>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas from Mandalay Bay for NetApp Insight 2017. This is exclusive Cube coverage, I'm John Furrier, co-host of the Cube, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. My co-host is Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is James Whitemore, who's the VP of Brand and Demand for NetApp, and David Richard, VP of Solutions Engineering. Guys, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on, appreciate taking the time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for havin' us, thanks for bringin' us in. >> So we're kickin' off the day here, a long day, we're going to go up to 7 o'clock I think, of interviews with the folks. A lot of exciting things happening with NetApp. Obviously data is changing the world, we're seeing a lot of those examples in the real world. Don't want to rehash, we just talked about it on the intro. But society changes, from the board room to the dorm room, from play to work, you're seeing every dimension of life changing. We call this digital transformation in the enterprise, but it's affecting truly everyone. This is the consumerization of IT playing out in real time. People are re-imagining how life and work is happening. NetApp, a great leader, entrepreneurial company, back in the 90s, always had that DNA. How does storage become more enabling, in a way that's going to change society? >> How does storage, or how does data? >> Storage company NetApp that's turning into a data company, having the kind of solutions. What's the brand promise? What's the DNA of NetApp right now? >> Well I think, data first. We're really not a storage company anymore, we are a data company. And we will help our customers put data at the center of their business. Not think about storage, but think about data, and where it is, what it does, how they use it, how they bring data from multiple places, multiple partners, and really put it at the center of their business. >> David, I was talking with, eight years ago, with NetApp folks, you guys were kind of progressive, in Amazon, first. Real company, in Amazon, doin' this kind of storage data convergence way back when. So, eight years now, where's the solutions for customers? 'Cause customers want the cloud, they want on premise, they got to take care of business there, hybrid house sees everyone's hype. But on premise activity, whether it's private cloud or DevOps, the data piece is critical. How has that evolved? >> And first of all, like you said, NetApps's been pretty early to the space, so, six, seven years ago, we're already pretty embracive of cloud as a delivery technology, and as an ecosystem, and we were never, as a company, threatened by that. I think a lot of people in our business, especially in the storage industry, were very concerned that, ultimately, they were a competitor of ours. So I think we realized early on that it was a part of an ecosystem that we had to be part of, and we really focused on trying to demonstrate our value, regardless of where the bits and the bytes are stored. Trying to drive that consistency of customer experience whether or not they're doing an on prem, hybrid, or a full public cloud. And trying to leverage the skill sets and the technologies that they already had in a traditional NetApp environment, and use those to manage it across a very complex multi-cloud, multi-hype advisor environment. And that's really most of the stuff we've been talking about today, right? We did a lot of great announcements in the last hour, and it's all around helping enterprises put cloud technology in the center of their business, and do that with the confidence that the data's going to be protected, that there's going to be predictability of customer experience, and if they're going to be able to maintain that asset that data's becoming to the company. >> So, I'm curious, NetApp, SolidFire, rock-solid technology from a storing and retrieving bits perspective. But now we're gettin' into the conversation about data. We knew who NetApp's and SolidFire's customer was in the traditional enterprise or ISP, or service provider. Who's the customer today, who you guys talkin' to? It's no longer the storage call center anymore, who's that message that you're deliverin' it to, and how are they receivin' it? >> In my role as bein' the guy that runs the Solution Engineers, so the guys that are out there interfacin' with customers and trying to collect requirements, it's been an amazing shift. So we were very familiar with going into the infrastructure guy, and having a conversation around how they can build a performance-secure storage environment inside the four walls of a data center, maybe expanding it to, "Hey, how can I replicate that to a couple data centers?" Now, that's not the case. Now, we're really spending a lot of time finding the application owners, or, better yet, finding the people that have inside organizations that have connections to customers, who are looking to engage those customers differently through technology. So it's a lot more searching for people, it's much more of a discussion about business outcomes and customer intimacy than it ever was. >> I'd love to get some of the solutions you mentioned, I've got some announcements, but before we get there, how do you guys solve the problem for a customer? Or, better yet, what is the core problem that you solve for customers today? Obviously, it's not just a storage, as we're pointing out, it's a data problem. What is the problem that you're solving? And what are some of the new solutions you guys have coming out at the show here that you'd like to talk about? >> I'll give you my perspective on that, and I think you guys probably didn't get to see the kilo presentation this morning, I'm sure you guys were selling up here. There's really three ways that we think about it. We think that each and every one of our customers is doing one, some, or all of three things. They are trying to modernize their existing infrastructure, to bring it current, to make that infrastructure more efficient and operationally effective. They're trying to build a next-generation data center, and they're trying to look outside of what they have today, and look at what that next-generation data center should be. And they're trying to harness the power of a cloud. And we tend to group our solutions, and the way that we think, and the way that we talk to our customers in those three areas. And many of them are doing all of those three things at once, right? >> So get up to date, get up to speed, get the next-gen data center, what