(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. I've been here all day with Stu Miniman, and we've had a jam-packed agenda of guests. We're now coming to the end of our program. We bring back two CUBE alumni. We've got Bharat Badrinath, welcome back. I feel like it's deja vu. The VP of Product and Solutions Marketing at NetApp. And Ken Ringdahl, also an alumni, VP of Global Alliance Architecture from Veeam. Hey, guys. Thanks for stopping by towards the end of the day. I'm sure you guys have both lots of meetings today. Let's talk a little bit about the NetApp-Veeam partnership. NetApp bought Veeam a few months ago, Ken. The reseller relationship that Veeam has with NetApp was announced. Let's talk about the impetus of that, that momentum coming from joint partners, customers, channel partners? Tell me a little bit about that from Veeam's perspective. >> Yeah, sure. I think earlier this year, we announced that resell relationship, which went live in March. So VeeamON was in May, so we were just at the early stages of that, and we've seen some good momentum. We've expanded that relationship. And now we're able to jointly sell the whole portfolio. And I'd say it's a combination of two things: and really it's customers and partners, right? So, we had a lot of success in the channel. Veeam and NetApp have been partnering together on the channel for, you know, five, seven years. A long time now. And just based on the success of our meeting on the channel and then customer demand and partner demand, you know, we decided to expand our relationship and go deeper and really go deeper not only from a go-to-market perspective, but from a product perspective. We're getting even closer together and driving more business and integration and really highlighting the value of the NetApp platform. >> What's NetApp's reaction to when the channel and customers are saying, "Hey, guys." Tell us about that, Bharat. >> We obviously are here to make sure the customers have a great experience with it. And Veeam brings in something which is unique in the market for the customer, so we've heard it from our customers, our joint customers saying that better integration is going to help them. Being the stewards of the customers' data, we want to make sure the data is protected. And Veeam brings that expertise into the market. We integrate better to make it more seamless for the customer, which is what we're doing as we expand this partnership to the next level. >> Both Veeam and NetApp were pretty early in learning into this hybrid, multi-cloud world. Wondering if you have any good customer examples you might be able to share as to customers that are kind of moving towards this future that we're talking about in the partnership. >> Yeah, sure, I mean at Veeam our goal is to really provide a hybrid environment. We started in the virtual world. We expanded to physical. We've gone to cloud. You know, we see NetApp with a very strong presence on-prem. They obviously have strong relationships with the public cloud vendors and have done a really good job of pivoting the strategy and embracing the cloud, which is what we've done at Veeam as well. We see our customers.. they're really choosing cloud. They're choosing best of breed now, right? So, they don't say, "Hey, I'm a single cloud strategy. I don't do just one cloud here. I'm saying best of breed. Maybe I'm doing my machine-learning and AI and Google, And I'm doing my cloud native apps in AWS, and I'm doing my Microsoft native workloads in Azure." And so really you do need to provide that hybrid solution. That's really what we've looked to focus on is taking the strength of where we came up and providing that best solution in the virtual world, extending that to physical, and now going to the cloud. You know, we see lots and lots of customers that they just want a comprehensive solution. They don't want point solutions, a point solution here, a point solution there. They want a comprehensive solution, and so it comes down to two companies really I think that have a very strong strategy for that hybrid world, for best of breed solutions that we can work together in all those facets. >> Yeah, and I think our strategy and Veeam's strategy are pretty aligned when you look at the hybrid cloud, when you look at our data fabric, (inaudible) in the market, and what we are doing to stitch together on-prem and cloud. Veeam happens to be a great partner to help protect that data as we work with the customer along this journey. And today Veeam just announced an SEI part of it as well. Just making sure that we are helping the customer through every aspect of the journey. >> I'm wondering if you might have.. Since the deal was announced earlier this year, any specific customer examples--even anonymized-- that you could share? >> I'm sure there are lots of customers we have had jointly. I don't have any specific ones at this moment. >> There's a few I can highlight. Probably one of the top ten international banks, AMEA. That's a really, really large deal that we're working to get closed. It's multi-million dollars to both of us. Very, very large deal. I think we're seeing success. Veeam's strength has always been sort of in the commercial world, and we're moving up into the enterprise. That's a big impetus for the partnership quite honestly 'cause NetApp has a lot of strength 'specially with the ONTAP system in enterprise. So, I think we're really sort of dovetailing each other. Veeam is bringing NetApp into more of our commercial deals. NetApp is bringing us into more enterprise deals. But really it's across the board: large banks, even healthcare and other deals as well. I don't know if there's any specific names I can call out, but I can tell you it really stretches the entire sort of stretches vertical, all different types, different sizes, different types of customers. >> We just had Dave Hitts on a little bit ago, Stu and I did today, and he kind of talked about in the last five years, really a big revolution at NetApp that has been around 26 years. Ken, you mention that NetApp and Veeam have been partners for about five to seven years. I'm curious what Veeam's perspective is of NetApp's digital and IT and cultural transformation to now go out boldly and say, "We're the data authority," and really kind of wrap their strategy around cloud. >> Yeah, sure. I would say we are in a data-driven world. Data is the currency in the cloud world. We look at ourselves as being the stewards of data availability. NetApp has the strength in that primary data management. There's really a natural dovetail between the two of us and a natural hand-off, where we can provide the entire end-to-end from primary to DR to secondary and really about sort of managing the placement of that data, the value of that data, and the availability of that data. It's incredibly important. I think together we cover that end-to-end. >> Bharat, one of the messages we've been hearing today is talking about there's a lot of complexity out there. NetApp's goal, like many companies in this space, is to try to help simplify. What is the partnership, the integration, reselling.. How does that help simplify solutions for companies? >> Absolutely. As you heard earlier, it was all about providing a comprehensive stack end-to-end, but what makes it simple is when it is comprehensive and integrated, right? So, when the two companies' engineering teams work together to drive that integration, that results in simplicity, which our customers and our partners.. For our partners, it's assurance that we're both working together, so it makes the solution more reliable, works well, as advertised, if you will. And the customer premise is for customers. It's the simplicity in the form of integration, which comes in where the two companies' engineering teams are driving towards that. >> Last question, Ken, for you. In terms of kind of following on what Bharat was saying, the customers now not only need that simplicity, they expect it. I'm curious where is that in that, in the selling motion, where is that conversation? Is it with some of the folks that are down in the technical weeds, who are looking to drastically improve recovery time and recovery point objectives? Or are you also having conversations at the business level of the business going, maybe it's a legacy not cloud-native that needs to go, "We have so much data, which is an advantage, but how do we use that?" Are you seeing those business leaders, business unit leaders in C-levels involved in this conversation with Veeam and NetApp? >> Yeah, yeah, no question. I think traditionally Veeam has really been compelled by the Backup Administrator, by the IT director. Because the product is so easy to try, you can download it, you can try it for free.. Our whole "It Just Works" has been our tagline because it is just so simple to get started with Veeam. We make it simple to get up and running and to manage your backups and also give some of that power back to your customers. In fact, just a quick sidebar. Had dinner last night with a longtime Veeam customer, longtime NetApp customer, and they said, "Hey, look, NetApp is my storage vendor of choice. Veeam is my backup data protection vendor of choice. And they come together well. And NetApp does such a great job from primary to leveraging the snapshot replication," but he told me about this great story. He said, "We had somebody at midnight needed to recover a file. We have self-restore capabilities that they were able to give that power to their end users to go recover a file to their server instead of calling up and opening a ticket. Instead of what took maybe eight hours to go through a whole process to get a storage admin and then a backup admin took eight minutes." I think it talks to the value of the NetApp platform in providing that availability and the simplicity of the Veeam system to be able to give that power and take what might be complex and make it very simple. So, back to your original question, Lisa, about.. We've traditionally really sort of been very, very valuable to that backup administrator, IT admin. As we move further into the enterprise, of course that goes up into VP of IT, all the way up to the CIO. I think our relationship is really bringing us both ways. We can come bottom-up, NetApp can come top-down. And we're hitting both sides and really that whole stack of influencer to buyer to decision-maker in that whole stack. >> Bharat, last question for you. We've got a few seconds left. I'm curious when a customer says, "Veeam is our backup, and recovery, NetApp is our storage," how does that, in this day as, "Hey, cloud is the heart of our strategy," how do you react to, "NetApp is our storage provider?" >> I don't see those as exclusive things. We manage the data on-prem, and Veeam, given their abilities in the hybrid cloud, if a customer considers us as on-prem storage company, that is great. We're working with them to change that impression, to get with them on their journey to the cloud. So we don't want to force them to get into the cloud, but as they move to the cloud, we want to be there to make sure we can manage the data in the cloud. And Veeam, given their hybrid capabilities and where they've been and what they do with the customer, and their ability to manage monthly cloud maps really well, to what we offer the customers. Of course we'd like our customers to change their perception to not just view NetApp as on-prem storage but as a cloud vendor as well, but it takes time for them to change their perception, and we're working very hard on that. As you saw today in the keynote as well, you're starting to see customers.. It has to be driven by the customer need. Sometimes they realize certain things are done better in the cloud, which drives them to the cloud. We want to be there to provide that service for them as they move. >> Well, Bharat and Ken, thanks so much for stopping by at the end of the day here. We appreciate your time, and we look forward to, in 2019, maybe hearing more from that big AMEA bank and some of the great successes they're achieving with this partnership. >> Thank you for having us. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching. This wraps up theCUBE's full day. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We've had a great day, Stu, talking with NetApp executives, customers, partners, and we want to thank you for watching. Hope you've learned a lot, and of course, watch the replays at theCUBE.net. For Stu, I'm Lisa, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and guess who's here now, Dave Hitz, EVP and founder of NetApp, Dave, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you and glad to be here. >> This is a big event, we were in the keynote this morning when we were walking out, standing room only really strong messages delivered by George Kurian, who stopped by for the first time couple hours ago. Great customer story, the futurist was very interesting perspective, 26 years ago, can you envision? >> You know the futurist? >> Where you are? >> Never mind that, I have a very different perspective than him, I think we are entering the golden decade of artificial intelligence. It's smart enough to be super, super cool and it hasn't figured out how to kill us yet, decade. (laughing) >> Lisa: That's good. >> Enjoy your last 10 years. >> Oh no, that's it? >> I, no, no, you asked, you asked that I envision this 26 years ago, oh my god, no, I mean, you know, we were a little start-up and we had these spread sheets that said we would grow to, you know it basically that, what the VC's told us if we could get to 100 million in revenue we can go public, so, naturally our spread sheets showed 200 million (laughs) in revenue, you know or five, six, some where in there and is like, we're so far beyond anything I imagined when we started, and we were doing technical nerdy products for little engineers and little work groups, you know and the idea that that part of the storage market would merge against the heavy duty, high-end enterprise storage market doing databases, and then that would end up colliding with the cloud market and helping, like no we didn't even imagine this stuff that's happening now, I mean it's so far beyond. >> Enabling DreamWorks to make movies, I mean-- >> I love that, you know they do showings, they do previews for their vendors and so I've gotten to take my 11-year-old daughter, she's 11 now, but to see, you know early viewing of some of these movies it's, it's just fun. >> So, Dave, it's always interesting in the industry a lot of time you say like, okay, this architecture is long in the tooth, there's a new generation do things better and everything like that. ONTAP, been around for a long time now.. >> You know, so let me-- >> Seems like it's been reinvigorated with the cloud and everything like that, you know. >> Let me make a comment about that. >> Yeah. >> Cause people do this, oh, ONTAP is so old, isn't that the old generation? So lets talk about old. Mainframes are old, and AS400s are old, and Unix is old, and then there's Windows which is kind of younger, and ONTAP's younger than that, and then there's Windows NT, which was a rewrite of Windows and Clustered ONTAP is younger than that, so like stop with the old, you know I mean iOS is after that, so okay fine we're older than iOS, but it's not an ancient, and then we've revamped it again to go run in the cloud, I mean we first started doing ONTAP running in Azure, sorry I mean Amazon initially, we started that work in 2013 and shipped it in 2014, so like that was yet another refresh so. >> Well, but you bring a point, you've, it is adjusted and moved, it wasn't something that's static. Can you speak a little bit, that cloud, the you know, the rewrite and focus around the cloud and what, that mean internally, I know you've been reinvigorated. >> Ha! >> With everything that's happened for the last few years. >> You know, the cloud everybody's doing it now and everybody's trying to be cloud relevant, we were really struggling early on I will say you know 2013, 2014 we were really trying to get our heads around what to do and a lot of people were stepping back like, no, no, no, let's see if we can slow it down, and, I mean not just outside of NetApp but NetApp as well, and the guy that was the CEO of the time Tom Georgens, and George Kurian was part of the staff then. We, I'm proud of what we did was we said, you know let's really lean in, its either going to happen or it's not going to happen, probably not, based on what we do, and if it does happen we'll be way better off leaning into it early, learning how to make this stuff work, and that's, you know we shipped ONTAP in the cloud in 2014, and it sucked, I mean, and no one body else had anything like it, it was awesome, right, whenever you look at old tech die, the first iPhone sucked too, but it was both great, but it needed so much more work, like the very first rev I remember a story, Joe CaraDonna as a programmer he's like, we tried to get our own IT organization to use it and they told us the security wasn't good enough, so we had to fix the security, like, I mean we've been through so much stuff that's almost five years ago. We've been working on it, and so you do all of this work and then Cloud Volumes is a complete, have you guys had Anthony on? >> Both: Yes. >> Couple hours ago. >> I love how Anthony thinks, so, he's a cloudy guy right from the foundation, he joins the executive staff, whole new perspective on stuff, so Cloud ONTAP, like ONTAP's my baby and we put it in the cloud. I'm proud of that, like you have our forward leaning cloud and Anthony's like, you know, just so you know, that's not nearly good enough, like, that is a very old school infrastructural thing, probably storage infrastructural people will like that they can have their same old OS running in the cloud, but it's not what cloudy people want, cloudy people don't want to run a storage OS in the cloud, cloudy people just want to say, I'd like a volume, please. Here's your volume, Thank you, and by the way, it should be a RESTful API, like God, ONTAP was none of those things and so if you look at the work we're doing now is like, okay, here's a RESTful API, here's the JSON schema, send it to the Azure Resource Manager Like that's cloudy and so, it was because, you know we did a good job engineering getting it in but we didn't, we didn't have that like the, what does cloud smell like? If you know what I mean, like, the right whiff of cloud. Anyway, so Anthony really brought that and I, and I just feel really good about where we are at now, because, it's like cloud developers, develop this stuff for other cloud developers, it feels like that. >> Well in the last five years it sounds like tremendous amounts of transformation, reinvigoration, NetApp has some bold marketing messaging. We are the data authority, we help customers become data driven, you talk about these three business imperatives, customers have lots of choices that, you know public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, George talked about this morning in his keynote that hybrid and multi-cloud is now de facto. >> You know, someone asked me, I was giving a talk and they asked me, okay so much cloud, how long do you think till NetApp's not shipping hardware? And I was like, no, no, like we don't see that going away anytime soon, if anything we think our success in the cloud, 'cause customers want to do that, will help us gain share on-prem because customers also want to do that, right? George's picture shows, yes there is traditional on-prem IT, enterprise IT, there's private clouds people, HCI, convergence CI, and then there's public cloud. To me the interesting question, is why do people do those different things, the number one driver for public cloud is innovation, like, if you just, like all the catchwords you can think of, if you want to start up a DevOps team to-go program, I would like a new mobile phone app and I want it to take a picture of the person's face, oh look it's a woman, she looks happy, and then you want it to listen to her, to the voice, and like transcribe the voice and then do a sentiment analysis on the words, oh, she looked happy but it's snarky, and then you want to feed that into neural net deep learning engine, and say, what should we try to sell her, like, I guaranteed you, the team working on the public cloud will beat the on-prem team hands down every time. Right, I mean that's, so when you look at people and they go, we want all in on the cloud, or there's got to be 100% cloud. My question is what, what's your, like, don't start with that, what's your problem? If it's derive innovation, for the private cloud, typically that's just all about speed. They're so uniform regular, they're all the same you have extra capacity, you know you got empty rack space, for where the next one goes, someone says, I need some storage, and you say, hey, it's got a self service offer defined API, like, just do it yourself, and then in the enterprise space, the enterprise IT, Unix, Windows, clients, server, like that zone, probably the bulk of your investment, right? That's where you been spending the money historically. Probably still the bulk of most people's investment, but they want to modernize it, they don't want to get rid of it, they don't want to turn it off, it's working, but they'd like it to work better, so flash enable it, just get the performance issues out of the way. By the way, shrinks your footprint in the data center, frees up space, and connected to the cloud. Like not moving it, but just back it up or do DR, or like something cloudy and so to me I look at those three goals are tightly linked to the three styles of infrastructure. Notice, I haven't talked about products yet? The conversations I like to have with customers these days, help me understand what your business challenges are, your trying to move faster, be more innovative, modernize the stuff you have. Okay, like what ratio, now lets talk about how we could do those things together with the Data Fabric and let you build the Data Fabric you need, I mean, our Data Fabric strategy is not to tell customers what to do, it's to help them build the Data Fabric they need for their needs based on, oh, we're all about innovation, all on the cloud, like okay fine. We can do that like, but let's talk about that or is it. Now I'm stuttering. >> You bring up a great point there, Dave. >> I'm excited about this stuff. >> It's really exciting 'cause you know I think back, you know, just a couple of years ago, if you go to the enterprise, oftentimes storage was the boat anchor to prevent me from moving forward. Now we know that data, is absolutely going to be one of the drivers going forward, how do we help those people make that transition? How do you see NetApp driving that transition? So boating, that's an interesting word because I think if you look at cloud compute, it's very easy to move compute into the cloud, right. >> Stu: Yes. >> The thing about compute is it just happens and then its done, like you turn it on, you turn if off. You spin up the VM, you spin down the VM, it's easy. The reason data is a boat anchor is not because its a boat anchor, because data is the hard part, like you fired up the compute to the cloud but usually you're computing some data, well, how did you get the data to the place where the compute is? And then when you're finished a lot of times you created some data, well, how do you keep track of the data you created in the cloud, and is it legal for it to stay in the cloud, and now you want to put the data in a different cloud or put the data in your own data center and like, who's watching all that data? It's not a boat anchor because data sucks, it's a boat anchor actually because its the important thing you want to keep forever, right? I mean, maybe you do or maybe you want to delete it and know for sure it's gone. Like, those, compute doesn't have any of those issues. So, what's my point, whatever is hard, like if this was easy anybody can do it, right? Whatever is hard, you go hire lots and lots of smart people to work on hard problems and then customers are like, whoa, you're solving hard problems, I guess I will pay you after all. Isn't that what business is? >> So the majority of your conversations start with helping customers identify what they've got, where best to spread out their investments, it's not product based its about business outcomes. I'd love to get kind of in the last few minutes here, your perspective on NetApp's own IT and digital, and cultural transformation, how does that help your legacy long time enterprise customers feel an even stronger trust with NetApp? >> I think prior to our cloud work customers for the most part, customers and potential customers, they knew us, you know, it was interesting even as we thought about marketing the new work that we are doing, one of the questions was like, how much should be about the cloud, how much should be about the old stuff, and we've really leaned in almost 100% on telling people our new cloud stories, they're both public and private. And our VP of marketing I think she had a really, Jean English, she had a really good perspective. She basically said look, we've been telling the on-prem storage iron story for 26 years and if there's a customer who's out there waiting to decide who to use I don't think telling them that story again and year 27, is going to be the thing that makes the difference, like, they've decided they're happy with their Hitatchi or they're EM's, whatever it is, but, but they don't know that NetApp can help them in this brave new world. Right, they have no clue that ONTAP is also running on Amazon, I mean, It's like, seriously, I can run ONTAP on Amazon? Yeah like fire it up, it's five bucks an hour, or whatever the number is, it's like that's crazy, you know and so, so and then people go, well, we've had so many conversations where they're trying to get a cloud strategy together, and we talk about all these things and data movement and data management and cloud, and like just all of these tools and they're very excited about where they're trying to go and they said, you know, by the way, I do also have a on-prem storage need. Could you do me a quote for like what I need this week and meanwhile let's do some planning about what I need next year, right, you've got both of them working together, and I think it's that combo that's important. >> Last question, how do you, if only you had more energy and excitement like legitimately about this, but how do you keep some of the NetApp folks that have been here for a long time? How have you helped reinvigorate them to, to really be able to digest the massive impact that you guys are being able to make across industries? >> One of the things I think helps, 'cause there is a... Let me back up a step, you know, Steve Jobs, is such an awesome guy and also in his life he made so many mistakes, and one of the things he did when, when Apple was almost entirely floated on their Apple III business and, was that Apple III, Apple II? And he was doing the Mac, and basically his message to everybody else was, if you're not working on the Mac, you suck, except, by the way, that's the product that's floating the entire business and generating all the products, and I really was conscious of, like that's the wrong way to do it. And when I look in particular of what we're doing we've got new operating systems like E-Series and like SolidFire, the HCI is a whole new thing, and yet ONTAP is still shot through our entire product line. I mean, the Cloud Volumes' the cool, hottest new thing. It's ONTAP under the covers, right, and you look at the HCI it's got the SolidFire block storage built in there as a very scalable model, oh but if you'd like files guess what? We run ONTAP in a VM, it's HCI it runs VM, and so actually if you look at what's going on in there the work that we've done going way back, and yes it's evolved, it's changed, but that same work is actually shot through as technology, no longer the front piece but it's shot through all of it as technology, so it is kind of a unifying characteristic. If you talk about that, I think it helps people get more comfortable both internally but, we have the same, you know, you asked how do you get employees comfortable, a lot of customers have the same problem, you know-- >> Lisa: Right. >> They've spent a lot of investment and learning ONTAP's foibles over the year and Cloud Volume's hides all of that. So, gee, maybe I don't like this, you know what if you need all those features Cloud ONTAP, you can run ONTAP, like some people do want to do that, so, I just feel like the fact that the pieces all fit together, work together, actually gets people comfortable with it. >> Excellent, well Dave thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you for sharing your energy, and your excitement, your passion and all this wisdom and looking at where you guys are 26 years later, we look forward to year 27. >> Great, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we're at NetApp Insight 2018 in Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight, 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. From the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, I am Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. And we're welcoming back one of our alumni, Brendon Howe SVP of the Cloud Volume Services at NetApp. Hey, Brendon. >> Hey. >> Thanks for taking some time to come chat with Stu and me. >> Brendon: And thank you for having me. Great to be here. >> Big event about 5,000 plus people, the keynote this morning we had a chance to go to that, and it was when we were leaving standing room only. Biggest, Jean English was saying, this is the biggest collection of customers and partners under one roof. >> That's great. >> Yeah, fantastic. You're a long time NetApp-iac. >> 12 and a half years. >> 12 and a half years young. So you've seen a lot of NetApp's transformation. >> I have. >> In the messaging and the