He's the founder of vets who code coming down from Nashville, Jerome, I seem to remember a time where I was able to travel. I did some lovely hiking even saw bear last time I was down in Nashville. Thanks so much for joining us. Roger that. Thank you, a funny story. I saw a cow on the loose while driving on the highway yesterday. So not much has changed. (Jerome laughs) Thank you guys for having me. >> Yeah, it is a little bit of strange times here in the Covert area. I live kind of suburban Massachusetts area. One of my neighbors did report a small bear in the area. I'm definitely seeing more than just the usual, what kind of wild turkeys and the like that we get up in New England, but let's talk about Vets Who Code. So, you're the founder, the name doesn't leave much up for us to guess what you do, but tell us a little bit as to the inspiration and the goals of your organization. Roger that, Vets Who Code is the first veteran founded, operated and led, a remote 501 C three that focuses on training veterans regardless where they are and modern age of technologies. Our stack right now, I would say is focused more towards front-end DevOps with a lot of serverless technologies being built-in. And that's pretty much what exactly what we do well. >> Well awesome, I had been loving digging into the serverless ecosystem the last few years. Definitely an exciting area, help us understand a little bit, who comes and joins this? What skill set do they have to have coming in? And explain a little bit the programs that they can offer that they can be part of. >> Yeah, cool. So we run Vets Who Code like a mixture between a tech company or a tech nonprofit, I guess, using those practices while also using military practices as well. And the people that come in are veterans and military spouses. And we try to use what we call a pattern matching practice, showcasing like. Hey, these are the things, he's been in military. This is how it translates to the tech side. Like, our sit reps is what you guys would call stand up. Kanban is what we would call like systems checks and frag orders, Op orders, things like that, or, our SLPs. So we turn around, we just train them, retrain them. So that way they can understand the lingo, understand how things, how you code, move and communicate and make sure that these guys and girls, they know how the work as JavaScript engineers and a serverless community. As of right now, we've helped 252 veterans in 37 States get jobs, our social economic impacts, then I think it's at 17.6 million right now. So it all from the comfort of their homes, that's like the cool and free, and those are like the coolest things that we've been able to do. >> Wow, that's fascinating. Jerome, I heard something that you've talked about, leveraging the military organizational styles. I'm just curious, there's in the coding world a lot of times we talk about Conway's law, which is that the code will end up resembling the look of the organization. And you talk about DevOps, DevOps is all about various organizations collaborating and working together. It seems a little bit different from what I would think of traditional military command and control. So is that anything you've given any thought to? Is there some of the organizational pieces that you need to talk to people about? Moving into these environments compared to what they might've had in the military. >> Negative, I think the biggest misconception that we have is that people, when you're talking about how the military moves, they're thinking of the military of yesteryear of 20, 30, 40 years ago. They're not thinking of global war on terrorism veterans and how we move and things like that. We understand distributed chains. We understand cause we call, that's what we've done at CENTAF and CENTCOM in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we honored, like we are already doing a lot of this stuff, we just naming it different. So that's part of the thing that we have as an advantage as the, cause all the people who are educators, there are veterans who learn how to code and they've been working in industry and they know. And so when they're teaching, they know the entire process that a veteran's going to go through. So that's how now we focus on things. And so the organizational structure for us first term to second term veterans is pretty normal. If you're coming out within the last, heck 10 years. (Jerome laughs) >> Yeah, absolutely. That's wonderful. And I I've had the opportunity to work with plenty of people that had come from the military. Very successful in the tech industry, definitely tend to be hard workers and engaged in what they'r doing. Curious, you talked about being able to do this remotely and then it is free. What's the impact of the current global pandemic? Everything that's happening here in 2020 been on what you're doing in your resources. >> Of the impact, unfortunately, I mean, not unfortunately, fortunately it has been nothing but positive. It's been crazy, we've gotten more applications. We have people are seeing that during, I was the crazy person in the room, when in 2014, when I was saying nonprofits should move to remote first protocols. So that way they could have greater impact for less, with less financial resources. And back then I was the, like what are you talking about? This is the way we've always done. Well now everybody was scrambling to try to figure out how to help people without being in same room with them. We were like, Oh, okay, lt's do today. So we got an influx of people applying, influx of people, sending me, trying to get into our next cohort in August. It's just, the biggest thing that has happened for Vets Who Code is yet, it's been a really positive experience for us, which is really weird to say, but I think it has, my doomsday Murphy's law style of preparing, I assume that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So I try to prepare for that. So being open source, being serverless, being having everything in a manner to where--in case I was out of the pot, out of the situation, other people operate having this distributed teams, or there are other leaders that can take over and do things. It's all stuff that, I guess I got from the military. So, we were know we were prepared because there was absolutely zero pivot for us. If anything, it has been more resources. We've been able to dive deeper in more subjects because people have had more time, but, we can do, we can dive deeper into AWS. We started a lunch and learn every two weeks. We actually have a lunch and learn next week with Dr. Lee Johnson. And she's going to be talking, we open that to it by all juniors and entry level devs, developers, regardless of whether you're a veteran or not, we just throw it on Twitter and let them get in. And the focus will be on tech ethics. We all know, right now we've been leading the charge on trying to make sure people are supercharging their skills during this time frame. So that's what, it's been very positive. I've been working with magazine, front-end masters. It's been awesome. >> Well, that's wonderful. Wish everyone had the mindset coming into 2020, because it does seem that anything that could go wrong has, (both laugh) I'm curious, once people have skilled up and they've gone through the program, what connections do you have with industry? How do you help with job placement in that sort of activity? >> That is the most asked question, because that is the thing that people expect because of code schools, because of our educational program protocols. We don't really need that issue because our veterans are skilled enough to where to hiring managers know the quality that we produce. I live in Nashville and I've only been able to place one veteran that I've trained locally in the community because of fame companies have snatched up every other veteran I've ever trained in the community, so things like that, it's not a problem because no, a usually 80% of our veterans have jobs before they even graduate. So you're literally picking up, picking people who, they know they have the potential to get a bit companies if they put the work in and it's just as they come, we actually have people. I think a company reached out to me yesterday and I was like, I don't even have people for you. They already have jobs. (jerome laughs) Or I'm in a situation now where all my senior devs are looking for fame companies. Cause that's one of the things we do is that we support our veterans from reentry to retirement. So we're not like other code schools where they only focus on that 30 to 60 to 90 days, so that first job, our veterans, they keep coming back to re-skill, get more skills, come up to the lunch and learns, come to our Slack side chats to become better programmers. And once they're, so we've helped several of our programmers go from entry-level dev to senior dev, from absolutely zero experience. And so, I think that's the most rewarding thing. When you see a person who they came in knowing nothing. And three years later, like after the cohort safe they got their job and then they come back after they got the jobs, they want to get more skills and they get another job and then they come back. And the next thing, my favorite, one of my favorites Schuster, he starts at a local web shop, a web dev shop in Savannah, Georgia. And then next thing, oh, he's on Amazon, he's at Amazon three years later and you're like, Oh wow, we did that, that's awesome. So that's the path that we do is awesome. >> I'm curious, are there certain skill sets that you see in more need than other? And I'm also curious, do you recommend, or do you help people along with certain certifications? Thinking, the cloud certifications definitely have been on the rise, the last couple years. >> I feel like the cloud, the cloud certifications have been on the rise because it's expensive to like test for that stuff. If a person messes up, unless you have a very dedicated environment to where they can't mess up, they can cost you a lot of money, right? So you want that certain, right? But for us, it's been, we just focused on what we like to call front-end DevOps. We focus on Jamstack, which is JavaScript, APIs and markup, also along with a lot of serverless. So we're using AWS, we're using, also they're, they're learning Lambda functions, all this stuff. We're using a query language called GraphQL. We're using Apollo with that query language. We're using some node, React, GET, Speed. And a lot of third party API has to do like a lot of heavy lifting cause we believe that the deeper dive that a person has in a language and being able to manipulate and utilize APIs that they can, the better they will be, Right? So, same way that colleges do it, but a more modern take like colleges, they give you the most painful language to learn, which is usually like C right? Where you had to make everything a very low-level language. And then you're going through this process of building. And because of that, other languages are easier because you felt the pain points. We do the same thing, but with JavaScript, because it's the most accessible, painful language on earth, that's what I called it with Wire magazine last year anyway. (jerome laughs) >> So Jerome, you've laid out how you you're well organized. You're lean and financially, making sure that things are done responsibly. We want to give you the opportunity though. What's the call to action? Vets Who Code, you're looking for more people to participate. Is it sponsorships? Work in the community, look to engage. >> Roger that, we are looking for two things. One, we're always looking for people to help support us. We're open source, we're on GitHub sponsors. Like the people who we we're up, we're open source. But the people that do most of our tickets are the students themselves. So that's one of the best things about us. there is no better move, feeling that having something in production that works, right? It actually does something right? Like, Oh, this actually helps people, right? So we help have our veterans like actually pull tickets and do things like that. But, we also, we build, we're building out teams that they're on all the time as well. We have our new tutorials team or veterans. They literally built front facing tutorials for people on the outside. So that way they can learn little skills as we also have podcasts team and they're always podcasting, always interviewing people that in community, from our mentors to our students, to our alumni. And so just, let's throw our podcasts on Spotify. Let's do some codes, the best Code podcast and sponsor song get up. >> Wonderful, Jerome. We want to give you the final word. you're very passionate. You've got a lot interested, loved hearing about some of the skill sets that you're helping others with. What's exciting you these days? What kind of things are you digging into, beyond Vets Who Code? >> Oh man, everything serverless dude. As a front-end, as a person who was full stack and move to front-end. This has never been a more exciting time to learn how to code because there's so many serverless technologies and is leveling the playing field for front-end engineers, just knowing a little bit of like server-side code and having DevOp skills and being able to work in a CLI, you can do like Jamstack and the people that are using it. You have Nike, you have governments. It's just, it's such an exciting time to be a front-end. So I'm just like, and just seeing also how people are like really turning towards wanting their data more open source. So that's another thing that's really exciting for me. I've never been a person that was very highbrow when it came to talking about code. I felt like that was kind of boring, but seeing how, when it comes to like how code is actually helping normal, average everyday people and how the culture as a whole is starting to get more hip to how, API is like our running the world and how tech is being leveraged for. And it gets them, I'm on fire with these conversations, so I try to contain it cause I don't want to scare anyone on TV, but we could talk like, we could talk hours of that stuff. Love it. >> Well, Jerome, thank you so much for sharing with our community, everything you're doing and wonderful activity Vets Who Code, definitely call out to the community, make sure check it out, support it. If you can and tie so much in Jerome, I've got a regular series I do called Cloud Native Insights that are poking at some of those areas that you were talking about serverless and some of the emerging areas. So Jerome, thanks so much for joining, pleasure having you on the program. >> Roger that, thank you for having me. >> All right. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the videos that we have as well as Siliconangle.com for the news an6d the writeups, what we do. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios today. And obviously, what's top of the news is the coronavirus and COVID-19, and it's having a direct impact on anything where people get together. We're obviously really tied into the convention space. But we're excited to have an expert in the field coming at it from a different kind of point of view, more from the entertainment side. We'd like to welcome, calling in from Tennessee, Lauren Spahn. She is a partner for Shackelford, Bowen, McKinley, or excuse me, but yeah, McKinley & Norton. Lauren, great to see you. >> Hey there, how are ya? >> Jeff Frick: Good. So we were introduced through kind of the process of the South by Southwest cancellation. Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about kind of what you do, what type of clients do you have, who do you guys kind of represent? >> Yeah, sure, so I practice primarily in entertainment law here in Nashville. But I work with a variety of people in the music industry, whether it be artists or music festivals, record labels, publishing companies, you name it, across the US. So I do a lot of work in L.A. and New York as well. And our firm specializes in a little bit of everything, but our national hub is kind of the spearhead for the entertainment and music practice. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause we're not so directly involved in entertainment, but we do go to a lot of conferences. And, I think, for us, the watershed moment this year was Mobile World Congress earlier this year in February, 100,000 people in Barcelona, Spain. That's a little unique because most of the main vendors are Asian in terms of all the mobile carriers and the handset tech carriers. But, you were saying before we turned the cameras on, that now the South By Southwest event cancellation is kind of sending the same shock waves if you will through the entertainment industry. >> Yeah, I mean South By Southwest obviously is a big coming together of multiple industries. You know, music, film, TV, technology, but it really was one of the first events that were canceled that impacted the music industry. And so, such a large conference to completely cancel, really just started, it was the tip of the iceberg, or I think what we are going to continue to see across the sphere in music whether its tours being canceled or music festivals that are being canceled, everything is kind of starting to ramp up, and were starting to see the effects from South By Southwest line. >> Jeff Frick: Right. So, one of the things that really is just kind of a splash of cold water, is these things are going down it just really highlights the interconnectedness of all these different parts of these events, right? whether it is the primary promoter or the primary bands in the case of South By Southwest or even the tech companies, but then there are tons and tons of secondary, third and other vendors that are involved from food and transportation and the list goes on and on. So, you're quoted quite often in the press about talking about force majeure and that this is something that kind of comes up in contract law when these types of events happen. So, I wonder if you can kind of explain the dictionary definition of force majeure and how do you see it kind of executed traditionally in a contract where maybe one person just can't uphold their part of the deal and how that contrasts with something like this, which is hitting kind of both sides of the agreement, if you will. >> Completely. So, I think it's important to step back and look at if we are going to use a music festival as an example. You have a contract, the music festival itself will have a contract with the artist, but they will also have contracts with their vendors, with the production team that comes in and sets up the staging and the sound and the light. There are a myriad of contracts and so, the language in each contract tends to govern the relationship between the festival and that third party. So, in this situation of let's use an artist, for example. There is different things in the contract that point to how you can cancel and what happens when you cancel. A force majeure is an example of that. And force majeure is something that is outside of the control of both parties. So, again, the festival and the artist. If something like the Coronavirus is coming, neither one of those parties can control that from happening. And so it typically relieves both parties of any obligation to move forward with the contract. What is important, though, is the language that's in that force majeure provision. So, you sometimes will see language like sickness or an epidemic. But then, you may not have that, and you may have language that says, a local or national state of emergency. So, depending upon the state you're in, depending upon the exact situation in the city that you are holding the event, all of those things can be looked or looked to to interpret whether or not the language that's in that force majeure contract will impact you or will give you the rights to cancel that event without having to pay additional money. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> And so, you know, not only that but you're then seeing it carried out through the insurance policies, as well. So, even if you have force majeure language whether or not the insurance company will help cover the losses for you again depends upon the exact language that's in your insurance policy. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> So, across the board, it really is a contractual right, that can differ for the different people that are involved. >> Right. But, there's the contractual, the language in the contract, but then there is kind of this random stuff that comes up. And, we hear kind of act of God kind of thrown up by insurance companies when it's something they haven't defined in all the fine language. And then, the other piece that we're hearing about a lot in the news here on Palo Alto, right is the specific descriptive terms used by the authorities. Is it a pandemic? Is it an outbreak? Is it a natural disaster? Is it a state of emergency called by the government? >> Or other. So, how does that figure in on something like we're experiencing? I don't know that we've seen anything quite like this before. >> You know, I was looking back through some contracts earlier this morning because I had a potential cancellation that was going to happen, and I mean some contracts go as far as to even describe the Swine Flu and similar things like that but we really are looking to the authorities to see what decision they are making on everything. And whether or not they are calling it a local state of emergency because a lot of times that exact definition or that exact cause is defined in the agreement . But, yeah, I mean really it comes down to small print wording in this situation, if you are looking at the contract itself to see what rights that you have. What I found is that people aren't going to the nitty gritty of at least the contracts, you're probably going to get into the nitty gritty of the insurance policy, if you have a chance of getting any kind of protection. But, at the end of the day, the artist doesn't want to go play a festival that could potentially cause their fans to have some outbreak of the Coronavirus. An event doesn't want to be liable for holding an event that could be connected with that, as well, because across the board, that creates a PR nightmare for whoever's making that decision. So, you're seeing people that are trying to work together to figure out exactly how we're going to handle things, and what we're going to do moving forward, because no one is going to win in this situation. >> [Jeff Frick} Right. Right. >> It's really just figuring out a way that we can all be in the best position possible across the board. >> Yeah. And I think that's what we're kind of seeing a lot too, where, you know, I think everyone is again instead of just one party that's not upholding their part of the deal and the other party getting screwed on that, this is really, you know, we're kind of in it together, this has kind of come down on both of our houses so how do we work together to minimize the pain and at least, kind of get through this window that we assume will pass at some point or at least the current heightened state will go. But, I just wonder if you have an opinion on, from a legal point of view, and it's not your space, so if you say no that's an okay answer, but, you know, if you look at kind of market forces is determining what is the appropriate action, right? Because we don't really know what's the right action. But, clearly, the market is defined based on activity and the University of Washington shutting down and Stanford shutting down >> Vanderbilt >> Almost is a self-imposed kind of semi-quarantine state, which is just, you know the latest now I think they get the local high school basketball game is they can only have 100 people in the stands in the biggest building they can find and everybody needs to spread out. So, it's just been very interesting to see you know kind of what is the appropriate response. What's the right response? Because ultimately it seems like it's driven by nobody wants to be the one that didn't take the max precautions and something bad happens. >> To be honest, I don't think that anyone really knows. You know, it really is the conversations right now are not the artist's agent calling the festival and saying we're absolutely not doing this The conversation is more so, hey what are you guys seeing? What are you guys thinking? What's the best way to handle this? You know, no one wants to put the consumers and the fans at risk. And, you know, until we have a better handle on exactly how we handle this type of situation, it's really going to be people doing their best to try to not create a situation that's going to, you know, cause some kind of massive outbreak. >> Right. Right. >> If you look at, you know, something like South By, no one wants to cancel, you know. It really impacts, not only the company and the event itself, but really everyone that's associated to it, has a financial hardship because of that decision, but the decision isn't made because someone wants to do it, it's made because collectively, you know, people are feeling like it needs to be done in order to keep people safe. >> Right. >> And if they didn't think that, they'd probably go ahead and try to hold the event and, you know, risk the liability. But, I think people truly want what's in the best interest of everyone. And that's why they are working together to try to figure this out. >> Yeah. Yeah. It really is driven home what social creatures we are when you start to kind of disconnecting crowds and groups of people from so many events and it just continues to ripple through whether it's our business, a convention business, the entertainment business, you know March Madness is coming up here in a very short order. What's going to happen there all the way down to you know, the local talent show for the local middle schoolers that they used to have before graduation, which is now canceled. So, it's interesting times. >> And I think for us, the biggest indicator in terms of just music festivals is going to be what happens with Coachella. And, you know, Billboard and Variety have reported that they're looking to potentially reschedule the event to October, if artists are able. And if not, they're going to have to completely cancel it for this year. And, you know, Coachella is such a massive festival that attracts people from all over the world. And if Coachella is canceled then I think there is a good chance that so long as this is continuing at the speed it is, that we're going to see a lot more music festivals canceled. >> When is Coachella scheduled? >> It starts in about a month. >> In about a month. >> So it's the second weekend in April, but they have to start production and really building out the grounds now. >> Wow. Wow. >> And so the decision kind of has to be made before then. And then, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a decision there in the next few days. >> Yeah. I think I would take the short if I was in Vegas, because there's just not enough data, I don't think, to go forward based on the current situation. I'm glad I'm not the one sitting in that chair. >> Yeah. It'd be a tough position. >> All right, well Lauren, well thank you for sharing your insight and, you know, it's great to get the perspective of another you know kind of industry that's all built around bring people together. And, I think we probably both would agree that this time will pass and we'll get a vaccine out, we'll get the growth curves to start to flatten out and go down which is where they need to go. And then you know I think it will be a different time, but hopefully things will get approximate a little bit more to normal in the not too distant future. >> Yeah, fingers crossed. I hope it gets figured out sooner rather than later and we can all have our summers full of conferences and festivals and the gathering of people. >> Yep. All right Lauren. Well thanks again for your time >> Thank you >> And have a great Tuesday. >> Awesome. You too. >> Alrighty. She's Lauren. I'm Jeff. Thanks for checking in on this Cube Conversation. We'll catch you next time. (upbeat music)

la from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and in care along with its ecosystem partners hey welcome back everyone cubes live coverage of eight of us reinvent 2019 this is the cube seventh year covering Amazon reinvent it's their eighth year of the conference and want to just shout out to Intel for their sponsorship for these two amazing sets without their support we would be able to bring our mission of great content to you I'm John Force to many men we're here with the chief of AWS the chief executive officer Andy chassis tech athlete and himself three our keynotes welcome to the cube again great to see you great to be here thanks for having me guys congratulations on a great show a lot of great buzz thank you a lot of good stuff your keynote was phenomenal you get right into you giddy up right into as you say three hours 30 announcements you guys do a lot but what I liked the new addition in the last year and this year is the band house man yeah they're pretty good they hit the Queen note so that keeps it balanced so we're going to work on getting a band for the cube awesome so if I have to ask you what's your walk-up song what would it be there's so many choices depends what kind of mood I'm in but maybe times like these by the Foo Fighters these are unusual times right now Foo Fighters playing at the Amazon intersect show they are Gandy well congratulations on the intersect you got a lot going on intersect is the music festival I'll get that in a second but I think the big news for me is two things obviously we had a one-on-one exclusive interview and you laid out essentially what looks like was gonna be your keynote it was transformation key for the practice I'm glad to practice use me anytime yeah and I like to appreciate the comments on Jedi on the record that was great but I think the transformation story is a very real one but the NFL news you guys just announced to me was so much fun and relevant you had the Commissioner of NFL on stage with you talking about a strategic partnership that is as top-down aggressive goals you could get yeah I have Roger Goodell fly to a tech conference to sit with you and then bring his team talk about the deal well you know we've been partners with the NFL for a while with the next-gen stats are they using all their telecasts and one of the things I really like about Roger is that he's very curious and very interested in technology in the first couple times I spoke with him he asked me so many questions about ways the NFL might be able to use the cloud and digital transformation to transform their various experiences and he's always said if you have a creative idea or something you think that could change the world for us just call me is it or text me or email me and I'll call you back within 24 hours and so we've spent the better part of the last year talking about a lot of really interesting strategic ways that they can evolve their experience both for fans as well as their players and the player health and safe safety initiative it's so important in sports and particularly important with the NFL given the nature of the sport and they've always had a focus on it but what you can do with computer vision and machine learning algorithms and then building a digital athlete which is really like a digital twin of each athlete so you understand what does it look like when they're healthy what and compare that when it looks like they may not be healthy and be able to simulate all kinds of different combinations of player hits and angles and different plays so that you can try to predict injuries and predict the right equipment you need before there's a problem can be really transformational so it was super excited about it did you guys come up with the idea it was the collaboration between there's really a collaboration I mean they look they are very focused on player's safety and health and it's it's a big deal for their you know they have two main constituents that the players and fans and they care deeply about the players and it's a it's a hard problem in a sport like football but you watch it yeah I gotta say it does point out the use cases of what you guys are promoting heavily at the show here of the stage maker studio which is a big part of your keynote where they have all this data right and they're dated hoarders they've the hoard data but they're the manual process of going through the data it was a killer problem this is consistent with a lot of the enterprises that are out there they have more data than they even know so this seems to be a big part of the strategy how do you get the customers to actually a wake up to the fact that they got data and how do you tie that together I think in almost every company they know they have a lot of data and there are always pockets of people who want to do something with it but when you're gonna make these really big leaps forward these transformations so things like Volkswagen is doing with they're reinventing their factories in their manufacturing process or the NFL where they're gonna radically transform how they do players health and safety it starts top-down and if they if the senior leader isn't convicted about wanting to take that leap forward and trying something different and organizing the data differently and organizing the team differently and using machine learning and getting help from us and building algorithms and building some muscle inside the company it just doesn't happen because it's not in the normal machinery of what most companies do and so it all wait almost always starts top-down sometimes it can be the commissioner or the CEO sometimes it can be the CIO but it has to be senior level conviction or it does get off the ground and the business model impact has to be real for NFL they know concussions hurting their youth pipelining this is a huge issue for them is their business model they they lose even more players to lower extremity injuries and so just the notion of trying to be able to predict injuries and you know the impact it can have on rules the impact it can have on the equipment they use it's a huge game changer when they look at the next 10 to 20 years all right love geeking out on the NFL but no more do you know off camera a 10 man is here defeated season so everybody's a Patriots fan now it's fascinating to watch you and your three-hour keynote Vernor in his you know architectural discussion really showed how AWS is really extending its reach you know it's not just a place for a few years people have been talking about you know cloud as an operation operational model it's not a destination or a location but I felt that really was laid out is you talked about breadth and depth and Verna really talked about you know architectural differentiation people talk about cloud but there are very there are a lot of differences between the vision for where things are going help us understand and why I mean Amazon's vision is still a bit different from what other people talk about where this whole cloud expansion journey but put over what tagger label you want on it but you know the control plane and the technology that you're building and where you see that going well I think that we've talked about this a couple times we we have two macro types of customers we have those that really want to get at the load level building blocks and stitch them together creatively and however they see fit to create whatever is in there in their heads and then we have this second segment of customers who say look I'm willing to give up some of that flexibility in exchange for getting 80% of the way they're much faster in an abstraction that's different from those low level building blocks in both segments of builders we want to serve and serve well and so we built very significant offerings in both areas I think when you look at micro services you know some of it has to do with the fact that we have this very strongly held belief born out of several years at Amazon where you know the first seven or eight years of Amazon's consumer business we basically jumbled together all of the parts of our technology and moving really quickly and when we wanted to move quickly where you had to impact multiple internal development teams it was so long because it was this big ball this big monolithic piece and we got religion about that and trying to move faster in the consumer business and having to tease those pieces apart and it really was a lot of the impetus behind conceiving AWS where it was these low-level very flexible building blocks that don't try and make all the decisions for customers they get to make them themselves and some of the micro services that you saw Verner talking about just you know for instance what we what we did with nitro or even what we do with firecracker those are very much about us relentlessly working to continue to to tease apart the different components and even things that look like low-level building blocks over time you build more and more features and all of a sudden you realize they have a lot of things that are they were combined together that you wished weren't that slowed you down and so nitro was a completely reimagining of our hypervisor and virtualization layer to allow us both to let customers have better performance but also to let us move faster and have a better security story for our customers I got to ask you the question around transformation because I think it all points to that all the data points you got all the references goldman-sachs on stage at the keynote Cerner and the healthcare just an amazing example because I mean this demonstrating real value there there's no excuse I talked to someone who wouldn't be named last night and then around the area said the CIA has a cost bar like this cost up on a budget like this but the demand for mission based apps is going up exponentially so there's need for the cloud and so seeing more and more of that what is your top-down aggressive goals to fill that solution base because you're also very transformational thinker what is your what is your aggressive top-down goals for your organization because you're serving a market with trillions of dollars of span that's shifting that's on the table a lot of competition now sees it too they're gonna go after it but at the end of the day you have customers that have that demand for things apps yeah and not a lot of budget increase at the same time this is a huge dynamic what's your goals you know I think that at a high level are top-down aggressive goals so that we want every single customer who uses our platform to have an outstanding customer experience and we want that outstanding customer experience in part is that their operational performance and their security are outstanding but also that it allows them to build and it build projects and initiatives that change their customer experience and allow them to be a sustainable successful business over a long period of time and then we also really want to be the technology infrastructure platform under all the applications that people build and they were realistic we know that that you know the market segments we address with infrastructure software hardware and data center services globally are trillions of dollars in the long term it won't only be us but we have that goal of wanting to serve every application and that requires not just the security operational performance but also a lot of functionality a lot of capability we have by far the most amount of capability out there and yet I would tell you we have three to five years of items on our roadmap that customers want us to add and that's just what we know today well and any underneath the covers you've been going through some transformation when we talked a couple years ago about how serverless is impacting things I've heard that that's actually in many ways glue behind the two pizza teams to work between organizations talk about how the internal transformations are happening how that impacts your discussions with customers that are going through that transformation well I mean there's a lot of a lot of the technology we build comes from things that we're doing ourselves you know and that we're learning ourselves it's kind of how we started thinking about microservices serverless - we saw the need we know we would have we would build all these functions that when some kind of object came into an object store we would spin up compute all those tasks would take like three or four hundred milliseconds then we spin it back down and yet we'd have to keep a cluster up in multiple availability zones because we needed that fault tolerance and it was we just said this is wasteful and that's part of how we came up with lambda and that you know when we were thinking about lambda people understandably said well if we build lambda and we build the serverless event-driven computing a lot of people who are keeping clusters of instances aren't going to use them anymore it's going to lead to less absolute revenue for us but we we have learned this lesson over the last 20 years at Amazon which is if it's something it's good for customers you're much better off cannibalizing yourself and doing the right thing for customers and being part of shaping something and I think if you look at the history of Technology you always build things and people say well that's gonna cannibalize this and people are gonna spend less money what really ends up happening is they spend spend less money per unit of compute but it allows them to do so much more that the ultimately long-term end up being you know more significant customers I mean you are like beating the drum all the time customers what they say we implement the roadmap I got that you guys have that playbook down that's been really successful for you yeah two years ago you told me machine learning was really important to you because your customers told what's the next tranche of importance for customers what's on top of mine now as you look at this reinvent kind of coming to a close replays tonight you had conversations your your tech a fleet you're running around doing speeches talking to customers what's that next hill from from my fist machine learning today there's so much I mean that's not it's not a soup question you know I think we're still in this in the very early days of machine learning it's not like most companies have mastered yet even though they're using it much more than they did in the past but you know I think machine learning for sure I think the edge for sure I think that we're optimistic about quantum computing even though I think it'll be a few years before it's really broadly useful we're very enthusiastic about robotics I think the amount of functions are going to be done by these robotic applications are much more expansive than people realize it doesn't mean humans won't have jobs they're just going to work on things that are more value-added I thought we're believers in augmented and virtual reality we're big believers and what's going to happen with voice and I'm also I think sometimes people get bored you know I think you're even bored with machine learning maybe already but yet people get bored with the things you've heard about but I think just what we've done with the chips you know in terms of giving people 40% better price performance in the latest generation of x86 processors it's pretty unbelievable and the difference in what people are going to be able to do or just look at big data I mean big date we haven't gotten through big data where people have totally solved it the amount of data that companies want to store process and analyze is exponentially larger than it was a few years ago and it will I think exponentially increase again in the next few years you need different tools the service I think we're not we're not for with machine learning we're excited to get started because we have all this data from the video and you guys got sage maker yeah we call it a stairway to machine learning heaven we start with the data move up what now guys are very sophisticated with what you do with technology and machine learning and there's so much I mean we're just kind of again in this early innings and I think that it was soaked before sage maker was so hard for everyday developers and data scientists to build models but the combination of sage maker and what's happened with thousands of companies standardizing on it the last two years Plus now sage maker studio giant leap forward we hope to use the data to transform our experience with our audience and we're on Amazon Cloud I really appreciate that and appreciate your support if we're with Amazon and Instant get that machine learning going a little faster for us a big that'll be better if you have requests so any I'm you talked about that you've got the customers that are builders and the customers that need simplification traditionally when you get into the you know the heart of the majority of adoption of something you really need to simplify that environment but when I think about the successful enterprise of the future they need to be builders yeah so has the model flipped if you know I normally would said enterprise want to pay for solutions because they don't have the skill set but if they're gonna succeed in this new economy they need to go through that transformation that yeah so I mean are we in just a total new era when we look back will this be different than some of these previous waves it's a it's a really good question Stu and I I don't think there's a simple answer to it I think that a lot of enterprises in some ways I think wish that they could just skip the low level building blocks and and only operate at that higher level abstraction it's why people were so excited by things like sage maker or code guru or Kendra or contact lens these are all services that allow them to just send us data and then run it on our models and get back the answers but I think one of the big trends that we see with enterprises is that they are taking more and more of their development in-house and they are wanting to operate more and more like startups I think that they admire what companies like Airbnb and Pinterest and slack and and you know Robin Hood and a whole bunch of those companies stripe have done and so when you know I think you go through these phases and errors where there are waves of success at different companies and then others want to follow that success and and replicate and so we see more and more enterprises saying we need to take back a lot of that development in-house and as they do that