is the products you guys announced? Can you take a minute to talk about them? >> Sure. A whole bunch of things. Probably the most interesting and exciting one is the Microsoft NFS solution that we just announced. So this is actually a pretty cool capability, this is the ability for a user inside of Microsoft Azure to natively provision NFS. And, like I said, it's natively driven inside of the Azure infrastructure, but it's delivered through the NetApp technology. We think it's important that, as customers start moving to the cloud, that they start to be able to bring their tool sets and their expectations that they have, and so that was a key one. What you're seeing is the maturation of the relationship that we announced with those guys about six months ago. Also, a couple of other things there, about deepening the relationship around some of our backup products, and especially around helping our customers protect Office 365 applications in the cloud, so that was a big one. Most recent release of Data ONTAP 9.3, we did our first pre-announce of that today. Same thing, it's a lot about, obviously, it's leveraging the new technologies around performance. Right, so this is NVMe, this is high-speed interfaces in Flash, which, obviously, is very important today. When you're really tryin' to, when you're building applications, that latency really matters. So that's a big thing. It's also building and expanding upon our ability to provide the highest levels of data availability, as well as data compression and efficiency around that. So that was a pretty big one. We're continuing to evolve the tool set around cloud, so the things that allow our customers to be able to orchestrate, and maximize, and visualize their utilization of the cloud. And some other products around helping customers truly do multi-cloud and multi-hype advisor in an operational way. >> Alright, final question for you guys both to share. This comes up a lot, so I'd like to get your thoughts. What are customers saying? Share some anecdotal sound bites around what customers are saying about some of these challenges, 'cause they're pretty significant. You got to take care of business and modernize infrastructures, blocking and tackling. You got to do next-gen, which means either software paradigm, DevOps, or private cloud ready. And then, obviously, cloud apps, that's a hybrid and/or public, private, whatever you want to call it, that's a lot of work. Now over the top, you got data governance, you got IoT around the corner. I mean, this is really, really challenging for CxO's. What are customers saying to you guys about the relationship that they're having with NetApp? Share some either data or anecdotal sound bites. >> So we had around 50 CIO's, Chief Data Officers, and that type of person here in Executive Summit yesterday, and got some really, really, clear requests. It's, "Help us. "This is complicated. "The way that we look at our world "is very mixed between our legacy infrastructures, "the private clouds we're trying to build, "and the public clouds that we're trying to harness, "and help us do that." And the feedback they give us is, "Yes, you're doing the right things." Everything that we showed them yesterday, everything that we showed them today, of really being able to look at data holistically 'cross all of those type of platforms is exactly what they want, but they need help. >> So they're leaning on you guys more. >> They're looking for leadership. For, "How do we do this?" >> I think you were talking about NetApp DNA, right, and I think that's an important thing right now. Things are very complex, customers can be very confused. I think customers are also very fearful of lock-in. And I think they're very fearful of making decisions today that they can't unmake in the future. So they're asking us a lot of questions about, "If I make this decision today, "does that preclude me from being able to make "bigger decisions or different decisions in the future? "If I go down this road, can I go back?" And so it's more about just demonstrating to them that they have a safe ecosystem, and that we're not going to be providing all the solutions that they're going to use inside the cloud, but we're going to be open and embracive of as many of those as possible to protect their investment. >> You guys got a great customer base too, and it's growing, and the thing that we took away last week at our big Data NYC event we had in Manhattan was, in that world, big data, you've seen the hype come and go. There's no tolerance for hype, customers to your point are super busy, their plates are full, and the rubber's got to hit the road. And so they've played with some stuff, the total cost of ownership becomes a big problem, right? The fruit's not coming on the tree of some of those hyped-up technologies, so they want to have a partner. You guys hear that same thing? In general? >> Yeah, definitely. I would encourage everyone to go check out the recording of the general session this morning. Some really clear demos of how we're helping customers, how we're really helping them drive efficiency in their existing infrastructure, to work across clouds, all of the hyper-scale clouds, to bring a next-generation data center platform together, based on, you have SolidFire, HCI products. And really, really, clear things that we're doing to help them. >> You can't just buy a new digital transformation prod, you got to lean on what you got, and build from there. You can't buy hybrid cloud, there's no SKU for that. >> But there's almost this consumerization of IT where there's expectations that things should be that easy. And especially, I think, at some senior levels, there's an expectation that they're trying to drive change down into organizations, and organizations are being resistant to it, but often it's just that things are still complex. >> Well, that's a good point, we're going to get into some other segments around that. That speaks directly to the automation, that speaks to the non-differentiated labor that's shifting to more labor activities, value activities. We're seeing that certainly in the Wikibon Data on our side, but great point. They want the ease of use, "Wait, it should be magic!" (chuckles) It should be like a Tesla, right, everyone wants the self-driving storage. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Kicking off day one, here at NetApp Insight. Check it out, they got great demos. Again, it should be easy, but a lot of work involved. If you're an enterprise, check out NetApp. It's the Cube, more coverage after this short break.