positioning, NetApp is the data authority. We're helping customers to be hashtag data driven. Cloud is really now seeming to be at the heart of NetApp's strategy. >> Brendon: Yeah. >> Talk to us about that evolution. >> Absolutely, you always want to be positioning yourself ahead of where you are, where you want to go. Alright, you want to be perceived as the future of where you're aiming. And I think it's been clear to us for a while now that the whole dynamic and movement to cloud, is probably the most disruptive and most impactful thing that's hit traditional IT. We've lived through a lot of changes. I've been here for a lot of them, where you went to a virtualization and the way applications were deployed and the way infrastructure was deployed waves. And up and down of the economy. Those were minor speed bumps, I think, in the journey of how we get to where we want to go. The disruption of cloud, which really could be characterized as the availability of an unprecedented set of services from the biggest public clouds in the world, who happen to be the biggest companies in the world, has changed the dynamics completely. I don't know that people fully appreciate why it's been so impactful. When you talk to customers, what you hear is they go to the cloud for agility and speed. It's not really a cost discussion of where are compute instances or bits or storage cheaper, one or the other. It's an agility argument. And what cloud brings to them is unprecedented pace of change, of adoption, of speed of line of business. That they can't reproduce otherwise. So, I think it's really important, that we aim ahead of where we want to be, which is really a cloud-first, data-oriented company. And that's why you see so much of that messaging from us. >> Brendan, it's really interesting, I think back. If I turn back the clock a dozen years ago, we didn't talk about software defines. >> Brendon: No. >> Yet, there were certain companies out there that storage, it was like, okay, we're going to create software for storage. Well, no, that was some software that ran on their box and only on their box. >> Brendon: That's right. >> You know, NetApp was the hipster software defines storage company, right? They were software before anybody else was. When you talk about NetApp in this cloud world, I think it's taken a while to come into focus. I remember back at the early solutions it was like, oh, let's stick a filer in a data center direct-connect it, we can offer some services. But the nirvana we've been trying to reach is storage services, available lots of different places. Can you walk us through some of that? Philosophically where NetApp's going? >> Yup, I think that's a good observation. I would say, think back four or five years ago, which I still think most of the industry's in at the moment, the notion of working with cloud was largely a connect-to-cloud theory. As you describe, where you have systems that would interconnect into the cloud. Or even leap into that world of taking an operating system and having it run in a VM in the cloud. I think of that as a cloud-connected strategy. And customers were intrigued, but what we often heard from them is it really can't be consumed as a cloud service. And it really can't be part of my traditional build with Azure, Google, or AWS. So, it's interesting, but it's an adjacency. And what we're really looking for are native cloud services. So, we took that to heart and really retrenched our effort to figure out how to build Cloud Data Services that behaved every bit like a native cloud service from the big cloud companies. All the way through to metered billing, provisioned and managed through the native portals of those cloud companies. Other than a brand label here and there, a customer may not even know it's NetApp. That's how cloud-oriented these services are. I think that's what it's going to take to be successful in this space. And you do that across multiple clouds with a quest towards going after market share. At the end of the day, you want to be relevant in as many cloud instances as exist, so you aim at the big cloud companies and you aim at global scale. I think that was what the learnings that we had through that journey is, it's not enough to reference architectures or software ports to the cloud, you really have to think about native services. There clearly, you have to find unique value, you have to do something that's not available otherwise, which is par for the course, but you also have to look at levels of integration that make it very, very easy to consume. And in the cloud, that's an unprecedented level of simplicity. >> One of the big challenges of the multi-cloud world is, it would be really nice if it was just a utility. People always say, oh well, I'm going to choose a cloud, and I can change things. Well, as you said, there's differentiation in the cloud. If you go talk to Amazon, Google and Microsoft, they're not all saying. no longer is it the race to the bottom. >> Absolutely. >> When you talk about partnering with the clouds, how do you provide, you need to provide unique differentiation, you need to integrate with all of the different players, yet, customers would love to be able to, oh, it's just a Kubernetes service and I use this deal and I move things around. How do you balance and deal with that complicated nuanceness of what multi-cloud really is? >> I think that the starting point is being good at a cloud in something. Right, and then you build on that competency. The Big Bang theory of going in and helping a customer with a hybrid cloud scenario that extends to multi-cloud is sort of the longest term vision of where they might end up over time. So, to some extent, it's the hardest problem to take on first. So if you core that back a little bit saying, let's focus on a use case that runs on the cloud to get started, and we'll build on that. The true fashion of, start small, iterate, grow, earn monthly recurring revenue, build under success and go is really the nature of the beast of what we're trying to do. Each of the cloud environments, tend to have real core competents that leads customers there in the first place. I don't know that you can ever listen to discussions from AWS without hearing about the breadth of their platform as a service. And how attractive it's been to the development in the DevOps community. Or you swing over and talk to Google, it's all about machine learning and analytics and tensor data flow, and all of that big query type stuff. And you swing over to Azure, and you hear about linking to the enterprise with traditional applications now enabled to run natively in the cloud. You follow those paths toward use case success and figure out how to build those solution stack with real value for the customer. So, we're trying to bring Cloud Volume Services into the fold, not as infrastructure as a service that's an option as well that might be faster, but tether that to real use cases where, look people are trying to move SAP HANA environments into the cloud; can we help? People are trying to figure out how to run database in the cloud; can we help? People are trying to figure out how to run analytics on file data that may even be collected on-prem; how can we help? You get into those types of discussions and start building validation, and it gets a lot easier to begin the journey of getting involved. I do think a multi-cloud world is the reality where people end up. As I do a hybrid-cloud. But customers have to work their way through that implementation in order to achieve that outcome. I think that's a long journey for a lot of customers. And I think there's a lot of technology that still has to be built to realize that full vision, the point is we're focused on that. I think we're on the right path, and if you saw the keynote this morning Anthony gave a nice preview of some of the data fabric vision that really showed snippets of how that plays out. A lot of which is available today. Which is pretty cool. >> Last question, and about a minute left, Brendon, NetApp is very customer focused, very customer-centric >> Brendon: Always has been. >> Exactly. Massive install base, as George was addressing this morning. A lot of enterprise customers not born in the cloud, those who are digital, those who are now. And last question, how have your customers helped influence the evolution of Cloud Volume Services? >> In a variety of ways. At times the traditional NetApp customer, that runs with things on-prem, is the most complex customer for services in the cloud because they're expectations are take everything the way they run on premise, and reproduce that in the cloud. And that's just simply not practical. Because you're in a new environment with new circumstances with new economics that make that achievement for a customer near impossible to do. To some extent, you have to sort of reprogram the traditional NetApp customer to understand, the cloud is different. The compare is not against us on-premise, the compare is the services in the cloud today that we look to improve upon. So that's one aspect of it. But clearly, a lot of our customers here at the show have decades of experience in leveraging the features we have into application environments that exist in the cloud today as well. And as it turns out, efficient handling of data, still is a problem. Having a reliable and dependable way to do backup and recovery is still a problem for customers. The ability to deal with bulk data from a backup and archive perspective, it's still a problem. So, I think a lot of the themes are the same and that the technology applies, but it has to be built differently because of the ecosystems that we're going in. I think the customers here are beginning to realize that, and then you bring in the wildcards of what's happening with Kubernetes and the drive towards application provisioning and how all of that can be linked to our solution set. We bring a lot of new opportunity that is different than the way traditional on-premises worked. >> Is that just one of the biggest barriers initially, was helping these large incumbent enterprises realize that it isn't possible to just go from on-prem to cloud, poof? >> Yes, I think so. The whole notion of taking the exact configuration, by the way, they custom tuned, and said I want to do that exact same thing in the cloud. It turns out that the configuration options in global cloud services just simply aren't available to do that. So you have to rework your customer's minds set, into the proper compare, and set expectations the right way. >> Lisa: It's all an evolution. Well, Brendon thanks so much for stopping by >> Thank you. >> and having a chat with Stu and me. We appreciate it. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are at NetApp Insight 2018 from Vegas, we'll be back with our next guest shortly. 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>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of the third annual NetApp Insight, with customers, partners about 5,000 plus people here Lisa Martin with Stu Minamin and very excited to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time George Kurian the CEO of NetApp. George, thank you so much for stopping by. >> Of course, thank you for having me. >> Really enjoyed your key note this morning, first of all it was standing room only there was about 5,000 plus people here Jean English, your CMO mentioned to us a few hours ago, that this is the biggest collaboration of your partners and customers under one roof, the momentum is palpable the messages are palpable, and I really enjoyed some of the messages that you delivered in your keynote. One, I'd love to get your perspective on the data authority and how NetApp itself has transformed in recent years to become that data authority, what does that mean from your C-level perspective? >> You know, we've always been in the business of helping our customers, help make their businesses better with data. We used to do it strictly in the form of storage systems, but over the last few years we have built a much more robust portfolio of capabilities. Both technological as well as partnerships to enable customers to use our technology wherever their data sits, whether it's in the edge of the enterprise or in heart of the biggest cloud providers in the world, and we believe that the world will be a hybrid, multi-cloud world, because of the need for speed and efficiency in how IT delivers support to digital businesses. And our idea is to help our customers by using our tools to integrate all of their data for business advantage. So, we see ourselves as someone who is really knowledgeable about being, managing customers' data in a hybrid cloud world. That's what we call data authority for the hybrid cloud. >> And you talked about, this morning too, kind of early in your keynote it sounded like you were addressing, NetApp has a massive install base, to helping those customers understand those that weren't born in the digital age they have to be there now to be relevant, to compete, to identify new service models, so I thought that was a very, poignant message. But something, that Stu and I were talking about is the four, kind of, pillars of digital transformation, walk us through, for those that didn't have a chance to see your keynote, walk us through those four pillars, how NetApp is enabling customers to utilize them. >> Absolutely, we talk to our customers about if you're not a born digital business you need to transform yourself especially using your data, to compete with these born digital companies. And, there are four ideas that we shared with customers that are the cornerstones of such a transformation. The first is that, digital transformation requires IT transformation, businesses usual in IT wouldn't cut it for the digital era. The second is an idea that was created by the Boston Consulting Group, which is that, speed is the new scale. It's the hallmark of competitive differentiation and advantage in the digital world. You know, I was talking about the fact that, Fortnite, a game that was created just a year ago has now got 125 million customers or players. That wouldn't happen in the physical world. And the third is, that because of the need for speed you need to be able to take advantage of innovation sources anywhere, which creates the necessity to operate in a hybrid multi-cloud world where IT is enabling the business to access innovation everywhere. And finally, that while you're doing it you need to think about your data. The critical asset that you have, that the born digital companies don't and how to use that and you need to build a data strategy which requires you to move from thinking about data centers to data fabrics, and so those were four key principles that we're sharing with our customers. >> Yeah, George I think that's a great way to measure what's happening with digital transformation. I wonder if you can help us take a lens at NetApp itself, so, when you talk about speed, NetApp has 26 years of experience, you've got over 10,000 employees a company of this size and this heritage you have some strengths but you're competing against some of those cloud native players. You know cloud is the bar which we are all measured someone said in the keynote this morning, I believe it was you, can you speak especially to the speed aspect how you look internally, what has to change culturally, I know Jean talked to us this morning, operationally there were changes made, that's your background. >> Absolutely, you know I think that we are an example of a company that is using data to accelerate our business right, in multiple ways. The first was in product development, we have used a lot of information about how customers use our systems. How, the support organization reacts to customer situations, and have accelerated cycle times for software development, it was 20 months when I joined, it's now six months on our hardware platforms and on the cloud we're releasing new capabilities every two weeks. So, we've really become a cloud native development organization and it required a lot of changes, I will just tell you that, getting the engineers through to the other side of it, has been extraordinary, they love the new world. They would never want to go back to the old world. Another place is around our custom interface where we've invested a lot more in digital marketing capabilities our CMO Jean English, is an expert in that world and so we have had new discussions with cloud only customers entirely electronically, and on the back end in terms of support we have amassed a lot of information about our customers systems, and now we're using artificial intelligence through a capability called active-IQ to tell them proactively what they can do to bench mark themselves against the best. So we say, listen Stu, we think your system which is operating in exactly similar environment to Lisa's system, is not working as well because you've done these five things. And so there's a lot of ways where we are trying to progress our own transformation. I would tell you that the secret, there are two important lessons learned. One was we started with business led initiatives rather than an end to end transformation of the business. And the second is we structured a transformation program led by the chief transformation officer so that it would become the day to day reality of our business, not the after thought of the normal course of business. And so, those are two key practical tips that we would share with our customers about transformation. >> George, NetApp has a strong history with partnerships, when I think about channel lead, NetApp has always been there, from a technology stand point, NetApp has negotiated some challenging waters I think specifically, VMware was a big wave of course acquired by EMC, but NetApp did better in VMware environments than it did in the market as a whole. Today VMware is still a very important piece of the marketplace, but Amazon's another one that is a challenging company to partner with, everybody's always worried, okay how long do you partner with them before they take over. How do you look at that, what are the most important partnerships from a NetApp standpoint, and how do you face those today? >> We've always kept the customer at the center of a partnership. I think that the secret to our success has always been that we keep the customer interests paramount, and it allows us to partner with companies who may be part of some of our competitors. I think today, if I look at it, clearly, in terms of the customer lens we have a lot of work going on with the big cloud providers, both in North America as well as overseas. To help customers architect a truly hybrid multi-cloud, we showed some really exciting work that we've done over the last year to make that a lot more tangible and real, and it's the result of deep engineer to engineer collaboration with them. I think the second area that we're making investments in are really to build the foundation for using data alongside artificial intelligence and machine learning, specifically with training and inference models and there we've been fortunate to be able to collaborate with the leader, NVIDIA, in that market. And it's about focusing on what we bring and keeping the customer at the center of the conversation. In terms of the go to market side of things. We've also done work, for example, with Lenovo, where we are bringing complimentary skill sets into the market, they are bringing computing skills, we're bringing storage and data management skills. They have strength in certain geographies and so we feel like it's a really complimentary relationship and we respect all of our partners, what they bring to the market and we're excited to, and honored to work with them to be honest. >> So, one of the things that I've read recently and it was apparent in a lot of the messaging today is the evolution of the data fabric. It's moved, it's transformed from a vision to a legitimate architecture. Talk to us about some of the evolution in the last twelve months and how your customers have helped be able to really make that real? >> We've learnt a lot, about, real use cases of the data fabric. Today, we have hundreds of customers deployed and in production with it, and we've been fortunate to be able to iterate at cloud speed on the new capabilities, it is real today, we allow you to have data management services integrated across all of your environments, in your data center with the world's best flash we've connected and we're very excited to connect our enterprise Grade 8CI solution to it, and of course a catalog of consistent data services that cross enterprise cloud with our 8CI and the biggest public clouds, we have taken advantage of new container technology and capabilities that Kubernetes and Istio bring to the market to build a really good control plane for all of this, we've innovated around data insights using foundational technology from on command insight that gives you now visibility into where all your data sits. And you'll see us continue to bring out really exciting innovations in the data fabric. The reason that the data fabric is resonating with customers is because it helps you build a consistent set of data services in a hybrid multi-cloud world, and use your data for business advantage. That's why it's resonating. >> George, NetApp has gone through some ups and downs over the 26 years. In many ways, it's been close, or people have said it's on the brink of being gone, and it's remade itself. How has NetApp continued to do this, and why should people believe that NetApp is in the position to execute best for the future? >> I think we've always been resilient at looking at things that could have been threats, and making them opportunities. Throughout the generations there was the transition from the internet computing, the dotcom bust that affected everybody, virtualization was supposed to kill storage, the cloud was supposed to kill storage, and through every one of those transitions we have looked carefully at how could we take what could be a threat and make it an opportunity, and make it an opportunity by serving our customers best through those technology moves, and I think that's the core to our success, I would say that what we have done over the last few years, is massively upped the game on execution. We laid out the data fabric strategy four years ago, as a vision and four years later we've got customers, we've got the biggest cloud providers, we've integrated it with the world's best flash and the world's best HCI and we are delivering road maps. So, I think that's really the promise of the new NetApp, we are really, really, focused on execution. >> Another, thing, sorry Stu, that we've heard along those lines in terms of NetApp's evolution, and continuing to stay relevant, is that the NetApp on NetApp story is one that NetAppians are proud of and should be, but it's also seeming like, is that a differentiator, when you're talking with customers who have so much choice that NetApp on NetApp story, that authentic, this is how we pivoted over the last 26 years to stay relevant, to compete. Tell us little bit about how you're, as the CEO, when you're meeting with customers, how does that story resonate with them? >> Our transformation story is a topic of conversation with all C-level executives. Everything we talked about with our customers today, we are an example of. So, for example, we did not take on an end to end IT re-architecture, we prioritize the digital business initiatives in the company and said, what are the barriers in our own IT that preclude that and so we prioritized IT initiatives to support the digital business transformation of the company. We have created two data hubs in the company as we have progressed those initiatives, one a product data hub through our auto support mechanism, which is now integrated into every technology that we sell to customers, both in the data centers of our customers and the cloud and on the customer facing side we've evolved to a customer hub that so, I think that there are examples that we share both in terms of leadership, people change management, transformation of IT that are extraordinarily relevant and I think that one of the things that we are open about sharing is the mistakes we've made. I think that brings an honesty and a transparency to our relationships with our customers and they trust us because of that. >> Alright, George, it's been really interesting, people have said for years storage is going to be killed off by everything else. If you look at all of the big waves right now data's at the center of all of it. >> George: That's correct. >> What I want you to help us understand is connect the dots for us, because NetApp, most of the customers I talk to here, the first thing they'll think about is, oh, well, NetApp's my storage company. Storage versus the data and how I get value out of that, help us connect the dots as to how I go from being a storage supplier to helping customers become data visionaries, as you say. >> I think one of the really important discussions we have with customers is data is the foundation of a digital business it's sort of the oil of the digital business, and software is the engine. It operates on the data to make the business go better, the challenge that most business leaders have as they think about digitizing their businesses is that they have fragmented their data across systems and silos that were the prevailing norm in IT, not only did it fragment the data, but it made operating IT much more complicated and so two long held paradigms that we have shared are finally coming to reality, NetApp has always been a simplify your data center unlike our competitors and that's coming through for the needs of simplification. And the second is, while you're doing it build a platform that can integrate all of your data, so that you can accelerate your transformation, and I think we're well positioned for that. I think there are customers here who have never met us in the storage systems world, that have joined us on the cloud like WuXi NextCODE, the genomics company that never buys a piece of equipment from NetApp, so we're really excited about an enormous number of those new faces that we're seeing. And then there are customers that started with us, as a storage system supplier, that we are bringing to the cloud. And, so we're going to keep pushing forward. >> Just quick follow up on that, it really opened my eyes, I was at the Cisco show earlier this year and when you talk about the future, Cisco, the networking company, they said, ten years from now you won't think of us as a networking company, you'll think of us just as a software company. What's NetApp of the future? >> We will offer our intellectual property in a broad range of ways, I think we'll still be offering systems but I think the brains of those systems will really be super smart software. Software that's, digitally enhanced and software that's enhanced with machine learning capabilities. I think we'll offer them also as cloud services, and we're really going to be focused on helping our customers with their data problems we think that's an extraordinarily rich landscape and we think that it has the opportunity to propel our business to achieve everything we've wanted to achieve. So, we're excited about the momentum. We are, honored to have so many customers, partners, and technologists here, and I think this is the best insight in the three years that I've been CEO, and I'm looking forward to having an even better one next year. >> Excellent, keep moving up bar, George. Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE, you're now an alumni so I'm going to give you a sticker so you-- >> Thank you >> Can brand yourself. Stu and I really appreciate you sharing your insights and your time with us. >> Thank you so much, it's been an honor to be here. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, we are live from NetApp Insights 2018 in Las Vegas, I am Lisa Martin for Stu Minium, stick around we'll be back with our next guest shortly. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. From the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're welcoming back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Jennifer Meyer, Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing at NetApp. And welcoming to theCUBE Alok Arora, Senior Director of Cloud Data Services and the Product Owner for NetApp Cloud Advisor, which we'll talk about today. So guys, the keynote this morning, one of the things that George Kurian, your CEO, whose going to be on the program I think next with Stu and me, talked about the four pillars of digital transformation, and one of them was hybrid and multi-cloud is now the de facto architecture. Jennifer, from a cloud marketing, product marketing stand point, how is NetApp engaging with your customers, both your install base enterprise customers and engaging with new customer to help them evolve a successful multi-cloud strategy? >> Well what's funny about that is it's not really even up to us, it's up to the customer and where they're at today, meeting them there and then taking them kind of to that destination that's interesting or important for them. And what we know today is that not only are customers in the cloud because they want to be close to innovation, that's one of our big themes, inspiring innovation with the cloud, but they've got their hands in multiple clouds. And studies show that at least 80-81% of customers are doing multi-cloud with two or more public clouds, and I think that's really interesting, you know I think that in some cases it's because their end uses, or their customers, have chosen a cloud that they want to go with and so they're trying to service those needs where they exist, but also maybe they realize that they want to subscribe or consume services in one cloud versus what's available in another cloud, and so it's not our job really to tell them where to go, it's to make sure we've got a consistent seamless amount of services to give these customers to consume, wherever they may be, in whichever public cloud. >> Yeah, well I like what you said, meeting them where they are, cause I think in some ways we're giving customers a little bit of credit that this was actually planned for as to how they got to where they are, you know I'm sure if we took that 81% that say they know they're multi-cloud, if we go with the other 19%, most of them are probably multi-cloud and just don't realize it. >> Jennifer: Absolutely. >> Because just like we had an IT in the old day, I have an application, a business unit, or somebody drives something, and oh my gosh, that's how we ended up with silos, we ended up breaking those things apart. >> Or shadow IT, right? You've got a lot of developers that know exactly what tools they want. >> We had a good discussion with Anthony Lye and Ted Brockway talking about Azure and some unique functionality that NetApp's looking to drive into that partnership with Microsoft. I wonder if we could step back, if you could help us understand kind of the cloud portfolio of NetApp, people that just know NetApp as "Oh it's, that's that filer company that I've probably "got a lot of products from." The multi-cloud has been evolving, for quite a few years now, so I want to help understand the breadth and depth of the offering. >> That's right and I think you know we always think about it almost like a four layer stack, in terms of our strategy and what we're doing to bring more of these innovative data services to our install base to your point, but also our net new buyers, folks that are coming to us through Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, or AWS, and so it really does start with our legacy and our foundation of, in this case, cloud storage, and the data services, or the advanced data management that's built upon those storage protocols. So of course it's NFS, NSMB, but when you think about being able to offer that, and compliment what's available in the public clouds today, because that's why they've chosen to partner with NetApp. On top of that we are delivering advanced services in those public clouds that have never been available before, things like automatic snapshots, or rapid cloning, and backup, and tiering, and I think it's really important because what it does is it extends our customers' experience from On-prem into the public cloud, without having to sacrifice a thing. >> Alok, it's a tough thing that customers are trying to figure out. When I look at it and talk to customers, they've got an application portfolio. What are they modernizing? What are they starting from fresh? And then they've got all the other stuff that they have, how is NetApp helping with what they do? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think that's a great point. So you talked about the offerings that we have with multi-cloud and that creates all the options for future state architecture, I can build there, however, in order to understand how do I get there I need to understand where I am today, right? So we start looking at your current state footprint, we look at our customer's current state footprint. Understand how it is architected. How it is designed, how it is serving up the applications. Because it can be really a tedious job to get started, to get to the cloud and building the roadmap. So what Cloud Advisor does is it leverages active IQ data to get that inside for us and be leveraging data science, machine learning, to give them a guidance as to how they can get there. What should be their migration approach. How should they build a transition strategy. Because a lot of times they would call the consultants to help with the transition strategy, at the end they get a PowerPoint, which is not very actionable. We started this grounds up, we understand their detail you know, how the stuff, the bits and bites, are organized so we start giving them an actionable strategy they can execute upon. So that's really Cloud Advisor geared for accelerating that journey to the cloud that our customers should be taking to. >> How are you guys helping customers to start embracing emerging technologies, IoT devices, we had Ducati on this morning, a MotoGP bike is basically an IoT device, but in terms of, Jennifer you talked about this, and Alok you reinforced it, you are basically co-developing in partnership with your customers, it's about where they, helping them understand where they are, what they can do today. How are some of the services helping them to be able to harness the power of AI, say for example, to work with data authority to use that data for actionable business insight, and outcomes? >> Yeah it's interesting you talk about the IoT, I think NetApp saw that 20 years ago. I mean ASAP is our original IoT, that is what we get billions of data points from our customers. Controllers, millions of controllers worldwide, and we build on that mirror data, and we apply the artificial intelligence in there. We actually start looking at classifying their applications so that, if they have a strategy driven by the application, as you were saying, hey there is a director from a BU, from majority point of view, we want to take these applications in the cloud. How do you figure out what application are? Where does the data live? How does it governed? We figure that out by that IoT data, by that artificial intelligence and also making sure that these applications, no work loads are left behind because applications can be complicated they talk to each other. So when you start thinking about taking one part of the application, you also want to make sure the other parts that make that application whole also go to the cloud. And that is where we're leveraging Artificial Intelligence to cluster these applications and recommending the customer that: "Hey don't make, don't leave these workloads behind "because otherwise you're going to have a failed strategy." So we warn them upfront to make sure they're successful when they start making the executions. >> I think another piece to that too is just the fact that for many years we've had workloads just trapped On-prem. They haven't had a place to go into the public cloud without a ton of refactoring or rearchitecting, right. You'd have to rewrite them for objectory. You'd have to do a lot of manual labor and things just to make it happen. In most cases it hasn't been worth it. And so when you looked at the fact that about 80% of On-prem files where in NFS V3 protocol, there wasn't really a place in the public cloud to match that and so by even just delivering Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and AWS or Azure NetApp Files which is the version for Azure, we're able to give customers an, a way to free up that trapped set of workloads, put those into the public hub, so that it then can be available to all of those advanced services that live on those public clouds to do things like Big Data Analytics or to do developing, you know, applications and services of their own and for their own benefit. >> You Know. >> Yeah I think that's a great point because >> He's so excited.| >> Sorry. >> Because when you start looking at building your strategy you want to have confidence in your strategy. >> Jennifer: right. >> So, with your protocols and all that discovery. We also not only give you the option that NetApp offers but show you what are the other options you have within Hyperscalers and how would your workload perform with NetApp technology. So you can move with confidence, right. So that's the good part of about Cloud Advisor to make sure you're moving with confidence not just, you know, with a blind spot with you. >> You know one of the transitions we've been watching is really the ascendancy with the developer in DevOps. And I've talked to the SolidFire team for many years, I see them at some of the shows that we've been covering. In the Keynote this morning George Kurian said that Kubernetes and Istio are the multi-Cloud control plane. Jennifer I'm wondering if you can help explain the StackPointCloud acquisition. >> Jennifer: (agrees) >> Some people that might not have the context of about what NetApp and SolidFire, even before the acquisition were doing. You know, we're being like: "Wait I don't understand, you know." >> Sure. >> Kubernetes is something That you know Google and you know, Red Hat and others are doing. >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> And we even learned what the abbreviation for is was. >> Stu: K8s. >> It's like we're all hip. Absolutely. >> Absolutely, just because. >> It's all about concatenate long words together. So it, it's really interesting because when I talked about that four layer strategy, right the third layer. So it's you know cloud storage at the bottom. Then it's the advanced capabilities and data management above that. But the one that's next is orchestration and integration. And there's really a few things that live in there. You know, the, our cloud orchestration sort of technology is really what we got from our Qstack acquisition. Our teams in Iceland and what they've been able to do largely to underpin a lot of what we've seen with cloud volume service today. But certainly right in there is NetApp Kubernetes service, which as you now know, is from our StackPoint intellectual property. And so back on September 18th, when we announced this acquisition it was really to kind of give our developers and our DevOps folks a way to finally start solving for some of that data gravity that I think we've been periled by over the last few years. And what we now know is Kubernetes is the operating system of the clouds, right. It is the clear winner of container orchestration among things so it made a lot of sense to pair that kind of multi-cloud orchestration again given our strategy to be where our customers want to be with some of our cloud orchestration technology from our Qstack acquisition and make sure that with Trident and some of the ways that we're able to deliver finally persistent storage to those containers. I mean this is like a match made in heaven. Right, we're going to give people the way to make sure that they know that containers are a femoral and data is not. So let's help them do kind of all the things that they want to do in the clouds if they want to do them. >> I think I read on line that, was the StackPointCloud acquisition based on after actually NetApp used it internally. >> Jennifer: Yes. >> Tell us a little bit more about that. Because I think the NetApp on that up story is probably something that could be leverage, you're a marketer, as a differentiator when customers have so much choice. >> Well and I feel like it's a story that every vendor should be forced to tell. If you're not willing to use your own IP and technology what is that saying to your customers. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> So it is true and a lot of our developer teams, if you've hear of Jonsi Stefansson and Anthony Lye's team, that is how this sort of came about as we were looking for a way to sort of do it ourselves. And we thought man through all this investigation there's something here. There's something that we shouldn't hold to ourselves and we should share with the rest of the world. And so at one point we need to get those guys on with you as well so they can tell a little bit more about their story. >> So proof is always in the pudding. Can you give uan example of one of your favorite customer stories. We'll start with you Alok. Who have really embraced the clouds, first of all helped you develop the optimal cloud services are now really achieving big business benefits with the cloud services NetApp is developing. >> Yeah so, several of the customers as we talked to you and specially for Cloud Advisor, as we were looking at their journey as they were starting to think about how much money they were spending upfront to figure out a strategy, they had a strategy driven by a data center that was, were the lease was coming up, and so they had to plan to evacuate that data center into the cloud from there they need to figure out what applications they're running there obviously the virtualization also was there, so that had to be configured in the cloud. So we started thinking about in that use case that we need to provide these triggers and strategy points to our customers. At the same time the other shift that we saw was that these guys were not just talking amongst the infrastructure teams, they had to talk to the application owners and they had to have conversations with CFO's to talk about the economics of the clouds. So we made sure that when we build this that give them the tools that enable them to talk to various stakeholders. Give them the application footprint that is running there. Give them the economics. What it is going to cost to run these applications and workloads that they have identify too when they're in the cloud. So give them the data point that they can go and talk to their CFO. So with that really it starts shaping a product that will meet their needs and meet the needs of all of our customers. >> Lisa: Jennifer, favorite customer example. >> Oh, it's easy this week because it's all about WuXi NextCODE and I don't know if you picked up on any of their story cause we've plastered it around our conference this week because we're so proud of, not only what they're doing as a mission which is very impressive in terms of genomics sequencing and the scale at which they're doing it but the fact that they've based their foundation now on NetApp Cloud Volume services is huge. And really what they came to us and said is: "Look, we are trying to sequence all of these genomes "in parallel and our benchmark is really to look at about "a hundred thousand individuals at once." When they were trying to do that on their own, using there own self-managed storage in the cloud, they could never complete it. It would either fail or they would have some sort of a problem where they just couldn't get it to work. And with NetApp Cloud Volume Service they were able to complete in about 45 minutes. And so what their finding is again with this extreme performance, with the ability to scale and most importantly the tie it back to our discussion, it's multi-cloud, they themselves are multi-cloud because of their big pharma and hospitals that they serve. They have customers in every one of those public clouds and so we are able to help them where ever they need us to be. And that's very exciting. >> It's also one of those great examples that everybody understands. Genomic sequencing related to healthcare, you know disease predictions and things like that. So it's a story that resonates well. >> Jennifer: Sure. >> But something that you just said sort of reminded me of one of the four principles that George Kurian talked about this morning. And speed is the new scale. And this sounds like a customer who's achieving that in spades. >> Well it's so fun because I think for a long time we've been really fast On-prem and I think people have just sort of come to expect a certain level of it's good enough in the public cloud and what we're showing them in droves again on AWS GCP or with Azure is that you should expect more. Particularly for high-performance computing workloads or things that you really just, if you're moving your SAP workloads to the cloud and speed is, there is no option it has to be fast. We are showing people now possibilities that they didn't ever dream of before because of this extreme performance through things like Cloud Volumes Service. >> It's really too bad you guys aren't excited about this. (laughs) >> I know how much longer do you have? >> (laughs) Jennifer, Alok, thank you so much for stopping by and having a chat with Stu and me. And talking about how customers are really helping NetApp become a data authority that they need to be to help customers become data driven. We appreciate your time. >> It's our pleasure. >> Have a great time at the rest of the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you both. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from NetApp Insight 2018, from Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we're live at NetApp Insight 2018 from the Mandalay Bay, in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the day is Stu Miniman. We're welcoming back two distinguished alumni to theCUBE, we've got Anthony Lye SVP and GM of the Cloud BU at NetApp. Hey, Anthony, welcome back. >> Hello, thank you very much. >> Fresh from the keynote stage. And we've also got a Tad Brockway, the head of product Azure Storage, Media and Edge at Microsoft, Tad, welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So guys, this is day one, keynote this morning, it was standing room only, 5,000 plus people here, Jean English was on your CMO of NetApp and said, most ever customers and partners under one roof at NetApp. So that's exciting. Let's talk about partnerships. NetApp has been around 26 years and the slide of partners and sponsors this morning was like a NASCAR slide. Tell us Anthony, about what you guys are doing, and how you're evolving your relationship with Microsoft? >> Oh, I mean, I think of all the relationships, Microsoft is unique. Tad and I have worked together now for over a year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And it's an engineering relationship. There is absolutely no doubt about it. We are doing things in Azure that nobody else has ever done. I think we sort of bring 26 years of NetApp experience to the infinite possibilities that Azure brings to its customers. It's transformation based on, very reliable infrastructure. So you get all the forward looking values of Azure, complemented by the 26 years of NetApp. >> Yeah, it's a great way to-- >> So a year ago, at this very event, NetApp Insight 2017, you announced some exciting things. One of them being Azure NetApp files. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Tell us about, a year later, where you are with that? I know McKesson, big brand in healthcare, they're going to be on stage tomorrow, give us a little bit of perspective about what that announcement has transformed into, one year in? >> Well, let me give you my perspective and then Tad, you should obviously give the view of Microsoft. For NetApp, it's given our customers confidence and confidence in their choice of public Cloud, that they now feel that Azure has distinct advantage in that it can land workloads that today currently run on NetApp. And they have the confidence that Microsoft has selected NetApp, that Microsoft will sell the service, Microsoft will support the service, Microsoft will build the service. I think we've also done something quite unique in the way the service is delivered. We could have just thrown up storage and said to customers, "You manage it." But I think together, we wanted to try and provide almost like dial tone, we just wanted storage to be there, and we wanted to give people performance guarantee. So they felt very comfortable picking a particular performance level with a particular workload. And that's not been done before. So, we're seeing fantastic results from customers, we have a backlog that's growing by the day, and customers who have been onboarded onto the system, have rave things to say about it. You'll hear from one of those customers tomorrow on stage with Tad and I. But Tad, how would you characterize the year? >> Yeah, sure. So, a lot of engineering effort, and that's the thing that makes this, customers don't care about how something is implemented, they care about the value that they get out of it. But it's because we've put so much effort into this across our companies, from an engineering standpoint, that there's nothing like this in the industry today. As we roll this out into Azure regions around the world, it is going to be a highly differentiated offering. And that's because fundamentally, what we're doing is, we're bringing Azure NetApp into Microsoft data centers, and we're wiring NetApp ONTAP directly into Azure. So we've worked together on the design for some advanced networking capability, all the way down to the switch level, where we have very low latency, very high throughput from the Azure Public Cloud, all of the infrastructure, all of the customers VMs, directly into ONTAP, very low latency, very high bandwidth. So all of the performance characteristics of ONTAP on-prem, and then bringing that into the Public Cloud. So you get really a no compromise transformation for your existing apps and you get the ability to provision that app volumes in a way that is fundamentally unique, it fits with the whole Cloud paradigm of being able to pay for your resources as you go, the democratization of IT so that individual business units can go provision volumes. So it really is Cloud paradigm plus all of the performance capabilities of ONTAP. >> I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit. When I think about Microsoft and NetApp, you both have really, it's called today Hybrid Multi Cloud. But Microsoft it's been given a lot of credit that it's got a strong Hybrid strategy. When I think back, I mean, Microsoft's always had storage as part of the Stack. If today, and Azure Stack, you've got Storage Spaces Direct, you've got a Cloud first strategy. So I want to be able to do the same thing in public Azure as when I'm building solutions, put it in the environment, can you help connect, where does that this ONTAP solution fit in there? Because, some people would say, "Well, come on Microsoft, "wouldn't you just build this with your own solutions?" Why do you turn to NetApp? >> So, it's true, I guess, the spirit, I think the spirit of what you're asking is, it's an observation that what brings our companies together is an appreciation for enterprise customers being able to do things on their terms. That involves customers taking existing IT workloads and then transforming them over to the cloud, as opposed to zeroing everything out and starting over, that's just not realistic. So, it's the strategy for Microsoft and the strategy for NetApp, and then our partnership together to meet customers where they are, help them evolve. So scenarios like Hybrid, they fit very nicely within that and Microsoft's portfolio with Azure Stack and some of the other things that we're doing there with Data Box, and so on. These are edge investments that are intended to extend the reach of Cloud into customer environments. And then to make it really easy for customers to take their existing assets, and then take advantage of the Cloud. That fits with the whole model of what we're doing with ONTAP as well. >> Anthony, we would love to hear your piece because there's NetApp pieces that are going into the Cloud but we see Microsoft, the Cloud is the starting point, we start in the public Cloud, and then that pushes out to the edge. >> Yeah, I think, I would make two points, I think, just to reinforce what Tad said, that there's just a technology that sits behind the file system that you cannot underestimate the importance of what Dave Hitz really started. I mean, ONTAP does things that no other file system can do. It manages the data in a very particular way, it allows us to run NFS and SMB protocols on the same volume for certain use cases. It has almost linear performance throughput characteristics. And we've been able to take that file system and then build intellectual property for certain workloads. So, NetApp is really the most commonly deployed platform for SAP. We are probably still the biggest platform for Oracle Database deployment, for MySQL deployment. So I think there's a technology, I think there is a sort of a history and legacy in Linux and open source based workloads, that we have an understanding of that adds to Microsoft. Now, the second point I would say is, I personally agree very much with Tad, but I think what you're going to see is IT will be redefined by Cloud. What I mean by that is, the Cloud will essentially establish the baseline and then push itself and it's sort of it's own access control lists, security models, those will end up getting pushed back to IT. So I think you're going to see a Cloud defined IT business as opposed to an IT defined Cloud. >> Yeah, I buy that. >> And I think there's just so much elegance and simplicity and scalability in Azure. Now, they had 25 years of watching everybody else make a mess of legacy IT, and now Azure is such a pure environment that it can extend, I think, and provide tons of value outside of Azure. >> So you guys mentioned, I think, Anthony, you mentioned when we kicked off, that this is really kind of an engineering partnership, when if we look at the history that both NetApp and Microsoft, have massive install basis of customers, customers that didn't start out in the digital era, obviously, customers that are born in that too. I'm curious, you mentioned about IT, from a joint selling standpoint, where are these conversations initiating? Are you talking with the IT folks? Are you going to the business folks who are having a more business outcomes led conversation? So Anthony, I will start with you? >> Well, so I would say, my favorite line about Cloud was, actually a line Marc Benioff quoted which was, what Clouds do is they democratize innovation. And if you think about that for a second, the environments that we grew up in, the big companies had a material advantage in their use of technology. The small companies couldn't afford to do it. You look at Azure now, and any single person on the planet can consume Azure. They don't need permission, in many cases, and ideas that would never get through the business case, can now be started on Azure. And there are so many great ideas and concepts that needed that sort of easy onboarding and services that, machine learning and artificial intelligence, there's a handful of companies that could buy that stuff themselves. Azure gives you access to all of that. So I think what's happening is that democratization has sort of infused more buyers. So what used to be a fairly linear process through the CIO has now been fractured. A lot of application developers are buying by themselves. Line of business people are funding project work sometimes without IT's knowledge. So for us, we wanted to make sure that we could allow traditional customers to extend to Azure, traditional customers to migrate to Azure, but we wanted to build a service that would appeal to the new Cloud buyer. To the application developer, to the data scientist. And I think we've done a very good job doing that. >> Yeah, no, I agree. I think, it's the combination of empowering folks to go do things to increase productivity at the individual business unit level, but then do that with technology that has taken decades of thousands of engineers to develop. This combination, there really is nothing like it in the industry, it's really unique. >> At lunch, I was talking to a couple of users here, and they were a little bit nervous, a little bit excited, going to go through some sort of Cloud certification. Cloud is an opportunity for a lot of people to scale up on new skill sets. I'm sure there's new certification. Can you talk a little bit about how you're helping customers move towards the future? >> Yeah, I think we've sort of, in many ways made, ONTAP, very much a relevant service in Azure and what we hope that means is for all of the people that have been very loyal to NetApp and to ONTAP that their skill set now translates into the Cloud compensations. One of the things we'll say, on stage tomorrow is, Microsoft and NetApp have worked together to create a certification that blends the best of what ONTAP can do for workloads, strategy and design with the wealth of services that Azure has. It's awesome to be onstage with Tad, we provide a critical service, but Microsoft has how many services now, in Azure? >> Tad: Oh, Gosh, hundreds. >> Hundreds and hundreds of services. And as a developer, I feel, you're like a kid in a candy store when you're in Azure, you can switch on almost anything and find services that will do incredible things that you could never get from IT. You could just never get those services. What Microsoft has is a scale so vast, I mean, how many data centers will you be at, by the end of the year? >> Well, we're in 54 regions today, and then each region has multiple data centers. >> Anthony: Hundreds. >> So anyway, we're all over the planet. >> So guys, we're out of time, but just really quickly, so we've seen this evolution, you guys have lived this evolution in the last year. The public preview is out for-- >> Azure NetApp files. >> Azure NetApp files, any Sneak Peek you can give us into what some of your customers are going to be saying tomorrow about the business outcomes like, reducing costs, or speed of transactions, that are going to be here tomorrow? >> You should get Brad up here from McKesson because he's awesome. Brad's been on point for it and I think, you'll hear from a customer tomorrow that they plan to bring the biggest enterprise workloads to Azure. I mean, I think when he names the applications, they are non-trivial applications that couldn't move, but now with Azure Netapp files can. I think he's also going to say that as well as benchmarking very well at the big workloads, we actually benchmark very well on the cost curve. That we can migrate workloads and give very good cost, I think characteristics as well as performance. So we've tried to give people that two dimensional flexibility. >> Well, that's going to be something not to miss. So if you're here at NetApp Insight, check it out, if you're not, watch it on their live stream. Tad, Anthony, thanks so much for joining-- >> Thank you, very much. >> Stu and me and sharing with us the momentum and the vision that you're now seeing manifest. We appreciate your time. >> Perfect, thank you. >> From Stu Miniman and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live from Las Vegas, NetApp Insight 2018, stick around we'll be back after a short break.