and as they add more developers those developers in most cases like to deal with the building blocks and they have a lot of ideas on how they can create us to creatively stitch them together on that point I want to just quickly ask you on Amazon versus other clouds because you made a comment to me in our interview about how hard it is to provide a service that to other people and it's hard to have a service that you're using yourself and turn that around and the most quoted line in my story was the compression algorithm there's no compression outliving for experience which to me is the diseconomies of scale for taking shortcuts yeah and so I think this is a really interesting point just add some color comments or I think this is a fundamental difference between AWS and others because you guys have a trajectory over the years of serving at scale customers wherever they are whatever they want to do now you got micro services it's even more complex that's hard yeah how about that I think there are a few elements to that notion of there's no compression algorithm I think the first thing to know about AWS which is different is we just come from a different heritage in a different background we sweep ran a business for a long time that was our sole business that was a consumer retail business that was very low margin and so we had to operate a very large scale given how many people were using us but also we had to run infrastructure services deep in the stack compute storage and database in reliable scalable data centers at very low costs and margins and so when you look at our our business it actually today I mean it's it's a higher margin business in our retail business the lower margin business and software companies but at real scale it's a it's a high-volume relatively low margin business and the way that you have to operate to be successful with those businesses and the things you have to think about and that DNA come from the type of operators that we have to be in our consumer retail business and there's nobody else in our space that does that you know the way that we think about cost the way we think about innovation and the data center and and I also think the way that we operate services and how long we've been operating services of the company it's a very different mindset than operating package software then you look at when you think about some of the issues and very large scale cloud you can't learn some of those lessons until you get two different elbows of the curve and scale and so what I was telling you is it's really different to run your own platform for your own users where you get to tell them exactly how it's going to be done but that's nothing really the way the real world works I mean we have millions of external customers who use us from every imaginable country and location whenever they want without any warning for lots of different use cases and they have lots of design patterns and we don't get to tell them what to do and so operating a cloud like that at a scale that's several times larger the next few providers combined is a very different endeavor and a very different operating rigor well you got to keep raising the bar you guys do a great job really impress again another tsunami of announcements in fact you had to spill the beans early with quantum the day before the event tight schedule I gotta ask you about the music festival because I think there's a really cool innovation it's the inaugural intersex conference yeah it's not part of replay which is the concert tonight right it's a whole new thing big music act you're a big music buff your daughter's an artist why did you do this what's the purpose what's your goal yeah it's an experiment I think that what's happened is that reinvent has gotten so big with 65,000 people here that to do the party which we do every year it's like a thirty five forty thousand person concert now which means you have to have a location that has multiple stages and you know we thought about it last year when we were watching it and we said we're kind of throwing like a four hour music festival right now there's multiple stages and it's quite expensive to set up that set for our partying we said well maybe we don't have to spend all that money for four hours in the rip it apart because actually the rent to keep those locations for another two days is much smaller than the cost of actually building multiple stages and so we we would try it this year we're very passionate about music as a business and I think we are I think our customers feel like we throw in a pretty good music party the last few years and we thought we were trying at a larger scale as an experiment and if you look at the economics the headliners real quick the Foo Fighters are headlining on Saturday night Anderson Park and the free Nashville free Nationals Brandi Carlile Shawn Mullins Willie Porter it's a good set Friday night it's back in Kacey Musgraves so it's it's a really great set of about 30 artists and we're hopeful that if we can build a great experience that people want to attend that we can do it it's scale and it might be something that you know both pays for itself and maybe helps pay for reinvent to overtime and you know I think that we're also thinking about it as not just a music concert and festival the reason we named it intersect is that we want an intersection of music genres and people and ethnicities and age groups and art and Technology all there together and this will be the first year we try it it's an experiment and we're really excited about I'm gone congratulations all your success and I want to thank you we've been seven years here at reinvent we've been documenting the history two sets now once-dead upstairs so appreciate a cube is part of reinvent you know you guys really are a part of the event and we really appreciate your coming here and I know people appreciate the content you create as well and we just launched cube 365 on Amazon Marketplace built on AWS so thanks for letting us cool build on the platform appreciate it thanks for having me guys Jesse the CEO of AWS here inside the cube it's our seventh year covering and documenting they're just the thunderous innovation that Amazon is doing they're really doing amazing work building out the new technologies here in the cloud computing world I'm John Force too many men be right back with more after this short break [Music]

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. Stu Miniman is here with me, Lisa Martin and we are wrapping up two days of really exciting wall to wall coverage of the new vault and we're very pleased to welcome a couple of special guests onto the program. To help us wrap up our two days, we have Miranda foster, the vice president of worldwide communications for comm vault and Al Bunty is here, the co founder, former COO and board member. Welcome Miranda and Al. Great to have you on the program. Thanks Lisa. So a lot of energy at this event and I don't think it has anything to do with our rarefied air here in the mile high city. Al, let's start with you. >>Well, there's other things in Colorado. >>There are, yeah, they don't talk about it. They talked about that on stage yesterday. So owl, you have been with convo ball as I mentioned, co-founder. What an evolution over the last 20 years. Can you take us back? >>Surely. So, um, yeah and it's been, it's, it's really kind of cool to see it coming together at this point. But if you go back 20 years when we started this, the whole idea was around data. And remember we walked into a company that was focused on optical storage. Um, we decided it would be a good company to invest in. Um, for two reasons. One, we thought they were really great people here, very creative and innovative and two, it was a great space. So if we believed we believe data would grow and that was a pretty decent thesis to go with. Yeah. And then, then it started moving from there. So I tell people I wasn't burdened with facts so I didn't understand why all these copies were being made of the same set of data. So we developed a platform and an architecture focused on indexing it so you just index at once and then could use it for many different purposes. >>And that just kept moving through the years with this very data centric approach to storage, management, backup protection, etc. It was all about the data. I happened to be lucky and said, you know, I think there's something to this thing called NAS and sand and storage networks and all those things. And I also said we have to plan for fur on scale on our solution of a million X. Now it was only off a magnitude of about a thousand on that, but it was the right idea. You know, you had to build something to scale and, and we came in and we wanted to build a company. We didn't want to just flip a company but we thought there is a longterm vision in it and if you take it all the way to the present here it's, it's really, um, it's, it feels really good to see where the company came from. It's a great foundation and now it will propel off this foundation, um, with a similar vision with great modern execution and management. >>Yeah. Al, when we had the chance to talk with you last year at the show in Nashville, it was setting up for that change. So I want to get your view there. There are some things that the company was working on and are being continued, but there's some things that, you know, Bob hammer would not have happened under his regime. So want to get your viewpoint as to the new Convolt, you know, what, what is, what are some of those new things that are moving forward with the company that might not have in the previous days? >>Yeah, that's a good questions. Do I think Mo, a lot of the innovation that you've seen here, um, would have happened maybe not as quickly. Um, we, the company obviously acquired Hedvig. Uh, we were on a very similar path but to do it ourselves. So you had kind of been a modern, we need to get to market quicker with some real pros. I think, um, the, the evolution of redoing sales management essentially was probably the biggest shift that needed to be under a new regime, if you will. Yeah. >>So Miranda, making these transitions can be really tricky from a marketing standpoint. Talk, talk us through a bit, some of the, how do you make sure trusted yet innovative and new that you've accomplished at this show? >>Well, trust it is obviously the most important because the Bob, the brand that Bob and Al built really embodies reliability for what we provide to our customers. I mean that's what gives them the peace of mind to sleep at night. But I'll tell you, Sanjay has been with us for just eight months now, February of 2019 and it's been busy. We've done a lot of things from a points on J transition with Bob and now to his point we've, we've acquired Hedvig, we've introduced this new SAS portfolio and you're exactly right. What we need to do is make sure that the reliability that customers have come to rely on Convolt for translates into what we're doing with the new Convolt and I think we've done a really good job. We've put a lot of muscle behind making sure, particularly with metallic that it was tried, it was trusted, it was beta tested, we got input from customers, partners, industry influencers. We really built it around the customer. So I think the brand that comm brings will translate well into the things that we've done with these, with these new shifts and movements within the company >>on, on that questions too as well. Um, I think Miranda is a good example of somebody that was with the company before a tremendous talent. She's got new opportunities here and she's run with it. So it's kinda that balance of some, uh, understood the fundamentals and the way we're trying to run the business. And she's grasped the new world as well. So, >>and Rob as well, right? Robin in his new, >>yeah, that's another good point. So that was all part of the transitioning here and Sanjay and the team had been very careful on trying to keep that balance. >>Change is really difficult anywhere, right? Dissect to any element of life. And you look at a business that's been very successful, has built a very strong, reliable brand for 20 years. Big leadership changes, not just with Sanjay, but all of the leadership changes. You know, analysts said, all right, you've got to upgrade your Salesforce. We're seeing a lot of movement in the area. You got to enhance your marketing. We're seeing metallic has the new routes to market, new partner focus, so PSI focuses. We're also seeing this expansion in the market, so what folks were saying, you know a year ago come on is answering in a big way and to your point in a fast way that's not easy to do. You've been here nine years since the beginning. Can you give us a little bit of a perspective, Miranda, about some of the things that were announced at the show? >>How excited everybody is, customers, partners, combo folks. How do you now extend the message and the communications from go globally after the show ends? That's an awesome question. I'm really passionate about this. So you know, Monday we announced metallic, we announced a new head of channels and alliances and Mercer Rowe, we had crazy technology innovation announcements with activate, with the acceleration of the integration with Hedvig with the momentum release that we put out today. We're also doing cool stuff with our corporate social responsibility in terms of sponsoring the new business Avengers coalition. That's something that Chris Powell is really championing here at, at the show and also within combo. So we're very excited about that. And then when you add people like yourselves, you know the tech field day folks, because not everybody can be here, right? Not everybody can be at go. So being able to extend the opportunity for, for folks to participate in combo, go through things like the cube through things like tech field day and using our social media tools and just getting all of the good vibes that are here. Because as Al says, this really is an intimate show, but we try to extend that to anybody who wants to follow us, to anybody who wants to be a part of it. And that's something that we've really focused on the last couple of years to make sure that folks who aren't here can, can get an embrace the environment here at Commonweal go. >>It's such an important piece that you're here helping with the transition I talked about. It's important that some of the existing >>get new roles and do responsibility going forward. What's your role going to be and what should we expect to see from you personally? Somebody has got to mow the lawn. >>Yeah. >>But yes, do I, I'll stay on the board. Um, we're talking through that. I think I'll be a very active board, not just the legal side of the equation. Um, try and stay involved with customers and, and strategies and, and even, uh, potential acquisitions, those kinds of things. Um, I'm also wandering off into the university environment. Uh, my Alma mater is a university of Iowa. I'm on the board there and uh, I'm involved in setting up innovation centers and entrepreneurial programs and that kind of thing. Um, I'll keep doing my farming thing and uh, actually have some ideas on that. There's a lot of technology as you guys know, attacking Nat space. So, and like I said, I'll try to keep a lot of things linked back into a combo. >>What Al can have confidence in is that I will keep him busy. So there's that. And then I will also put on the table, we agree to disagree with our college athletic loyalties. So I'm a big kid just because we don't compete really. Right. So I mean, but if I won Kansas wherever to play, then we would just politely disagree. Yeah. Well that's good that you have this agreement in place. I would love to get some anecdotal feedback from you of some of the things that you've heard over the last three days with all this news, all these changes. What are you hearing from customers and partners who you've had relationships with for a very long time? >>I think they're, I think they're all really excited, but, and maybe I'm biased, but they liked the idea that we're trying to not throw out all the old focus on customers, focus on technologies, continue the innovation. I'm pleased that we, Miranda and the team started taking this theme of what we do to a personal level, you know, recovery and those kinds of things. It isn't just the money in the business outages. It's a really a effect on a personal lives. And that resonates. I hear that a lot. Um, I asked our bigger customers and they've loved us for our support, how we take care of them. The, the intimacy of the partnership, you know, and I think they feel pleased that that's staying yet there's lot of modern Emity if that's a good word. I think fokai was what you, I think it's the blend of things and I think that really excites people. >>We've heard that a lot. You guys did a great job with having customers on stage and as a marketer who does customer marketing programs, I think there's nothing more validating than the voice of a customer. But suddenly today that I thought was a pivot on that convo, did well as Sonic healthcare was on main stage. And then he came onto the program and I really liked how he talked about some of the failures that they've been through. You know, we had the NASA talking yesterday, NASA, 60 years young, very infamous, probably for failure is not an option, but it is a very real possibility whether you're talking about space flight or you're talking about data protection and cyber attacks and the rise of that. And it was really, I'd say, refreshing to hear the voice of a customer say, these are the areas in which we failed. This is how come they've helped us recover and how much better and stronger are they? Not just as a company as Sonic healthcare, but even as an individual person responsible for that. That was a really great message that you guys were able to extend to the audience today and we wanted to get that out. >>I loved that as well. I think that was good. I have also back on driving innovation, I always felt one of my biggest jobs was to not punish people that failed. Yeah. I, you know, with the whole engineering team, the bright people in marketing, I, I would be very down on them if they didn't try, but I never wanted them to feel bad about trying and never punish them. >>And one of the things Matthew said on main stage, first of all, I love him. He's great. He's been a longtime CommonWell supporter. I love his sense of humor. He said, you know, combo came to me and said, can you identify, you know, your biggest disaster recovery moment? And he was like, no, because there's so many. Yes. Right? Like there's so many when you're responsible for this. It's just the unpredictability of it is crazy. And so he couldn't identify one, but he had a series of anecdotes that I think really helped the audience identify with and understand this is, these are big time challenges that we're up against today. And hearing his use case and how con ball is helping him solve his heart problems, I think was really cool. You're right. I loved that too. He said, I couldn't name one. There are so many. That's reality, right? As data proliferates, which every industry is experiencing, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. There's also great risk as technology advances for good. The bad actors also have access to that sort of technology. So his honesty, I thought was, was refreshing, but spot on. And what a great example for other customers to listen to the RA. To your point, I, if I punish people for failure, we're not going to learn from it. >>Yeah, you'll never move forward. >>Miranda. So much that we learn this week at the shows. Some, a lot of branding, a lot of customers, I know some people might be taking a couple of days off, but what should we expect to be seeing from con vault post go this year, >>continue to innovation. We're not letting our foot off the gas at all. Just continuing innovation as as as we integrate with Hedvig continued acceleration with metallic. I mean those guys are aggressive. They were built as a startup within an enterprise company built on Comvalt enterprise foundation. Those guys are often running, they are motivated, they're highly talented, highly skilled and they're going to market with a solution that is targeted at a specific market and those guys are really, really ready to go. So continued innovation with Hedvig integrate, sorry, integration with Hedvig with metallic. I think you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt in the future on the heels of what we consider humbled, proud leadership with the Gartner magic quadrant. You know the one two punch with the Forrester wave. I think that you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt and in terms of how we're really getting out there and aggressive. And that's not to mention Al, you know what we do with our core solutions. I mean today we just announced a bunch of enhancements to the core technology, which is, which is the bread and butter of, of what we do. So we're not letting the foot off the gas to be sure >>the team stay in really, really aggressive too. And the other thing I'd add as a major investor that I'm expecting is sales. Now I'd love to just your, your final thoughts that the culture of Convolt because while there's some acceleration and there's some change, I think some of the fundamentals stay the same. Yeah, it's, it's right to, and again, that's why I feel we're at a good point on this transition process. You alluded to it earlier, but I feel really good about the leadership that's in, they've treated me terrifically. I'm almost almost part of the team. I love that they're, they're trying to leverage off all the assets that were created in his company. Technology, obviously platform architecture, support base, our support capabilities. I, I told Sandy today I wish she really would have nailed the part about, and by the way, support and our capabilities with customers as a huge differentiator and it was part of our original, Stu knows he's heard me forever. Our original DNA, we wanted to focus on two things. Great technology, keep the great technology lead and customer support and satisfaction. So those elements, now you blend that stew with really terrific Salesforce. As Ricardo says, have you guys talk with Ricardo soon? But anyway, the head of sales is hiring great athletes, particularly for the enterprise space. Then you take it with a real terrific marketing organization that's focused, Oh, had modern techniques and analytics on all those things. You know, it's, it's in my opinion, as an investor especially, I'm expecting really good things >>bar's been set well. I can't think of a better way for Sue and me to our coverage owl veranda. Thank you. This has been fantastic. You've got to go. You get a lawn to mow, you've got a vacation to get onto and you need some wordsmithing would focus your rights. You have a flight ticket. They do five hours. Hi guys. Thank you. This has been awesome. Hashtag new comm vault for our guests and I, Lisa Martin, you've been watching the cubes coverage of Convault go and 19 we will see you next time.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Welcome to the cube. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are in Denver, Colorado, specifically Aurora, actually for the fourth annual comm vault. Go. Stu, I'm super excited to be back hosting with you again. Lisa, it's great to be with you our second year doing Convolt go last year. Keith Townsend with here with me and so glad you're here with me because you've got a little bit of background with this company I was with come out 10 years ago. It's scary to think that it's been 10 years that we're at the Gaylord Gaylord Rockies, which is one of their customers, massive conventions that aren't, as you said, the first conference that the Gaylord that probably heard that this, this convention center just opened up a couple of months ago. I think it holds like 1500 people, the 1500 rooms at the hotel and supposedly this is the first large event that they've done and this was planned last year. >>Last year we were in Nashville at the Gaylord the year before. I think they were in DC at the Gaylord and next year I know there'll be at another Gaylord, so definitely putting their customers first. Just like in the keynote this morning they had the state of Colorado opening up the event. We always love to hear a local customer welcoming us and talking about their partnership with the supplier. Absolutely agree with that. The state of Colorado, the statue share the highest number of micro breweries per capita and I don't know about you, I'm not a beer person. I would be super blown away if that, if I was there is the too much choice in beer. It used to be, you know, you'd go in and say, okay, here's the five or 10 beers I like. Now you go in and it's like, all right, there's a hundred new ones. I haven't tried that because they weren't here last time. >>So many beers here, a greater Denver. I've been to Boulder a couple of times. They say if you want to start a microbrewery, there's one that's ready to hand you over a place because they're going out of business. They just churn and go over and everything like that. So yeah, my first time actually hosting an event of the cube here in Colorado. Super excited for that. It's a great locale. And yeah, we're talking about, you know, so Convolt a 20 year old company, a lot of customers, but a lot of new faces. You look, we're going to be talking to the next two days. They run a whole new executive team. We knew this was coming last year. Our final guest in our two days is going to be Al Bunty, who is the CEO, was one of the original 20 years with the company. So we'll, we'll talk about the Baton and some of the changes in some of the things that are, are the same. >>So yeah. Interesting. You mentioned they started things off this morning with the customer at the state of Colorado. I too, like you always love to hear the voice of the customer. And I also really like it when customers talk about the challenges that they had. They talked about the Samsung attack and all of the exposures and vulnerabilities. I love that because that's what happens. We're seeing data protection as a service, the market positive trends in the market. There are a rise in cyber attacks. I love it when customers articulate, yep, nothing is perfect, but here's how working with Combalt we were able to recover quickly from something like that. A lot of big news, you mentioned a lot of new executive leadership. This is Sanjay merchant Donnie's first go. As CEO came in about nine months ago. He's a cube alumni, said we'll get to talk to him later this morning, but he came in after successfully leading puppet through many rounds of millions and venture funding. >>He took puppet worldwide, but he came into a company with declining revenues and one where folks said combat, you've got pressures to find alternative sources of growth. They said three things specifically. One, you need to upgrade your sales force. Two, you need to enhance your marketing, and three, we need to shift gears and expand your market share and there's been a whole bunch of news, not just yesterday, today, but in the last month or so, last few weeks actually where combo is making headway in all three of them. >> At least so right, because you look on paper and you look in the key, the keynote and say we have 20 years of experience. Here's all of the analyst reports that show us as the clear leader in this space. But then you look at it and say, Oh, 2018 to 2019 declining revenues. There are a lot of competitors both as some of the big stalwarts in technology as well as many startups. >>Heck, I'm even seeing the startups now. They're trying to call the last generation of startups that are going after con vault as the legacy. So if you're not fully cloud native microservice sass base architecture, you're the old way. And that's one of the news from Combolt already is they, they've done a couple of what they call Convult ventures. So the first one you were alluding to is they bought Hedvig, which was a software defined storage company. They just bought them back in September. What was their a two 40 $250 million, which was almost half of the cash that Combolt had sitting there. Hedvig company that had been around for a number of years. We're going to have Avinash who's the founder and CEO on the program here. He was on the keynote stage going through the demo. They kind of sat at this interesting line between software defined storage and actually hyperconverged infrastructure because you could in the early days do either storage only or fully converged environments, but massive scale. >>The customer that he talked about was a very large scale deployment. Those large scale deployments are really tough and can be challenging and they're not something that you just deploy everywhere. Unlike the other announcement that Convolt announced is metallic. If you go to metallic.io, they have this new sass based architecture. They built it in months from the ground up from the internal team. Part of me is sitting there saying, okay, wait, if they could do this and you know, six months or nine months or whatever it was, why hadn't they done it before? What has changed what Convolt technology is under there? It's great. It's working, you know, Azure and AWS as well as you can have a local copy in your environment. They call it SAS plus. Um, and we need to understand a little bit more of the technology. So a lot of exciting things. >>Definitely getting awareness, but both metallic and Hedvig they call Convolt ventures. So new areas, areas that they're looking to add some incremental growth. And one of the things Sandra said in his keynote is we want to, you know, rethink primary and secondary storage. So where is Convolt will they start dipping their toe into the primary storage? Does that line blur? We've got HP on the program, you know, NetApp is up on stage with them. They have partnerships. So changing landscape Convolt has long had a strong position in the market, but as things change they want to make sure that they make themselves relevant for the next era. >>Absolutely. And the Hedvig acquisition gives them a pretty significant, a much larger presence in the software defined space. But it also is going to give them a big Tam expansion. We look at metallic as you mentioned, the venture. I want to, I want to break that down. We've got Rob Kelly's, John Colussy, and on a little bit later, what is this Combolt venture, but also giving them, it sounds to me like giving customers in mid market more choice, but one of the things I mentioned that that analysts were saying is, Hey you guys, you gotta, you gotta expand your market share, you really gotta expand marketing. So we're seeing not just the technology announcements with Hedvig for the large scale enterprises of which I think most of their revenue, at least three quarters of combat revenue does come from that large space, metallic for mid market, but also some of the seals, leadership changes that they've made to are really positioning them. New initiatives, new partner initiatives, really focused on the largest global enterprises. We're gonna break some of that down today. So in terms of routes to market, you're seeing a lot of focus on mid-market and enterprise. >>Well, at least 80% of the convulse revenue comes from the partners. So that is hugely important. How does metallic fit in? Will that be as a SAS offering? Will that be direct? Will that go through the channel? Believe it's going to, you know, the channel's going to be able to be enabled. How do all of these pieces go together? One, one note on Hedvig you talk about Tam expansion. Hedwig was not a leader in the market when it comes to where they are. There's a lot of competition there. You know, they were not a, you know, a unicorn that had a road to $1 billion worth of actual revenue there. So they got bought at a very high multiple of what their actual revenue was. And the question was did they just not have the go to market to be able to bring that and maybe Convolt can bring them there where they miss positioned in the market. >>Should they not be really primary storage? Should they go more to secondary storage where partner closely with secondary storage, because I know some of Combolt's competitors did work with Hedvig. I've talked to a number of partners out there that liked Hedvig and was like, Oh it's a nice complimentary offering to what we have, whether they be a hardware or place. So we'll being in Convolt hyper charge that growth. Obviously they've got some smart team, smart team members, have an Ash, came from Amazon and Facebook and his team. But what will this do to accelerate what they're doing? How will there be hit the word but synergies between the two sides of the company. So Sanjay and team really laying out their vision for where they want to take the company and it's challenging to be, we're the trusted, reliable enterprise and we're going to go down to the lower end of the market and we're going to go on all these cool new spaces and everything. So Combalt only has limited resources just like any other company. And how will they maintain and grow their position going forward. >>We are going to hear from a number of their customers do today who been combo customers for 10 plus years. Some of them who have a number of Convolt competitors within, you know, disparate organizations. I love to hear from them, why are you running, you know, comm vault, the backup exec within these different departments. For example. AstraZeneca is one of them. And what makes Combalt in certain departments really ideal. So going to get a good picture of that, but also love to understand from these customers who've been using Combolt for years. Do you see a new combo in 20 in their fiscal year 2020 talked about the leadership changes. As you mentioned, this is a company that's not only 20 years old but at low run. Some stats by you that Sandra Mirchandani shared this morning, they've got 2.8 million. The virtual machines protected, they've got over 700 millions of petabytes. They're protecting in the cloud, 1.6 million servers on and on and on. How is con vault of fiscal year 2020 different and and really poised at this intersection of unified >>in? One of the answers for that that we'll dig into is it's about data. So while con vault does 45 million weekly backup jobs, we used to know backup is something that you just kind of had, but you didn't necessarily use it. Now it's not just having my data and making sure that it's relied on, but how can I leverage that data? It's, you know, data at the core and you know, Sandra said data is the heart of everything they're doing. So coming from puppet, Sanjay knows about dev ops and agile and he's going to bring some of that in. He's brought in a team that's going to infuse some change in the culture and we'll see. I expect Convolt to be moving a little, little faster. They definitely have made a number of changes in the short time that he has already been there and we'll get a little bit of a roadmap as to where we see them going. >>Yeah, there's certainly seems Stu to be moving quickly. You mentioned, you know, Sonjay being nine months metallic. You mentioned also being developed in house in a matter of months, announcing the Hedvig acquisition in September. It closed October 1st there Q2 earnings come out in just a couple of weeks right before Halloween. So it seems like a lot of momentum carrying into the Denver aura area. Is it going to be a trick or a treat? Ooh, I like that as a marketer, I'm jealous that you thought of that and I didn't, but I liked that. We'll go with that all these years on the cube. You gotta you gotta have the snappy comebacks, right? So, Steve, it's gonna be a great day today we are jam packed session interview after interview with combat executives, really dissecting what they're doing, what's new, what's positioning them to really kick the door wide open and really reverse those revenues, taking them positive and really not only meeting the endless expectations, but exceeding them. So I'm looking forward to an action packed two days in Aurora with use to, can't wait. All right, first two minute, man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from comm vault. Go 19 we'll be right back with our first guest.

>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering PagerDuty summit 2019 brought to you by PagerDuty. >>Okay, welcome back everybody. Jeffrey here with the Q. We're in San Francisco at the Western st Francis historical hotel. It's our third year coming to PagerDuty sound, but I think it's the fourth year of the show. Jennifer tahana just finished the keynote. You can see those places packed with people packed with energy. We're excited to be back and have our first guest of the day. He's Josh Cade and chief evangelists at Cherwell. Josh, great to see you. Great to see you. Thanks for having me today. Absolutely. So have you been to a PagerDuty, sung it before? This is actually my first event with PagerDuty. What do you think yeah, I mean they've really grown. I mean Patriot and he's been a partner of ours for awhile, but they have grown so much so rapidly and I think, you know after the IPO especially, you know, they've, they've really grown pretty crazy. >>A lot of gasoline on the fire with the IP. Exactly right. So let's jump into with the Cherwell for people aren't familiar with Cherwell, what are you guys all about? So Sheryl software is a company that we specialize in it service management and enterprise service management. So we recognize that the world of what we used to know is like help desk management and whatnot has grown. You know, digital transformation means that more people are involved in more revenue bearing activities across the company. And just like PagerDuty recognizes, you're always on, you've got to keep doing all of these things across the company. And so what we do is we act as a system of record to move request to move orchestration across an organization across all teams. So it's not just an it focus and we build a platform basically to enable the building out of all of your processes, automation, orchestration, et cetera. >>We focus in ITSs because the it group is, is the best entry point for this kind of functionality inside of an organization because they have the best broad kind of horizontal view across all departments. Um, but again, we've got customers that use it in a pretty much any kind of way from running public housing development to all kinds of just uses that we never even imagined. Right. Okay. So I think what's confusing to people, certainly the layman certainly me, is you know, there's kind of all these competing system of records, it appears from the outside and we know ITSMs space, we've covered it for a long time. You know, you need to have a single system of record to know what the answer is. And yet, you know, PagerDuty announces all these integrations with all these systems like Cherwell. How do those systems work together to still maintain kind of system of record integrity and yet leverage the capabilities of the different platforms? >>Yeah. You know, it's an interesting thing because we're seeing so much convergence in the industry and we're seeing that, you know, pretty much all of our software has to talk to all of our software, right? And so what we're seeing a lot is system of record doesn't necessarily mean the same thing that it used to. You may have a system of record for your customer data, you may have a system of record for your financial data, you may have a system of record for your request management and workflow data. And the key is really making those things talk to each other. And so, you know, between the, you know, the cloud and all of the growth that we've had there and, and the way that software just works, it's really about being able to handshake and talk to other companies. Software. Okay. And you know, so it's also about companies, one of the problems that happens in a lot of companies is you choose too many systems of record and you know, so you've got this team that all has different data. >>So I think that's part of what we'll see the kind of the future battle of the next few years is either we all got to talk together or somebody has to, you know, become more prevalent and become a bigger system of record if you get what I mean. So what are some of the use cases where the two systems, PagerDuty system, the Cherwell system would interact around a particular type of customer interaction? Yup. So there's a couple of different entry points, but uh, one of them is, so let's say a customer has a request so it's not even an incident for example. So they have a request and you've got SLS where you've got to fulfill a request very quickly. Um, you know, Sharewell is great at getting that request, interacting with the customer, making sure that they know, you know what to expect and whatnot. PagerDuty is great at getting the team together and getting people together to fulfill those things. >>And so there's that kind of transition point where that request goes to PagerDuty and PagerDuty gets to bring the team together, work on fulfilling that thing and get back to the customer, Hey, your thing has been fulfilled. Okay. So another one that happens, a great use case is, you know, we have a lot of links to different event monitoring. You know, just like PagerDuty does. But a lot of times those things will come to our system and turn into, uh, incidents, you know, in our system. So we're able to send that data over to PagerDuty and basically with up the team and get things moving so that we can resolve that event. And we have a upcoming integration to basically share that back and forth. I believe we're actually officially announcing it next week at our conference in Nashville. Um, but so we have an upcoming integration so that we'll be pushing stuff to directional and getting things from pager duty and pushing things back in. >>Great example. That's a great uh, example cause what you're basically doing is breaking the problem down into the pieces that each of the different software takes care of and PagerDuty's really good at figuring out kind of who the team needs to be pulling together the teams and having a relatively low impact, uh, task group to come in and fix that, that the resolution. Well, and you know, while being a system of record for request management and workflow and whatnot, you know, one of the things that we see in the industry is so many of the customers want best of breed. They don't necessarily want one piece of software to come in and try to be everything cause nobody can be everything. Right? And so that key of lets you know, PagerDuty does what they're really good at. We do what we're really good at. Um, our customers really like that. >>So that's how we partner with other companies. Okay. So later today I think you're giving a session on low code. Um, what does low code, I mean I I have an opinion but share would, do you guys think it's low code or why is low code so, so low code is really important for a few reasons, but the first is really, I would say time to value. So when you have to spin up a development team and spend a lot of time to build everything that you want to do in your organization, just a simple business process that can take a lot of time and expense. So the Sharewell platform is built in a low code way. Most of the things that you can do in our software you do through drag and drop interfaces. And a lot of times we'll have people a little skeptical. >>You know, when they first encounter us, no, we need to write Java script or we need to write some language and we bring them into the system and they find, no, not only do not have to, but you can accomplish what you needed to before you got done planning what code you were going to go. Right. You know, forget testing and all that kind of stuff. So most of what you can do in Sharewell is actually no code, but we call it low code because when it comes to integrating, oftentimes you need to speak to other API. So you know, not every piece of software out there is no code. So talking to rest API is talking to other API APIs, you know, integrating things together. That's where a little bit of code comes in. But we also have, you know, basically drag and drop interfaces for even integrating to other things. >>We have something in tune of 80 partnerships right now, partners that we integrate with and that number is growing all the time. Okay. So is the main benefit of low code just the existing developers being able to move faster or we're hearing a lot of conversation about is really kind of democratization and letting people at maybe kid code in the ed are not qualified to do that last integration step, but the start to build absolute lows and processes without having to figure out if I'm doing it in Java or Perl. Yeah, no, it's, it's definitely both of those things. I mean, you know, so you know, the time to value aspect is important for those devs, but often, you know, companies can be utilizing those resources in a much more fruitful manner. And so if you allow the service owners or business analysts to be able to go in and actually affect those processes, just like you're saying, that democratization really helps speed up a business. >>Right? So in terms of engines for your guys' growth, you know, there's a bunch of them that are talked about all the time. There's dev ops, um, which, which is clearly the right bet to make 10 years ago. There's cloud, which has worked out pretty well. Um, and then this whole thing, that digital transformation that everyone is, is, is a, is trying to get done. Yup. No. Which of those three do you think are most important? How do you see those kinds of playing out in your business? So, you know, I think all three are very important. I think digital transformation though is, you know, if you don't transform your business and take advantage of digital transformation right now, you're liking amoeba in the primordial goo. Watching those first fish walk on land and laughing at, that's just a trend. You know, I think all businesses need to transform themselves and take advantage of the digital technologies that they can get ahold of. >>So I think for us, you know, being an accelerator for that being a way that you can bring inputs and outputs into a singular platform and basically, you know, speed up that ability to transform and make it more predictable, uh, utilizing governance and auditability and all those things that don't generally happen in a dev ops or a transformation environment. Right. That's really our key and that's, I think where we're going to see the industry. You know, everybody has to transform to stay competitive and so we're focused on that transformation or I'm distracted. Jen just walked by the star of the show and really make it. Absolutely. All right, Josh, thanks for taking a few minutes. Good luck on your talk. No brag, good luck at your event in Nashville. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Josh on Jeff here watching the cube words PagerDuty summit at the historic Wetsons de France. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host. Still Minutemen. >> Hi, I'm Stew Minutemen. And welcome to a special cute conversation here in our Boston Areas studio where in spring 2019 whole lot of shows where the cubes gonna be on going to lots of events so many different technologies were covering on one of the areas we always love to be able to dig into is what's happening with the users. Many of these shows, we go to our user conferences as well as the community. Really happy to Boca Burger. Believe first time on the program. Steve Methodists famous. Who is the newly elected president of the mug s. So I think most of Ronan should know the V mug organization to the VM where User group. We've done cube events at, you know, the most related events. Absolute talked about the mug we've had, you know, the CEO of the mug on the program. And of course, the VM were Community 2019 will be the 10th year of the Cube at VM World. Still figuring out if we should do a party and stuff like that. We know all the ins and outs of what happened at that show. But you know the V mugs itself? I've attended many. Your Boston V mug is one that I've been, too. But before we get into the mug stuff, Steve could just give us a little bit of your back, because you are. You're practicing your user yourself. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for having me. You know what? I've been watching the cube for years, and it's ah, it's great to be on this side of the of the screen, right? So, yes. So I'm Steve. I think I, you know, show up every day as the associate chief information officer of the University of Massachusetts. Little just for 95 here, and that's my day job. That's my career, right? But what? You know what? I'm excited to be here to talk about what I'm excited in general with the mug is it's a community organization. And so it's a volunteer gig, and that's true of all of our leadership, right? So the from the president of the board of directors to our local leaders around the world, they're all volunteers, and that's I think, what makes it special is We're doing this because we're excited about it. We're passionate about it. >> Yeah, you know the mugs, It's, you know, created by users for user's. You go to them, talk a little bit. It's evolved a lot, you know, It started as just a bunch of independent little events. Is now you know, my Twitter feed. I feel like constantly every day. It's like, Oh, wait, who is at the St Louis? The Wisconsin one? I'll get like ads for like, it's like a weight is the Northeast one. I'm like, Oh, is that here in New England that I don't know about? No, no, no. It's in the UK on things like that. So I get ads and friends around the world and I love seeing the community. So, boy, how do you guys keep it all straight? Man, is that allow both the organic nature as well as some of the coordination and understanding of what's going on. How do you balance that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, So I was a V mug member for many, many years before I ever got interested in becoming a leader, and you're right it when it started, it was 10 of us would get around with a six pack of beer and a box of pizza, right? And we'd be talking shop and that, you know, that was awesome. And that's what would that was, how it started. But you get to a certain scale when you start talking about having 50,000 now, over 125,000 members around the world. You gotta coordinate that somehow you're right on the money with that. And so that's why you know, we have, you know, a strong, um, coordination effort that is our offices down in Nashville, Tennessee, and their their role is to enable our leaders to give back to their community and take the burden out of running these things. You know, sourcing venues and, you know, working with hotels and stuff. That is effort that not everybody wants to do all the time. And so to do that for them lets them focus on the really cool stuff which is the tech and connecting users. >> Yeah. Can you speak a little bit too? You know what were some of the speeds and feed to the event? How many do you have How much growing, you know, Like I'm signed up. I get the newsletter for activities as well as you know, lots of weapons. I've spoken on some of the webinars too. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for that s o. We have over 30 user cons around the world on three continents. >> In fact, what's the user cough? >> Great questions. So user kind is user conference, you know, consolidated into user Connery. And those are hundreds of end users getting together around the world were on three continents. In fact, I was fortunate enough in March, I went to Australia and I spoke at Sydney and Melbourne on That was awesome, getting to meet users literally, almost a sw far away from Boston. As you can get having the same challenges in the office day today, solving the same business problems with technology. So that was exciting. And so we've got those all over. We also have local meetings which are, you know, smaller in scope and often more focused on content. We've got 235 or Maur local chapters around the world. They're talking about this, and so we're really engaged at multiple levels with this and like you talk about. We have the online events which are global in scope. And we do those, you know, we time so that people in our time zone here in the States could get to them as well as folks in, you know, e m b A and a factory. >> Yeah, and I have to imagine the attendees have to vary. I mean, is it primarily for, you know, Sylvie, um, where admin is the primary title there up to, you know, people that are CEOs or one of the CEOs? >> Yes. So that actually we've seen that change over the past couple years, which is exciting for me being in the role that I'm in is you're right historically was vey Sphere admits, right? And we're all getting together. We're talking about how do we partition our lungs appropriately, right? And now it has switched. We see a lot more architect titles. We Seymour director titles coming in because, you know, I said the other day I was in Charlotte talking and I said, You know, business is being written in code, right? And so there's a lot more emphasis on what it's happening with V m wearing his VM worth portfolio expands. We've got a lot of new type of members coming into the group, which is exciting. >> Yeah, And what about the contents out? How much of it is user generated content versus VM were content and then, you know, I understand sponsorships or part of it vendors. The vendor ecosystem, which vm where has a robust ecosystem? Yes, you know, help make sure that it's financially viable for things to happen and as well as participate in the contest. >> Yes, I feel like I almost planted that question because it's such a good one. So, you know, in 2018 we started putting a strong emphasis on community content because we were, you know, we heard from remembers that awesome VM were content, awesome partner content. But we're starting to miss some of the user to user from the trenches, battle war stories, right? And so we put an emphasis on getting that back in and 2018 we've doubled down in 2019 in a big way, so if you've been to a user kind yet in 2019 but we've limited the number of sponsors sessions that we have, right so that we have more room for community content. We're actually able to get people from around the world to these events. So again, me and a couple folks from the States went toe Australia to share our story and then user story, right? And at the end of the day, we used to have sponsored sessions to sort of close it out. Now we have a community, our right, and Sophie Mug provides food and beverages and a chance to get together a network. And so that is a great community. Our and you know, I was at one recently and I was able to watch Ah, couple folks get to them. We're talking about different problems. They're having this and let me get your card so we can touch base on this later, which at the end of the day, that's what gets me motivated. That's what >> it's about. It's Steve. I won't touch on that for a second. You know what? Get you motivated. You've been doing this for years. You're, you know, putting your time in your president. I know. When I attended your Boston V mark the end of the day, it was a good community member talking about career and got some real good, you know, somebody we both know and it really gets you pumped up in something very, a little bit different from there. So talk a little bit without kind of your goals. For a CZ president of Emma, >> Sure eso I get excited about Vima because it's a community organization, right? And because, you know, I've said this a bunch of times. But for me, what excites me is it's a community of people with similar interests growing together right and reinforcing each other. I know for a fact that I can call ah whole bunch of people around the world and say, Hey, I'm having a problem technically or hey, I'm looking for some career advice or hey, one of my buddies is looking for work. Do you know of any opening somewhere? And that's really powerful, right? Because of the end of the day, I think the mug is about names and people and not logos, right? And so that's what it motivates me is seeing the change and the transformation of people and their career growth that V mug can provide. In fact, I know ah ton of people from Boston. In fact, several of them have. You know, they were administrators at a local organization. Maybe they moved into partners. Maybe they moved into vendors. Maybe they stay where they are, and they kept accelerating their growth. But I've seen tons of career growth and that that gets me excited watching people take the next step to be ableto to build a >> career, I tell you, most conferences, I go to the kind of jobs take boards, especially if you're kind of in the hot, cool new space they're all trying to hire. But especially when you go to a local on the smaller events, it's so much about the networking and the people. When I go to a local user, event it. Hey, what kind of jobs you hiring for who you're looking for and who do I know that's looking for those kind of things and trying to help connect? You know, people in cos cause I mean, you know, we all sometime in our career, you know we'll need help alone those lines that I have, something that's personally that you know, I always love to help >> you. I have a friend who said it. I think best, and I can't take credit for this, right? But it's It can be easy to get dismissed from your day job, right? One errant click could be the career limiting click. It is nigh impossible to be fired from the community, right? And that that, to me, is a powerful differentiator for folks that are plugged into a community versus those that are trying to go it >> alone. Yeah, there are some community guidelines that if you don't follow, you might be checking for sure, but no, if if we're there in good faith and we're doing everything like out, tell me it's speaking. You know, this is such, you know, change. Is this the constant in our world? You know, I've been around in the interview long enough. That's like, you know, I remember what the, um where was this tiny little company that had, you know, once a week, they had a barbecue for everybody in the company because they were, like, 100 of them. And, you know, you know, desktop was what they started working on first. And, you know, we also hear stories about when we first heard about the emotion and the like. But, you know, today you know Veum world is so many different aspects. The community is, you know, in many ways fragmented through so many different pieces. What are some of the hot, interesting things? How does seem a deal with the Oh, hey, I want the Aye Aye or the Dev Ops or the you know where where's the vmc cloud versus all these various flavors? How do you balance all that out? All these different pieces of the community? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. And to be fair with you, I think that's an area that were still getting better at. And we're still adapting to write. You know, if you look at V mug Five years ago, we were the V's fear, sort of first, last and always right. And now you know, especially is VM. Where's portfolio keeps increasing and they keep moving into new areas. That's new areas for us, too. And so, you know, we've got a big, uh, initiative over the next year to really reach out and and see where we can connect with, you know, the kubernetes environment, right? Cause that the hefty oh acquisition is a really big deal. and I think fundamentally changes or potential community, right? And so you know, we've launched a bunch of special interest groups over the span of the past couple years, and I think that's a big piece of it, which is, if you're really interested in networking and security, here's an area that you can connect in and folks that are like minded. If you're really interested in and user computing, here's what you can connect into. And so I think, you know, as we continue to grow and you know, we're, you know, hundreds of thousands of people now around the world so that you can be a challenge. But I think it's It's also a huge opportunity for us to be ableto keep building that connection with folks and saying, Hey, you know, as you continue to move through your career, it's not always gonna be this. You're right. Change is constant. So hey, what's on the horizon for >> you? When I look at like the field organization for being where boy, I wonder when we're gonna have the sand and NSX user groups just because there's such a strong emphasis on the pieces, the business right now? Yeah, All right, Steve, let's change that for a second. Sure said, You know, you're you got CEO is part of your title, their eyes, what you're doing. Tell me about your life these days and you know the stresses and strains And what what's changing these days and what's exciting? You >> sure? So you know, it's exciting to have moved for my career because I'm an old school admin, right? I mean, that's my background. Uh, so, you know, as I've progressed, you know, I keep getting different things in my portfolio, right? So it started out as I was, you know, I was the admin, and then I was managing the systems engineering team. And then they added desktop support that was out of necessity was like, I'm not really a dustup person, right? So something new you need to learn. But then you start seeing where these synergies are, right? Not to hate, like the words energies. But the reality is that's where we launched our VD. I project at U Mass. Lowell, and that has been transformative for how we deliver education. And it has been a lot of ways. Reduced barriers to students to get access to things they couldn't before. So we had engineering students that would have to go out and finance a 3 $4000 laptop to get the horsepower to do their work. Now, that can use a chromebook, right? They don't have to have that because we do that for them and just they have to have any device t get access via via where horizon. Right, So that happened, and then, you know, then they moved in. Our service is operation, right? So what I'm interested now is how do we deliver applications seamlessly to users to give them the best possible experience without needing to think about it? Because if you and I have been around long enough that it used to be a hassle to figure out okay, I need to get this done. That means they need to get this new applications I have to go to I t there and I have my laptop. Now it's the expectation is just like you and I really want to pull out my phone now and go to the APP store and get it right. So how do we enable that to make it very seamless and remove any friction to people getting their work >> done? Yeah, absolutely. That the enterprise app store is something we've talked about is not just the Amazon marketplace these days. >> In some ways, it is so not all applications rate. Some applications are more specific to platforms. And so that's a challenge, which is, you know, I'm a professor. I really like my iPad. Well, how do I get S P ss on that? Okay, well, let me come up with some solutions. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious if you have any thoughts just from the education standpoint, how that ties into i t. Personally myself, I think I was in my second job out of school before I realized I was in the i t industry because I studied engineering they didn't teach us about. Oh, well, here's the industry's You're working. I knew tech, and I knew various pieces of it and, you know, was learning networking and all these various pieces there. But, you know, the industry viewpoint as a technology person wasn't something. I spend a lot of time. I was just in a conference this week and they were talking about, you know, some of the machine learning pieces. There was an analyst got up on stage is like here I have a life hack for you, he said. What you need to do is get a summer intern that's been at least a junior in college that studied this stuff, and they can educate you on all these cool new things because those of us have been here a while that there's only tools and they're teaching them at the universities. And therefore that's one of those areas that even if you have years, well, if you need to get that retraining and they can help with that >> no, that's that to me is one of most exciting parts about working in education is that our faculty are constantly pushing us in new directions that we haven't even contemplated yet. So we were buying GPU raise in order to start doing a I. Before I even knew why we were doing and there was like, Hey, I need this and I was like, Are you doing like a quake server? Like they were mining Bitcoins? I don't think so, but it was, you know, that was that was that was an area for us and now we're old. Had it this stuff, right? And so that is a exciting thing to be able to partner with people that are on the bleeding edge of innovation and hear about the work that they're doing and not just in in the tech field, but how technology is enabling Other drew some groundbreaking research in, you know, the life sciences space that the technology is enabling in a way that it wasn't possible before. In fact, I had one faculty member tell me, Geez, maybe six months ago. That said, the laboratory of the past is beakers and Silla scopes, right? The laboratory of the future is how many cores can you get? >> Yeah, all right, So next week is Del Technologies world. So you know the show. The combination of what used to be A M, C World and Del World put together a big show expecting around 15,000 people in Las Vegas to be the 10th year actually of what used to be M. C world. We actually did a bunch of dead worlds together. For me personally, it's like 17 or 18 of the M C world that I've been, too, just because disclaimer former emcee employees. So V mugs there on dhe, Maybe explain. You know, the mugs roll there. What you're looking to accomplish what you get out of a show like that. >> Sure. So V mug is a part of the affiliation of del Technologies user communities. Right? And what I love about user communities is they're not mutually exclusive, right? You absolutely can. Being a converged and Avi mug and a data protection user group. It's all about what fits your needs and what you're doing back in the office. And, you know, we're excited to be there because there's a ton of the move members that are coming to Deltek World, right? And so we're there to support our community and be a resource for them. And that's exciting for us because, you know, Del Del Technologies World is a whole bunch of really cool attack that were that were seeing people run vm were on Ray. We're seeing via more partner with, and so that's exciting for us. >> Yeah, and it's a try. Hadn't realized because, like, I've been to one of the converted user group events before, didn't realize that there was kind of an affiliation between those but makes all the sense in the world. >> Yeah, right. And it's, you know, again, it's an open hand thing, right? Beaten and one being the other. You realize them both. For what? They're what They're great at connecting with people that are doing the same thing. There's a ton of people running VM wear on. Ah, myriad. Like you talked about earlier VM Where's partner? Ecosystem is massive, right? But many, many, many in fact, I would say a huge majority of converged folks are running VM we're >> on it. All right. So, Steve want to give you the final word? What's the call to action? Understand? A lot of people in the community, but always looking from or always, ways for people to get involved. So where do they go? What? What would you recommend? >> Yeah, thanks. So if if you are not plugged into user community now, when you're in the tech field, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Right? V mug, obviously, is the one that's closest to my heart, right? If you're in that space, we'd love to have you as part of our community. And it's really easy. Go to V mug. dot com and sign up and see where the next meet up is and go there, right? If you're not into the VM where space and I know you have lots of folks that air, they're doing different things. Go check out your community, right? But I tell you, the career advantages to being in a user community are immense, and I frankly was able to track my career growth from admin to manager to director to associate CEO, right alongside my community involvement. And so it's something I'm passionate about, and I would encourage everybody to check out. >> Yeah, it's Steve. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I give a personal plug on this. There are a lot of communities out there, the virtual ization community, especially the VM. One specifically is, you know, a little bit special from the rest. You know, I've seen it's not the only one, but is definitely Maur of. It's definitely welcoming. They're always looking for feedback, and it's a good collaborative environment. I've done surveys in the group that you get way better feedback than I do in certain other sectors in just so many people that are looking to get involved. So it's one that you know, I'm not only interviewing, but, you know, I can personally vouch for its steeple. Thank you. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright. And be sure to check out the cube dot net. Of course, we've got dealt technologies world in the immediate future. Not that long until we get to the end of summer. And vm World 2019 back in San Francisco, the Q will be there. Double set. So for both del world del Technologies world and VM World. So come find us in Las Vegas. If you're Adele or Mosconi West in the lobby is where will be for the emerald 2019 and lots and lots of other shows. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you.

>> Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE! Covering CommVault Go 2018. Brought to you by CommVault. >> I hear the train a'comin'. It's rollin' round the bend, and I ain't seen the sun shine since I don't know when. Oh, you're watching theCUBE, and we're in Nashville, Tennessee. Yes, Johnny Cash, he played his last days here. And I'm Stu Miniman with Keith Townsend. And helping us to round up the program, he's wearing a He Wore Black shirt >> Yes I am. >> Which is a Johnny Cash tribute band. And my only guest of the day wearing cowboy boots. Friend of mine, happy to help us round this up, David Chapa, who's the founder of the CTO Group, also known as Mister Recovery in the industry. David, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. CTE Group. >> CTE Group, I'm sorry. >> I haven't made the O level yet. >> I'm sorry, I'm confusing things with the CTO Advisor here. >> I know, you got an O, you got an E, we have almost all the letters. >> We got all these TLEs, TLAs in the industry here, but thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, so my first time at the CommVault show. I've known CommVault for a lot of years. Keith's been here twice. What's your experience been at the show so far? >> This is my first time to the show. So far it's been very impressive. This show room floor is huge. I like how they set it up. They want it set up like it's a street, and they were successful. You can walk down, you can stroll down a street. You can go and see different vendors. I thought it was, as far as the design, I thought it was really really good. Information's great. >> Yeah. What I found, "engaging" is what I'd say, that's what you want with a show floor. The booths did pretty well, but there's little pavilions where they're having lots of sessions. Every time I went by, there were people there. There's labs, people going away, and there's media and podcasts, and food and beverage, and all that stuff there, but a nice dynamic and really kept it going and that's been this show itself. I found it to be engaging. There's a lot going on, a lot of announcements. What's your take on CommVault? >> Well, I think that their transformation, they've been talking about, you know, transform the company. I heard a lot about, you know, people tag us as a legacy company. We're too expensive, we're this, we're that. I heard Bob say a couple times, "What 20-year-old company is not going to be called legacy?" There's some truth to that. But they've done, I think, a pretty good job of kind of laying out what it is they plan on doing. They've tried to simplify things. I look at different companies and I often say this to clients. You know, there's four things you really want to worry about in life when you're running a business. You want to make money, that's one of them. You want to make sure you have good customer satisfaction. You make sure your people are happy, and you want to make sure you make it easy for people to do business with you. And I think CommVault's really taking a hard look at the, how do we make it easy for them to do business with us. And so they've reduced the, they put all our products on one slide, which I thought was pretty impressive. They've also simplified the pricing, which I thought was pretty impressive. So, I think, what they are doing is they are trying to make some good strides to make those things happen and they are focusing on the customers as a result. >> All right. So, Keith, I'm going to let you ask some questions. But we talked some in our opening analysis, but after talking to customers, talking to their execs, what are you walking away with from this show? >> You know what? Some companies are transformed because it's just the natural flow of business. They are forced into competition. They have to react. CommVault's transformation is not a fluke. From the top down, this is not silos. This is not individual product silos competing in their individual silo. We talked to Al Bunte, the COO, and he talked about doing the right thing by the customer because it's the right thing to do. And if you don't focus on money, money will come. I think we all like to have those idealistic views, but, I think, it's something that on the surface, at least from this show, is working for CommVault. They are transformed. I ran a backup project. One of my first major projects of my IT career almost 20 years ago. And one of the big dogs was CommVault. Needless to say with any technology, much, much different company dealing with today than I dealt with 20 years ago. And I think I'd go as far as to say CommVault was a much different company than three years ago versus the first CommVault Go. >> Coming into this show certain things I was looking for. How do they play in the cloud? Okay. Are they actually doing things with AI? Or as I saw this joke on the internet that was a zoo took a donkey and painted stripes on it and said, "Typical AI start-up VC funded." You know, not actually a zebra and the like. And I tell you, the questions that I had, I think CommVault had a good solid answer. At the open this morning we said there wasn't anything that jumped out that was like, "Wow. I've never heard of that or thought of it." But, you know, good customer base. You know, strong brand in the industry. And making a lot of the right moves to get there. The announcements this week, anything jump out at you? Anything surprise you? >> Nothing surprised me. But, you know, things that jump out cause my focus with the CT Group is on really disaster recovery, business continuity, helping customers really understand the value of the data, and how to recover that data. I shouldn't say the data because it's about recovering the mission of the business, whatever that may be. And one of the things that I liked that I heard this yesterday and today, was about their recovery readiness report. I thought that was pretty interesting. Their interface is very clean and a customer can drill into the RP that they want. And I got a demo earlier from one of the developers and that was one thing that stood out. Because for me, it's all about the recovery. Backup is great. I've been doing backup for a long time. But if you can't recover that stuff, man, they, you know, once someone said that a backup admin is a great job because no one knows your name. >> (laughs) >> Until you can't restore the data, and then they know your first name, last name, and middle initial. And my middle initial is A, so you can imagine the kind of names I was called when that stuff wasn't happening. When you can have a plan, and that's the idea, disaster recovery plan, and then you can respond and not react, that's where you want to be. And I think that's what CommVault needs to deliver to their customers to be successful in this transformation is, how can they achieve that plan, and how can they be responsive and not reactive, cause reactive is when you make mistakes. >> So I think one of the things that I had tweeted earlier was that CommVault isn't asleep at the wheel. And we asked Al a challenging question, which was, "How do you provide these new features that's expected in the modern backup data protection platform, but yet please your legacy customer? I mean, some customers don't want the change. If they didn't have to upgrade their backup software for three years, they'd prefer not to. So one of the things I thought is interesting is that their walking a tightrope. And, Dave, I'd like to hear from you on your thoughts around their ability to please their traditional legacy customer while attracting net new customers. >> There's that word again, legacy. Now it's with the customers. I think as you look at the market, and you guys know this, I had a conversation with a health care customer months and months and months ago. Actually, I think it was about two years ago. And the CTO was really a legacy minded person. Why should we go to the cloud when everything is working? Why should we do this when everything is working? Well, the conversation I had with him was, "Your business is going to be accelerating. Your competition will be accelerating. And you need to keep up with the competition by adopting some of these things that will help you move faster, smarter, and make better decisions for your business." So those legacy customers at some point will have to make a decision that we need to be competitive in the market place and we're going to need new tools. Now for those customer that are using CommVault today, well, CommVault is sitting there with their new platform, the transformative ideas that they have to help them get there. So, you know, to try to answer your question, it's really hard. There will be legacy customers, of course, but those legacy customers need to survive. And you've got to survive by responding to the market demands. >> It was interesting for me to look at this ecosystem here. Talk about the partnerships. Talk about how their playing in multi-cloud. There are, potentially, a lot of threats to a CommVault out there. Not just, you know, the start-ups that are coming directly after this space that are well funded, but, you know, the same people that are trying to partner with in the public cloud, well stop partnering with the public cloud. They are driving a lot of innovation in the industry in doing this. What does CommVault need to do to stay successful, you know, grow their customer base, and, you know, accelerate through this transformation? >> Well I saw the interview that you did with Al. And the one thing he said was, "Listen to the customers." And that is one thing I would tell them too is, you have to listen to your customers. And you have to comprehend what they are saying. Not just understand what they are saying. Those are two different things. When you can comprehend what someone is saying that means you can repeat that with the same passion in your own words. So listen to your customers, really comprehend what their challenges are and how you can help them, either with the existing product or the features that you need to develop to help them get over that hump or that challenge they have. So that to me is the biggest thing, listen to the customers. That's going to drive the market. >> Yeah, David. I'm really taken a back by the amount of change, the amount of conversation around multi-cloud. We had a great conversation with the tech field data guys a little bit earlier about data management. One of the things that I'd like to hear from you from your industry perspective from CTE and helping customers with data recovery, and not just data recovery as you mentioned, business recovery. Are customers hearing the message from the CommVaults of the world that your cloud strategy, your multi-cloud strategies, starts with data, data management, data protection. Is that actually resonating with customers? Or is that a niche, I think, awareness? >> It depends on who you're talking to. So for me, I think any organization that wants to win the hearts and minds of the mid-market and the lower end of enterprise, you have to really start thinking more business centric. That's the focus of what we do. We look at business centric IT. And what does that mean? Well that means that you throw away the lexicon that we're so used to using in IT, and you really start to try to use the terms that the business will understand and comprehend. And the way you do that is by asking a lot of questions of the business. What's important? Why is it important? What's the mission? In IT, we should not be the ones that own the data, that own the application. We are the stewards or the custodian of that. And as the steward or custodian, we do know we have to protect it, but we don't know necessarily know why. But we need to understand that. And then, when we have that conversation with the with the business, then we can start talking to them about recovering the mission of that particular business unit. It might be two servers. It might be 40 servers. So is that message resonating with companies? I think, I think CommVault needs to do a better job at communicating at that business value level. And I think that this conference, this launching pad, if you will, is the starting point for them to do that. More companies want to understand how they can solve real business problems and challenges and not hear how fast your feature is or how cool this new widget is that you have in your product. They have real business challenges. They want to solve those challenges. >> All right. Well, David, that critical analysis is one of the reasons that I asked you on the program. Keith, it's been a pleasure doing the show with you today, as always. But before I let you off the hook, David, this is our first time doing the show in Nashville. I've barely gotten to see much of the city. Keith and his wife are checking out a little bit of it. I did get some Nashville hot chicken. But for those in our audience that maybe haven't been to Nashville, what are they missing here culturally, musically, and the like? >> Wow. What are you missing? Well there's a lot of great music. You can't find a bad musician in Nashville. If you do, they're not in town very long. >> (laughing) Run them out of town. >> Yeah. But Nashville is a very, very cool town. Downtown Nashville you walk around there at 10:00 in the morning you're hearing music. Live music anywhere you walk in. The country side is beautiful. So from a Johnny Cash perspective, you can go to Hendersonville and you can drive by where Johnny Cash's house was at right on the Old Hickory Lake there. It's burned down, but it's still, the foundation is still there. A lot of rich history in Nashville. You've got to come check it out. This is one of my favorite cities, man. And there's a reason why I changed my flight to get down to this show. I was already here in Nashville last week playing a music gig. I thought I could play the CommVault gig for a little while. I could do that. >> Excellent. So when you closed the show, what was the closer for the Johnny Cash tribute band? >> For me it's The Man In Black. >> All right. Well I appreciate you joining, David. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. For the whole crew here, thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of the coverage from this show. All the shows we'll be at the future. Feel free to hit us up through social media if you have any other questions. And once again, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

why from nashville tennessee it's the hue covering CommVault go 2018 brought to you by CommVault welcome back we're a few miles down the road from the Jack Daniel's distillery I believe there's some whiskey flowing on the show floor here but we're gonna finish a couple more interviews you're watching the cube I'm Stu minimun this is Keith Townsend happy to welcome back to the program Don Foster is the senior director of solutions marketing with Conn volt Don great to see you hey great thanks for the invite all right so been really good energy at the show these second time at the program it's my first you've got 2000 of the loyal supporters here lots of breakouts you know the pavilions been hopping labs and everything yeah how's the show been for you so far I think it's been incredible I mean first hats off to our partners and customers for coming the buzz is great this year we try to do something maybe a little bit different than in years past and really make it all about the partner ecosystem and about how solutions are more than just combo software it's CommVault together with our partners really get the outcomes what the customers want so we've really integrated everything in as best we possibly can from the content and the theaters and who's doing presentations and even how we do some of the collaboration yeah one of the themes we've been poking at a bit is like okay what's the same and what's different about CommVault you've got obviously you know trusted brand got a lot of existing customers but you know this is not the CommVault of five years ago it was a really broad set of announcements this week yeah I want want you to say what what's been anything surprise you as to kind of what is resonating which things people are getting most excited about I'm sure yesterday when you showed off that bezel and a bunch of people were booing and I you're like really the bezels it's a bunch of geeks here yeah so you know sometimes the flashy lights still you know get us going for sure well like there's always a few things that kind of surprise you and some things that really don't I mean you say what's same what's different you know there's a few terms that we use one of them being powerful simplicity the fact that the power that comma offers for customers from technology perspective you know that's always a mainstay and I think our customers know that our partners absolutely know that and the fact that we can deliver these these solutions for our customers that are really interesting an integrated way is always powerful the simplicity side I don't know even listening to Al not too long ago talking about hey we need to make things more simplified that's really resonating well and it's not just a dashboard or an interface but it's all the automation that's coming behind the scenes that's really starting to change people's idea in my and their minds and I mean we know we know the customers are expecting more me a Bob and I'll talk to battle Don look on that on the keynote stage our partners are expecting more so we need to deliver more as well so I mean those are some really interesting things on the bezel you know it's interesting appliances you never think it's like people don't want to see the equipment I mean that people see servers and their server racks every day but you bring a piece of equipment you stick in our podium and everyone wants to touch it take a selfie with it it's the new appliance look I applaud your team for not you know smoke and you know music and everything and you know here's the unveiling yeah your software company and therefore one of the deployment models might be we make it nice and easy here it is that's great and everything yeah you have little design people do their thing but at the end of the day I don't want to think about it it's most of the stuff sticking in racks in my data center or in the cloud aren't things that I need to worry about right right I mean it appliance is cool but guess what what we're doing with partners like HP and Cisco on building even larger scale and appliance that's just as school if not maybe cooler so I mean it's just it's great kind of showcase that sort of a spectrum of what we can do for our customers so let's talk about the part of the ecosystem for the size so you guys have a really big show floor great announcements with Cisco HPE but 500 partners doing a partner portion of the show what are some of the under-the-radar announcements or even trends that you've seen that customers are excited about yeah sure so actually I just before I came out here I was a TBC with one of our large worldwide partners and one of the things we were talking about they're super excited about the CommVault activate a product and then did the portfolio of applications that were launching and they basically look you guys absolutely nailed it it's kind of the duh moment you know in fact the partner said three years ago we were trying to tell our customers it's it's the data stupid like the data it's that's what's most important deer is cool but it's the data and when they heard this came out it's a whole nother route for them to talk to customers about how they can do things smarter around their data without trying to sell them on necessarily swapping out back and recovery first so let's really understand what your environment looks like and I'm hearing a lot of buzz from our partner community just on how cool what this might be able to do for them and how they're building their business but more importantly the customers are starting to realize hey GDP are just isn't in an EU thing the California just brought their own regulations we're gonna see that probably come to a state near year before you know it so you're gonna have to have a need to act and really maintain and control that data that's really what activate does right going beyond just metadata and giving giving companies a chance to really understand what they have and how they might need to act against it either to meet their compliance requirements or maybe just be smarter with data yeah I love that be smarter with data I think I was saying you know half the customers that they're starting with compliance because that's something we have to do but then there's the opportunities as to what can I do with the data a great example in the keynote it was like oh well I can actually use intelligence too how do I call the data yes you want to save a lot of data but I don't necessarily need to save all the data and that could save me millions of dollars when I do that so yeah I mean the power of data I think we are still in the early days of you know how does CommVault help customers through that that's so I mean it's it's really kind of in the breath of how we crawl information and what we sort of unlock as we do that right so you probably saw we talked about the four dimensional index the 40 index and it's real it's to call it 4d just to try to make it sound super technical but there really are multiple dimensions that we pull together from information and the meta information and where it comes from and whatnot that's all super important from a starting point but once you start working through a review process you've been vent oriented you want to be able to start adding in some tags maybe some entity detail on where and how that fits the organization and then from that you can get deeper into context and content so the content indexing adding and those are tributes being able to really start to align different different sets of data against one another and then the next piece which we do a little bit ourselves and we also work with partners like lucid works like folks like brain space we can start driving context from that information so before we've even talked about moving or storing data we're crawling this information and really giving customers the chance to solve what really is probably a top-three issue for CIOs and that's what they do do I have where is it and is there value in it or is there risk in it or what is is what I don't know about my data bigger than I realize and that's what this helps to unlock and solve for so I think now we're at the beginning of just the beginning of where infrastructure traditional infrastructure companies like con vault are bleeding into data management specifically with 4d indexing where we're providing data outside of the traditional or what's the file size the data was created centered on recover backing up recovering today that actually providing business context and value that application is v's can pick up are you starting to see any movement in is v-space to leveraging the data that's provided by index 40 so we're definitely seeing interest you know so when people think about data they tend to go down this idea of a data Lake and I've talked I'm sure you guys have heard this oh yeah we just throw the data Lake we throw the data lake well what are you throwing in the data Lake now that's a good question we don't know what's in the data Lake anymore and it becomes a data swamp you probably heard those level of stories right well if you don't know what's in there if the integrity of the information then it becomes a major challenge well a lot of the partners the is V is the folks that want to build and work on solutions outside of you know on top of the data they need to know that they have a good source of truth from what they're working from so being able to showcase that we have sort of that virtual data layer the fact that we can crawl data it's not even under our own management and then be able to offer that information back up to another another partner that really starts to you know sparks and some ideas or maybe what could be next so action we're still working through that we still have some things to do around software development kits and make it easier for our partners to build and get that ecosystem going but it's absolutely right down the alley what we were we want to take this all right so Don I hear your data Lake and the data swamp and when we go to the world of multi cloud and edge components really what we get into is the data ocean because there are currents and weather patterns and you know challenges unforeseen the edge of the map you know don't go there things like that it's one of the things you know I've been looking at the last couple of years when I look at companies like comm vault is you know how do you play in the multi cloud world we had a good chat with AWS I stopped by the Microsoft Azure booth here and as things like multi cloud and edge computing fit in you know weirdoes comm bolt fit so on the cloud space I mean it really starts with how you're actually leveraging or moving data or using data in the cloud right and it seems seems minor but if you're not really using the cloud natively if you're not storing data in a way that an s3 blob expects it and you