(electronic upbeat theme music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at NetApp Insight 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we're please to welcome for the first time to theCUBE, Cindy Warner, SVP of Worldwide Service and Support at NetApp. Cindy, it's great to have you here. >> Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. >> So this morning's keynote, talked a lot about transformation. Transformation of NetApp. Transformation that your customers need to execute to be competitive, to be successful. Tell us about customer transformation that you're seeing as the leader of service and support. >> Sure, our customers want outcome plain and simple. They are buying solutions that lead to outcome. So in the service and support area, the conversations we're having with our customers now is all about outcome. What can we do to ensure their outcome. To ensure their transformation. To ensure they can provide the services to their customers that they're looking to provide, or new revenue streams, or what have you. But it's really all about outcome and that's awesome because they don't care what's behind the curtain. They don't care if it's this box or that box. They care about outcomes. So that's a really big transformation for us. >> Yeah Cindy, one of the big challenges that used to be, okay, I got a box. I know exactly where it is. I know exactly, you know, who set it up and all the configuration. Now it's like wait. It's a multi-hybrid cloud world. >> Cindy: Right. >> And I got software spanning all of these environments and my data is all over the place. That has to have a huge ripple effect on the services and support. Walk us through a little bit about what that looks like. >> Yeah, I would tell you the number one thing in our world, if you really think about it, is data sovereignty. Because where's my data, you know. If I were a CTO or CIO, I'd wake up in the morning and go, where's my data. Right because, and we're managing that data for a lot of clients. And so it's really all about where's my data, and making sure that the sovereignty of the data is suppose to be in a certain place. It's suppose to be protected in a certain way. We work with a lot of regulated environments. So think healthcare, right. Think, you know, even automotive to some extend. All that IOT data, who's touching that data? That's personal data. So as, you know, the futurist talked about this morning, the ethical side of data for services and support is really intriguing to us actually. >> What's the conversation like, Cindy, with your enterprise legacy customers who weren't born in the cloud? How are you helping them kind of embrace the change that they have to go through? >> Yeah, I think the number one thing is to not be persuade into thinking it's all cloud, right. It's not everything is not made for the cloud. Especially if it wasn't born on the cloud. The pathway to the cloud could be very difficult, and maybe not even prudent. So we're doing a lot of assessments for our clients to decide what workloads belong in the cloud, and helping them to understand, it isn't all cloud. It's some cloud and it's hybrid cloud, and so it's this wonderful Lego cube that we build for them. >> NetApp has done quite a few acquisitions, you know, in the last couple of years. How does that impact what you're doing? Think about everything from the Gubernatis pieces and what's happening in AI. Talk about some of those challenges and opportunities. >> Sure, I mean, I would tell you something like Green Cloud that we did last year. When we look at managing those workloads, and helping to build up that Rubik's cube, right. Of piece parts and what that overall orchestration and architectural looks like in the future. Something like a Green Cloud helps us to orchestrate that. It helps us to manage that and really, that management plane for our clients is really where the heartburn is. It's taking look and seeing that entire data landscape and managing and orchestrating that. And the movement of all that data. That's the biggie. >> You know, follow up question. When I think about NetApp, NetApp was heavily involved in helping to really fix storage in a virtualized environment. >> Cindy: Sure. >> Lots of us have, you know, the wounds, the memories of, you know, over a decade of kind of fighting through that. What is FCS's role in kind of the cloud native this next wave? >> Yeah I, you know, I think it's the overall integration. Our team now is really fixated on where do we go with the overall integration of legacy and the cloud native stuff that clients are building. And grand it, the cloud native stuff gives competitive differentiation. Gives speed, gives scale. Really great stuff. But you can't leave the other stuff behind, right So for us, integration and how that integration is going to work through APIs or otherwise, is really a huge fixation in services and support. >> So NetApp has grown a lot. Done a lot of transformation. Talk about some of the changes to your customers' segmentation and how you're using that information and that segmentation to really deliver differentiated services. 'Cause let's face it, customers have a lot of choice. >> Right, and that's a key word for us actually. We say that the tag line, and for services and support we're looking for value based differentiated services that deliver outcomes. Big mouth. All I know, and I have no marketing chops, as you can tell, but the truth be told, when we look at our Global 1000 customer, they want high touch. And in some cases, no touch. And they want to get the information, solve problems really quickly without having to go, L1, L2 all through the tiers. And so we're piloting programs that are proactive predictive. And that are very high touch to ensure that they can solve their problems quite quickly. Either on their own or through the right person instead of going through some of that typical pathways to support. >> Alright, Cindy, I love you. You're going to help us decode some of this marketing discussion. So, hashtag data driven is something we're seeing at the show. >> Cindy: Right. >> Help connect for us, you know, how are customers being data driven as they look at their future in the cloud and beyond. >> Well, when I think of data driven, I think of new services. That to me means new services. And looking at the correlation, if you may say. Give you, you know, a start here. So the gentleman that had the DNA and Gene-Up data, right, in the keynote. If we can take that data and correlated to somebody's overall health history and see the transition, right. See as your blood pressure is going up. Or see as, you know, certain changes and doubts are happening in your health profile. Overall holistically, you can I think see the train before it hits you. Right, you can see a stroke coming. And that would be the most beautiful thing. Is to see stuff before it hits you. Same with the car manufacturer. If they see a pattern of brakes that are going out, Marry Barra probably never wants to sit in front of the Senate again, right. So we can see those patterns before a massive recall has to happen. So that's data driven to me. It's either new goods and services or seeing a train before it hits you. >> Cindy, I know this is a short segment, but we want to thank you so much for stopping by. I'm going to give you a CUBE sticker because you are now officially an alumni. >> I'll feel CUBED forever more. >> Excellent. CUBED forever more. That's a new hashtag. We want to thank you for sharing your perspective from a services and support standpoint because those are critical services >> Thank you. >> For customers needs. >> And we want to thank you for watching this segment. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE live from NetApp Insight 2018. (electronic upbeat theme music)

(upbeat techno) [Announcer] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018 There's over 5000 customers, partners, Netappians, analysts, press here. TheCUBE is here as well, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman back for our second year of covering. We're joined by two guests, one an alumni and one a new guest to theCUBE, Henri Richard EVP a worldwide field and customer operations from NetApp, welcome. >> Good morning. >> Morning. And Kamran Amini, the VP and GM of data center infrastructure from Lenovo, welcome back! >> Glad to be here. >> So guys, Lenovo, NetApp, just about a month ago announced some exciting news, Henri let's start with you, kind of give our viewers who may not be that familiar with the news announcement what this new technology partnership is all about. >> Well, it's a multi-faceted partnership. I think it's important to understand that for us there is a component that has to do with a worldwide engagement of Lenovo around storage solutions that will be infused with NetApp technology. There's a second element, which is the opportunity for us to pull or go to market organization in certain countries, and get to critical mass to cover the needs of customers. And then the last part, the one that's probably the most talked about, is a joint venture in China where we will combine our forces to serve the needs of the very fast-growing Chinese market. >> Alright, yeah. Henri, I was at the Lenovo event where this was announced, want you to give us a little bit about the field engagement, because it really does seem a place where NetApp and Lenovo, there's good synergies there, but there's not a ton of overlap. Maybe explain a little bit from the field engagement. >> That is really one of the reasons we were excited, I think, on both sides to do this agreement. You know, we feel that Lenovo is a fantastic server company, that's demonstrated incredible momentum in the last 12 months. We have ourselves, you know, modestly a pretty nice momentum in the storage business, and in coming together I think we can be stronger in serving the needs of customers that have both compute and storage needs. When we did the analysis of our market coverage, it so happens that there's a lot of places where we're strong and Lenovo can benefit from that, and other places where they're strong, and we can benefit from it, so you're correct in stating that there was not that much overlap. And then lastly, we've put in place a process where our go-to-market organizations are going to combine their strength and help each other in some of accounts where both a strong compute story and a strong storage - needs to be integrated to serve the needs of the customer. >> Let's talk a little bit more, guys, about the impetus from the customers. The keynote this morning, as I was mentioning was jam packed, and we heard a lot, Stu, about the customer experience, and how NetApp is an enabler of customers to harness their data to become data-driven. Kamran, from your perspective, what was some of the customer input that really sort of brought this partnership - and this multi-faceted partnership - together? >> I think as we see customers looking their applications, not only current applications, but emerging applications, data's becoming very critical. And be able to accelerate data and the availability of data is going to be key for them, alright? As you heard earlier this morning, data's gold, right? It's the next oil, as we think about it. So we looked at our customers and at their transforming moving toward machine learning and AI, big data analytics, and it's driving massive amount of data that you have to be able to accelerate and be able to give results back. The partnership was the best of breed here. Looking at a leader partner around all flash and growing massively with their data-management solutions, and us leveraging our server technology and the capability we bring as a data center group, bring the both of best breeds to deliver an end solution for customers is really what we're focused on. And it's all being driven, really, by data, really where we see the acceleration happening in the workload aspect of it. >> You know, I was listening to the keynote this morning it talked about how customers today, it's a hybrid, multi-cloud world, is what NetApp positioned, and what I actually like is both NetApp and Lenovo are really aware and work with, really, the hyper scalers out there. There's a bunch of years that we kind of - there was this fighting from certain vendors out there, it was like, "Don't go that, that's not the future," you know, "We know what we're telling." Maybe talk a little bit about how that plays into philosophy, how you deal with customers, and how that leads to co engineered solutions that you'll work with together. >> Well, I think that both companies have a history of being good partners in the industry. Let's start there. Secondly, you're right, that some vendors in what we call traditional IT, are still fighting the reality of the hybrid multi-cloud, and I think that that's the path to death. Lenovo doesn't have that position, we certainly don't have that position, and we believe that combining our strength, when we're serving the customer to help them go to the public cloud, to help them leverage both great compute capabilities on prem and the extraordinary innovation that happens in the cloud is the right way to serve the customers. >> No, absolutely. I think that customers are looking to be more agile, all right? As their business evolves, and they're seeing competitive nature in their line of business, agility is becoming more and more important. Everybody also has to fit within a budget, so the hybrid-cloud story is really the path. And today, again, Lenovo is serving six of the top 10 hyper-scalers today from a technology, and we believe the hybrid-cloud story for on prem is the path of the future, where the customer adopt and deploy, to be more agile and reactive to their markets. >> George Kurian talked about, in his keynote this morning, that we seemed to kind of initially address, stand up has a massive install base, a lot of enterprises that were not born in the digital age, so he kind of talked about something that reminded me of what you said, Henri, is, "If customers don't adapt, transform rapidly at scale, they're out of business." So NetApp itself has undergone a very significant transformation, I'd love to understand from both of your perspectives, Henri, we'll start with you. How does the NetApp Lenovo multi-faceted partnership deliver differentiators? Presumably Lenovo has a lot of choices to do a partnership with a cloud storage data management company. What are some of those unique things from NetApp's field? >> So, one of the salient points that George made this morning is that for legacy companies, you know, they have to understand that the fact that they already have data is a huge asset that they need to leverage, right? That's using that data is how they're not going to become disrupted by a new company. Startups have agility, but they don't have the data. So jumping on that opportunity was certainly something we did at NetApp, and we have an application called Active IQ that actually takes a massive data lake of information we get from our systems, and is helping our customers make better usage of our technology. So just an example of our digital transformation. To the point of the relationship with Lenovo, the nice thing about our data fabric strategy is that it is not related to NetApp hardware, it's really all encompassing, it's there to serve the needs of the customer to be able to leverage the value of their data. And so it makes it very easy to partner with us, because really we're not parochial about, how we go about leveraging the technology. >> Yeah, I think what we see is, you know this digital transformation is driving many new use cases. IOT's becoming a big thing, putting edge to the cloud. So, data and our understanding data, and what you can do with data, is going to become more relevant across all lines of business. And that's where we're really focused on, and our transformation as Lenovo it's all around, "How do we address that shift that's happening in the market, where customers are moving away from data being just there to actually leveraging data and being able to create an outcome out of that data so it's going to be effective?" >> Alright, so this was announced about a month ago. Give us a little insight, how's the rollout been going? What's the reaction been from customers, channel partners, and the like? >> So I think channel partners, analysts, and press have been very positive, right? I think as we talked about being frictionless, it's been there, right? I think people see that what we said is actually out there. We're seeing good success in parts of geography worldwide already for the parts that have been shipping as of 09/14. We have our DE series shipping shortly, in early November, and we're going to continue acceleration in our channel partners and our customers. So we're very excited, I think as we saw prior to announcement we were growing triple digits in all flash as Lenovo. I think that with the expanded TAM going from 15% to averaging above 90% on market with the storage portfolio, we're excited here. We're anxious to keep going. >> Yeah, I'll go a little further, I would tell you that I think many channel partners felt hostage to some of the other choices in the industry. And the overwhelming feedback to the announcement of this relationship is, "Thank God, I now have an alternative that is powerful, with great focus on the compute side, great momentum on the storage side, bringing together best of great portfolio, and now I've got choice that I didn't have before." So I think there's a very high level of expectation, excitement, and I expect the momentum with channel partners and distributors to be very high. >> Let's unpack that joint go-to-market GTM strategy a little bit more. Let's talk about it first from the NetApp side. How are you going to market with an image and your partners? The selling motion, how do customers engage? Help us understand that. >> So NetApp is really coming from a very high-touch sales model, you know the beauty of our partnership with Lenovo is they have a velocity model. So for the part of the markets that are really about having velocity, I think it's a perfect marriage. The second thing is, they have a much larger world-wide presence than we do, I mean they've got physical location in many countries where we are not present. So that's expanding the footprint of potential close in service to NetApp customers. And then lastly, you know, the world is evolving very quickly, it's all about the apps, and I am excited about the fact that my go-to-market team rubbing shoulders with the Lenovo team is going to get more intelligent about compute, which is important for us to understand the real needs of the customers. >> Lisa: And Kamran, from your view? >> I mean I think we - And Lenovo serves over 160 countries, as you know, Henri, so we have a very expanded. We serve customers all the way from SMB all the way to very large enterprise like cloud service providers and MSBs. I think the momentum we have based on the park announcement is really provides an alternative solution to the HPE 3PAR and Delhi AMC, right? As Henri stated I think a lot of our channel partners, our disties, our value-added resellers are looking for an alternative route of a solution between the two leading platform solution providers here. And I think we're seeing that momentum, right? I think as of 09/13 when we made the announcement at Transform, we're seeing the excitement and the pull coming from the field and driving it, and of course we of course have a direct sales model, right? Having that high touch with a customer, selling the value prop of this storage solution and entire portfolio we can bring in, and the partnership value that brings in with NetApp here. >> Alright, so what should we expect to see from this partnership in the near future? >> Well, I think, you know, expansion of the product portfolio, particularly in the case of the China JV. One of the mission of that JV will be to design products specifically for the Chinese market, which we all know is very big and growing extremely fast, so that's one aspect that is yet to be seen. And then the second thing is as we collaborate on solving real customer problems, I expect to see a higher level of innovation, as we understand both sides of the equation and how we can bring our technologies together to solve real customer problems. >> The last question for both of you. You both talked about this joint partnership gives both NetApp and Lenovo and your respective install bases choice. What is the one differentiator? Why would a customer choose to go this route versus, as you mentioned, Delhi MC, HPE...? >> So I think you look at where NetApp has had leadership performance in all flash, and Ontap's amazing software, data management software solution. And look at Lenovo, we've been the fastest-growing server provider in the world. We see where we're bleeding in HPC environments, and really driving software to find. So I think customers are looking for, "How do I take the best of breed of things and bring it together? And making sure when you bring it together it is working together." So part of having the relationship of leveraging the NetApp technology is that Lenovo storage portfolio also provides that ability that says, it's a proven technology, the server technologies and the storage are proven. So it doesn't matter if a customer wants to leverage a NetApp technology with a Lenovo server, it is a proven solution for them, and they can depend on the value it's going to deliver. >> From my standpoint, you've got two credible, long term, solid people in the industry, partnering to get best-of-breed solutions with an eye towards being leaning into the cloud, and I think that in two days, IT business with a new wave of IT, if you don't embrace the cloud, the cloud will kill you. And so I think that's our unique differentiation, is that we have two companies that can serve our customers on prem needs, but have a very comprehensive private cloud, public cloud, and on prem strategy. And I think that nobody else can claim that differentiation. >> Henri, Kamran, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting and sharing a little bit more about this exciting partnership. We look forward to hearing news next year! >> It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are live from NetApp Insight 2018, we'll be back after a short break. (upbeat techno)

(techno music) >> At Ducati, we create racing bikes and road bikes, and unique experiences for our bikers. The Ducati teams participate in 19 races, in 15 countries, on five continents, as part of Moto GP Championship around the world. When you own a bike, you are part of a new family, the Ducatisti. (engine revving) We have a DNA racing, that we bring into everyday's bike, you can be a racer, or you can be someone who want to go down downtown Bologna, or San Francisco, or Bangkok. Data is at the heart of the Ducati digital strategy, in racing we know how to analyze data, the experience is directly moved to our road bikes. In race bikes and road bikes we have physical sensors, now thanks to machine learning, artificial intelligence, we can bring to data together to create Bitron sensors, that give us information that were not available before. We are looking for a partner that truly understands the value and the power of data, and this happened to be NetAPP. We want to arrange data in new ways, to transform the sport of Moto GP racing, and the road bike experience. NetAPP has controlled data to make experimentation more quickly, the bike we race on Sunday, is the bike we sell on Monday, and we can test the riders sensation through data. I'm Piergiorgio Grossi, and I'm data driven. (techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering NetAPP Insight 2018, brought to you by NetAPP. >> Welcome back the the Cube our continuing coverage today, from the Mandalay Bay of NetAPP Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we have a couple of guests joining us. If you're a Motorsport fan, turn the volume up. First we have, welcoming back to the Cube, Jean English, the SVP and CMO at NetAPP, great to have you back Jean!. >> Oh thank you very much, excited to be here. >> And we have Konstantin Kostenarov, CTO of Ducati Motor, wow Ducati, there is by the way, I encourage you to go to the NetAPP.com web site after the segment here there's a very cool video about how Ducati is working with NetAPP on the racing side, these bikes are like flying IOT devices, as well as the consumer side. So Jean let's kick of things with you, this is day one, record breaking attendance for NetAPP, 5000 attendees, we were in the Keynote this morning, standing room only, talk to us about NetAPP as a Data authority, what's some of the feedback that you're hearing from your wealth of partners and customers that are here this week? >> Absolutely, well we're thrilled to have so many partners and customers and employees here with us, record breaking attendance, more customers and partners that have ever joined us before here at Insight a Data authority, people are asking us what do I need to do to maximize the value of that data, whether it's integrating the data, simplifying the data, they're trying to figure it out, and most of the time it's in a Hybrid role, it's in a multiclout world, and so we're just excited about where we are with our strategy, we're bringing it to life, more and more customers, like Ducati everyday are helping us to see this vision come true and we just can't wait to get started with everyone else. >> And this is a really interesting example, NetAPP has, in it's 26 year history, a massive install base, probably every industry, but when you look at something like Ducati, which probably every guy knows about, I have some Motorsport experience myself, it's much more of a, oh as a consumer, as a fan of the sport, so Konstantin, tell us about Ducati's decision to work with NetAPP, because you guys aim to not only utilize, all of the data, tons of data coming off the two bikes, every race weekend, to improve performance, but you're also wanting to use that speed, which is the new scale as George Curion said this morning, to even improve the consumer experience, and talk to us about Ducati's partnership with NetAPP. >> So we start to work with NetAPP about two years ago, more over, and in these, nowadays, every people around us talk about job thinking, extreme improvement, extreme increase of customer experience so in this world this will be Ducatis very excited challenge and this challenge requires us to respond with the best technology. The best technology that help us to collect the best information from our motorbikes, from our racing teams that we know how to collect the data, how to transformate this data into usable information, and how to generate the opportunity to have data sensors that we can transform in in information but also in knowledge that we hear before, and put all this information inside our fabric, and inside our shop floor, inside our R and D department, in order to be able to extremely increase the experience of our customers. >> I love that we get to work with one of the most innovative companies in the entire world of Motorsports, and I think really from the inception of Ducati, you guys have been really focused on how do you keep innovating through technology, and we talk about transforming the world of racing with data and how are we doing that together, so together with Ducati and NetAPP, how do we help enable them to have the best motors in the whole world, we're really excited! >> Jean, it's a great discussion, we've loved watching from just talking about the storage industry to where we're talking about data, and transformations so maybe explain to our audience that maybe not understand, you know, what's different about the industry today, and what's enabling this, NetAPP to be able to work with companies like Ducati, to help them through these transformations today, that they might not have been able to do a few years ago. >> Absolutely, I think there's just more and more