don't have the index behind it if you're just passing it out into containers so you're not really putting that rigor to what that information is then you start to lose a lot of the downstream capability and so taking advantage of all these different services that are inside of the cloud so I mean this is back in 2008 you know 2007 when AWS was starting to really hit cloud computing you started hearing about Microsoft and Microsoft as you're starting up we realized that we wanted to work with these blob based storage devices and from there we realized all right if we're gonna let customers go to the cloud we want to make sure that once their data goes there there's never a reason for them necessarily to have to pull it back let's be able to help them orchestrate the resource utilization and in order for us to do that that data has to be natively accessible really easy right there in that cloud so that's kind of been our vision so as we've supported AWS and there are many services as we supported Microsoft Azure there many services as we're working through in supporting Google cloud platform Oracle cloud we're tying into those back-end services to make sure that that native access is always available and the red thread there is really the way CommVault indexes it very similar what the 40 index is from an activate perspective that red thread is how we can help manage and information across those clouds so it gives customers an ability to know all right it can be in cold storage but I still know where it is what it's meant for and at any point in time I can use it to drive more insight or pull it up into a production compute resource in the cloud all right don't want to give you the final word as we're coming towards the end of our broadcast here CommVault go what what main takeaway you want customers to have when they think about CommVault and think about this event great so I want them to walk away and realize okay the CommVault maybe they thought we were you know five years ago or the cow bought that maybe they're hearing from other people that isn't from us give us a chance and really take a look the things we're doing around AI the way we're working in a delivery of cloud environments the fact that we have that reliability that dependability and all the modern technologies that you're looking for I bet they will be surprised if they just give us a chance they'll see that the power in our software has become something that's really simple and will actually help them get faster to achieve their outcomes than if they looked at buying point solutions and trying to piece it together on their own so that's really well that's really what we're looking for is start to learn and understand at the new con volt is I bet will surprise them all right Don Foster really appreciate you giving us the update we appreciate the opportunity to be able to dig in with your customers in this broad ecosystem for Keith Townsend Tom's to minimas we'll be doing a wrap-up here in a second and thanks so much for watching the Q [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. (light upbeat music) It's theCUBE. (light upbeat music) Covering Commvault GO 2018. (light upbeat music) Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is Commvault GO, and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost is Keith Townsend. And I am thrilled to welcome to the program, Al Bunte, who's the Chief Operating Officer at Commvault. Thanks so much for having us and pleasure to see ya. >> Thanks for having me. >> Hold on. In your keynote this morning, your CEO did a little bit of the talking. We made the joke that you might be the Teller to his Penn there. >> (laughing) >> So Keith and I will talk for a little bit, and then we'll let you get in. >> Fine. >> All right. >> I'm used to that. >> All right. So Al, we've really had a good day here. We've talked to some of your customers, talked to partners, talked to a lot of people here. The story that's coming across is Commvault's a company we know but maybe don't know the Commvault of today. So what's some of the messages you want customers to kind of come away with from the show, and then we'll get in from it from there. >> Yes, so we're focusing on trying to get the message across that we've simplified. We're in a complex world, as you guys well know. You have to do it through automation. Lots of it. Orchestration, et cetera. And we're trying to drive outcomes that are better for our IT customers out there. Almost that simple. >> Yeah, you use the word simple. Actually I liked in the keynote there was a little back and forth you had. Cloud was supposed to be simple and cheap. And when people actually got in and did it, they found out that it really was neither. >> Al: Correct. >> The word that was used in the keynote was, well you want to be smart and that might lead to things that are simpler and everything. Bring us inside a little bit to what Commvault is doing that is smarter to lead to easier, simpler down the road. >> And or better outcomes. >> Stu: Sure. >> I agree. So yeah, again as you guys know, as new technologies and or infrastructures come out like cloud, their initial use case is we're just a parking lot for data. So just write it up there and whatever works. Well it turns out that's simple, but now if you really want to use that data and those capabilities up in the cloud for cooler use cases, now you should be doing it smarter. So we talked, guys, about automation again. We talked about how you even write that data initially. Write it natively, so there isn't a conversion back and forth. That's a lot of latency. And then throughout everything we're talking about, we're adding a lot of machine learning, analytic capabilities, maybe overusing the word AI but you know leading down that path, and it makes a big difference. Cause these are big complex operations. >> So let's talk about this simple and smarter lesson. We've obviously seen a lot of change come out of Commvault. I went to Commvault GO last year. Just between this year and last year, you guys have made strides. Licensing model completely changed. As you talk to customers who are dealing with these complexities as a result of cloud and they look at simplified licensing, what have been some of the lessons learned over the past twenty years that have made you guys comfortable making which I have to say is a pretty bold decision in licensing? What has enabled that decision? >> It's a good question, Keith. I think it gets at that's what they want (laughing). >> (laughing) >> It's about that simple. >> Seems simple enough. >> Yeah we went off and talked to not just enterprise customers but midmarket customers. Remember, we're doing a lot of our activity through partners, so you have a third party. You don't want to get too confusing there. So we pushed hard on that idea, both in quoting, selling, and applying, and we just worked it a lot with our customer base and determined simplicity, by the way, is the number one criteria these days. It trumps cost, it trumps risk reduction, it trumps capabilities. People want it's got to be simple. Or I prefer simplified. Not simple dumb, simple smart. >> All right so Al, Commvault has quite a few employees. >> Yes. >> You've got quite a lot of customers. >> Al: Yes. >> You've got some very well-funded startups in this space. How does a Commvault compete? As the COO, how do you put the organizational structure in place, and how do you enable the company to be able to compete against some of these well-funded new players? >> Yeah so that's always a challenge, it really is. So I think personally, I have to have philosophies like, you have to change as a company. No resting on your laurels. You guys know that in tech industry, you can't rest on your laurels. Number one. Number two, we used to have to compete and change just a little faster than our competition. Now you have to change faster than startups. So everything we do, we're trying to drive change, we're trying to drive responsiveness, we've moved to rapid dev models. Again, I know you guys are well versed on it. We want to be able to respond to the market back to pricing, licensing, messaging, extremely fast. Back to the way Bob and I started the business, is we always, always, always believed you have to have the best technology. You can't go to sleep on that. You can't go on autopilot. And in our space you have to have the best support. So don't try to finesse those things. There may be other things to finesse, but just go all out and really drive the technology, the support, and then where you guys are going now get your act together on marketing, packaging, pricing, messaging, positioning, all those things. And that's where we're really bringing our game up. >> Well on that competition front, you guys have a, I don't know if it's an advantage, disadvantage, you can tell me, against your competitors. You have up to 100,000 customers who have used this product or a variation of this product for 20 years. So disruption may not be the word they're looking to hear. Some of these customers may be wanting to hear steady, reliable solution that I've used over the years, served me well, while you're trying to appeal to a customer that we had on earlier that said, "Man, the idea that Commvault is going to sass and having these rapid deployment cycles is what I love about the company." Brand new customer to Commvault, how do you balance those two, and is it an advantage or disadvantage? >> It's a great question, and it's tricky >> Keith: (laughing) >> is the right answer. But I think I've heard a lot of people, Keith, say as well, "Wow, in your space, "we don't necessarily want simple and limited. "It's got to be reliable, it's got to be consistent, "it's got to be," tada tada tada, all those same kind of things. Experienced people really like that level of experience. So, the real simple answer is, sorry for overusing simple, is that you got to do both. You got to try and simplify, and again that's why I distinguish between simple and simplified. So, put automation against them, make it simple, save some minutes and steps in those IT guys' day. And try to do both. We've actually used the tag line, I don't think I did today, on powerful simplicity. So you got to do both kind of idea, if that makes sense. >> Yeah taking automation and using these automation techniques to make what was a complex job simple, bottle that up, abstract it and allow customers to use services. So how are your >> Al: Yeah. >> traditional customers reacting to the new combo? >> I think very well. Gotten really a lot of great feedback, new products through the summertime, through even back to the springtime. I happen to believe enterprises are coming around more to the idea that you have to consolidate your platform. The platform idea, you guys, to automate. I'm running into customers 50% of their activity is tied to compliance. Well and that takes a ton of automation, and you don't want to be doing scripts and all that stuff everyday, cause it's repeatable. So again take those kind of ideas, simplify the environment, sorry the operations, and yet still keep a ton of capabilities and features. >> Yeah it's funny, if we dial the clock back two decades, things like intelligently managing our data and building in automation probably wouldn't have sounded that foreign. But >> I agree. >> today, it's a little bit different. We've talked about a decade ago, metadata was something I think most of us in the storage industry were like, this is critically important, but today it's actually happening. Why is today so important and is it? We would love to hear your6 viewpoint on that. >> Another great question. I don't know is the honest answer for sure, but I think it's all got to be driven with just the mountain of data, as you guys know, just tremendous data growth, I think point one. Point two is, I think a lot of organizations are seeing that it's required to run their business. I mean if you saw Steve Connell this morning, he talked about data is the new water. It's like that. So more and more people are coming to that conclusion. You know, I can't go into a business meeting and say, "Guys, I think we out to do this," and they go, "What do you base that on?" It's just an instinct. That doesn't play anymore. So, it's about the data. It's using the data. And that's been tricky in this space. I always said in the back up arena, people just backed it up because they were supposed to. It didn't even occur to them that they might need to use it. So it's like a big dumping ground, but, yep, check the box we backed it up. So all those sorts, velocity, its volume, those kind of things too, and Keith, I think is probably where it's going. >> Yeah, it's interesting. We've been hearing for a number of years now, data's going to drive everything. You must have data, you can't have opinions. But we're still early to see data-driven businesses. >> Al: Yeah, I agree. >> Do you have some kind of early exemplars, or what do you expect to see over the next couple of years that will drive things even more? >> Well we're focused right now on the operations side of it. So we're using tons of these techniques. I don't know if you saw my example today, but take a typical run, you have 48,000 events and logs. How the heck you going to do that without advanced analytics and machinery? And you saw my example, and this is all true stuff. It got it down to six issues that you needed to deal with. So, again we're focused on that side of the equation, but we have a ton of customers wanting to do, and you're hearing all the BI type-of-use cases out there, be it retail, be it security, be it the media industry. How do I capture and save and understand what bits of media clips I have. Today it's just in a big pile, right? So, want to be nicer with your user. >> So Al, you're entrepreneur, you're farm boy background. >> Good word. >> You're a COO of a company going through tremendous transformation. As you talk to your peers, whether it's peers within other technology companies, the farming community, et cetera, all these industries that are being disruptive, what advice have you given to them? Commvault GO, is a great example of Five years ago you guys didn't have a show. You're transforming the company. What advice have you given to your peers or even received that you'd like to share? >> I think it's you can't kick the can down the road, really. You got to deal with it. It's a tough question, Keith, but I think just deal with it and start investing. We go into so many places, and I'd have to be careful on how I say this but in a lot of companies the capabilities that they have within their companies of dealing with major architectural issues and data issues is: A, some of that talent has left, and B, they got other, more short term activities that are pressing 'em. So, guys, just back up, take a broad view, take a long view. Go get your foundations in place, and do this data thing right. I guarantee it's going to pay off for ya. Or you're going to be really disappointed if you don't. So just embrace it. >> All right, well Al, really appreciate catching up with you. I think, summarize what you were saying there, you can't just think about it, you need to go. >> (laughing) >> Stu: All right. >> Oh, you're tricky. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Couple more left here at Commvault GO in Nashville, Tennesse. Thanks so much for watching theCube.

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE covering COMMVAULT GO 2018 brought to you by COMMVAULT. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is COMMVAULT GO and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program Lauren Nelson who's a principal analyst with Forrester. Thank you so much for joining us. >> My pleasure! >> Alright, our first time doing theCUBE in Nashville. COMMVAULT goes third year at the show. Have you been to the COMMVAULT shows in the past? >> I have. Not last year but the year prior, first year. >> So you skipped a year. From two years ago, just from my own knowledge COMMVAULT's changed quite a bit. I mean, they had some pressures on them. They've been going through a lot of pricing models. What's your take on what COMMVAULT's been doing in the last couple years? >> Yeah, a lot of focus on the show on pricing model changes, packages changes, emphasis on selling through partners and how to try and foster that in the actual village space. So, how do you bring partners into conversations early on and in a smoother way and just looking around, you've got white boards on tables, you've got spaces very changed in terms of collaborative space right in the middle of the booths rather than around the perimeter. So, very very interesting layout. >> Alright, so Lauren, your research, one of the things that you focus on is cloud and cloud migrations which is, of course, one of the key messages COMMVAULT talks about. When I talk to users, the multi-cloud strategy that they're figuring out, as I say, the ink's still drying and it's one of those things that's revisited quite often. What are you hearing from customers? What's your research showing of the state of cloud and how cloud migration fits in to it? >> Yeah, so you've got two really big topics right now on the cloud space. You've got the migration side and you've got the multi-cloud side and they are the conversations going on right now. First of all, you've got migration which is not SAS migration but migrating an app to an infrastructure as a service environment and that is something that is difficult. And a lot of companies that are talking about cloud migration don't always recognize that. They sum it up to SAS migration and often find that they are going to have higher performance when they move. They don't look at the challenges or the architectural changes from moving to vertical scaling to horizontal scaling and it's this conversation where, well, if we hear one company doing it, then maybe that should be our entire cloud strategy, And for a number of organizations, it is. Especially if you look at small mid-size organizations, they're looking at cloud migration as a data center replacement method. If you look at the average enterprise, that's not the typical story unless they're in a unique moment of change. Typically, what they're looking at is a few apps typically driven by location or app specific support that they're planning to get from their service provider of choice and they're moving this app for specific reasons. If you look holistically at our latest stats, survey taken in August, shows that 69 percent of enterprises in North America and Europe are actually migrating workloads to the cloud. If you then ask about how, they're methods are all over the map, the number of total apps they're moving is far less than what we're made to believe, in some of the more sensationalized or exaggerated stories or kind of unique use cases. When you look at the other side of that, you've got the multi-cloud story which is, all of a sudden with this migration topic, you get organizations questioning, "Should I be multi-cloud? "Am I doing this wrong? Am I adding needless complexity?" And we saw a bit of a drop in 2016, after GE presented at Amazon Re: Event, on associating with the term multi-cloud, that that was their specific strategy. And we've actually seen that come back in spades. In fact, we've seen a number of organizations actually say they are multi-cloud and then they have various definitions of what multi-cloud means for them. Multi-cloud is either public and private, private and some public cloud usage, multiple public, non cloud plus cloud. It's all over the map. And so, I think organizations are starting to take a step back, starting to think about, "How does my cloud strategy map to my larger organizational values?" Should seem obvious that should've been done that way from the start but for a lot of organizations it's a unique step that they're doing this year of being more pragmatic on how they should approach cloud. Not trying to force fit deployment models and look at the real opportunities that are there. And that includes all of these things. It includes private cloud and your on-prime data center for using it for specific workloads, for use cases that it just does not make sense to have that much change at once or to force the economics. The other side, you do see cloud migration. That is very much a real thing. It is not the most exciting use case to cloud. You're moving an app that you're not changing at all in terms of customer experience to an environment that is not meant to handle it that may suffer from performance. So it tends to be the less sexy side of the cloud strategies that we see today but very much apart. And it is the use of infrastructures of service for just that cheap infrastructure rather than some of it's more compelling past services. So it's an interesting time! All of those conversations are emerging, in fact, I can't tell you how many research reports we have on queue on these very topics around just the one-on-one level which I think is what we've primarily covered. Just the grazing the surface versus some of the latest conversations around, how do we have cloud neutral pass services that are obstructed from the underlying platform. Who will deliver those? What technologies will be standardized beneath that? How will we leverage kubernetes and the many different types. So, It's an interesting thing that I'm pretty passionate about as you can see. >> Well Lauren, let's talk about that step to when I'm out talking to customers about multi-cloud. One, multi-cloud or even cloud migration, that you're absolutely right, I see the same thing. They need to answer the why question like, "why are we even considering that?" And for multi-cloud I think customers are starting to look back and really wonder, "do I need that complexity?" "Is it really worth the effort?" But the second thing that I think customers underestimate the complexity of is having a data strategy unique to cloud versus their data strategy on PRIM. Are you seeing the same, that customers are realizing, wow, that I can't just take wholesale of my data strategy, my own PRIM data strategy and take that to the cloud. >> Yup, and it's the classic analyst response is, it depends. There's some organizations that are literally creating two different data hubs where they're having different access levels and different apps that you're allowed to connect to based on what classification is for that particular data. It's this theme of zero trust model of, how do you secure from the data out? And simply put, some data sets are more valuable than others. Some have security requirements that are far more expensive to meet and when you try and problem solve for this, some people try and think, well, is the easiest way just to completely segment the two, and be able to have control of how you access these two, Or, is it more complex than that? Do we need different databases that we're leveraging? Do we need to look at migrating some days or replicating some data to avoid data out fees from some of the major service providers? Do we leverage a third party like a collocation provider that can provide some ease for us in terms of movement of data? So, I think that's one of the big topics in the upcoming year is if I'm going to to multi-cloud, if I'm going to take on that effort, why am I doing that? You know, why am I taking on this as an important app? Is it because of fear of lock-in and flexibility long term? And if I do that, what are the implications in terms of data both security wise and cost wise. And a lot of organizations' challenge is, you know, you write out your cloud security, or your actual cloud strategy map and you don't really understand the proof points or where that strategy breaks until you start getting in to the details, testing out and trying to do this to try and figure out what are the actual costs of this scenario. So it's a challenging problem but it's one that I think organizations are going to be facing for the next few years. >> Yeah, it's interesting and I'm thinking through some of this. A lot of what we're talking about is infrastructure. And it's like, my private cloud, how do I modernize it? How do I simplify it? The reason we have infrastructure is to run my applications and the most important piece there is the data. How much does the cloud strategies that the data companies are working on look at data and how they are going to take advantage of data even more in the future? >> Yeah, it's a great question and there's so many different sides of this. There's one, you've got GDPR which is making them think about data in a whole new level just from a security and compliance perspective and how quickly they can react to requests that are put in by a particular citizen about their knowing what's on file for them as well as requesting it to be deleted and being held accountable for ability to complete that. On the other hand, you've got organizations that are trying to draw insights that are trying to change customer experience, design new products, market to their organizations more effectively leveraging data that they don't know where it is, they don't know how to use it or even how to start thinking about it together. They have a