data that we're finding every day, whether it's Ducati, Motorsports, if it happens to be in health care, and thinking about the millions and billions of genomes types of research that they're doing. We know even from banking how they're trying to connect the dots across an entire customer experience. Sure they're using technology like storage, absolutely, they're thinking about computers, they're thinking more and more though about services, and the cloud, APIs, how are they going to gain all this innovation through AI, analytics, but it's about making the customer experience better. What I love about the partnership we have with Ducati is it's not just about the bikes themselves, it's about the community that they have and that they're building and that community is yes, based on data from the bike, it's about the data coming from the riders, and it's about the data they collect so they all become a stronger community as a whole. >> Yeah, Konstantin maybe explain a little bit more to your audience the role of data as Ducati see's it, and how that drives innovation in your company. >> In the world like motorbike racing team, where every millisecond counts and the difference, in how we can collect in, very quickly mode the data, and to transform the information becomes determinate if you win or not because as you know, in Qatar we win with 29 milliseconds, and this is the work that we've done, days before, analyzing data, and set up the motorcycle, in the best way, because for us, the collaboration with NetAPP is not only storage, and is not only data, but is data management, and extremely short time to respond to our business requests and work to transform the paradigm of time, and money the paradigm of data and information, and we talk about performance with our line of business, not from the technical point of view but from the extremely business oriented, the customer oriented point of view, and we collect the data from the more than 60 sensors, from the racing motorbikes and transform it with artificial intelligence and deep machine learning, in vector sensors that give us information that we cannot reach from the normal road bikes, and this improves extremely our competitiveness, and we are able to give this, experience to our riders that becomes our families, because a good thing, a good product to all our customers, and with attention of environment in the behavior of the riders we would think that the good people in the good universe act in a good way. >> And we're happy to be part of that too. >> Before we get into that, the consumer side, so your riders, Andrea Dovizioso, and Jorge Lorenzo, how has their performance improved because you're able to take data, gigs per quali day, race day, analyze it in real time, how has their performance improved as a result of your NetAPP partnership? >> As you know, the racing motorbike is not able to stop in real time during the race, not like in Formula One so you need to use the best technology to connect the bikes to our minidata center inside the box during the race. Make our strategy to set up the bike as better as we can, and the speed which we can reach the, and collect the data, put it in the telemetry software, calibrate it, make the strategy decision is very very important. And with the HCI technology we can do it. >> How are you taking the transformation that you're making on the racing side and applying it to the consumer side so that, as I think I heard on the video, Ducati wants to deliver the bike that a guy or gal rides on a Sunday by Monday, that speed, speed is the new scale as George Curion mentioned this morning, how is the consumer side of Ducati Motorsport being influenced positively to enable those consumers to have exactly what they want? >> If you see our new creation, the Dopra, the Panigale V4, this is the right example how we transform racing motorbikes to the road bikes, and we give to our customers this kind of experience because all information we manage during the Sunday we are able to put in on Monday and sell the bike that have the same performance, safety, and pleasure of riding for the final customers and we have a racing that we bring to everydays motorbike, so when you buy a bike we give you experience that before you're riding, during the riding, and after your riding when you are at your home, with our uplink connection, we use the NetAPP technology to give the best experience of connected bikes. >> So when you think about customers, especially our partnership with Ducati, in order to be customer centric, or rider centric, we really have to be data driven, and so as we think about what are all the connections and the dots of data that happen, whether it's on the bike, the rider, the community itself, how does that bike that's driven or ridden on a Sunday, how is then really performed and given to customer that next day, it's all about the data. >> I'm curious, cause how have you been able to improve that speed of scale meta HCI as part of your data driven foundation, what's kind of a before and after, are you able to deliver bikes faster? Have you transformed the customer experience like Jean was saying? >> So before NetAPP, our production plan is more difficult to be connected to all other line of business and we are not able to collect the information from our final user, our customer. And give this information to our R and D department or the shop floor, in order to be able to transform in real time our production process, and to give the best experience for everyday bikers. >> So significant business impact? >> Exactly, and with our connected bike, this has become a reality. >> Jean, just want to bring it back to NetAPP for a minute here you've been on board for about two years, George Curion talked about the transformation that NetAPP is going through itself, can you speak a little bit to the culture, you know I think back for years and NetAPP has been known for one of the top places to work, it's talking about that transformation, what can you say about what's happening inside NetAPP? >> Sure, so I think the transformation has gone through a couple of different cycles. I mean one was really around the operational efficiency we needed to be as a company to really be focused on what were the customers caring about? What were the technologies and innovations that we needed to shift to that mattered to the customer? Cloud being one of those, whether it was a private cloud, or a public cloud, we also started to think through, is the right leadership that we needed to have in the company to start making those shifts? A big part of it is the culture though and that culture is ground up, it definitely starts across the leadership team we have today, but it is infused across all of NetAPP. It is one of the reason why I joined the company, when I first started interviewing with George, he wanted me to come help him write the new story, but so much a part of a story of a company is the people themselves, and so if you think about any kind of transformation, it is definitely strategy, it's technology, it's around what you do from processes, but culture and people are the biggest part of that, and we think of the brand inside of NetAPP, the people are the biggest part of it. And who we are and what we stand for, really always leaning in to the latest technology, because it's what customers care about, if I think about the history over the last 10 to 15 years, what could have broken NetAPP, moving from Linux to Windows, moving in to virtualization, now with the cloud, we've always leaned in, because we want to care about what the customer cares about. And that's every single person inside of NetAPP that makes that happen. So I love being at NetAPP and it's an exciting place to be! >> Cultural transformation is hard to do, it's essential for IT transformation, digital transformation, security transformation, I'm curious Jean, NetAPP has such a big install base of a lot of enterprise incumbents that weren't born in digital of course you've got some amazing customers like Ducati, talk to us about how your customers, you mentioned NetAPP is good at leaning in, how do you leverage that voice of the customer to help the sustain the cultural transformation you need to really put cloud at the heart of your strategy? >> Absolutely, even with the example of Dreamworks, we just started working with Dreamworks as one of our partners to start co-engineering with them, to help them on their own transformation. And so that's taking right from the customer, what are their requirements, how are they going to take this cutting edge digital content, and then be able to make it into beautiful, engaging films that we all know and love, How To Train Your Dragon's coming out very soon and we're excited about seeing it, but those kind of partnerships really matter, and how people are leaning in to the cloud, and how they're leaning in to hypercloud, multicloud, we want to hear what our customers need and work with them to be able to really build out that technology and innovation for the future. >> Konstantin, last question for you, what are you, I know you had a session yesterday, what are you excited to hear about from you partner NetAPP at the event this week? >> I'm excited to hear about the people, it's a very put attention of the details, of what the NetAPP mean regarding the data management. And the data driven company, what is the real time feedback to the customers, and improvement of the customer experience, and one of the things that I like is the simplicity to use the NetAPP technology that give us the speed of reaction, and transform the information into knowledge, and how can I say in experience to know how to do the things >> Well Konstantin, Jean, thank you so much for stopping by and giving us a really cool, sexy example of how NetAPP is helping a company like Ducati really revolutionize the racing side and the consumer side of the businesses. And we want to encourage you to go to NetAPP.com search Ducati and you will find a very cool video, on how these two companies are working together. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube live, all day from NetAPP Insight 2018, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay at NetApp Insight 2018, the third annual with customers, partners, endless press, NetAppians. We're excited to welcome two alumni back to theCUBE. We have Nancy Hart, Head of Marketing for Cloud Infrastructure at NetApp, and Dale Degen, Cloud Infrastructure Business Director. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. It's so great to see you guys again. >> Likewise. So we got back from a standing room only keynote, thousands of people here, and one of the interesting things, Nancy, that Stu and I both observed were today no product announcements. It was really about concepts. The first time we heard anything architecture related was really the Data Fabric, but George Kurian, the CEO of NetApp, talked about the four principles of digital transformation. >> Nancy: Right >> I wonder if we can unpack those with you guys. >> Nancy: Yes >> The first one talking about digital transformation requires IT transformation. >> Nancy: Yes >> Talk to us about that speed as the new scale. What does that mean for NetAPP as a company that needs transformed... >> Nancy: Right >> and to your customers? >> So it means for our customers the idea is that speed is the new scale, right. That to create new businesses, to create new opportunities, to create new revenues, there has to be a lot more agile and agilent on their ITs. Right. So, NetApp will really focus on doing is how to break down the barriers between Dev and Ops. The days of silos, months of provisioning all of that is now gone. Because companies need to now help their teams build faster, build better, and that's really what George was talking about, in this idea that the speed is the new scale. And if our customers are not driving IT agile... Agile IT operations on their own data centers, their competitors certainly are. >> How does... NetApp talks a lot about being driven, the data authority and hybrid cloud. George also said hybrid clouds do in multi-cloud or the defacto architecture. >> Yes >> When you talk with customers, how do they digest "NetApp's going to help "me be data driven?" >> Nancy: Right >> What's that conversation like? >> So, looks like a lot these days, we have our customers, they have their own users, their own internal DevOps team who have gotten very used to taking their Corporate AMEX and running up the Amazon, setting up a new compute shape or storage. The thing is we see customers are trying to rebalance where they put their data cap with data, where they put their applications. Do somethings being, belong in public cloud? Absolutely, but there is also this natural rebalance, that not every application should be in the cloud. For reasons of data governance, perhaps cost, whatever it is, when they build that next new application, it may be in the data center. So, to make that work is the idea of a hybrid multi-cloud experience, and the key part of that is the experience. It's not a management experience. It's a consumption experience. It's a very seamless, simple consumption experience if you've got up in the public cloud, but in a private cloud in your data center. >> Stu: Nancy, I like that. We've always, we've been saying on theCUBE for a couple of years now, cloud is not a destination, it's an operating model. >> Yes It's the way we need to think things, but Dale, when I talk to customers, we talk about their cloud strategy, we talk about what they want, every single one of them, totally different. How much they're doing SaaS , versus how many mulvic public lines they're doing, and of course, they're still figuring out what they've got in their traditional data centers. And its that certain companies have been selling them multiple products, they've got their data all spread out, so, are we getting away from silos, how architecturally do we build this? There's so much differentiation out in the marketplace today. It'd be lovely to have a magic wand and say "Oh, everything's, "you know, simple." But that really hasn't been the case in an enterprise IT. >> Dale: I think you nailed it the way you described it right there You have an enterprises that have built up a collection of applications, some of them have been given a cloud mandate. And so, that means something different to everyone. Sometimes they're going out all SaaS, sometimes they're saying, "I want to put everything, "all my storage in the cloud." We're seeing an interesting moment in time where, there's almost a reaction to that, and finding out maybe there's silos within different public cloud service providers, maybe the monthly cost is a little bit larger than what people might have expected on that. At NetApp, we've been working with our customers, I kind of love being here because the last couple years has just been this huge transformation of the company around that, taking a lot of our customers have viewed us as number one in storage the trusted provider on that. I really, expanding out to a more data driven solution on there. And things we've done internally to address side is really focused on different business imperatives there. Because I think each of our customers has their data center that they need their rock solid applications on. They're thinking about this journey to the cloud. They're trying to innovate with acceleration in the cloud with different services with the cloud public... the biggest public clouds and along the way they're also saying "I need some of that agility internally." And so we've, we've really built that, to build out your kind of a hybrid multi cloud experience. And the company strategy is coming together. We're seeing investments, we're seeing growth and announcements and all of those. >> So one of the interesting things that I observed in the keynote this morning was NetApp being 26 year old, 26 years young company, right? Massive install base. You've got a lot of customers who were not born in the digital age and George Kurian your CEO seems to kind of address them almost right out of the gate. >> Nancy: Yes. >> So let's talk about the data fabric a little bit more. Let's unpack that because some of the messaging seems to be reflecting that, that, and I think Anthony liked talked about this a little bit this morning in the keynote as well. It, it's, it's transforming from a vision to an architecture for your customers, your incumbent enterprise customers who were not born in the cloud, what does being data driven mean to them? How are they embracing this architecture idea of the data fabric and using it to use their data to identify new customer touchpoints, deliver new services, increased revenue? >> Dale: So we're seeing a lot of our customers really transform their business to take advantage of these new services in the cloud. The value that a lot of them are bringing to us is they have a massive amount of institutional data that maybe was in different silos. May be they had different as a service offerings touching it. We're able to bring it together with the data fabric. So now they can consolidate this into a large amount of tangible data. You can have multiple as a service solutions and services coming from public cloud service providers to do analytics on data. For example, we have energy companies that have seismic data from 50 years ago that is sitting on tapes. It's better than anything they could even get today. They bring it all together and now they're doing data analytics on this and they're finding new ways to really take advantage of that. So we're seeing that across the board and we're, Our goal is to try to move them along that journey. >> Nancy: Yes >> Stu: Nancy, could you give us a little insight as to who you're selling to? >> Yes Where is NetApp getting involved in kind of those strategic discussions? As I said, >> Great >> you know everybody's got a cloud strategy, but I said usually the external still drawing and it's something you need to revisit often so you know where is NetApp seat at that table? You've got a lot of partners here >> Nancy: Yes >> and how are things changing? >> Nancy: So, a lot of things are changing a lot of ways for Netapp and the companies that we're selling to and who we're selling to at those companies. We certainly see a lot of new buyers and it's interesting to see now that the decision making, the who's sitting at the decision table when they make that decision of what kind of infrastructure to purchase, is it getting larger and larger group and now we're really seeing the Dev teams, their internal Dev ops teams have a seat at that table who are and they're having significant influence on the infrastructure and operations teams on what kind of investments that companies should be making. Right, so, working with partners, going to market through the largest public hyper scalers and reaching these new buyers and new and existing accounts as well. So even if there is a traditional part of the data center, I guarantee you somewhere in every company there's a new Dev team working on new business models. And so we want to attend (mumbles) >> Lisa: Does the conversation Nancy, start at the business outcomes level? >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> And, and your perspective, how are you seeing some of the more technical folks in an organization participating in a business outcomes driven conversation where it's more about these are the things we need to do to, to compete to increase our revenue. What, how is that persona based conversation changing? So actually I have a story from a customer meeting earlier this week, right? And so we were talking with the customer about data fabric and what we can do and how we can deliver a seamless experience between public and private clouds. And we walked out of their room and the gentleman from the customer who's I walked in that room as a storage admin and I walked out as a data fabric architect. Right. >> Lisa: It's pretty good validation >> It's pretty good validation. It's happening right now like the personas, even personas that we've traditionally known are certainly changing. What do yo say? >> So that point we're seeing some of the attributes that service providers are offering. We're seeing enterprises at the same time trying to build those up scale. And it's really been amazing as we're seeing you, you spoke about speed is the new agility on here and it's really the agility to be kind of build those infrastructures quickly and take advantage of that at a business advantage level. And a lot of the most technical customers of ours are saying now they're kind of at a, they have a seat at the table to kind of inspire some of those business innovations. They, they see how they could make the company more efficient and all of a sudden they're getting a lot more attention at the C level. >> Stu: Alright. So a few years ago there was the wave of big data, you know, it was really what I summed it up. One of the key findings was it was that bit flip of saying, oh my gosh, I have so much data to, Oh yes, yes, I've got so much data and I can take advantage of it. What I want you to help connect us is when you talk about being data driven, NetApp at its core is you know, there's storage, there's infrastructure, there's software. How do I then get the insights and the value out of the data, the data that I've helped my customers get to? >> Nancy: So let me give you an example of what NetApp is doing around this very issue, right? So we have a very large install base like you talked about. We have a new product called the active IQ. And what it does is based on community wisdom pulled from 30,000 or more installed systems across our entire customer base. And what we do is we use AI ML to extract value and intelligent insights and then actionable plans for our customers. So even if a customer doesn't have 30,000 units installed, they can take advantage of all of that knowledge themselves. So we drink our own champagne and we apply the things that we learned, but we can also help customers do the same thing in their own business as an extract value from their own data. >> Lisa: I'm curious too, from a company as as history does NetApp, formerly network appliance, how is NetApp drinking our own champagne example? How does that influence customers perspective on NetApp's transformation and convince a customer to trust NetApp and go, "yes, this is a partner "that I want to work with "to help us be able "to just do point, "not just a mass, "a tonne of data "and the silo, "but extract insights that are "essential to try this, this change." >> Dale: So we actually have some breakout sessions here where NetApp IT is speaking to that a talking about how we have NetApp on NetApp. You know we've got the active IQ data coming in, so an all flash fas tier being teared down through east series to object storage to a giant data lake of active IQ doing analytics on that. And so that's a great reference for us. We're able to have them speak to our customers directly, eye to eye in our executive briefing center, and oftentimes that pushes them over the edge on that one. >> Nancy: Because we're living the dream and we're making our own mistakes along the way and so when we have folks from our NetApp's own IT department come speak with customers, it's very credible about we did this at work, we did this. It didn't work so much. Right? But we're in that same transformation journey as our customers as well. >> Well, the failure I always say is my, It's not a bad word. It's part of that journey. >> Nancy: Yes. Well, finishing up Nancy with you. Talk to us about the media customer example that really articulates the value that NetApp is delivering as an enabler of the data driven company. >> So one of my favorites these days as we work with a company called Children's Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, right? And they brought us new Ciox and he was really interested in transforming the IT experience for his clinicians. Right. These are the people that work with kids in the hospital, sick kids, they're stressed out families. And I love this story because it's very easy for me to imagine if my child was in the hospital, how stressed out I would be to have a clinician walk in fast, easy access, the latest data about my child, a happy clinician. That would be such an impact to me. And so to see what our customers are doing at children's mercy and they'll also multi cloud they've got their own private clouds are accelerating their VDI, they're working with public clouds all through NetApp product in the end to help those kids and to help maybe some moms on wherever you are, just a smidge less. >> Lisa: Are you helping them to use some of the emerging technologies, IoT AI to drive faster, better outcomes and decision making for these in these critical literally life and death situations? >> So the first project we're working on them as about accelerating their VDI. How does he get a virtual desktop to all his clinician? So whatever room that clinician is in, he has access. So she has access to the latest data about that child. Right. And to make the overall just a better experience so that the new ciox is very keen on just delivering a better experience, not better technology, but a better experience for his clinicians and for his patients. >> Nancy, Dale, thanks so much for stopping by on day one of insight. We appreciate your time. Got to give you some cubes stickers because you're doubling the alumni now. Real. Exactly. We want to thank you. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman for watching the cube. Again, we're live all day at NetApp Insight 2018. Stick around. Stu and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage today of NetApp Insight 2018, I am Lisa Martin. Stu Miniman is my co-host for the day, and we're welcoming to theCUBE, for the first time, a couple of guests, one from NetApp, my former colleague, Emily Miller, acting VP of brand content and influencer marketing. And one of this morning's keynote, Gerd Leonhard, futurist, the CEO of The Futures Agency. I loved, Gerd, I loved your keynote this morning, it was very very interesting and informative. >> Thank you. >> And I liked how you said, you don't predict the future, you observe the future. So Emily, thinking about NetApp, its history, NetApp today, and in the future, talk to us a little bit about how this brand has transformed. >> Sure >> Not just digitally, for IT, but transforming, taking the feedback, and the really, kind of direction from your customers. >> Sure, so if I think about, you know, NetApp's been around for 25 years and we've played a great role in the, you know, kind of the storage history. But over the last few years as our customers' needs have changed, you know, really having to have data as your design point, how everything is evolving, changing, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, we had to listen to that and knowing that our customers are going to places like AI and, you know, deep learning, we have to move there. And so, a couple years ago, we looked at who are we as a company and who are we going to be for the next 25 years? And our purpose now is around how we empower our customers to change the world with data because that is what they are doing. So using a lot of these technologies, and the things that Gerd talked about this morning, it is happening, and so, we've got some great customers we're working with, where we're able to kind of see that brand promise come to life with things they're doing, and we're just excited to be able to continue to work with those companies that are pushing the edge because that helps us be better and be more proactive about the future. >> When you talk with customers, #datadriven is all over, right? We've been hearing that for a while. What is being data driven mean to a customer, because as Gerd talked about in his keynote this morning, there's always that conversation, Stu, we hear it all the time on theCUBE, on ethics. >> Right. >> When you talk about enabling customers to be data driven and developing a data strategy, how do they internalize that and actually work with NetApp to execute? >> Right, so we really see it as putting data at the heart of your business, it is that lifeblood, it has to be centered around that. And then, thinking about data fabric, it's really the strategy and the approach, so how do you envision how data from all over, all parts of your organization are able to be leveraged? You get the access and the insights, and you can utilize it. You don't want it to be stagnant, you've got to be able to use it to make better decisions, to have that information, those insights at your fingertips to do the things that have to be done in real time, all the time. >> So Gerd, we want to bring you into discussion here, there's certain fears, for people in technology, "Oh my gosh, my job's going to be "replaced, that can be automated." You know, I've gone to shows, talk about, oh hey, in humans, you're good at getting things to 95, 96%. You know, I can get perfectly accurate if I let the robots just automate things. You write about humans versus technology, what's your take? You know, singularity's coming, you were saying, so are we all out of a job? >> Well, this is of course, what I call a reductionism, right? It's the idea that you would have a machine who would do just what I do, exactly what I do, for very little money, and then you would have thousands of other machines that do thousands of other things, then. And the fact is that, I think McKinsey's study says only 5% of all jobs that can be automated, can be fully automated. So, even a pilot can be automated, but I wouldn't fly an airplane without a pilot, so we still have a pilot. And data scientists can be automated by an AI, yes, but there'll be many things that I need the data scientist for as a person. So, if you take human skills, what I call the andro-rhythms, you know, the human things. So, passion, ingenuity, design, creativity, negotiation. I think computers may learn that in 100 years, but to really be compassionate, it will have to be alive. And I wouldn't want them to be alive. So, I'm saying that yes, true, I think if you only do routine, like bookkeeping, like low level financial advice, like driving a bus. You have to retrain and relearn, yes. But otherwise, I wouldn't be that negative, I think there's also so many new things happening. I mean, 10 years ago, we didn't have social media managers, right, and now we got what, 30 million? So, I'm not that dark on the future there. >> I'm glad, you actually, you gave a great quote from Albert Einstein talking about that, really, imagination is infinite as opposed to, knowledge is kind of contained. NetApp talks a lot about being data driven, you gave the Jeff Bezos example of, you know, I need to listen to it. But there's heart, and there's kind of history, there's another great line from Jeff Bezos, is, "There is no compression algorithm for experience." So, how do we as humans balance that humanity and the data and the numbers? >> Well, the reality is, we don't live in a binary world. When we look at technology, it's always about yes, no, yes, no, zero, one. That's what machines do, we don't do that. (laughs) Humans are called multinary, which is essentially, to us, a lot more things matter than yes or no. Like, it depends, maybe, it may change, and so on. And so if we just look at that and say it's going to be data or humans, we have to pick one of the two, that will be a rather strange suggestion. I think we need to say that it's sometimes data, sometimes human, but we have to keep the humans in the loop, that's my key phrase. >> And I would say, I feel like that's really our opportunity as humans, is to decide where is the value, where is the layer of value that we add on. You know, again, kind of thinking back to NetApp's history, we're moving from storage to data, we are evolving. We have to add value at a higher level for our customers, and what was something that maybe we did as humans, and for advising, that's automated now, like think of the demo we saw this morning, and now what is that additional layer of value that you add on top? >> Yeah absolutely, as you're both saying, it's not a binary thing, Andy McPheener from Jolmston, from MIT, say, tracing with the machines, that humans plus machines will do way better than either humans or robots alone. >> You know, I think if you are arguing that we would be in a perfect world if the machines could run it perfectly, then I would argue that world would be a machine, right? So, it would be perfect, but it wouldn't be human, so what are we getting, right? It's a bad deal, so I think we need to find a good balance between the two, and also carve out things that are not about data. You know, like dating and love, relationships, you know, that can be about data, like matching, right? But in the end, the relationship isn't about data. (laughs) >> Well, you even said this morning, it's, knowledge is not the same thing as understanding. >> Right. >> And that's kind of where we are at these crossroads. Emily, let's kind of wrap up with you, you got some interesting customer examples, of how NetApp is helping customers become and live that data driven life, and embrace these emerging technologies, like AI. >> Right, so we have a customer we're working with in Serbia, and they are basically kind of digitizing a human to be able to interact from an AI standpoint, in terms of having an interactive conversation. And I've seen some of this before, with interviewing your grandparents, and you can store them, and you can interact, and I think what's really exciting, is that gives you the opportunity to do something you never could do before. I think to your points this morning, it's, how do we make sure we don't lose the richness from those more kind of offline experiences, so that they are complimentary? If we, as we expand and do things that we couldn't think about, that we didn't, we couldn't envision or imagine, and I think that's about being a data visionary. Like the people at the companies like 3Lateral, like we've seen today, on Wuji NextCODE on stage, the data visionaries are those who are saying, how can data transform my, not just my company, but my industry, my category, and how do I really think about it completely differently? >> It's an exciting time. Emily, Gerd, thank you so much, I wish we had more time to chat with you guys, but we appreciate you stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights. >> Great, thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Insight, pun intended. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we are with theCUBE, live all day at NetApp Insight 2018, stick around, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we are live at NetApp Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by Stu Miniman. Stu and I are going to be here all day. And this is the third annual Insight, with customers and partners and NetAppians and analysts and press. Stu this is the second time theCUBE has been here. We just came from the keynote and the interesting thing that Stu, that you and I both noticed, was at least the first 75 minutes of the keynote that we got to see today, none of the product news was announced. It was really about strategy, #datadriven, how NetApp wants to enable their customers from DreamWorks to oil and gas companies, health care, etc. To use data, develop a data strategy, to move their businesses into the digital age. >> Yeah, Lisa, first of all, great to be working with you again. >> Always. >> And I'm excited, it's second year that we've been at this show, third of the NetApp Insights that we've done. Cause we've done both the U.S. and the European shows. My first time actually coming to a NetApp event. I remember, gosh I'm showing my age, I remember when NetApp started, network storage was becoming a thing. NetApp really rose its ascendancy with file systems and NAS, and FAS was the one operating system to rule them all, really grew into a very sizable business. Company's about $6 billion worth of revenue and I think somewhere about 10,000 employees. Today, NetApp is really the largest independent storage company after Dell took EMC off as an independent now, so it's interesting to watch. George Kurian got on stage and talked about digital transformation. And one of the things I'm really interested in looking at is how is NetApp doing in that transformation? Because, most people when I was talking to some customers at some of the meals and walking the floor and things like that it's, NetApp is my filer company. I buy boxes, sometimes I mine some software and there's some things there, but I'm the guy that runs NetApp Gear, if you will. And that transformation, what is the NetApp of 2019 and beyond? Are they a storage company? Are they a hybrid, multi-cloud software led something something company in the future? Are they a services company? There's a nice ecosystem here, so that's what I'm excited to dig into. George Kurian he in the keynote this morning, laid out the four things that companies need to do for digital transformation. It's something we'll dig into, but yeah, I had to go search NetApp on the news release and be like, oh Cloud Insights, and ONTAP in the Cloud, and HCI and Partnership News and things like that, so there definitely is some news, they just didn't talk about it in the keynote. >> Yeah, it was an interesting keynote for me, and as theCUBE we go to a lot of keynotes, many times a year, and this was an interesting start to it. It's clear from the NetApp messaging on NetApp.com, NetApp Insight, things that are being put out on media that they're really putting cloud at the heart of their strategy. The discussions and the keynote this morning included futurist Gerd Leonhard, who's going to be on the program with us in just a few minutes. Interesting take on data, humanity, the only thing that NetApp talked about was about 75 minutes minutes into they keynote this morning was when Anthony Lye got on, he's going to be on the show later today, talking about the data fabric. And I think some of the messages that NetApp was wanting to get out is that data fabric is transforming from a vision into an architecture kind of foundationally to enable organizations to employ those four principals of digital transformation that George Kurian talked about. Digital transformation requires IT transformation, speed is the new scale, some interesting thoughts and concepts there, more conceptual. I liked the DreamWorks customer, I think she's a great speaker. Kind of talked also about how DreamWorks, everybody knows DreamWorks, "Shrek", "How to Train your Dragon", are becoming more morphing from a customer to an engineering partner. So that was and interesting kind of, I wouldn't even say undertone, but part of the story today. >> You know, Lisa, absolutely. When you look at traditionally, not only NetApp, but all the storage companies, where they sold to. It was the storage budget, and oh how do I manage with the explosion of data, and that growth and what's the performance, the speeds and feeds, the price per terabyte, all that kind of stuff? I thought we could actually take George Kurian's four characteristics and say, how's NetApp doing? First is digital transformation requires IT transformation. >> (Lisa) Right. >> I heard yesterday in some of the sessions they actually had some of NetApp's IT people talk about how they're leveraging and using new technologies. We talked about speed is the new scale, well how fast is NetApp? We have a number of acquisitions. There was the big SolidFire acquisition which is now fully part of the portfolio. They had a Kubernetes company that they bought recently. They've had management companies that they bought. How fast is NetApp keeping up with the pace of what they're doing? Hybrid multi-cloud, I think NetApp first of all was really what you would call software-defined before that was a thing, and they were very early in jumping on this wave of we need to play in the cloud environment. Most of the storage companies really lined up and was like, oh wait, Amazon's the competition, you can't do that, but NetApp was partnering with Amazon for many years, now I'd like to see more proof points as to what customers are doing, how are they doing it differently. But absolutely we're going to have Microsoft Azure on the program with Anthony Lye, this afternoon. I know we're going to be talking about Amazon, we're going to be talking about Kubernetes and Istio, where does NetApp fit into that environment? I've been going to theCUBE Con shows for a couple years, and storage is actually lagging in that space. When you talk about having persistent data, that's not something we're there with. We spent more than a decade trying to fix storage and networking in the virtualized environments, and NetApp played a strong role in helping on the storage piece there. So it would be great to see how they are going to play into the Kubernetes and issue discussion. And the last piece is they said moving from data center to data fabric. >> Right. >> Which is the closest tie to the products as you said. >> (Lisa) Yes, exactly. >> To what they're doing. >> Well, Stu we have a jam-packed schedule today, all day. We're going to be able to unpack a lot of things from NetApp, execs, to their branding folks, to customers, so Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. Again, theCUBE Live from NetApp Insight 2018. We'll be right back. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from Berlin, Germany. It's theCube, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by, NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are joined by Jean English. She is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of NetApp, thanks so much for comin' on the show. >> Thank you for having me, we're glad you're here with us to join us at Insight Berlin. >> We're always excited to do anything with NetApp. So, talk a little bit about NetApp's digital transformation. You're now at a year's long transformation from storage, your legacy, to data. Talk a little bit about your positioning in the market. >> Sure, so I think people have previously thought of NetApp as storage, and what we're so focused on now is data. And why data? Because that's what we hear from our customers, our partners, the analysts, is what is really topping their needs right now. If we think about how companies are transforming, they're having to think about digital transformation is topping the list. It's topping the most strategic agendas of most CEOs. But what happens is they have to think about the data. It has become a life blood of their business, and as it seamlessly flows through that business, and what does it mean to either optimize their operations, if they've gotta increase their customer touch points, do they have to create new product services, and even businesses. So we feel like right now that is where our focus is on data, and it's so much a part of our heritage that we look to the future as well. >> One of the things that you're working on now is helping customers use data in new, exciting, innovative, creative ways, can you talk broadly about your approach to that, and how you're drawing inspiration on customers and then empowering them? >> Absolutely, so we really try to think about, what is our purpose? And our purpose could be true to our heritage from 25 years ago, we just celebrated our 25 year anniversary this past spring, and it is to empower our customers to change the world with data. Just a few of those, we've seen now, especially in hybrid cloud environments, customers have to think about how are they gonna simplify to integrate data across on-prem, cloud environments, to accelerate digital transformation. One example of that is EidosMedia. We love their story, because their talking about how to get news stories, real time, through a cloud platform, into the hands of journalists that can publish real time live insights. Real time journalism, and so when you think about the speed that has to happen with creating stories, getting 'em published, getting 'em out to news networks, that's data. And it's a good data story. >> When you think about the data story though, a lot of people talk about how data is a fuel, or data is. And we tend to think, at least at SiliconANGLE Wikibon, that that's probably not the best analogy, because data's different from other resources. Most resources share the economics of scarcity, you can do this, or you can do that, but data's different because data could be copied, data can be shared. But data also can be appropriated inappropriately. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship or the direction that NetApp's taking to on the one hand, facilitate the sharing of data strategically while at the same time, ensuring that proper security and IP controls are placed on it. >> So I think people are looking to make sure that they can share freely data, and seamlessly integrate data across multiple sources. Right now what we find is that whether it's because you've had data that's been on-prem, and maybe that's more structured. Now we're startin' to see more unstructured data. So data's becoming a lot more diverse. People are constantly looking for the latest source of truth of data, so dynamic, and because it's so distributed across environments, people are trying to figure out, how do you integrate data, how do you share data, but it's all about simplicity, 'cause they need it to be efficient. They need to make sure that it's protected, so security is top of minds, so data protection is the upmost of importance. They're looking for ways to embrace future technologies. And whether that's thinking about different cloud environments, SAS applications, and then how do they create the most open opportunities. A lot of people aren't just putting their data in one cloud, what we're finding is, is it's a multi-cloud world, and they're looking for a holistic solution to more easily and seamlessly manage their data through those environments. >> But the infrastructure has to move from as you said, a storage orientation towards something that's going to facilitate the appropriate sharing and integration of data. Like a fabric. >> Yes. >> Can you talk a little bit about that. >> So we started the conversation around data fabric, it was one of the first people to really talk about data fabric in the market back in 2013. And this vision was about how do you seamlessly be able to share and integrate data across cloud and on-prem environments. That has become so true in how we've been building out that data fabric today. We just launched a few weeks ago that we are the first industry leading storage data service in the Microsoft Azure console, so that people can easily be able to, can do complete storage capabilities in cloud storage, in Microsoft, we've also been developing solutions to make sure that, maybe if you're not wanting to do everything in Office365 and Azure, you wanna back it up to AWS, so how do you have better backup capabilities? Sharing of data across clouds. We're also seeing that you may wanna sync data, so maybe once you put data into the cloud, and you run analytics or even machine learning, how do you then get data back? Because you wanna make sure that you're constantly being able to look holistically at your customers. This notion of one cloud, to back to on-prem, multi-cloud environments, has been critical as we think about customers and where they're going. >> One of the things we're also hearing about at this conference is, this is the day of the data visionary, and this is where people who are thinking about how to store data, use data, extract data, find value in the data. The demands on them, the pressures on them, are so intense. How is NetApp helping those people, sort of understanding where they are, not only in their businesses, but also in their trajectories of their careers, and then helping them move forward. >> We've been really thinking about who is really using data to disrupt, and are this disruptive use of data to really drive business results. It's not just about having the data, it's about how are you gonna have an impact on the business. So we start to think about this notion of who is a data thriver? Who's thriving with data versus who's just surviving and in fact, some are even resisting. So we actually partner with IDC to launch a study on data thrivers to look at who is truly looking at driving new revenue streams, attracting new customers, how are they able to use data as correlistic part of their business. Not some one off or side project to help do the digital transformation, but what was gonna drive really good business results. Data as an asset. Data across business and IT. And we see new roles are emerging from this. We're seeing that, Chief Data Officers, there's Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Scientists, Chief Transformation Officers. All new roles that have been emerging in the last couple of years, but these data thrivers are seeing tremendous business impact. >> So, what is it that separates those people, I mean I think that, those really, those companies and those business models, and what are sort of the worst case scenarios for those companies that are just surviving and not necessarily thriving, in this new environment. >> Yeah, I think it's interesting, we're seeing that companies that actually put data at the center of what they do. So we think of it as a data-centric organization, are seeing 6x in what they're seeing in terms of being able to drive real customer acquisition. When we think about what it means to drive operational efficiency, when we think about 2x times in terms of profitability, real bottom line results, compared to people that are simply just surviving with data. What's interesting is that when we start to think about what are the attributes of these people, so business and IT working together in unison. These roles in fact that are emerging are starting to become those catalysts and change agents that are bringing IT and the business more together. We're also seeing that when you think of data as an asset, even to the bottom line, how does data become more critical in terms of what they see in terms of being a differentiated advantage for the company. Also, thinking through quality, quality, quality. You've gotta make sure that the data is of highest quality and it's constantly being cleansed. Then in terms of how do we think of it being used across the business, it's not just about holding data and locking it away behind a firewall. Data more today is so dynamic, distributed and diverse, that you have to let it be utilized and activated across the business. And then to think through, it's starts not just in terms of what customers are using and seeing from data, what they can actually see in terms of customer touch points and having a better customer experience, but then how do you make sure it even comes back to the development to create new products, create new services, maybe even eliminate waste. Stop doing product lines based on what they're seeing from actual usage. So it's a pretty fascinating space right now, but the data thriver is the new thought we're thinking in terms of getting that out in the market and really sharing more so with our clients, so that they can benchmark themselves as well. >> So, you're a CMO. >> Yes. >> You're telling a story, but you also have operational responsibilities. How would you tell your peers to use data differently? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. I mean, for me data's the life blood of how we think about how we actually create a better customer experience. We're using data constantly to better understand what are our customer's needs, and those customers are evolving. Before, in the loyalist that we love was storage architects and admins, we're starting to see that people are thinking about how to use more hybrid cloud data services with CIOs. How are they gonna look at a cloud strategy? With DevOps, how are they gonna create, deploy, and, applications at speed? How are they gonna be able to help to really think through, what are they gonna do to drive more analytics and better workload usage, and efficiencies? Our clients are evolving, and when we think about how do you reach those clients differently, we have to know who they are. We have to use data to understand them. We have to be more personalized. We just relaunched our entire digital experience, so that when we try to look at how do you bring people into something that's more customized, more personalized, what does it mean to be a cloud architect that's thinking about a data backup and protection plan. What does it mean for someone in DevOps who's thinking about how do I actually create and deploy an application at speed? How do you think about someone that's gonna look at the needs from a CIO, so much differently than before. But, using data, using customization, thinking about an engaging experience, bringing 'em through that experience so that we solve their business challenges. We use data and analytics every day. I think of us as being the new data scientists. People say, is it art or is it science and marketing? I'm like, it's a little bit of the storytelling, absolutely, we have to lead with stories, but the data and the analytics is where we really understand our customers best. So using analytic models, using predictive models, using more ways in which we can actually reach customers in new ways we never have before through social. But bring them into a new conversation. Analytics, analytics, storytelling, and understanding, getting closer to new clients like we never have before, and then thinking through how do we use that full-circle loop of learning to get better and better in how we engage our customers in ways they want to engage with us. >> I wanna switch gears just a second, and I know that you've just been nominated as an International Board Member. You were a Board Member before, of Athena of the Triangle, which is about supporting and inspiring women in the technology industry. As we know that this is the dearth of women, technologists, is a big problem in the US and globally. Can you tell us a little more about the organization and what you're doing? >> So, Athena International is really about, how do you promote women's leadership? It's across the world, in fact we just launched some very exciting initiatives in China where I lived for a year, and the President of Athena International is a friend of mine, and she was really looking at how do you foster growth, especially in emerging markets and countries where women's leadership can be so profound in terms of how do you impact the business, government, and market, and really overall global success. Athena is focused on, is technology, but it's also with women in many industries. But really, how do you gain the powerful mentorships, how do you gain powerful access to programs, to having more access to expertise that can help them to think through business models, business cases. How do they grow their business, it might be from financial to career counseling, to mentoring on marketing, but it's really thinking through women's leadership as a whole. >> And is NetApp also working on behalf of those, of that cause too? >> We're really focused on, today in fact we're gonna be hosting the, the annual Women in Technology Summit. So we're so focused on how do we think about developing women in technology, how to think about that across not only our employees, but our partners and our customers, and it's not just about women, this is men and women working together to determine how do we stop the fact that we've got to get more access to women in mentorships and sponsorships, and really really driving how we have leadership as we grow, really grow into our careers, and can drive more business impact. >> Great. Well Jean, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, >> Thank you. >> It was really fun talking to you. >> Absolutely, thank you both. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight, here in Berlin, Germany in just a little bit.

Live from Berlin Germany, it's the queue Covering NetApp insight 2017 brought to you by Neda Welcome back to the cubes live coverage of net app insight here in Berlin Germany I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are joined by Mark Bregman. He is the CTO of net app Thanks so much for coming on the cube Thanks for taking the time so you have been recently looking into your crystal ball to predict the future and you have some some fun sometimes counterintuitive Predictions about what we're going to be seeing in the next Year and decade to come right so so your first pitch in you said data will become Self-aware right what do you mean by that? Well the title is kind of provocative really the idea is that? Data is going to carry with it much more of its metadata Metadata becomes almost more important than the data in many cases and we can anticipate Sort of architectures in which the data drives the processing whereas today? We always have data is sort of a pile of data over here And then we have a process that we execute against the data that's our been our tradition in the computing world for a long long time as data becomes more self-aware the data as it passes through Will determine what processes get executed on it? So let me give you a simple analogy from a different field from the past in The communications world we used to have circuit switched systems There was some central authority that understood the whole network If you and I wanted to communicate it would figure out the circuit set up the circuit And then we would communicate and that's sort of similar to traditional Processing of data the process knows everything it wants to do it knows where to find the data. It does that it puts It somewhere else But in the communications world we move to packets which data, so now the packet the data Carries with it the information about what should happen to it And I no longer have to know everything about the network nobody has to know everything about the network I pass it to the nearest neighbor who says well I don't know where it's ultimately going, but I know it's going generally in that direction and eventually it gets there now Why is that better? It's very robust it's much more scalable and Particularly in a world where the rules might be changing. I don't have to necessarily redo the program I can change the the markup if you will the tagging of the data You can think of different examples imagine the data That's sitting in a autonomous vehicle and there's an accident now There are many people who want access to that data the insurance company the authorities the manufacturer the data has contained within it the Knowledge of who can do what would that data? So I don't have to now have a separate program that can determine Can I use that data or not the data says sorry you're not allowed to see this. This is private data You can't see this part of it Maybe the identify our data for the obviously the insurance company needs to know who the car owner is But maybe they don't need to know something else like where I came from The authorities might need both well he came from a bar So you can imagine that as an example if you the implications, yes marker are important for example if I Wanted to develop an application. That would be enhanced by having access to data I had to do programming to get to that data because some other application control that data and that data was defined contextually by that application right and so everything was handled by the application by moving the metadata into the data now I can bring that data to my Application more easily less overhead and that's crucial because the value of data accretes It grows as you can combine it in new and interesting ways so by putting the metadata end of the data I can envision a world where it becomes much faster much more Fasil to combine data and new and Exactly it. Also is easier to move the Processing through the data to the data because the processing is no longer a monolithic program It's some large set of micro services and the data organizes which ones to execute So I think we'll see I mean this is not a near-term prediction This is not one for next year because it requires rethinking How we think about data and processing, but I think we'll see it with the emergence of micro services compositional programming Metadata together with the data will see more functional programs little programs well That's your quick rush before we go on to the next one. It's almost like in the early night or the late 1970s It was networks of devices ARPANET the became the Internet and then the web was networks of pages And then we moved into networks of application services Do you foresee a day where it's going to be literally networks of data? Yes, and in fact That's a great example because if you think about what happened in the evolution of the web through what we called web 2.0 That the pages were static data They came alive in the web 2.0, and there was a much less of a distinction between the data and the program In the web layer right so that's what we're saying we see that emerging even further Next prediction was about virtual machines becoming rideshare machines well this is somewhat complementary to the first one they all kind of fit together and Here the idea is you know if we go back in the earlier days of IT it wasn't that long ago that if you needed? Something you ordered the server, and you installed it you owned it and then we got to the model of the public cloud, which is like a rental and by the same analogy if in the past if I wanted a vehicle I had to buy it and Then the rental car agencies came up, and I said well, you know when I go to Berlin I'm not gonna buy a car for three days I'll rent a car, but I can choose which car I want do I want the BMW, or do I want you know of Volkswagen That's very similar to the way the cloud works today. I pick what instances I want and They they meet my needs And if I make the right choice great and by the way I pay for it while I have it not for the work It's getting done so if I forget to return that instance. I'm still getting charged But the rideshare is kind of like uber and we're starting to see that with things like serverless computing In the model that I say I want to get this work done The infrastructure decides what shows up in the same way that when I call uber I don't get to pick what car shows up they send me the one that's most convenient for them and me and I get charged for the work going from point A to point B. Not for the amount of time There's some differentiation if there is so cool Ah, they come to that and and so that's more like a rideshare But as you point out even in the rideshare world. I have some choices. I can't choose if I want a large SUV I might get a BMW SUV or I might get a Mercedes SUV I can't choose that I can't choose it the silver or black But I get a higher class and what we're seeing with the cloud Or these kind of instances virtual solutions is they are also becoming more specialized I might it might be that for a particular workload I want some instance that has have GPUs in them or some neural chip or something else In much the same way that The rental model would say go choose the exact one you want The rideshare model would say I need to get this work done and the infrastructure might decide this is best serviced by five instances with GPU or Because of availability and cost maybe it's 25 instances of standard processors because you don't care about how long it takes so It's this compromise and it's really very analogous to the rideshare model now coming back to the earlier discussion as The units of work gets smaller and smaller and smaller and become really micro services Now I can imagine the data driving that decision hailing the cab hailing the rideshare and driving What needs to be done? So that's why I see them in somewhat complementary and so what's the upshot though? For the employee and for the company I think there are two things one is you got to make the right decision? You know if I were to use uber to commute to Sunnyvale every day It'd break the bank, and it would be kind of stupid so for that particular task I own my vehicle But if I'm gonna go to Tahoe for the weekend, and I meet an SUV I'm not gonna buy one neither am I going to take an uber I'm in a rent one because that's the right vehicle on the other hand when I'm going from you know where I live to the marina within San Francisco, that's a 15 minute drive I On demand I take an uber and I don't really care now if I have 10 friends I might pick a big one or a small one But again that the distinction is there so I think for companies They need to understand the implications and a lot of times as with many people they make the wrong initial choice And then they have then they learn from it so You know there are people who take uber everywhere And I talked and I said I had a friend who was commuting to HP every day by uber from the city from San Francisco That just didn't make sense he kind of knew that but The next one is data will grow faster than the ability to transport it, but that's ok it doesn't sound ok it Doesn't sound ok and for a long time. We've worried about that. We've done compression, and we've done all kinds of things We've built bigger pipes And we've but we were fundamentally transporting data between data centers or more recently between the data center and the cloud big chunks of data What this really talks about is with the emergence of quality IOT in a broad sense? Telematics IOT digital health many different cases there's going to be more and more and more data both generated and ultimately stored at the edge and That will not be able to be shipped all of that will not be able to be shipped back to the core And it's okay not to do that because there's also Processing at the edge so in an autonomous vehicle where you may be generating 20 megabytes per hour or more You're not gonna ship that all back You're gonna store it you're gonna do some local processing you're gonna send the summary of it the appropriate summary back But you're also gonna keep it there for a while because maybe there's an accident and now I do need all that data I didn't ship it back from every vehicle But that one I care about and now I'm gonna bring it back or I'm gonna do some different processing than I originally Thought I would do so again the ability to Manage this is going to be important, but it's managed in a different way. It means we need to figure out ways to do overall Data lifecycle management all the way from the edge where historically that was a silo we didn't care about it Probably all the way through the archive or through the cloud where we're doing machine learning rules generation and so on but it also suggests that we're going to need to do a better job of Discriminating or demarcating different characteristic yen classes of data, and so that data at the edge Real-world data that has real-world implications right now is different from data that summarizes business events which is different from data that Summarized as things models that might be integrated something somewhere else And we have to do a better job of really understanding the relationships between data It's use its asset characteristics etcetera, would you agree with that absolutely and maybe you see the method in my madness now? Which is that data will have? Associated with it the metadata that describes that so that I don't misuse it you know think about The video data off of a vehicle I might want to have a sample of that every I don't know 30 seconds, but now if there's really a problem and it may be not an accident Maybe it's a performance problem. You skidded I'd like to go back and see why was there a Physical issue with the vehicle that I need to think about as an engineering problem was it Your driving ability was it a cat jumped in front of the car so But I need to be able to as you pointed out in a systematic way distinguish what data I'm looking at and where it belongs and where it came from The final prediction it concerns the evolution from Big Data to huge data so that is Really driven by the Increasing need we have to do machine learning AI Very large amounts of data being analyzed in near real time to meet new needs for business And there's again a little like many of these things There's a little bit of a feedback loop so that drives us to new architectures for example being able to do in memory analytics But in-memory analytics with all that important data. I want to have persistence technologies are coming along like Storage class memories that are allowing us to build persistent storage persistent memory We'll have to re our Kotak the applications, but at the same time that persistent memory data I don't want to lose it so it has to be thought of also as a part of the storage system Historically we've had systems the compute system, and there's a pipe and there's a storage system And they're separate they're kind of coming together, and so you're seeing the storage Impinge on the system the compute system our announcement of Plexus store acquisition is how we're getting there But at the same time you see what might have been thought of is the memory of the computer System really be an extended part of the storage system with all the things related to copy management backup and and And so on so that's really what that's talking about and you know it's being driven by another factor I think which is a higher level factor. We started in the first 50 years of the IT industry was all about automating processes That ran the business they didn't change the business. They made it more efficient accounting systems etc since probably 2000 there's been a little bit of a shift Because of the web and mobile to say oh I can use this to change the relationship with my customer Customer in density I can use mobile and and I can change the banking business Maybe you don't ever come to the bank for cash anymore even to an ATM because they've changed that The wave that's starting now which is driving This is the realization in many organizations, and I truly believe eventually in all organizations that They can have new data-driven businesses That are transforming their fundamental view of their business so an example I would use is imagine a shoe maker a shoe manufacturer well for 50 years. They made better shoes They had better distribution, and they could do better inventory management and get better cost and all of that with IT in the last Seven or ten years, they've started to be able to build a relationship with their client. Maybe they put some Sensors in the shoe, and they're doing you know Fitbit like stuff mostly for them That was about a better client relationship, so they could sell better shoes cuz I wrench eiated now The next step is what happens if they wake up and say wait a minute We could take all this data and sell it to the insurance companies or healthcare companies or the city planners Because we now know where everyone's walking all the time That's a completely different business But that requires new kind of lytx that we can't almost not imagine in the current storage model so it drives these new architectures And there is one more prediction, okay? Which is that and it comes back again? It kind of closed the whole cycle as we see these Intelligence coming to the data and new processing forms and so on we also need a way to change data management to give us really Understanding of data through its whole lifecycle one of the one example would be how can I ensure? That I understand the chain of custody of data the example of an automobile there's an accent well How do I know that data was an alter or? how can I know whose touch this data along the way because I might have an audit trail and So we see the emergence of a new Distributed and mutable management framework if when I say those two words together you probably think Blockchain which is the right thing to think but it's not the blockchain. We know today there may be something It's something like that But it will be a distributed and immutable ledger that will give us new ways to access and understand our data Once you open up the once you open up Trying to get the metaphor once you decide to put the metadata next to the data Then you're going to decide to put a lot more control information in that metadata Exactly, so this is just an extension said it kind of closes the loop exactly Mark well, thanks so much for coming on the show and for talking about the future with us It was really fun to have you on the show we should come back in a year and see if maybe you're right exactly exactly Thank you. I'm Rebecca night. We will have more from NetApp insight. Just after this

>> [Announcer] Live from Berlin, Germany, It's The Cube, covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApp. >> We are wrapping up a day of coverage at NetApp Insight on The Cube. I'm Rebecca Knight, along with My cohost, Peter Burris. So, we've had a lot of great interviews here today. We've heard from NetApp executives, customers, partners about this company's transformation, and about what it's doing now to help other companies have a similar transformation. What have been some of your impressions of where NetApp is right now, and what it's saying? >> I think it starts with the observation that NetApp realized a number of years ago that if it was just going to be a commodity storage company, it was gonna have a hard time, and so NetApp itself went through a digital transformation to try to improve its understanding of how customers really engaged with it, how it could improve its operational profile's financial footprint, and the result of that was a company that, first off, was more competitive, but also that had learned something about digital transformation, and realized the relationship between the products that they were selling, the services that they were providing, the ecosystem they had that they could tap, been working with customers, and said, what is we took this knowledge, applied it to those things, what would we end up with? And so we now have a company that is still talking about products, but very much it's also talking about what businesses could do in day to day differently to effect the type of transformation that NetApp itself has been going through, and it's a compelling story. >> And you're describing this introspection that the company did, as you said, if we can't survive with our old business model, what can we do differently, and now eating it's own dog food, but then telling other companies about its story, and how its made changes. I mean, do you think NetApp is where it should be today? Are you pleased with the progress you've seen? >> Well that's one of the great challenges in the tech industry today, is nobody's quite sure where they should be. >> [Rebecca] There are no benchmarks. >> Because nobody's sure what's going on underneath them. So many years ago, in response to a reporter's questions about IBM, they said, well what do you think? Is IBM going to be successful at moving the aircraft, turning the aircraft carrier? And I said, you don't get it. IBM's problem is not that they're trying to turn the aircraft carrier, it's that they're trying to rotate the ocean, so that they could go straight, and everybody else's position would change, and that's a lot of what's happening in the technology industry today, as the people are turning, the ocean's being rotated, and there are a couple of companies, like AWS, that seem to have their fingerprint, or their finger on some of those changes. I'm not sure NetApp has that kind of a presence in the industry, but what is clear is that the direction that NetApp has taken is generating improved financial results, a lot better customer satisfaction, and it's putting them into position to play in the next round, so to speak, of competition in this industry, and in an industry that's changing this fast, that, all by itself, is a pretty good position to be in. >> Well, you know, and you're talking about the changing industry, and then also the changing employment needs that this company has in terms of getting people in their workforce who really understand, not just that data in an asset, which is what we keep hearing today, too, but really understanding how to capture the data, tease out the right insights from the data, and then deploy a strategy based on those insights that actually will create value to the business, whether that's acquiring new customers, or saving money, or earning new lines of business, too. >> Well, for example, we had a great conversation with Sheila Fitzpatrick about GDPR, this phenomenal conversation. Sheila is in charge of privacy at NetApp, and the decision that she drove was to not just to GDPR, NetApp have to GDPR here in Europe, but to GDPR across the entire company. Now two years ago, I don't know that a NetApp person would have come onto The Cube and talked about GDPR, but that is a problem, that is a challenge that every business is facing, and bringing somebody on that has made some really consequential decisions for a company like NetApp to be able to say, here's how other businesses need to think about GDPR, think about data privacy, is a clear example of NetApp trying to establish itself as a thought leader about data, and not just a thought leader about commodity storage. So I think there's a lot of changes that NetApp's gonna go through. They still are talking about on tap, they still are talking about HCI, they're talking about all the various flash products that they have, so that's still part of their conversation, but increasingly they're positioning those products, not in terms of price performance, but in terms of applications to the business based on the practical realities of data. >> And I also think we've heard a number of executives talk about NetApp having a more consultative relationship with its clients and partners, and really learning from them, how they're doing things, and then sharing the learnings at events like NetApp Insight, here, and just really on the ground more, working in partnership with these companies, too. >> Data is a physical thing, and I think a lot of people forget that. A lot of people just look at data and say, oh it's this ephemeral thing, it's out there, and I don't much have to worry about it, but physics is an issue when you're working with data. Adam Steltzner, Dr. Adam, the gentleman from NASA, he talked about the role that data science is playing in NASA Mars exploration, talked about the need to worry about sparse data, because they have dial up speeds to send data back from a place like Mars. They're working on problems, but when you start thinking in those terms, the physical limitations, the physical realities, the physical constraints of data become very real. GDPR is not a physical constraint, but it's a legal constraint, and it might as well be physics. If a company does something, we heard, for example, that there are companies out there, based on their practices and how they were hacked, would have found themselves facing $160 billion liability. >> [Rebecca] Yeah. >> Now that may not be physics, you know, I can only move so much data back from Mars, but that is a very real legal constraint that would have put those companies out of business if GDPR governance rules had been in place. So what's happening today is companies, or enterprises are looking to work with people who understand the very physical, practical, legal, and intellectual property realities of data, and if NetApp is capable of demonstrating that, and showing how you could turn that into applications, and into infrastructure that works for the business, then that is a great partner for any enterprise. >> Well do you think that other companies get it? I mean, the sense of where we are today? You use this example of GDPR, and how it really could have sent companies out of business if those rules had been in place, and they had been hacked, or suffered some huge data breach. Do you think that NetApp is setting itself up as the thought leader, and in many ways is the thought leader? Are there companies on the same level? >> No, they're not, and certainly there are a lot of tech companies that are moving in that direction, and that they're comparable with NetApp, and working both close with NetApp, and in opposition to NetApp, at least competitively, but the reality is that most enterprises are, how best to put this? Well, what I like to say is William Gibson, the famous author who coined the term cyberspace, for example, once said, the future's here, it's just evenly distributed. So there are pockets of individuals in every company who are very cognizant of these challenges, the physical realities of data, what it means, what role data actually plays, what does it mean to actually call data an asset? What's the implications on the business of looking at data as a asset? That's in place in pockets, but it's not something that's broadly diffused within most businesses, certainly not our client base, not the Wikibon angle client base, is certainly not broadly aware of some of these challenges. A lot of things have to happen over the course of the next few years for executives, and rank and file folks to comprehend the characteristics, or the nature of these changes, start to internalize, start to act in concert with the possibilities of data, as opposed to in opposition to the impacts of data. >> And those are the people who, we had guests on today just talked about the data resisters, because there are those in companies, maybe they're just an individual in a company, but that can have a real impact on the company's strategy of moving forward, deploying its data smartly. >> Yeah, absolutely, and we also had the gentleman from The Economist who made the observation that concerns about artificial intelligence impacts employment might be a little overblown. >> [Rebecca] Right, right. >> So a lot of those data resisters might be sitting there asking the question, what will be the impact of additional data on my job? And it's a reasonable question to ask, because if your business, we also talked about physicians. A radiologist, for example, someone who looks at x-rays has historically not been a patient facing person. They would sit in the back and look at the x-rays, they would write up the results, and they would give them to the clinician, who would actually talk to the patient. I, not too long ago, saw this interesting television ad where radiologists presented themselves as being close to the patient. Why? Because radiology is one of those disciplines in medicine that's likely to be strongly impacted by AI, because AI can find those patterns better than, often, a physician can. Now the clinician may be a little less effected by AI, because the patient is a human being that needs to have their hand held. >> [Rebecca] And their life is on the line. >> Their life is on the line. The healing and treatment is about whether or not the person is able to step up and heal themselves. >> [Rebecca] Right. >> So there's going to be this kind of interesting observation over the next few years. Folks that work with other people will use data to inform. Folks that work with machines, folks that don't work with other people, are likely to find that other machines end up being really, really good at their job. >> [Rebecca] Right. >> Because of the speeds of data, at the compactness of data, human beings just cannot respond to data as fast as a machine, but machines still cannot respond to people as well as people can. >> And they don't have empathy. >> And they don't have empathy, so if I were to make a prediction, I would say that, in the future, if your job is more tied to using machines, yeah, you got a concern, but if your job is tied to working with people, your job is gonna be that much more important, and increasingly, the people that are working with machines are gonna have to find jobs that have them work with other people. >> Right, right. Well it's been a great day. It's fun to work with you. This is our first time together on The Cube. It was a great day. >> Well The Cube is a blast. >> The Cube is a blast. It's a constant party. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, this has been NetApp Insight 2017 in Berlin. We will see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Berlin, Germany, it's The Cube covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of NetApp Insight here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are join by Alfred Manhart. He is the Senior Direct Channel and System Integrator Ischemia for NetApp, and Lars Gobel, who is the Head of Strategy and Innovation for DARZ. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> So Manfred, I mean Alfred, before the cameras were rolling, you were talking a little bit about key partnerships and why they are so critical to helping NetApp manage the data and help it flow freely. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about the partnerships aspect? >> So we have, of course, partnering with NetApp is a base of our strategy. It's not just a initiative. So partnering is key for us. And what we currently see is that the partner landscape has to change. The existing partner that what we are trying to help them to transform to the digital world change the world with data on one side and on the other side we need additional new partner that make the complex customer-oriented offering become reality. This is an example probably DARZ's staff anyhow, but they build up this kind of multiple partnerships to offer the customer-related offering and solution for the end customers. >> Great, great. So tell us how you fit in here Lars? I mean, as important of partnerships. >> So, we are in a situation that IT is getting more and more complex. And we also get into the position that the understand is now clear that not the company can internally are the best at every part. So, for example, Global Innovation Index makes analyzes with the outcome that everywhere where partnerships exists, the innovation is much higher. And today we talk over new business model, we talk over innovation, scalability, flexibility, and for these topics and all the for the new size of environments and also of the challenges the customers have. They need the best for every part of the solutions and we at DARZ, a full IT service provider, try to bring that together. So we offer from co-location housing over private co-hosting up to a public cloud and hyper cloud scenarios complete bandwidth. So we bring together Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure to realize one solution for the customer. >> So, every large enterprise is gonna have multiple relationships like the one that they have with you. And while you are helping to bring Amazon and Azure and others under the DARZ umbrella of services, there is gonna have to be something that connects them a little bit more deeply, right? That's probably gonna be data. >> Lars: Yeah. >> So tell us a little bit about that underlying fabric that's going to be required to ensure that data can be rendered in all of these different environments and sourced from all of these different environments according to the needs of business. What do you think? What will NetApp's role in that be? >> That's an interesting one. I think the world from a partnership perspective is even getting more complex, yeah? Instead of making everything as a single one st-- One initial shot, more technical, it's more outcome-based, longer-term based. So if you're not thinking that way, what should be my desired outcome of what-- How my world should look like in a year, in two years from now, you probably choose the wrong partner from the beginning. So this kind of being relevant and being prepared for the future, for all the challenges that are coming up, is very, very important. And data is a short-term issue and of course you have to consider what you want to do with data long term. That is the challenge to balance out the short-term benefits with the long-term objective you have. And thus makes the world more complex. >> So what do you look for in a partner? As you said, you could realize too late you chose the wrong partner from the beginning. But what are sort of the key characteristics and attributes that you want? >> OK, from our perspective we also, we do two things. On the one side, we concentrate on the existing partners and support them on their way to the new world. Yeah? Not all of them will make it. Yeah? And on the other side, we have an acquisition program in place, that we address the partner that are needed for the future and also expand the ecosystem with partners, which are probably we are not even aware of. Talking about coder partners, alliance partners, cloud partners we currently have not in our portfolio. So it's both, driving the existing channel ecosystem to the digital world and acquiring partners that are needed for the future. >> Great. Well Alfred, Lars, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been great having you. >> Thank you >> Thank you very much for inviting us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. (techno music) Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Peter Burris. We have two guests for this segment. We have Matt Watts, he is the director and data strategist and director of technology at NetApp, and Kenneth Cukier, a senior editor at The Economist, and author of the best-selling book Big Data, and author of a soon to be best-selling book on AI. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you much for coming on the show. Pleasure to be here. So, this is the, we keep hearing NetApp saying this is the day of the data visionary. I'd love to hear both of you talk about what a data visionary is, and why companies, why this is a necessary role in today's companies. Okay, so I think if you look at the generations that we've been through in the late nineties, early 2000's, it was all about infrastructure with a little bit of application and some data associated to it. And then as we kind of rolled forward to the next decade the infrastructure discussion became less. It became more about the applications and increasingly more about the data. And if we look at the current decade that we're in right now, the infrastructure discussions have become less, and less, and less. We're still talking about applications, but the focus is on data. And what we haven't seen so much of during that time is the roles changing. We still have a lot of infrastructure people doing infrastructure roles, a lot of application people doing application roles. But the real value in this explosion of data that we're seeing is in the data. And it's time now that companies really look to put data visionaries, people like that in place to understand how do we exploit it, how do we use it, what should we gather, what could we do with the information that we do gather. And so I think the timing is just right now for people to be really considering that. Yeah, I would build on what Matt just said. That, functionally in the business and the enterprise we have the user of data, and we have the professional who collected the data. And sometimes we had a statistician who would analyze it. But pass it along to the user who is an executive, who is an MBA, who is the person who thinks with data and is going to present it to the board or to make a decision based on it. But that person isn't a specialist on data. That person probably doesn't, maybe doesn't even know math. And the person is thinking about the broader issues related to the company. The strategic imperatives. Maybe he speaks some languages, maybe he's a very good salesperson. There's no one in the middle, at least up until now, who can actually play that role of taking the data from the level of the bits and the bytes and in the weeds and the level of the infrastructure, and teasing out the value, and then translating it into the business strategy that can actually move the company along. Now, sometimes those people are going to actually move up the hierarchy themselves and become the executive. But they need not. Right now, there's so much data that's untapped you can still have this function of a person who bridges the world of being in the weeds with the infrastructure and with the data itself, and the larger broader executives suite that need to actually use that data. We've never had that function before, but we need to have it now. So, let me test you guys. Test something in you guys. So what I like to say is, we're at the middle of a significant break in the history of computing. The first 50 years or so it was known process, unknown technology. And so we threw all our time and attention at understanding the technology. >> Matt: Yeah. We knew accounting, we knew HR, we even knew supply-chain, because case law allowed us to decide where a title was when. [Matt] Yep. But today, we're unknown process, known technology. It's going to look like the cloud. Now, the details are always got to be worked out, but increasingly we are, we don't know the process. And so we're on a road map of discovery that is provided by data. Do you guys agree with that? So I would agree, but I'd make a nuance which is I think that's a very nice way of conceptualizing, and I don't disagree. But I would actually say that at the frontier the technology is still unknown as well. The algorithms are changing, the use cases, which you're pointing out, the processes are still, are now unknown, and I think that's a really important way to think about it, because suddenly a lot of possibility opens up when you admit that the processes are unknown because it's not going to look like the way it looked in the past. But I think for most people the technology's unknown because the frontier is changing so quickly. What we're doing with image recognition and voice recognition today is so different than it was just three years ago. Deep learning and reinforcement learning. Well it's going to require armies of people to understand that. Well, tell me about it. This is the full-- Is it? For the most, yes it's a full employment act for data scientists today, and I don't see that changing for a generation. So, everyone says oh what are we going to teach our kids? Well teach them math, teach them stats, teach them some coding. There's going to be a huge need. All you have to do is look at the society. Look at the world and think about what share of it is actually done well, optimized for outcomes that we all agree with. I would say it's probably between, it's in single percents. Probably between 1% and 5% of the world is optimized. One small example: medical science. We collect a lot of data in medicine. Do we use it? No. It's the biggest scandal going on in the world. If patients and citizens really understood the degree to which medical science is still trial and error based on the gumption of the human mind of a doctor and a nurse rather than the data that they actually already collect but don't reuse. There would be Congressional hearings everyday. People, there would be revolutions in the street because, here it is the duty of care of medical practitioners is simply not being upheld. Yeah, I'd take exception to that. Just, not to spend too much time on this, but at the end of the day, the fundamental role of the doctor is to reduce the uncertainty and the fear and the consequences of the patient. >> Kenneth: By any means necessary and they are not doing that. Hold on. You're absolutely right that the process of diagnosing and the process of treatment from a technical standpoint would be better. But there's still the human aspect of actually taking care of somebody. Yeah, I think that's true, and think there is something of the hand of the healer, but I think we're practicing a form of medicine that looks closer to black magic than it does today to science. Bring me the data scientist. >> Peter: Alright. And I think an interesting kind of parallel to that is when you jump on a plane, how often do you think the pilot actually lands that plane? He doesn't. No. Thank you. So, you still need somebody there. Yeah. But still need somebody as the oversight, as that kind of to make a judgment on. So I'm going to unify your story, my father was a cardiologist who was also a flight surgeon in the Air Force in the U.S., and was one of the few people that was empowered by the airline pilots association to determine whether or not someone was fit to fly. >> Matt: Right. And so my dad used to say that he is more worried about the health of a bus driver than he is of an airline pilot. That's great. So, in other words we've been gah-zumped by someone who's father was both a doctor and a pilot. You can't do better than that. So it turns out that we do want Sully on the Hudson, when things go awry. But in most cases I think we need this blend of the data on one side and the human on the other. The idea that the data just because we're going to go in the world of artificial intelligence machine learning is going to mean jobs will be eradicated left and right. I think that's a simplification. I think that the nuance that's much more real is that we're going to live in a hybrid world in which we're going to have human beings using data in much more impressive ways than they've ever done it before. So, talk about that. I mean I think you have made this compelling case that we have this huge need for data and this explosion of data plus the human judgment that is needed to either diagnose an illness or whether or not someone is fit to fly a plane. So then where are we going in terms of this data visionary and in terms of say more of a need for AI? Yeah. Well if you take a look at medicine, what we would have is, the diagnosis would probably be done say for a pathology exam by the algorithm. But then, the health care coach, the doctor will intervene and will have to both interpret this for, first of what it means, translate it to the patient, and then discuss with the patient the trade-offs in terms of their lifestyle choices. For some people, surgery is the right answer. For others, you might not want to do that. And, it's always different with all of the patients in terms of their age, in terms of whether they have children or not, whether they want the potential of complications. It's never so obvious. Just as we do that, or we will do that in medicine, we're going to do that in business as well. Because we're going to take data that we never had about decisions should we go into this market or that market. Should we take a risk and gamble with this product a little bit further, even though we're not having a lot of sales because the profit margins are so good on it. There's no algorithm that can tell you that. And in fact you really want the intellectual ambition and the thirst for risk taking of the human being that defies the data with an instinct that I think it's the right thing to do. And even if we're going to have failures with that, and we will, we'll have out-performance. And that's what we want as well. Because society advances by individual passions, not by whatever the spreadsheet says. Okay. Well there is this issue of agency right? So at the end of the day a human being can get fired, a machine cannot. A machine, in the U.S. anyway, software is covered under the legal strictures of copywriting. Which means it's a speech act. So, what do you do in circumstances where you need to point a finger at something for making a stupid mistake. You keep coming back to the human being. So there is going to be an interesting interplay over the next few years of how this is going to play out. So how is this working, or what's the impact on NetApp as you work with your customers on this stuff? So I think you've got the AI, ML, that's kind of one kind of discussion. And that can lead you into all sorts of rat holes or other discussions around well how do we make decisions, how do we trust it to make decisions, there's a whole aspect that you have to discuss around that. I think if you just bring it back to businesses in general, all the businesses that we look at are looking at new ways of creating new opportunities, new business models, and they're all collecting data. I mean we know the story about General Electric. Used to sell jet engines and now it's much more about what can we do with the data that we collect from the jet engines. So that's finding a new business model. And then you vote with a human role in that as well, is well is there a business model there? We can gather all of this information. We can collect it, we can refine it, we can sort it, but is there actually a new business model there? And I think it's those kind of things that are inspiring us as a company to say well we could uncover something incredible here. If we could unlock that data, we could make sure it's where it needs to be when it needs to be there. You have the resources to bring to bed to be able to extract value from it, you might find a new business model. And I think that's the aspect that I think is of real interest to us going forward, and kind of inspires a lot of what we're doing. Great. Kenneth, Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a really fun conversation. Thank you. Thank you for having us. We will have more from NetApp Insight just after this. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017, here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Peter Burris. We are joined by Shelia Fitzpatrick, she is the Chief Privacy Officer of NetApp, and Paul Stringfellow who is a Technical Director at Gardner Systems. Shelia, Paul, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for inviting us. >> So, I want to talk about data privacy. The general data protection regulation, the EU's forthcoming laws, GDPR, are going to take effect in May of next year. They represent a huge fundamental change about the way that companies use data. Can you just set the scene for our viewers and explain what these changes mean? >> Sure, happy to. As you said, GDPR is the newest regulation, it will replace the current EU directive, goes into effect May 25th of 2018. It has some fundamental changes that are massively different than any other data privacy laws you've ever seen. First and foremost, it is a legal, compliance and business issue as opposed to a technology issue. It's also the first extra-territorial regulation, meaning, it will apply to any organization anywhere in the world, regardless of whether or not they have a presence in Europe. But if they provide goods and services to an EU resident, or they have a website that EU residents would go to to enter data, they are going to have to comply with GDPR, and that is a massive change for companies. Not to mention the sanctions, the sanctions can be equal to 20 million Euro or 4% of a company's annual global turnover, pretty phenomenal sanctions. There are a lot of fundamental changes, but those are probably the biggest right there. >> What are some of the biggest challenges that companies are... I mean, you talked about the threat of sanctions and just the massive implications of what companies need to do to prepare? >> To really prepare, as I'm talking to customers, they really need, unfortunately a lot of companies are just thinking about security. And they're thinking, well as long as we have encryption, as long as we have tokenization, as long as we're locking down that data, we're going to be okay. I'm saying, no. It first and foremost starts with building that legal compliance program. What does your data privacy program look like? What personal data are you collecting? Why are you collecting it? Do you have the legal right to collect it? Part of GDPR requires unambiguous, explicit, freely-given consent. Companies can no longer force or imply consent. A lot of times when you go on to websites the terms and conditions are so impossible to understand that people just tick the box (laughs). Well, under GDPR, that will no longer be valid because it has to be very transparent, very easily understandable, very readable. And people have to know what organizations are doing with their data. And it puts ownership and more control of data back into the hands of the data subject, as opposed to the organizations that are collecting data. SO those are some of the fundamental changes. For the Cloud environment, for instance, for a lot of big hyperscalers, GDPR now puts obligations on data processors which is very different from the current regulation. SO that's going to be a fundamental change of business for a lot of organizations. >> Now, is it just customers or is it customers and employees as well? >> It's customers, employees, suppliers, it's any personal data that an organization collects, regardless of the relationship. >> SO what does it mean? Does it mean that I'm renting your data? Does it mean that I, 'cause you now own it, it's not me owning it. >> I own it, that's right. >> What are some of the implications of how folks are going to monetize some of these resources? >> SO what it actually means is, as an organization that's collecting data, you have to have a legal and valid business reason for needing that data. SO part of GDPR requires what's called, data minimization. You should only be collecting the minimal amount of data you need in order to provide the service you're going to provide, or manage the relationship you're going to manage. And you are never, as an organization, the owner of that data, you're the data steward. I am giving you permission to use my data for a very specific reason. You can't take liberties with that data. You can't do, what I call, scope-creep which is, once you have the data, "Oh, I can do whatever I want "with that data," no you can't. Unless I have consented to it, you cannot use that data. And so, that is going to be a major change for organizations to deal with and it doesn't matter if it's your employee data, your customer data, your partner data, your alternative worker data, your supplier data. Whose ever data you have, you better be transparent about that data. >> Shelia, you haven't once mentioned technology. Paul, what does this mean from a technology perspective? >> I suppose it's my job to mention technology? >> As Shelia will tell you, the GDPR, it should not be driven by IT. Because it's not an IT problem, it's absolutely a legal and compliance issue. However, I think there's a technology problem in there. So for lots of things that Shelia is talking about, in terms of understanding your data, in terms of being able to find data, being able to remove data when you no longer need to use it, that's absolutely a technology problem. And I think, actually, maybe something you won't hear said very often, I'm a real fan of GDPR, I think a it's long overdue it's probably because Shelia's been beating me round the head for the last 12 months >> I have. >> about it. But, I think it's one of those things that's long overdue to all of us within enterprises, within business, who hold and look after data. Because what we've done, traditionally, is that we just collected tons and tons of data and we bought storage 'cause storage could be relatively cheap, we're moving things to the Cloud. And, we've got absolutely no control, no management, no understanding of what the data is, where it is, who has access to it? Does anybody even access it, I'm paying for it, does anybody even use it? And I think what this is, for me, if GDPR wasn't a regulatory thing that we had to do, I think it's a set of really good practices that, as organizations, we should be looking to follow anyway. And technology plays a small part in that, it will enable organizations to understand the data better, it will enable those organizations to be able to find information as and when they need it. When somebody makes a subject access request, how are you going to find that data without appropriate technology? And I think, first and foremost, it's something that is forcing organizations to look at the way they culturally look after data within their business. This is no longer about, "Let me just keep things forever and I won't worry about it." This is a cultural shift that says data is actually an asset in your business. And as Shelia actually mentioned before, and something I'll pinch in future, the data is not mine, I'm just the custodian of that data while you allow me to be so. So I should treat that like anything else I'm looking after on your behalf. SO I think it's those kind of fundamental shifts that will drive technology adoption, no doubt, to allow you to do that, but actually, it's much more of a cultural shift in the way that we think of data and the way that we manage data in our businesses. >> Well you're talking about it as this regulation that is long overdue, and it will cause this cultural shift. So what will be different in the way that companies do business and the way that they treat their customer data, and their customer's privacy? And their employee's privacy, too, as you pointed out? >> Well, and part of the difference is going to be that need for transparency. So companies are going to have to be very upfront about what they're doing with the data, as Paul said. You know, why are they collecting that data, and they need to think differently about the need for data. Instead of collecting massive amounts of data that you really don't need, they need to take a step back and say, "This is the type of relationship "I'm trying to manage." Whether it's an employment relationship, whether it's a customer relationship, whether it's a partner relationship. What is the minimum amount of information I need in order to manage that relationship? So if I have an employee, for instance, I don't need to know what my employee does on their day off. Maybe that's a nice thing to know because I think well, maybe we can offer them a membership to a gym because they like to work out? That's not a must-have, that's a nice-to-have. And GDPR is going to force must-haves. In order to manage the employment relationship I have to be able to pay you, I have to be able to give you a job, I have to be able to provide benefits, I have to be able to provide performance evaluations and other requirements, but if it's not legally required, I don't need that data. And so it's going to change the way companies think about developing programs, policies, even technology. As they start to think about how they're developing new technology, what data do they need to make this technology work? And technology has actually driven the need for more privacy laws. If you think about IoT, artificial intelligence, Cloud. >> Mobile. >> Absolutely. Great technology, but from a privacy perspective, the privacy was never a part of the planning process. >> In fact, in many respects it was the exact opposite. There were a whole bunch of business models, I mean if you think about it in the technology industry, there's two fundamental business models. There's the ad-based business model, which is, "Give us all your data "and we'll figure out a way to monetize it." >> Absolutely. >> And there's a transaction-based business model which says, "We'll provide you a service "and you pay us, and we promise to do something "and only something with your data." >> Absolutely. >> It's the difference between the way Google and Facebook work, and say, Apple and Microsoft work. SO how is this going to impact these business models in ways of thinking about engaging customers at least where GDPR is the governing model? >> Well, it is going to force a fundamental change in their business model. SO the companies that you mentioned, that their entire business model is based on the collection and aggregation of data, and in some cases, the selling of personal data. >> Some might say screwing you. >> Some might definitely say that, especially if you're a privacy attorney, you might say that. They offer fabulous services and people willingly give up their privacy, that's part of the problem, is that they're ticking the box to say, "I want to use Facebook, I want to use Twitter, "I want to use LinkedIn "because these are great technologies." But, it's the scope-creep. It's what you're doing behind the scenes that I don't know how you're using my data. SO transparency is going to become more and more critical in the business model and that's going to be a cultural, as Paul said, a cultural shift for companies that their entire business model's based on personal data. They're struggling because they're the companies that, no matter what they do, they're going to have to change. They can't just make a simple, change their policy or procedure, they have to change their entire business model to meet the GDPR obligations. >> And I think from, like Shelia says there, and obviously GDPR's very much around, kind of, private data. Well, the conversation we're having with our customers is, is a much wider scope than that, it is all of the data that you own. And it's important, I think, organizations need to stop being fast and loose with the information that they hold because not only is the private information about those people there that, you know, me and you, and that we don't want that necessarily leaked across the well to somebody who might look to exploit that for some other reason. But, that might be, business confidential information, that might be price list, it might be your customer list. And, at the moment, I think in lots of organizations we have a culture where people from top to bottom in an organization don't necessarily understand that. SO they might be doing something where, we had a case in UK recently where some records, security arrangements for Heathrow Airport were found on a bus. So somebody copied them to a USB stick, no encryption, somebody copied it to a USB stick, thought it was okay to take home and leave in the back of, probably didn't think it was okay to leave in the back of the taxi, but certainly thought it was okay to take that information home. And you look at that and think, well, what other business asset that that organization held would they have treated with such disdain, almost to say "I just don't care, this is just ones and zeroes, "why would I care about it?" It's that shift that I think we're starting to see. And I think it's that shift that organizations should have taken a long time ago. We talk to customers, and you hear of events like this all the time, data is the new gold, data is the new precious material of your choice. >> Which it really isn't. It really isn't, here's why I say that because this is the important thing and leads to the next question I was going to ask you. Every asset that's ever been conceived follows the basic laws in economic scarcity. Take gold, you can apply to that purpose, you can make connectors for a chip, or you can use it as a basis for making jewelry or some other purpose. But, data is fungible in so many ways. You can connect it and in many respects, we talked about it a little bit earlier, the act of making it private is, in many respects, the act of turning it into an asset. SO one of the things I want to ask you about, if you think about it, is that, there will still be a lot of net new ways to capture data that's associated with a product or service in a relationship. SO we're not saying that GDPR is going to restrict the role that data plays, it's just going to make it more specific. We're still going to see more IoT, we're still going to see more mobile services, as long as the data that's being collected is in service to the relationship or the product that's being offered. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, one of the things that I always say is that, GDPR's intent is not stop organizations from collecting data, data is your greatest asset, you need data to manage any kind of relationship. But, you're absolutely right in what it's going to do is force transparency, so instead of doing things behind the scenes where nobody has any idea what you're doing with my data, companies are going to have to be extremely transparent about it and think about how it's being used. You talked about data monetization, healthcare data today is ten times more valuable than financial data. It is the data that all hackers want. And the reason is, is because you take even aggregate and statistical information through, say trial clinics, information that you think there's no way to tie it back to a person, and by adding just little elements to it, you have now turned that data into greater value and you can now connect it back to a person. SO data that you think does not have value, the more we add to it and the more, sort of, profiling we do, the more valuable that data is going to become. >> But it's even more than that, right? Because not only are you connecting it back to a person, you're connecting it back to a human being. Whereas financial data is highly stylized, it's defined, it's like this transaction defining, and there's nothing necessarily real about it other than that's the convention that we used to for example, do accounting. But, healthcare data is real. It ties back to, what am I doing, what drugs am I taking, why am I taking them, when am I visiting somebody? This is real, real data that provides deep visibility into the human being, who they are, what they face, and any number of other issues. >> Well, if you think about GDPR, too, they expanded the definition of personal data under GDPR. SO it now includes data, like biometric and genetic information that is heavily used in the healthcare industry. It also includes location data, IP information, unique identifiers. SO a lot of companies say, "Well, we don't collect personal data "but we have the unique identifiers." Well, if you can go through any kind of process to tie that back to a person, that's now personal data. SO GDPR has actually the first entry into the digital age as opposed to the old fashioned processing. Where you can now take different aspects of data and combine it to identify a human being, as you say. >> So, I got one more question. This is something of a paradox, sorry for jumping in, but I'm fascinated by this subject. Something of a paradox. Because the act of making data private, at least to the corporation, is an act of creating an asset, and because the rules of GDPR are so much more specific and well thought through than most rules regarding data, does it mean that companies that follow GDPR are likely, in the long run, to be better at understanding, taking advantage of, and utilizing their data assets? That's the paradox. Most people say, "I need all the data." Well, GDPR says, "Maybe you need to be more specific "about how you handle your data assets." What do you think, is this going to create advantages for certain kinds of companies? >> I think it absolutely is going to create advantages in two ways. One, I see organizations that comply with GDPR as having a competitive advantage. Because, number one it goes down to trust. If I'm going to do business with Company A or Company B, I'm going to do business with the company that actually takes my personal data seriously. But, looking' at it from your point of view, absolutely. As companies become more savvy when it comes to data privacy compliance, not just GDPR, but data privacy laws around the world, they're also going to see more of that value in the data, be more transparent about it. But, that's also going to allow them to use the data for other purposes, because they're going to get very creative in how having your data is actually going to benefit you as an individual. SO they're going to have better ways of saying, "But, by having your data I can offer you these services." >> GDPR may be a catalyst for increased data maturity. >> Absolutely. >> Well, I wanna ask you about the cultural shift. We've been talking so much about it from the corporate standpoint, but will it actually force a cultural shift from the customer standpoint, too? I mean, this idea of forcing transparency and having the customer understand why do you need this from me, what do you want? I mean, famously, Europeans are more private than Americans. >> Oh much so. As you've said, "Just click accept, okay, fine, "tell me what I need to know, "or how can I use this website?" >> Well, the thing is that, it's not necessarily from a consumer point of view, but I do think it's from a personal point of view from everybody. SO whether you work inside an organization that keeps data, that's starting to understand just how valuable that data might be. And just to pick up on something, that just to pop at something you were saying before, I think one of the other areas where this has business benefit is that that better and increased management and maturity, actually I think is actually a great way, that better maturity around how we look after our data, has huge impact. Because, it has huge impact in the cost of storing' it, if we want to use Cloud services why am I putting things there that nobody looks at? And then, looking at maintaining this kind of cultural shift that says, "If I'm going to have data in my organization, "I'm no longer going to have it on a USB stick "and leave it in the back of a cab "when it's got security information "of a global major airport on it. "I'm going to think about that "because I'm now starting to understand." And this big drive about, people starting to understand how the information that people keep about you has a potential bigger impact, and it has a potential bigger impact if that data, yeah, we've seen data breach, after data breach after data breach. You can't look at the news any day of the week without some other data breach and that's partly because, a bit like health and safety legislation, GDPR's there because you can't trust all those organizations to be mature enough with the way that we look after our data to do these things. SO legislation and regulations come across and said, "Well, actually this stuff's really important "to me and you as individuals, "so stop being fast and loose with it, "stop leaving it in the back of taxis, "stop letting it leak out your organization "because nobody cares." And that's driving a two-way thing, here, it's partly we're having to think more about that because actually, we're not trusting organizations who are looking after our data. But, as Shelia said, if you become an organization that has a reputation for being good with the way they lock their data, and look after data, that will give you a competitive edge alongside, actually I'm being much more mature, I'm being much more controlled and efficient with how I look after my data. That's got big impact in how I deliver technology and certainly, within a company. Which is why I'm enthusiastic about GDPR, I think it's forcing lots and lots of long-overdue shift in the way that we, as people, look after data, architect technology, start to think about the kind of solutions and the kind of things that we do in the way that we deliver IT into business and enterprise across the globe. >> I think one of the things, too, and Paul brought it up, is he mentioned security several times. And, as Paul knows, one of my pet peeves is when companies say, "We have world-class security, "therefore we're compliant with GDPR." And I go, "Really, so you're basically locking down data "you're not legally allowed to have? That's "what you're telling me." >> Like you said earlier, it's not just about having encryption everywhere. >> Exactly, and it's funny how many companies say "Well, we're compliant with GDPR "because we encrypt the data." And I go, "Well, if you're not legally allowed "to have that data, that's not going to help you at all." And, unfortunately, I think that's what a lot of companies think, that as long as we're looking at the security side of the house, we're good. And they're missing the whole boat on GDPR. >> It's got to be secure. >> It's got to be secure. >> But-- >> You got to legally have it first. >> Exactly. The chicken and the egg. >> But, what's always an issue with security, around data and the stuff that Shelia talked about is quite a lot, is that one of the risks you have, is you can have all the great security in the world but, if the right person with the right access to the right data has all the things that they should have, that doesn't mean that they can't steal that data, lose that data, do something with that data that they shouldn't be doing, just because we've got it secured. SO we need to have policies and procedures in place that allow us to manage that better, a culture that understands the risk of doing those kinds of things, and maybe, alongside technologies that identify, unusual use of data are important within that. >> Well, Paul, Shelia, thank you so much for coming on the show, it's been a fascinating conversation. >> Thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks for having us on, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight here in Berlin in just a little bit. (upbeat music)