shortage of data scientists. They have a shortage of ... tools and solutions that can help them try and piece together this challenge. So, I would say companies have done very little of this so far. It is something that's on the road map. You get some organizations that are in the lead, that are testing the waters right now but if you look at the average organizations, they haven't even gotten to this. They're trying to use public cloud for very low end use cases at this point. >> Alright. So, I want to ask you when you talk about your research, of course, it depends. The customer by customer what they're having, but what differentiates a customer that can really start kind of moving up the stack, being more strategic, having IT really answering to the business and doing things with their data versus the laggards out there? Is there anything that you're finding in your research as to what separates those leaders from laggards? >> There's a few things and I'm not the first. A lot of vendors look for changes in executive boards. So, typically new folks coming in trying to change the way things are being done. Kind of, fresh innovative talent. That's a good flag that they're ready for it. Other organizations, there's the classic, they're threatened by others in their industry or believe they'll be threatened soon. For some organizations, it happens to be the right place, the right time. They have a leader they can trust that they believe will head this cloud strategy and that can tackle some of these challenges. For a lot of organizations, there's the desire, there is some action but often times the action is delayed. They face very stagnant cloud strategies. They face very stagnant data problems cause they're either missing cash, they're missing the ear of their executive board, or they have the wrong individuals that are trying to take the torch forward. So it takes a lot of critical self reflection as an organization that isn't easy. >> So let's talk a little about that (mumbles) within organizations. A lot of times, I'm seeing multi-cloud, cloud migration, cloud efforts being driven by, not just IT but infrastructure organizations within IT. Are you seeing successful efforts being driven from, I call that bottom up, versus whether if it's evens some VP or above, driving the effort from a business perspective? >> I think it varies. So, there some organizations where it's, our VPs are bringing a cloud first policy to our organization and then you have to figure out what that means to that particular executive. It may mean, we are going to go AWS completely all now! For a lot of organizations, it's a progress of, we're going to include all things that could be possibly labeled as cloud technologies, which, doesn't really describe much. If it does anything, it's to describe change is on the horizon. We are going to do things differently than we previously did. For a lot of companies, they have been tasked by their executives of, you need to tell me what to do for the cloud strategy and so they're trying to figure out, how do we problem solve for cloud from our perspective. I think that's been on of the biggest problems of the cloud industry for the last seven years, is this bottom up approach or top down approach with very little thinking about where's the value. So, bottom up, typically you get folks thinking about how to we have more efficient infrastructure, how do we modernize, how do we add in automation and build the best private cloud in the world? And often times over spending, often times delaying and having no self service access for developers for five years into their strategy. From that you see a lot of organizations trying to redesign their cloud strategies to deliver real business value up front early on and then look to see, how do they modernize, how do they mature, to help support and scale that effort, where as, top down approaches are very froofie, high level, shiny objects and so a lot of organizations that are trying to change that are trying to get individuals in the same room together, figure out, let's start from our business strategy and work our way in to how cloud serves that greater purpose. >> Lauren, when Forrester talks to customers, this space of data protection, secondary storage, whatever you call it, is pretty crowded. Are there specific things that, customers are calling out or that Forrester gives advices to how to differentiate in the market place or what they're looking for? And along those lines, what're customers looking for down the road to even expand more and get more value from vendors in the future? >> Yeah, I tend to focus on the cloudy questions. So, when I'm looking at data protection, I'm looking at it as a module of, how you manage multiple clouds. And when you look at the hyper cloud management space, it's a very busy space. It tends to focus on orchestration, template building, occasionally some compliance and policy, tags that can be applied, and then cost optimization. Very little has been done on the security side so far and very little has been done on data production side. So, when you look at, how do you differentiate, there's not a lot of players in this market yet. For as many security players as there are, it has not been aggressively tackled as heavily as the classic management providers have been attacking other management challenges. You look at the cloud costs optimization space, it's done very well. It's the first cloud challenge that organizations are trying to solve is, how much am I spending? Who's spending it? How do I integrate with my billing system? The next challenge is, how do I problem solve for data. They see that as a potentially huge cost escalator if they don't get this under control for many reasons, compliance, from data out costs. So, that's the next beach head. So, I would actually argue that there's not a lot that's been done specifically around cloud in this space yet. >> Lauren Nelson, we really appreciate you sharing your insight in customer views with us. >> My pleasure! Thank you. >> Alright, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here from COMMVAULT GO, in Nashville, Tennessee, Thanks for Watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. It's theCUBE covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. You're watching theCUBE at Commvault GO. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program Lance Shaw, who's the director of Solutions Marketing at Commvault. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much, glad to be here. >> All right, so we've been having a great day here. We're talking to some of your partners. Talking to some of your customers. Solutions Marketing, of course, everything's a solution these days. That's what they're looking for. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you do at Commvault. >> Lance: Absolutely, right. So, I came from a product management and product marketing background and one of the things we're really focused on here at this show, of course, is all about customers and what their stories are and frankly, how we can improve our products and our solutions to better meet the needs of the customers, right. That's what ultimately what it all comes down to. And so, that's why we're here, the whole reason for the show. I think what's been interesting so far at this show has been the focus on, not only just cloud utilization, but the fact that customers are having to deal with multiple clouds and the fact that why they have to do that. There's a variety of reasons that drive people to say well you know maybe five years ago, you would have said, "Are you using a cloud?" Yeah, I've got one cloud provider, but now I've got lots. >> Stu: Yeah, and Lance I'd love to hear what you're hearing from customers 'cause one of the things you talk to customers and oh, they have a multi-cloud strategy and when you dig in, first of all, every customer has a totally different environment, >> Lance: Right. >> Stu: and it reminds me, I spent the last two decades trying to help customers get out of their silos, and in some ways I'm a little worried that we've just created a whole bunch of new silos, that just don't happen to live in my data center, and we called it multi-cloud >> Lance: Right. >> Stu: because the strategy is oh, well I did this application for here and then oh, there's this service over here that I needed and then I sissified a bunch of stuff. So, tell me we've got it all figured out. Customers, they have a good strategy, they're really sharp as to where they're going, and the future is bright. >> Lance: Absolutely. Now the reality of that is, (laughs) that in fact, you're absolutely right. Unwittingly or unknowingly we've gotten to a path of history repeating itself where I'm creating new silos of information and data. So, you're absolutely right. Organizations start out with a point solution for a particular application or a particular data set or acquired a company and so brought in this new thing. And pretty soon, I have no idea what I've got in the Singapore office versus the London office versus New York, right, so. And how do I reconcile that and bring it back together? So I've got that same old problem that, if you've been around in the industry for a few years, we saw 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I've got to bring my silos of information together. And so, yeah you're right. It's suddenly a new, same old challenge all over again. Alright, so and that's why it's become a focus area because I suddenly have fragmented, disconnected application and data silos. So that's really where Commvault, turns out, can really help because sometimes it's a matter of consolidation. You know what, I need to get down from three locations to two, or four to one, or whatever the case may be, some sort of consolidation. And usually there's some cost savings involved there. And or, it's I got these multiple solutions that are out there and I've got no control and I have no visibility, I know I'm exposed so, I've got a risk factor now that I didn't have before. So when you start to blend all of those together, you're absolutely right, it's the same old story again, right. >> Keith: Industry versus vertical versus use case, you've given us a couple of different ones. Use cases, reducing costs, consolidation, even multi-cloud in itself is a use case. But, if you're an enterprise software company, if you're an enterprise IT company, you're challenged as you talk to different industries about specific solutions. You got to tailor solutions to industries. Talk about some of the industries that Commvault has come to solve specific problems for. >> Lance: Right, well I think there's a lot, to be honest, right, because every company faces those set of challenges. I think where it gets really interesting is in highly regulated industries, right. So, you think about biopharmaceuticals, you think about financial services, or certainly in the government space, in the federal space. And they have a whole set of unique challenges there because you're dealing with top secret clouds and you're dealing with, you know, some special concerns there. I think where it gets of particular interest is when I've got all those fragmented or disconnected silos, is that I need to address my compliant's concerns. I need to understand the data for more than just is it protected and could I recover it in a specific amount of time? I actually need to be able to show that I have it and prove that what I've got and be able to address specific industry regulations that are unique to my particular industry. So, that's where we start to see very specific use cases that kind of get down from the generic or the general, down to the very specific how do I manage this data and how do I understand what I have? And then of course you get into, you know, can you prove what you've got? Can you go out and retrieve it? And there's all sort of, you know, regulations along that that I've got to adhere to. But that can be addressed once I have that full index, an understanding of what my environment's like. Now, I can go out and locate that information, I can retrieve it when I need to, and actually open it up from a persona based access perspective, let specific people in an organization have access just to the limited data sets that they need, alright. So that comes into play a lot, especially, for example, every organization, right, you've got database admins, you've got critical tier zero applications that you need need to manage. It's your CRM system, it's your supply chain management system. If it goes down, you know, people freak out, alright. So, and I want to be able to provide, you know, self-service access to information for those people. So I've got a well-managed understanding of my environment, but then I'm able to dole out access to the individuals that need it when they need it and they don't have to come ask us or ask IT or ask anybody else, you know, for that information. >> Stu: Yeah, Lance as we watch the cust-to-cust companies really understand that data is very valuable, we have a transition that's going on. Traditional customer for Commvault, you're talking about things like RPO and RTO and the like. And, you know, you've got the admins of the world trying to figure out how they do their jobs and things like, okay, backup Windows of the past versus recovery and all those moving pieces. As opposed to today, you talk about the value of data, these are board-level discussions. >> Lance: Right. >> Stu: You've got the C-Suite that you're working with. We talked to a few of your teams about, well, you've got the top down and the bottom up. How are you helping them and what conversations do you have with them? >> Lance: They are entirely different conversations, right. IT is serving the business, as we all know, right. You know, maybe a bit cliché, sorry. >> Stu: Hopefully, if they're doing their job right, they're responding to and actually doing what they need to. >> Lance: Why am I here? Oh, that's right! To serve the business. Yeah, let's try that. So, anyways, there's that delivery of data, but you're absolutely right. The utilization of data and how it's consumed and the understanding that I can get from it, that is an entirely different conversation and, you're right, it is. It's a business unit discussion, you know, it's a line of business discussion at the very least, and it's probably a senior executive discussion because with that additional visibility, I'm then able to make much better, at least theoretically, better business decisions and because I've got more information to draw from. So, you're right, in terms of the conversation, we're not talking about strictly data protection. It's like, yes, when your data is understood, here's what else you can do with it. And then you got to tailor that to the specific industry, specific vertical, and a little more specific to that particular conversation. >> Keith: So Lance, give us a feel for that conversation that's happening here at Commvault GO, 2,000 people, over 150 sessions, education focused event, and there's different personas. I'll let the focus on that executive persona a little bit. I got you in front of the SVP of some group, the CDO. What's the Commvault story? Why Commvault over any other data protection company? >> Lance: I like to think of it as the proverbial, killing two birds with one stone, right. So, is my data growing? Oh, yeah, right. You're never going to hear someone say, you know data is shrinking, I have less to worry about. I mean, I've been in the industry a couple years now, give or take, and it's just never going to happen, right. So, you don't have to worry about that. With that in mind, the need to be able to have the visibility is continuing to increase. So, you see the rise of a chief data officer and what are they concerned about? They're concerned about utilizing data in ways that they were previously never able to do. And so, when we have those conversations, it's one of if I'm going to kill two birds with one stone, I'm going to be able to not only protect my data, but I'm going to give you additional visibility that you didn't have before because I'm providing you visibility into all of the secondary data and the application protection and I'm allowing you to be, ultimately, more flexible because now you're able to actually move data where you need it and expand your data center in ways you previously could not. So, I want to move from one cloud to the other. No problem, I can do that. I want to finally move, finally get off of tape and consolidate my environments and move either to an on premises environment or to a cloud. Not a problem. I can come back, we see customers that are coming back to on premises from cloud in some cases just for particular use cases. So the conversations that we have with a CEO, will just stick with a CEO as an example, are around better utilization of the data and better risk mitigation around that data, alright. So I've had a number of conversations related to that where we were concerned about not, you know, everybody talks about ransomware, but in general, attacks on the business and it's not if it's when, so how do I make sure that I can keep my business up and running? And so, it's that broader perspective that you have around how I manage data and how I deliver it to the business. That's what they care about, alright. That's crazy you're protected by the way, that's sort of important too. But what I can do with it and how I deliver it to my lines of business, that's where the interest starts to lie in a CEO level conversation. >> Yeah, Lance. One of the things everybody loves coming to a show like this, you get some of those great user stories. This morning, we had the State of Colorado on talking about how they're recovering from ransomware. >> Right, right, right. >> We had American Pacific Mortgage on talking about just the scale. You talked about the growing data and how, you know, using Commvault they're able to manage that much better. Any other specific examples of kind of interesting use cases or good customer stories you might have? >> Yeah, we recently had a very large customer that was looking to consolidate their environment. It was a classic case of I got offices spread around the world and they had a number of different point solutions, right. So, without naming names, I've got different protection solutions for different areas. I've got different administrators. I've got different policies. And, you know, they hit a scenario where they were exposed from a risk perspective that that particular set of data was not covered as they thought it was because they didn't have standardization of policies, standardized policies I should say, around how they manage, access, and the retention of that data. And so that, sometimes there's that forcing event that says we have a problem here, we need to do something about this. Alright so, in their case, they we able to consolidate from multiple solutions down to Commvault where they could have predefined set of policies in place around the data and not only for what they were gathering in. So as they ingested it or moved data under Commvault's management, they were able to automatically assign policies to that, but then in their case, they were also acquiring other companies. So, they were acquiring a rather large European entity, and when they were bringing that organization in, they wanted to make sure that they did so in a way that didn't expose the risk again in the future because if we're going to grow as a business with an acquisition strategy, we've got to be able to make sure that what comes into the organization is consistent. >> So, being partner presence here, Commvault has been pretty direct and forward talking about how you're shifting from a direct sales model and having gone through partners to help provide the solutions to these challenges. Talk through, how do you enable partners, or how do you encourage partners, this is a crowded market, there's a lot of investment in the area of data protection, how do you rise to the top of the partner list and for partners putting your solutions in front of their customers? >> Lance: Right, there's two ways we do that, right. So, the first, because you're absolutely right. You know, partners are key to our growth and we can be key to their growth and success. No doubt about it. So, the first thing is give them something that's going to really make them successful. So, instead, if I'm a partner, I want the flexibility to be able to address a wider variety of demands. I want to be able to go in to a potential prospect and say yeah, I can address this, but also I have the software behind the scenes, Commvault, to be able to attack multiple other scenarios for you. Oh and by the way, it's all in one and you've got one solution to be able to address all that. So, one of the key ways that we differentiate, and you're right, in a very crowded market, alright, that says we should really have Commvault in the back of your mind, at the top of your list. If you're going in and seeing scenarios where point solutions simply doesn't do it or paints you into a corner where you're not going to be able to help them grow down the future. The other thing partners obviously want, as every business wants, is repeat business. I want to be able to go back in and expand, I want to build my footprint out, and if I can go in with a partner that enables me to do that, then I've got long term opportunity versus just going in like, hey, I made a quick sale and I'm out and good luck to you, right. >> Stu: Lance, last thing I wanted to ask you. Last year, GDPR was the talk of every single show like this. >> Lance: Yeah, I've seem to have heard about that, yeah. >> Stu: We got a good education. My boss actually read through the entire specs. I read the Cliffnotes version >> Lance: Okay, yeah, me too. >> Stu: and then talked to a lot of smart people about it. California is looking at some new legislation, but what's the latest on that? It seems like, you know, I know some of the lawsuits already happening at some of the biggest companies in Europe, you know, from a technology standpoint, but what are you hearing and how has Commvault helped customers understand kind of today and future legislation? >> Lance: Yeah, I think, you know what's interesting? When we looked at, you know, everybody was kind of marching up to the GDPR date as if it was Y2K all over again. >> Stu: Right. >> Lance: Not that I remember that of course. I'm too young for that. (Keith laughs) You know, it was like May 25th, May 25th, the sky's going to fall, and we all knew that, hey listen, that day is going to come and go and somebody's going to be made an example at some point, right. And sure enough, that's starting to happen. And you know, it's a good thing. It's building the awareness that we tried to educate people, tried to get the word out, you know, it happens longer. Why wait past May 25th? It's still going on, right. So, for a lot of customers that we're talking to, they're looking to, they've had a plan in place and they're moving there gradually, it wasn't right away, but I think sometimes when you see those things in the press about there's actually being a finesse, it's actually real and it brings it to life like, uh we should really do something here, right. So, I think, honestly, that's a process that's going to continue for years. You know, I've heard everything from we'll just pay the fine, which is a risky strategy both probably on a personal level as well as professional. (Keith laughs) You wouldn't want to bet your career on that strategy. With the advent of, we also always knew that hey, GDPR is one of these set of regulations. There will be others, there are others. And you have to be able to adhere to those no matter where you live on the Earth. So, you know, long story short, I think it's a continuing evolution. We help customers understand their data. So, you know, through our Commvault activate product, we can do it. Even if you're not using Commvault for backup and recovery, you're actually able to go out and scan your environment and get a better understanding of what personal information you've got under lock and key, what you've got in your environment, and be able to ascertain well okay, where's my risk, where am I exposed? And then I can start to put a plan in place to mitigate that. So, I think it'll be going on for quite some time in terms of especially as new laws like the California law. I always forget the letters and numbers associated with it, but it's same idea around personal privacy. And I think, you know, we've had the Patriot Act for a long time, right, where foreign governments are concerned about data sovereignty and where data lives and that's going to continue to increase, you know, for a variety of reasons. So organizations have to really know where their data is and what's encapsulated within that data and that's where the Commvault data platform, the index, actually shines to uncover that information. >> Stu: Well, Lance Shaw, I really appreciate you sharing with us where your customers are in a lot of these really important issues. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault Go in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)